Saint-Exupéry is the only 20th-century writer to figure on a French banknote and will soon have his own set of stamps.
The buyer is UBM, under new boss Tim Cobbold, who is making a career-defining bet within six months of joining from De La Rue, the banknote printer.
Bitcoin shows huge promise as real "digital cash" for the internet: just as with cash, you can buy goods and services with it essentially anonymously (each "coin" has a serial number, like a banknote, but few people worry about their cash transactions being traced).
Only partly in jest, he pulls out a one-peso banknote printed in Oaxaca a century ago, when the state was pressing for autonomy during the Mexican revolution.
Try to redeem a banknote at the central bank and all you will get is a newer banknote.
Hitachi says it has been discussing the issue with European banknote makers.Obviously, such tags would make counterfeiters' lives far more difficult.
Until very recently the highest-denomination banknote was 50 naira (worth a mere 50 cents).
All this makes PNG a paradise for anthropologists but hell to govern.Sir Michael sees himself as the father of PNG's independence he has even put himself on the 50-kina banknote.
Portals, a firm it acquired in 1995, has an even longer heritage: it began supplying banknote paper to the Bank of England in 1724.
Any reputational damage from a shortage, or surfeit, of cash lies with the central bank.Investors feared that De La Rue had done irreparable damage to its own reputation in 2010, when it botched an order for high-quality banknote paper from a big client, said to be India's central bank.
De La Rue, the world's largest commercial banknote printer, is one of them.
