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The Curse of Cash by Kenneth S Rogoff

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial intermediation, financial repression, forward guidance, frictionless, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, government statistician, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, moveable type in China, New Economic Geography, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, payday loans, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, RFID, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, unconventional monetary instruments, underbanked, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

Over the years, however, the constant evolution of new transaction technologies has whittled down the role of cash in the legal economy until it remains important for small transactions but has become increasingly vestigial in medium-sized and large transactions. This point is brought into sharp relief by the ever rising and ever more dominant share of large-denomination notes in the currency supply of advanced countries. The $100 bill and the 500-euro note, for example, are relatively unimportant in everyday retail transactions. Yet they dwarf small bills in their share of currency supplies in the United States and Europe. The evidence was already overwhelming two decades ago, when I first began to argue that retaining large-denomination notes was penny-wise and pound-foolish; the likely benefits from marginally increased tax receipts and marginal reductions in crime almost certainly outweigh the lost seigniorage revenues from printing paper currency.

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By some estimates, there are as many as 300,000–400,000 French citizens living in London, leading London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, in 2013 to observe that he was mayor of the sixth-largest French city.7 For the United Kingdom, it certainly will be much easier to phase out paper currency (soon to be plastic currency) in coordination with Europe. However, controls of the type SOCA and the Treasury have already implemented could easily be extended to other large-denomination foreign notes. EMERGING MARKETS Most emerging markets would likely be large net beneficiaries if advanced countries phased out their own paper currencies, especially the large-denomination notes so prevalent in corruption and crime. But for most, it is far too soon to contemplate phasing out their own currencies. For one thing, most emerging markets are not anywhere near the zero bound on interest rates; many are working hard to keep inflation rates in single digits, and most are forced to pay risk premiums on their bonds.

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Back in the early 1980s, monetary theorist Neil Wallace argued that the only reason the government gets away with issuing non-interest-bearing fiat money is because the government makes it difficult to use interest-bearing government debt for transaction purposes. For one thing, the government issues interest-bearing bonds and notes only in large denominations. If three-month Treasury bills paid market interest and if they came in, say, $100 denominations, they might even be preferred to cash for some transactions. (Something akin to this occurred in the United States during the War of 1812, when small Treasury bills bearing interest were sometimes used as currency.1) Second, even if the government issues bills and bonds only in large denominations, it has to be careful to prohibit private financial firms from issuing interest-bearing paper money–like substitutes that are 100% backed by government bonds.

The Global Money Markets by Frank J. Fabozzi, Steven V. Mann, Moorad Choudhry

asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency risk, discounted cash flows, discrete time, disintermediation, Dutch auction, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, land bank, large denomination, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market fundamentalism, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, paper trading, Right to Buy, short selling, stocks for the long run, time value of money, value at risk, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

This innovation was critical in helping depository institutions increase the amount of funds raised in the money market. It also ushered in a new era of competition among depository institutions. There are two types of negotiable CDs. The first is the large-denomination CD, usually issued in denominations of $1 million or more. The second type is the small-denomination CDs (less than $100,000) which is a retail-oriented product. Our focus here is on the large-denomination negotiable CD with maturities of one year or less and we refer to them as simply CDs throughout the chapter. The largest group of CD investors is investment companies, with money market mutual funds purchasing the lion’s share.

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See Integrated investment banks artificial barriers, 70 group, 53 Investment grade rating, 182 Investors, flexibility, 54 Invoice price, 214–215 IRSB, 254 ISDA. See International Swap Dealers Association ISSUE SIZE, 63 Issues, underwriting, 84 Jackson National Life, 99 JCPenney, 192 Junior tranches, 182–183 Kambhu, John, 43 King & Shaxson Bond Brokers Limited, 139 Knight-Ridder, 35 Kuwait, invasion, 38 Large-denomination CDs, 86 322 Large-denomination negotiable CDs, 85–90 Lazards, 139 Lee, Wanda, 76 Legal structures, 187 Lending lines, 262 Letter of credit (LOC), 96 Level I PAC bond, 178 Level II PAC bond, 178 Level III PAC bond, 179 Leveraged inverse floater, 103 Leveraging, 131 Liabilities. See Current liabilities; Long-term liabilities; Noninterest-bearing liabilities Liberty Brokerage Inc., 34 LIBID.

