d*2
发帖数: 2053 | 1 http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20101206/us_yblog_thelookout/government-cant-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.
[Rewind: Another printing snafu delays $100 bill]
(AP photo of older $100 bills rolling off the presses: Doug Mills) |
|
