
The Piranha of Portugal: the Greatest Counterfeiter of All Time (2014) - jpelecanos
https://www.globalfinancialdata.com/gfdblog/?p=1862
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Laforet
Thanks for posting. A very similar operation is happening today in North
Korea: Millions of counterfeit USD/CNY/EUR are printed and laundered through
NK banks every year[0]. Turns out somebody has already done it before.

[0]:[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar)

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B1FF_PSUVM
_" A lowly, underpaid teller who worked part-time at a jeweler to help make
ends meet had become suspicious of the Banco Angola e Metropole. The Escudo
notes he received were never in numerical order (Reis’s plan to shuffle the
banknotes to avoid detection actually caused detection),[...]"_

Rats. The Germans got caught with the WWII tank serial numbers, this guy
sidesteps that (years before), gets caught.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

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pouta
Being from Portugal I wonder how this was completely unknown to me

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icebraining
Not to me. RTP made a whole TV series about it:
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424598/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424598/)

(Not that I recommend watching it)

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jaclaz
JFYI, there was also a (IMHO quite nice) TV mini-serie in Italy long before
the 2000's, in 1974:

[https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accadde_a_Lisbona](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accadde_a_Lisbona)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGYt5_UJWF0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGYt5_UJWF0)

etc.

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icebraining
That's curious, thanks.

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erebrus
More than anything, I find interesting the impact this probably did have on
the failure of democracy in Portugal back then.

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montyf
Probably no real impact. I'm not an expert and my knowledge on this comes
entirely from a free guided tour of Lisbon I went on today, but the democracy
was already a complete disaster. The second paragraph on this wikipedia
article[0] says it all:

> The sixteen years of the First Republic saw nine presidents and 44
> ministries, and have been described as consisting of "continual anarchy,
> government corruption, rioting and pillage, assassinations, arbitrary
> imprisonment and religious persecution".

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Portuguese_Republic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Portuguese_Republic)

~~~
Firerouge
The linked article actually gives a decent amount of credit to the forgery for
the downfall of democracy.

" _The revelation of the counterfeiting plot created a huge loss of confidence
in the corrupt, democratic government. Military officers who were aggrieved
over their pay failing to keep up with inflation, overthrew the democratic
government on May 28, 1926. ... A scheme to counterfeit currency and make a
forger rich had led, indirectly, to the downfall of a democracy which was
followed by a forty-year dictatorship._ "

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ggm
I like that one of the high end techniques was to social-engineer a banknote
printing company of repute, to print your banknotes.

Those moments when high end US government officials get given proof sheets of
banknotes, one-sided half-printed notes, Steve Woz gets his banknotes bound
into a cheque-book like thing.. They're on the fringe of 'what is money'
questions too.

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peerreviewed
No less than 330,000 banknotes introduced in circulation. The man is a legend.

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Fnoord
"Historical examples of government-induced debasement include: [...]"

Does the switch of many EU countries switching to EUR count in this context as
a valid example as well?

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fwdpropaganda
Care to explain in what kind of bizzaro logic universe a country adopting a
currency counts as debasement?

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Fnoord
I'm asking it as question, not stating it like a premise I agree with.

I can explain what happened in my country:

First, we had the guilder (NLG) since the 17th century [1], then we adopted
the EUR. The conversion rate for us was approx 2.20 NLG for 1 EUR.

When we adopted the EUR basically within a few months everything became as
expensive in amount as it was before but then in EUR. That's not a normal
recession or normal inflation.

This inflation often gets directly attributed to adoption of the EUR. Whether
that is factually correct or not, I don't know. If it _would_ be factually
correct (ie. let us assume it hypothetically _is_ ), would it be a correct
example as a debasement?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_guilder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_guilder)

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fwdpropaganda
Now I understand the question, thank you.

So, _inflation_ is a term normally used for increase of good's prices over
time as measured in the currency of the country where you're buying the goods.
So you can't use the term inflation to mean "the conversion rate was 2.20 NLG
for 1 EUR and within a few months everything because as expensive in amount of
EUR as it was before in NLG." This isn't a mere technicality. You can't
measure increase in price across the moment when the EUR was introduced,
because the EUR didn't exist before that and the NLG didn't exist after that.

In my opinion the conversation onwards should be: if something happened, what
interesting metrics should we be looking at to detect it and measure it? Let
me suggest one: number of hours of median salary needed to buy the CPI basket
of goods. Measure that before and after the introduction of the EUR. If that
number increased, then you can say that consumers lost purchasing power. Loss
of purchasing power does not necessarily follow as a consequence of inflation
(although it can) but is usually the bad consequence of inflation that people
worry the most about.

