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Klaus W. Bender | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1938 |
| Nationality | German |
| Occupation(s) | Author, Journalist |
| Known for | Moneymakers: The Secret World of Banknote Printing |
Klaus W. Bender (born 1938) is a German financial journalist and author, best known for writing the book Moneymakers: The Secret World of Banknote Printing. [1]
He was born in 1938 in Darmstadt, county of Hesse. Bender studied economics at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and, later, at University of Cologne, financing his entire studies by working as a factory hand and office clerk. After graduation in 1964, with an MA in business administration, he immediately joined the research institute of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FESt), one of the largest German political foundations, which in 1966 dispatched him to its newly opened regional office in Tokyo, Japan.
In 1970, Bender left FESt in order to become a journalist, a move he had planned for a long time. Initially, he reported from Tokyo on Japanese economic affairs as a freelance journalist for about 20 German and Swiss newspapers but soon was hired by Der Spiegel , Germany's most prominent weekly magazine, and simultaneously by Handelsblatt , one of Germany's leading economic dailies, as a freelance (economic) writer with a fixed retainer fee. In 1972, upon invitation from the board of publishers, Bender joined Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Germany's leading daily (conservative) paper. He now reported on an exclusive basis for FAZ on politics, economics, and culture in the Asian region. Assignments by FAZ sent him to all countries of East and Southeast Asia, with the exception of war-torn Indochina. Highlights were trips to mainland China (repeatedly), to North Korea, and to the Soviet Far East. All at that time were regions still closed to visitors from the West.
After 14 years in Japan, Bender in 1980 asked for a transfer back to Europe. He was reassigned as economics correspondent of FAZ in Rome, covering Italy and selected countries around the Mediterranean Basin. [1] Although Bender considered the years passed in Italy as particularly happy and enriching, the fall of the Wall in Berlin induced him to ask in 1992, for a transfer to Eastern Europe. As economics correspondent of FAZ for Eastern and Southeastern Europe, he now accompanied the countries in the Prague-Bucharest-Belgrade triangle on their painful road of transition from Soviet oppression to a free market system and parliamentary democracy.
In the year 2000 Bender asked to be relieved of his duties as a full-time reporter in order to have more time for writing a non-fiction book about the arcane international high security printing industry that prints our banknotes, passports, and credit cards. However, he remained affiliated with FAZ as a reporter for specialized topics. In view of the upcoming common European currency, Bender as early as 1996 had started collecting material for a book on this subject even though frequent travelling for his newspaper made this additional task very difficult. As one result of this research, Bender in 2000, broke in FAZ the story of the misprint of more than 300 million pieces of 100-euro banknotes by Germany's high security printer Giesecke & Devrient. [1] Bender's story went around the world, forcing the Munich-based company to recall the affected banknotes from the European Central Bank, and adding the missing security feature at an estimated additional cost of 15 million euro. Later it was Bender, who with several pieces published by FAZ, for the first time publicly denounced the shocking events surrounding the privatization of Bundesdruckerei, Berlin. This highly reputed German state banknote printer, because of the greed and incompetence of the people involved in the privatization process, was brought to the brink of collapse. It was one of the biggest economic scandals in post-war Germany.
In 2004, Bender published the result of many years of research in German language in his book Geldmacher, das geheimste Gewerbe der Welt, published by Wiley-VCH, Weinheim (Germany). This first book published worldwide on the extremely secretive high security printing industry was applauded even by the sensitive industry itself, and was on the list of bestsellers (economics) in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. In 2006, Bender published an up-dated version in English titled Moneymakers: The Secret World of Banknote Printing, again with Wiley-VCH. In this English version, based on technical facts, Bender, for the first time presented the massive doubts harboured by the high security printing industry and European police forces concerning the American accusations that North Korea is counterfeiting US 50- and 100-dollar bills on a large scale. These counterfeits called "supernotes" are of such high quality that even seasoned experts of banknote printing cannot distinguish them from a genuine note. More detailed information on this extremely touchy issue, obtained by Bender after the English version had gone to print, was published in two separate articles in FAZ (February 2006, January 2007), and in the Swiss paper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (February 2007). In these articles Bender also alleges that "supernotes" are actually produced by CIA in a facility near Washington D.C. [2]
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Operation Bernhard was an exercise by Nazi Germany to forge British bank notes. The initial plan was to drop the notes over Britain to bring about a collapse of the British economy during the Second World War. The first phase was run from early 1940 by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) under the title Unternehmen Andreas. The unit successfully duplicated the rag paper used by the British, produced near-identical engraving blocks and deduced the algorithm used to create the alpha-numeric serial code on each note. The unit closed in early 1942 after its head, Alfred Naujocks, fell out of favour with his superior officer, Reinhard Heydrich.
