Latest news with #penny
CBS News
3 days ago
- Business
- CBS News
Faith Salie offers her two cents on the end of the penny
Faith Salie offers her two cents on the end of the penny Faith Salie offers her two cents on the end of the penny Faith Salie offers her two cents on the end of the penny What is worthless, but priceless? Overlooked, but treasured? Ubiquitous, but ephemeral? What makes us stop in the street to transcend our pride and stoop to pick it up? It's the humble, shiny, tiny penny. The Treasury announced it will cease making new pennies by early next year. Will they disappear immediately? No. But like so many things in our lives – reliably snowy winters, face-to-face conversations, books whose pages we can turn – pennies are fading away. Before you shrug me off as a sentimental fool old enough to remember visiting the penny candy store on Cape Cod, I do understand that pennies are "outdated" and "inefficient." The government spends about 3.7 cents to make 1 penny. That's a loss of $85 million last year alone. And around half of us don't even carry cash anymore. I don't think the Tooth Fairy believes in pennies nowadays. So, canceling them makes "cents." But in a world where it seems like everyone's looking down, a penny can remind us things might be looking up ... you know, pennies from heaven? You know who was on the first penny in 1792? A woman! It was deemed un-American back then to depict a ruler on a coin, so pennies featured Lady Liberty. A 1793 "flowing hair" penny with Lady Liberty. U.S. Mint It wasn't until 1909 that President Lincoln's face graced the coin. His iconic profile was designed by a Lithuanian-born Jewish immigrant, Victor David Brenner, who created what's thought to be the most reproduced piece of art in history. 1943 pennies were made of zinc-coated steel, because copper was needed for World War II. Should we just throw that history away? Well, yes! As long as we imbue each toss with our wishes. "A penny for your thoughts" was coined nearly 500 years ago by Sir Thomas More, back when offering someone a penny meant their musings were really worth something. These are just my two cents, but ... nobody throws a bitcoin into a fountain. Call me a numismatic nostalgic, but in a world full of crypto and virtuality, I'll keep my eyes peeled for the tarnished, tangible, inefficient promise of luck. For more info: Story produced by Liza Monasebian. Editor: Ed Givnish. See also:
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Sound Off: May 31, 2025
Sun Herald readers weigh in on local and national topics. It costs 3.69 cents to make a penny. So it seems to be a no-brainer to stop making them, which the U.S. Mint will do next year. I figure that at some point, stores will rounding prices off to 5 cents. When that happens, more nickels dimes and quarters will likely be needed. I will let those versed in probability to calculate how many of each will be needed. If too many nickels are needed it may not be worth getting rid of the penny unless we get rid of the nickel, as well. Why do I say that? Because it costs 13.78 cents to mint a nickel. That makes a penny to look like a bargain. there no problem with the dimes and quarters because they cost 5.76 cents and 14.68 cents respectively to mint. What happened to the Gulfport Connect app where requests for city services are done? My app disappeared and attempts to Download have been unsuccessful. The liberal judicial branch of the U.S. government is setting policy for the executive branch of government. We the people voted for change in foreign trade. Same with immigration. The USPS is not funded by the U.S. taxpayer. Only Congress could change/do away with the post office. It is a 'stand alone' quasi-government entity. It is provided for in the Constitution. Read Article Article 1, Section 8, Clause 7: 'the US Constitution ... grants Congress the power to 'establish Post Offices and Post Roads.' As far as your 'so-called' junk mail complaint: Business pay for the post offices to deliver their 'advertisements,' the same as the spurious ads you see while doing a 'google search.' You can go to the post office and fill out a form to stop the delivery of Bulk Business Mail if you desire to do so. Benjamin Netanyahu is concerned that President Trump's 'deal' Iran might cause a nuclear war. We already had a treaty with Iran, but Trump ended it. Now he's making his own deal. It probably involves a golf course. After reading about TACO trades, all of President Trump's flip-flopping on tariffs is making me hungry. And making the folks on Wall Street rich, apparently. The people have spoken. Elon Musk and his DOGE team have done their work. And now Congress is sitting on its hands. How many more folks to we need to vote out to get something done? Send your Sound Offs to soundoff@
Daily Mail
7 days ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
Collectors set to rake in fortune from rare pennies after Trump ceased production
