Some fraction of $1.1 billion worth of new US $100 bills will have to be scrapped due to a printing error; the new high-tech security features are so complex that they foiled the Treasury's own printers. Up to 30% of the bills are defective, and unless someone invents a machine that can tell bum notes from good ones, the whole run will have to be shredded. I think they should do it and sell printers' error commemorative confetti to pay for the next run.
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.
The Fed Has a $110 Billion Problem with New Benjamins
(via Consumerist)
