U.S. $20 Goes Color This Fall (1 Viewer)

[Peter Kline]

Go here for more info.

 

[Malcolm R]

Great. Our money gets ever closer to looking like it came from a Monopoly box...or Canada.

 

[Philip Hamm]

Our money gets ever closer to looking like it came from a Monopoly box...or Canada.

There's a difference between Monopoly money and Canadian money?

 

[Brian Perry]

Is the $1 bill ever going to be changed to the style of the other bills (larger president's head)?

 

[Malcolm R]

Doubt they'll spend too much time worrying about $1 and $2 bills. They seem to be concentrating on $5 and up, as those are more likely to be counterfeited.

 

[Francois Caron]

There's a difference between Monopoly money and Canadian money?

Canadian Tire money is more valuable than either of those!

 

[Max Leung]

Heh, you guys finally have the technology to print colored bills? Welcome to the 19th century.

Just about every country in the world has color bills...makes them much harder to counterfeit, and also makes it easier to tell bills apart.

BTW, the Canadian dollar is worth 72 cents US right now...factor in the lower cost of living here in Canada, and I can buy up all your pretty ladies home theater equipment for real cheap!

 

[Cam S]

That hardly looks like any color has been added to me? Not like our 10 or 5 dollar bill.

Haha, those are some good points Max!!

 

[RichardDP]

What cracks me up is that all of this is moot unless they immediately recall all of the "older" green $20s.

As long as they still accept the old ones as legal tender, a counterfeiter can continue to produce the older ones and pass them off. These new bills will do nothing to prevent that until all of the old bills are destroyed, which will happen exactly...never. For Pete's sake you can still spend the "old, old" $20 bill, no one bats an eyelash.

The continued stupidity of the government astounds me.

 

[Greg*go]

I agree with the above poster, until we say "no more" to the old... old $20 bills, what's the point of updating? The newer bills can be as hard to duplicate as they want, but it doesn't matter as long as the easily counterfeiting ones can still be used.

Although, I would be suspcious of someone that paid $5000 with old $20 bills. Maybe that's the reasoning.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

Heh, you guys finally have the technology to print colored bills?

Actually many countries have the "US Banknote Company" print their currency for them, so it's probable that we invented the colorful currency most other countries enjoy.

 

[Peter Kline]

This post is kinda like movie comments. Some making judgements just on the basis of a small poorly photographed representation of the new $20. Let's wait until the legal tender arrives in our grimey hands!

 

[Mark Hayenga]

I think this could make sense even with the continued circulation of the old currency. The problem is you guys are thinking of it from the POV of the counterfeiter - ie "I can just keep making the old $20s". This could be exactly why it makes catching counterfeiting easier, relative to the current situation.

Think about it in terms of the cost of government expenditure for a given result. If the new bills are significantly more difficult to counterfeit, counterfeiting efforts will become concentrated in the old style of currency. As older bills will are replaced as a result of wear & tear, they will be representing a smaller and smaller portion of the total search set the government has to deal with. The higher likelihood of counterfeiting the old-style bills and their decreased percentage of the overall money in circulation means the government has to deal with a smaller search set that has a significantly higher percentage of containing counterfeit bills. It's akin to a cop yelling to a room full of people, "All you criminals get on the left side of the room, and all you honest folks get on the right" and having people more or less comply.

But why not just retire the old currency completely, and make people trade-in their old bills for new ones? Well, one of the reasons the dollar is the wonderfully strong currency it is is that we don't do that. Do you think the Saddam's of the world would stockpile US dollars if they thought they'd have to trade them in to Uncle Sam at some point in the future? Making it possible for existing US currency to become 'invalid' at some point in the future lessens the desireability of our wonderful greenbacks.

 

[Charles J P]

Well, I know that the pictures might not be the best indication, but to me it looks like the added some colored reflective coatings to very small areas of the current green bill, not created a colored bill.

 

[Sean Conklin]

Looks good to me, I am more interested however in obtaining large quantities of these colorful and uncolorful bills. That's the important thing.

 

[MarcVH]

I see no particular resemblance between this new note and Monopoly money. Even if there were, I'm not sure that would be a bad thing. In Monopoly, the different colors mean it's pretty easy to look at a pile of cash and get a sense of whether it's mostly $100 bills or $1 bills. This can help with the strategy of the game, particularly when you have opponents who deliberately(?) keep their cash disorganized so you can't tell what they have.

Not so for greenbacks; a pile of mostly $1 notes looks about the same as a pile of mostly $100 notes unless you can look at each one closely. I don't see how this is a good thing.

Don't expect to see a redesign of the $1 note; that would require reprogramming every bill acceptor in every vending machine in America, which would be more expensive than a few campaign donations to stop it from happening. $5 and $20 notes can be redesigned because fewer vending machines have bill acceptors that take them (because there's no good way for a vending machine to give that much change, which is partly because of the failure of the dollar coin, but I digress.)

Backward compatibility is also why we still have bills that are the same size, despite the obvious advantages of making larger denominations slightly larger. Many of the features of our currency, like the QWERTY keyboard, have become so enshrined they'd be very difficult to change, whether they're any good or not.

 

[Max Leung]

I wouldn't be concerned about the old bills circulating, because what is supposed to happen is that, when a person deposits the bills at the bank, the bank is supposed to take the old bills and destroy them.

At least, that is how it is done in Canada to phase out the old bills. I'd expect it to be the same in the US.

 

[Randall Dorr]

These new bills will do nothing to prevent that until all of the old bills are destroyed, which will happen exactly...never.

You're sure about that?

A bill only lasts for about eighteen months. And seeing as most people don't hang onto their cash forever, each and every bill eventually goes back to a bank.

ex.
You have a twenty dollar bill. You spend that bill at a store. The store sends that bill to a bank. If the bill is old enough, it (and many others) will be given to the government. The government destroys the old bills and gives the bank newly manufactured ones. The bank now has the new bills which it distributes every time someone (be it a person or business) takes money from their account, cashes a check, etc.

Look at the twenty as it currently is, with it's off center picture of Jackson. Twenties from a few years ago had the picture in the center. But bills with the picture in the center are disappearing because of the above process. And the current twenties will be replaced with the more colorful ones by the same means.

Sure, there will always be those who use a mattress as a bank, and keep the same physical cash for years and years, but most cash is eventually circulated back to the government.

The next time you get some money from the ATM, see how long it stays in your wallet. It will make it's way back to a bank before long.

EDIT-

Max beat me by one minute.

 

[MarcVH]

Remember, a lot of US money is held outside the U.S. for various reasons. Saddam Hussein isn't the only one with huge stashes of our currency; it's commonly held by people in many countries for various reasons (the local currency isn't very stable, they're using it to engage in activities of dubious legality, etc.)

The Euro is starting to replace the US Dollar in this role, however, for various reasons (not the least of them being there's a 500 Euro note, which allows large amounts of it to be stored and carried more easily than large amounts of 100 USD notes.)

I think the commonly cited 18 month lifespan of a circulating bill is for $1 notes, which tend to circulate a lot. I would expect that $20s circulate at a lower rate.

 

[Glenn Overholt]

The old 20's will be around for years to come. The feds are too chicken to say that the old ones won't be valid after say, 2 years.

Remember, there are 20's everywhere
1. inside buried coffee cans in back yards
2. between mattresses of little old ladies that don't trust banks. (Ok, they're a dying breed!)
3. in cookie jars (where the Oreo's used to be).
4. Between walls and in other illegal places, both here and abroad.

I wish they would do it, though.

As for the new colors, who are they kidding? I even saw one on TV, and I now think that I'm going colorblind.

Glenn