When will non-federal coin distributors stop harvesting cents?

MsMorrisine

if retail is not using them and banks don't order them, then they are effectively harvesting them now

MsMorrisine

@Morgan White said:
I don't trust AI but at any rate, here's Grok's take on it.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/31/part-82

JBK

@Morgan White said:
I don't trust AI but at any rate, here's Grok's take on it.

Yikes. That's extremely incorrect. 😆

jmlanzaf

@cladking said:

@JBK said:

@cladking said:

The government is not allowed to break the law.

**They will simply change the law as soon as FED inventory gets too large not to.

Your responses continue to make no sense to me. 🤔

I believe that the prohibition on melting cents and nickels is a ruling issued by the Secretary of the Treasury, not a law enacted by Congress. And the government routinely exempts itself from its own laws. You don't have to look any further than the destruction of defective coins from the mint. They are shipped out to be scrapped (legally).

I remember the road better than the signposts. Government now is melting coins that have been demonetized rather than breaking laws. The melters don't get exemptions to melt good coin. They are contracted to melt specific demonetized coin.

And you've again suggested that it was illegal - even for the government - to melt silver coins until the law was changed. I am not aware of any such law and I'd appreciate more details on that.

I don't recall. Removing valuable metal in circulation was certainly in the purview of the FED but melting them was not until the law changed. It was changed to allow everyone to melt. I believe it was the same law that enacted the date freeze in 1964 that banned melting of silver coin. This law was mostly superseded by the Coinage Act of 1965 but some of it remained in effect.

As for a "too large" inventory of cents at the Fed, I personally doubt that there will be any such thing. They will fill orders as they come in, until inventory runs out. The cent is not being recalled or demonetized. Cents will go wherever they have been going all along, until banks (and the Fed) run out of inventory.

I don't know. I've been saying for many years that the government and everyone will be surprised how few coins come in for processing. It might be even fewer than my projections because I never imagined how much negative value pennies would obtain., THIS ISN'T POLITICAL. Pennies have had negative value for decades caused by the actions of ALL OF Congress and not one individual or party. We did it to ourselves.

Pennies are flowing out of the banks because most are going to stores and users who are not yet rounding. When they stop ordering cents there will be a very strong net inflow to banks and they aren't going to trash them. They are going to all go into alloy, entropy, and the garbage dumps. It won't take long because they fit with garbage so well and zincolns virtually evaporate in air.

.

My AI adds; _ "“The cent won’t be recalled. It will be forgotten. And in that forgetting, it will melt—not by decree, but by drift.”_

Why does your AI read like a fortune cookie?

BStrauss3

@JBK said:
I believe that the prohibition on melting cents and nickels is a ruling issued by the Secretary of the Treasury, not a law enacted by Congress. And the government routinely exempts itself from its own laws. You don't have to look any further than the destruction of defective coins from the mint. They are shipped out to be scrapped (legally).

Half right.

It is a Federal Regulation (https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-31/subtitle-B/chapter-I/part-82), But that derives its authority from 31 U.S.C. 5111(d) (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2023-title31/pdf/USCODE-2023-title31-subtitleIV-chap51-subchapII-sec5111.pdf)