Comment by burningChrome
5 hours ago
>> and we won't have $100 bills anymore.
Heard some pundits on the radio talking about the elimination of the penny and one of them who worked at the Secret Service as an analyst talked about why the US paper money only goes to $100 bills. He said it was to reduce criminals and illicit activity and criminals having to store it.
He related the story of Pablo Escobar's brother or cousin who was the accountant for the cartel. He said they were losing billions of dollars every year because of various kinds of attrition like rats chewing up the money, it getting too wet and disintegrating. They were losing so much because they had to store it and that wasn't always the best because they had so much of it on hand which seemed to lend credence to his story.
So if you were to get rid of the $100 bills that would further erode the ability of criminals to store so much of it.
I'm not really sure about "He said it was to reduce [...] criminals having to store it". Storage shouldn't be a huge problem - IIRC you can pack about a hundred million onto a standard pallet. Even for Escobar, who is THE outlier here, and assuming he's holding 100% of it in cash, that's about 300 pallets which easily fits into a normal warehouse. If you've got that much money it shouldn't be impossible to keep a warehouse like that clean and dry.
Now, "illicit activity" more broadly speaking checks out to me. The EU stopped printing the 500 euro note because it was primarily used for illegal transactions and money laundering.
When the $1000 bill was retired, a loaf of bread cost a couple cents. There was indeed a push to purge them during the drug scares of the late 20th century. A suitcase of $1000 bills is far sexier than one of $100 bills. It really was porting them.
With bitcoin, it's moot.
A $100 is basically a tank of gas and a sandwich in CA.
> A $100 is basically a tank of gas and a sandwich in CA.
I was just lamenting with my wife the other day about how "$100 is the new 20 bucks"
When I was a kid, mowing someone's yard for $20 was a really good payout. Kids my neighborhood last year were doing it for $70 lol.
In 1934 the dollar was worth approximately 24x more than in 2025. A cheap loaf of bread is about $2 here in NYC, so it would be about 8¢ at the time.
On one hand, the difference between 2¢ and 8¢ looks completely inconsequential now. OTOH it's a four-fold difference.
The 500-euro bill is being phased out for similar reasons. Though it's worth noting a 100-dollar bill was worth more than twice what it is today when Pablo Escobar died.
> rats chewing up the money
Profit for the US government. Fixed by plastic bills.
Every $ printed but never redeemed is a significant profit (assuming other costs are low like printing).
Especially yummy when countries just want to hoard the currency - same as selling stamps that are never used:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/1993/460/ifdp460.pd...
> Every $ printed but never redeemed is a significant profit
Redeemed? Redeemed for what? Its not like they're still trading dollars for gold at any kind of fixed rate.
I'm pretty sure the OP was talking about a far future where a $100 bill is worth less than the current penny
Though I think the parent means, eventually in the (hopefully) distant future, we'll get rid of the $100 bill because it will be worth too little.
Exactly. Like with the Zimbabwe dollars being printed in billion-dollar denominations, $100 is irrelevant then