[107444] in Cypherpunks
Bad money driving (was: RE: Suggestion for Public Echelon counte
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brown, R Ken)
Thu Jan 14 09:15:16 1999
From: "Brown, R Ken" <brownrk1@texaco.com>
To: "'Jukka E Isosaari'" <jei@zor.hut.fi>
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com, ukcrypto@maillist.ox.ac.uk
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 1999 07:10:38 -0600
Reply-To: "Brown, R Ken" <brownrk1@texaco.com>
> Jukka E Isosaari[SMTP:jei@zor.hut.fi] wrote:
>
> Another idea that spawned on me on the theme of
> alternative ways of fighting wars...
[...snip...]
> IMO, the US single-mindedness on money and spying even on
> allies for economic and scientific benefit, would only be nicely
> complemented by destroying the threatening economies,
> for example Japanese economy, by printing a few billions
> of extra Yens and spreading them around causing
> the said economy to collapse.
> Can someone tell me how this would or woudn't work?
Works in short run, not in long run, because you want successful economies
to trade with. A rich Japan that wants to trade makes me and you richer
(even if they subsidise exports to undercut ours and even if they are more
efficient producers of *all* goods and services - look at any intro to the
theory of comparitive advantage) Hey, even I know that and I'm one of these
slimy nasty *socialists* yechh...
> Has this method been used by anyone in previous wars?
> (Any pointers on monetary warfare appreciated.)
Again & again & again.
It's one of the main reasons the UK & some other countries deliberately use
expensive printing techniques to make paper money (forgoing some of the
artificial "profit" they could make by printing or minting cheap money) &
no longer have high-denomination banknotes (biggest you can get now is 50
quid & most shops won't accept them). Don't believe what they tell you about
drugs & money laundering - it is forgers, especially government-sponsered
ones, they are worried about. IIRC Libya was accused of planning to forge
UK 20 & 50 pound notes some time ago. No idea if it was true.
In the US Civil war the North tried to forge southern money. They didn't
need to (according to Kahn's Codebreakers book) the south (whose knowledge
of economics was on a par with their printing technology) was paying British
& Canadian printers and even forgers in New York City to print vast quanties
of their own money. They had this strange idea that the reason their economy
wasn't working was that there wasn't enough money around. Which is why they
used to give Confederate dollars away with bubblegum
A country that can't even print it's own banknotes is not likely to beat the
USA in a war... (actually quite a lot of countries don't print their own
banknotes or mint their own coins - about half of them use British printers,
some even pay the British government to do it for them - same goes for
stamps - not so much for technical reasons as security - biggest players in
that market IIRC are the UK Royal Mint & DeLaRue - who presumably know a
lot about cryptography & security)
Strangely enough the large country *most* vulnerable to this attack might be
the USA - they have a lot of their paper money abroad (mostly in Russia,
rumour has it), they use cheap printing processes & they have relatively
high denomination notes.
Ken Brown
