A penny saved is now just a penny sitting in a cup somewhere

The penny dropped
A few months ago in a jumble of change I got after a payment in a store (yes, I still use cash), I noticed that I had three very old pennies. 1957, 1950, and 1941. It's pretty rare to get even one of these wheat pennies (the back features two wheat stalks) back in a payment, but three was unprecedented, at least for me.

I'm not exactly a numismatist, but I do like old coins. I always go through my change and see if I've gotten any. They are a tangible connection to another era and I find that fascinating. The oldest one I ever got was a 1914 penny. It was very worn and the year was hard to even read; I took it to a coin buyer thinking it might be worth something, but he wasn't interested in it. 

It interested me, though. Somebody in the year 1914 had handled that coin. Somebody who witnessed the Great War and remembered the Titanic and maybe hadn't even ever seen an airplane. Somebody who lived in a completely different time from me who I would never meet, but we'd both touched this penny.

And then there are all the other people who over the decades also handled it. That penny had an incredible history, even if I'd never know the stories or the people who'd come in contact with it. That penny is a time machine.

Those coins are even more precious to me now, since Congress passed a bill to get rid of the penny, as our Claire Williams reported. Banks and merchants seem to be generally in favor of it, as it makes it easier for them to plan for a pennyless currency system, something that has been coming for years. Inflation has made it unprofitable to produce pennies and drained their value, and the rise of electronic payments means that lots of people don't even touch cash anymore. So it's only oddballs like me who care about pennies.

Of course, it's somewhat ironic that the penny is disappearing as digital currencies are rising, because a digital currency is in actuality a penny-producing machine. They can be subdivided into way more than just 100 pennies. A bitcoin, for instance, can be divided to the eighth decimal place, which means there are not 100 pennies, so to speak, but 100 million pennies.

In any case, I'll be holding onto my old pennies even if I can't spend them anymore. Their value goes beyond currency to me.

Serious penny collecting
I wrote the other day about the challenges for small banks, after the failure of Nano Banc in California, the sixth bank failure this year.

One of those challenges of course is how large the big banks are getting. The top four banks — JPMorganChase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup — hold 35.1% of all the nation's deposits, up 20 basis points from last year, S&P Market Intelligence wrote, using data from the FDIC's annual summary of deposits report. The other 46 of the top 50 banks hold another 40%. That leaves the other roughly 4,200 banks in the U.S. to compete for the remaining 25%. 

This is not a new trend of course, but it is stark when you look at the really long-term numbers. In 1994 — as far back as the FDIC's online database goes — the top four banks held only 7.84% of the nation's deposits. Bank of America was the largest bank in the country, with 2.6% of deposits. Chemical Bank held 1.5%. Wells Fargo, 1.3%, and Home Savings of America, 1.2%. Just outside the top four were Citibank and Chase Manhattan, Great Western Bank and Nationsbank of Texas. Those eight had much more competition. In 1994, there were more than 12,000 banks. 

Banking by its very nature can be and should be a very steady, lucrative business. But every year it gets a little bit harder if you're not one of the big guns.