the scanners.
“The vast majority of counterfeits we run into are printed on offset presses, the same way books and magazines are produced. They feel flat, wrong. To get around the problem of the paper, counterfeiters bleach one-dollar bills and use them to print counterfeit hundreds. That’s very big in Colombia and Thailand right now.
“But the Supernote is printed using the intaglio process, exactly the same way the U.S. Mint makes legitimate currency. An engraved plate is slammed onto paper, which gives the bills their distinctive feel. The Supernotes have sequential serial numbers, just like the real thing. The paper used in the Supernote is an almost exact duplicate of the paper produced for the U.S. Government.”
Then Flaherty went on to answer the question that had just popped into Murdock’s mind. “None of our paper is missing,” he said. “Crane & Company have been making it for the government since 1879, and none of it has gotten away from them. The Supernote paper is a perfectly manufactured copy. And incidentally, we’re not missing any printing plates either.
“We subsequently discovered that these bills had been circulating in Europe, the Far East, the Middle East, and Russia since the early 1990’s, but with very few showing up here.”
“I’ll take it now,” said a smoother voice from around the table.
Flaherty paused. “Gentlemen, Director Capezzi.”
This was the first briefing that Murdock had ever been to where none of the higher-ups asked a bunch of dumb-ass questions just to show everyone how well informed they were. Then he realized, to his horror, that they had all heard this before. That the briefing was for
him
. Oh, shit, where was this heading?
Capezzi was a little smoother than Flaherty, but just as blunt.
“There are now nearly four hundred billion dollars worth ofU.S. paper money in existence,” Capezzi told them. “Of that, around two hundred and fifty billion is in foreign hands. If their own currency is unstable or inflationary, people like to have dollars. And every hundred-dollar bill that a Russian sticks in his mattress is an interest-free loan to the U.S. Treasury, an amount of money that we would otherwise have to obtain by issuing interest-bearing bonds. It saves us twenty-five billion dollars a year in interest, based on what’s out there right now. And if these loans in the form of currency stay in the mattress and are never called in, that’s even more money in the bank for the U.S. Treasury.
“Ironically enough, in the past few years in which we’ve become aware of the Supernote, our main obstacle in combating it has been our superiors in the Treasury Department. While the total money supply consists of hundreds of billions of dollars in currency, the amount in wire, check, and credit card transactions runs into the tens of trillions. So Treasury doesn’t bother itself much with cash. And the bottom line is that for the last five years Treasury has felt that any public acknowledgment of the problem of the Supernote would risk a loss of confidence in the dollar as a reserve currency overseas.”
In his devious SEAL brain, Murdock was starting to figure out why there were no high-level officials from the Treasury in the room. Had the Secret Service gone over the heads of their bosses, or just around them to the CIA?
“Unfortunately,” said Capezzi, “we are now beginning to see just such a loss of confidence. The Russian Central Bank estimates that Russians hold twenty billion dollars of U.S. currency, and that up to twenty percent of that may be Supernotes. In Germany banks will not accept one-hundred-dollar bills from Russian citizens. British, Irish, Greek, and Hong Kong banks are increasingly reluctant to exchange hundred-dollar bills from anyone, period.
“The Secret Service has always been aware that the hundred-dollar bill is most common under attack by counterfeiters. Wealso feel that the unchanging design of our currency has been
“The vast majority of counterfeits we run into are printed on offset presses, the same way books and magazines are produced. They feel flat, wrong. To get around the problem of the paper, counterfeiters bleach one-dollar bills and use them to print counterfeit hundreds. That’s very big in Colombia and Thailand right now.
“But the Supernote is printed using the intaglio process, exactly the same way the U.S. Mint makes legitimate currency. An engraved plate is slammed onto paper, which gives the bills their distinctive feel. The Supernotes have sequential serial numbers, just like the real thing. The paper used in the Supernote is an almost exact duplicate of the paper produced for the U.S. Government.”
Then Flaherty went on to answer the question that had just popped into Murdock’s mind. “None of our paper is missing,” he said. “Crane & Company have been making it for the government since 1879, and none of it has gotten away from them. The Supernote paper is a perfectly manufactured copy. And incidentally, we’re not missing any printing plates either.
“We subsequently discovered that these bills had been circulating in Europe, the Far East, the Middle East, and Russia since the early 1990’s, but with very few showing up here.”
“I’ll take it now,” said a smoother voice from around the table.
Flaherty paused. “Gentlemen, Director Capezzi.”
This was the first briefing that Murdock had ever been to where none of the higher-ups asked a bunch of dumb-ass questions just to show everyone how well informed they were. Then he realized, to his horror, that they had all heard this before. That the briefing was for
him
. Oh, shit, where was this heading?
Capezzi was a little smoother than Flaherty, but just as blunt.
“There are now nearly four hundred billion dollars worth ofU.S. paper money in existence,” Capezzi told them. “Of that, around two hundred and fifty billion is in foreign hands. If their own currency is unstable or inflationary, people like to have dollars. And every hundred-dollar bill that a Russian sticks in his mattress is an interest-free loan to the U.S. Treasury, an amount of money that we would otherwise have to obtain by issuing interest-bearing bonds. It saves us twenty-five billion dollars a year in interest, based on what’s out there right now. And if these loans in the form of currency stay in the mattress and are never called in, that’s even more money in the bank for the U.S. Treasury.
“Ironically enough, in the past few years in which we’ve become aware of the Supernote, our main obstacle in combating it has been our superiors in the Treasury Department. While the total money supply consists of hundreds of billions of dollars in currency, the amount in wire, check, and credit card transactions runs into the tens of trillions. So Treasury doesn’t bother itself much with cash. And the bottom line is that for the last five years Treasury has felt that any public acknowledgment of the problem of the Supernote would risk a loss of confidence in the dollar as a reserve currency overseas.”
In his devious SEAL brain, Murdock was starting to figure out why there were no high-level officials from the Treasury in the room. Had the Secret Service gone over the heads of their bosses, or just around them to the CIA?
“Unfortunately,” said Capezzi, “we are now beginning to see just such a loss of confidence. The Russian Central Bank estimates that Russians hold twenty billion dollars of U.S. currency, and that up to twenty percent of that may be Supernotes. In Germany banks will not accept one-hundred-dollar bills from Russian citizens. British, Irish, Greek, and Hong Kong banks are increasingly reluctant to exchange hundred-dollar bills from anyone, period.
“The Secret Service has always been aware that the hundred-dollar bill is most common under attack by counterfeiters. Wealso feel that the unchanging design of our currency has been
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