I suspect that’s the position most politicians are taking. Changing currencies is politically painful. Hard currency is falling out of use organically so any changes made today would have little reward in the long term.
Once the vast majority have stopped using paper currency regularly (and boomers die off) you could drop the $1 bill with a lot less drama.
That’s the sweet spot.
Yes and they hate it when you pay with quarters.
Here’s a $3 bill from Joseph Smith’s “anti-bank” bank, listed on eBay for $13,000.
Sometimes I have to use a laundromat and some have machines that only take quarters. So if a washer load costs six bucks, I’m standing there for a while, feeding 24 quarters in the machine. Really annoying. (I’ve since found another laundromat with machines that accept credit card payment.)
This story is as phony as a three dollar bill. The preceding sentence is true either way, (but why would the treasury pursue such an obvious joke?)
I like all your ideas but the last. Let us not make it easier for drug cartels and money launderers.
I concur.
Eh, only small players deal in cash anymore. All the big players have graduated to international bank transfers, art auctions, and cryptocurrencies.
A $500 may make your local drug dealer’s life a touch easier, but it’s not going to be a boon to El Chapo.
It’s a more interesting question than most realize. There’s still a significant number of people who almost must use cash regularly because they do not have (and often cannot get) credit. It’s not a big deal for most of us (who tend to be at least middle income) but the issue can be very important for low income people who may not have other options.
This is becoming much less true. Touchless payments are transitioning away from being credit card based. Apple Cash, Paypal, Cash app and others provide the ability to use what are effectively pre-paid cards without ever talking to a bank or lender.
Trust me, cash is still king for drug buys.
It’s also still very popular at the grocery store, and not just among drug dealers. Lots of old farmers, general geezerhood, poor people who had trouble getting a foot in the door of the traditional banking system, and sometimes personal preference. How do I know this? I’m one of the people handling the cash at the store I work at. 1/4 to 1/3 of our transactions on a given day are still in cash, and given that some days around Christmas we do a literal million (or more) in sales you do the math. That’s way too much money to leave on the table, so the company still very much accepts cash.
With rising prices we’re seeing more larger denomination bills (again, I know this because I’m in the cash office and handle them). It’s now routine for some people to be handing over four or five c-notes for their purchases. As a cashier, I have had people occasionally purchase over a thousand dollars worth of goods from us and pay in cash. If this keeps up a $500 note will begin to make more and more sense and the only way to reverse that would be significant deflation - which I’m pretty sure most people wouldn’t want to happen.
Cash isn’t disappearing in the near future, even if cashless is more and more popular. Heck, people still use checks, money orders, and wire money with Western Union.
IF people were logical about this (and they’re very much not) we’d probably have the dime as the lowest coin, dollars and fives as coins, and possibly $500 or even $1,000 bills. And we’d still use the same number of coin and bill slots as at present.
I confess to a perverse sentimentality toward some denominations of coins and bills myself which does not conform to the above but then, I am human and thus subject to irrational attachments and emotion.
Speaking of the difficulty of changing money, read some of the comments to this article.
And - it’s not even about money that you or I would see. It’s about something akin to the
Woodrow Wilson $100,000 gold certificate.
The euro used to have a €500 banknote, and it’s being phased out (no new ones printed, existing ones remain legal tender but as soon as they reach a bank they’re withdrawn) for the express reason that they’re used a lot in organised crime. There is a discussion of doing the same with the €200 note, which still exists.
Anecdotally, I remember my mother buying a car for 16,000 deutschmarks (about $10,000 then, give or take) in the 1990s. She went to the bank, got sixteen 1,000 mark notes, put them in an envelope, and paid for the car. I found that pretty cool. Germans are notoriously fond of cash, and the €500 note was introduced in 2002 as a replacement for the 1,000 mark one (the two had almost the exact same value).
I have had occasion to use those for simple transactions (in Germany 
and I am not even an organised (or disorganised) criminal! I know someone who would keep a couple of 1000 CHF banknotes for emergency cash while travelling. This is all anecdotal evidence, but it does appear that some non-criminal, non-rich people use those higher-denomination bills. I have no idea if any studies claim to prove that 98% of use is by criminals…
In the US I know someone who went to the bank to withdraw a SHOEBOX FULL OF $100 bills (as mentioned, that is the highest denomination available). He said he felt paranoid walking out of the bank branch carrying that much cash (though I am not sure if having it in $1000 or $10000 bills would have helped much).
This is why I like living in a country where ALL parties saw the logic of eliminating the dollar bill, and if you wanted to vote for a party that promised to keep it, you’d end up voting for the “Monkey Purple Dishwasher Party” or not voting at all.
To share another anecdote, I used to work for the German central bank (the Bundesbank) for a while and remember a case when a local celebrity (apparently a state-level politician, but acting in a private capacity) walked into a branch office and got a six-digit amount (don’t remember the exact amount) in cash, which the cashier (not me) counted out to the client in €500 notes. Took a while and covered the entire counter. The whole thing and been organised in advance - the client had given the branch office advance notice so the withdrawal could be prepared and a time slot scheduled, and the purpose for which the cash was needed (which was apparently a vintage car purchase) had been checked in advance.
In the U.S. anecdote I related, I know for a fact he had to call the branch in advance. They did not keep piles of cash in the vault just in case a client decided to walk in and withdraw a backpack full of money. And, yes, they had to count it out (which therefore took 5x as long as in your story, and had to be done in a back room as there was not enough space on the counter). The Feds (not the bank) later asked what it was for, so it evidently generated some routine paperwork as well.
What is more interesting about your story is that the central bank was involved in a private transaction—is that usual? Can I even open eg a current account at the German central bank or French central bank?
The link someone posted earlier about a “digital dollar” has to do with a scenario where people would be able to have digital central bank cash rather than just money in a retail bank account. There has been discussion of digital Euros as well (and how to control them—e.g, could they stop them from being traded outside certain geographical areas, or would it have to be exactly like banknotes where a suitcase full of money could be sent overseas easily) if I recall correctly.
I certainly wouldn’t hold it against a politician for advocating for a bill eliminating the dollar, the penny, and even the nickel. I think that’s a good idea.
OTOH, there are quite a number of issues that I will judge a politician on, and, off the top of my head, I can’t think of anything that is less important to me than their position on types of paper currency in circulation.
Does it require a bill? They do not need a formal bill to set important things like the interest rate, do they?