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US Pennies To Be Worth Five Cents?
Z-MaxX writes to point out Reuters coverage following up on last month's news that the US Mint has made it illegal to melt or export US coins in bulk, since the value of their constituent metals — in the case of pennies and nickels — now exceeds their face value. The new story quotes Francois Velde, senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, who thinks the new rules will not be enough — he believes that determined speculators are already piling up pennies. Velde suggests "rebasing" the penny to be worth five cents. Quoting Velde: "These factors suggest that, sooner or later, the penny will join the farthing (one-quarter of a penny) and the hapenny (one-half of a penny) in coin museums."
A few similar stories...
About 15-odd years ago, South Africa replaced all their coinage (and paper currency too). One unexpected side effect was that the new 20 cent coin was a similar size to the old one cent coin. Some older badly calibrated vending machines, notably parking meters, were unable to tell them apart, so there was a sudden rush to aquire old one cent coins, and lots of people got away with very cheap parking for a while.
The problem was fairly short-lived, though -- all the old one-cent coins used this way went straight to the banks and were destroyed, so although it caused a short-term revenue issue for vending machines, it did a very effective job of removing all those old coins from circulation much quicker than they would otherwise have been.
Further back, the British decimalised their currency in the 1970s, but kept the same sizes of coin, so they were interchangable. The older silver coins (shilling, two shilling, etc) had previously been made with a pretty high content of actual silver metal, the older the coin, the more it contained. And since the coins were still in circulation, it was possible occasionally to get in your change a hundred year old coin worth a lot more than the ten pence (two shilling) face value. My grandparents kept a collection of the really old ones they got for years. I don't know what happened to it in the end, but it would probably be quite valuable. (The UK coin sizes were changed relatively recently, so you won't get the really old coins any more)
More recently, again in Britain, the news media carried excitable stories about the two pence coin being worth three pence for it's scrap copper value. It has been illegal to deface British currency for a long time, and you'd have to collect a vast number of two pence coins to make it worth the effort, so as far as I know, no-one has bothered actually trying to make any money from it, but in theory it is possible.