US Mint screws up $100 bills

[bsshog40]

Mon Dec 6, 9:36 am ET

Government can’t print money properly

By Zachary Roth

 

 

As a metaphor for our troubled economic and financial era -- and the government's stumbling response -- this one's hard to beat. You can't stimulate the economy via the money supply, after all, if you can't print the money correctly.

 

Because of a problem with the presses, the federal government has shut down production of its flashy new $100 bills, and has quarantined more than 1 billion of them -- more than 10 percent of all existing U.S. cash -- in a vault in Fort Worth, Texas, reports CNBC.

 

"There is something drastically wrong here," one source told CNBC. "The frustration level is off the charts."

 

[Related: Money fair showcases $100,000 bill]

 

Officials with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve had touted the new bills' sophisticated security features that were 10 years in the making, including a 3-D security strip and a color-shifting image of a bell, designed to foil counterfeiters. But it turns out the bills are so high-tech that the presses can't handle the printing job.

 

 

More than 1 billion unusable bills have been printed. Some of the bills creased during production, creating a blank space on the paper, one official told CNBC. Because correctly printed bills are mixed in with the flawed ones, even the ones printed to the correct design specs can't be used until they 're sorted. It would take an estimated 20 to 30 years to weed out the defective bills by hand, but a mechanized system is expected to get the job done in about a year.

 

[Related: Design firm seeks to rebrand dollar with Obama's image]

 

Combined, the quarantined bills add up to $110 billion -- more than 10 percent of the entire U.S. cash supply, which now stands at around $930 billion.

 

The flawed bills, which cost around $120 million to print, will have to burned.

 

The new bills are the first to include Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's signature. In order to prevent a shortfall,the government has ordered production of the old design, which includes the signature of Bush administration Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. That, surely, is not the only respect in which the nation's lead economic officials would like to turn back the clock to sometime before the 2008 financial crisis.

 

 

[Brol]

hehe maybe it is easier to recycle them to toilet paper and print new ones

[RWB]

The US Mint is not involved...it is BEP.

[bsshog40]

The US Mint is not involved...it is BEP.

Sorry, they are usually one and the same to me.

[WoodenJefferson]

Send me a couple of bundles, I'll help sort out the good from the bad

[RareSov]

How can it cost that much to print, geez. Time to make BIGGER DENOMINATIONS. Not likely, gee where have we seen that recently

[Oldtrader3]

I can't deal with this government of ours anymore. It just keeps costing more and more to do less and less, or do more wrongly!

[thebeav]

I had heard, on the news, that sorting through these notes by hand is out of the question. It would take 30 years !

 

Paul

[Conder101]

What I'm curious about is why did it take them so long to discover the problem? These notes are constantly inspected at every step of the printing production. A billion notes is 31.25 million sheets or 781 print runs. And no one noticed a problem and got it corrected before then? What percentage of the notes are flawed? Are the flawed notes distributed throughout the whole group of printed notes or did they just find a pack of notes that had a gutter fold note in it and they are now condemning the whole printing? I hate to tell them this but gutter fold notes do happen from time to time.

[Coindude]

Just put them on the market. Who cares? That many errors equals no premium, and would make them even harder to counterfeit.

[bsshog40]

By what I understand is that there was a new design implemented, they were printed and then noticed that some of the security measures in the new note were not being printed into the bill by the printing machines. Like the printing machines software? was not able to do all it was asked of.

[Conder101]

In the OP is says the paper creased and left a blank area. (creased, printed, and opened back up.) And even if it was a case of a security item not being printed, why wasn't it discovered before they printed 781 print runs?

[bsshog40]

In the OP is says the paper creased and left a blank area. (creased, printed, and opened back up.) And even if it was a case of a security item not being printed, why wasn't it discovered before they printed 781 print runs?

This was added also Conder:

 

Officials with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve had touted the new bills' sophisticated security features that were 10 years in the making, including a 3-D security strip and a color-shifting image of a bell, designed to foil counterfeiters. But it turns out the bills are so high-tech that the presses can't handle the printing job.

 

[coinman_23885]

Mon Dec 6, 9:36 am ET

Government can’t print money properly

By Zachary Roth

 

 

As a metaphor for our troubled economic and financial era -- and the government's stumbling response -- this one's hard to beat. You can't stimulate the economy via the money supply, after all, if you can't print the money correctly.

 

Because of a problem with the presses, the federal government has shut down production of its flashy new $100 bills, and has quarantined more than 1 billion of them -- more than 10 percent of all existing U.S. cash -- in a vault in Fort Worth, Texas, reports CNBC.

 

"There is something drastically wrong here," one source told CNBC. "The frustration level is off the charts."

 

[Related: Money fair showcases $100,000 bill]

 

Officials with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve had touted the new bills' sophisticated security features that were 10 years in the making, including a 3-D security strip and a color-shifting image of a bell, designed to foil counterfeiters. But it turns out the bills are so high-tech that the presses can't handle the printing job.

 

 

More than 1 billion unusable bills have been printed. Some of the bills creased during production, creating a blank space on the paper, one official told CNBC. Because correctly printed bills are mixed in with the flawed ones, even the ones printed to the correct design specs can't be used until they 're sorted. It would take an estimated 20 to 30 years to weed out the defective bills by hand, but a mechanized system is expected to get the job done in about a year.

 

[Related: Design firm seeks to rebrand dollar with Obama's image]

 

Combined, the quarantined bills add up to $110 billion -- more than 10 percent of the entire U.S. cash supply, which now stands at around $930 billion.

 

The flawed bills, which cost around $120 million to print, will have to burned.

 

The new bills are the first to include Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's signature. In order to prevent a shortfall,the government has ordered production of the old design, which includes the signature of Bush administration Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. That, surely, is not the only respect in which the nation's lead economic officials would like to turn back the clock to sometime before the 2008 financial crisis.

 

 

Forget the error, is anyone else troubled by the fact that the federal government is printing 1,000,000 $100 bills like they're some sort of candy wrapper? Is the BEP trying to destroy the national economy? Now I see why inflation is such an issue... Isn't this analogous to what happened in the Civil War?

[physics-fan3.14]

coinman, a few billion printed is pocket change compared to the trillions pumped into the economy over the past couple of years