If I wanted to artificially create a penny shortage in the UK, how much money would I need?
I'm not sure if you would need more than a few years of savings, just pop into the bank and ask if they can give you £30k in 1p coins. Presumably they would have to honour it and in doing so leave you hording a significant amount of the local if not national supply. Then I could sell packs of 9 for 10p to retailers desperate for change.
>>8910 How do you manage to read an article that states there's been an oversupply of a particular thing and then conclude that thing is ripe for engineering a supply squeeze?
The upshot of that article is that the Royal Mint has overproduced 2 pence coins by more than £2.5 million. That's on top of the 300 grand they're supposed to hold in reserve. Good luck with your thirty grand.
>>8914 He could head to Scarborough and get all the pennies and tuppences from the pusher machines, he might even bag a Chupa-Chups lolly and keyring while he's at it.
I've heard that there are rules for how many coins in one go still count as legal tender. For example, you can't buy £100 of shopping with pennies, because once you reach about £1, they can just refuse to accept any more. I assume banks have similar rules for giving out that much money. Also, if the bank has that many pennies in the vault, then you're not taking the pennies out of the economy. You're just taking spare pennies from the vault.
>>8914 He should do some "scientific" "research" which will "discover" that pennies give you AIDS, and everyone needs to throw them away. Once that research is disproven, nobody will have pennies and our man here can make several pence of pure delicious profit.
Unfortunately you have no idea what legal tender even is. Shops can refuse to accept any coins or any notes for any reason. Legal tender exists to form a valid defence in court against non payment of debt; you cannot be said to have failed to pay if you offered legal tender.
No debt ever exists in everyday shop transactions and so the idea is utterly irrelevant.
>>8920 A Clydesdale fiver once thwarted my plans to buy a snack at Man Picc without having to deal with people. The automated till spat one out and I had to go to a staffed checkout to change it for real money.
>>8922 I hate places that don't take £50s because it drives a vicious circle reducing the number in circulation and making it more likely those one does encounter are counterfeit.
