The Money Game: Choire Sicha

America’s Quarter-Life: Crisis Where’s our change? The answer is gnarlier than you’d expect.

- Choire Sicha

OUR GOVERNMENT just dropped a hot new quarter featuring Maya Angelou with her arms dramatically aloft, posed before a bird’s giant wingspan. It’s the first of a series, each depicting women on the back. (George Washington is still on the front.) Arrival of the long-planned quarter was met with joy tempered with bafflement. Hey—aren’t we in a coin shortage?

The answer is complicated. For some time now, the United States of America, among her other struggles, has indeed been in the silvery throes of a slow-moving crisis of coin. It became apparent in the spring of 2020, when our sudden lack of desire to get breathed on forced many of us to stop transacting money IRL. The Federal Reserve found that in April 2020, only a third of Americans had made an in-person purchase within the past 30 days— and only slightly more than half of those people reported using cash. (In previous surveys, nearly everyone had reported recently making an in-person purchase.) We had ceased being cogs in the money-circulation system; we were neglecting our role as the pollinators of cash. It was yet another supply-chain issue, one in which the troublesome link was you and me.