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Here are your Bush coins

Aug 25th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
5 comments

For the Presidential numismatists out there. You know who you are.

We can only aspire to be like Millard

The U.S. Mint unveiled the design for coins honoring President George H.W. Bush and his wife, Barbara Bush, on Tuesday.

The presidential $1 coin for President Bush will bear his portrait with the inscriptions “George H.W. Bush,” “In God we trust,” “41st president,” and “1989-1993” on the obverse, or “heads,” side of the coin. The reverse, or “tails,” side will feature the Statue of Liberty, as with other presidential coins.

The first spouse gold coin bears the former first lady’s portrait with the inscriptions “Barbara Bush,” “In God we trust,” “Liberty,” “2020,” “41st,” and “1989-1993” on the obverse side. The reverse side depicts a person reading, with an open road before them, in homage to Barbara Bush’s advocacy for family literacy.

The coins will be available for purchase on Aug. 20, according to a release from the mint.

President Donald Trump signed a bill by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Rep. Roger Williams, R-Austin, in January that authorized creating the commemorative coins. Under the resolution, the Treasury Department must mint and issue presidential dollar coins with the image of President Bush for one year and bullion coins with the image of his wife during the same period.

[…]

The legislation creating the gold coins program to honor former presidents and their spouses requires a president to be dead for at least two years before coins can be issued. The resolution passed this week bypasses that provision, as the two-year anniversary of President Bush’s death isn’t until Nov. 1.

The resolution received widespread support, with 66 Senate cosponsors. In the House, 27 members of the 36-member Texas delegation cosponsored the bill.

See here for the background. More info on the George Bush coin is here, and the Barbara Bush coin is here. I’m a lifelong fan of interesting coins, and as such I love this program. But boy howdy, I do not envy the poor schlub at the Mint who will some day have to write copy for the Trump coin.

Time for another COVID roundup

Aug 15th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
5 comments

Let’s start with some good news, which comes wrapped in a warning.

The number of coronavirus patients crowding hospital wards in the Houston area is now in its sixth week of steady decline, a welcome reversal of the virus’ alarming surge in June and July.

The headcount of COVID-19 patients has fallen by half since its mid-July peak in hospitals affiliated with the seven systems based in the Texas Medical Center. And the number of intensive care patients at those facilities has dropped by a third.

The subsiding wave has merely shifted civic leaders’ concerns, however — and not only because hospital headcounts, new cases, and other metrics remain well above their levels before the spike.

Worried that Houstonians will invite another crisis by concluding it is safe to attend cookouts or crowd onto restaurant patios, public officials and medical leaders are stressing that the best measures of success are not empty intensive care beds but an absence of widespread infections.

“I do worry about people listening to this news and taking it the wrong way, saying, ‘Whew that’s over, now let’s go back to life as normal,’” said Dr. Esmaeil Porsa, CEO of Harris Health, the county’s public hospital district. “This is not the time.”

[…]

In every case, these metrics suggest the Houston region remains well short of containing the virus. The testing positivity rate, for instance, is about 15 percent in the city and county, and 10 percent among TMC institutions.

What about case counts? Harris County over the last week has averaged more than two and a half times as many daily cases as the 400 it would take to step down from Hidalgo’s top threat level. And the nine-county Houston region is averaging almost nine times as many new daily cases as the TMC goal of 200.

Another of Hidalgo’s metrics calls for the share of intensive care patients who have COVID-19 to not exceed 15 percent; the share of ICU patients in the county who have COVID-19 remains more than double that.

We’re headed in the right direction, but we’ve still got a long way to go. Stay home. Maintain social distancing. Wear a mask. Wash your hands.

And while case numbers may be coming down, fatality numbers are higher than we’ve counted.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Texas, the state’s death toll from all causes has soared by thousands above historical averages — a sobering spike that experts say reveals the true toll of the disease.

Between the beginning of the local pandemic and the end of July, 95,000 deaths were reported in Texas, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control data. Based on historical mortality records and predictive modeling, government epidemiologists would have expected to see about 82,500 deaths during that time.

The CDC attributed more than 7,100 deaths to COVID-19, but that leaves roughly 5,500 more than expected and with no identified tie to the pandemic. The CDC’s chief of mortality, Dr. Bob Anderson, said these “excess deaths” are likely from a range of pandemic-related problems, including misclassifications because doctors did not initially understand the many ways that COVID-19 affects the circulatory system and results in a stroke or a heart attack.

