Imagine reaching into your wallet right now.
OK. And you pull out a single standard size piece
of paper. And you just use it to buy an entire
house in cash. Just one bill. Right. No briefcases.
No wire transfers, no waiting for a bank to clear
a mortgage or anything. You just slide it across
the table? Yeah, just sliding one foldable, lightweight
piece of paper across the table and taking the
keys. That's wild to even picture. It is, right.
Because we are so conditioned to associate massive,
life -changing wealth with digital numbers sitting
on a screen. Right. Or like an impossibly heavy
pallet of gold bars locked in a vault somewhere.
Exactly. The idea of holding a genuine fortune
in something that could literally blow away in
a stiff breeze. It just feels completely absurd
today. It really does, because it fundamentally
alters the psychology of what you're holding.
I mean, we treat paper money as pocket change.
Yeah, coffee money. Exactly. Something meant
for tips or minor conveniences. But treating
a single note as a massive financial asset. It
forces you to rethink the very concept of physical
currency. Oh, absolutely. It bridges this gap
between a simple medium of exchange and a highly
concentrated portable store of immense value.
And that concept is exactly what we are exploring
today on this deep dive. It's a fun one. It really
is. We are looking into the entirely forgotten,
completely wild history of large denomination
United States currency. The mega bills. Yes,
the mega bills. Anything printed over $100. Our
mission today is to figure out why the US government
ever felt the necessity to print bills up to,
and this is a real number, $100 ,000. Still hard
to wrap my head around that number on one bill.
Right. And we're going to find out who was actually
authorized to use them, how they function mechanically
in the economy, and why the government ultimately
decided to... quietly, systematically hunt them
down and destroy them. Yeah, the trajectory of
these high denomination notes is essentially
the biography of the American financial system
itself. Oh, totally. It's the story of a nation
transitioning from a fragmented, highly physical
frontier -based economy into the incredibly complex,
interconnected, and well, ultimately digital
financial behemoth that dictates global commerce
today. OK, let's unpack this. Because to understand
the astronomically huge bills of the 20th century,
we really have to rewind the clock significantly.
We do. We need to establish why a big bill was
ever practically necessary in the very first
place. Right. And this practice of printing massive
denominations actually started long before the
United States was even a unified economic powerhouse.
Oh yeah, way back. We were talking about the
late 18th century. Yeah, the initial necessity
arose out of sheer geographical and logistical
challenges. I mean, North Carolina, for instance,
they printed a five hundred dollar note as early
as May 1780. 1780. Yeah. And Virginia saw the
utility in this and almost immediately followed
suit by October of that same year, authorizing
their own five hundred and one thousand dollar
notes. Wow. And by 1781, Virginia was already
printing two thousand dollar notes. I mean, a
two thousand dollar note. in the 1780s is just
an unfathomable sum of money. It really is. You
are talking about the value of vast estates and
massive commercial enterprises compressed into
a single slip of paper. Exactly. And this trend
only seemed to accelerate during times of severe
national crisis. Right. Like when the government
needed to move incredible amounts of capital
to keep an army fed and armed. The printing presses
just scaled up. Yeah. War is expensive. During
the War of 1812, you see the authorization of
$1 ,000 treasury notes. And by the time the American
Civil War breaks out, the numbers just explode.
The Confederacy was issuing 500 $1 ,000 notes
to desperately keep their war effort afloat.
While the Union side, in 1861, was issuing three
-year interest -bearing notes in denominations
of 500, 1 ,000, and an astonishing $5 ,000. $5
,000 in 1861. Yeah. And the physical design of
these objects, it was heavily leveraged to project
authority and stability during incredibly unstable
times. They weren't just boring pieces of paper.
No, not at all. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing
didn't just print numbers on blank paper. They
created highly intricate nationalistic art. Right.
The obverse designs featured major historical
figures. You had James Madison anchoring the
five thousand dollar note, Andrew Jackson on
the ten thousand dollar note. Wow. But beyond
the presidents, these notes were heavily decorated
with allegorical figures meant to inspire deep
confidence. Yeah, you had engravings of justice,
liberty and victory. I was reading that an eighteen
sixty nine five hundred dollar note. featured
John Quincy Adams positioned right alongside
a detailed engraving of justice. That's right.
Others featured eagles, shields, or grand historical
depictions like the surrender of General Burgoyne.