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These institutions are simultaneously among the biggest buyers and issuers of money markets instruments. Moreover, there are certain short-term debt instruments peculiar to financial institutions such as certificates of deposits, federal funds, bankers acceptances, and funding agreements. These instruments are the focus of this chapter. T LARGE-DENOMINATION NEGOTIABLE CDS A certificate of deposit (CD) is a financial asset issued by a depository institution that indicates a specified sum of money that has been deposited with them. Depository institutions issue CDs to raise funds for financing their business activities. A CD bears a maturity date and a specified interest rate or floating-rate formula.

Stigum's Money Market, 4E by Marcia Stigum, Anthony Crescenzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, flag carrier, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high net worth, implied volatility, income per capita, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, land bank, large denomination, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, paper trading, pension reform, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, tail risk, technology bubble, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The maximum maturity for which commercial paper may be sold is 270 days, since paper with a longer maturity must be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a timely and expensive procedure. In practice, very little 270-day paper is sold, and most paper sold is in the range of 90 days and under. The average maturity for commercial paper is 45 days. By regulation, commercial paper is sold in large denominations, which prevents investment by most individuals. However, individual investors hold large amounts of commercial paper through money market mutual funds. Proceeds received from commercial paper issuance must be used to finance “current transactions,” which include the funding of operating expenses and the funding of current assets such as receivables and inventories.

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For example, higher-yielding CDs sometimes have “call” features that enable issuing banks to terminate the CD after a specified period of time. Callable CDs are more likely to be called when interest rates decline, because the issuing banks can then reissue the CDs at lower rates. Small denomination CDs are sold in denominations smaller than $100,000. Large denomination, or “jumbo,” CDs are sold in denominations over $100,000, though they are normally sold in $1 million units. CDs can have any maturity longer than 14 days, and some 5- and even 7-year CDs have been sold (these pay interest semiannually). Most CDs, however, have an original maturity of 1 to 12 months though some have maturities of five years or more.

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However, by interpretations that weren’t challenged, banks were permitted to underwrite and deal in CDs and BAs. The grounds for these interpretations were that: (1) such paper is not securities for the purposes of Glass-Steagall and (2) underwriting such paper was not the sort of bank activity that Glass-Steagall intended to prohibit. Note there were no large-denomination, negotiable CDs until 1961, decades after Glass-Steagall was written in 1933. The agency provision of Glass-Steagall enabled banks to do private placements in which they sold to a limited group of institutional investors in large minimum amounts corporate stocks, bonds, and other securities.

When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson

Albert Einstein, British Empire, fixed income, full employment, large denomination, plutocrats, Right to Buy, South Sea Bubble, strikebreaker

The full enormity of Havenstein's policies was duly revealed in the speech he made — published immediately afterwards — to a Council of State on August 17. 'The Reichsbank,' he said, with evident pride and satisfaction, 'today issues 20,000 milliard marks of new money daily, of which 5,000 milliards are in large denominations. In the next week the bank will have increased this to 46,000 milliards daily, of which 18,000 milliards will be in large denominations. The total issue at present amounts to 63,000 milliards. In a few days we shall therefore be able to issue in one day two-thirds of the total circulation.' How he would bring all this paper into circulation was the least of the questions raised.

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To the reproach that he had not refused to discount the government's bills, he replied that 'Even a threat by the Bank would have been a useless gesture,' adding that if the Bank's discount rate had been raised to meet the depreciation such a policy would have harmed all branches of industry -and would have had a 'catastrophic' effect, too, on prices. 102 Havenstein's speech, made in the closing days of August to the central committee of the Reichsbank, ended with a description of what he still regarded as the most serious task in hand: 'The whole extraordinary depreciation of the mark has naturally created a rapidly increasing demand for additional currency, which the Reichsbank has not always been fully able to satisfy. A simplified production of notes of large denominations [including printing on one side only] enabled us to bring ever greater amounts into circulation. But these enormous sums are barely adequate to cover the vastly increased demand for the:means of payment, which has just recently attained an absolutely fantastic level, especially as a result of the extraordinary increases in wages and salaries.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

