Cash is in the spotlight. The European institutions are already talking openly about the possibility of abolishing the 500-euro note, the famous Bin Laden, while in the US the debate on the 100-dollar note has also been opened. It seems that in the future money will be plastic, but in the past they played an important role in the history of the dollar.
No, we are not going to talk about the famous 1 billion dollar bill that Fidel Castro stole from the evil Mr. Burns in a famous episode of the Simpsons. We are talking about 100,000, 10,000, 5,000, 1,000 and 500 dollars, the largest denominations of the US currency in history, although today the 100 dollar is the largest.
They existed in various forms and types, such as paper money, as private money, Treasury bonds, or as gold certificates since the end of the 19th century. Of all of them, the most curious are the cases of the two largest.
The $100,000 bill, in any case, was not a typical bill. Issued at the height of the Great Depression in 1934, it was issued as a certificate for its value in gold backed by the US Treasury and never circulated publicly, it only served to facilitate transactions between the different banks of the Federal Reserve system.
Only 42,000 of these certificates were issued and they have another unique feature: it is not legal to own one and they are only found in museums, although the different Fed banks still keep some.
The bill of the ‘father’ of the dollar
More interesting is the story behind the largest dollar bill that has ever circulated, the $10,000 bill (and it is still in circulation, because it is perfectly legal, although if you come across one, take it to a collector, they will pay you more for it).
The curious thing about the $10,000 bill is that, unlike the rest, it does not bear the face of a US president or one of the Founding Fathers, but of a Treasury secretary, Salmon P. Chase. Although his name is not as well known as his portrait companions, Chase is a very important figure in US financial and political history.
Governor of Ohio, after the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 he was appointed Secretary of the Treasury by Abraham Lincoln. With the cost of the war skyrocketing, he was commissioned to issue a new currency that was not backed by gold or silver, the so-called green back (appellation that is still given to the dollar today) which, as its name indicated, was printed in green by the reverse. On the obverse, he decided to put his own face, something that, however, did not help him to reach the presidency of the United States.
Perhaps he was looking for self-publicity with this decision, but despite not becoming president, it did at least serve him for one thing: to enhance his figure as the ‘father’ of modern banknotes. Precisely for this reason he wanted to honor him in 1928 when that $10,000 bill was printed. His name also became linked to banking: Chase National Bank, the predecessor of Chase Manhattan, today part of JP Morgan Chase, was named in his honor when it was founded in 1877, four years after Salmon’s own death. .
In any case, the life of these giant banknotes (inflation must be taken into account, the real value would be much higher at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century than it is today) was not excessively long. The Federal Reserve, created in 1913 and in charge of printing, stopped printing this type of bill in 1945 and officially began withdrawing it from circulation (and destroying it) in 1969, although much earlier some such as the 5,000 and 1,000 barely they were used
The curious thing is that although there was official talk of “lack of use”, suspicions of its use for criminal activities (the advantages of large bills to transport that money that you want to hide are obvious) were also key to its withdrawal, a reasoning that today is what moves the authorities as well. History repeats itself.
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