Grab your piggy banks, you may just have a rare penny that could rank you in thousands! The Donald Trump Administration has ordered the Treasury Department to stop the production of pennies. The agency will stop putting new pennies into circulation by early next year and businesses will have to start rounding up or down, the Treasury said. It costs the Treasury roughly four cents to make a penny, meaning it cost more than the coin is actually worth. The halt on production is expected to save the US $56million a year, the Wall Street Journal reported. It also means penny collectors could make a pretty penny - get it? - off some rare coins. For those in possession of a 1943-D Lincoln Bronze Wheat Penny, it could garner up to $2.3million in mint condition, according to Newsweek. The coin is particularly rare as the currency is made of 95 percent copper that year. The same coin in less ideal conditions could still garner $100,000, the outlet reported. The coin is disguisable by the small D, which shows it was made at the Denver Mint, under the 1943 in the right-hand corner. One sold for $840,000 in 2021, according to the Professional Coin Grading Service (PCGS). Another rare coin that brings a nice payday is the 1944-S Steel Wheat Penny, which is estimated to be worth $1.1million, Newsweek reported. The S stands for San Francisco, where the coin was produced, but don't spend too long searching for it, as only two copies are known to still exist, according to Newsweek. The coin has a silvery look as it is zinc-coated steel. One sold for $408,000 in 2001, according to PCGS. Another coin worth looking in the couch cushions for is the 1793 Strawberry Leaf Cent. The coin is made out of copper and features a woman with long tresses on the front and two wheat stalks on the back. It was made at the Philadelphia Mint. Another coin worth looking in the couch cushions for is the 1793 Strawberry Leaf Cent. The coin is made out of copper and features a woman with long tresses on the front and two wheat stalks on the back. It was made at the Philadelphia Mint The coin sold for a record $862,500 at an auction in January 2009, according to PCGS. Most pennies will be worth their value of one cent or a little more than that. 'Outside of a few variations that are in low will be worth just a tad more than their original value,' Alex Beene, a University of Tennessee financial literacy instructor, told Newsweek. However, the few rare ones are worth the search. 'While most wheat pennies are pocket change, the rare ones can buy you a house,' Finance Expert, Michael Ryan, told the outlet. Trump stopped the production to stop due to the cost of making it being higher than the value. 'For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents,' he wrote on Truth Social in February. 'This is so wasteful! I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies. According to a 2024 report from the US Mint, it cost 3.69 cents to produce a penny, a process that lost the Treasury $179million in 2023 'Let's rip the waste out of our great nation's budget, even if it's a penny at a time.' The US produces new pennies designed for circulation at its mints located in Denver and Philadelphia. According to a 2024 report from the US Mint, it cost 3.69 cents to produce a penny, a process that lost the Treasury $179million in 2023. A nickel meanwhile cost around 13.78 cents to manufacture last year. The increased production cost is partly due to the price of raw materials. The US Mint said it was the 19th year in a row production costs had been above face value.
Forbes
26-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Don't You Dare Eliminate The Penny, Redux
Farewell. (Photo) Getty Images In 2013, I wrote a Forbes column that became one of my most-read and most-cited, 'Don't You Dare Eliminate the Penny.' In it I considered the views of elite opinionators who wanted the United States to scotch its lowest-denomination monetary unit, the penny. They said it would save money to get rid of the thing, because copper costs more than one cent now. Remember copper thieves? They would lurk around construction sites and pull wire out of the frame of a building and then resell the stuff on the black market for big bucks. Wonder why copper got so expensive. Wonder why gold did. In the 2000s, it has absolutely kicked the tush of stocks. Gold was selling at $266 in 2001. Now it's at $3300. That is about exactly how well Microsoft stock, Mister Softee itself of $3 trillion market cap fame, has done over that interval. The indexes? Forgetaboutit. Gold is up twelve-fold since 2001. The Dow industrials are up fourfold. Back when the United States had a great economy, in the nineteenth century, in the roaring 1920s, in postwar prosperity after World War II, the dollar itself was redeemable not merely in copper (100 pieces to a dollar) but in gold (1/35th of an ounce of it). Again, how did we do, as an economy, when like old-fashioned cranks we had currency redeemable in precious metal? We grew and prospered like crazy. How have we done with modern, serious, professionally managed fiat money? Slow-growth, inequality-wracked 2000s! But we are so sophisticated it makes me blush. Yes, we are now eliminating the penny. This appears to be the gist of news reports last week. The feds are going to strop striking the old bird. This will make pennies in circulation too scarce and valuable from a numismatic and copper perspective, and they will all flee from circulation. Vendors, in turn, will have to round prices to multiples of five cents. This is because we still strike half-dimes, which by the Coinage Act of 1792 Congress still must mint, in silver. Oops, we don't have half dimes anymore. In the civil war Congress nixed those for the nickel, because nickel was cheaper. The United States in that war started printing paper money not redeemable in gold, and everybody hoarded silver. Just like today! The decline of the penny is yet another further attenuation of the classical monetary systems of the past—read about it in Free Money—above all the gold standard that we had with us as recently as 1971. You can kid yourself—Washington and academia do—that the gold standard is crankery and so forth, or you can get real and note that classical monetary systems accompanied the industrial revolution. The canard that gold caused the Great Depression is a joke. We had the most comprehensive tax system ever suddenly by the early 1930s and people say something else—capitalism! gold! the rich!