A single machine that prints say 100 sheets of 10x10 $100 notes per minute, would take 694 days running 24/7 to print 1 trillion dollars. 10 machines would reduce it to 70 days. 100 machines could do it in 1 week working continuously. How many machines do they have I wonder? How much does it cost to print a trillion I wonder. By adding zeroes to the currency you can reduce the time and cost considerably. Who needs more machines?
I think you might be selling the technology a little short there cobber, why would it take a minute to print?...surely the treasury would have equal to or better tech as a news paper mill, and they print gazillions of sheets per day. Australia's Polymer note press prints notes for many different countries, that would have to be a huge number of notes and these countires can't wait years for delivery. Anyway, It's not about printing power anymore. It's all about how long it takes you to hit the "0" key on a keyboard!
I read somewhere that only 3-5% of currency in the Australian economy is actual phisical. The rest is electronic. I assume that the US is similar.
You will never, ever, ever know how many print machine there are. You will never know exactly how fast they can print. You will never know how much it costs to print. (I would assume the *interest* would cover this. But then the way the system is soooo rigged i'm sure the Fed or the RBA would pass on the actual cost of printing to their respective govts) (hahhahahaha.... respect... i made a joke)
Some old data but interesting, in Australia in 1984 there was a total of 430,000,000 notes printed various denominations I watched a doco on Note printing in America and they had to source paper and the ink for the notes at $0.01c so it didn't matter if they printed $1 or $100 the cost was the same to make. So we can find out some details but not all I imagine
Just watching the machines that collate the sheets prior to cutting you see the suction pick up sheets and place them. The speed is actually slower than one per second so I was giving them a bit of a boost by saying 100 per minute since thats more than one per second. The notes have other processes like cutting and bundling etc that are more rate limiting. There are videos of these processes that show it takes at least an aggregate of a second or more to print the sheets. Also no machine can run continuously like that anyhow, so it was more a mental exercise than one of fact.
Ok time to add facts. Turns out I was being very generous. The process for the notes has many rate limiting steps, including the production of the special paper which is stockpiled. There are 32 notes per sheet, so I was being generous by a factor of three. The paper once produced with watermarks, red green fibres, and security strip which takes a long time so is stockpiled; goes through at least 2 steps in the printing. One offset step to add backgrounds and the the intaglio process on a second step. Definitely more than a second per sheet. Nevertheless the data says they can produce $635 million dollars a day which means they can print a trillion dollars in only... 1,575 days!! 4 years thats if they had the paper and ink to actually do it. Lol. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY71cxDZ5tg[/youtube]
But that's only one press... the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing has at least 2 facilities, Washington and Fort Worth, so that number is down to 2 years now. So it is feasible...If Zimbabwe can do it ...But as pointed out, It's not like they need 1 trillion in Cash...most of it wil be electronic. The insidious thing about that is that it won't go to the people that use cash.....the poor. It'll all go to the big end of town, while those that drive the economy, the working & middle class, will miss out.
that makes it more, not less frightening in my eyes. I'll clarify later. The real thing is that it isn't just 1 trillion. The hole is way way deeper. I remember before Bernanke's name was well known, back in 2007 when the housing bubble/ mortgage backed securities/ collateral debt obligation crisis was just breaking the size of the hole was 12 trillion!! That's still unfilled and in fact has grown! So while these trillions are outstanding, and as you observe the printing will be electronic, you see just how enormous what they are doing is. They are unleashing trillions which would otherwise have required years of printing effort and time. That's why the speed of the collapse once the tipping point is reached will shock people. The coming event is going to be of galactic proportions. Mass evaporation of illusory wealth. The non existent digital dollars infinitely less valuable than even the banknotes of the past which at least had utility as fuel or wallpaper once their day was done. The only surviving wealth locked up in real physical things. The accounting process started long ago, and will continue till every last fiat dollar is dust (or a digital erasure).
You won't be able to access electronic funds so they won't evaporate they'll simply disappear instantly. Perhaps at some time in the future they'll dust off your deposit record and give you X of your dollars back as the new currency. ie. they'll open the ATM again and you'll have a new total that is equal to something we know not what, but I'm almost certain it will be a fraction of what you had there previously.
Even in the days when records were kept literally on a physical balance sheet, that could be dusted off, when the bank went 'bust' you still lost everything. This was illustrated clearly even prior to the Great Depression in Jack Lang's book "The Great Bust" (extract Below) N.B. This book is out of print and from a public library. As banks start becoming insolvent people start hoarding their cash...under their beds, in shoe boxes...that's when the physical currency supply starts contracting. The Govt keeps printing, but people keep hoarding. Then as businesses start going to the wall they drop their prices and cause a deflation, and then all that hoarded cash comes flooding out of nowhere. They say this is where the hyperinflation starts...but technically it started years earlier when the govt started the printing presses. The strange thing about this is the emphasis given to printing the US's largest denomination, $100 note. I hope that doesn't eventuate to be the smallest value note that people use.
Not as such. But when debts go bad, and derivatives become valueless the electronic records that represented that "wealth" will necessarily vanish. I hope I didn't mislead by my description.
I can see little difference between digital dollars and the handwritten ledger entries of old ! Likewise I can see little difference in todays paper money compared with the days of old... nor for that matter gold and silver now, compared to days of old
Moreover the most important thing, US as in we, are really no different from the people in the days of old Thanks for the excerpt; very illuminating.
Precious metals are one insurance against the privations that vast debt, peak oil, climate change, overpopulation and eventually, war, will visit on our species. However, do not neglect the more mundane things, like having a vegetable garden.
