The CoinNews Saturday eNewsletter and the short post Sunday morning included information about the Sunday night 60 Minutes news segment titled, Should We Make Cents?
Morley Safer reports on how the penny and nickel are worth less than the U.S. government cost to manufacture them – the penny almost two cents and the nickel almost a dime.
The largest portion of the segment, as the 60 Minutes title suggests, revolves around the various points of view on whether the government should stop making Lincoln pennies.
Why is the manufacturing cost of the 1-cent penny and 5-cent nickel up so much? United States Mint Director Ed Moy summed it up:
Read the rest of this numismatic news article »
Copper used to be the problem step-child of metals. It was either not thought about or considered in a negative context, like the mental picture of paying for the repair of copper piping underneath the sink. For some, copper has turned to gold. And better, it wasn’t purchased first – it just found its way [...]
Every year New York City children from participating schools collect pennies from family, friends and neighbors. These pennies don’t make their way into piggy banks or Lincoln coin collections. Instead, the children put their pennies together and they’re literally trucked to the Penny Harvest Field, an enormous and specially designed penny-holding structure in Rockefeller Center. [...]
Take the new two-click poll on the CoinNews website asking that very question (found in the upper right). Surprisingly, at least so far, results have been close to evenly mixed. Compared to the U.S., interesting and different dynamics are in play with other countries and their small change. Several countries are actually suffering through serious [...]
The debate heated up on whether the metal composition of coins should be controlled by the U.S. Treasury and whether the ban of melting pennies for their copper content should be lifted. CoinNews.net had its own article on the topic and, like other news organizations, coin collectors and bloggers, everyone was interestingly awaiting some type [...]
During just the first half of this year, nearly 5.4 billion pennies and almost 880 million nickels were minted. That’s a lot of change. But did you know it actually costs more to make a penny or nickel than what they’re worth? Craziness right? Well, unfortunately, it’s the truth. Since the fourth quarter of last [...]
