Good grief, we cannot afford metal coinage anymore. When I was growing up, American kids collecting coins would laugh at zinc and aluminum coinage as cheap material, grossly inferior, 'Third World,' etc. I remember this, about the time cable first appeared. PAYING FOR TEEVEE was crazy but it was "no commercials!" That didn't last too long, either. Debasement doesn't surprise me, but historical amnesia is still odd. Do all coin-collectors really love crud-metal & carny tokens that much? Oh well - Internet taxes come next year ; maybe there will be a user-fee like in the UK. Or legislation that forces everyone to buy new computers (like the digital tv legislation) with a special chip? And why do I feel like I've seen this show before, LOL
As I've posted here before, we need to move the decimal and get rid of the penny, nickel, and quarter. This will necessitate a nickel-sized brass-colored half and a short term rounding of left over cents. But we have to get past trying to figure out how to make a cheaper penny and nickel! (We STILL buy gasolene in tenths of a cent for anyone worried about what will happen to all those fractions.)
They (the US Mint) could have saved a whole bunch of money just by studying what the Europeans have done (with alternative metals) in recent years.
just wondering why the problem could not be solved by reducing production across the board and i would think gradually increasing the value of u.s. currency.they should also cut some gov.benefits that it's supporters can only dream about or maybe once you become a gov. emplyee you automatically move to a higher plain and are intitled to more then the people that support your benefit programs.i personally think that the gov. is by far the biggest welfare recipient.
Actually if you move it two places you can KEEP the cent, nickel, dime, and quarter. The cent will now have the purchasing power of today's dollar. (Penny candy will make a comeback, and you'll be able to get several pieces for that cent.) Put a cent into the parking meter and you can park for two or three hours. Might cause some problems for the vending machine industry unless we bring back the half cent. The five and dime stores can come back! Move it one place and you can still keep the coins for awhile. (You only get one or two pieces of candy for that cent though.) Get two hours of parking for a dime, and most vending machine items cost five or ten cents.
Money can't simply be automatically re-valued without destroying the economy! I'm surprised how many times I see this posted on coin collecting forums. This is a practical reality of economics. The reason is because the value of non-monitary assets are not automatically re-valued at the same time. Asking people to suddenly start assuming new values for everything they own is not practically possible. Is the car purchased last week for $20,000 really now only worth $200?! Is the loan also suddenly re-valued? Do all the drink machines suddely get converted from $1.50 to $0.01 per transaction? It gets more complicated for conversion to foreign currency, overseas assets, compounded interest, long-term asset re-valuation, etc. Remember, every single transaction system would have to be automatically converted at precisly the same fraction of a second or someone would be able to make billions on the conversion process. Not possible. Re-valuing money or artificially fixing its value is something dictatorial governments can do for the short term (Venezuela, pre-war Germany, USSR, Greece, etc.). But eventually it leads to collapse. No, my proposal is not to actually re-value our money, it is to simply stop producing coins with values or fractions of values less than ten cents. Prices can still be calculated with those cents, just like banks and gas stations currently calculate values with subfractions of cents. But the final transaction with physical money would be rounded to the nearest ten cents.
It gets done all the time around the world Yes., but you will have to include the clause requiring the automatic revaluation into the legislation. Yes. And so are salaries etc. Yes they would have to be converted by the specified conversion date. The only real problem would be that all new coins and currency would have to be readied for use by the conversion date. It is really no different from the introduction of a new currency like much of Europe did with the Euro in 2002 (I didn't notice the entire European economy crumbling to destruction that year. What has happened since is not the fault of the euro introduction.) Only in that case it wasn't a nice simple moving of the decimal, it was some odd amount and it was different for every country. So it CAN be done. In practical terms though such a revaluation is meaningless. If before I earned $10 and hour and paid $10 for something it took me one hour of labor to earn that item. After the conversion I'm now earning N$1 an hour and the item costs N$1 so it still takes me one hour of labor to earn that item. Absolutely NOTHING has changed except the name/denomination on the piece of paper. The only advantage is we get to work with smaller numbers.
Maybe the U.S. Mint doesn't have to go to Europe for advice. Seems to me that they should just follow the Casino's in making usable money. If anybody knows how to save a buck, it's them. Dave
No it doesn't and certainly not by stable economies. Check out this list of currency redenominations and tell me which example you'd like us to emulate. Nearly every one is attributable to inflation other than those converting to the Euro. (And I would argue that was effectively an exchange, not a redenomination. There was not supposed to be any value in the remaining currency even though Germans saved their Deutschmarks and still spend them like Euros which points to continuing cracks in the agreement.) Instant redenomination is not possible with the same currency since the pennies in my pocket are not capable of changing by themselves. It requires an instantaneous change of perception and that is not going to happen in a population of 300m+ (plus another large chunk outside). There would be fortunes made and lost in that moment. No thanks.
You have it all thought out except for one thing. If I am sitting on $10,000 in cold hard cash, it would suddenly be worth the equivalent of $1,000,000. The only way it could work is with a complete replacement of the physical money. People would have to be given a window to exchange old dollars for new dollars and goods and services would have to be dually priced during that exchange period. That is how the conversion to the Euro was completed. None of this is worth the time or effort involved and will not solve the problem of cent and nickel coins.
This reminded me of something. I'm 21 years old and recently my mom gave me a bag of old Polish coins that my grandfather had given me when I was little. I found a few coins worth 10000 Zl (Zl is the Polish dollar) and asked my mom about it. She said that sometime in the late 1980's early 1990's Poland switched their monetary system due to vast inflation. I did a quick google search and found that the 10000 Zl coin is equivalent to about 1 Zl today. I don't know any more about this but I guess it is possible to just move the decimal points around.
They've wasted so many millions of dollars making worthless slugs that it's only right they should waste more millions of dollars looking for ways to continue wasting money forever. This is a symptom of an economy founded on waste and moribound by the status quo.
Did you see the second sentence in the next to the last paragraph where I said new coins and currency would have to be ready before the conversion date? On conversion day the new currency becomes valid, and the old can either be exchanged or it might be allowed to circulate, at 10% of its old value if you chop one zero, or 1% if you chop two. So the $10,000 you are sitting on doesn't become $1,000,000, if you try and spend it it becomes $1000 or $100 depending on how many zeros we are dropping.. Old currency could probably still circulate (although it would most likely be exchanged rapidly for convenience sake.) Old coins would probably be more of a problem because you are not likely to get vending machines to accept both types, and the values of the old coins would drop so much they would become a pain to handle. Exchange once again would either take place quickly or they would just disappear into hoards. As would a change of the dollar. Inflation has reduced the value of the dollar to roughly 1% of what it was a hundred years ago. An exchange of Francs for euros at some given rate, an exchange of dollars for new dollars at a rate of ten or a hundred to one. I don't see a difference Same as when the Mexican Peso was exchanged for the New Peso at 1000 to one, and then after a few years they drop the word "New". After a few years we drop the word new and they are just dollars Actually it does, because you can keep the composition the same, change the size a little to make the new cent and new five cent distinguishable from the and the new cent coin has the purchasing power of the old dollar, the face value of N$0.01 and the cost of N$0.0002
the 10k to 1 mill sounds good to me.i think a world cruise to celabrate is in order.please get this done guys.
I've had arguments with my wife for years about getting rid of the penny. She thinks that is a horrible idea because she wants to get every cent of change coming to her. But one thing to keep in mind is that your change is always being rounded to the nearest penny. And if you go back in time far enough when a penny used to actually be able to buy something, you will realize that those people were actually loosing (or gaining depending on how your round) considerably more value than a nickel is today when they had to do their rounding.
