Word: craning
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...Bureau of Engraving and Printing, an arm of the U.S. Treasury, produces 35 million notes a day with a face value of approximately $635 million at its two printing facilities--in Washington and Fort Worth, Texas--and all those greenbacks are printed on paper supplied by Crane and shipped by truck from Massachusetts. Any interruption in that production could be "devastating to the U.S. economy," Van Den Brandt says...
...Crane replies that its 127-year knowledge of the currency supply enhances security. Although the company is best known among consumers for its fine stationery and other paper products, about 60% of the company's 1,200 employees are involved in the day-to-day production of currency paper. "The majority of our employees' time and effort goes toward making a single product that we can sell to a single customer," Lansing Crane says. "We're going to do everything we can to keep doing that for as long as possible...
That includes protecting the company's turf. In 1987 Silvio Conte, a Congressman who represented the Massachusetts district where Crane is based, introduced the Conte Amendment, which was passed by Congress and bars foreign suppliers unless no domestic source exists. A Crane competitor, the British paper manufacturer De La Rue, has threatened to complain to the World Trade Organization about the unfair advantage the Conte Amendment gives Crane. Congress also threw up a hurdle for Crane's American competitors. By setting the contract's length at four years, the law makes it difficult for companies without extremely deep pockets...
...Crane's currency challengers have found a champion in Arizona Republican Representative Jim Kolbe. A free trader who calls the Crane monopoly "un-American," Kolbe has introduced legislation every year for a decade to overturn the laws that he says favor Crane. "First, there's the provision that only companies that are [at least] 90% American-owned can bid," he says. "We don't allow that for anything else, not even defense." The Secret Service insists that money must be produced and printed within the U.S. to maintain security, but the GAO found no reason to bar foreign companies from...
Kolbe is convinced that the government could get a better price with more competition. Another GAO report, written in 1998, bolsters Kolbe's stance. It found that in at least 13 negotiations with Crane, agency practices have caused "the government to pay more for currency paper than it should have...