New High Tech $100 Bills Start To Circulate Today 302
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "New $100 bills made their debut today in the U.S. They include high tech features designed to make it easier for the public to authenticate but more difficult for counterfeiters to replicate. Those measures include a blue, 3-D security ribbon, as well as color-shifting ink that changes from copper to green when the note is tilted (PDF). That ink can be found on a large '100' on the back of the bill, on one of the '100's' on the front, and on a new image of an ink well that's also on the front. 'The $100 is the highest value denomination that we issue, and it circulates broadly around the world,' says Michael Lambert, assistant director for cash at the Federal Reserve Board. 'Therefore, we took the necessary time to develop advanced security features that are easy for the public to use in everyday transactions, but difficult for counterfeiters to replicate.' The bill was originally due to reach banks in 2011, but three years ago the Federal Reserve announced that a problem with the currency's new security measures was causing the bills to crease during printing, which left blank spaces on the bills. This led the Feds to shred more than 30 million of the bills in 2012. The image of Benjamin Franklin will be the same as on the current bill, but like all the other newly designed currencies, it will no longer be surrounded by an dark oval. Except for the $1 and $2 bill, all U.S. paper currency has been redesigned in the last 10 years to combat counterfeiting."
All that, and yet ... (Score:5, Interesting)
And yet they can't do such basic things as, say, change the sizes of the notes so that vision impaired people can tell the difference between a one dollar and ten dollar bill just by checking its length. (Have a look at the Australian notes [wikipedia.org] for an example: each note is seven millimeters longer than the preceding one by value.)
They'd also do well by dropping the one and two dollar bills, replacing them with coins; the currency has devalued so much, it's not worth keeping the low value notes as notes. You could also make a case for ditching the penny, to boot.
But hey, what would I know ...
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They'd also do well by dropping the one and two dollar bills, replacing them with coins; the currency has devalued so much, it's not worth keeping the low value notes as notes. You could also make a case for ditching the penny, to boot.
But hey, what would I know ...
The government would *love* to be able to discontinue those bills, and replace them with coins. But to date, there have been *two* attempts to replace the $1 bill with a $1 coin, and both have failed miserably because people refused to use them.
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not true, the only reason the programs failed was because the government cowardly refused to proactively remove and destroy $1 bills. the lifetime of a $1 bill is only 18 months on average, in two years the country could be converted over
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No... it was not. Canada did not pull the $1 bill from circulation until about 2 years after the coin was introduced.
They did, however, pull the $2 note from circulation at the same time that they introduced the $2 coin.
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The government would *love* to be able to discontinue those bills, and replace them with coins.
It costs 18.03 cents [usmint.gov] to mint those dollar coins, but only 5.4 cents [federalreserve.gov] to print a one dollar bill. So why exactly would they want to get rid of the paper bill?
Re:All that, and yet ... (Score:5, Insightful)
It costs 18.03 cents [usmint.gov] to mint those dollar coins, but only 5.4 cents [federalreserve.gov] to print a one dollar bill. So why exactly would they want to get rid of the paper bill?
Because coins can last for decades, whereas paper money has to be continually replaced. I'm sure I read somewhere that the Bank of England heats the building by burning old money, which is replaced by new notes.
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Thanks.
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The reason for that is they wanted the coin to have the same electro-magnetic signature as the old Susan B. Anthony dollars, which were a copper-nickel sandwich just like the quarter. So they ended up with some funky brass alloy that they'd never use otherwise except that it just so happens to look like a SBA to a vending machine so that it spends the same. Well, in theory at least, not all vending machines were so accepting of the new coins.
Of course, it wouldn't be so bad if the coin had any relief to i
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Because the paper bill only lasts 18 months but the coin can go for many years. Don't forget the cost to securely destroy the worn out notes. The notes end up much more expensive.
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The first one was far too easily mistaken for a quarter. No idea about the second one other than the only place I ever actually saw one was from a stamp vending machine.
I'll bet if they had just said no more $1 notes will be printed, it would have worked fine.
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I like how euros (and most European currencies in general, IME) physically scale(d) with value, very handy even for a person with good vision.
Definitely disagree on the 1/2 bills though. Canada got rid of both years ago, and there's just too much bloody change. I need to get suspenders or something.
(we did finally kill the penny this year, though. thank god).
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I like how euros (and most European currencies in general, IME) physically scale(d) with value, very handy even for a person with good vision.
Whereas I dislike that.
