THE US Mint, which hardly anybody would have accused of being cash short, says indeed that it’s been experiencing such an important reversal of fortune that it’s had to significantly reduce not only its operating budget, but the number of coins that it will be able to put into circulation.

Among the immediate victims of the cash crunch are the two companies, Fleishman-Hillard and Hill & Knowlton, whose Washington offices have just seen their upcoming seven-figure promotional campaigns go up in smoke.

Strange as it may seem, the decision comes in the wake of that taken last year by the US Treasury to invest important sums of money — dollars, we presume — in the revamping of its paper currency, in the production of a new generation of “greenbacks” as part of a programme code-named NexGen, for which, even more strangely, the US government has let it be known it’s looking for a PR agency to handle the international launch of the new currency.

Now, from what the US Mint is telling us, whereas the international paper money circuits will soon be flooded with new dollar-denominated currencies, the national cash registers will be seeing a smaller number of coins.

In the words of US Mint spokesman Matt Kilbourne, the Mint’s budget crunch is attributable to the economic recession, which, he says, has resulted in a “pretty significant reduction in coin demand for the coming year.”

“Last year,” he continues, “we made about 27 billion coins. This year, that number will shrink to about 16 billion. Because the Mint makes its money from selling coins to the Federal Reserve, it will have considerably less to spend in 2002.” And, among the programmes particularly hard hit will be the Mint’s state-themed quarter (25-cent) campaign, for which Hill & Knowlton was in the midst of a ten-year $10-million campaign, and Fleishman, which had promoted the Mint’s gold Sacagawea dollar since 1999, in a campaign worth more than $1 million.

One wonders, as if with US paper bills, it’s the successful introduction January 1st of the euro (seven bills and eight coins) that’s to blame for Washington’s decisions to make near-revolutionary changes in its production of the country’s paper and metallic currency.

Although Washington has always publicly given the impression that in its eyes the dollar would never be dethroned by the euro, governmental insiders do not hide their concern that the Euro, which is already utilized as their national currency by more than 300 million Europeans, a number which within ten years could jump to 500 million and beyond, will certainly one day be in a position to perhaps not dethrone the dollar, but provide a major competitive force against the reigning American currency.

According to the draft of a Treasury Department report seen by this writer, the US government is especially concerned about the use that could be made in the counterfeiting of the new generation of US bills of personal computers, scanners, and colour printers - devices that are also providing sleepless nights to European financial authorities, especially those at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, who recently expressed their outrage when some of the more secret anti-counterfeit devices included in the new European paper bills were made public in the German press.

As for the US Treasury report, it says that the NexGen currency, which US Federal authorities also refer to as the “new currency design,” are to incorporate “conceptual” features that have been developed to counter the issuance of bogus bills, among them what the government refers to as “covert, machine-readable features” that will not be apparently identified to the public.