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Orell Füssli is a Swiss banknotes printing and bookselling company, established by Christoph Froschauer in 1519 as a book printer and publisher. It is currently operating in many print-related segments, such as security printing, bookselling and publishing, with security printing being a primary contemporary product of company. Company's shares are traded on SIX Swiss Exchange since 1897. It is the oldest continuously publicly traded company of Switzerland.
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Security printing is the field of the printing industry that deals with the printing of items such as banknotes, cheques, passports, tamper-evident labels, security tapes, product authentication, stock certificates, postage stamps, and identity cards. The main goal of security printing is to prevent forgery, tampering, or counterfeiting. More recently many of the techniques used to protect these high-value documents have become more available to commercial printers, whether they are using the more traditional offset and flexographic presses or the newer digital platforms. Businesses are protecting their lesser-value documents such as transcripts, coupons and prescription pads by incorporating some of the features listed below to ensure that they cannot be forged or that alteration of the data cannot occur undetected.
A superdollar is a very high quality counterfeit United States one hundred-dollar bill, alleged by the U.S. government to have been made by unknown organizations or governments. In 2011, government sources stated that these counterfeit bills were in "worldwide circulation" from the late 1980s until at least July 2000 in an extradition court case.
The Neue Zürcher Zeitung is a Swiss, German-language daily newspaper, published by NZZ Mediengruppe in Zürich. The paper was founded in 1780. It has a reputation as a high-quality newspaper, as the Swiss-German newspaper of record, and for detailed reports on international affairs.
Bruno S. Frey is a Swiss economist and visiting professor for Political Economy at the University of Basel. Frey's research topics include Political economy and Happiness economics, with his published work including concepts derived from Psychology, Sociology, Jurisprudence, History, Arts, and Theology.
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Giesecke+Devrient is a German company headquartered in Munich that provides banknote and securities printing, smart cards, and cash handling systems.
Werner F.M. De Bondt is one of the founders in the field of behavioral finance. He is also the founding director of Richard H. Driehaus Center for Behavioral Finance at DePaul University in Chicago. Previously, he was the Frank Graner Professor of Investment Management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Thomas F. Gleed Chair of Business Administration at Albers School of Business and Economics at the Seattle University.
Fidelity Printers and Refiners (FPR) is Zimbabwean security printing and gold refinery company wholly owned by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe. The company was established in 1966. FPR operates from a printing and gold refinery plant located in Msasa Industrial area in Harare and a coin minting facility in Bulawayo.
Martin Dahinden is a Swiss diplomat who has served as ambassador of Switzerland to the United States of America from 2014 to 2019. Dahinden presented his credentials to the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, on November 18, 2014 at the White House in Washington, D.C. He retired in 2019.
George Geza Szpiro is an Israeli–Swiss author, journalist, and mathematician. He has written articles and books on popular mathematics and related topics.
Gualtiero "Rino" Giori (1913–1992) was an Italian security printer and inventor who founded the company Giori SA in 1951.
Banknote processing is an automated process to check the security features and the fitness of banknotes in circulation, to count and sort them by denomination and to balance deposits. This processing of currency is performed by security printing companies, central banks, financial institutions and cash-in-transit (CiT) companies.
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