“It can cause all sorts of havoc in the body,” he said.

The CDC data offers an opaque but important estimate of how deadly the virus has been in Texas, which suffered from testing shortages for weeks as COVID-19 case counts climbed.

“It has shocked me to see people think that there’s overcounts of the COVID deaths, because I can’t even imagine that that’d be the case,” said Mark Hayward, a professor at the University of Texas who studies mortality trends. “The undercount is so dramatic.”

And there is a clear racial disparity in the undercounts. Between March and the end of July, Texas recorded more than 21,000 deaths of Latinos — more than 5,000 higher than epidemiologists predicted. Of those, about 2,100 were attributed to COVID-19. That leaves more than 3,000 deaths in excess of the expected number, many of them in border counties that lack resources for testing.

This is a phenomenon we’ve seen literally around the world. We’ve certainly known that it’s happening in Texas. The expert opinion is that we’ve already passed 200K deaths nationally, or about 25% more than the official count. If you could read one of the names of those 200K dead Americans every second, it would take you over 55 hours, nonstop, to read them all. Think about that for a minute. Or for 55 hours.

Also, too, we still suck at testing.

After plummeting for days, the number of COVID-19 tests reported in Texas suddenly jumped by 124,693 on Thursday, which state health officials said was a result of coding errors and a system upgrade.

Backlogs at a hospital lab and a commercial lab accounted for most of the tests, which could not be added to the state’s official tally until the coding errors had been fixed, said Lara Anton, spokesperson for the Texas Department of State Health Services.

Of the 124,000 tests reported on Thursday, approximately 95,000 were from a lab that served several hospitals, Anton said, adding that the lab sent files containing an error in one of the data fields, which DSHS’ electronic system could not read.

DSHS doesn’t know when the tests were actually conducted and is working with local health departments to find out, she said.

[…]

Whether because of human error, shifting benchmarks or bureaucratic changes, it’s not the first time that Texas officials have corrected their data since the beginning of the pandemic. Almost every major data point has come with caveats, sometimes blurring for days the big picture of the pandemic in Texas.

It is what it is. I don’t know what else to say.

Finally, the coin shortage is real, y’all.

Some retailers have started posting signs notifying customers that they might not be able to provide exact change for their purchases, and instead ask for them to pay with a credit or debit card or exact payment.

“It’s not like coins are not there,” said Venky Shankar, professor and director of research at the Center for Retailing Studies in Texas A&M University’s Mays Business School. The coins are just being used less as business has slowed and more people stay home.

Another hurdle for coin usage, Shankar said, is the fear that money could carry the novel coronavirus, even though experts don’t know definitively whether cash actually poses a threat.

In order to keep coins circulating, the U.S. Mint has asked people to pay with exact change. “We ask that the American public start spending their coins, depositing them, or exchanging them for currency at financial institutions or taking them to a coin redemption kiosk,” the mint said in a news release. A new task force — the U.S. Coin Task Force — has also been charged with determining how to reinvigorate the supply chain.

[…]

According to Shankar, roughly 45 to 50 percent of sales in smaller stores — places such as convenience stores — are made in cash. But big grocers such as H-E-B, Kroger and Walmart have also faced a shortage of coins.

In response to the shortage, some retailers and restaurants have started to pay or reward customers for their coins.

The U.S. Mint has also increased production from 1.2 billion coins in June to 1.35 billion coins per month for the rest of 2020, according to a Statista review.

But that doesn’t solve everything.

“That still will not unlock the coins that are already in the drawers and the banks,” Shankar said.

Laundromats, which rely heavily on coins to function, are among the businesses directly impacted by the coin shortage.

Yeah, that would suck if no one has any damn quarters. This is a problem all over, and offhand I have no idea what to do about it. I normally like paying for things in cash, but have barely used any since March. This is a teeny tiny reason for saying this, but we live in very strange times.

Coronavirus and coins

Aug 3rd, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

If you’re not using cash, you’re not circulating any coins.

Show some love for Millard

Stores around the U.S. are struggling with an unexpected shortage. (No, not toilet paper — sorry, we’ve already made that joke.) They’re running low on coins.

Supermarkets and gas stations across the U.S. are asking shoppers to pay with a card or produce exact change when possible. Walmart has converted some of its self-checkout registers to accept only plastic. Kroger is offering to load change that would normally involve coins onto loyalty cards. Some Wawa gas stations are accepting coin rolls in exchange for bills.

