Ask HN: Why don't Russia or China create counterfeit dollars?
I am making an assumption that they as a Govt have all the technology and resources and what not to create counterfeit paper currency?
Send it to your embassy at the target country but then what? How many staff would you need spending cash like crazy to get rid of it? You cannot spend it on anything expensive because paying cash for a house or Ferrari will raise flags. Especially if done often by a small number of the same people. You could need to get the money into the banking system so you can aggregate it together into a useful pile. But with banks on the look out for money laundering that might be tricky.
Given the embarrassment to a country if caught it just does not seem worth the effort and political risk. North Korea can try it because they can hardly be punished more than the sanctions already do.
Why would a state-level actor choose to counterfeit currency? "Nations have used counterfeiting as a means of warfare. The idea is to overflow the enemy's economy with fake bank notes, so that the real value of the money plummets. Great Britain did this during the American Revolutionary War to reduce the value of the Continental Dollar." On the other hand, this is probably not worth doing unless you can counterfeit at least a few percent of all the money in circulation...
Another reason that states would do it is if they are in a position like, say, North Korea, with little access to the currencies they need to buy the items they would like to buy from abroad due to international sanctions. "There have been two primary reasons for [North Korea's alleged] counterfeiting: the first is to wage economic warfare against the United States,[2] and secondly, to help ease North Korea's domestic economic problems.[12]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea%27s_illicit_activi...
Well, thanks anyway for sending me down this k-hole of wikipedia articles about forgery...
paper currency is much less than one percent of the total currency dealt with by banksters.
1. Russia and China have no real need or use for counterfeit (or real) paper US dollars. What the hell would they do with them? These countries have GDPs in the trillions of dollars.
2. It is illegal.
Ok. If they already did or are doing it, then won't it hit US economy really hard or even make the paper currency irrelevant to begin with?
source: I just returned from a vacation in India :)
Anyway, how do you think the US should deal with old notes in circulation, any suggestions or examples from other countries doing it in a sane way? Perhaps the Euro currency transition could be a model?
If I understand correctly, this is very much like the situation in the US, where there is no specific date on which the old bills change from being currency to being non-currency, which is what DrScump is getting at: "all an enemy has to attack are the simplest notes" (except for the way that it would be REAL WEIRD to show up somewhere with a big stack of 100s that ALL happened to be series 1988 bills, i.e., some of the last ones from before the metallic strip and microprinting were added. "oh yeah we found this in grampa's attic when he died, donchano")
Removing overall currency availability is something else altogether (and IMHO indicative of planned government suppression).
I'm not familiar with the EU strategy (another subthread addresses this), but what I'd seek is the removal-by-attrition of vulnerable notes coupled with a hard "expiration date", maybe 2 years or so after passage.