Keep the Change Read online

  Was Scott’s act legal or not? The law prohibits intentional destruction of money but says we’re allowed to use money to create works of art. Scott’s intent was artistic, and there are many precedents for using fire to create art. The most prized ceramics in Japan, for example, are tea bowls with blackened surfaces created by the intense heat and smoke of the raku method of firing. Scott’s work might have even helped create a new law about burning money, akin to that which protects flag burning as free speech. He knew what people would think about his piece, and he explains: “It’s crazy to burn money on the street, but it is the height of rationality to have a market where billions of dollars can vanish on a bad day.”4 At least for now, as Scott’s example shows, those seeking to make artistic or political statements by burning money are operating in a gray area between art and immolation, between fire’s dual capacity to destroy and forge anew.5

  CHAPTER

  7

  HONEST WEAR

  The Discovery of an Anticounterfeiting Secret

  WHEN I SAW HOW BEAUTIFULLY artist Cyrilla Mozenter wove faded and flaccid bills into her canvases, I began the hunt for a beat-up buck of my own. It wasn’t long before I found my weathered wonder. {Fig. 19} This 1999-series single had been circulating for only five years when I became its final owner. The verso (back side) is unremarkable, but I keep it because I love handling its fuzzy and faded recto (front side). The black ink has gone ashen. The engraved signatures are illegible. George Washington seems hidden behind a gauzy gray veil. “Just spend it already,” people tell me, but I’m far too attached to the look and feel and stories engendered by well-worn and near-derelict cash.

  Once, when I was idly staring at this bill, I realized it’s not as faded as I’d assumed. Yes, most of the black ink is gone, but the black seal of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and its four corresponding numeral 12s are almost as dark as new. Why had only some of the black faded? Suddenly, my single seemed important. I continued my investigations.

  Around that time, a tech-savvy friend invested in a company that was developing bar codes for currency and creating algorithms for unique sequencing to deter counterfeiting and money laundering. He gave me a Vistatector Magnetic Ink Detector 99X, a pen-sized battery-operated device for checking the authenticity of currency by verifying the presence of magnetic particles. I learned that only some of the black ink used to print US money contains this easy-to-detect magnetic oxide (I presume that this iron oxide powder destabilizes the ink, making it prone to fading). Bankers, retailers, couriers, hoteliers, and the like are privy to this information, but the public is not generally in the know about money’s magnetic inks (and what must be a host of additional secret anticounterfeiting measures).

  Fig. 19

  Very worn one-dollar bill

  Counterfeiting has been a problem since the invention of money. In the 1700s, for example, when British visitors saw the First Nations using seashells for currency, they began forging wampum out of porcelain (their counterfeits rarely succeeded). The US Secret Service was initially founded to stem counterfeiting. The agency remains “committed to zero tolerance and is determined to investigate each and every counterfeiting case.”1 Secret Service agents work on anti-counterfeiting with colleagues from the FBI, the Treasury, the Federal Reserve System, and regional and local authorities.

  US currency is created on $7 million Super Orlof presses, which have 185,634 parts and exert up to 60 tons of pressure to force ink into bills. Ordinary presses merely layer ink on the surface of paper and cannot compete with this massive machine’s power and fineness of line. It is the tactility imparted by such high-quality intaglio printing that, in part, gives our money its distinctive feel. It’s why people can discern real bills from counterfeits by feel alone.

  The Bureau of Engraving and Printing identifies the more than two-hundred-year-old Crane & Co. of Dalton, Massachusetts, as the original and exclusive maker of the 75 percent cotton and 25 percent linen bond used for US currency, but that’s not the full story. Paper money is a misnomer—our bills are actually made of cloth. Linen is not necessarily a type of material; it is a type of weaving that can be done with silk, wool, or any other fiber. It is linen from the flax plant that gives US banknotes their distinctive “tooth” and enables them to survive rigorous durability tests involving repeated crumpling, folding, laundering, soiling, and soaking in solvents, acids, and gasoline. Coins last an average of thirty years, but one-dollar bills circulate for less than six. Fifties have the shortest life expectancy (3.7 years); hundreds, the world’s most respected store of value, stay in circulation the longest (around 15 years). We take care of our Benjies.

