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E-mailNew $50 bill debuts here
Making its debut
Warren L. Leeder/Tribune-Review
Mike Wereschagin is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review staff writer and can be reached at 412-320-7900 or via e-mail.
The U.S. Treasury's Bureau of Engraving and Printing put the new bill on public display Thursday for the first time during the World's Fair of Money, the annual seven-day gathering of the American Numismatic Association at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Downtown.
The Treasury plans to begin circulating 140.8 million bills Sept. 28, said Antoinette Banks, numismatic coordinator for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
This denomination accounts for less than 7 percent of all the money in circulation, Banks said.
Like the latest version of the $20 bill released last year, the most striking feature of the new $50 bill is its abandonment of the venerable monotone color scheme.
The bill is colored at both ends in blue, red and purple. The center portrait is still Ulysses S. Grant, but the border around the 18th president is gone and his shoulders extend to the bill's bottom border.
New anti-counterfeiting features include color-shifting ink used to print the "50" -- on the bottom right corner on the front of the bill -- which changes from green to copper. The ink on older bills changes from green to black.
On the back, the "50" on the lower-right corner has been enlarged.
With 66 percent of U.S. currency circulating outside the nation, American money is the most counterfeited in the world, said Edward Arrich, 56, of Houston, Texas, who is in town for the gathering.
Most developed nations have switched to colored ink because it's tougher to copy, and it's about time the United States caught on, said Arrich, a numismatist since he was 12.
"There are countries where shopkeepers won't take $50 or $100 bills older than 1991" because they've been counterfeited so much, he said. On this new $50 bill, there are 26 anti-counterfeiting measures, he said, adding conspiratorially, "that are known, anyway."
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