The trouble began weeks ago, when the coronavirus pandemic delivered a bizarre double blow to the U.S. supply of quarters, dimes, nickels and even pennies. Social distancing and other safety measures slowed production of coins at the U.S. Mint. But also fewer coins made their way from customers to banks, coin-sorting kiosks and stores’ cash registers as people holed up at home.

“The flow of coins through the economy … kind of stopped,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told lawmakers in June.

That month, the Fed began rationing coins. Soon after, business groups — representing grocers, convenience stores, retailers, gas station operators and others — wrote to Powell and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that the situation was an emergency.

“We were alarmed to hear that the system for distributing coins throughout the country is at the breaking point,” they wrote on June 23, offering a series of suggestions for how to fix it. A week later, the Fed announced it would convene a U.S. Coin Task Force to address the matter.

All things considered, I’d generally rather use cash for buying lunch and other small purchases. Old habits, I suppose, plus I know that no one is taking a cut of the cash away from the merchant I’m patronizing. But since we all started staying home and doing contactless transactions, I’ve barely used the stuff. I haven’t hit an ATM since February. I do tip more, and more often, now that it’s all credit card all the time. That’s something I need to pay attention to going forward. I do look forward to the day when I can just hand over a $20 for my lunch, if only because it will be a sure sign that things have returned to some kind of normal.

Et tu, nickels?

Dec 21st, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

I’ve blogged a few times before about pennies and the effort some people have made to eliminate them. Now it looks like we may need to add the nickel to the endangered coin list.

The U.S. Mint has some good news and bad news in its latest biennial report to Congress. The good news is that we’re wasting less money on pennies and nickels. The bad news is we’re still wasting money on pennies and nickels.

Production costs for all four major coin types fell in fiscal year 2014 due to the falling price of copper, one of the primary metals used to make coins. The Mint estimates it saved $29 million this year compared to last year on account of lower copper prices.

But it continues to lose money on pennies and nickels. It now costs $1.62 to make a dollar’s worth of nickels, and $1.66 to make a dollar’s worth of pennies. By contrast it costs only 36 cents to make a dollar’s worth of quarters, and 40 cents for a buck of dimes. Paper dollar bills are even more cost-effective.

As recently as the early 2000s, the Mint was still turning a small profit on the nickels and pennies it produced. But the costs of those coins spiked in 2006, and haven’t broken even since then.

As of 2013 taxpayers were losing $105 million annually on penny and nickel production. This report doesn’t include total production numbers, so we can’t calculate costs at the moment. But it’s safe to assume that losses on pennies and nickels decreased this year, in line with their falling cost.

As is the Wonkblog way, there are charts to illustrate each of those points above, so click over and take a look. The author suggests that eliminating the penny and nickel could save $100 million annually, but as you know I’m not a big fan of killing off coins. An option that may be less objectionable would be to revalue each coin so that it is now worth ten times its face amount – the penny goes to ten cents in value, the nickel becomes like the half dollar, and so forth. It would make these coins cost effective again, and would produce a modest boost to the economy, which of course means that there’s a greater chance I’ll dance the lead in Swan Lake at the National Ballet before that happens. Just by talking about it we could make Ted Cruz’s head explode. Anyway, while there does’t seem to be much chatter for eliminating the nickel, certainly not at the same level as the penny-killers, at these prices it’s just a matter of time.

Don’t kill the penny, revalue it

May 18th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Ryan Cooper proposes a big idea to make coins more useful so that people start spending them again instead of hoarding them in jars for months at a time.

Millard is keeping hope alive

Here’s my solution: multiply the face value of every U.S. coin by 10. A penny will be worth 10 cents, a nickel 50 cents, a dime one dollar, a quarter $2.50, and a dollar coin 10 bucks. (We could also reinvent the half-dollar, which is barely produced now, as a nice $5 coin.)

This will have several beneficial effects: first, it will make change real money again. The whole point of having money is to facilitate the process of exchange, but studies have shown that people tend not to spend even the vaunted dollar coin. It’s no surprise, given that we’ve been training people for decades to think of change as worthless. And multiplying by 10 sounds like a lot, but if anything, it isn’t going far enough — the BLS inflation calculator only goes back to 1913, but even so, one dollar from that time was worth the equivalent of $23.87 today! The one-cent coin was the smallest then, and people still somehow survived. Rounding to the nearest tenth of a dollar in cash transactions today will be no problem.

