The Treasury Department has pledged to stop producing the penny by early next year. Here's why — and what becomes of your one ...

The penny’s demise is a sign of ill health for America’s monetary and fiscal policies.

That's notably less pennies than it sent the year prior (when nearly 4.14 billion 1-cent pieces went out ... that vary in production costs. Dollar bills also see differences due to paper ...

and it got rid of five-cent coins in 2006. (It also replaced one-dollar and two-dollar bills with coins in 1991, and shrunk its twenty-cent and fifty-cent coins, which had been hubcap size ...