The Federal Reserve has been forced to stop printing, counterfeiting if you or I printed them, $100 bills. CNBC reports,
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.
Officials don’t know exactly what caused the problem. “There is something drastically wrong here,” a person familiar with the situation said. “The frustration level is off the charts.”
Officials say they remain optimistic that the majority of the 1.1 billion bills will eventually be cleared for circulation.
Congress should take this opportunity to tell the Federal Reserve to shut down all of their printing presses, abolish the Legal Tender Law and allow for competing commodity based currencies.