Originally Posted by
Kev Williams
There was a movie several years ago, forget the name, one of you will probably remember
- the counterfeiters had a clever way to make money from low $ bills:
All paper money 'in the system' eventually ends up incinerated. After making up their bogus bills, they broke into the place where pallets of cash about to be incinerated was stored- they swapped in their bad cash for good cash. They made a ton of money watching their bogus money burn up, and nobody was the wiser...
The problem with this idea is that most, if not all, Fed Reserves process all currency they receive on counter/sorters that off sort bills that are mutilated then auto destroy them on the spot. They are shredded into very small confetti. Most Feds have tours and you can buy small containers of the confetti to take home. As far as I know, there is no master depot for burning old cash. The counter/sorters used by the Fed are large machines that cost in the millions.
Mutilated coin on the other hand is a whole other beast.
In the early 90's, I was at a convention and one of the speakers was from Bureau of Engraving and Printing. This was about a year before the first redesign of the hundred. He asked that the doors be closed and locked, then posted a couple of his fellow workers at the doors. He then passed around samples of the new hundreds so we could see them. He talked about the new anti-counterfeiting features the bills would have, but only about half of them. The rest were classified and he couldn't tell us. When he was done, no one could leave until he had every sample back in his hands.
Printing $1 makes no sense to me. As others have said, the cost to pass them would be high for little return. A $5 or a $10 would make so much more sense.
I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love.... It seems to me that Montana is a great splash of grandeur....the mountains are the kind I would create if mountains were ever put on my agenda. Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans. Montana has a spell on me. It is grandeur and warmth. Of all the states it is my favorite and my love.
John Steinbeck