An early visitor, the Jesuit priest Father Charlevoix, found that New Orleans consisted of ‘one hundred randomly situated huts, a large wooden store, and two or three houses unworthy of any French village’.20 The settlers faced a variety of illnesses, including ‘fevers, scurvy, dysentery, venereal diseases and leg ailments’.21 Around half of them perished or returned to Europe.22) The main stimulus for the bubble came from the Royal Bank’s printing press. Over the course of 1719, the amount of paper money in circulation increased by an estimated billion livres.23 The bank employed eight printers around the clock to crank out notes in large denominations. The most commonly issued note was worth 10,000 livres.24 The money-printing became so furious that the handwritten signature of the bank’s cashier had to be replaced by a printed impression (as on modern banknotes). Saint-Simon claimed that ‘the printing of shares and banknotes was actually delayed because the manufacturers could not supply paper fast enough!’

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Robertson, Dennis, ‘Alternative Theories of Interest’, Economic Journal, 1937. Robertson, Dennis, ‘How do We Want Gold to Behave?’, in The International Gold Problem (London, 1932). Robinson, Joan, ‘The Rate of Interest’, Econometrica, 19 (2), April 1951: 92–111. Rogoff, Kenneth, The Curse of Cash: How Large-Denomination Bills Aid Crime and Tax Evasion and Constrain Monetary Policy (Princeton, 2017). Rogoff, Kenneth and Yang, Yuanchen, ‘Has China’s Housing Production Peaked?’, China and the World Economy, 21 (1), 2021. Röpke, Wilhelm, Crises and Cycles (London, 1936). Rosen, Daniel H. and Wright, Logan, ‘Credit and Credibility: Risks to China’s Economic Resilience’, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 3 October 2018.

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Likewise, Bernanke in his talk ‘Asset Price “Bubbles” and Monetary Policy’ before the New York Chapter of the National Association for Business Economics (2002) ignores Japan’s experience in the 1980s and 1990s when arguing that central banks should focus on price stability rather than attempt to prick asset price bubbles. 15. Sidney Homer and Richard Sylla, A History of Interest Rates, 3rd edn (Hoboken, NJ, 1996), p. 385. 16. Ibid., p. 386. 17. Kenneth Rogoff, The Curse of Cash: How Large-Denomination Bills Aid Crime and Tax Evasion and Constrain Monetary Policy (Princeton, 2017), p. 119. 18. Robert Samuelson, The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Transformation of America’s Economy, Politics, and Society (New York, 2008), p. 128. 19. Ibid., p. 132. 20. In an article entitled ‘Gold and Economic Freedom’ (1966), Greenspan wrote that the Gold Standard provided the only reliable balancing mechanism in the banking system.

Money Free and Unfree by George A. Selgin

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disintermediation, Dutch auction, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market microstructure, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Y2K

Higher-value coin from the same mints was mainly used in international markets (Cipolla 1956), where it competed head-on with foreign coin.9 Because the demand for high-value coins was much more elastic, a rational dictator would subject high-value coins to lower rates of seigniorage (less frequent debasement). Medieval European governments accordingly extracted less seigniorage from gold coin than from silver, and debasement of silver coins was much less frequent for large denominations than for small.10 Mints went to great lengths to preserve the quality of their “international” monies (monete grosse) even while ruthlessly debasing the locally used petty coins. The Spanish government, for example, took pains to preserve the metallic content of its silver coin, which by the late 15th century had become Europe’s (and the New World’s) most stable and coveted, while actively debasing the petty copper coinage that it produced as a local monopoly (Motomura 1994).

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Because, apart from being the arrangement most familiar to the founders, owing to its long employment in the British Isles, bimetallism had the advantage of being capable of providing the nation with exchange media covering a wide range of desirable denominations with a minimum need for either bank-issued paper or token coins. Full-bodied gold coins would be too valuable to serve conveniently as anything other than money of fairly large denominations, while full-bodied silver coins would be suitable for smaller denominations, but not for larger ones. Though paper money and token coins might in contrast serve for all denominations, the former was anathema to at least some of the Founders, while the latter was at best a necessary evil, to be adopted only for those tiny denominations for which even silver wasn’t suitable, and even then with trepidation, owing to the risk (all too familiar from both British and colonial experience) of rampant counterfeiting.3 The first Coinage Act established a ratio of mint “prices” for gold and silver that made an ounce of gold worth 15 times as many dollars as an ounce of silver.