  When a Federal Reserve bank receives worn-out money from commercial banks, it performs a complex analysis of each note.2 In the 1940s and ’50s, it canceled bills using diamond-shaped punch-outs: two each, in the top and bottom halves of the worn bills. In the 1970s and ’80s, before the implementation of toxic magnetic inks in the 1990s, shabby scrip was incinerated at the rate of 1.2 million pieces per day. Today, bills that are soiled, defaced, limp, torn, partially destroyed, disintegrated, or plumb worn out are given numerical grades from one to five and shredded.3 Since 2012 these shreds have been sent to a farm in Delaware, which converts thirty tons of cash to compost per week. Even though we might not be aware of it, our money is in constant flux. The bills in our wallets are slowly eroding; thankfully, the US government’s covert and overt vigilance in ensuring our trust is not.

  The Bank Manager Who Throws Away a Grand a Year

  …but I’m not bound and I never will Be to a wrinkled crinkled wadded dollar bill.

  “Wrinkled Crinkled Wadded Dollar Bill,” 1968 song written by Vince Matthews and sung by Johnny Cash

  My best friend, Joe, has been a banker for more than three decades. He started as a teller in 1980 and now manages a bank with more than $400 million in assets. He’s as honest as a summer day is long and good at the work. He can, for example, by feel alone, unfailingly distinguish the denominations of US currency.4

  One autumn night in the mid-1980s I called Joe to shoot the breeze. “What’s cooking?” I asked.

  “Not much,” he said. “The wife and daughter are good; I’m making my mortgage; and—oh, yeah—I threw out $870.53 earlier tonight.”

  “Huh? Come again?” I inquired, incredulous, of the guy I’d trusted to divvy every tab we’d ever rung up.

  “I just threw away almost a grand,” Joe replied impassively.

  “C’mon, man, stop pulling my leg.”

  “No, seriously, I threw out nine hundred large tonight. Not only that, my boss told me to.”

  “You gotta be kidding.”

  “Nope. I took a small cardboard box, threw in a few hundred coins and bills, taped it up well, said goodnight to the staff, waited until everyone was gone, turned on the alarm...”

  “What hey?” I interrupted, realizing he might be serious. “Forget the rest, just tell me which Dumpster,” I added breathlessly. “I’ll fly out tonight. Dinner’s on me.”

  “You know I can’t do that, Harley. So anyways, I locked the doors of the bank, went out to the parking lot, shoved my little box deep down in a Dumpster, and drove home.”

  “You’re not kidding?”

  “No. It was part of my job. I do it every year.”

  “You’re really not kidding. What gives?”

  “Well, you know how some money gets so mangled that only the banks will accept it? You know what banks do with those beat up coins and bills? We call ’em ‘mutes,’ and they’re a pain in the neck. For each piece of money that comes in mutilated, we have to fill out federal paperwork; label and bundle it according to strict regulations; and return it, insured, to the Bureau of Engraving [bills] and the mint [coins]. Then we wait for the government to take its sweet time determining how much they’ll replace—sometimes up to a year. The time it would take for my staff to prepare the mutes and complete the forms and monitor the progress would be extensive
and end up costing the bank more in salary and overhead than the mutes are worth. So, no, I can’t tell you where, but as part of my job, once a year, I throw away about a thousand US dollars.”

  Hard as it may be to fathom, under certain circumstances, banks save money by throwing it away. If only things were so easy for us ordinary Joes.

