Treasury Goes High-Tech With Redesigned $100 Bills

Hugh Pickens writes "AP reports that as part of an effort to stay ahead of counterfeiters, the Department of the Treasury has designed a high-tech makeover of the $100 bill with a disappearing Liberty Bell in an inkwell and a bright blue security ribbon composed of thousands of tiny lenses that magnify objects in mysterious ways. The new blue security ribbon will give a 3-D effect to the micro-images that the thousands of lenses will be magnifying. Tilt the note back and forth and you will see tiny bells on the ribbon change to 100s as they move. Tilt the note side to side and the images will move up and down."

Comments

Re:time for a change

[slick7]

sounds like a secret service agent fearing the downsizing monster?

Re:Still out of date

[Kral_Blbec]

Will people please stop comparing the USA to Europe? There are many reasons that we are not/should not/and don't want to be like them.
On the currency side, think about the difference in the volume of bills between the US dollar and the EU. We have a lot more bills and we have a lot more ATMs/vending machines. It isn't feasible to change that quickly. Furthermore, they have not switched entirely in the space of a few months. Its taken years to phase over to the Euro (which many over there don't want) and it still isn't universally accepted (at least it wasn't last time I visited. I would be very surprised if that had changed).

Re:time for a change

[inviolet]

Inflationmore generally, any increase in the supply of any good leading to its devaluationis not damage. Everyone has a right to their dollars, but, as with any good, no one has a right to receive any specific price for those dollars in the marketplace.

The problem is that people, with the strong encouragement of governments, insist on treating as a stable store of value objects which have essentially no direct use valued in proportional to the price paid for them, not even as raw material, and which thus only command a nonzero price due to the artificial scarcity granted them via enforcement of anti-counterfeiting laws and restraint on the part of the Treasury (as limited as that may be...).

That's backwards. Inflation is a desirable practice precisely because it discourages people from treating their dollars as a stable store of value. If we did not inflate the money supply in order to keep up with the increase in our total social wealth, then dollars would deflate, and consequently people would horde them as a profitable 'investment'. Whereas in the presence of inflation, individuals must seek out real investments.

Meanwhile, counterfeiting is wrong because it is the use of inflation for personal private gain.