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Market Intelligence
Is It Time To Get Rid of the Penny?
President Trump wants to eliminate penny production because it loses money, but the 1-cent piece — and coins as a group — also have been losing relevance. In fiscal year 2024, it cost 3.69 cents to produce a penny — more than double the 1.81 cents required in 2020, according to the U.S. Mint. Do the math, and the Mint saw an $85.3 million shortfall in seigniorage, the difference between a coin’s face value and its production cost, on the 3.2 billion pennies it shipped in 2024. At the same time, electronic and digital payments have made pennies and other…
The Slow Motion Decline in the Number of Banks
Broken down by year, the past decade in bank M&A looks like a wild rollercoaster ride, buffeted by external forces ranging from the first Trump administration’s 2018 regulatory relief to the Covid-19 pandemic, spiking interest rates and big bank failures. Last year’s deal volume rose from a decade-low 98 in 2023 to 125 in 2024, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, but pales in comparison to the 253 deals recorded in both 2018 and 2019. The market is cyclical, and history is filled with plenty of other rough patches of temporarily suppressed activity, only to see things even out when…
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WRITTEN BY
John Engen
Contributing Writer
John Engen is a contributing writer for Bank Director. He has more than 30 years of experience as a business journalist, writing for a variety of newspapers and magazines, and was a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press. He graduated with a degree in economics and international relations from the University of Minnesota and did his post-graduate work in Asian studies at the University of Hawai’i.