Quality Control and Printing Money, or, why Having an Helicopter is not enough

CNBC had an interesting article on the problems in the production of the new $100 bills. (“The Fed Has a $110 Billion Problem with New Benjamins“, hat tip to Ian Farrington).

Several years ago in a speech that earned him the nickname “Helicopter Ben” – Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said that the government could easily reverse a deflation, just by printing money and dropping it from helicopters. Apparently, the government is not so good in printing money:

An official familiar with the situation told CNBC that 1.1 billion of the new bills have been printed, but they are unusable because of a creasing problem in which paper folds over during production, revealing a blank unlinked portion of the bill face. A second person familiar with the situation said that at the height of the problem, as many as 30 percent of the bills rolling off the printing press included the flaw, leading to the production shut down.  The total face value of the unusable bills, $110 billion, represents more than ten percent of the entire supply of US currency on the planet, which a government source said is $930 billion in banknotes. For now, the unusable bills are stored in the vaults in “cash packs” of four bundles of 4,000 each, with each pack containing 16,000 bills.

We tend to hear about quality problems when there is a recall (see Toyota, BMW, etc… ), but in this case, the product is still in the vault.  The interesting part though is that no one knows what’s causing the problem. And because they don’t know, they cannot figure out how many contain this issue, or even how to create a mechanism to sort the good bills from the flawed ones. Without a clear system, one needs to sort them by hand (which will take between 20- 30 years). Sorting them through an automated mechanism will take “only” a year. To get a sense for the loss in shredding the defective ones:

According to a person familiar with the matter, the bills are the most costly ever produced, with a per-note cost of about 12 cents—twice the cost of a conventional bill. That means the government spent about $120 million to produce bills it can’t use. On top of that, it is not yet clear how much more it will cost to sort the existing horde of hundred dollar bills.

Interestingly, the article says that more than a decade of research and development went into the new security features on the redesigned $100. Yet, as in many cases, we see that a lot of thought is given to the design of the product, but not so much time and attention are given to the production process.

The main question I have is why we have to print a whole batch of 1.1 billion bills before we subject these to rigorous testing.  I am sure that some (or maybe even extensive) testing has been done, but it seems that only inspection by people detected these issues. Unlike many products, allowing people to use a beta version of the product is not possible, but it is quite obvious that these issues had to be detected somehow before the large scale production and before the launch date. I am not familiar with the fixed costs associated with the production of these bills, but if this is not exorbitantly high, one may hope for a small run before full production begins.

For those worried about the prospects of our economy, the machines are still printing the old bills.