The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

5. Drop and Give Me a Twenty

We were outraged this week to see that the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing was advertising the new, multicolored $20 bill on the CBS MarketWatch Web site.

Now, could this outrage have something to do with the fact that the ad was on their site, and not the research lab's?

Possibly.

But it was something else, too. Why, we thought, do you have to advertise a $20 bill anyway? You give it to people, and they'll spend it. The whole advertising strategy struck us as Dumb as a public service announcement reminding people to breathe air.

Just to confirm our suspicions, we called up the folks at the B of E&P, who argued us out of them.

Apparently, the last time the bureau introduced a radically new note -- you know, the "big head" bills that the new ones are replacing -- the government did it without benefit of advertising. And it showed. A spokeswoman says that when people first got them from automated teller machines, many people doubted they were real U.S. dollars. Cashiers in stores refused to accept them. "We didn't reach the masses like we needed to," says the spokeswoman. "We learned some lessons from the last time."

Working for That Twenty

This time around, the Bureau has a $53 million budget over five years to smooth the way for new $20s, $50s and $100s -- money that will be spent on advertising, press relations and training materials for businesses that handle cash. The advertising budget for the new $20 note, she says, amounts to $16.8 million.

The spokeswoman also tells us that the bureau issues between 2 billion and 2.5 billion $20 dollar notes annually. So, given that we have nothing else to do, we decided to figure out how much the government is spending on each $20 bill over the next five years to advertise the use of that $20. The number we come up with is 15/100 of a cent.

Such a bargain.