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Trump Penny-Killing Plan Stirs Hope of Profit, 20 Tons at a Time
February 14, 2025
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(Bloomberg) -- Adam Youngs is looking to make a lot from truckloads of the little red cent.
His company, Portland Mint, sells old pennies in bulk — 40,000 pounds (18,100 kilograms) at a time — to investors angling to profit on the copper that makes up 95% of the coins minted before 1983. A cache of one-cent pieces from Portland Mint with a face value of roughly $60,000 sells for about $120,000.
The wager is that those older pennies contain copper that would be worth about $180,000 at current prices. One snag: It’s illegal to melt a mass of Lincoln cents to harvest the metal. But penny hoarders gained fresh hope that their bets will one day pay off when President Donald Trump said this week that he ordered the Treasury secretary to stop minting the coins.
Perhaps the demise of the humble penny, the thinking goes, will eventually bring an end to the melting ban – positioning owners of the coins to cash in on their mountains of cheap copper.
“You buy at a discount now, things change in the future, then you can actually capture the true value,” Youngs said.
Trump’s broadside touched off a national fuss over the venerable penny, sparking reactions from nostalgia to a sense of “it’s about time.” The potential end of an era, combined with a copper rally in metals markets, is also breathing new life into a cottage industry based on piles of pocket change.
“Collectors and investors speculate the value of copper will go up,” said Ted Ancher, director of numismatics at Apmex, a precious metals dealer in Oklahoma City that has been selling copper pennies for years. “That is the primary reason they buy copper cents.”
Customers favor “the ’82 and earlier stuff,” said Dennis Steinmetz, founder of Steinmetz Coins & Currency in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The company offers 5,000 pennies – with a $50 face value – for $79.
“As you may know you may not currently melt these,” Steinmetz’s website says. “However if the government authorizes melting you will be way ahead.”
There’s reason to be skeptical, however. It’s not clear whether Trump has the authority to cancel the penny without approval from Congress. Even if he does, the coin’s demise wouldn’t necessarily lead to the government scrapping the near-total ban on melting pennies.
“I don’t believe the penny’s elimination would affect the prohibition,” said Philip Diehl, former director of the US Mint.
In other words, potentially controversial policy changes would be needed to unlock the business opportunity. Even then, skeptics question whether all that copper would pencil out to a tidy profit.
“I cannot imagine anyone would have enough mass of pennies to make this very profitable,” said Adam Simon, a professor of Earth and environmental sciences at the University of Michigan who has studied US copper markets. “My educated guess is that the cost to do all of this would exceed the market value.”
Is that enough to torpedo the market for old pennies? No, it isn’t.
Modern pennies, composed of copper-plated zinc, contain little melt value. So the game for investors is to find the older, mostly copper pieces.
At his warehouse in Oregon, Youngs isolates the more valuable older pennies with 15 industrial sorting machines that can sift through 3,000 coins a minute. Do-it-yourselfers can opt for semi-automatic sorter made by Michigan’s Ryedale Enterprises that can work through as many as 300 cents a minute.
Or penny hunters can just buy old coins.
“We’ve seen a major uptick in the last few weeks with copper prices making headlines and rising again,” said Stefan Gleason, chief executive officer of Money Metals Exchange. The firm sells 34-pound bags of copper pennies for $203.66, or about 4 cents a coin.
Before Trump took on the penny, which the US has made since the late 18th century, people from select lawmakers to former President Barack Obama signaled openness to ditching the coin. One big reason is the expense: It costs the US about 3.7 cents to make a penny, according to the Mint’s 2024 annual report. The Mint struck 3.2 billion of them last year, more than half of all the coins it produced in 2024.
Canada stopped producing its penny in 2012 and instituted rounding requirements for cash payments to the nearest five-cent increment.
But if the US adopted a similar approach, that would probably increase demand for nickels, which are also a money loser for the Mint. From 2014 through 2024, it cost $776 million more to make nickels than the face value of the coins, an even bigger loss than for pennies. (The Mint made that back and more on dimes and quarters, whose production costs are lower than face values.)
For all the focus on money, though, some penny aficionados say the appeal goes beyond dollars and, well, cents.
David Frey from Zionsville, Indiana, built his 60-pound copper penny collection from a decade of his father’s saved pocket change. He said he likes to imagine the coins jangling in the pockets of countless strangers over the years.
Tristan Kwiatkowski, a collector from northeast Pennsylvania who recently acquired a Fugio cent minted in the 1780s, also has around 30 pounds of more recent copper pennies that he got by sorting through rolls of coins from his bank.
He predicts many people will keep trying to hold their old pennies as they become scarcer. But even if the melting ban were lifted, he said he probably wouldn’t part with his stash of copper coins.
“Coins are one of the most tangible pieces of history that somebody can hold,” he said. “Like a lot of people, I don’t really have much of an endgame for them.”
--With assistance from Charlie Wells and Stefani Reynolds.
