I recently read a book called Traitor's Purse by Margery Allingham. Written and set in England during the Second World War, it features Albert Campion, her aristocratic detective, who was occasionally called upon not only to solve murders in high life, but to save England.

In Traitor's Purse, he saves it from a fiendish Nazi plot to destroy England's national morale at around the time of the Battle of Britain, and the fiendish plan is this: the villains have printed up millions and millions of pounds of counterfeit bank notes, which of course are not actually backed by anything, and plan to distribute this by mail.

This will make the currency worth much less automatically, by inflating the money supply, and make all of it untrustworthy, which with a little luck, the Nazis thought, would create panic. In a particularly fiendish touch, they'd planned to do it by mailing it to every house in Great Britain which had received government assistance, with an official looking note saying it would be the patriotic thing to do to spend it as soon as possible.

It is actually not that easy to give money away on the street, because people think there's a catch to it, and patriotic people would reject money that had been showered on them from Luftwaffe planes, (which was, believe it or not, a real-life Nazi plan, never carried out) but people who have been on the dole are used to the idea of getting money from the government, and usually have no problem spending it right away. (Almost all these people would have been white, by the way.)

You'll be happy to know that Campion saved the day, by blowing up the cave full of trucks where the money was stored, and England went on to win the Second World War.

As for the fiendish plot to inflate the currency by giving away money at random to people who were supposed to spend it as fast as possible–it's back. This time it's called ”The Stimulus.”