For a long time if you ever went into a doctor’s office or went into someone’s home it was not hard to find a Reader’s Digest. From the format of the Reader’s Digest, eventually large coffee table books were produced and one of many is Fakes & Forgeries, edited by Brian Innes, Reader’s Digest, Pleasantville, NY, 2005. If you have some money, there is always people trying to get a piece of it. If you own something valuable, then there are others trying to copy it. Much of civil society is based on trust, you trust nothing deliberate will happen to you as you go through your day; you trust when you buy something at a store it is what it reports to be; we generally trust various newspaper outlets. We trust that people are reasonably honest and sometimes if we do not, people will say I need to shake their hands and look them in the eye. Trust and honor are wonderful ideals and more often that not we need them, they are also can be turned around to the worst aspects of humanity. In the Reader’s Digest book are a number of chapters – Funny Money, Fake Art, False Papers, Phony Prehistory, Bogus Identity, The Confidence Tricksters, Faking for a Cause and Suspect Science.

Funny Money or Counterfeit Money – As long as people have accepted money for payments, someone has been trying to counterfeit it. Most of the time, it is only a small amount but once in gets into the system, the system there is little that can be done. Once it gets into the system and it unnoticed – the money will have passed multiple hands making it hard to trace. However, with the treasury office making improvements every year it gets harder, but not impossible. In 1992 if you added up the sums of every bank robbery in the US there were $63 million in losses; in you looked at the financial statements they had $4.2 billion in fraud. The person who steals with a pen steals more than the person who steals with a gun. In terms of the copying bank notes there were some who could nearly match the treasury staff.

Fake Art – as soon as art prices begin to appreciate there will be copies. It is normal for young and old people to sit before a painting of one of the greats of the past and learn what were they thinking and how did they do what they did. It seems in the average museum there is at least one copy on the walls. For paintings that sell for millions, the investigation into the painting will be what did the painter use in painting? Now days artists can walk into a store and buy paint, what did the masters do? And many masters had apprentices working for him – he was the creative, not all the time the worker.

False Papers – today people use computers, a few short decades ago people used to write letters. If someone became famous, those letters could be sold. If the person reached well into public life then the value increases for there is more goodwill and desire to see the person’s letters. This led to forging the letters and manuscripts of writers.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, there are many pretenders but few methods which  use the advantage of compounding interest to the shareholders advantage. With profitable companies, they should be around for a number of years or centuries. If there is profitability you can rest assure they are doing something right and good and more importantly fighting fraud, not starting it.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.