Great Britain recently announced plans to introduce a new 1 Pound coin* which will be specially designed to foil counterfeiters. According to a British Broadcasting Company report, the move is necessary because an estimated 45 million one-pound coins - roughly 1 in every 30 - are phonies. The new coins will contain a number of features designed to make them impossible to counterfeit, such as having 12 sides and including two colors of metal. This is what the obverse side** of the spiffy, ultra-secure new coin will look like:
What can we do to make American coins less susceptible to counterfeiting?
A brilliant Harvard-trained economist recently suggested adopting the coinage used by Yap Islanders, which is considered extremely secure because it's just too much trouble to forge ...
Over the last few years we've had major makeovers of much of our paper currency to try to make it less vulnerable to counterfeiters. Special papers, color-shifting inks, embedded threads, and evil curses levied by sorcerers hired by the Treasury Department have all been used to discourage paperhangers, to no particularly noticeable effect. Of course, at the rate the economy is going, there probably isn't much difference any more between the value of the real and the phony notes, anyhow.
There have been some suggestions for new versions of the hundred-dollar bill, known colloquially as the "Benjamin" ...
and ...
How about a little musical interlude on the subject of money to wrap things up ...
Bilbo
* No, it's not really that heavy, it's just that the British call their currency the "Pound." Given the state of the world economy, though, they're rumored to be considering renaming it the "Ounce."
** Why on earth is it called the "obverse," rather than just the "front" side?
*** They're a lot lighter, and each one buys more stuff. And besides, who uses dollar coins, anyhow?
5 comments:
Bimetallic coins that are not round make them easier to distinguish, if not harder to counterfeit.
How many C5 flights to the middle east would it take to haul billions of dollars Susan B. Anthonys instead of pallets of one hundred dollar bills?
Love the comment about Reagan! James Taylor wrote a great money song: Money Machine. "You can measure your manhood by it, you can get your children to try it, you can bring your enemies to their knees, with the possible exception of the North Vietnamese." (Yes, it's an old song. )
Will the weight of the pound coin pose problems?
Functionally, we're down to four coins, the penny, the nickel, the dime, and the quarter. The 50 cent piece is rarely seen; presumably it's because they're unusable in vending machines.
If we were to have a successful dollar coin, it would have to be bimetallic and multi-sided. Oversized coins like the old dollars will never be easy to carry.
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