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Their suspensions were eventually sanctioned, subject to varying conditions, by state authorities, allowing the banks in question to advance a substantial part of their still-considerable specie reserves to the Confederate Treasury, which arranged to pay for it with paper notes. Although the first such notes were for large denominations not intended to serve as currency, the Confederacy soon issued large amounts of smaller denomination paper that would serve as the region’s standard money until the North’s victory rendered it worthless. In the Union, Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln’s first secretary of the treasury, discovered upon taking office that the government had available “less than $2,000,000, all of which was appropriated ten times over” (Hammond 1957: 720).

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives) by David Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, creative destruction, credit crunch, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, index card, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, Northern Rock, Pingit, prediction markets, price stability, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social graph, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, wage slave, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons

To build up a picture of the cashless economy we need to begin by looking at all of the issues set out here to build our understanding of the cashless economy and what it means for regulators, governments and national (and supranational) institutions. Let us therefore work through those issues individually. Electronic money issues. Crime Citi’s chief economist Willem Buiter has noted the odd conspiracy between finance ministries, central banks and organized crime (Buiter 2009): Large denomination bank notes are an especially scandalous subsidy to criminal activity and to the grey and black economies. There is no economic justification for $50 and $100 bank notes, let alone for the €200 and €500 bank notes issued by the ECB. The euro example is particularly noteworthy. Two-thirds of the euros in circulation are in the form of these €100, €200 and €500 notes, which I have never seen.

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Roberds, W. 1998. The impact of fraud on new methods of retail payments. Economic Review, Q1. Robinson, J. 2014. BitCon: the naked truth about Bitcoin. Amazon Digital Services, 26 September, p. 149. Rogoff, K. S. 2017. International dimensions and digital currencies. In The Curse of Cash: How Large Denomination Bills Aid Tax Evasion and Crime and Constrain Monetary Policy (paperback edition). Princeton University Press. Rosner, M., and A. Kang. 2016. Understanding and regulating twenty-first century payment systems: the Ripple case study. Michigan Law Review 114(4), 648–681. Rugaard, M. 2014.

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, central bank independence, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Francisco Pizarro, German hyperinflation, Hernando de Soto, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, large denomination, liquidity trap, long peace, low interest rates, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, random walk, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

In 1875, the English economist Stanley Jevons observed that the £20 million in transactions that cleared the London Bankers' Clearing House each day would weigh about 157 tons if paid in gold coin "and would require eighty horses for conveyance."5 The density of gold means that even very small amounts can function as money of large denominations. Gold is almost as soft as putty. The gold on Venetian glasses was hammered down to as little as five-millionths of an inch-a process known as gilding. In an unusually creative use of gilding, King Ptolemy II of Egypt (285-246 Bc) had a polar bear from his zoo lead festive processions in which the bear was preceded by a group of men carrying a gilded phallus 180 feet tall.

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When, in 1529, Francis I of France paid over 1.2 million escudos to Charles V of Spain to ransom his two sons, the process of counting and testing the coins took four months, during which time the Spaniards rejected forty thousand coins as below standard.14 In a later time, 1662, one hundred chests were required to handle the physical transfer of five hundred thousand large-denomination French coins!" Gold coins were so valuable in the Middle Ages that they did not circulate much among the common people.t For the most part, gold coins were used in transactions by merchants and traders involved in foreign trade, by tax collectors, by the retinue of the monarch himself, and, as we have already seen, by monarchs as a means of buying off enemies and ransoming friends and family members.

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The guinea's consistent weight and fineness made such a vivid contrast with the rotten state of the silver coinage up to the Great Recoinage that people preferred to accept the guinea wherever possible. Bankers held it as reserves, tax collectors welcomed it in order to avoid the arguments about what a worn silver piece might be worth, and economic activity in England at that time had developed to a point where a large-denomination coin such as the guinea was no longer just an inconvenient curiosity. From the moment when Elizabeth I ascended to the throne in 1558 to the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694, a period of 136 years, the Mint had issued no more than £15 million in gold coinage, of which half was in guineas that appeared after 1663.

