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Working Paper
Demand for U.S Banknotes at Home and Abroad: A Post-Covid Update
In principle, physical currency should be disappearing: payments are increasingly electronic, with new technologies emerging rapidly, and governments increasingly restrict large-denomination notes as a way to reduce crime and tax evasion. Nonetheless, demand for U.S. banknotes continues to grow, and consistently increases at times of crisis both within and outside the United States because dollar banknotes remain a desirable store of value and medium of exchange when local currency or bank deposits are inferior. Most recently, the COVID crisis resulted in historic increases in currency ...
Working Paper
Estimating the Volume of Counterfeit U.S. Currency in Circulation
The incidence of currency counterfeiting and the possible total stock of counterfeits in circulation are popular topics of speculation and discussion in the press and are of substantial practical interest to the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Treasury and the United States Secret Service (USSS), who are jointly responsible for U.S. banknote design, including security features, and production. This paper assembles data from Federal Reserve and USSS sources and presents a range of estimates for the number of counterfeits in circulation in the United States. In addition, the paper presents figures on ...