Friday, May 02, 2008

New money

England has a new set of coins coming out very soon. They are very cool.

And here's an interview with the designer of the coins. The designs were awarded to him via a competition.

Heather and the kids went to the Denver Mint recently. There's a new series of dollar coins coming out.* Apparently dollar coins cost much less in the long run than dollar paper money. I wish that our country would switch wholesale to dollar coins! The European Union and England did that with their equivalent, a long time ago.

*I guarantee they won't be as cool as the English coins. Sigh. I doubt that a large competition was part of the design process.

The US mints are producing dollar coins because the state commemorative quarters have been so popular. (They have made a good amount of profit for these government-run institutions.)

Interestingly, a penny costs 2.3 cents to make. (Or something like that - I can't remember the exact number that my kids told me.)

4 comments:

Rob said...

The interesting thing about the Sacejewea dollar is that it was almost the same size as a quarter. Anytime I worked at the schools subbing (while I was going to grad school) and the kids would use those coins to buy lunch with, the lunch ladies wouldn't know what to do with them.

Over here in Euroland all they use are coins for anything under 5€ There's no such thing as a 1€ bill. I can't say I miss them, although it was a real pain to get used to at first. The checkers really hated me for being so slow, especially here in Germany where efficiency is king. They have .02 cent coins too, but that's just too much for me to deal with - they're exactly the same size as the American penny.

Jenny said...

They are great coins.

We have pretty good ones too. And our paper money is colourful, compared to yours.

Anonymous said...

We had one ringgit coins over here in south east asia for a while but then they canceled them. Too heavy. They also just canceled the one cent coins, like a penny but less. I still have a bunch....hoping to sell them on ebay someday.

Bob A said...

I'm afraid I can't get excited over $1 coins. Too heavy. Except for the trip between a store and home (sometimes just to the van), I don't carry coins, period. I much prefer paper money. And...just do away with pennies and round everything up or down to the nearest $0.05.