They really wanted them to look official. It
was a conscious choice to make the money look
undeniably legitimate. But I have a major mechanical
question here. Sure. I'm trying to picture the
reality of the 1860s economy. Carrying one of
these notes is essentially like carrying a physical
bearer bond, meaning whoever physically holds
the paper owns the money. No questions asked.
Right. It's just whoever has it. So did a regular
citizen ever actually walk into a general store,
pick up a loaf of bread and some ammunition and
hand the clerk a five hundred dollar bill? Or
was this strictly an instrument for the financial
elite and the commercial banks? So for the everyday
citizen walking down a wooden sidewalk, these
bills essentially did not exist. Okay, that makes
sense. Yeah, the average person would live their
entire life without ever seeing a $5 ,000 note,
much less actually holding one. Right. To understand
their mechanical purpose, you really have to
look at the constraints of a banking system operating
without instantaneous communication. No internet.
Exactly. When an institution in Boston needed
to settle a massive complex account with an institution
in Philadelphia, they could not rely on a digital
network. Wealth was heavily tied to physical
assets, specifically gold and silver. So it's
basically a problem with sheer physics. If you
need to move a million dollars in 1865, doing
that in $20 bills, or worse, actual gold coin
is a complete logistical nightmare. Oh, it requires
a massive amount of physical space, reinforced
train cars, heavily armed guards. But if you
convert that million dollars into $5 ,000 notes,
suddenly you're dealing with just 200 pieces
of paper. That is so much easier. Right. It can
fit securely in a single strong box. So the high
denomination bills were essentially institutional
tools that function to compress physical space
and ease the logistical burden of moving capital.
That's a great way to put it. physical space.
Yeah they were legally tender but functionally
they were bank -to -bank settlement mechanisms.
Okay here's where it gets really interesting
because knowing that moving physical wealth across
the country was a dangerous expensive nightmare
perfectly sets up the arrival of the ultimate
behemoth of American currency. Oh here we go.
A bill so large and so unimaginably valuable
that the general public was explicitly forbidden
from ever holding it. Yes. This brings us to
the series 1934 Gold Certificates. Right. And
you really cannot separate the creation of these
specific notes from the economic terror of the
Great Depression and the drastic measures taken
by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. March 9th,
1933. FDR signs Executive Order 6102. A huge
moment. This is a massive turning point in how
Americans interacted with their wealth. The order
compulsorily confiscated privately held gold
from the public and effectively repealed the
gold standard for everyday domestic commerce.
Yeah. Citizens could no longer legally hoard
gold bullion or gold coins. The government just
aggressively centralized the gold supply. And
the centralization of that gold was a foundational
shift. I mean, once the public was removed from
the gold standard, the federal government and
the Federal Reserve still had to manage the immense
reserves they had just consolidated. Right. They
have all this physical gold now. Exactly. So
to facilitate the internal accounting of this
massive, newly centralized wealth, they issued
the series 1934 gold certificates. And the denomination
scaled rapidly. You had 100, 500, 1000, 10 ,000.
And finally, the absolute apex of American currency.
The $100 ,000 note. The $100 ,000 note featuring
the portrait of Woodrow Wilson. Yeah. $100 ,000
printed on a single piece of paper during the
height of the Great Depression. I mean, that
is a staggering amount of capital. It's hard
to even fathom. That is not a transaction. That
is macroeconomics represented on a 2. six by
six point one inch rectangle. Beautifully said.
And these were used exclusively for intergovernmental
transactions between Federal Reserve banks. Like
they were never issued for public circulation.
If an average citizen somehow got their hands
on a Woodrow Wilson note, it was considered illegal
possession of government property. Straight to
jail. Right. Yeah. But I have to push back on
the logic of the system first. OK. Wait. If only
the Federal Reserve Banks were using the $100
,000 bill to talk to other Federal Reserve Banks,
why go through the immense trouble and expense
of printing a physical, highly secure banknote
at all? I mean, if it's just the government settling
accounts with itself, why not just use a ledger
book? Why not just write down a credit in a master
ledger and avoid printing a fancy piece of paper
entirely? What's fascinating here is how this
specific physical object highlights the psychological
transition of the 1930s banking infrastructure.
