As Queer As A $100 Bill
The U.S. Mint produced 1.1 billion $100 bills — or $110 billion worth — that are all riddled with errors tied to the bill’s new anti-counterfeiting measures, which the Treasury Department evidently couldn’t quite get right. The “3-D security strip and a color-shifting image of a bell” are among the Benjamin’s new security detail, although big government is saying which new features are responsible for the queering of the currency. So the bills are being stored in a vault in Ft. Worth, where they’ll likely be destroyed since sorting through all of them to find the bad ones is too arduous a process. Which means the bills that were to be the first to feature Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s signature are DOA; instead the government is printing more of the old bills featuring George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s scrawl.
From a collectors perspective, they would have been smarter to distribute them as is. Now, some perverse person in the Treasury will stuff some in his underwear and have a rarity that will be worth plenty in the not too distant future!
What would be the harm of circulating them? We went through two or three $20s!