July 4, 2025 • 15 mins
For decades, the penny has cost more to produce than it’s worth. Now, the US government is finally stopping production of the one-cent coin for good.
So, how did we get here? And what does it mean for those little Abraham Lincolns stuck behind your couch cushions? On today’s Big Take podcast, Bloomberg’s Steven Dennis takes us through the life and death of the penny, and explores what it reveals about the way the US government works.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
It's July fourth, Independence Day in the US, and to
mark the holiday, we're taking a look at a financial
staple that's as fundamental to the story of America as
apple pie, Betsy Ross, and good old fashioned capitalism, the penny.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Penny. Collectors beware, the US mint is killing the penny.
The penny has been around basically since the start of
the Republic when we're minting, since even before the Constitution
was ratified.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Bloomberg reporter Stephen Dennis has been following the one cent
coin with interest since he first started covering Congress about
twenty years ago.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
It really does feel like this time around the penny
is actually going to disappear.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
In May, the Treasury Department made its final order of
penny blinks, the unmarked metal discs that get minted with
Lincoln's head to become a unit of currency. And after
it mints that final batch, the Treasury is going to
stop making new pennies. The move came after President Donald
(01:15):
Trump ordered his administration to ditch them. During this year's
Super Bowl second quarter, in a ten to nothing game,
Patrick Mahlmes trying to make a play.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
And we had something to talk about in my household
over the chips and salsa.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Republicans and Democrats don't agree on much, but across the
aisle there's been a general consensus that the economics of
making the scent don't make sense because these days it
costs more to produce a penny than the worth of
the coin itself.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
One of the things that you see chronically in government
is it's very hard to get rid of things that
don't work so that we can then invest in the
things that do.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
That's President Obama in a twenty thirteen interview.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
And the penny ends up being I think a good
metaphor for some of the larger problems that we've got.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
And here's President Trump in February.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Thank you, Henny's said Nickel.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Next, so how did we get here? And what does
it mean that those little Abraham Lincoln's in your basement
coin jar will soon be a collector's item. I'm Sarah Holder,
and this is the big take from Bloomberg News Today.
On the show, we pay Tribute to the Humble Penny,
(02:37):
we look at its history, its symbolism, and what phasing
it out could mean for the US economy. When's the
last time you used a penny, really think about it,
was it to make a wish in a fountain, capitalize
on some sidewalk good luck, add to your growing coin collection.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
I don't recall the last time I've used a penny
other than getting it off the floor and putting it
in a jar, and I think that's true of a
lot of people.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Bloomberg Stephen Dennis is something of a penny enthusiast, and
even he acknowledges that very few of us are still
using pennies for their intended purpose of buying stuff.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
In the last year or so, I think I've seen
two or three people in the US Senate cafeteria where
I eat most days, used pennies, and both of them
were US Senators near the age of eighty.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Elder statesmen in Congress, holding on to a relic of
the past years after society has moved on. There's some
irony there, for sure. But a few centuries ago, pennies
weren't just wedged in the corner of people's wallets. They
were everywhere.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
In seventeen ninety three, the first penny, as we've come
to know it, was minted by the US Mint, and
you know back then, a penny was a lot of money.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
In the early twentieth century, you could send a letter
for two pennies. In the fifties, a few pennies could
buy you a newspaper. In the sixties, a penny could
buy you a candy or a gumball. They were worth something.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Older people especially grew up on the idea of a
penny saved as a penny earned, and never waste a penny.
But we've dealt with so much inflation, and it's not
at the point where you can't buy anything with a penny.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
And it's not just the value of a penny that's
gone down. The cost of making pennies has also gone up.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
For the last twenty years or so, it's cost more
than a penny to make a penny. A penny right
now costs about three point seven cents for each one.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
That's in part because of the costs for a penny's
ingredients today copper and zinc. Over the years, there have
been efforts to change the penny shape or its metallic
composition to bring down those costs, but copper especially is
just getting more expensive because it's used in renewable energy
projects and electric vehicle production. There are other overhead costs
(05:12):
attributed to making the penny, too, like staffing the US
myths and keeping the electricity running. So for the US Treasury,
making pennies just doesn't pencil out. The department reported losing
eighty five point three million dollars last year on penny
production alone.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Sort of a poster child for inefficiency, and it's arguably
America's least useful product.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Critics of penny production say it's especially inefficient because the
individual coins often don't make their way back into the economy.