I think Canada has enough, between the colors, and the tactile feedback.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_currency_tactile_feature [wikipedia.org]
My grandmother lived a sighted life but her vision is deteriorating with age, and while she is unlikely to ever learn braille she had no problem mastering the new "not really braille" on the new bills. I think its
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You can't replace the $1 bills, how will we tip the strippers?
A good question. Here in NZ we've long since switched to plastic notes and $1 and $2 coins and I'd say it has been well received. Just looking at a pair of $2 coins from my wallet I can't see any real difference in wear between one minted in 2003 versus the 1990 model. The designs may be different but their lustre is much the same.
Tipping isn't a big part of Kiwi culture (yet?) but the girls are as well looked-after here as anywhere. Simply flip out a few extra notes as you pay your entry fee - or, more lik
but all the old stuff is still good, right? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Eventually, these get circulated enough so that when a cashier is presented with an old $100, they can inspect it more thoroughly because they don't have to do it as often.
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So why would I bother trying to counterfeit the newer more difficult bills instead of just doing the older easier ones since they remain legal tender?
As the years go by the older notes will get less common, especially new looking old notes.
I was at a casino once and this guy put a stack of crisp old style 100s on the table. The casino employees spent 15 minutes inspecting them, calling others over to look at them, etc before they accepted them.
Re:but all the old stuff is still good, right? (Score:5, Informative)
That's why forgers have found ways to "age" their bills. It works a bit like aging jeans to give them that appealing "ruggedly used" look.
Yes, "laundering money" gets a whole new meaning that way.
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...and they promptly set them aside in the cage, to be deposited and not mixed with the circulating bills, as most of the slot machine bill validators (the most likely target for any $100 bill in a casino) won't read them.
That said, as a frequent gambler, I still get the occasional small-head hundred from casinos. They don't sequester all of them.
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So why would I bother trying to counterfeit the newer more difficult bills instead of just doing the older easier ones since they remain legal tender?
Because change takes time and you need to start somewhere? They'll start phasing out the old $100's at the bank and replacing them with the new ones. The old ones will be destroyed. As people use them and more leave circulation it will be more and more suspicious for people to break out the older bills. Will there still be counterfeit bills popping up for years? Sure. But the point is that it will become more suspicious if someone tries to cash in a lot of them.
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But by the time it really is suspicious, don't you think the forgers catch on?
So far every security feature has been thwarted sooner or later. The new roadblock is the color changing ink. Well, let's see how long it takes. I give it a year.
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It' already been several years and nobody has managed to get the ink right (this bill is not the first to use it).
The second 3D security strip is new as well and is woven in to the paper.
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So why would I bother trying to counterfeit the newer more difficult bills instead of just doing the older easier ones since they remain legal tender?
Because it'll only work so long. They collect and destroy the old bills and replace them with new ones. About 15 years ago, I tried to "pass" some real 20-year-old dollar bills I inherited. They'd been sitting unused in a desk. Since they were a little different from the then-current design, they occasionally got some extra scrutiny.
Pedant note: I'm not claiming that this is foolproof or anything. Just noting something I experienced using new old stock bills.
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You can absolutely make a SMALL quantity of old bills, and you can pass a few of them without issue. Small-time counterfeiters likely do.
But you can't move wholesale blocks of old currency without raising the wrong (right?) eyebrows.
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The more time passes, the more suspicion using one of the old bills will raise. t some point it becomes a problem for people trying to pass counterfeit old hundreds.
In other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
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...the United States still has the world's fugliest currency.
What, you got a problem with Olmec heads and vague references to the illuminati? :3
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hey show some respect, that's just George our founding father in his friday night drag. And he really doesn't care to be called a queen either, he says "double-gaited" will do just fine
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I'm canadian and i personally think we should get rid of her but some people actually want to keep the ties...
Yeah, but who would we replace her with? Kim Campbell?
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It's not... green? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it me, or does it have a bluish tinge now that makes it easier to tell that it's a different denomination?
Most countries already use different colored bills to help distinguish one denomination from another (and to aid in quickly determining how much cash on hand you have by a quick glance). Only in the US do I have to manually count out every bill to make sure a $5 didn't sneak in with the $1s and so on.
Of course, perhaps it's time to go beyond linen/cotton/paper based bills and move to plastic (polymer) based ones...
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Is it me, or does it have a bluish tinge now that makes it easier to tell that it's a different denomination?
