Historical Currency

September 13, 2003 8:40 PM

Have you ever seen a $100,000 bill?
From the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco's Historical Currency Gallery.
posted by crunchland (27 comments total)

yes i have, twice, at the smithsonian and at a boy scout jamboree in 1978.

no, i was not casing the place.

(hey, where would i have gotten that broke)
posted by clavdivs at 8:44 PM on September 13, 2003

hey, where would i have gotten that broke

Vegas?
posted by Stynxno at 8:47 PM on September 13, 2003

i tried to break one at mickey-d's yesterday, and the feeb at the register tried to fake me out with three $33,333 bills and something she called "a single". who'd ever fall for that?
posted by quonsar at 8:49 PM on September 13, 2003

That's much nicer than the design of the $200 bill.
posted by boaz at 8:53 PM on September 13, 2003

For those who haven't seen it: the urban legend of the $2 bill at Taco Bell.
posted by PrinceValium at 9:13 PM on September 13, 2003

Where's the one with all of the presidents on it, having a party with Jimmy Carter passed out on the couch?
posted by Space Coyote at 9:23 PM on September 13, 2003

Moo, a three dollar bill. My grandfather claimed the ghost of a drover haunted the house on the next farm. Doors would slam, stairs would creak, typical ghostly stuff.
posted by philfromhavelock at 9:32 PM on September 13, 2003

I don't mean to politicize this thread, but it's scary to think that President Bush just asked for 87,000 of those $100,000 bills.
posted by crunchland at 10:11 PM on September 13, 2003

Isn't that really 870,000 of them? Or are those 87,000 just the ones he's gonna dump on the Oval Office floor and roll around in?
posted by boaz at 10:24 PM on September 13, 2003

We just need to steal the trillion dollar bill back from Fidel Castro.
posted by gyc at 10:47 PM on September 13, 2003

Wow.

I wonder how much that bill is worth...
posted by Stauf at 11:11 PM on September 13, 2003

Hey, check it out - your posts can end in question marks too!
posted by jonson at 11:34 PM on September 13, 2003

*tweet* Curmudgeon foul! jonson looses coolness! *tweet*
posted by will at 11:40 PM on September 13, 2003

oh, will, it was a joke! crunchland knows this isn't the same kind of "question mark" post.
posted by jonson at 11:59 PM on September 13, 2003

Nope, skallas, it's still worth $100,000. Paper money isn't affected by inflation.
posted by PrinceValium at 12:13 AM on September 14, 2003

The Inflation Calculator
posted by crunchland at 1:10 AM on September 14, 2003

Checks the replay monitor...

It's all good! Playball!
posted by will at 10:33 AM on September 14, 2003

What I can't wrap around my head is why or how anyone would use a one hundred thousand dollar bill. When one deals with numbers that large, you have to go through banks anyway and most of the time it's electronic. I guess if you were paying a ransom, you could get an evelope full of hundred thousand dollar bills instead of a briefcase full of smaller stuff, but then the kidnappers would kill your wife anyway cuz they always demand "small unmarked bills."

In a world where breaking a fifty or passing twos as real are almost criminal offenses, who would even consider printing hundred thousand dollar bills? I just don't understand human beings.
posted by ZachsMind at 10:49 AM on September 14, 2003

Zachsmind: I believe ginormous bills like this were only really used to transfer money from one fed bank to another.

John D Rockefeller probably did not go running around with a stack of these in his pocket.
posted by bshort at 11:03 AM on September 14, 2003

Immediately after posting the above lameness, I glanced back at the link and caught that bit on a different page about how they stopped printing anything bigger than a hundred back in 1969. So color me slow-on-the-uptake. =)
posted by ZachsMind at 11:10 AM on September 14, 2003

about how they stopped printing anything bigger than a hundred back in 1969

Really? So sad. When I was saving to go to Europe back in 1983 I kept my cash in a little plastic container in thousand dollar bills. Those were sweet. They smelt better than regular money, too.

I think you can still get them here in Canada, should you wish.
posted by jokeefe at 11:32 AM on September 14, 2003

Really? So sad. When I was saving to go to Europe back in 1983 I kept my cash in a little plastic container in thousand dollar bills. Those were sweet. They smelt better than regular money, too.

How many thousands did you need?
posted by bshort at 11:42 AM on September 14, 2003

Two.
posted by jokeefe at 3:44 PM on September 14, 2003

Hmm, even though they've stopped printing them, I know I've seen thousand dollar bills in circulation. Now, I've only seen one, and it was maybe as much as 20 years ago. Bastard in front of my in line at some restaurant in Disney World used one to buy something like 4 drinks and 4 fries. As a result, I had to wait for them to verify the bill as real before they got to me.
posted by piper28 at 6:41 PM on September 14, 2003

Bastard in front of my in line at some restaurant in Disney World used one to buy something like 4 drinks and 4 fries.

So he got, what, like $8.24 in change?
posted by Ufez Jones at 8:34 AM on September 15, 2003

Hmm, even though they've stopped printing them, I know I've seen thousand dollar bills in circulation.

When I was a kid, I'd see Monty Hall give them out all the time on "Let's Make a Deal."
posted by chuq at 10:44 AM on September 15, 2003

Thinking about the size of that $87 billion request got me to working it out, visually. (self link)
posted by crunchland at 6:23 PM on September 15, 2003