Will Copper Cents Go Up In Value Overtime?

Joe you have my attention. I have a 5 gallon jar about 2/3 full of pennies now. If the big copper melt does come I'll be pulling out all of my 1959-1982 coins an putting them into tubes for a later date.

I hoard copper pennies. I have a little over $700 face. Copper pennies are already selling for a premium as bullion. Do a search on ebay and you will see $50 and bigger lots readily selling for 1.3 to 1.5 face value.

Copper pennies have a melt value of 2¢ right now. I will go out on a limb and predict that in the not too distant future you will see copper pennies being sold as "junk copper" the same way as junk silver already is. Even APMEX is geting in on the bullion aspect of it. They are selling copper pennies by the bag like they do junk silver.

Copper is slowly becoming a precious metal. It will become a hedge against hyper inflation right next to gold and silver. Along with silver, copper has a vast array of industrial applications that will always keep it in demand, and valuable.

For all practical purposes the mint stopped using copper for the cent over 25 years ago. Even with the huge number of cents produced, I'm sure they use much more copper in the nickel each year than they use in the cents. (For example they used enough copper in the 2005 nickels to produce 14 billion Lincoln cents.) Ending the production of cents will not affect the value of the old copper cents. What WILL affect their value is the market price of copper.



If the market price of copper rises high enough I'm sure the government will start melting them down. There is precedent for this, in the late 60's all of the dimes quarters and halves that came through the Federal Reserve banks had to go through a separation machine that separated the silver from the clad coins and they melted down the silver. As a historical note at the time this was going on there was a law forbidding the people from melting down the silver coinage just as today we had a law forbidding the melting of cents and nickels. After the amount of silver dropped low enough that it wasn't cost effective to keep running the separation machines the law forbidding the melting of the silver coins was repealed. My guess is that once the number of copper cents still in circulation drops very low the no melt law for cents will disappear as well. But once again it will not be the melting of the cents that causes their rise in value but rather the market price of copper. I also don't believe it will cause any rise in the value of copper cents with minor erros be caus e the coins will still be too common. Even after over 40 years of melting down the silver coins, minor errors are them still don't bring any real premium over the metal value, and the mintages of the copper cents are MUCH higher.



I'd forget numismatic value, but for the metal value it may eventually be worthwhile. Sure they are only worth 2X face right now, but I remember when the silver coins were worth LESS than 2X face, and I remember when there was a steady market in the bulk silver coins when they were 3X face.



As said the melting by the government will not have an effect. How many years? Who knows. It all depends on the metals market and no one can predict them accurately. Al you can say is that in the long run they will continue trending upwards, but how fast they will trend upwards no one can say.



On the common wheat cents maybe, because most of the value of those coins rests in the value of the metal. But even for the common Indian Head cents in low grade the value tends to run around 100 cents apiece with a copper value of 2 cents. If the copper in them rises to 3 or even 4 cents I don't see a 2 cent change in the copper value having much of an effect on the 100 cent numismatic value.

i keep all the old cents from my change I have about $30 worth of copper cents. I ask friends if I can have their cents heh..( pennies) and they are glad to give them to me. :) I find copper most of the time.

I don't know about diminishing to very little. Electrical wiring inside the home is still copper in most areas, and a hundred feet of 14-2 Romex contains far, far more copper than 100 feet of twisted-pair phone line. Copper is still used widely for its heat-transfer properties as well. While aluminum is being substituted in a lot of applications, it does have significant disadvantages for some of the applications. And for right now, fiber-optic is crazy expensive compared to CAT5/6 or coax for data use.

Personally, I'm wagering that severe inflation will drive up the dollar cost of copper long before the industrial uses go away, or transmutation becomes economically feasible...

Let me throw my 2 cents in. One poster commented that common date Morgans are selling for just over melt value and that a large number have already been melted.

I wold make the point that no one knows exactly how many of each date and MM are left. What is now regarded as common may, in fact, not be common at all. When you look at the number melted by the Pittman Act, Some dates could very well have been almost wiped out and no one would be the wiser.

I guess it is all a matter of perception.

Australia has been moving steadily away from copper pipe for over a decade now, there are cheaper, better alternatives with modern plastics.

And as for china, I travel there a lot on business, within 10 years, China will be the most powerful economy in the world. There is more development, and high tech development at that, than anywhere else I have ever seen. My last trip earlier this year was an eye opener. In Guangzhou, a southern city not to far from Hong Kong, there was more development going on in terms of infrastructure and building in a 5km radius from my hotel, than there is in my entire home city of Melbourne, second largest city in Australia. And I am in construction.

Out of necessity, other materials are used to expedite the development process. Copper is expensive, and suffers from supply shortages, so it isn't used where it is not necessary. Same in third world countries, which China definitely is not, cheaper, more practical methods are used. As these methods are further developed, forget about copper.

My copper coins seem to be always going up in value!