Did the Mint actually lose 2c per coin making War Nickels?
lsica
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At a spot price of $1.29 per oz, which is where the face value of pre-1965 US coins equal their bullion value, the bullion price of a 1942 to 1945 War Nickel is 7.25 cents. That seems like a pretty big loss to take, especially during wartime. Or am I missing something?
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They need nickel for the war effort, and silver was the only available metal suitable for the job.
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Could the country have survived commerce-wise had there been no mintage of five cent coins from 1942-1945, or was there such a coin shortage that those "nickels" were required to fulfill?
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That's what I'm wondering. Rounded up about a billion war nickels were made. That means a $20 million loss. That's about $400 million adjusted for inflation. It just seems like a huge hit for a country at war like we were in the 1940s. Wouldn't it make more sense to just not make nickels during the war? Is there some historical information about this that I'm missing?
Where are you getting that spot price from? One source I found online shows that an ounce of silver was worth between 35 and 45 cents during the war years.
Wasn't $1.29 the monetary value not the market value? The market value was much lower than that according to ćharts.
https://sdbullion.com/silver-price-by-year
The monetary value is supposed to be higher than spot prices to prevent melting.
$1.29 was the monetary value set by Treasury not the spot price which was under 50 cents as you indicated.
If it was that much of a hassle, they probably would have gone back to minting half dimes. When the legislation passed to authorize wartime coinage, there was a clause that allowed for making 3 cent coins again that went unfilled.
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Hmmmmm...I always thought that the price of silver was historically more or less around that $1.29 before the big increases of the early 1960s, and that's why the coin silver weights were established in the first place
Monetary fix not actual spot price.
Losing money making a coin simply isn't done in a sane world.
The US was sane in WW II.
Seigniorage: the profit made by a government when a coin is issued with a face value higher than the value it cost the government to buy the metal to make the coin from (and production costs for making the coin).
Most circulating coins generate seigniorage for the government that makes them, and precious metal circulating coinage was no different. Governments don't produce coinage purely as a public service; they do it to make a profit.
Seigniorage has always been a fine balancing act: to maximize seigniorage, you want to use the cheapest metals possible, but most cheap metals (like brass and aluminium) "look cheap" in coinage, and in countries where this happens, the public tends to lose faith in the currency - which accelerates the inflationary spiral. So countries that could afford it, continued to use precious metals in coins, even though it meant reduced seigniorage profits. The risk was, of course, that metal costs would rise to the point of the seigniorage becoming negative: a coin costing more to produce than its face value.
Which of course happened with silver in the 1960s. The whole reason behind the global abandonment of silver in circulating coinage was the rising silver price making the seigniorage go negative - the government making a loss on every single silver coin they produced. Negative seigniorage is also the reason why ceasing production of the 1 cent coin is economically rational - the Mint becomes more profitable for the government simply by ceasing doing something. That the US government has continued to produce 1 cent coins, years after they started earning negative seigniorage, proves that the government is behaving irrationally.
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The value of the nickel for the war effort was far, far higher than any small loss due to the value of the silver.
Defense spending peaked at 40% of GDP (although that's squishy as war production accounting isn't typically GAAP).
The US spent $340 BILLION during the war, $20 MILLION isn't even a rounding error.
Also, recall the nickels were made with the distinguishing mintmarks allowing them to have been pulled out of circulation and the silver recovered if it had been economically viable.
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There was no such loss. The actual value of the silver was more like 2.5 cents. [See the posts above]
Been chatting with Roger B. about this. Starting in 1934 the Treasury would buy newly mined silver at $0.6464+ per ounce, which was half the $1.2929+ price at which the silver in a silver dollar was worth exactly $1.00. This was a deliberate subsidy of the mining industry, which had been hard hit by the collapse in the free market price of silver. They then monetized it by issuing Silver Certificates backed by it, essentially doubling their money.
Despite all that, the free market price for older silver bars was running around 35 cents an ounce during WW2. (I think that the rock bottom price during the Depression was 27 cents an ounce.) So, the warnix had about 2 cents worth of silver in them when they came out.
