5 Dollars William McKinley

Liberia's commemorative coinage program of the late 1990s and early 2000s was essentially a commercial licensing operation — the government contracted with private minting firms to produce collector pieces featuring foreign heads of state, American presidents chief among them. McKinley's appearance here has nothing to do with any Liberian-American diplomatic moment; he was simply marketable. The coins were sold through mail-order dealers and home shopping channels, rarely touching Liberian soil.

KM#933 and X#45 cross-references signal the split cataloging problem these issues create: Krause lists them as legal tender, while the X-number acknowledges their de facto exonumia status.