Friday, I saw one of the new $20 bills. Hailed by the government as "the most secure currency in US history", it turns out that this is, in fact, an outright lie.

The biggest "security improvement" that they're boasting about is the colorful background. The new colors are being promoted with the claim that for the first time since the 1860s, American money will contain colors other than green and black. This in itself is a lie; the twentieth century saw US money printed with blue and red. Apart from that, though, it isn't colorful in the way that English or Canadian money is; the new $20 looks like someone left it in the wash and something else bled on it.

As a security feature, the new colors are a joke. They can still be bleached off, permitting higher denominations to be printed on the special paper (thus foiling the counterfeit-detecting pens).

And since the treasury department isn't collecting the old bills and immediately replacing them, but letting them stay in circulation as long as they're in good shape, counterfeiters can still copy the old bills and pass them off as legal tender. But even if they want to copy the new ones, a high resolution scanner and printer do just as well with the new ones as they did with the old ones. Sure, a color laserprinter can't reproduce the color-changing ink, polymer strips and portrait watermarks, but all of those features were present in the 1998 redesign. And I have never seen a cashier check for those features; at most, they simply swipe the pen across the bill.

Now, if you want to take a look at a banknote that's both colorful and secure, check out New Zealand's money. It's printed on a polymer film (which can't be bleached and reprinted like American rag paper notes), with transparent windows and other effective anticounterfeiting measures.

New Zealand's government is serious about stopping counterfeiters. Why isn't ours?