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Fancy Greens, Pusherman Blues
Why the new Jackson spells problems for your local dealer–and more tax dollars for Uncle Sam.

The subtle effectiveness of the new $20 bill as a post-recession market stimulant is something the Federal Reserve System is not taking credit for.

In fact, no one is taking credit for it. Not the Fed, the FBI or the Secret Service–which was originally created to handle counterfeiting, not presidential security. None of these agencies admits to seeing so much as a memo suggesting that the introduction of the new twenty would wind something of a nervous timer in the minds of people sitting on large sums of old twenties, creating a paranoid deadline to decommission conspicuous sums of old bills from their untaxed "underground economy."

The U.S. is making an incalculable profit on the roll-out of the snazzy new twenties, a profit that remains unarticulated in the Fed’s frontline campaign that explains the currency–with its watermark, security thread and color-shifting ink–solely as an anti-counterfeiting measure. What’s not being said is that the new twenty puts the zap on the heads of people who routinely reintroduce hefty wads of currency from the underground economy to the aboveground one: money launderers and hoarders operating from considerable private cash holdings...