Press Used To Print Millions of US Banknotes Seized In Quebec 398
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."
plastics the new paper (Score:5, Interesting)
How is this any different from Fed practice? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Go after the real thieves lol (Score:1, Interesting)
Ah, yes, and spiral back into a recession.
Printing is bad, why? Because Weimar Germany? Because Zimbabwe? What about all the times printing money saved an economy? France and England in the 1920s. America circa 2008? And no more that I'm too lazy to lookup because, while I've studied a significant amount of economics (mostly on my own time and outside school, but also in school), I doubt you have.
As has been recently explained in the economics blogosphere recently, printing money is _bad_ when you're supply-side constrained. It's _good_ when you're demand-side constrained. The United States is currently demand-side constrained, ego inflating the money supply is a good thing. As demand improves the Feds will ease back on currency inflation, precisely as they've been doing for the past 12 months.
Re:plastics the new paper (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Are they embossed? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Go after the real thieves lol (Score:2, Interesting)
There are far more examples of central banks doing things to hurt the economy than there are of them helping it. It would be one thing if they ONLY protected us against inflation by adjusting the interest rate/money supply, but because they are run by politics most often, they feel pressure and medal in things they certainly should not. The fed can do nothing more than add a splint, the economy must heal itself just like a broken leg. What the fed does now is similar to what "Sports medicine" does to get million dollar athletes back on the field. Yes, they may win the game tonight but what happens to them in the long run? What the US Federal reserve is doing now is horrific in its implications. The looming disaster will be far worse than what would have happened had they not intervened at all.