Makes Cents to Me, Ha, Ha ...

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:

This is clearly a wake-up call for those who worry about the security of American coinage. Although I imagine it makes more economic sense for counterfeiters to make phony $20 bills than phony dollar coins***, there is clearly a niche criminal market for those who would counterfeit Susan B's or Sacagawea dollars. After all, someone may use them someday.

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 ...

This proposal was vetoed by GOP members of the Senate and House Banking Committees because, according to the Government Accountability Office, it would be prohibitively expensive to engrave Ronald Reagan's image on each one.

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" ...

As well as variations on a new design for the traditional one-dollar bill featuring the image of our first President ...

and ...

In the final analysis, though, we'll probably never get too far ahead of the counterfeiters. It's the only way some people can actually make money in today's economy, other than to act crazy enough to appeal to the extremists of the far right (and, to a lesser extent, the far left) and start up a Super PAC to vacuum up loose cash.

How about a little musical interlude on the subject of money to wrap things up ...

Have a good day. More thoughts coming.

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?