—caused the disaster. If we had serious economic growth, nobody would hoard the penny, and copper would fall in price. What did gold do when Reagan got serious about economic growth? It fell from $840 all the way down eventually to the $260s. Nobody wants precious metals—copper included—when the real investment environment is excellent. We are getting rid of the penny because we have not gotten fully serious about having a great economy again. If we did have a great economy, or expected to have one, there would be no reason to think people would hoard money. The penny costs too much to make? Then make it cost less by having people want to get rid of inert metal for real growth projects. The shame of getting rid of the penny is that the venerable copper, 'found a penny at my feet,' as Joni Mitchell warbled, is yet another hacking away of links to the hard-money systems that really delivered growth. Yes, we still have other pocket change, but you know the inflation in the wings is coming for the rest of it. Hoard your quarters, weird-looking as they have become with all the bizarre new 'artwork' that is making Augustus St. Gaudens (not to mention TR) roll in his grave. Quarters look bad now because they want to soften us up for getting rid of them altogether. Bing Crosby used to sing the old carol, redolent of times of prosperity when 'the goose is getting fat' about poor folk who had nothing. 'If you haven't got a haypenny'—remember half-pennies?—'then God bless you.' Well the United States has now neither a half-penny nor a penny. That means it's poor folk. Then God bless it, I guess.
CNN
25-05-2025
- Business
- CNN
So what happens to America's 114 billion pennies once the US stops making them?
The American penny isn't going anywhere anytime soon. The US Treasury Department announced Thursday that it plans to start winding down production of the one-cent coin it has been minting for more than 230 years. But the penny will still remain legal tender, and will still be in use at thousands of retailers around the country for sometime to come. 'If we look at the experience in Canada, for the first year after they stopped making pennies, there's really no change in transactions,' Jeff Lenard, spokesperson for the National Association of Convenience Stores, told CNN. Convenience stores do more cash transactions than any other group, about 32 million a day, or about 20% of the total number of purchases by their customers, Lenard said. The National Retail Federation, which represents most major US store chains as well as thousands of small retailers, also said it anticipates its members will use pennies even after production stops at some point early next year, although it does anticipate that many will round cash transactions to the nearest nickel once the supply of pennies at banks starts to run short. 'Retailers' primary goal is serving customers and making this transition as seamless as possible,' said Dylan Jeon, senior director of government relations for NRF. There are an estimated 114 billion pennies currently in circulation, but they are 'severely underutilized' according to the Treasury department. Many are at home in coin jars or junk drawers, or some other forgotten location gathering dust. The math says that all those pennies could fill a cube roughly 13 stories high. Many people don't even take them as change, tossing them into the leave-a-penny-take-a-penny dishes at store checkouts. Lenard said the large number of pennies in circulation means that retailers won't necessary run out of them for a while. But eventually stores won't be able to get new rolls of pennies from their banks and will start rounding transactions up or down to the nearest nickel. The decision when to do that will rest with each retailer, not official government policy. Electronic transactions such as credit and debit card purchases, will continue to be down to the penny, Lenard said, with only cash transactions being rounded. Even in countries like Canada, where penny production has been discontinued, the penny remains legal tender today. Canada's finance ministry said pennies retain their value for transactions 'indefinitely' despite the fact that it stopped making the coin in 2012. If a customer wants to use pennies to complete a transaction, most retailers are likely to allow them, Lenard said. 'There's a saying in retail, 'Never lose a customer over a penny,'' he said. 'I never really thought of it in these terms, but it applies even more here. I think if someone wants to pay with pennies, most retailers will err on the side of making those customers happy.'