Second, it will be easy to accomplish. We won’t have to have a big fight with the zinc lobby or Abraham Lincoln fans over whether to stop production of a particular coin, or rebuild all the vending machines around differently-shaped coins. Instead, we just alter the mint plates slightly with new numbers. (Making U.S. money more coin-based would also save the government a bit of money, since coins last much, much longer than paper money.)

Third — and this might be the most contentious part of this proposal — changing coins could be a nice piece of badly-needed economic stimulus. Effectively, we’d be printing up a bunch of new money and handing it to whoever has coins on hand. We’d have to think carefully about the details, but the idea would be to allow people who have old coins to hand them in for fresh new versions worth 10 times as much. Vending machines can be easily reprogrammed to help soak up the old currency (which will be exactly the same size and weight as the new stuff), and banks could be required to exchange for the new versions for a few years. To keep them from being swamped and to ease the effect, we could say banks don’t have to exchange more than $50 worth of new currency per person per day, or something similar.

[…]

How much money are we talking about? According to the Federal Reserve, as of 2010 there was about $40 billion worth of coins in circulation, which constituted 4.3 percent of the U.S. currency stock. We’d be increasing that by $360 billion at a stroke, which would actually be a pretty powerful economic stimulus. Indeed, it might cause a bit of moderate inflationary pressure, as all the coin hoarders with soup tureens full of pennies went on spending sprees. However, that would be exactly the kind of situation the Federal Reserve is equipped to handle. I doubt any inflationary pressure would be sustained long, but if so, it would be a godsend to the Fed, which has been stuck at the zero lower bound and mostly below its inflation target since the financial crisis. Indeed, there is a very strong case that a bit higher inflation target is wise economic policy for the future.

Usually, when I blog about coins it’s in the context of arguing against eliminating the dollar bill in favor of dollar coins, but I have also objected to killing the penny. As does Kevin Drum, I mostly like this idea, but I think Cooper sells short the problem of rounding prices to the nearest old-school dime. The limited bit of empirical evidence we have suggests this would affect poorer folks adversely, since prices would be rounded up much more often than they would be rounded down. One thing that occurred to me in writing this post is that it would likely cause a hike in transit fares around the country – here in Houston, a ride costs $1.25, which would undoubtedly become $1.30 under Cooper’s plan. I’m not sure what the best way to deal with that is. On the plus side, it would as Cooper notes provide a bit of short-term stimulus, which likely means Cooper is underestimating the opposition to his idea as well. This will never happen, but it’s an interesting suggestion. What do you think?

Slowdown at the Mint

Mar 29th, 2009
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

They’re not making as many coins as they used to.

As falls the economy, so falls the jingle of coinmaking at the U.S. Mint.

Production at the federal government’s coin factory in Denver fell a sharp 26 percent in 2008 from the previous year, contributing to a national output decline of 30 percent.

Mint officials said the drop is a direct reflection of the plunging economy and the resulting fall in cash-register transactions that require merchants to provide change.

“Coin demand is definitely affected by economic activity,” said Greg Hernandez, acting director of public affairs in Washington for the U.S. Mint.

“Banks are not ordering as many coins as they were,” he said. “If local banks are not getting orders from local merchants, it’s going to affect Mint production.”

The U.S. Mint in 2008 produced 10.1 billion general-circulation coins, the fewest in at least 10 years.

[…]

Part of the coin-production decline stems from diminishing consumer interest in collecting quarters issued for each of the 50 states — a phenomenon that had ramped up the minting of quarters to a record level in 2000.

And some analysts say increasing use of credit and debit cards, and other electronic transactions, has played a role in reduced demand for coins and currency.

But economic conditions are believed to be the biggest factor.

“If people are just buying fewer things and there are fewer transactions, that will have an effect” on the demand for cash, said Dennis Stansbury, assistant vice president for cash operations at the Denver branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

That makes sense, though I admit it’s not something I ever would have thought of. Learn something new every day.

Mint officials said they expect production of at least one coin type — the relatively new U.S. presidential $1 coin — to increase as the government conducts a marketing push for merchant and consumer acceptance of the coin.

It’s been more than a year, and I’ve still never seen one of these coins. Maybe some day.