Internet Mocks Treasury's Fancy New $100 Bill

Not a lot of love for this new Benjamin

The U.S. Treasury has unveiled new currency, revamping the $5, $10, $20 and $50 bills. But what's really making waves is the totally redesigned $100 bill, which has a whole range of impressive new protections against counterfeiting. You can play with a neat Treasury-produced interactive on the currency here.

• Looks Like Kids Made It  Gawker's Hamilton Nolan groans, "Now it looks like a child's crayon scratch pad. ... Why not just turn over a sheet of blank currency paper to a kindergarten class and come back in an hour? Was this bill designed by Coogi? Are we some Third World Banana Republic unable to keep gaudy hues off the face of our worthless currency? Mortifying."

• Appropriately Dons Benjamin Franklin  Conservative blogger Lew Rockwell snorts, "Uglier and Uglier ... The note features, appropriately enough, the inflationist and paper-money printing contractor Ben Franklin."

• Goldman Sachs Already Took 'Em  Due to high interest, the website touting the new bills briefly crashed as readers flooded the site. The Atlantic's Joshua Green joked of the new bills, "Site doesn't load. Did Goldman take them all?"

• Ronald Reagan Now on All Bills?  Riffing off Green's joke, Talking Points Memo's Michael Sweeney quipped, "Site's down while they replace all portraits on money with Reagan's."

• Laser Light Show on A Bill  The Swamp's Mark Silva marvels. "Benjamin Franklin hasn't lost his seat on the C-note. But, in the age of higher-tech currency, a disappearing Liberty Bell in an inkwell and a bright blue security ribbon of thousands of tiny lenses that magnify objects in mysterious ways have joined him. This bill is a show in itself, with images moving as the note moves."

• Thanks, 1990s-era Design  I Love Typography tweets, "The redesigned $100 bill, courtesy of Corel Draw 1.0 & MS Paint."

• What Will Glenn Beck Say?  Liberal blogger DougJ sighs, "I’m pretty sure that the new $100 bills will produce some kind of wingnut freakout. The most obvious angle is 'they look like European money!', but we may also see some chatter about jack-booted Federal thugs coming to take back all the old hundreds."