Apparently, if you’re the government, it isn’t as simple as just printing money. The anti-forgery features of the new $100 bill are so complex that the mint misprinted them. Thirty percent of the new bills, which the Treasury announced in a flashy video in April, have been printed with blank spots. But because sorting out the bad bills by hand could take between 20 and 30 years, all the new bills are being held until a mechanized way of sorting them is figured out. The total face value of the unusable bills is $110 billion, over 10 percent of supply of U.S. currency in the world. Not counting the cost of sorting, the government has spent about $120 million producing the new bills, which feature a 3-D security strip and a color-shifting image of a bell.
