Metaphor of the Day: 110 Billion Dollars Worth Of New $100 Bills Quarantined As Unusable Due To Systematic Printing Error

As Ben says: We can't even print up money right. He thinks this is 10% of all currency in print, but doesn't have a source for that. $1 trillion then in all currency? Sounds low to me. I figure more like 1%, but let me know, if you know.

An official familiar with the situation told CNBC that 1.1 billion of the new bills have been printed, but they are unusable because of a creasing problem in which paper folds over during production, revealing a blank unlinked portion of the bill face.

A second person familiar with the situation said that at the height of the problem, as many as 30 percent of the bills rolling off the printing press included the flaw, leading to the production shut down.

The printing errors stem from very sophisticated printing techniques intended to foil counterfeiters. I guess if the techniques are this difficult for even the US print to manage, it will make life hard on counterfeiters.

Then again, the private sector is always better at their jobs than the government sector.

posted by Ace at 04:42 PM

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