'Carnage' ahead for the humble penny?

And so, it would appear, the Governor of the Bank of England wants to erase over 1,200 years of history by scrapping the penny.
In for a pennyIn for a penny
In for a penny

Mark Carney, who openly admits that one of his childhood nick-names was Carnage, wants to stop minting the humble penny.

Why?

Because he rarely sees them!

And that makes me believe that he must be walking around with his eyes shut.

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According to figures freely available from the institution he heads up, there are over 11.2 billion pennies in circulation, more than any other coin.

When in charge of a similar organisation in his native Canada, Mr Carney scrapped the one cent piece.

Now he thinks it would be a good idea to do the same thing here.

Is he trying to hike up inflation in small measures?

Will everything that currently costs 99p have to be sold for a pound?

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Or will we all be expected to have a handful of loose change about our person to solve a conundrum like how to pay for, for instance, a greetings card that costs £2.39?

Handing over £2.40 for that purchase would mean someone missing out on a penny if our smallest unit of currency was no longer available.

Missing out on that penny might not seem like a big deal.

But how many similar transactions would it take before everyone started to get more than a little fed up with the situation.

It could be solved by handing over £2.44 and getting 5p change.

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Or you could hand over £2.50 and get one 5p and three 2p coins as change.

But how much frustration would that lead to at tills and supermarket checkouts all over the country?

When the pound stopped being divided into 240 pennies under decimalisation in 1971, there was bound to be some inflation.

The same would be true of scrapping the penny.

And that is not something that we should have to put up with.

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