Death to Pennies
Grey's blog: http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/
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The story of the penny starts in the first US Mint founded in 1792 which produced theseone-cent pieces along with other coins including the Quarter, Dime, Half Dime and a mysterycoin that we'll get back to later.These pennies of the new republic were born of 100% pure copper.But, two forces conspired to ensure this wouldn't remain the case for long. The value of copperwent up and, because of inflation, the buying power of the penny went down.This caused The Mint to reduce the amount of copper in pennies, first from 100% to 95%,and then to only 5% copper and 95% zinc.Despite this debasement, in 2006 the value of the metal in older pennies rose over 1cent and suddenly they were worth more dead than alive so people melted them to sell theraw copper for profit.In a rational, efficient world, the story of the penny would have ended here with theGovernment realizing that they weren't worth Minting an...
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The story of the penny starts in the first US Mint founded in 1792 which produced theseone-cent pieces along with other coins including the Quarter, Dime, Half Dime and a mysterycoin that we'll get back to later.These pennies of the new republic were born of 100% pure copper.But, two forces conspired to ensure this wouldn't remain the case for long. The value of copperwent up and, because of inflation, the buying power of the penny went down.This caused The Mint to reduce the amount of copper in pennies, first from 100% to 95%,and then to only 5% copper and 95% zinc.Despite this debasement, in 2006 the value of the metal in older pennies rose over 1cent and suddenly they were worth more dead than alive so people melted them to sell theraw copper for profit.In a rational, efficient world, the story of the penny would have ended here with theGovernment realizing that they weren't worth Minting an...
