December 12, 2005

BUT ISN'T THE DOLLAR WORTHLESS?

Counterfeiting Cases Point to North Korea: Pyongyang is accused of being behind a growing effort to print and move rafts of U.S. $100 bills (Josh Meyer and Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times, 12/12/2005)

The counterfeiting operation began a quarter of a century ago, he recalled, at a government mint built into a mountain in the North Korean capital.

Using equipment from Japan, paper from Hong Kong and ink from France, a team of experts was ordered to make fake U.S. $100 bills, said a former North Korean chemist who said his job was to draw the design.

"The main motive was to make money, but the secondary motive was inspired by anti-Americanism," said the chemist, now 56 and living in South Korea.

Before long, sheets with 30 bills each were rolling off the printing presses. By 1989, millions of dollars' worth of high-quality fakes were showing up around the world. U.S. investigators dubbed them "supernotes" because they were virtually indistinguishable from American currency. The flow of forged bills has continued ever since, U.S. officials say, despite a redesign intended to make the cash harder to replicate.

They haven't shifted to production of the renminbi?

Posted by kevin_whited at December 12, 2005 9:24 AM
Comments

Reason number 147 to overthrow this tyrant.

Posted by: obc at December 12, 2005 9:51 AM

America could have solved this problem w/the redesign - treat the old stuff as script. Want new bills? Have to come to America and turn it in.

What's a drug dealer to do?

Posted by: Sandy P at December 12, 2005 11:41 AM

I've read that half of the $ 100 bills in Russia are fakes, mostly bad ones.

It doesn't much matter, because few of them find their way back to America, and if the Russian people are willing to treat them as valuable, then they are valuable - although only in a speculative way.

Posted by: Michael Herdegen [TypeKey Profile Page] at December 12, 2005 11:57 AM

When I was in Viet Nam in 1968, we had military script (I think that was what it was called, for money). It's been a while, and since I can't remember the exact color switch, we went from brown money to green money, or vice versa. If you had more money than you should have, you couldn't trade a lot of the stuff in. I remember moma-sans who were making money like crazy off of whores, desperate for help. It was kinda funny. Not that anyone took advantage of the situation, of course.

Posted by: AllenS at December 12, 2005 12:27 PM

this has been going on for at least 10 years. the gangs producing these fakes don't bring them into the u.s. they are only out in other countries. i don't remember why but the article i read talked about how this wasn't exactly a bad thing in terms of the u.s. 's interests; i.e. it somehow helped us. anyway there are "super fakes" that can't be detected except with super precise scanners.

Posted by: uh huh at December 12, 2005 12:28 PM

I don't know that it helps us, but it can't really hurt us. Money supply, broadly measured, is about $10 trillion. The currency component is about $700 billion. You'd have to print up an awful lot of $100s to make any difference to the money supply.

Posted by: David Cohen at December 12, 2005 1:12 PM
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