You have to remember that while the government
had severed the public's direct tie to the gold
standard, the institutional framework like the
internal logic of the Federal Reserve was still
deeply intrinsically tied to physical assets.
The ghost of the gold standard was still haunting
the vaults. So the bankers themselves still needed
something tangible to hold onto. Precisely. When
the Federal Reserve branch in New York needed
to transfer 50 million dollars of wealth to the
branch in San Francisco The internal regulations
of the era required a physical gold certificate
to legally back that transfer interesting So
the $100 ,000 note wasn't circulating money.
It was a high security accounting token It was
a highly specialized receipt proving that a specific
amount of gold was physically accounted for in
the Treasury vaults Okay, that makes more sense.
Yeah printing it as an intricate counterfeit
proof banknote was the highest technology of
the day to ensure that these ledgers balanced
perfectly without having to load tons of literal
gold bullion onto a specialized train every time
the regional branches needed to settle their
balances. Wow. So it was a bridge between the
physical past and the digital future. The paper
is lighter than a ton of gold, but it still feels
real enough to satisfy the institutional requirements
of the bankers. But as we know, that bridge eventually
crumbled. If these massive bills were so incredibly
useful for the government and the banking sector
to move dense amounts of wealth, why did they
suddenly face execution? Well, the execution
wasn't sudden. It was a slow, deliberate strangulation.
Oh. Yeah. These high denomination bills from
the 500 up to the 10 ,000 notes meant for general
circulation were last actually printed on December
27th, 1945. Right, in the aftermath of World
War II. Exactly. But they didn't vanish immediately.
They continued to circulate quietly within the
banking system for a couple of decades. OK. It
wasn't until July 14th, 1969 that the Federal
Reserve System and the Department of the Treasury
officially announced they were discontinuing
them. Right. And the stated public reason from
the Fed in 1969 was simply a lack of use. Right.
Which sounds reasonable. Yeah. And on the surface,
that makes total sense. I mean, the average consumer
wasn't buying groceries with a $5 ,000 note.
Definitely not. But the government didn't issue
a recall. They didn't put out a public notice
demanding everyone turn in their large bills
by a certain date. They instituted a much quieter
mechanism, a policy of Passive retirement. Passive
retirement is an incredibly effective bureaucratic
method for systematic destruction. I bet. Yeah.
Starting in July 1969, the Federal Reserve simply
ordered that any time one of these large bills
was naturally deposited at a commercial bank
or returned to a Federal Reserve branch to settle
an account, it was instantly flagged. Wow. It
was pulled out of circulation, sent to a secure
facility and permanently destroyed. It was a
one -way street into the shredder. So what does
this all mean? Right. The official public line
is lack of use. But the underlying mechanics
point to two massive colliding shifts in modern
society. What shifts? The first shift is technological.
We finally saw the rise of complex electronic
money systems. Mainframe computers were starting
to take over the banking ledgers, which completely
eliminated the need to compress geography into
paper. That's very true. A computer could update
a balance. in New York and San Francisco simultaneously,
rendering the physical transfer of a $10 ,000
note completely obsolete for the banks. But the
second shift is much darker. and it has entirely
to do with the criminal underworld. Ah, yes.
The intersection of high value currency and law
enforcement. Exactly. It sounds like the government
essentially realized they had accidentally engineered
the ultimate logistical tool for a Hollywood
movie villain. Oh, totally. Like a way to fit
a million dollars into a single small briefcase.
If you are running an illegal drug trafficking
syndicate, or you need to systematically launder
a million dollars in cash, doing that in standard
$20 bills. is a logistical nightmare. Yeah, a
million dollars in 20s weighs roughly 110 pounds.
Exactly. It requires duffel bags. It is bulky.
It is highly suspicious. And it is incredibly
difficult to transport across borders undetected.
But if you convert that million dollars into
$10 ,000 notes... That is just 100 individual
pieces of paper. You have taken a massive logistical
hurdle and shrunk it down to something you can
slip inside a folded newspaper or a standard
paperback novel. And that extreme value density
became an intolerable threat to the state. Technological
advancement in the legitimate banking sector
intercepted perfectly with the urgent needs of
federal law enforcement. That kind of lied, Eddie.
