Being a printer used to be a licence to print money. Case in point: UK industry mythology has it that Patrick Howitt, ex-chairman of the eponymous Nottingham print firm, famously chartered a private jet to fly a jolly of journalists the 100 miles from Heathrow to East Midlands Airport.
I’m surprised they even had time to order drinks before touchdown (though being journos, no doubt they managed it).
These days, one of the only real licences to print money in our industry is, in fact, having a licence to print money. Take banknote specialist De La Rue, which time and time again took the highest denomination in the PrintWeek Top 500 UK print companies. However, the real money is in plastic: in June, De La Rue sold off its cash systems division (which makes ATMs and the like) for around £350m, which could see it lose its top spot and fall to around sixth in the next Top 500.
We Australians also know that real money is in plastic, our polymer-based banknotes being a source of national pride. This is especially true when you scam your British mates in a pub bet by waging they can’t rip a fiver in half, only to pull from your wallet the hardy Down Under version rather than the expected, and easily tear-able, paper pounds sterling.
The Oz cash sets a world standard and represent a true hybrid of more than half a millennium of print evolution, incorporating offset, intaglio and letterpress. Not only secure and near-on indestructible, it’s waterproof as well, especially useful when you jump in the surf still carrying your wallet.
But back to turning money-producing into money-earning – you’ll struggle to print money, either literally or figuratively, when you haven’t got a substrate to run through the press, a fact of which Zimbabwe is now well aware. German paper supplier Giesecke & Devrient this month bowed to local and international pressure over the “political tension” in the African nation and cut it off from the banknote paper supply. Which must’ve hurt G&D’s cash flow somewhat – we’re talking about a currency customer that issued a whole new set of banknotes in 2006 in order to lop off a few zeroes, then pulled a U-turn last year by introducing 14 new denominations ranging from $250,000 to $50bn… in a bid to stifle raging inflation.
Wacky plan it may seem, but you’ve got to trust the enlightened judgement of bank governor Gideon Gono, who put minds at ease by saying: “I know the zeroes we removed last time came back quickly, but this time we are doing it in such a way they will not return.”
Their national reserve’s in a safe pair of heads, then.
Surely Gono studied at the same school of media relations as leader Robert Mugabe; back in those halcyon days of late 2003, when his regime was still just about tolerated by the international community, Mugabe said of then Australian Prime Minister John Howard: “They tell me he is one of those genetically modified because of the criminal ancestry he derives from.”
Well, we were all thinking it.
Those same convict roots offer a good case for Australia’s banknote printing strategy. It may have taken 200 years to realise that a nation founded by criminals should put in place a few extra obstacles to counterfeiting, but eventually in our bicentenary year 1988, a lightbulb went on at Reserve Bank subsidiary Note Printing Australia and it introduced those first polymer notes, putting the country at the forefront of monetary security printing, and paving the way for free rounds at my local in London. And I’m not the only one turning dollars into pounds into pints – I actually heard someone hustled a free four-pack of Beck’s cans by using the note-ripping con at their corner shop.
Which is not really a licence to print money, but it’s definitely an off-licence for drinks money.
Steven is Deputy Editor of Printing World and PrintBuyer.