Get rid of pennies please! (and any coin worth less than 0.10 USD/GBP/EUR)

Greg Mankiw mentions a USA Today article by Don Campbell that explains why keeping pennies (US$ 0.01) in circulation is not worthwhile:

• The cost of producing the one penny is greater than $0.01. Making 1 cent costs 1.26 cents.
• Handling pennies makes each cash transaction slower (2.5 seconds). And time is money of course.

The same argument applies also for pound sterling pennies and eurocents.

I find the existance of eurocents particularly irritating. $0.01 and £0.01 coins have always been around for a long time and it’s certainly difficlut to remove them from circulation because people are so used to them.

I can’t think of a sane reason for introducing the €0.01 coin in 2002. Finland and the Netherlands showed to be more sane than the other contries and do not produce €0.01 and €0.02 coins, although they are oblged to accept coins brought in from other countries.

Business Daily on food subsidies

BBC Business Daily on 20 May explains why food subsity and the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) are madness.

Listen to the podcast.

More on biofuels

An article on the International Herald Tribune reports two studies that conclude that biofuels are probably not such a good idea after all.

Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the pollution caused by producing these “green” fuels is taken into account, two studies published Thursday have concluded.

Biofuels

A humorous video against biofuels.

Links:

• Biofuel Wikipedia entry

Update: An article about biofuels on The Guardian.

Eugenio Benetazzo: Pseudo-economics, pseudo-finance, and pseudo-politics

He calls himself the first and only Italian financial preacher.

Like a fundamentalist evangelical Christian preacher, he warns of the imminent end of the world as we know it. He blames capitalism, America, the financial system, and globalisation among others.

His conclusions are backed by imaginary scientific analysis.

If you have read (and understood) an introductory economics textbook. You’ll find this either useless, entertaining, or disturbing.

If you know nothing about economics and you want to believe, you’ll like it and you’ll start counting the days left to the financial apocalypse.

Links:

• Website
• YouTube Channel

A podcast by Greg Mankiw

Greg Mankiw, one of the Web’s most popular economists, has just released a podcast on EconTalk. He also has a blog.

Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman died November 16 at the age of 94. He was one of the most influential economists of this century.

Numerous new stories and blog articles have reported his death and discussed his enormous contributions to Economics: NY Times, The Economist, again The Economist, and the FT. Also in Greg Mankiw’s and Becker and Posner among many others.

Most of the articles above hardly mention that Friedman was a fierce advocate not only of ecomonic friedom, but also of social freedom, such as ligalisation of drugs. I assume this is because most of the writers of the articles have politically conservative tendencies. It’s worthy of note that Friedman’s support for ligalisation of drugs is not based on abstract moral convictions, but on paracmatic economic analysis.

Here is an articles that don’t:
- The Baxter Bulletin
- American Chronicle

Here are some articles my the man himself:
- An Open Letter to Bill Bennett (April 1990)
- The Drug War as a Socialist Enterprise (November 1991)
- Prohibition and Drugs (May 1972)

He also co-coauthored a book on the subject: Friedman and Szasz on Liberty and Drugs: Essays on the Free Market and Prohibition, by by Arnold S. Trebach, Kevin B. Zeese, Milton Friedman. It’s out of print, you can get it used on Amazon or Bookfinder.

PS: This is already the second post on drug legalisation. I hope I won’t end up on Crack Whore Magazine!