Yeah. The legal economy no longer required the
physical density of a 5 ,000 or 10 ,000. note,
but the criminal underworld absolutely relied
on it to function at scale. That makes so much
sense. Deep concerns regarding sophisticated
counterfeiting, international drug trafficking
rings, and unchecked money laundering really
forced the U .S. government's hand. Wow. They
recognized that continuing to circulate or reissue
large denomination currency was effectively subsidizing
the logistics of organized crime. Geez. This
raises an important question though. At what
point does the convenience of cash become a liability
to a society? That is the ultimate tension of
modern currency, isn't it? When the physical
tool you engineered for your own institutional
convenience is entirely co -opted by entities
trying to actively subvert your legal system,
you kind of have to break the tool. You do. And
the government tried incredibly hard to break
it. They tried to systematically destroy all
of these notes through that passive retirement
mechanism. But human nature threw a wrench into
the shredder. Specifically, the human instinct
to hoard, collect, and preserve rarities. Exactly.
What blows my mind is how few of these notes
actually survived the 1969 purge. It's really
wild. Out of the millions of high denomination
bills printed across the centuries, we are talking
about a microscopic fraction making it out alive
into the modern era. The scarcity data on these
surviving relics is staggering. The attrition
rate is historically profound. I mean, based
on detailed numismatic tracking data from May
2009, there were only 336 of the $10 ,000 bills
known to exist in the world. Wait, 336 individual
notes left on the entire planet? Yeah. And the
numbers for the $5 ,000 bills are nearly identical,
with only 342 known to exist. Wow. As you move
down the denomination ladder, the survival rate
increases slightly, but it remains incredibly
sparse. There are roughly 165 ,000 of the $1
,000 bills left in existence, and fewer than
75 ,000 of the $500 bills remaining. Out of how
many? Out of the well over 900 ,000 that were
originally printed. Man. And because they are
so incredibly scarce, the basic laws of supply
and demand have taken over. Absolutely. These
pieces of paper are worth exponentially more
than the number printed on their face. Collectors
and numismatists pay massive premiums at auction
to own them. Oh yeah, huge premiums. Some of
the best preserved examples are locked away in
heavily guarded museum archives, like the National
Numismatic Collection at the Smithsonian. But
the absolute best illustration of how these bills
transition from functional money to cultural
mythology is the Benny Binion casino display.
Oh, the Horseshoe Casino exhibit in Las Vegas.
It is legendary in currency circles. Yes. Binnie
Binion was a famous, highly flamboyant Las Vegas
casino owner. And for years, right on the floor
of Binion's Horseshoe Casino, he set up a public
display that perfectly captured the sheer audacity
of high denomination currency. It was quite the
sight. He took exactly $110 ,000 bills, arranged
them meticulously, and encased the entire stack
inside thick bulletproof acrylic. Just right
out there in the open. It was a literal physical
million dollars in paper just sitting there under
the casino lights for tourists to stand next
to and take photographs with. That display is
a perfect encapsulation of the psychological
mystique these bills carry. It really is. By
encasing them in acrylic, Binion permanently
stripped them of their functional utility and
elevated them entirely into the realm of spectacle.
Right. They weren't money anymore. Exactly. They
ceased to be financial instruments intended to
settle accounts. They became powerful cultural
artifacts representing the raw, visceral fantasy
of American wealth. Eventually, that specific
display was dismantled and the individual bills
were sold off to private collectors. But it deeply
illustrates how our relationship to these notes
shifted over time. They evolved from vital logistical
tools for the 19th century frontier to banking
receipts for the Federal Reserve to museum pieces
and casino attractions. A pretty incredible journey.
Yeah. But the concept of the mega bill isn't
entirely relegated to the history books. We are
actually seeing a modern resurgence of the underlying
idea playing out right now in the halls of Congress.
It is a fascinating contemporary coda to a centuries
-old history. It is. If you look at the official
policy, the U .S. Department of the Treasury
stance is unequivocal. They explicitly state
that the current denominations in circulation,
the $1 through the $100 bill, perfectly serve
the logistical and economic needs of the modern
public. The Treasury has zero plans to change
the denominations currently in use. But the legislative
branch periodically pushes back against that.
They do. For example, in June 2024, Representative
Paul Gosar introduced a formal bill into Congress,
attempting to force the Federal Reserve to restart
the issuance of the $500 bill. And the legislation
specifically proposed that the design feature
the portrait of former President Donald Trump.
