Who in the heck would be spending pennies and nickels now? As you mention, the pre-82 pennies have over two cents of copper in them. The post-82 pennies were almost at par with their zinc content a couple months ago. Nickels have more than five cents of metal in them.
And now commodity prices are starting to roll again. When hyper-inflation comes these small coins will retain their intrinsic metal value escalating against the collapsing dollar -- and in a worse case scenario would become "small change" for your Silver Eagles or 90 percent.
The nephew regularly "buys" hundred dollar boxes of nickels and twenty-five dollar boxes of pennies from the bank. His reasoning is that he can never lose money on the deal and in a financial meltdown the coinage will hold value better than paper money.
The government is destroying the middle class with the hidden tax of inflation caused by excessive money supply. For a supposedly conservative forum there is very little discussion of hard money economics here.
When it all comes tumbling down you would much rather hold a hundred pennies or twenty nickels than one paper "dollar" of American debt vouchers. Copper and nickel with a bit more substance than paper.
Oh well, you seen one Great Depression then you've seen them all.
HG
As the post above mentions, it's a no brainer to be hoarding pennies and nickels now. You can't lose the intrinsic metal value of them even as the purchasing power of the "dollar" declines -- and you can always spend them in a pinch. Some will tell you that you lose out on "interest" by holding coinage rather than keeping the paper "money" in the bank but most by now should figure that collecting interest at a rate slower than the metal's appreciation is a sucker's game.
It's been awhile since I've posted due to health problems but the illness hasn't kept me from watching the gold price jump up and down and I can tell you now that gold is getting ready to take off again. It's back over 600 now and the billions of dollars the central bankers have thrown away to knock it down for the last six weeks was just another economic piss in the wind.
I was born shortly after my namesake president Harding was elected. Granny said we were so poor that they only had enough ink to write my initials in the family bible so I have been HG ever since. I saw the Great Depression first hand and now that this quack doctor says I'm going to live it looks like I'm going to see another. Because sure as the sun is coming up tomorrow, we are about to have a crash in this country that's going to make 1929 look like a country picnic like we used to have.
I wrote once before how Father coming back from the Great War with gold coins kept us alive during the Great Depression. Of course if he hadn't been such a damn fool and bought all those stocks on margin we wouldn't have lost the city house and had to move to the country. But those gold coins erased a lot of sins in those days and when everybody was wiped out Father still had his gold coins from France.
We ate while others starved.
That thieving dog Roosevelt tried to take everybody's gold and Father just laughed when the subject came up. The other thing he brought back from the war was a Hun Mauser and he knew how to use it and said that anyone that tried to steal his gold would wind up getting lead instead. He called it "reverse alchemy" when he had been drinking a little.
Right now gold is dirt cheap at 600. For about a quarter of that price you can buy a hundred year old British Sovereign or even a German 20 Mark coin like Father acquired in France. If you have extra money do it soon before the price starts going vertical by the end of this year. Gold is one of only two protections the citizen has against central bankers gone mad. If you've read this far you know the other one.
The middle class in America is being destroyed through inflation and it breaks my heart to see what has happened to this great land of ours. Sometimes when Father had been hitting the bottle hard he would start carrying on about British bankers starting the war and getting all his buddies killed in France. When Roosevelt was elected he said it would be the end of America in my lifetime and if I can hang on a few more years I think he will have been proven right.
Start buying gold and silver -- quietly. Shhhhhh .... as another Roosevelt might be right around the corner. The price is low now because the central bankers will do whatever it takes to keep the price down by creating more money and naked short selling gold on paper. But eventually they print so much money that the paper becomes worthless -- when that happens gold and silver have no theoretical upside in paper dollar terms
If you can't afford silver and gold start hoarding pennies and nickels. You won't lose any money and each one saved ultimately is worth more than its paper equivalent.
During this July 4th holiday take a moment or two to think about these things. You might find you have a lot more in common with the Founding Fathers than you think.
HG
Oh not really. We just have a band of status quo addicts who instantly jump on anybody who brings that stuff up.
Try posting a thread sometime. Watch what happens.