©2025 Bloomberg L.P.
.jpg)
(Bloomberg) -- Adam Youngs is looking to make a lot from truckloads of the little red cent.
His company, Portland Mint, sells old pennies in bulk — 40,000 pounds (18,100 kilograms) at a time — to investors angling to profit on the copper that makes up 95% of the coins minted before 1983. A cache of one-cent pieces from Portland Mint with a face value of roughly $60,000 sells for about $120,000.
The wager is that those older pennies contain copper that would be worth about $180,000 at current prices. One snag: It’s illegal to melt a mass of Lincoln cents to harvest the metal. But penny hoarders gained fresh hope that their bets will one day pay off when President Donald Trump said this week that he ordered the Treasury secretary to stop minting the coins.
Perhaps the demise of the humble penny, the thinking goes, will eventually bring an end to the melting ban – positioning owners of the coins to cash in on their mountains of cheap copper.
“You buy at a discount now, things change in the future, then you can actually capture the true value,” Youngs said.
Trump’s broadside touched off a national fuss over the venerable penny, sparking reactions from nostalgia to a sense of “it’s about time.” The potential end of an era, combined with a copper rally in metals markets, is also breathing new life into a cottage industry based on piles of pocket change.
“Collectors and investors speculate the value of copper will go up,” said Ted Ancher, director of numismatics at Apmex, a precious metals dealer in Oklahoma City that has been selling copper pennies for years. “That is the primary reason they buy copper cents.”
Customers favor “the ’82 and earlier stuff,” said Dennis Steinmetz, founder of Steinmetz Coins & Currency in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The company offers 5,000 pennies – with a $50 face value – for $79.
“As you may know you may not currently melt these,” Steinmetz’s website says. “However if the government authorizes melting you will be way ahead.”
There’s reason to be skeptical, however. It’s not clear whether Trump has the authority to cancel the penny without approval from Congress. Even if he does, the coin’s demise wouldn’t necessarily lead to the government scrapping the near-total ban on melting pennies.
“I don’t believe the penny’s elimination would affect the prohibition,” said Philip Diehl, former director of the US Mint.
In other words, potentially controversial policy changes would be needed to unlock the business opportunity. Even then, skeptics question whether all that copper would pencil out to a tidy profit.
“I cannot imagine anyone would have enough mass of pennies to make this very profitable,” said Adam Simon, a professor of Earth and environmental sciences at the University of Michigan who has studied US copper markets. “My educated guess is that the cost to do all of this would exceed the market value.”
Is that enough to torpedo the market for old pennies? No, it isn’t.
Modern pennies, composed of copper-plated zinc, contain little melt value. So the game for investors is to find the older, mostly copper pieces.
At his warehouse in Oregon, Youngs isolates the more valuable older pennies with 15 industrial sorting machines that can sift through 3,000 coins a minute. Do-it-yourselfers can opt for semi-automatic sorter made by Michigan’s Ryedale Enterprises that can work through as many as 300 cents a minute.
Or penny hunters can just buy old coins.
“We’ve seen a major uptick in the last few weeks with copper prices making headlines and rising again,” said Stefan Gleason, chief executive officer of Money Metals Exchange. The firm sells 34-pound bags of copper pennies for $203.66, or about 4 cents a coin.
Before Trump took on the penny, which the US has made since the late 18th century, people from select lawmakers to former President Barack Obama signaled openness to ditching the coin. One big reason is the expense: It costs the US about 3.7 cents to make a penny, according to the Mint’s 2024 annual report. The Mint struck 3.2 billion of them last year, more than half of all the coins it produced in 2024.
Canada stopped producing its penny in 2012 and instituted rounding requirements for cash payments to the nearest five-cent increment.
But if the US adopted a similar approach, that would probably increase demand for nickels, which are also a money loser for the Mint. From 2014 through 2024, it cost $776 million more to make nickels than the face value of the coins, an even bigger loss than for pennies. (The Mint made that back and more on dimes and quarters, whose production costs are lower than face values.)
For all the focus on money, though, some penny aficionados say the appeal goes beyond dollars and, well, cents.
David Frey from Zionsville, Indiana, built his 60-pound copper penny collection from a decade of his father’s saved pocket change. He said he likes to imagine the coins jangling in the pockets of countless strangers over the years.
Tristan Kwiatkowski, a collector from northeast Pennsylvania who recently acquired a Fugio cent minted in the 1780s, also has around 30 pounds of more recent copper pennies that he got by sorting through rolls of coins from his bank.
He predicts many people will keep trying to hold their old pennies as they become scarcer. But even if the melting ban were lifted, he said he probably wouldn’t part with his stash of copper coins.
“Coins are one of the most tangible pieces of history that somebody can hold,” he said. “Like a lot of people, I don’t really have much of an endgame for them.”
--With assistance from Charlie Wells and Stefani Reynolds.
©2025 Bloomberg L.P.
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