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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Numbers, post: 403533, member: 11668&quot;]Because somebody wasn&#039;t thinking ahead, basically.&nbsp; <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie11" alt=":rolleyes:" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p>In 1933 there was a need for the amount of currency in circulation to be quickly increased, in order to shore up the economy.&nbsp; One result was the brown-seal Federal Reserve Bank Notes of Series 1929; notes of that type hadn&#039;t been issued in years, but the law allowing them was still on the books, and there weren&#039;t as many legal restrictions on their issue as there were on some other currency types.&nbsp; So a whole bunch of them were quickly printed and circulated, using the existing National Currency printing plates due to the need for haste (which is why the notes say 1929 rather than 1933).</p><p><br /></p><p>But the Nationals only went down to the $5 denomination.&nbsp; The only $1&#039;s circulating in 1933 were Silver Certificates, and the Treasury couldn&#039;t quickly issue a bunch of extra SCs because they didn&#039;t have the silver handy to back them.&nbsp; So they printed up a bunch of $1 USNs instead, with another previously prepared but unused design (hence the 1928 date).&nbsp; Only belatedly did they realise that, due to the cap on the total value of USNs that could be outstanding at any one time, they wouldn&#039;t be able to dump enough of these red-seal $1&#039;s into circulation to make much difference anyway.&nbsp; So the printing was called off.</p><p><br /></p><p>About 1.8 million of the red-seal $1&#039;s had already been printed, but essentially none had been placed in circulation.&nbsp; Those notes sat in a Treasury vault until the late &#039;40s, when somebody decided to go ahead and issue them as a cost-saving measure.&nbsp; In order to avoid confusing the public, which was used to seeing only blue-seal $1&#039;s, all of the red-seal $1&#039;s were shipped to Puerto Rico and placed in circulation through banks there, the idea being that very few would make it back to the mainland.</p><p><br /></p><p>Incidentally, something like half of those brown-seal 1929 FRBNs also went unused in 1933, and ended up sitting in a vault for years and then being issued in the &#039;40s.&nbsp; But in that case, the public was already familiar with the brown-seal notes since many had been paid out in 1933, so the Treasury didn&#039;t try to ship them to the middle of nowhere.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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