How to Make Money

Some of the most atrocious forgeries in the long history of the U.S. dollar are circulating today in Eastern Europe. The bills are so badly rendered that Warsaw's daily Zycie Warszawy recently felt obliged to chide the forgers. "It must be admitted with shame," the paper said, "that in Poland forgery is attempted by slackers, by people devoid of professional pride who let loose on the world shoddy goods rather than self-respecting forgeries."

Eastern Europeans love to acquire dollars as inflation hedges and status symbols, but few of them are familiar enough with U.S. currency to spot the fakes. So forgers are indulging in such crudities as adding a zero to single-dollar bills to make them tens, and changing other bills into century notes. They even peddle U.S. currency in brown, blue and beige. In Yugoslavia, a batch of grey hundred-dollar bills printed up for a movie were soon fetching $120 worth of dinars on the black market. Another Eastern European buck passer got away with putting some pink "play money" into circulation.

Since the Eastern Europeans often stash their dollars away, it may take them years to discover that they are the owners of fakes. If they do make the discovery, there is nothing much they can do about it: since acquiring dollars is illegal except through government channels at artificial exchange rates, the man who admits to having a forgery would have to answer a lot of awkward questions.

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