Amusing to think that if you had your hands on one of the historic earliest notes that were written out by hand in odd amounts, you could present it at Threadneedle Street and get a few pounds and some odd pence for something worth a great deal more.
With regard to the U.S. I don’t know why we have two versions of the $20 floating around and will soon have multiple versions of other denominations. If we’re changing the designs to foil counterfeiters, then you’d think that when a new design appears, the old ones would be pulled from circulation as quickly as possible. That happened when the “classic” $20 bill was replaced in the 1990S by the first large portrait design. The old ones disappeared almost overnight. However, when it comes to the new “colorized” design, I still only rarely get those from the ATM, and they circulate side by side with the last generation.
I remember a documentary on such a scheme, a lot of forged bank notes ended up being dumped by German soldiers in a lake in eastern Europe before the Russians over ran them. Can’t remember where exactly, near where the German Navy had a research station on a lakeside
This is where the English definition of ‘legal tender’ is important. It doesn’t mean ‘valid currency’, because that’s anything a vendor is willing to accept.
If a banknote is no longer legal tender, a creditor (including a bank) is not obliged to accept it in repayment of a debt. So it’s easy to remove old English notes from circulation quickly, by deeming them to be not legal tender beyond a specific date. Therefore, banks will refuse to accept them after this date from anyone or any business with a debt, i.e. lots of them, and so businesses will refuse to accept them, and in turn the public will make efforts to get rid of them before that date.
If you have a situation where all old notes are deemed valid in all situations forever, then this ‘gentle encouragement’ to get rid of old notes doesn’t work.
This is true; but my point was that the classic twenties were almost entirely pulled from circulation without the imposition of an expiration date. I don’t know how they managed it, unless commercial banks were directed to exchange all their old notes for new ones. A $20 bill normally circulates for many months if not several years, and the old ones disappeared much more quickly than that.
I think over here, the imposition of an expiration date would be considered tantamount to repudiating the note, even if plenty of warning were given. It would run counter to the idea that a valid banknote, once printed and issued, should retain its face value in perpetuity, just as in former times a gold coin would.
Thanks, Mk VII - it’s coming back to me now. I seem to remember reference to it in Frederick Forsyth’s thriller “The ODESSA File,” in which the head forger weeps as all of his beautiful bogus bills are dumped into the lake!
Well, that’s not the case here, either, because old notes can always be exchanged at the Bank of England. After all, they’re the issuing authority, rather than other banks, or retailers.
