Please note "for larger bills" in my earlier email What you say applies to small change, which progressively gets phased out as inflation drives up prices.
You hardly ever see 1 paisa coins now, but till say 1982 I could buy a single, tiny (smaller than the 1p coin) sickly orange colored boiled sugar type sweet with one of those. -- srs (blackberry) -----Original Message----- From: Vinayak Hegde <[email protected]> Sender: [email protected] Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:45:28 To: <[email protected]> Reply-To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [silk] Of paper tigers and tigers on paper On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 11:05 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian <[email protected]> wrote: > Udhay Shankar N [23/01/12 22:37 +0530]: > >> On 23-Jan-12 9:53 PM, ss wrote: >> >>> Once you oursource a thing like making curreny then you can only writhe >>> and >>> kick about when it gets faked. >> >> >> The hidden assumption in this statement is that it is feasible to get >> the same anti-forgery features done here at a comparable cost. > > > Udhay, for larger bills (such as the 10 rupee and above currently in > circulation), the face value of the bill is going to be far more than its > printing and distribution costs. > > It wont cost 500 rupees to print a 100 rupee bill Well only partly true. Currency can sometimes be cost more to make than face value. Case in point the lincoln penny costs 1.7 cents to make when the face value is 1 cent. http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/02/12/new-penny-lincoln-love-helps-keep-waste-alive/ One guy even built his business model on monetising this differential cost. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_owen More links: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/05/the-lincoln-cen.html I have lately been fascinated that countries have been printing currency on plastic. I have few of those in my collection. Nothing tells about how high inflation is (the govt manipulated index notwithstanding) than how cheap is the metal that goes into making the coins. Case in point Look at how the 1 Rupee / 2 Rupees / 5 rupees coins have "evolved". The metal has become cheaper and the coins have become smaller. 25/50paise coins have gone out of circulation. -- Vinayak
