Redesigning the US Bank Note

As someone who worked in the currency exchange industry years ago I can say that the two currencies I hated to deal with were the Indian Rupee and the US greenback. The Indian Rupee was mostly because they were almost always dirty and full of holes (I was told once that punching holes in it was a form of telling if the bills were counterfeit or not). The brand new bills were fine but the vast majority of bills that came through my till were pretty grimy.

The American currency, on the other hand, was hated for a number of reasons:

1. They were all the same colour so visually it was harder to tell the different notes apart. One of my favorite (note sarcasm) things to hear from the American tourists was, "your money is so pretty. Its all differnt colours." Actually, your money is the only currency in the world that's one colour.
2. Before this current crop of bills, they were so easy to counterfit that kids were printing off $100 bills in their shop class. They had this marker you could use that would change colour if it was printed on a different stock of paper but some of the smart criminals were circumventing that by bleaching away the ink on a $1 and printing $100 bills on top of it. There was so much counterfeit currency floating around that it was never a surprise to us when we encountered it (although some customers were completely taken aback) and I am sure a bunch of it passed through my float completely undetected.

So when I found this article on Design Boom about Dowling Duncan and their submission to the Dollar ReDe$ign Project I was greatly intrigued. Conceptually, I like them a lot. I think some of them don't look like money though but that may be just a matter of getting used to and using the new design. From a practical standpoint I think the American public will never go for it. They love their American greenback and when a new design was rolled out in 1995 for the first time in nearly 70 years there was a huge, public outcry of how much the new design made their money feel more like Monopoly money. The US made another adjustment to the design in 2004.

In 2008 a US federal appeals court upheld a ruling that having all dollar notes the same size and texture was unacceptable. The case which was brought by the American Council for the Blind states that 937,000 people in the US are legally blind while another 2.4 million count as having low vision (meaning they are unable to read newspaper print) and the current design for the currency made it difficult for those people to use it. I guess we'll see what happens in the coming years.

Feel free to chime in with your own comments on the proposed design or the general state of US currency.

Some interesting facts about American currency that you may not know:

• The US has a $1 coin. Most of you might be familiar with the Susan B. Anthony dollar but did you know a new dollar coin was introduced in 1999 depicting the Native American Shoshone woman Sacagawea, a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, carrying her son Jean Baptiste Charbonneau?

• The US has a $500, $1000, $5000, $10,000 and $100,000 bill. Although they are still technically legal tender in the United States, high-denomination bills were last printed in 1945 and officially discontinued on July 14, 1969.

• American Currency is actually controlled by a semi-private company. The Federal Reserve is actually independent within government because "its decisions do not have to be ratified by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branch of government." However, its authority is derived from the U.S. Congress and is subject to congressional oversight. Additionally, the members of the Board of Governors, including its chairman and vice-chairman, are chosen by the President and confirmed by Congress. The government also exercises some control over the Federal Reserve by appointing and setting the salaries of the system's highest-level employees. Thus the Federal Reserve has both private and public aspects.

• Life expectancy of bills are as follows: $1 bill - 18 months; $5 bill - two years; $10 bill - three years; $20 bill - four years; $50 and $100 bills - nine years.

• Martha Washington is the only woman whose portrait has appeared on a U.S. currency note. It appeared on the face of the $1 Silver Certificate of 1886 and 1891, and the back of the $1 Silver Certificate of 1896.

• The US Mint makes around 1 or 2 billion pennies annually but depending on demand has made as many as 14 billion.