Here's what I mean. Businesses are required to give customers
exact change when they buy something in cash, but many
customers don't actually use those pennies to buy anything after that,
(05:59):
So businesses have to keep restocking those rolls of coins
to make exact change, which means the Treasury has to
keep minting more pennies. Steven says that vicious penny supply
demand cycle helps explain why the Treasury Department has been
minting billions of the increasingly unpopular coins every year, and
(06:19):
why politicians have wanted to stop minting them altogether.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
It's lost its utility frankly a long time ago. To
the point where even in two thousand and one, the
West Wing had part of an episode where they talked
about trying to get rid of the penny and ran
into resistance on Capitol Hill. He wants to abolish the penny.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
He doesn't want to abolish it as much as he
wants to give his boss a reason why we can't.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
For a long time, Washington's real life efforts to abolish
the penny ran into fierce opposition too.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
The first efforts to go after the penny date to
like the eighties and nineties when Arizona lawmakers were trying
to get rid of the penny and one of the
things they wanted to replace it with was dollar coins,
and dollar coins use a lot of copper, and copper's
mind in Arizona, so you had sort of like these
(07:13):
regional interests in Congress fighting each other. And so one
of the ideas was, well, if there were fewer pennies
taking up space in your pockets, people might be more
willing to use dollar coins and have the weight of
the dollar coins in their pockets. That would lead to
more copper being mined in Arizona, more jobs in Arizona,
(07:33):
and so you could see how that would all have
sort of coin versus coin politics.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Coin versus coin politics, the dollar coin advocates facing off
against the penny lobby.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
It's called Americans for Common Sense, where sense is spelled cents,
and it's funded primarily by the company Artisan, which makes
billions of penny blanks every year out of Zinc, primarily
in Tennessee.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Big Penny, as Stephen calls it, has been fighting efforts
to phase out the penny for decades. And it's not
the only one.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
You've got Tennessee lawmakers trying to protect jobs. You also
have mint workers in Denver and Philadelphia who want to
keep their job.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
There are also Abraham Lincoln enthusiasts and everyday nostalgics who
don't want to lose the penny, who think finding one
is good luck, or who like getting them pressed as
a memento at a museum, or who remember putting them
in their piggybanks as kids. In other words, there were
always people who'd be angry at lawmakers who took on
the penny.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
You know, there's a phrase in Washington of is the
juice or the squeeze? And for many lawmakers, the amount
of money you could save on pennies maybe fifty to
one hundred million dollars a year, depending on the year,
is not worth the pain of having people angry at you.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
All this helped the pennies stay alive for all these years,
but cost cutting in Washington won in the end. So
what changed?
Speaker 1 (09:15):
The ball got rolling when Jony Ernst of Iowa, she
is the chair of the Senate Doge Caucus, and she
sent Elon Musk and his team a list of things
that she thinks could be cut. Now, she didn't say
let's get rid of the penny, but she did say
it's ridiculous that it costs now more than three pennies
(09:36):
to make one.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
About two weeks before the Super Bowl, the official Doge
account posted on x highlighting those costs.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
And basically hinted that the penny should disappear.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Then came game day when Trump posted on truth social
calling for an end to penny production. And that's all
it took. In May, the Treasure he replaced its final
order for penny blinks and said they'll run out in
early twenty twenty six. So what does it mean for
the average American that pennies are heading out of production?
