Two pieces on counterfeiting of cars in China. Note in the first piece posted here, academic Stephen Mihm describes how 150 years ago, the USA was also a counterfeit economy, ripping off everything from books to gin. Mihm (Ph.D. New York University, 2003; Assistant Professor of History) is the author of A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Harvard University Press, 2007). There is a short interview with him here.

I don’t find a PDF of this book online (anyone?), but here is an excerpt, and this summary is from the New Yorker:

When Americans went shopping in the early eighteen-hundreds, they used paper money issued by any one of hundreds of banks—the country lacked a single paper currency—and both customer and banknote would be scrutinized before being accepted. The spuriousness of much of the money in circulation made it a rich era for counterfeiters, who, as Mihm writes in this revelatory, entertaining book, enjoyed a status somewhere between that of folk heroes and alchemists, forming a demimonde of criminal clans and master engravers. These were less reviled than “real” financiers whose speculations left notes worthless; many preferred a fake note bearing the name of a sound bank to one issued by a shaky, though legitimate, institution. The absurd apotheosis of this phenomenon came in the Civil War, when the Confederacy honored counterfeits of its own money. By then, the quest to “purify the currency” was inseparable from the effort to build a unified nation, and the Union victory put an end to the money madness.

As well as being interviewed on the New York Times’ Freakonomics Blog, Mihm also surfaces talking about N. Korea’s prodution of counterfeit U.S. currency ‘of such high quality that the bank notes are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing’ on NPR. Here is the New York Times piece on the same topic.