[This thread will be updated as more information becomes available. Forum posters may wish to refer questions about the upcoming new series here, rather than answering them repeatedly whenever they come up in different threads....]Beginning at the beginning:
Henry M. Paulson was sworn in as Secretary of the Treasury on July 10, 2006. Therefore, there'll be a new currency series coming up, carrying the Cabral and Paulson signatures.
If the BEP follows the recent pattern, the
new series should be called Series 2006, for the year the Secretary took office. It's possible, however, that they might decide to continue to use different series designations on the Kodachrome and non-Kodachrome bills, in which case they might choose 2006 and 2007, or even 2005 and 2006, or who knows what else. (An article in the latest Coin World mentions that somebody at the BEP referred to the new bills as Series 2006, but I wouldn't put too much weight on such an early statement; this time last series change, the BEP was saying that *all* denominations of the Cabral-Snow notes would be Series 2004A, including the $1....) At this point, I'd say the 2006 designation is the most likely choice but not a certain one.
Anyway, Paulson provided his official signature to the BEP shortly after being sworn in (it looks like either he or the BEP decided to dispense with the somewhat cutesy ritual of signing a gigantic eight-foot-wide replica $10 bill for the news cameras, as the last few new signers had done). It typically takes the BEP several months to convert that signature specimen to a steel engraving, create new master printing plates from it, and then start producing working printing plates from those masters. Therefore, we'd expect the
first Cabral-Paulson notes to roll off the presses sometime this fall, probably around October or November (plus or minus a month or two).
Once the first notes are printed, it could then take anywhere from days to months for them to trickle through the Fed's distribution pipelines to circulation. They'll first appear in a few random areas of the country, and then begin popping up in more and more places until they're everywhere. (Last time around, for example, the greater Kansas City area had 2003A $1's a couple of weeks before anyone else; then they appeared in Chicago, and California, and then rapidly in so many other places that we lost count. But even a couple of months later, some sizable areas still hadn't seen any....)
The new signature doesn't typically hit all denominations at the same time. Most often the $1 gets it first, and then other denominations follow at the rate of one every month or two. So it'll probably be well into mid-2007 before all denominations are in production with the Cabral-Paulson signatures. The Kodachrome $5 note is due to be released in the spring of 2008, meaning it'll need to go into production in the fall of 2007; therefore, it's possible that the BEP will decide to delay the signature change on the $5 denomination for those extra few months, to avoid printing a short series of Cabral-Paulson $5's of the current design. (The BEP generally likes to avoid short series when possible; it's inefficient to produce a master plate that you're hardly going to use....)
Meanwhile, the Series 2003A and 2004A notes with the Cabral-Snow signatures remain in production. These Cabral-Snow series are looking to end up lasting slightly less time than the previous few series have done, but they're not anywhere near short enough to be considered scarce. (A *possible* exception is the 2004A $50. The $50 denomination is in such low demand that it commonly goes out of production for many months at a time, and it just so happens that there's only been one month of $50 printing since the changeover from 2004 to 2004A. It's still quite possible that the 2004A $50 will end up being common, though; it'd only take a couple months' production to make this series just as plentiful as many other $50 series, and the Cabral-Snow era easily has that much life left in it.)
That should do it. Anybody think of anything I've left out?
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Paulson Sworn into Office as the 74th Secretary of the Treasuryhttp://www.ustreas.gov./press/releases/hp04.htm
Secretary Henry Paulson Provides his Signature for use on U.S. Paper Currencyhttp://www.ustreas.gov./press/releases/hp12.htm