(10:11):
That's after the break Bloomberg, Stephen Dennis says the loss
of the penny is mostly symbolic, but he says we
could see businesses make some shifts for.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
The eighty four percent and rising percentage of transactions that
are now digital. You wouldn't see any change for the
increasingly vanishingly small percentage of transactions that are done in cash.
It would probably be rounded to the nearest nickel.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Other countries like Canada have already gotten rid of their penny.
An economist at the Atlanta FED don't expect to see
any significant inflationary consequences when the penny goes away in
the US, But Stephen says, when you think about it,
many of the transactions that do come down to a
penny are more of a branding exercise than anything else.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
You know, I think a lot of retailers will go
to ten ninety five instead of rounding up to eleven
because of that psychology. You know, you're trying to spur
more sales, and if it has a ten in front
of it instead of eleven, there's something in our brains
that says lower, cheaper better.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
To those that argue that getting rid of the penny
sends the wrong message on inflation that it says that
our money is worthless.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
The thing is is our money is worthless, and I
think people know that, which is why they're not using pennies.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
So everyday Americans shouldn't worry that the penny's death spells
higher costs. But will the change actually save the government
any money? Maybe? The Treasury has predicted that stopping penny
production will save the US fifty six million dollars a
year and costs. But there are some scenarios in which
this move could cause added trouble and expense.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
John McCain, the late Senator, tried to pause pennies for
ten years. We're not going to mint them for ten years,
he said during the first Trump administration, and the research
arm for Congress did a study. They asked the US Ment, Okay, well,
what would happen if we just stopped minting pennies and
(12:21):
the mint was like, we would have a big problem.
Two hundred and forty billion pennies or so are sitting
in people's basements. And if people thought that the penny
was going away and they decided to return those two
hundred billion pennies to the government under fear that they
wouldn't be able to cash them into the future. The
(12:42):
government would have to house all of these pennies, and
they don't have the storage facilities to handle that huge
tsunami of coinage, and that could actually cost them a
huge amount of money to get those storage facilities up
and running for all these pennies.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
But Steven says the idea that Americans are suddenly going
to collect their pennies and return them to the government
feels far fetched.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
I don't think there's going to be some kind of
like panic where everybody's like, I've got to get the
coins in by such and such a date. And I
had a little short conversation with Scott Besson in the
hallway this year when I kind of pressed him, I'm like, so,
when are you guys to actually get rid of the penny?
You know, months had gone by, and he's like, we're
(13:28):
working on it. And he also clarified, you know, we're
not getting rid of it. We're just not going to
make it anymore. And so it'll still be legal tender. If
you have those coins for a long time to come,
you could still take them to a bank and they
will presumably accept them. But it's it is possible that
a lot of retelligent will stop accepting them.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
And as cash transactions become rarer, the end of penny
production raises questions about the value of other coins. Nichols,
after all, cost about fourteen to make. That's almost three
times more than they're worth. And even without the penny,
the US mint will keep paying for many of the
same facilities, which come with their own costs.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Those administrative expenses, A lot of them will stick around.
You still have the buildings, you're gonna still have overhead.
You're just gonna have a factory that's not running at
full tilt anymore. And so penny people believe that the
cost of a nickel could go up to as much
as twenty five cents each, and so there's a good
(14:32):
argument to get rid of nichols as well, but that's
not what the nickel.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
People want for now. Nickels are safe, and don't get
too sentimental about the penny. If history offers any guide,
it's possible that once the little guys are truly gone,
we won't really miss them. This was before your time,
but America used to have a halfpenny. It was discontinued
in eighteen fifty seven.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
It costs more than half a penny to make the
halfpenny we got rid of the half penny sound familiar.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
The show is hosted by Me, David Gura, Wanha and
Talaa Mosen. The show is made by Aaron Edwards, David Fox,
Eleanor Harrison Dengate, Patti Hirsch, Rachel Lewis, Krisky, Naomi Julia Press,
Tracy Samuelson, Naomi Shaven, Alex Sugiera, Julia Weaver, Julian Weller,
(15:28):
Yang Yong and Taka Yasuzawa. To get more from The
Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg dot Com,
subscribe today at Bloomberg dot Com Slash Podcast Offer. Thanks
for listening. We'll be back on Monday.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
It's July fourth, Independence Day in the US, and to
mark the holiday, we're taking a look at a financial
staple that's as fundamental to the story of America as
apple pie, Betsy Ross, and good old fashioned capitalism, the penny.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Penny. Collectors beware, the US mint is killing the penny.