Sorry since we're spending more than we take in we can no longer print with Green Ink. Using Red Ink would have been a give away to the Republicans so now we're just printing them with the Blue ink instead so you'll support the current Administration by using them and you won't feel so bad that that $100 bill is only worth about $4.50 now.
Re:It's not... green? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, all the bills except the $1 and $2 are slightly different colours now. The $5 is purple, the $10 is orange, the $20 is green, the $50 is pink, and the $100 is teal.
The ruling in American Council of the Blind v. Paulson required them to add accessibility features to the notes and the colours are one of those, in addition to some kind of tactile feature.
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"It is an organization mainly made up of blind and visually impaired people"
Yes, it is a bad name for such an organization, causing confusion among lazy snarky people everywhere.
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Surprised they didn't incorporate the blank spaces (Score:2)
Hey, wonder why they didn't incorporate the accidental blank spaces as an additional security feature? You know, like old school game disks used to have certain sectors purposefully corrupted as a method of copy protection, so if you copied the game to a new disk and the computer didn't see the bad sectors where it expected to, it would know it was a copy...
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Bills have (or used to have) intentional mistakes that a hand engraver was likely to fix subconsciously, including in some cases typos in microprint and tiny jagged (as if by accident) straight lines.
Nowadays bills are copied using high-speed high-precision laser scanners so I do not know if those artifacts are still used as security devices.
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Uh, because anyone making a set of counterfeit plates would just make sure his plates had the same blank spaces? The idea is to put in features that the counterfeiters couldn't easily copy...
(and FYI - it took me about 20 minutes to slap together a simple TSR to provide the proper "bad" sectors where required for those stupid disks. Turns out that was trivially easy to get around too...)
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Encrypt the serial number into the features on both sides of the bill. That way at least the forgers have to copy multiple bills using multiple plates if they want a bunch of different serial numbers.
So how is the *government* going to print these things, without having a different set of plates for every serial number?
FYI - Bills are typicallly printed in sheets, without the serial numbers, and the serial numbers are added in a later printing step.
the reason why $100 bills (Score:3)
$100 bills are the most popular bill counterfeited in the world. however, $20 bills are the most popular bill counterfeited in the US.
the new design is going to piss off North Korea because they counterfeit US $100 bills like crazy: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2013/1008/New-100-bill-why-North-Korea-won-t-be-very-happy-video [csmonitor.com]
The US is a bit late to the game (Score:4, Funny)
Iran has been circulating these new $100s since last week.
Large amount stolen last year (Score:2)
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If the government is supposed to be shut down, how could anyone release this money?
The federal reserve is not part of the government, it never was, it never will be.
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The Fed doesn't print the money, they're just the central bank that issues the money, which isn't the same thing. The actual printing of the banknotes is done by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and the coins are made by the United States Mint.
It's similar in Canada, where the Bank of Canada issues the money, the coins are made by the Royal Canadian Mint, and the banknotes are printed by a couple different private companies under contract. Interestingly, neither of those companies is Canadian-owned.
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The Bank of Canada is wholly Canadian owned. Legally, it is a crown corporation, belonging to the federal government. Ultimately, the Bank of Canada is owned by the people of Canada.
R.R. Donnelly runs the Canadian Bank Note Company, which prints bank notes for Canada, but this has always been a private company (before 1920, it was a subdivision of the American Bank Note Company in New York). The Canadian Bank Note Company is not to be confused with the Royal Canadian Mint, which is another crown cor
Re:What a farce (Score:4, Interesting)
The only way to make currency impossible to counterfeit is to not have fiat currency in the first place, which means the people would choose something real to be money, I am talking about gold, and you can't really counterfeit that.
Care to place a wager on that? [myfoxny.com]
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nonsense, counterfeiting gold is crime that goes to ancient times
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Re:What a farce (Score:5, Interesting)
The only stuff in the universe that cannot be counterfeited is energy.
I propose a new currency based on the kWh. Instead of slips of paper or plastic credit cards, people will use rechargeable batteries and actually transfer units of work between each other.
At first there will be extremely rapid inflation as people set up solar collectors and other such stuff, but eventually nearly every inch of the earth will be dedicated to collecting energy. Things like tax credits and welfare can be eliminated as every man, woman, and child will be able to collect or generate at least some energy (the government could give out stationary bikes that collect energy), which will act as a base negative tax rate.
With so much energy then available, what would our standard of living be?
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Conveniently, it can be freely converted to bitcoin. Unfortunately, it can't be converted back.
