My idea for US currency reform

[kphoger]

I wish some of those would make it to one of my banks.

For a few years, pre-pandemic, whenever I physically went into a bank (maybe a couple times a year) to get a supply of cash, I'd ask whether they had any $2's available.  No joy.

I do that too.  More than once, I've had the teller offer to get some out of the vault for me.

[Big John]

Gus Gorman in Superman III collects about $85,000 from all the partial cents in the company accounting balance.

[michravera]

I'm not in favor of totally scrapping the penny as a unit of coinage, but I see nothing wrong with putting a halt to minting of new pennies temporarily (or even indefinitely). There are plenty of pennies in circulation, and probably a lot more being hoarded that could be put back into circulation.

I agree that there a lot of pennies out there, but how do you convince lots of people to empty their pennies jars, roll them, and take them to the bank so they can go back into circulation?

Not having to roll them would go a long way.

I've never rolled coins to take them back to the bank  If your bank requires that, then I'm sorry.

If it's a few, they don't care.  If it's over 100 or so, either you have to roll them or they will but they'll charge, you guessed it, a fee.

Banks in Oklahoma usually have a Coinstar-esque machine you can dump loose change into. It prints off a receipt you take to the teller, and done.

As I complained about in another thread, my credit union in Nevada doesn't even accept or dispense coins. My business bank account's fee structure is such that even talking to a human teller costs $0.45 (and they have no change machine, either, so rolled coins it is).

I might try hitting up one of the casinos to see if they'd like to take my change. (The casino I worked at in Oklahoma exchanged coins for bills for free, but I don't really know what the standard policies are in Nevada.)

I doubt that they've disinstalled them, but Nevada Casinos that had slot machines always used to have coin counters. You would hand them your bucket of coins and they cashier would dump in the bucket and pay you in bills (or a check, if you asked nicely). They might have even worked with genuine $2 and $5 tokens from the casino, but I rarely played slots (and more rarely still at those stakes).

[NWI_Irish96]

Get rid of all but the following:

Coins: $1, 25c, 5c

Bills: $100, $20, $5, $2

May need to start recirculating the $500

[kalvado]

And a side effect of 1c thing:
Internet provider just increased the rate - by 1 cent a month. It is now .00 instead of .99
A new trend?

[Big John]

And a side effect of 1c thing:
Internet provider just increased the rate - by 1 cent a month. It is now .00 instead of .99
A new trend?

For the same psychological effect of .99, .95 would be used.

[kkt]

Gus Gorman in Superman III collects about $85,000 from all the partial cents in the company accounting balance.

And of course it was the trick the hackers in Office Space were trying to use, except that their software had a bug and they took out too much too quickly.

[Scott5114]

Get rid of all but the following:

Coins: $1, 25c, 5c

Bills: $100, $20, $5, $2

May need to start recirculating the $500

My proposal is simpler:

Coins: 5c, 25c, $1
Bills: $2, $5, $20, $100

I'm starting to think some of you haven't actually worked with cash before. 95¢ being three quarters and four nickels would be an unmitigated pain in the ass. Remember, rolls contain either 40 or 50 pieces; if you get rid of the dime that means you could blow through a whole roll of nickels in ten transactions. (Meaning you have to close the window while you get another roll of nickels from somewhere. Meaning customers start being a dick to you.)

The days where we ran out of dimes at work were always miserable.

Bringing back the $500 would be nice.

I really despise the fact that most places seem to have stopped carrying $10 bills. My wallet gets stuffed with $5s, which these days are barely worth anything, so I always end up having to use two or more of them anyway. When I lived in Oklahoma, I would get $10s from the bank instead of $20s to avoid this.

[Rothman]

Gus Gorman in Superman III collects about $85,000 from all the partial cents in the company accounting balance.

And of course it was the trick the hackers in Office Space were trying to use, except that their software had a bug and they took out too much too quickly.

Which was a great commentary on those who have an inflated view of their own competence.

