Change in junked cars, under vending machines, hidden in the grass, under the water, etc…
Like, if I could somehow find every piece of change or bill that has been misplaced how much would I have;
How much US currency has been considered lost on this planet??
Poop, this should be in GQ not GD, sorry.
[Moderator Hat ON]
To GQ.
[Moderator Hat OFF]
No-one`s willing to take a stab at this?
I’d say somewhere between a medium-sized ass-load and a helluva large shit-load. I think that’s about as factual as it gets.
Let’s count, shall we? A one, a two-who, a three. crunch Three.
Seriously though, I’d have to agree with TaxGuy. For starters, how would you know that a particular bill that hasn’t shown up in a while is actually lost? Maybe someone has kept it as their lucky dollar bill or something.
Hey, that twenty you found in the couch? I’ve been looking for that for AGES. Fork it over.
Well, I’ve been looking around the US Mint site, but I haven’t found much.
They do give their 2002 production totals, though, so we can assume that the rate of loss of coins is lower than that.
http://www.usmint.gov/about_the_mint/coin_production/index.cfm?action=production_figures&allCoinsYear=2002#starthere
Here’s a site that says workers at Chicago O’Hare find an average of 6 cents per passenger in the seats.
It shouldnt be too hard to find the values for how many coins the mint produced to account for the assumes loss of coins, should it?
How many people have 100’s and 1000’s of pennies and other change in jars at home? How would anyone know if those were lost or just out of circulation?
I think this question is darn near impossible to answer with any accuracy.
First, we must come to some sort of agreement that requires all money to be all lost in the same place…
There’s no way to measure it.
Well, the mint makes gets N worn-out coins per year. They put M new coins into circulation, of which P are intended to increase the amount of money in circulation. I’m guessing we could have our answer (for a given year) if we find the number
Q = M - N - P
No?
The mint makes more coins than it gets, and the difference exists becasue they assume a certain rate of attrition. What’s that rate?
what about those money supply indexes the fed keeps track?
That only tells you how much is “out there”. There’s no way of knowing how much is still in circulation and how much is behind seat cushions, dropped into the Charles River, and squished flat on RR tracks.