If practice truly makes perfect, one would think that the Obama administration would be expert at the art of printing money. Turns out they can’t even do that right.
CNBC/Yahoo Finance have the information on the latest incompetence:
A significant production problem with new high-tech $100 bills has caused government printers to shut down production of the new notes and to quarantine more than one billion of the bills in huge vaults in Fort Worth, Texas and Washington, DC, CNBC has learned.
Initially scheduled for release in February of 2011, the new bills were announced with great fanfare by officials at the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve in April. At the time, officials announced the new bills would incorporate sophisticated high-tech security features, including a 3-D security strip and a color-shifting image of a bell designed to foil counterfeiters. But the production process is so complex, it has instead foiled the government printers tasked with producing billions of the new notes.
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 total face value of the unusable bills, $110 billion, represents more than ten percent of the entire supply of US currency on the planet, which a government source said is $930 billion in banknotes. For now, the unusable bills are stored in the vaults in “cash packs” of four bundles of 4,000 each, with each pack containing 16,000 bills.
Our solution: Let’s outsource the printing to China and eliminate the middleman.
Source: CNBC/Yahoo Finance
This post was last modified on January 26, 2021
View Comments (5)
If they don't hurry up and get the problem fixed soon, what denomination are we going to use to buy a loaf of bread?
With the worst economy in 70 years most people are probably wondering, "What the hell is a $100 bill?"
Most places won't take 'em anyway. The only reason to use large bills is drug deals, buying vehicles of craiglist or snorting coke in style.
They can just drop them off at my place. I'll suffer through doing the QC on them.
I disagree. We should outsource to North Korea who already has the necessary production process to forge nearly perfect counterfits of US currency. Therefore, they could be in production within hours--and probably already are.