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That would only work if we had efficient storage methods to keep the energy from degrading practically at all.
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Crazy gold bug,
Gold-backed currency does not mean that everyone carries around gold in their pocket. It's actually quite a bit harder to accurately value and validate than paper currency with various anti-counterfeiting properties. Let me repeat that, physical gold is easier
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So we now make our money safe by implementing security means they had in their money for a decade now, because we know they don't have access to that kind of sophisticated technology. Uhhuh.
Makes about as much sense as anything coming out of capitol hill lately.
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"Actually, most $100 bill counterfeiting is in the former USSR and adjacent countries."
Since the old notes will keep their value forever, they can still print those old ones and hence this anti-counterfeiting measure is worthless.
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Re:$2 bill? (Score:4, Interesting)
There are something like 3 million of them in circulation, and new ones are still being printed periodically. But many people, like yourself, have never actually encountered one.
(I've heard anecdotes of people trying to spend one being accused of counterfeiting, because the cashier had never seen one and assumed that it was a fraud).
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that's mostly because people go, "oooo, a crisp $2 bill! hardly ever see those!" and then they stash it somewhere at home
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That's exactly what I do, I've got, like, 5 of them.
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Which is kind of sad, because the back of the $2 bill has been pretty awesome [wikipedia.org] since 1976.
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According to our friend Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], new ones have been printed as recently as last year...
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2 dollar bills would actually be what I'd forge if I were to. Think about it, it's legal tender, it's an amount where most businesses won't start to make a fuss over and nobody really knows what they should look like.
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And it's a bill that hardly ever gets used so people pay a great deal of attention to them when they see them. Whether or not people are intimately familiar with them, I don't think drawing a lot of eyes to your counterfeit transactions is very smart idea.
Especially when even genuine $2 bills [slashdot.org] can get you in trouble.
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Only difference is, European paper money quality has been so much better for a long time, that the largest notes are about 5...10x higher in denomination, even before the Euro. The largest one is 500EUR ~ 679USD.
US paper money sucked badly for a far longer time than the stuff used by the rest of the world. Well, better (very) late than never. You may consider $200 and $500 bills next. Well, maybe in 20 or 30 years when your tech has caught up.
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What's gold and silver backed by? Oh yeah, that's right nothing but our imagination.
Re:Looks European.... cue the conspiracy... (Score:5, Insightful)
"It has had value since humans placed value on things."
Correction: it has been GIVEN value since humans placed value on things. You can't eat gold, right? you can't shelter with gold, right?
Now, think of it. Gold has value because people gave it value. This means that other things can have value as long as people gives value to them. Pretty papers with a portrait of a famous dead guy, for instance.
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"I'm sorry but gold has had multiple uses throughout history, from sutures (first used by the Romans IIRC) to computer chips."
Yeah, and it was used to store and represent wealth because, you know, it's good to have some ounces of it in case you have to practice a suture. C'mon, man, C'mon.
I'll tell you exactly why it was chosen:
* First and foremost because humans are capable of abstraction and so, we can cognitate in terms of "look, this is gold, but let's pretend it is not gold but wealth". In other words
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Yes it does. IIRC about 2% of gold goes into these useful things. The rest goes into stockpiles or jewelry (which for many people is a stockpile.)
In fact we could shut down all gold mines today and use our stockpile of gold for the next thousand years. So in that sense gold is actually more plentiful then copper or iron.
So I don't think the value of gold is being driven on how useful it is in manufacturing. It is valuable because people deem it is valuable - much like fiat money. (but I will grant that fiat
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It has had value since humans placed value on things.
Ah, good, at least you understand where value comes from (and thus fundamentally agree with the person you were responding to), rather than believing in magical fairy tales like "intrinsic value" or such nonsense...
At least it has intrinsic value...
...
Re:Looks European.... cue the conspiracy... (Score:5, Funny)
Money is like a strapless evening dress on a 70 year old: It's held up by the collective belief that anything is better than having to see it drop.
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He didn't specify the gender of the 70-year old. Any misogyny here is your own.
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Speaking of old... I'm fairly sure if somebody pulled a Reagan era $100 note from a matress somewhere, it's still spendable. Anti-counterfeit measures are only good as the oldest version of currency still being accepted.
Here in Canada most stores won't take old large ($50-$100) bills so you have to take them to a bank. The bank tellers usually have enough experience to spot most counterfeits.
