Thursday, May 26, 2011

Coin Production

The US Mint reports that Coin Production is going at a staggering pace in 2011.

In 2009 the Mint produced 2,354 billion zinc pennies and 86.64 million nickels.

The rapid devaluation of the dollar in the last two years means that the older (pre 1982) copper pennies contain 3 cents worth of copper and the nickel contains 7 cents of nickel.

Entrepreneurs are running sorting machines to pull all copper pennies from the market, and collectors are hoarding nickels. They sell bags of pennies as copper bullion indicating contempt for the coin.

From January thru April the US Mint produced 1.454 billion zinc pennies and 223.92 million nickels. Dime production also increased but not at the rate of nickel.

I find no fault for people saving nickels. You can track the future devaluation by the calculating the melt value of the nickel at Coinflation.com.

The absurdity is that the mint is producing, at a loss, billions of coins which will soon go out of circulation when they change the formulation for all coins in the upcoming years.

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