Currency Wars: How Forged Money is the New Weapon of Mass Destruction | 
| Author: John Cooley
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $7.99
You Save: $16.96 (68%)
New (29) Used (5) from $6.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 299826
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.5
ISBN: 1602392706
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.133
EAN: 9781602392700
ASIN: 1602392706
Publication Date: May 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
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 Medellin 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.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Provocative and Visionary June 17, 2008
It's no secret that everything these days is vulnerable to mass counterfeiting. This includes DVDs, handbags, pharmaceuticals and money. Currency Wars traces the history of the mass counterfeiting of money, which has been used as an instrument of war.
The author of Currency Wars, John Cooley, is a renowned and celebrated journalist whose specialty is the Middle East. Cooley is one of the rare Western journalists with wide credibility in the Middle East and is famous for being friends with top leaders there.
In his previous book, Unholy Wars published in June 2002, Cooley was ahead of the curve in his understanding of the important events of the day. Always sweeping and provocative, Cooley has now turned his attention to the possibility of counterfeit money being used by all sides in the current wars with devastating results.
Currency Wars has many intriguing historical tales of belligerents forging the currency of their adversaries in order to win wars. The stories span many wars, including The American Revolutionary War, WWI and WWII. The author makes it clear that the weapon of counterfeit currency alone has never won a war, but that the practice is as old as currency itself.
Don't confuse this book with another book by the same title, Currency Wars, by a Song Hongbing, a popular first-time author in China. Hongbing's book is a best-seller in China. A bona fide conspiracy book, he contends that the Rothschilds were behind a conspiracy to control money issuance that continues to the present day and that this threatens developing countries. Song's Currency Wars appeals to protectionist impulses there.
If Cooley is correct, mass currency counterfeiting will become a major threat, if it isn't already, because it targets the enemy's economy so insideously without the perpetrator being exposed to hostile fire.
|
|
|
