I think you are underestimating the difficulty of actually making it work in practice. Printing notes that are good enough to pass as the real thing is going to be the easiest part of the problem. Say you have printed $10 billion worth of notes. How the hell do you spend that as cash?<p>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.<p>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.
it may be worth starting with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfeit_United_States_currency" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfeit_United_States_curr...</a> and more generally <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfeit_money" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfeit_money</a><p>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...<p>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]" <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea%27s_illicit_activities#Currency" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea%27s_illicit_activi...</a><p>Well, thanks anyway for sending me down this k-hole of wikipedia articles about forgery...
Don't know about those governments, but there are reports that criminal networks are printing counterfeit paper currency and that they are widely used. The huge black market demand for USD exists not only in Russia, but in many South American countries. Whilst it doesn't hurt the money circulating in USA, it increases the size of the black market in those countries and thus hurts their fiscal position.
LOL! They couldn't print paper as fast as the Fed is creating currency electronically! What do you think all those "Quantitative Easing" are?<p>paper currency is much less than one percent of the total currency dealt with by banksters.
They may do. The theory is North Korea but it could be China/Russia/Iran: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar</a>
Love this post.<p>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.<p>2. It is illegal.
I wonder whether a hostile government could print enough $100 bills to damage the currency? A single T-Bill auction would affect the money supply more than printing presses running 24/7.