Those who want to go cashless: when I close out a bank account, what will the teller give me?
An electronic transfer to another bank account. Or a check, if you are a determined Luddite.
Europe is already in the process of phasing out the €500 note, and I read a suggestion that the US should also phase out the $100 note. Personally, I’m not in favor of eliminating the $100 note, but then I almost never use either denomination for legal or illegal purposes.
People here use them to be impressive at the grocery store.
Buying/selling boats would be a pain in the ass without hundreds.
I can’t remember the last time I used $100 bill. Or even a $50 for that matter. I might keep the latter because with a decade of normal inflation, the ATMs might switch to it eventually. For coins, I would certainly can the nickel and the dime while I was at it since it is worth less than the penny when I was growing up (an ice cream cone cost a nickel; now you cannot get one for under a couple bucks) and the dime is incommensurate with the quarter. So quarter, dollar, $2 and $5 coins and then $10, $20, and $50 bills.
Yes, the usual suspect asshats suggest all kinds of dumbshit, including negative interest rates. I’m astonished that anyone thinks that $100 is a lot of money or a large bill at this late date. 50 years ago, maybe. Not anymore. I get it that drug kingpins like cash. So what? I bet they like Mom, Dad, apple pie, and Chevrolet too.
That probably depends upon one’s income.
It probably has more to do with how much one uses cash versus more modern stuff.
I make a decent living, have a decent net worth and last handled a hundred dollar bill a year ago. It was a style I’d never seen before except in pictures on the 'net. Other than that one time it’d been years since I last touched a hundred. I only use 20s and smaller. And those only rarely any more.
The guy who gave it to me is a small-time wheeler dealer. His income is 1/4th of mine. If that. But a lot of it is in cash. Looking at the wad in his pocket I bet he doesn’t think a hundred is a large bill. I do.
Who’s right? We both are.
Try and use 50s or 100s at our neighborhood merchants. It’s a PITA if they even take it.
Is the mint a for profit business?
I’d have a tree-fiddy coin and bill to please the Loch Ness Monster.
Facilitate it. The government doesn’t need to know every transaction.
Funny you should say that (PDF warning). Partly because of seigniorage. the mint actually does make money.
The difference in size is fairly subtle; it’s not like you’re folding up an A3 sheet to get it in your wallet. They still stack fine. But it’s enough to make it easier to pull out a particular denomination of note.
There should be a coin large enough to pay for cheap common things. Now, the largest coin in regular circulation is the quarter, and the only thing I can think of that can be singly priced and bought for a quarter is syringes at WalMart pharmacy. So coins have been relegated to nuisance.
Canada has a $1 and $2 coin, but they are too big and heavy. For the present buying power of the dollar, I’d suggest coins of 10c, 20c, 50c, 1.00 and 2.00, with the largest about the size of the current quarter. Nobody ever carries more than one $5 bill around, so that could be a coin, too.
When I was growing up, I don’t think I ever owned my own dollar bill until I was about 12. In terms of purchasing power then, the penny was worth about 15c and you could buy a piece of candy with it. Nickel would get you a phone call or a coke from a vending machine or bus fare or the morning paper. Dime would get a comic book or a double dip ice cream cone. Quarter was 3 or 4 bucks, and it was my weekly allowance. My dad paid a quarter for a gallon of gas or a pack of Camels or Time Magazine or the Sunday paper. Haircut was 50c. Coins actually had value for retail purchases. You could eat a decent meal at a sit down restaurant for a paper dollar, and leave a couple of coins under the plate for a tip.
I’ve been in several countries in the past year of two in which coins did not exist at all, even the slightest denominations were paper. Moldova, Somaliland, Cambodia. China had no coins when I was there, but maybe they do now. I don’t like that. Coins are much easier to handle than a huge wad of 20 or 30 bills. But not if they are not distinctive. In Mexico, I never learned to recognize the coins without turning them all over and looking at the numbers on them. Djibouti has two coins that are really hard to tell apart. I might have got ripped off there, I’ll never know.
there are a lot of perfectly legal transactions going on by other people, and money is needed for then, too. When I buy a used car, the seller never accepts a check, so I have to go around with 40 or 50 $100 bills wadded into my pocket. A lot of people cannot get bank accounts any more, so they have to cash their check at the supermarket and pay their bills with money orders, and those are all cash transaction of hundreds of dollars. At least half the rentters in my apartment complex pay their rent with a money order, bought at a convenience store, with cash. When gas prices went so high back around 2010, a $100 bill wasn’t enough to fill the tank of an SUV, but stations still refused to accept a $100 or even a $50. I see big ranch families wheeling $300 worth of groceries out to their cars on Saturdays. There’s another world than just sururbanites with salaries.
When I travel overseas, I don’t trust ATMs in third world countries (if you can find one at all), so I carry about 20 or 30 Benjamins with me, and exchange them as I need them with money changers. Which is damned bulky in my money belt. If our largest denomination was the $20, I’d have to leave home with over a hundred of them.
Granted.
My post was contrasting with somebody above me who said effectively that everyone he knew used hundreds all the time and most folks wished there were even bigger bills available so they wouldn’t have to carry so many Benjamins every day.
Clearly any well-implemented move to significantly reduce the cash use in the economy would have to solve the problem of the unbanked. Some sort of mandate that all banks had to offer a simple no-frills debit card account to all comers for a regulated low price. Subsidized by the Feds (i.e. the rest of us) if necessary. Ideally with some sort of trustworthy direct person-to-person transfer feature to solve things like buying cars, buying at flea markets, and paying tradesmen.
The cash economy will always (?) be with us. It doesn’t need to be as large as it is. Whether it’s broke enough to need fixing now is a separate question. The OP assumes we’ve arbitrarily decided on currency reform. Now we’re just playing around with how to tweak it and to what goal(s).
I still like my prime number currency plan. As Zippy the Pinhead almost said: “If you can’t propose something smart, at least propose something surreal.” 
If our government ever went all digital, and eliminated its issuance and distributions of cash, the private sector would immediately replace it with some form of physical portable currency. First, local banks would just print up notes the equivalent of low-value CDs payable to bearer. Then the big boys in the international banking cartel would get into the act, and you’d have Citi dollar bills. . The currency would then resemble those one pounds notes issued by the Scottish Linen Bank and other banks, that freely circulated in the UK into the 1970s. More recently I’ve seen local notes in Argentina, in which people had full confidence. There is a need for currency, but there is no natural economic requirement that the public sector control it.
In fact, even foreign currency could be used if the US got out of the business of printing money. Anything that people trust as redeemable with a recognized value. There is talk that Sweden (I think) is going to stop paper money, but everybody would then just start quoting prices and paying in euros. When a country switches to euros, that is effectively what has happened. Money will not go away.
YOW!!!
I think I’m having a mid-week crisis.