And just a year later, in 2025, another piece
of legislation was introduced in Congress to
issue a newly designed $250 note, which was also
proposed to feature Trump's portrait. Right.
And looking at these legislative proposals purely
as an extension of the historical record, it
deeply demonstrates how entirely symbolic our
physical currency remains. Exactly. And just
to be completely clear to you, listening, we
are just reporting the information from the source
text here. Oh, definitely. We aren't taking any
political sides on the specific bills. We're
analyzing this impartially as a reflection of
how currency functions beyond mere mathematics.
Exactly. If we connect this to the bigger picture,
physical currency has never been just a neutral
medium of exchange. It is an active, living reflection
of a nation's current priorities, serving as
both an economic tool and a highly visible political
canvas. Like the artwork on the Civil War bills.
Precisely. In 1861, A sprawling, intricate $5
,000 note reflected a fractured nation desperately
trying to project authority and move capital
quickly enough to survive a devastating civil
war. In 1934, the untouchable $100 ,000 Woodrow
Wilson note reflected a government executing
a massive, unprecedented restructuring of its
entire financial foundation, pivoting sharply
away from the public gold standard. And today,
the contemporary debates of for whether we should
print new large denomination bills and exactly
whose portrait should be elevated onto them.
Well, they reflect the realities of our modern
cultural and political landscape. The physical
paper we carry in our pockets is a deeply contested
national canvas. That is an incredibly profound
way to view something we usually just shove into
a wallet without a second thought. It really
is. It is a canvas that actively documents the
story of the country. And what a massive sweeping
journey we have unpacked today. We covered a
lot of ground. We really did. We started all
the way back in the late 1780s, looking at North
Carolina and Virginia, printing the very first
$500 notes to generate the capital needed to
fund the chaotic early days of a brand new nation.
Yeah. We looked at the extreme physical logistics
of the 1860s where moving wealth required strong
boxes and armed guards. Right. the psychological
shock of 1933, the confiscation of public gold,
and the creation of that mythical, untouchable
$100 ,000 Woodrow Wilson bill that was strictly
reserved for the vaults of the Federal Reserve.
And we examined the quiet, relentless mechanics
of passive retirement, where the rise of sophisticated
electronic banking networks and the urgent fight
against organized crime led the government to
systematically hunt down and destroy these beautiful
pieces of financial art. and we ended up staring
at a million dollars trapped in acrylic on the
Las Vegas casino floor right before looking at
the modern congressional debates attempting to
bring the mega bills back from the dead. Yeah.
It is a completely wild, hidden history. It truly
is. So to you listening, the very next time you
walk up to an ATM, plunging your pin in and pull
out a simple, crisp $20 bill, take just one second
to really look at it. Just look at the paper.
Yeah. You aren't just holding 20 bucks to buy
lunch. You are holding the ultimate surviving
winner of a brutal, centuries -long evolution
of American money. The survivor. Exactly. The
$20 bill survived the exact same evolutionary
cut that sent the $10 ,000 note and the $100
,000 note straight into the federal shredder.
Because the modern $20 bill is the perfectly
optimized tool for our current economic era.
It is small enough to be easily accessible for
daily, minor transactions, large enough to still
be highly useful, and the overarching system
behind it is digital enough to render the massive
cumbersome paper notes completely obsolete for
institutional transfers. But it does leave me
wondering about the ultimate trajectory of where
we are heading. Oh! Yeah. If physical cash continues
to rapidly vanish, replaced almost entirely by
digital numbers glowing on a smartphone screen.
Which is happening fast. Right. If peer -to -peer
apps and instantaneous wire transfers completely
take over the function of value exchange, and
these massive, beautifully engraved paper bills
are locked away forever in climate -controlled
museum archives or the heavy safes of private
collectors, does losing the ability to physically
hold our most significant wealth fundamentally
change our psychological relationship to money
itself? That's a great question. Like, does seeing
a digital million dollars registered on a banking
app ever really trigger the same visceral biological
reaction as holding a physical, heavy stack of
$10 ,000 bills right in the palms of your hands?
I mean, it represents a profound, unprecedented
shift in the human experience. For thousands
of years, wealth was defined by holding physical
value. Now we're rapidly moving toward a reality
where wealth simply means trusting the integrity
of invisible data. check your bank balance on
your phone. Thank you so much for joining us
on this deep dive. We'll catch you next time.