Factory Is the World’s Dollar Store

They’ve got a product the world wants and no one else can make. If that sounds like the perfect recipe for making money, it is.

In the belly of a block-long federal factory, clattering machines swallowing pungent brews of ink spit out money. Mountains of it, not only for use at home but increasingly for export to nearly every part of the world.

A recent day’s production from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington: 14,096,000 bills.

Adding the output from its smaller Texas plant, the government made 23,763,200 bills that day, worth $151,584,000.

In the Washington factory, tourists file along narrow hallways behind thick security glass to look down on the millions churning from the presses below.

A sign teases: “Have you ever been so close and yet so far away?”

The manufacturing of dollars is an oddity for a city that makes laws, policy and not always a lot of sense. It’s one of the few tangible things the government turns out.

The work of the moneymakers never stops.

The bureau toils around the clock in Washington and from Fort Worth to supply greenbacks the world wants to use.

Russians squirrel away American dollars to protect their savings if the ruble should tumble. U.S. dollars support the reserves of central banks around the world. Dollars change hands in oil transactions involving no Americans at all and help keep the economies of Mexico and even Cuba afloat.

The stability of the American dollar has persuaded a few countries to give up their paper money altogether and go with the buck.

Indeed, foreigners are the big spenders of U.S. money. Americans tend to rely on credit-card plastic or electronic transfers for expensive purchases; foreigners consume about three-quarters of U.S. $100 bills.

Of the $500 billion in U.S. currency in circulation, 50% to 70% is outside the United States.

It took 2,200 workers using 12,000 pounds of ink to make a day’s stash of $1, $10 and $20 bills, three of the seven denominations now produced. “The Buck Starts Here,” says a sign on the machines.

Shipped in by the barrel from a Virginia supplier, most of the ink was the familiar green and black, forced under tremendous pressure into the blended cotton and linen threads that make up the currency’s distinctive “paper.”

Presses first print the green backs of the notes, 32 to a sheet, which are left to dry for up to 48 hours.

Then the black fronts are printed and the paper is dried again before the sheets are inspected by computer, submitted for final printing of numbers and seals, sliced, bundled, thumbed through by workers, stacked in “bricks” of 4,000 bills each and readied for the road.

All that commotion is for the sake of 12 customers: the regional Federal Reserve banks that put currency into circulation.

Of the notes made in that one day, 3.5 million were manufactured for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the primary source for money that eventually ends up overseas.

Up to 30 institutions buy, sell and ship the currency. It often takes a circuitous route, coming from U.S. commercial banks as well as being hauled away in armored trucks from the reserve’s New York cash office.

Much of it is loaded on commercial flights, passengers unaware they are traveling with a fortune.

The recipients tend to appreciate a shipment that comes wrapped in distinctive blue plastic. That means it’s new currency and need not be counted or authenticated; recirculated currency has to be verified.

Buenos Aires, Frankfurt, London, Zurich, Hong Kong and Singapore are distribution hubs.

For all the bustle, these are not the moneymakers’ busiest times.

“We’re not full tilt today because the currency system is very clogged up right now,” said Larry Felix, speaking for the bureau.

The bureau, heeding all the worries that attended the arrival of the new millennium, produced extra cash in case Y2K bugs risked the money supply. For that reason, among others, the pace has moderated as the bureau fills orders submitted long ago.

Indeed, the growth in U.S. currency in circulation over the last decade has been driven mostly by foreign demand. In the mid-1990s, more than half of U.S. currency exports were to Russia alone.

U.S. dollars trade as freely in Argentina as the domestic currency; Ecuador replaced its sucre with the dollar last year. But coins, which came by ship from the Philadelphia-based U.S. Mint, quickly proved to be unwieldy because of their bulk and the cost of transport.

Ecuador is making its own coins once again, while keeping U.S. paper cash.

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Money, Money, Money

Moneymaking by the numbers:

* 4,000: Number of times you can fold a bill back and forth before it will tear.

* 2,600: Number of federal workers in Washington and Fort Worth, Texas, who make bills. More than 2,000 are in Washington.

* 4.2 cents: Cost of making one bill.

* $142 billion: Value of the 9.6 billion notes produced in 1999.

* 7: Number of denominations now made. They are: $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50, $100.

* 1969: The year $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills were discontinued.

* 490: Number of bills in a pound.

* 75%: Proportion of a bill made of cotton. The rest is linen. Before World War I, bills were made of silk.

* 1963: The first year “In God We Trust” appeared on all currency.

* $100,000: The largest note made by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. It was printed for less than a month at the end of 1934.

* 18 months: Average life of a $1 bill.

* 9 years: Average life of a $50 or $100 bill.

* 1862: First year the Treasury Department issued paper currency of the United States, needed to finance the Civil War and overcome a coin shortage.

Other tidbits:

* The auto shown on the back of the $10 note is a creation of the designer and not, as commonly believed, a Model T Ford.

* A widely accepted theory for the origin of the dollar symbol is that “$” evolved from the Mexican or Spanish “P” for pesos or pieces of eight. Over time, “S” came to be written over the “P,” approximating “$.”

* Businesses are not required under federal law to accept cash as payment. State law may have that requirement.

* The Bureau of Engraving and Printing also makes half of the nation’s postage stamps and engraved items such as White House invitations.

* Tour information: (202) 874-3188

* On the Net: www.moneyfactory.com

Source: Bureau of Engraving and Printing