Re:Looks European.... cue the conspiracy... (Score:5, Insightful)
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It was never backed by gold.
But it was once backed by SILVER, an it said so right on the face of Silver Certificates [wikipedia.org], which you could turn in for actual silver. Allegedly.
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It was never backed by gold.
But it was once backed by SILVER, an it said so right on the face of Silver Certificates [wikipedia.org], which you could turn in for actual silver. Allegedly.
You can still turn your bills in for gold, silver, zinc [blogspot.com], or BTC. You just have to trade it with someone besides the government.
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Re:Looks European.... cue the conspiracy... (Score:4, Informative)
No, you could go to any Federally Charted bank and get Silver Dollars (which at that time were in fact silver).
You didn't need a truckload, you could do it bill by bill. Only after 1968 did they abrogate the promise
of silver. This was preceded by a years notice, and was sort of a big deal at the time.
I distinctly remember many people gathering silver certificates and turning them in for silver granules.
This they thought was a hedge against inflation. Shortly after 1968, the price of silver crashed, and many sold at a loss.
By 78, silver had doubled from its 68 price, and by 88, it had risen ten fold.
It was only the bills marked Hawaii and North Africa that cold be canceled upon invasion.
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None. Same as all the other "backed" currency. It'd backed by faith alone.
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The gold is gone, where's the gold?
And the gold was backed by...?
It's awesomely shiny, and it has a small number of specialty scientific and industrial uses, but gold as gold isn't all that intrinsically valuable as a mineral; it's just rather rare and something that a number of societies historically used as one convenient medium of exchange.
You can't eat it. You can't drink it. You can't shoot someone with it. You can't get other people to do stuff in exchange for it unless there is a stable enough society that the recipients antici
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And the gold was backed by...?
"Backed" is the wrong word, but the factor that has made gold a trustworthy currency for millenia, one people are eager to receive and reluctant to part with, is scarcity.
In terms of "backing", Federal Reserve notes and gold are on the same footing. Neither is backed by anything else. The difference is that there is no practical limit to the number of FRNs in circulation, which means that if the Federal Reserve so chooses your currency could have half the purchasing power tomorrow that it has today. Admitte
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if the Federal Reserve so chooses your currency could have half the purchasing power tomorrow that it has today. Admittedly that is very unlikely, but no one has that kind of influence over the price of gold, because it can't simply be created on demand.
This, right here, is the usual logical error that gold bugs typically make. While the physical amount of gold in existence can't readily be changed (we'll neglect the small amount of 'new' gold added to the economy through mining), the supply of gold - reserves available for sale - and the overall demand for gold are very much vulnerable to both general volatility and deliberate manipulation. Changes in supply and demand in turn significantly shift the perceived value of gold, leading to swings in its ma
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Yeah, but the issuing government is gone. Where's the issuing government?
Right now, Zimbabwe has a more functional government than the issuing government of the $100 bill.
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It will still be worth 100 USD. No doubt about that.
It might be worth 1 EUR, though. Well, technically it IS worth an EUR, but we prop that toy money up because we simply got too much of it ourselves.
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Indeed. Currently the rest of the world is very much afraid what would happen when the USD would be valuated at what it is actually worth (hint: Greece may or may not be in better economic shape than the US, it is a close thing). Also China has a lot of USD they do not want to see crash. But as soon as this irrational fear vanishes, anything can happen. And the traditional way out for low-performing countries (tourism) is not open to the US unless the TSA is killed for good.
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No, more like a TV on standby. You don't really get anything out of it, but it still sucks up juice.
Re:federal reserve corporation's 0% interest rates (Score:5, Insightful)
no, the Federal Funds Rate is currently 0.25% and for overnight loans. very short term so does not have the explosive inflationary effect you seem to imagine.
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I've heard of a handful of isolated cases of people counterfeiting the new polymer Canadian bills, but no stories about any that actually entered circulation.
In other words, the hopeful counterfeiters who've attempted this so far are only fooling people who can't be bothered to actually check for even the most basic security characteristics. The forgeries discovered were actually quite crude,and it's nothing less than laziness on the part of the recipients that led to it being passed off as genuine in
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Kinda like when someone managed to pass a $200 bill (yes, $200) with GWB on the front and oil derricks on the back at a Dairy Queen.
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Seriously, I'm waiting a patent troll to step up to the plate and sue cuz the new currency uses something the troll patented.
the government has the power to seize any patent at will. while they have not done this to date, they might if it messes with our currency.