The penny has been around basically since the start of
the Republic when we're minting, since even before the Constitution
was ratified.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Bloomberg reporter Stephen Dennis has been following the one cent
coin with interest since he first started covering Congress about
twenty years ago.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
It really does feel like this time around the penny
is actually going to disappear.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
In May, the Treasury Department made its final order of
penny blinks, the unmarked metal discs that get minted with
Lincoln's head to become a unit of currency. And after
it mints that final batch, the Treasury is going to
stop making new pennies. The move came after President Donald
(01:15):
Trump ordered his administration to ditch them. During this year's
Super Bowl second quarter, in a ten to nothing game,
Patrick Mahlmes trying to make a play.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
And we had something to talk about in my household
over the chips and salsa.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Republicans and Democrats don't agree on much, but across the
aisle there's been a general consensus that the economics of
making the scent don't make sense because these days it
costs more to produce a penny than the worth of
the coin itself.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
One of the things that you see chronically in government
is it's very hard to get rid of things that
don't work so that we can then invest in the
things that do.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
That's President Obama in a twenty thirteen interview.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
And the penny ends up being I think a good
metaphor for some of the larger problems that we've got.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
And here's President Trump in February.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Thank you, Henny's said Nickel.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Next, so how did we get here? And what does
it mean that those little Abraham Lincoln's in your basement
coin jar will soon be a collector's item. I'm Sarah Holder,
and this is the big take from Bloomberg News Today.
On the show, we pay Tribute to the Humble Penny,
(02:37):
we look at its history, its symbolism, and what phasing
it out could mean for the US economy. When's the
last time you used a penny, really think about it,
was it to make a wish in a fountain, capitalize
on some sidewalk good luck, add to your growing coin collection.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
I don't recall the last time I've used a penny
other than getting it off the floor and putting it
in a jar, and I think that's true of a
lot of people.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Bloomberg Stephen Dennis is something of a penny enthusiast, and
even he acknowledges that very few of us are still
using pennies for their intended purpose of buying stuff.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
In the last year or so, I think I've seen
two or three people in the US Senate cafeteria where
I eat most days, used pennies, and both of them
were US Senators near the age of eighty.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Elder statesmen in Congress, holding on to a relic of
the past years after society has moved on. There's some
irony there, for sure. But a few centuries ago, pennies
weren't just wedged in the corner of people's wallets. They
were everywhere.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
In seventeen ninety three, the first penny, as we've come
to know it, was minted by the US Mint, and
you know back then, a penny was a lot of money.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
In the early twentieth century, you could send a letter
for two pennies. In the fifties, a few pennies could
buy you a newspaper. In the sixties, a penny could
buy you a candy or a gumball. They were worth something.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Older people especially grew up on the idea of a
penny saved as a penny earned, and never waste a penny.
But we've dealt with so much inflation, and it's not
at the point where you can't buy anything with a penny.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
And it's not just the value of a penny that's
gone down. The cost of making pennies has also gone up.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
For the last twenty years or so, it's cost more
than a penny to make a penny. A penny right
now costs about three point seven cents for each one.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
That's in part because of the costs for a penny's
ingredients today copper and zinc. Over the years, there have
been efforts to change the penny shape or its metallic
composition to bring down those costs, but copper especially is
just getting more expensive because it's used in renewable energy
projects and electric vehicle production. There are other overhead costs
(05:12):
attributed to making the penny, too, like staffing the US
myths and keeping the electricity running. So for the US Treasury,
making pennies just doesn't pencil out. The department reported losing
eighty five point three million dollars last year on penny
production alone.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Sort of a poster child for inefficiency, and it's arguably
America's least useful product.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Critics of penny production say it's especially inefficient because the
individual coins often don't make their way back into the economy.
