Could the Bush administration get anything right? When it was decided that the rich didn’t a new look for their pocket change the new $100 bills were designed. To thwart counterfeiters and make the money prettier for the elite, after all who else but they and drug dealers actually use $100 bills, a complex process was decided upon to create the bills. A bit to complex it seems. The printing process has thwarted printers, resulting in $110 billion in currently unusable bills. The new hundreds, planned for roll-out in February, include a 3D security strip and color-shifting bell image—and producing them is so tricky that as many as 30% of those printed so far creased down the face during the process, resulting in a blank area
The government shut down production and quarantined the 1.1 billion printed so far—which amounts to more than 10% of all US currency on the planet. Officials must now create a mechanized system to determine which bills include the flaw—doing so by hand would take between 20 and 30 years, versus about one year by machine. Until the usable bills can be released, the current design will be produced again in order to avoid a shortage. You will probably not be shocked to learn that the new bills cost twice as much to produce as a normal bill, meaning the government spent about $120 million on the defective batch.