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Hey, so, you know what’s fun?
When somebody in the comments says something like “you sound just like the guy from Wendover”
and then someone else replies “he is the guy from Wendover, you idiot” and then the
first person is like “I knew that; I was making a joke, you doofus” and then the
second person is like “I actually think you didn’t know that, and now you’re just
trying to backtrack, you nitwit” and then the first person is like “that’s not true
and by the way I think the world is run by lizards” and then the second person is like
“well clearly you’re an insane conspiracy theorist, and by the way the world is obviously
run by animatronic raccoons.”
Oh wait, my mistake, that’s not fun at all.
I wonder why it happens in the comments section of every single video, then.
Let’s try again.
Hey, so, you know what’s fun?
Coins!
They’re like little tiny dollars, if dollars were round and made of metal, which by the
way they definitely should be because that would save the US literal billions of dollars.
Coins are used for all kinds of things—collecting, opulent floor tiling, throwing them at strangers
on the street, and sometimes even buying stuff.
But right now, these metal-heads—get it, they’re metal and they have heads on them;
I am a genius—are undergoing the same problem as the jokes in this video: there’s a severe
shortage of them.
Well, technically it’s not a shortage—even though that’s what the news is calling it.
But then again, the news once called this channel “Fascinating and Educational.”
The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough coins—actually, we have more than ever:
according to the US treasury, there’s $47.8 billion worth of coins in circulation, up
from $47.4 billion last year—which, if my math is correct is a difference of eight dollars…
or 400 million dollars.
I’ll have my math department look into it.
So if we have more coins, what’s the problem?
Well, Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Fed, recently appeared in front of the House Financial
Services Committee and explained exactly what’s going on.
He said, “My name is Jerome Powell and I am the lost fourth Rice Krispies elf.
My brothers Snap, Crackle, and Pop hid me away for decades because I refused to shill
for their corporate cereal overlords.”
Wait sorry I totally misread that.
What he actually said was that the flow of coins throughout the economy has basically
stopped.
You see, in order for businesses to keep adequate coinage on hand, money has
to keep moving from people to businesses to people to businesses, like a game of hot potato
where the potato is hard and small and circular and has pictures of old dudes on them who
loved to rap.
Because of the Coronavirus, though, coins haven’t been moving the way they normally
would, for two reasons.
First of all, people aren’t going out to buy things as often, which reduces the cashflow—and
thus coin-flow—of businesses.
Second of all, even when people do go to stores to buy things, they aren’t using cash as
often.
Money, including coins, can carry germs, and germs make you sick, and being sick is—let
me check my notes—bad.
Basically, there’s plenty of coins—they’re just sitting in people’s houses, in a jar
or in a couch cushion or in the stomach of a child who thought it was one of the ones
made of chocolate.
This shortage has created a dilemma for businesses and banks, who are
hesitant to offer incentives for people to turn in coins for fear of creating an arbitrage
situation.
Arbitrage, if you don’t know because you’re not a big-brain business boy like me, is a
system whereby someone can buy something for one price and sell that same thing immediately
for a higher price—it’s essentially a way to make instant, unlimited, risk-free
profit, and offering an opportunity for it is generally very bad.
If you start offering, for example, more than one cent for a one-cent coin, that’s a problem—something
that apparently nobody has told the US Mint, which wastes about 90 million dollars a year
spending 7 cents to make a nickel and 2 cents to make a penny, because they gotta make sure
the money machines keep going brrr.
The Community State Bank in Wisconsin, however, did offer something like arbitrage in response
to the shortage, giving people an extra $5 in exchange for every $100 in coins they brought
into the bank, a program so many people took advantage of that the bank shut it down after
just a week.
To try to help with the situation, the Federal Reserve—which is like the big
daddy bank all the US’ little baby banks rely on—instituted a cap on how many coins
banks and other depository institutions can request from them, to make sure that the coins
stay evenly distributed throughout the country.
After all, it would be bad if all the coins ended up in Nebraska or something, especially
given that Nebraska doesn’t exist.
And further, although the Mint did have to temporarily reduce coin production because
of COVID, since June they’ve been back on schedule, producing 1.6 billion coins a month—half
of which, by the way, will be pennies, a currency so useless Americans throw away $62 million
of them a year, not that I’m annoyed about pennies or anything.
If you’re curious about how those new coins will be placed into circulation without creating
inflation, the answer is that the Fed will give them to banks while simultaneously deducting
the same amount of money from the bank’s electronic account with the Fed.
If you’re weren’t curious about that, oh well, deal with it.
Either way, maybe you will be curious about how you can get access to two great streaming
services for the price of one.
The answer is CuriosityStream’s bundle deal, where for less than $15, you’ll get an entire
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Or you could also watch The Brick Facade: A True Crime Story—an entire 40-minute long
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