Here's what I mean. Businesses are required to give customers
exact change when they buy something in cash, but many
customers don't actually use those pennies to buy anything after that,
(05:59):
So businesses have to keep restocking those rolls of coins
to make exact change, which means the Treasury has to
keep minting more pennies. Steven says that vicious penny supply
demand cycle helps explain why the Treasury Department has been
minting billions of the increasingly unpopular coins every year, and
(06:19):
why politicians have wanted to stop minting them altogether.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
It's lost its utility frankly a long time ago. To
the point where even in two thousand and one, the
West Wing had part of an episode where they talked
about trying to get rid of the penny and ran
into resistance on Capitol Hill. He wants to abolish the penny.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
He doesn't want to abolish it as much as he
wants to give his boss a reason why we can't.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
For a long time, Washington's real life efforts to abolish
the penny ran into fierce opposition too.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
The first efforts to go after the penny date to
like the eighties and nineties when Arizona lawmakers were trying
to get rid of the penny and one of the
things they wanted to replace it with was dollar coins,
and dollar coins use a lot of copper, and copper's
mind in Arizona, so you had sort of like these
(07:13):
regional interests in Congress fighting each other. And so one
of the ideas was, well, if there were fewer pennies
taking up space in your pockets, people might be more
willing to use dollar coins and have the weight of
the dollar coins in their pockets. That would lead to
more copper being mined in Arizona, more jobs in Arizona,
(07:33):
and so you could see how that would all have
sort of coin versus coin politics.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Coin versus coin politics, the dollar coin advocates facing off
against the penny lobby.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
It's called Americans for Common Sense, where sense is spelled cents,
and it's funded primarily by the company Artisan, which makes
billions of penny blanks every year out of Zinc, primarily
in Tennessee.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Big Penny, as Stephen calls it, has been fighting efforts
to phase out the penny for decades. And it's not
the only one.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
You've got Tennessee lawmakers trying to protect jobs. You also
have mint workers in Denver and Philadelphia who want to
keep their job.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
There are also Abraham Lincoln enthusiasts and everyday nostalgics who
don't want to lose the penny, who think finding one
is good luck, or who like getting them pressed as
a memento at a museum, or who remember putting them
in their piggybanks as kids. In other words, there were
always people who'd be angry at lawmakers who took on
the penny.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
You know, there's a phrase in Washington of is the
juice or the squeeze? And for many lawmakers, the amount
of money you could save on pennies maybe fifty to
one hundred million dollars a year, depending on the year,
is not worth the pain of having people angry at you.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
All this helped the pennies stay alive for all these years,
but cost cutting in Washington won in the end. So
what changed?
Speaker 1 (09:15):
The ball got rolling when Jony Ernst of Iowa, she
is the chair of the Senate Doge Caucus, and she
sent Elon Musk and his team a list of things
that she thinks could be cut. Now, she didn't say
let's get rid of the penny, but she did say
it's ridiculous that it costs now more than three pennies
(09:36):
to make one.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
About two weeks before the Super Bowl, the official Doge
account posted on x highlighting those costs.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
And basically hinted that the penny should disappear.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Then came game day when Trump posted on truth social
calling for an end to penny production. And that's all
it took. In May, the Treasure he replaced its final
order for penny blinks and said they'll run out in
early twenty twenty six. So what does it mean for
the average American that pennies are heading out of production?
(10:11):
That's after the break Bloomberg, Stephen Dennis says the loss
of the penny is mostly symbolic, but he says we
could see businesses make some shifts for.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
The eighty four percent and rising percentage of transactions that
are now digital. You wouldn't see any change for the
increasingly vanishingly small percentage of transactions that are done in cash.
It would probably be rounded to the nearest nickel.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Other countries like Canada have already gotten rid of their penny.
