Banknotes cannot be "printed in secret". There must be legal authorization for every banknote issued, otherwise it's not really a banknote.
This note claims to be a "Federal Reserve note" - those words are printed there, right at the top of it. That means, if it were genuine, its creation and existence must be covered by the Federal Reserve Act.
Section 8 of the Federal Reserve Act lists the denominations the Federal Reserve is allowed and authorized to issue. It states:
Quote:
In order to furnish suitable notes for circulation as Federal reserve notes, the Secretary of the Treasury shall cause plates and dies to be engraved in the best manner to guard against counterfeits and fraudulent alterations, and shall have printed therefrom and numbered such quantities of such notes of the denominations of $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50, $100, $500, $1,000 $5,000, $10,000 as may be required to supply the Federal reserve banks. Such notes shall be in form and tenor as directed by the Secretary of the Treasury under the provisions of this Act and shall bear the distinctive numbers of the several Federal reserve banks through which they are issued.
The Federal Reserve bank is legally not permited to issue any other denominations, other than those listed in this Section. To the best of my knowledge, this section has only been amended three times since it was first written: in 1918, the denominations of $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 were added to the list of permitted denominations; in 1963, $1 and $2 notes were added to the list of permitted denominations, and in 1994 the person in charge of the printing plates was changed from the "Comptroller of the Currency" to the "Secretary of the Treasury". There is no evidence of either the addition or deletion of permission to create and issue million dollar notes.
For a million dollar Federal Reserve note to exist, there must be some publicly available record of its existence, in this Act, as well as records of the numbers of such notes that were actually printed and numbers of notes eventually redeemed and destroyed. The serial number printed on this purported note implies at least 64,300 of them were printed - that's 64 billion dollars worth of banknotes, which is not a trifling amount of money that you can just bury in the Federal Budget and hope nobody notices.
There is no such evidence, and no such records. Therefore, there can be no such note.
Finally, of course, we have the fact that the portrait used on this purported note is identical to the portrait used on the regular $100 note. If million dollar notes had been issued, a different portrait, not used on any other denomination, would have been used. Using the exact same $100 portrait on a $1,000,000 note would have made it too easy for counterfeiters.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
Posted 10/12/2022 11:59 am
