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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> How would you know how much value in U$ is hidden in Brazil by international banks?

What on earth are you talking about? Are you saying the U.S. Treasury doesn't know how many dollars it has printed? Or the Federal Reserve doesn't know many dollars banks hold with it in reserve? Or how many dollars the banks it has under its jurisdiction have created? Note that apart from cash, the latter two categories are digital and intensely tracked.

> You don't know

Are you presuming or asking? $1.58 trillion of which $1.53 trillion are Federal Reserve notes and the rest coinage [1]. While estimating the exact amounts in any given country is not easy [2], just as estimating the exact number of dollars any person knows is far from definitive, the aggregates are tightly controlled.

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm

[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/bulletin/1996/1096lead.p...

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Printed what?

When was the last time you moved a trillion printed dollars?

"Printing money" today means moving virtual money around.

Banks can make money appear in Cayman Islands. "Here is a billion dollar SWIFT money order", that is it. There is no billion printed dollars. They "print" money at will.

> Printed what?

There are three types of money: central bank reserves, physical currency and commercial bank money. The U.S. government (Fed and Treasury, respectively) directly controls the first two down to the cent. Commercial banks "make" the final one, but to get the right to do that they have to agree to Federal Reserve jurisdiction (internationally, this happens with central banks entering into swap agreements with the Fed, i.e. opening "accounts" with the Fed into which the Fed deposits U.S. dollars whose--since this needs to be said--quantities it gets to track).

If rando Brazilian bank says "I have a billion U.S. dollars" and doesn't tell the Fed, they counterfeited. They can spend it in Brazil if nobody checks (hint: everyone checks, this is what the SWIFT and Fedwire protocols were designed to facilitate). But if they try to wire those funds to anyone else (or any other Fedwire or SWIFT member), the books won't balance and the message will be rejected. Someone will then have to (a) get real dollars to cover their crime or (b) risk having themselves, and/or their central bank, booted from the Fed's international system.

You are confused there are settlement accounts that are used to settle the transfers. So if you are doing a transfer from Chase account to CIBC FirstCaribbean International Bank account (for simplicity's sake we will assume that CIBC FirstCaribbean has a direct relationship with Chase) the appropriate debit and credit will be reflected in appropriate nostro and vostro settlement accounts. The SWIFT message is just a mechanism to exchange information but the actual money movement happens between settlement accounts.

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