An economist at the Atlanta FED don't expect to see
any significant inflationary consequences when the penny goes away in
the US, But Stephen says, when you think about it,
many of the transactions that do come down to a
penny are more of a branding exercise than anything else.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
You know, I think a lot of retailers will go
to ten ninety five instead of rounding up to eleven
because of that psychology. You know, you're trying to spur
more sales, and if it has a ten in front
of it instead of eleven, there's something in our brains
that says lower, cheaper better.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
To those that argue that getting rid of the penny
sends the wrong message on inflation that it says that
our money is worthless.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
The thing is is our money is worthless, and I
think people know that, which is why they're not using pennies.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
So everyday Americans shouldn't worry that the penny's death spells
higher costs. But will the change actually save the government
any money? Maybe? The Treasury has predicted that stopping penny
production will save the US fifty six million dollars a
year and costs. But there are some scenarios in which
this move could cause added trouble and expense.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
John McCain, the late Senator, tried to pause pennies for
ten years. We're not going to mint them for ten years,
he said during the first Trump administration, and the research
arm for Congress did a study. They asked the US Ment, Okay, well,
what would happen if we just stopped minting pennies and
(12:21):
the mint was like, we would have a big problem.
Two hundred and forty billion pennies or so are sitting
in people's basements. And if people thought that the penny
was going away and they decided to return those two
hundred billion pennies to the government under fear that they
wouldn't be able to cash them into the future. The
(12:42):
government would have to house all of these pennies, and
they don't have the storage facilities to handle that huge
tsunami of coinage, and that could actually cost them a
huge amount of money to get those storage facilities up
and running for all these pennies.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
But Steven says the idea that Americans are suddenly going
to collect their pennies and return them to the government
feels far fetched.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
I don't think there's going to be some kind of
like panic where everybody's like, I've got to get the
coins in by such and such a date. And I
had a little short conversation with Scott Besson in the
hallway this year when I kind of pressed him, I'm like, so,
when are you guys to actually get rid of the penny?
You know, months had gone by, and he's like, we're
(13:28):
working on it. And he also clarified, you know, we're
not getting rid of it. We're just not going to
make it anymore. And so it'll still be legal tender. If
you have those coins for a long time to come,
you could still take them to a bank and they
will presumably accept them. But it's it is possible that
a lot of retelligent will stop accepting them.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
And as cash transactions become rarer, the end of penny
production raises questions about the value of other coins. Nichols,
after all, cost about fourteen to make. That's almost three
times more than they're worth. And even without the penny,
the US mint will keep paying for many of the
same facilities, which come with their own costs.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Those administrative expenses, A lot of them will stick around.
You still have the buildings, you're gonna still have overhead.
You're just gonna have a factory that's not running at
full tilt anymore. And so penny people believe that the
cost of a nickel could go up to as much
as twenty five cents each, and so there's a good
(14:32):
argument to get rid of nichols as well, but that's
not what the nickel.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
People want for now. Nickels are safe, and don't get
too sentimental about the penny. If history offers any guide,
it's possible that once the little guys are truly gone,
we won't really miss them. This was before your time,
but America used to have a halfpenny. It was discontinued
in eighteen fifty seven.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
It costs more than half a penny to make the
halfpenny we got rid of the half penny sound familiar.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
The show is hosted by Me, David Gura, Wanha and
Talaa Mosen. The show is made by Aaron Edwards, David Fox,
Eleanor Harrison Dengate, Patti Hirsch, Rachel Lewis, Krisky, Naomi Julia Press,
Tracy Samuelson, Naomi Shaven, Alex Sugiera, Julia Weaver, Julian Weller,
(15:28):
Yang Yong and Taka Yasuzawa. To get more from The
Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg dot Com,
subscribe today at Bloomberg dot Com Slash Podcast Offer. Thanks
for listening. We'll be back on Monday.
Hosts And Creators
Sarah Holder
Saleha Mohsin
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