What you are missing is that the price of silver was lower than $1.29 in 1942. It didn't flirt with $1.29 until the mid 1960s.
The mint did plan on withdrawing the coins from circulation after the war, however. That was reason for the large mint mark above the dome.
what does it cost to produce a Lincoln cent today?
It's no longer sane. Money and wealth are created and destroyed with no regard to the commonweal. This goes many times over as it concerns the production of cents and nickels.
And this is the primary reason they were made with silver; small change was used to remind everybody that the country was on a war footing. They didn't want people grumbling when they couldn't buy sugar or tires. They wanted everyone to pitch in and make B-17's and ammunition.
@BillJones said: The mint did plan on withdrawing the coins from circulation after the war, however. That was reason for the large mint mark above the dome.
This was my first thought, the Nickels from that era were meant as a stopgap with removal from commerce the end result intended.
So not much has changed regarding waste.
So what was the reason they were not withdrawn from circ.? Logistics? I don't really see what the original reason was for planning to remove them, it seems like that would be more hassle than it's worth. Perhaps that is the very reason they were not withdrawn.
Precisely. There really was no reason to remove them anyway; the mint had already made a profit via seigniorage so it wasn't like they lost anything, plus it would have been nearly impossible to accomplish (and we know how well that went over with gold coins).
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This is an interesting thread and has me wondering how the mint got the war nickels back after the war. Does anyone know how many war nickels were withdrawn/repatriated by the mint after the war and when they stopped the repatriation effort? And how it happened? Did they ask the Federal Reserve banks to go through circulated nickels and separate the ones with the mint mark? Or was it done by the mints themselves? I’d have thought it would be more efficient to run them through a weighing machine.
Coins are almost always separated by machines. Having a large mint mark wouldn't be that beneficial to those with young eyes.
They never tried to get them back. Indeed, when the FED began separating out silver coins in 1968 they didn't even bother with war nickels. Usually the machines work with rotational inertia but there are various means to separate coins.
War nickels made for circulation are in abysmal shape today. Fewer than half can even be described as G or better since most are stained or badly tarnished. Better dates like the '44-S are pretty tough in nice high grade circ.
These are being melted in vast quantities because mintages were astronomical and demand is weak.
There are so many interesting RPM's and OMM's that they are easily found. Many of these are scarce or rare and most are tough above F condition.
Warnicks are a great source for laminations.
It might be added that there are lots and lots of XF and AU war nickels in this large overhang. Probably there are still 5% or a little more in all these hoards because there has never been enough interest to separate out the better coins, better dates, and varieties. Mixed war nickels are a great way to own silver. The problem is finding them. Even though there are still many many millions left the majority of these have already been destroyed to make electrical contacts and the like. They've been destroyed regardless of their condition and few were checked for varieties.
There is still very little interest but there are lots of companies that make up war nickel sets to sell to the general public and they are bidding up premiums on nice coins.
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Indeed! more than 1% have significant laminations. I've never thought to check if any dates are especially tough like this.
It is very difficult to refine the silver out of the warnix, partly due to the low fineness (even simple 40% silver halves have to be refined twice) but mainly because of the manganese.
Quite true which is why I doubt that many have been refined. There would be no profit in it.
I doubt it as well.
However I believe that many have been used to create alloy for things like electrical contacts and as chill scrap for low fineness alloy.
Of course I may be wrong but I sure don't see the quantities of these I saw 30 years ago.
I was born during the war nickel era. In the early 1960’s when I began roll searching, there were at least a few war nickels in a typical roll from a bank.
Beginning around 1963, some dealers were offering slight premiums for rolls of war nickels. Postage was cheap enough (and the dollar had enough purchasing power) to make it worthwhile to send them several rolls at a time.
I believe that today, the huge majority of war nickels have been lost or melted. During much of the post-silver era, war nickels were being bought and sold at prices well below melt, and there was little demand from stackers, making it worthwhile for dealers to ship them to refineries.
I wouldn’t be surprised if 1942-S and 1944-S nickels are now scarcer than the 1950-D. Their mintage figures were low, but not low enough to make them worth setting aside.