[mgk920]

Another funny thing about this credit union is that they have a little vestibule that contains just an ATM, which is accessible from outside when the branch itself is closed. To get into the vestibule, you have to insert your debit card

My BoA has a storefront like this, around the corner from where a branch used to be. Use your card to get in the door, and then there's just enough room for 2 ATM's and a small counter. I presume the business next door to it in the strip mall has the space behind it.

A regular bank here in downtown Appleton, WI does that.  It's fairly common.

Mike

[MikeTheActuary]

Bringing back the $500 would be nice.

The $500 was pulled because law enforcement types dislike how it facilitates certain criminal activity.

It's not coming back unless the real value of the dollar really tanks, and even then...well, I have my suspicion that that those law enforcement types would have preferred to eliminate everything larger than the $20.

[Rothman]

Bring back the Chase notes.

[Ted$8roadFan]

This is sacrilege for someone from Massachusetts, but I wonder if the U.S. would consider moving towards polymer banknotes.

[1995hoo]

Bringing back the $500 would be nice.

The $500 was pulled because law enforcement types dislike how it facilitates certain criminal activity.

It's not coming back unless the real value of the dollar really tanks, and even then...well, I have my suspicion that that those law enforcement types would have preferred to eliminate everything larger than the $20.

Europe has had a €500 bill and law enforcement are were pretty unhappy about that; it's sometimes known as the "gangster note" because there's evidence it's popular for money laundering. I tend to think that if there were something larger than a $100 bill, a new denomination like a $200 might make more sense (there is a €200). Even then, though, I have a feeling seeing one would be unusual for most people. I used a €200 in Berlin once and the lady seemed very surprised by it, as though she had not seen one before.

With all the stats that have been mentioned in the past week or two in connection with news reports about the penny, I tend to think the odds of anything larger than a $100 making a comeback are very, very slim, even with $100 not being worth as much as it used to be.

Back in 1997, I asked at the bank if they could give me a $500 and they said no because the Federal Reserve requires them to return them for destruction whenever they get one. (The reason I wanted one: I was moving out of the house in Alabama where I'd lived for the summer and I needed to pay my landlord about $500, but I couldn't give him a check because I was closing my bank account. That's also why I remember it was 1997.) Maybe 10 years after that, my parents were going to Uganda, where my father had a business trip, and they needed $500 cash to pay for a safari. My father told my mother to get a $500 at the bank. No dice. He was annoyed until I told him what I had been told ten years earlier. He didn't have a response when I suggested he just pay in euro because they had a €500.


(Edited to amend the first paragraph because it turns out the €500 was discontinued in 2019, though it's still legal tender in the eurozone.)

[SEWIGuy]

There is no reason to have bills larger than $100.

[1995hoo]

There is no reason to have bills larger than $100.

Oh, I can think of reasons for it (I remember what a pain it was when I worked at a computer store and someone paid $4600 cash for two laptops), but as a general matter, they're not compelling enough to outweigh the concern about money laundering and the overall decline in the use of cash for large transactions. As to that latter point, I'd suggest that the odds are that the use of cash for large transactions has likely declined to a greater degree than the use of cash for transactions overall. That is, for example, you're probably more likely to see someone pay $50 in cash at the gas station than to see someone pay, say, $3500 cash at the Apple Store to buy that Vision Pro headset. I think the people who make larger transactions are probably highly likely to have and use credit cards on which they have enough available credit or to be able to either write a personal check or get a cashier's check for transactions where credit is not an option (e.g., putting down a large down payment on a car or paying for the car in full).

[SEWIGuy]

There is no reason to have bills larger than $100.

Oh, I can think of reasons for it (I remember what a pain it was when I worked at a computer store and someone paid $4600 cash for two laptops), but as a general matter, they're not compelling enough to outweigh the concern about money laundering and the overall decline in the use of cash for large transactions. As to that latter point, I'd suggest that the odds are that the use of cash for large transactions has likely declined to a greater degree than the use of cash for transactions overall. That is, for example, you're probably more likely to see someone pay $50 in cash at the gas station than to see someone pay, say, $3500 cash at the Apple Store to buy that Vision Pro headset. I think the people who make larger transactions are probably highly likely to have and use credit cards on which they have enough available credit or to be able to either write a personal check or get a cashier's check for transactions where credit is not an option (e.g., putting down a large down payment on a car or paying for the car in full).

