[rdj]

Are these pieces of paper really worth $100 a piece or only the cost of the paper and ink? Since the notes never shipped, and likely won't, thus won't backed by the government I have a hard time thinking this is a $110 billion problem.

[stratomorph]

Depends on how you look at it. Yeah, they're "worth" $100 apiece because they can be exchanged for goods and services "worth" $100. (Let the chicken and egg lie.) So it's $110 billion worth of cash that can't circulate. Good or bad thing? That's over my head.

On the other hand, they don't cost that much to print, only 12 cents. But there's 1.1 billion of them. So that's $132 million of work that's not doing any good right now. Still a good-sized problem, without considering the time and expense of sorting and replacing bad notes.

[ugh]

It’s obviously not a $110 billion problem. That’s a sensationalist way of framing it. The only problem is that the production costs will be higher (no joke when more than one billion notes are affected but nowhere close to an additional $110 billion – the article says about $120 million). It doesn’t matter at all how many more notes than needed are printed as long as the superfluous ones are destroyed before anyone could do anything with them.

[lkjhgfvhjk]

You remember the $300 hammer? Well this is the same procurement operation!