Adam Youngs seeks to get a lot of benefit of a lot of money.
His company, Portland Mint, sells old cents in bulk to investors looking. A set of pieces of a penny of Portland Mint with a nominal value of approximately US $ 60,000 is sold for about US $ 120,000.
The bet is that those older cents contain copper that would be worth about US $ 180,000 at current prices. There is a problem: it is illegal to melt a mass of lincoln cents to extract the metal. But Centavos hoarders regained hope that their bets will one day bear fruit when President Donald Trump said this week that he ordered the Treasury Secretary to stop coining the coins.
Perhaps the disappearance of the humble penny, as it is thought, eventually It will end the ban on the foundry, positioning the owners of the coins to take advantage of their cheap copper mountains.
“Purchases with discount now, things change in the future and then you can capture true value,” said Youngs.
Trump’s diatribe unleashed a national scandal around the venerable cent, which generated reactions that went from nostalgia to the feeling that “it was time.” The possible end of an era, combined with a copper rebound in metal markets, also It is insufflating new life to a homemade industry based on lots of pocket coins.
“Collectors and investors speculate that the value of copper will increase,” said Ted Anchar, director of Numismatics at APMEX, a merchant of precious metals from Oklahoma City who has been selling copper cents for years. “That is the main reason why they buy copper cents”
Customers prefer “the 1982 and previous coins,” said Dennis Steinmetz, founder of Steinmetz Coins & Currency in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The company offers 5,000 cents (with a nominal value of US $ 50) for US $ 79.
“As you know, you can’t melt them,” says Steinmetz’s website. “However, if the government authorizes the merger, you will be very ahead.”
However, there are reasons to be skeptical. It is not clear if Trump has authority to cancel the penny without the approval of the Congress. Even if I had it, The disappearance of the currency would not necessarily lead to the government to eliminate the almost total prohibition of melting cents.
“I do not believe that the elimination of the Pentavo affects the ban,” said Philip Diehl, former director of the United States Currency House.
In other words, Potentially controversial policy changes would be needed to take advantage of the commercial opportunity. Even so, skeptics wonder if all that copper would translate into considerable gain.
“I can’t imagine that someone has enough cents to make this very profitable”Said Adam Simon, professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Michigan, who has studied the copper markets of the United States. “My substantiated assumption is that the cost of doing all this would exceed the market value.”
Is that enough to torpedo the old cents market? No, it is not.
Modern cents, zinc compounds covered with copper, contain little merger value, so the game for investors is to find the oldest pieces, mostly copper.
In its Oregon warehouse, Youngs separates the oldest and most valuable cents with 15 industrial classifying machines that can classify 3,000 coins per minute. DIY fans can opt for a semi -automatic classifier manufactured by Ryedale Enterprises of Michigan that can process up to 300 cents per minute.
Or cents can simply buy old coins.
“We have seen an important rebound in recent weeks, with copper prices in the headlines and going up again”Said Stefan Gleason, executive director of Money Metals Exchange. The firm sells 34 pound bags of copper cents at US $ 203.66, or approximately 4 cents per currency.
Before Trump took care of the penny, which the United States manufactures since the end of the 18th century, several people, from selected legislators to former president Barack Obama, expressed their willingness to leave the currency. One of the main reasons is the cost: Manufacture a penny costs about 3.7 cents, according to the 2024 annual report of La Casa de la Moneda. The La Moneda house coined 3.2 billion of them last year, more than half of all the coins that will produce in 2024.
Canada stopped producing its penny in 2012 and instituted rounding requirements for cash payments to the increase of five closest cents.
But if the United States adopted a similar approach, it would probably increase the demand for five cent coins, which are also a loss of money for the Mint. Between 2014 and 2024, manufacturing coins of five cents cost US $ 776 million more than the nominal value of the currencies, a loss even greater than that of the cents. (The Mint won that amount and more with the coins of ten and twenty -five cents, whose production costs are lower than the nominal values).
However, despite all the focus on money, some cents say that attractiveness goes beyond dollars and, well, the cents.
David Frey, from Zionsville, Indiana, CHe checked his collection of coins of 27 kilos of copper from a decade of coins saved by his father. He said he likes to imagine coins dyeing in the pockets of innumerable strangers over the years.
Tristan Kwiatkowski, a collector of the Northeast of Pennsylvania who recently acquired a penny escape coined in the 1780s, also has about 30 pounds of more recent copper cents that he obtained classifying scrolls of coins from his bank.
PREDICES THAT MANY PEOPLE WILL CONTINUE TO TAKEY THEIR OLD COINS AS THE.
“Coins are one of the most tangible pieces in history that someone can have in their hands,” he said. “As many people, I don’t have a definite final destination for them.”
