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 |
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| Dow Jones | S&P 500 | NASDAQ | 10-Year Note | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10,023.42 | 1,069.30 | 2,112.44 | 35.03 |
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