The Friday File: It costs the US Mint 1.7 cents to produce a penny, 9.4 cents to mint a nickel. As the Mint makes about five billion pennies/year and one billion nickels/year, those overages sum up to a loss of $110 million/year. Being a penny pincher, I say stop pushing pennies, or at least make them out of steel, not increasingly costly zinc. That way we wouldn’t be taking wooden nickels.