Working Paper
Demand for U.S Banknotes at Home and Abroad: A Post-Covid Update
Judson, Ruth A. (2024-03-25)
In principle, physical currency should be disappearing: payments are increasingly electronic, with new technologies emerging rapidly, and governments increasingly restrict large-denomination notes as a way to reduce crime and tax evasion. Nonetheless, demand for U.S. banknotes continues to grow, and consistently increases at times of crisis both within and outside the United States because dollar banknotes remain a desirable store of value and medium of exchange when local currency or bank deposits are inferior. Most recently, the COVID crisis resulted in historic increases in currency ...
International Finance Discussion Papers , Paper 1387

Discussion Paper
Estimating U.S. Cross-Border Securities Flows: Ten Years of the TIC SLT
Bertaut, Carol C.; Judson, Ruth A. (2022-02-18)
The Treasury International Capital (TIC) system collects cross-border securities positions and transactions data and is the primary source of information on foreign official and private demand for U.S. Treasuries and other U.S. securities, as well as for U.S. investment in foreign securities. As noted in earlier work, though, the TIC system currently collects data separately on holdings of securities (the monthly TIC SLT and the annual SHL/SHC collections) and on transactions, the TIC S, and these two data streams can be difficult to reconcile, making interpretation of movements in the data ...
FEDS Notes , Paper 2022-02-18-2

Working Paper
Estimating the Volume of Counterfeit U.S. Currency in Circulation
Judson, Ruth A. (2025-02-14)
The incidence of currency counterfeiting and the possible total stock of counterfeits in circulation are popular topics of speculation and discussion in the press and are of substantial practical interest to the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Treasury and the United States Secret Service (USSS), who are jointly responsible for U.S. banknote design, including security features, and production. This paper assembles data from Federal Reserve and USSS sources and presents a range of estimates for the number of counterfeits in circulation in the United States. In addition, the paper presents figures on ...
International Finance Discussion Papers , Paper 1404

Discussion Paper
Implications of a U.S. CBDC for International Payments and the Role of the Dollar
Flemming, Jean; Judson, Ruth A. (2024-02-16)
Technological advances in recent decades have brought about a wave of private-sector innovation in payments and have led central banks to explore a variety of improvements to their payment systems, including the possibility of issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC). Survey evidence from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) shows that over 90% of central banks are exploring CBDCs (Kosse & Mattei, 2022). The Federal Reserve is also exploring the implications of, and options for, introducing a CBDC.
FEDS Notes , Paper 2024-02-16