The lowest-mintage 1943-D, however, is in a different category. At the height of the roll boom in the mid-1960’s, circulated 1943-D nickels were bringing well over melt and were preferentially saved. Because of their relatively low mintage, uncirculated 1943-D rolls were apparently also preferentially saved at time of issue, and today it is one of the least expensive rolls in uncirculated condition.
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If they did, they got it back in taxes. Don't fret about the losers. .
I am not saying this is incorrect, but I've never heard it before. My understanding is that melting war nickels was always problematic because of the alloy used.
That's true. Which is why, for decades, war nickel rolls and bags were bought and sold at well under melt price. If refiners could obtain war nickels cheaply enough, they could make a profit by melting them and extracting the silver. The extra refining costs were "built in" to the market price of war nickels.
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I guess that was the cause of my initial confusion. Because of the discount, because I didnt know the face value of a bag of nickels ($200 vs $1000), because I just never did the actual math (bags of 90% and even 50% were just too popular), and because of the 35% purity I just incorrectly assumed that war nickels had less silver/face value than other US silver coins. Lesson learned.
How much is the mint losing today making the nickel? I bet it's more than 2 cents per coin.
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According to this it costs more than 10c a coin to make nickels, and just under 3c to make Cents
https://money.com/coin-costs-us-mint-solutions/?xid=nasdaq&utm_source=nasdaq&utm_medium=rss_synd
From the article:
Despite their name, nickels haven't been made solely of nickel in decades. Instead, nickels, dimes and quarters are coated with a nickel-copper mixture, which mostly covers an all-copper inside layer.
You learn something new every day. 😳
Actually, nickels are 75% copper and 25% nickel.
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"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value---zero."----Voltaire
"Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said."----Voltaire
Agreed. Buy they are a solid alloy, it's been that way for more than "in decades", and they are not "coated with a nickel-copper mixture, which mostly covers an all-copper inside layer."
But it's alloyed not coated.
Assuming that any part of the article can be believed after those glaring errors, I found it extremely interesting to learn that the mint wants to increase the percentage of copper in order to reduce costs.
The history of the star nickel is interesting one but there has been some doubt thrown into the mix.
The basic story is was that nickel was a critical war metal needed, but removing it from 5 cents really would haven't given much back to the war effort. The change in nickel alloy may have saved as much as 827,163 pounds of nickel but that amount was actually insignificant since 300 million pounds of nickel were produced annually during World War II.
But I have read several articles and speculation that the real reason for the change in composition was probably to boost the morale of American citizens by showing the Mint was doing its part in the war effort by doing without nickel.
And since no one posted pictures.
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Another consideration might have been the copper. War nickels were 56% copper while pre-war (and post-war) nickels were 75% copper.
Copper was used for cartridge cases (as brass) and electric wiring, among other things.
I have been throwing war nickels into a box for a few decades. Love the story here are a few
11.5$ Southern Dollars, The little “Big Easy” set
Even today, about 1 in 2000 or 2500 nickels are war nickels.
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Nice overdate.
And they were NEVER pure nickel.
The coin we call the nickel today is - as noted above - a 75-25 alloy.
It's the third coin we colloquially have called a "Nickel" because of its silverish appearance due to nickel in the alloy.
The first was the 88-12 alloy Flying Eagle / Indian head cents from 1857-1864.
The second was the 75-25 alloy Three Cent Copper-Nickel (3CN) in 1865.
The crown passed to the 5c Half dime replacement from 1866 where it finally stuck.
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I see a lot of these as well.
Of course all of them are coins that have gotten back into circulation after sitting out for decades. Even at 75c each they aren't worth taking one or a few to the coin shop so they get respent. They also get back into circulation accidently like almost any non-silver coin of the last century.
The odds against a war nickel circulating since 1964 are far higher than the total mintage of war nickels. Too large of a percentage of the population will pull them out. And this goes several times over if they are dark as all of them are below VF condition.
The government is losing more than two cents on every nickel minted today, along with about a cent on every cent produced. We are not living in a sane world today. News headlines will provide more proof if necessary!