  CHAPTER

  8

  HAMILTON, FRANKLIN, BIV, JUROR, AND GOLDEN

  Colorful Men of Money

  ALEXANDER HAMILTON

  Once I spotted a cozy-looking four-dollar pair of corduroys at the thrift store, so I tried them on, shoved my hand in a pocket, and struck a pose. “Eww,” I thought, as I pulled out a square of cloth the same mossy green as the pants, “someone left his hankie.” Into the wastepaper basket it went, but as it fluttered down, it unfolded, and Alexander Hamilton peered up through the murk. I snatched back the barely recognizable ten-dollar bill, paid for the pants, and pocketed the profit. My next thought—“Free lunch!”—was derailed when I realized if I spent the sawbuck, I’d never see another like it. This all took place a couple of decades ago, but I still remember checking the pockets one last time before giving the worn-out wide wales back to the thrift store where I scored this extragreen green. {Fig. 20}

  I’m not the first to make note of stained banknotes. J. H. Griffith wrote on the topic in 1877 in Money As It Was and Is, spelling out the rules for exchanging worn money and cataloging the ways banknotes could become mutilated through accidental contact with industrial oil, paint, and acid processes. These produced, he wrote, “strange results; instead of greenbacks, they are sometimes blackbacks, or partly or entirely blue, red or yellow—in fact all the colors which dyes can make them.”1

  Fig. 20

  The front of this ten-dollar bill is slightly less stained.

  TREY JUROR

  People stain bills with differing degrees of intentionality. Sometimes bills get stained by accident (next time you buy a pint of wild berries from a forager, check the color of your change). {Fig. 21, third row, second column} Sometimes people doing dirty jobs don’t have rags at hand and grab at anything absorbent. I don’t know how most of the bills in my collection got their added colors, but I can explain the yellow one shown in the fourth row, second column of Fig. 21. In 1973 artist Paul McMahon was working in a gas station, making change all day, when he was struck by a funny idea: “What if people gave me regular money, and I gave them colored money as change?” He got some dye, stained fifteen bucks or so in the three primary colors, and had so much fun he still makes new editions from time to time. The one I have is countersigned with a classic McMahon pun, directly over the engraved signature of Henry M. Paulson Jr.: “Trey Juror.”

  BEN FRANKLIN

  Why is US money green? No one knows for sure, but the Bureau of Engraving and Printing has some pretty good guesses. In general, the bureau tells us, green pigment is readily available in large quantities; is relatively higher in resistance than other colors to chemical and physical changes like fading, flaking, and discoloration; and is psychologically identified with strength and stability. The particular green of US money originated around the same time as photography in the mid-1800s, when an increase in the fraudulent erasing and reprinting of bills with higher denominations called for special colored inks that could not be cleanly removed. One such ink, a green, earned a copyright—and star status as the main color of US currency. The innovative hue, still the primary color used on US bills, is known as “patent green.”

  Fig. 21

  Except for the yellow bill I bought from artist Paul McMahon, these one-dollar notes were acquired in ordinary transactions.

  Maybe the choice of green also relates to Benjamin Franklin’s turn to nature for motifs that would help stem the counterfeiting that was rampant during the eighteenth century. Starting in 1739, Franklin printed banknotes with images of blackberry, willow, and other leaves that displayed complex shapes, unevenly serrated edges, and subtly gradated vein systems. Franklin’s banknotes bore the frightful inscription: “To Counterfeit is DEATH”; when that did not deter criminals, careful comparisons of the leaf prints’ singular shapes could uncover their deceptions. Franklin’s leaf-print method was ingenious, but if it were truly as counterfeit-proof as the great inventor believed, we would not need the more colorful currency technologies in use today.

  ROY G. BIV

  Most of the world’s national currencies use color coding to differentiate denominations. Not so the United States, producers of staid, mostly black-and-green banknotes from the get-go until 2003, when the Bureau of Engraving and Printing started issuing its most colorful bills to date.2 About this use of color in the first completely redesigned bill in sixty-seven years, a Treasury spokesman said, “It is purely a security feature and something to aid the public. It isn’t just something to make it pretty and different.”3 For centuries US banknotes were drab. Now they cover the spectrum with gradations and patterns in pastel shades of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet (aka Roy G. Biv).

