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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Numbers, post: 1532323, member: 11668&quot;]The &quot;printing presses&quot; involved in QE3 are entirely metaphorical. When the Fed buys billions of dollars worth of securities, it doesn&#039;t pay for them with paper money, after all!</p><p><br /></p><p>Most likely, QE3 will have no effect on the amount of paper currency in circulation, so it&#039;ll have no effect on the BEP&#039;s production figures either. Theoretically, if QE3 leads to sustained high inflation (as some folks like to predict), then that inflation would eventually require higher amounts/denominations of currency in circulation. But that&#039;d be a long-term consequence years down the road, not an immediate result.</p><p><br /></p><p>It&#039;s also worth noting that, when the economy is bad, production of coins and currency tends to be lower, since people can&#039;t afford to hold on to as much cash. This is strongly apparent in the Mint&#039;s coin production figures, which hit 50-year lows in 2009 and are still in the process of recovering; but the same phenomenon affects lower-denomination currency to an extent. On top of that, the Federal Reserve has in recent years installed improved currency-processing equipment that is much less likely to mistakenly send an acceptable-quality bill off to the shredder prematurely, resulting in a more-than-doubling of the average lifespan of a $1 bill. So currency production is proceeding at a considerably slower pace than it did back in the &#039;90s.</p><p><br /></p><p>Series 1995 basically had everything go right, from the perspective of high block letters. The Withrow-Rubin signatures were current for well over four years, at a time when a strong economy led to high demand for small-denomination currency, and when the lifespan of a $1 bill was fairly short before the Fed upgraded its equipment. The New York district hit the B..Y block only 29 months into the series, and San Francisco reached the L..Y block eight months later.</p><p><br /></p><p>Since then, we&#039;ve had fairly regular signature changes, with most series lasting only a couple of years. But the lower production rates have had a big impact too. Series 2006 was in regular production for 35 months, the longest-lasting series since Series 1995, but it only got up to block letter T. Looking at it another way, Series 2006 had two-thirds of the production lifetime of Series 1995 (3 years vs. 4.5 years), but had only half as many $1 notes printed (9.6 billion vs. 18.6 billion).</p><p><br /></p><p>Series 2009 is shaping up to look a lot like Series 2006, just a little longer. It&#039;s had a pretty good run (trivia: Obama will be the first president since Eisenhower to get through a full four-year term with only one pair of currency signers), but it&#039;s not going to last the five-plus years that it&#039;d need to reach block letter Y at today&#039;s lower production rates. We already know that Geithner is planning to step down if Obama&#039;s reelected, and of course both Rios and Geithner will be replaced if Obama loses the election--so in any event we&#039;ll almost surely see a new signature combination next year.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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