Currency Wars: How Forged Money is the New Weapon of Mass Destruction

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		Currency Wars: How Forged Money is the New Weapon of Mass Destruction
		Currency Wars: How Forged Money is the New Weapon of Mass Destruction

基本信息·出版社：Skyhorse Publishing
·页码：320 页
·出版日期：2008年05月
·ISBN：1602392706
·International Standard Book Number：1602392706
·条形码：9781602392700
·EAN：9781602392700
·装帧：精装
·正文语种：英语

内容简介 在线阅读本书

The world's quietest weapon of mass destruction is 75 percent cotton, 25 percent linen, and 100 percent fake.

The amount of counterfeit money in circulation is unknown, but hundreds of millions of bogus U.S. dollars are seized each year. Mass counterfeiting is not just organized crime, it can also be aggressive economic warfare waged by states to destabilize enemy governments, and it is reaching epidemic proportions. Forgery provides cash for states like North Korea and Iran in their pursuit of weapons—a fact publicly unacknowledged, even as fears grow over their nuclear ambitions.

In Currency Wars, John Cooley maps this dirty matrix of war and politics, sabotage and subterfuge, with new evidence and recently disclosed documents. With sound grounding in current affairs and history alike, Cooley demonstrates that the machinations of today's states echo attempts in antiquity by Persia, Greece, Rome, and China to use and defend against forgery and currency debasement. Counterfeiting remained a high crime throughout medieval and Renaissance Europe; played a key role in the American and French Revolutions; and was used by the British, Germans, and Soviets in two World Wars. Bad money mixed with post-war dictatorships, and was a tool of the KGB, CIA, Stasi, Hezbollah, the Medellín cartels, and the Chinese Triads.

This compelling, accessible account reveals grand-scale forgery's corrosive implications for global economic, political, and social stability. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with the complications and consequences of increasing and inevitable globalization, and it serves as a provocative reminder of the ways in which human greed and fear act as catalysts in world economics.
作者简介 John Cooley has worked as a translator and military-intelligence analyst and as a newspaper and television journalist. He served as a staff correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and ABC News. He is the author of Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism. He lives in England.
专业书评 From Publishers Weekly

Journalist Cooley (Unholy Wars) passionately inveighs against counterfeit money in this lively and well-researched—if occasionally overheated—exposé. Cooley delivers an entertaining history of debased currency, whose origins date back to the third millennium B.C. and has a long history as a weapon of war. Cooley recounts British counterfeiting aimed at destabilizing the American colonies and the 1860s union effort to spread fake Confederate dollars which contributed to wild inflation in the South. Nazis notoriously used Jewish concentration camp inmates to counterfeit massive quantities of dollars and sterling (depicted in the Oscar-winning Austrian film The Counterfeiters), and Cooley paints a vivid picture of the economic catastrophe this might have caused had all the forgeries been put into circulation. A disturbing recent development has been the flood of supernotes, superbly forged $100 bills pouring into circulation for 20 years, most likely from North Korea or Iran. Since 1995, the U.S. has redesigned its currency to foil counterfeiters, but the notes continue to appear. According to Cooley, the media prefers to cover more spectacular crimes such as terrorism, although counterfeiting causes greater economic damage; this compelling account illuminates this neglected issue, and readers will not be disappointed. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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