Yes, the bolded is a much better way to say it than I did.

I also think if we move to a $1 coin, there will be no need for a $2 bill.

[kalvado]

I'd suggest that the odds are that the use of cash for large transactions has likely declined to a greater degree than the use of cash for transactions overall.

My experience is that small contractors would happily take cash for odd tasks. Last time I paid a guy who works grounds in our building in cash for some work on my house - and don't ask me if it would be on his 1040.

As for truly criminal money, Bitcoin and alike are  doing great because they are taking that spot. Paper leaves too much trace.

[kphoger]

That is, for example, you're probably more likely to see someone pay $50 in cash at the gas station than to see someone pay, say, $3500 cash at the Apple Store to buy that Vision Pro headset. I think the people who make larger transactions are probably highly likely to have and use credit cards on which they have enough available credit or to be able to either write a personal check or get a cashier's check for transactions where credit is not an option (e.g., putting down a large down payment on a car or paying for the car in full).

We've paid cash for our last four vehicles (used) and, yes, we've definitely written a check each time instead of counting out $100 bills.

The only time I deal with a large amount of actual cash is when I'm doing my final bank runs leading up to a church mission trip, and that's because I don't have a church credit card, so I do all the trip expenses in cash and just keep the receipts.  Still, the only expenses I use $100 bills for are the hotel stays down and back, plus paying the import deposit(s) on the vehicle(s) at the Mexican border.  Both of those are just as easily accomplished with $50 bills instead.  When Mexican customs pays me the deposit(s) back at the border on the return trip, they usually pay it in $100 bills, and I honestly wish they would use smaller denominations, because some businesses still don't like accepting $100 bills, so sometimes it's hard to actually use that cash for the rest of the trip north.

For what it's worth, when I do my foreign exchange here in Wichita, the person at the forex desk always asks me if I want any 1000 MXN bills (equivalent to 50 USD), because they all know hardly anybody uses them in Mexico:  you almost never see anything larger than a 500 MXN bill (equivalent to 25 USD) in day-to-day life.  I've stopped saying yes, because they don't even necessarily have any in stock at the bank, and I see no need in making them order some for me.

Bringing back the $500 would be nice.

The $500 was pulled because law enforcement types dislike how it facilitates certain criminal activity.

It's not coming back unless the real value of the dollar really tanks, and even then...well, I have my suspicion that that those law enforcement types would have preferred to eliminate everything larger than the $20.

When the $500 bill was discontinued, it had an inflation-adjusted value of more than $4000.  A $500 bill today would be the equivalent of about $60 back when they discontinued the $500 bill but left the $100 in circulation.

[1995hoo]

Just for what it's worth, the first quote in kphoger's comment is from me, not from SEWIGuy.

[Rothman]

There is no reason to have bills larger than $100.

To reduce the number of bills one needs for large cash purchases.

[kphoger]

Just for what it's worth, the first quote in kphoger's comment is from me, not from SEWIGuy.

Fixed.  Thank you for catching that.

[SEWIGuy]

There is no reason to have bills larger than $100.

To reduce the number of bills one needs for large cash purchases.

If that is actually a concern, don't make cash purchases. It's 2025.

[GaryV]

Do the dispensary businesses still have to use cash? Because it might be legal in their state, but it's not legal in the US, so banks and CC companies won't touch them.

[kphoger]

If that is actually a concern, don't make cash purchases. It's 2025.

Or, you know, the few times you need to do so, just use a few more bills.

The $500 was pulled because law enforcement types dislike how it facilitates certain criminal activity.

Do the dispensary businesses still have to use cash? Because it might be legal in their state, but it's not legal in the US, so banks and CC companies won't touch them.

hmm