The Fed Has a $110 Billion Problem with New Benjamins

[Darwin333]

The new design is completely unusable, now. They'll need to redesign it, just in case some were leaked out into circulation.

No way, only the government can fuck up a billion times and still use it.

I find this absurdly amusing because I just ordered 5K trifolds for my company and they had a very small fuckup on the first 250 and they called and asked if I wanted them for free or if they should just throw them in the garbage.

The printing company that some asshole like me uses to print marketing material caught a very small color fuckup in the first 250 prints. The fucking US printing press prints over a billion $100 bills before they catch it. Fo real dawg? I mean, seriously?

What does $100B weigh? That has to be over a hundred of pallets of money.

 

[Slew Foot]

Very temporary stopgap. SS is indexed to inflation AFAIK.

No problem, well just make inflation not indexed to food, energy, healthcare, housing, education, and new cars.
As long as plasma TVs and iPods keep coming down in price, grammy is hosed.

 

[Zebo]

What is ironic is that our gov't goes through such hoops to make sure the money is not counterfeited. Then across the street, there's another gov't agency responsible for counterfeiting the money.

hehe

Then when you counterfeit $100 bill secret service will be at your doorstep and you'll do 10. Benny the B can do tens of trillions and we can't even audit the place.

 

[alkemyst]

Professional printers monitor their runs to literally stop the presses when something goes wrong. Ink spills, paper jams, and equipment malfunctions are usually detected by the machines themselves long before an operator intervenes.

Why do federal employees get away with massive screw ups that would never be tolerated in the real business world?

The more waste the more 'shrinkage'.

Someone's usually making out big on these mistakes and/or the clean up.

 

[Compnewbie01]

http://www.thevine.com.au/blog/tobler1/1-trillion-dollars20090312.aspx

You can imagine what 10% of the last picture would be like.

 

[Aluvus]

1.1 billion folks. Now for the ADHD generation I will reiterate. That number is not the value of the currency, that's how many bad bills were produced.

Err, no it isn't.

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.

"A very high proportion of the notes will be fit for circulation," said Darlene Anderson of the Treasury Department.

 

[boomerang]

Err, no it isn't.

You're splitting hairs.
Read this portion.

Because officials don’t know how many of the 1.1 billion bills include the flaw, they have to hold them in the massive vaults until they are able to develop a mechanized system that can sort out the usable bills from the defects.

Sorting such a huge quantity of bills by hand, the officials estimate, could take between 20 and 30 years. Using a mechanized system, they think they could sort the massive pile of bills, each of which features the familiar image of Benjamin Franklin on the face, in about one year.

This is nothing but spin. We're going to throw good money after bad to develop a mechanized system to sort out bad bills from good? This is the government here. It will take ten years what with bidding, security measures, numerous cost overruns, delays and setbacks to make this happen and nobody will account for the cost. It will cost more in the end. The first thing they'll do is have a relative set up a company to design and manufacture the equipment. They'll be fighting initially over whose "family" gets the work.

Save money by shredding them all now and firing a few key people.

 

[K1052]

I'm just guessing that the old worn bills will be culled out from wear and be replaced with the new ones, making the old ones, and especially the newly counterfeited "old ones" more conspicuous and suspect.

Bingo.

In my day job as a store manager I see an assload of $20 bills and getting anything older than the 2003 redesign is fairly rare. If someone came in with a lot of old bills we'd look at them and him a LOT more closely. Same for higher denominations, I think I've seen about two of the older $50s in the last 6 months.

 

[Darwin333]

http://www.thevine.com.au/blog/tobler1/1-trillion-dollars20090312.aspx

You can imagine what 10% of the last picture would be like.

Holy shit, 10 pallets of $100 bills is 1 billion dollars? So we are talking about over a thousand pallets of fuck up?

 

[Darwin333]

Err, no it isn't.

So, uh, you wanna start sorting the pallets of money on one side of the room, I'll start with the pallets on the other side of the room and we will meet in the middle?

 

[DrPizza]

According to a person familiar with the matter, the bills are the most costly ever produced, with a per-note cost of about 12 cents—twice the cost of a conventional bill. That means the government spent about $120 million to produce bills it can’t use.

I'd like to be the first to offer the government 25 cents per note. That way, they make a profit of more than 100%. I know that they can't use them, but I think I might find a use for them... In fact, come income tax time, maybe I'll even just give them some back! And at that point, if they want, they can sell them to me for 25 cents again.