Penny worth 5 cents?

There was an article in "The Daily Mail" (The worst newspaper in britain) claiming that a British couple had collected £350,000 in pennies over the last 20 years in loose change, of course I know this is impossible as they would need to collect around 5000 per day.

But anyway if this were true (they would have to be bank robbers) then their collection could be worth over £1,000,000!

I have like £3.50 in copper, wait till i sell it!

 

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Are pennies a good store of value at this point? What would happen if they're rebased? Would they quintuple in face value, or would the mint declare them nonlegal tender? In the latter case, would I then be able to sell them for their intrinsic value?

 

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http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=55326&highlight=redefine cent

I came up with this notion about 8 mo. ago. Seems like they're finally paying some attention.

 

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I think that the way to go is a 10:1 rebasement. This would have a similar flavor to what happened on the introduction of the euro. Rebase the dollar so that it has ten times the value it does now (essentially all prices would fall 90% - gas would be 23 cents a gallon, a newspaper would be five cents, etc). The key to this is the introduction of entirely new currency. The government prints all new paper currency - fives, tens, twenties, fifties and hundreds. It then mints pennies, nickles, dimes, quarters (skip the half dollar - useless), dollar and two-dollar coins, like Canada and Australia. Then blow a whistle and make everybody exchange their old for new. Give everybody thirty days to swap currency, then blow the whistle again and declare all old currency as worthless. Except, of course, for the metal value, which people are free to trade on.

Here's what you get - a complete flushing of all underground money back into the economy where it can be taxed, at least on the one-time exchange event. You also get hundreds of thousands of tons of copper, nickel and zinc released back into the metals market. There would also be an accurately known quantity of the actual amount of currency in circulation, at least for a while.

 

Then make the coins out of stainless steel...

 

Penny

Some 1982 pennies were made in copper. All pennies up to that point had 95% copper content. If you take $2.00 worth of copper pennies the total weight is roughly 19 oz. With copper being at $3.47 a pound you could see the melting of these pennies look more and more appealing.

 

I sold a few pennies for 5cents more than 60 years ago, but had to drill small hole in them first. (After the coal train, which ran near my 2 BR house had smashed them into a nice oval shape.) They make a nice "African-looking" necklace.

 

Ireland used to have coins with pictures of animals on them

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