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Paper or plastic for your money?
Today, scanners and software programs enabled the
unscrupulous to create $47.5 million in fake bills in our country
in 2001. Nor does the bleeding stop here. Since 1999, Secret Service
agents and the Colombian National Police have seized $133 million
from their Bogotá headquarters alone.
It took crooks more than four years to get close enough
to a polymer bill to risk floating it out in the Australian public,
says Les Coventry, head of Note Issue at the Reserve Bank. The first
attempt belongs in the stupid criminal tricks hall of fame: They
cut a hole into a piece of paper and taped plastic over the mess.
By 1998, Australians reduced their counterfeit bills to fewer than
200 a month, and most of those were knockoffs on the still-circulating
paper versions.
The power of polymer
If money is king, polymer is God.
Despite this evidence, the next round of changes rolling
off the US. Bureau of Engraving and Printing's presses this fall
features the $20 bill with subtle background colors. The $100 and
$50 get their makeup within 18 months. Yes, they'll keep some of
the current watermarks, security threads and color shifting ink
-- plus a few undisclosed counterfeit traps the Bureau remains mum
on.
Insiders such as Stane Straus, who owns the industry's
polymernotes.com
Web site, say they have unconfirmed news that the BEP did test 1
million to 2 million polymer bills in a controlled environment.
The BEP won't discuss that either.
"Everything we do is security minded. We're not
in the business of changing just to change or to please the aesthetics,"
says Claudia Dickens, public affairs specialist at the BEP.
As for polymer plans, "That has been looked at,
but it was decided not to do it at this time," she reports.
"I can't say what we'll do in the future."
The reason she offers: Countries using polymer don't
print nearly as many notes as the United States, and polymer costs
roughly twice as much to produce as the cotton linen security paper
currently in your billfold. Proponents snort at that logic by referring
to that extended life-expectancy feature.
Straus offers a more pragmatic political hurdle. "If
polymer notes last four or five times longer than paper notes, the
paper-banknote manufacturers face a 100 percent loss of revenues.
With over 4 billion notes printed each year in the United States,
that's a lot of money," he says.
Still, he believes the United States can't hold out
against polymer's appeal forever. And since we retool our money
every seven to 10 years, that future could be the next big press
release.
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