Slashdot Mirror
Press Used To Print Millions of US Banknotes Seized In Quebec
An anonymous reader writes "The Canadian Royal Mounted Police report: An offset printing press used to manufacture counterfeit $20 banknotes was seized by the RCMP and US Secret Service. This significant seizure was made earlier today in the Trois-Rivières area. The authorities had been looking for this offset press for several years. A large quantity of paper was also seized by police, that could have been used by the counterfeiters to manufacture from $40-$200 million. The very high quality counterfeit notes were virtually undetectable to the naked eye. Some of the features they had were uncommon, including the type of paper used, which was especially made with a Jackson watermark and a dark vertical stripe imitating the security thread found in authentic notes."
They were printed in both English and French, to avoid breaking Canadian bilingualism laws.
Now if we could just stop our government from printing themselves money.
switch to australian made notes, i'd like to see them try and replicate those notes!
Fed doesn't even bother with the paper - just pushes some buttons, and *magically* $4 billion pops out into the system *every day.*
Except they call it Quantitative Easing instead of its actual name, counterfeiting. Cuz they're economists, you know.
If you suspect you have government printed currency, you should send it to me, flyneye.
I will inspect it for bugs, flaws and make sure it works.
Bulk, no problem, will pay shipping fees or postage for large amounts.
Be safe, be sure, send your money to flyneye.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Couple of criminals bested by another lot of criminals.
When I first read this story I was amazed to read that someone was still using a printing press to print phony money. I thought only the North Koreans did that because their fakes are printed using the intaglio printing method, the same one used by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing to print American money. You're not going to get that from an offset press.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
Fancy heavy-weight offset printer, so yes. The press is what enables that difference, and this is one of those presses. Who gets to even buy these presses if quite tightly controlled. The fact that authorities spent years looking for it meant that its purchase was very carefully done and it was probably disassembled and moved after initial delivery. A difficult and expensive operation, but presumably the years it was in operation paid for it.
Once it gets back to the bank and is detected, you are long gone.
Hahahahahaha detected at the bank hahahahaha.
People get counterfeit twenties out of ATMs all the time.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Now if we could just stop our government from printing themselves money.
Why?
When interest rates are at 0%, and the politicians can't be bother inducing demand via stimulus spending/fiscal policy, the only way left to get the economy going is monetary policy. The Japanese have had 0% interest rates for decades, and have printed money a lot as well, and they've had deflation.
In science you pick the model which makes accurate predictions. The Austrians, gold bugs, and folks from the Chicago school of thought have been yammering on about inflation for years. The Keynesians (IS-LM folks) have been saying it won't/isn't because of the circumstances we're in. Who has been right? Which model has turned out correct over the last five years?
Of course that doesn't mean you can print money whenever you want, just in particular circumstances (which the US happens to be in):
Running deficits and printing lots of money are inflationary and bad in economies that are constrained by limited supply; they are good things when the problem is persistently inadequate demand. Similarly, unemployment benefits probably lead to lower employment in a supply-constrained economy; they increase employment in a demand-constrained economy; and so on.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/macroeconomic-populism-returns/
They Keynesians have been correctly predicting things. Their model works. By this point, if you're scientifically minded you, should be dropping other models as their predictions were wrong.