  Current US banknotes worth ten dollars or more feature metallic, color-shifting inks as alluring as the silver-and-green shimmer of olive tree leaves. You can view these iridescent pigments by tilting one of the larger notes and watching the numerals in the lower right corner shift in color, similar to how custom-painted cars approach an observer in one color and change to another color as they motor away. My eye doctor explained how such double refractivity works and told me about a Costa Rican national park where thieves break in and steal birefringent vegetation. The authorities don’t know why; it is our conjecture that the plant pilferers are in cahoots with counterfeiters.

  Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century bills contain ghostly watermarks and discreet polymer security ribbons that display fluorescent color when excited by ultraviolet light. {Fig. 22} When I first inspected these plastic ribbons under ultraviolet light, I worked my way up from the hot-blue five-dollar bill to the glowing-orange ten-dollar bill and grew more and more excited to see what surprises the hundred-dollar bill might have in store. Alas, it was a let-down. Its pinkish strip is not as bright as those of its fiscal inferiors. Figuring something was amiss, I returned again and again to the bank to exchange my bills for new samples, but the hundred’s strips were always the palest. Might this be part of a counterintuitive approach to crime prevention? Just as it was easier to make strong glue than to develop Post-it Notes with adhesive that can be cleanly removed, bright fluorescents might be easier to formulate than faint ones.

  Fig. 22

  One- and two-dollar notes do not have ultraviolet strips like other denominations of US bills. The 2013 hundred-dollar note (the second fluorescent strip from left) features a brighter pink strip than its predecessor (the far left strip).

  The United States regularly upgrades its anticounterfeiting endeavors. Try scanning a twenty-first-century bill on your computer, and you won’t get a reproduction—you’ll get a stern Secret Service warning flashing on your monitor. Creating such smart technology takes time, and the first colorized hundred-dollar bill wasn’t released until ten years after the first full-color bill, the twenty. The complex new Benjie took more than a decade to develop, and production costs are estimated at more than $100 million. Some of the expense arose from a theft of new hundreds a year before their official release date. Additionally, at least thirty million imperfect bills had to be destroyed. The newest hundreds, officially designated Series 2009A, weren’t released to the public until mid-October 2013. Their hidden fluorescent strips are brighter pink than their predecessors’, and they contain other newfangled features, including a copper-colored inkwell that, when tilted, causes a greenish-gold Liberty Bell to flicker. Most amazing of all are the blue security ribbons woven through the front of the bills. These quarter-inch-wide strips feature thousands of imperceptible microlenses that magnify microprinting and make dizzying 3-D Liberty Bells and numeral 100s whirl about. Seven months after the release of the new-generatio
n hundred-dollar bills, in order to deter fraud and abuse of the currency redemption process, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing hastened the release of the first amended regulations on the exchange of mutilated bills since April 1991. You still need clearly more than 50 percent of a banknote to cash it in, but now bills submitted for redemption also depend on the Bureau of Engraving and Printing’s determination of whether they contain “sufficient remnants of any relevant security feature.”4 There are other anti-counterfeiting technologies hidden within our money—but on this subject the feds are mum.

  SAM GOLDEN

  The self-described color junkies of Golden Artist Colors of New Berlin, New York, the specialty artists’ paint manufacturing business begun by Sam Golden in 1980,5 introduced a new line of paint the next year.6 Known as Panspectra, these bright metallic paints, when tilted, covered nearly the entire spectrum of visible light. The active ingredient was magnesium fluoride, a rare colorless-to-white mineral with intensely prismatic crystals. The dramatic pigment came with a hefty price tag (nearly one hundred times that of standard paint powders), but any bottle that might remain today could command an even higher price—a few years after the introduction of Panspectra, Golden acceded to a federal request to cease production. Presumably the US government was concerned that Golden’s product could be used to simulate aspects of its new bills.