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

Evidently, while the high-value notes are used to pay for drugs, an altogether different use is being found for low-value ones (see Table 1). Table 1. Attributes of different payment mechanisms from a criminal perspective. Economists have long pointed out the essential contradiction between governments having stringent anti-money-laundering regimes while printing large-denomination notes. Large notes are clearly convenient for those of a criminal persuasion: $1 million in single dollar bills weighs more than one tonne and has a volume of more than one cubic metre, but $1 million in $100 notes weighs about 10 kg (22 pounds) and fits neatly into a briefcase. In the even higher denomination €500 note, that same $1 million would weigh only 2 kg and fit in a small bag – or a large stomach.

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Figures on global financial crime, lower estimate, taken from US Treasury (2018): https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/2018NMLRA_12-18.pdf; upper estimate taken from RAND Corporation’s annual survey: www.rand.org/news/press/2019/08/20.html For cocaine on bank notes, see: www.theguardian.com/world/2009/aug/17/cocaine-dollar-bills-currency-us For large denomination bank notes and their use in the underground economy, see: K.S. Rogoff (2016). The Curse of Cash. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Figures on gold taken from the World Gold Council (www.gold.org) Chapter 5 For the ‘war on cash’, see: ‘Why elites are winning the war on cash’, UK Uncensored, October 2019 (https://ukuncensored.com/why-elites-are-winning-the-war-on-cash/); https://dailyreckoning.com/elites-winning-war-cash/ Willem Buiter’s quote is taken from: W.

9Tail Fox by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

gentrification, Kickstarter, large denomination, San Francisco homelessness, sexual politics, South of Market, San Francisco, transcontinental railway

When this bit of the plan was done, Bobby was going to buy some toys of his own, starting with a bike even bigger than the one belonging to Sanchez. He grinned. SERGEANT BOBBY ZHA husband, father and officer A good man … Bobby began with the hell banknotes, large denomination, because hell banknotes were always large denomination. What was the point of burning small notes when no one knew what things cost on the other side? After the notes, Bobby picked up the car, making sure he held it so Sanchez could get a good look at what he was about to burn. The kid had done him proud. Made from rice-paper and split bamboo, the car was quite obviously an SFPD cruiser, spray-painted in regulation colours and with a uniformed driver inside.

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

Yet dollar cash holdings have actually risen as a share of G.D.P. since the 1980s—a growth entirely accounted for by $50 and $100 bills. Now, large-denomination notes aren’t regularly used for payments—in fact, many stores won’t accept them. So what’s all that cash-holding about? We all know the answer: tax evasion, illicit activity, etc. And much of that is outside the U.S., with estimates suggesting that foreigners hold more than half of U.S. currency. Clearly, cryptocurrencies are in effect competing for some of the same business: very few people are using Bitcoin to pay their bills, but some people are using it to buy drugs, subvert elections, and so on. And the examples of both gold and large-denomination banknotes suggest that this kind of demand could support a lot of asset value.

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Potts

dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, follow your passion, George Santayana, Lao Tzu, large denomination, personalized medicine, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the map is not the territory

In countries where black-market exchange rates are preferable, try to make your transaction at a fixed business (hotels and jewelry stores are common for this) instead of a public space. Make sure you agree on a rate, count the dealer’s cash before you hand over yours, and don’t accept sailed or torn bills. In countries with weak currency, ask for large-denomination bills, as massive piles of small bills are hard to count. If at any point your black-marketeer begins to act suspicious (for instance, by making unusual requests or acting aggressive), exercise your right to walk away. • Avoid the urge to make too many of your on-the-ground transportation arrangements at once, as this will stunt your spontaneity.

Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775-1821 by George Anthony Selgin

British Empire, correlation coefficient, flying shuttle, George Gilder, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, large denomination, lone genius, profit motive, RAND corporation, school choice, seigniorage, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen

Mint prices and equivalents for silver and gold were reckoned in terms of the troy pound of 5,760 troy grains, which replaced the mint (or Tower) pound of 5,400 troy grains in 1526. 14 GOOD MONEY 1. strike both large- and small-denomination coins from the standard metal, with the coins' weights corresponding to their face values; 2. resort to bimetallism, with low-denomination coins made from the less valuable metal, and large-denomination coins made from the more valuable one; or 3. issue avowedly fiduciary or token small-denomination coins, on government account. 21 Each option had its drawbacks. 22 Under the first option, if the standard metal was sufficiently valuable, coins of lower denominations would be too small to be practical, as happened with Great Britain's quarter guineas.

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A still more egregious case was that of the silver farthings the Royal Mint issued in 1464. Weighing only three troy grains each, these were "lost almost as fast as they were coined" (Snelling 1766, preface). The standard metal could, of course, be one from which convenient small-denomination coins might be made; but then large-denomination coins of the same metal would end up being too bulky. A bimetallic system might have avoided the problem of undersized or oversized coins. 23 But it suffered from its tendency to give effect to Gresham's law, with one metal alone being taken to the mint for coining and with coins of the other metal being clipped, filed, sweated, or melted.

The One-Minute Workout by Martin Gibala

Biosphere 2, Kickstarter, large denomination, meta-analysis

The role of lactic acid formation in fatigue is actually quite a controversial topic that could be the focus of a separate chapter or an entire book. For our purposes here, suffice it to say that anaerobic glycolysis is a limited capacity system. By far, the most efficient way to supply energy is through a process called oxidative metabolism, which involves the use of oxygen to burn fuels such as sugars and fats—the large-denomination bills in your wallet. While slower than the other two processes, oxidative metabolism provides the capacity to utilize many different fuels. The other nice thing about it is that, given adequate fuel availability, the capacity is almost limitless. Oxidative metabolism really is an ingenious process.

Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, declining real wages, equity risk premium, European colonialism, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, foreign exchange controls, German hyperinflation, global macro, housing crisis, implied volatility, intangible asset, it's over 9,000, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, refrigerator car, reserve currency, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, uptick rule, value at risk, yield curve

During periods of tightening interest rates, the Federal Reserve also raised the reserve requirements in 1966–69, 1973, and 1979–80.32 Eventually, new funding instruments were invented to continue lending and bypass the reserve requirement. These included commercial paper, eurodollars, repurchase agreements, and large-denomination certificates of deposits.33 In 1969, the Federal Reserve attempted to address the loopholes that were enabling banks to skirt the reserve requirements. New bank borrowing from overseas branches was capped at 10%; this was done to stop banks from borrowing Eurodollars through their overseas branches (which were not subject to reserve requirements).

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Additionally, the Fed set a 10 percent limit on assets sales by banks to their overseas branches.34 In 1970, the limits on both borrowing from and selling assets to overseas branches were increased to 20 percent. However, in 1973, these requirements were both lowered down to 8 percent. This was the same requirement as was in place for large-denomination certificates of deposits.35 In the late 1960s, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) used reserve requirements to affect mortgage lending. The FHLBB reduced requirements when savings declined, thereby increasing liquidity in mortgage lending, and raised requirements when lending was high, or liquidity already abundant.36 As part of the Paul Volcker’s effort to rein in inflation, the Federal Reserve increased interest rates and reserve requirements in October 1979.

The Money Machine: How the City Works by Philip Coggan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, call centre, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, endowment effect, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", joint-stock company, junk bonds, labour market flexibility, large denomination, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, pattern recognition, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Premium bonds are another form of tax-free investment open to the individual investor but the chances of getting any return at all are fairly small. In early 1993, the government revamped the scheme increasing the top prize to £1 million in an attempt to compete with the National Lottery. The yield on the fund varies with the level of interest rates. The government also issues long-term bonds in large denominations, known as gilts. These can be bought through a stockbroker. Unlike most of the other investments we have so far described, gilts offer the chance of capital gain. As we saw in Chapter 2, the prices of bonds move up and down in inverse fashion to the level of interest rates. So, it is possible to buy a gilt at £80 one year and sell it the next at £100 and earn interest in the process.

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Etonian, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invisible hand, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, open economy, plutocrats, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, rolodex, scientific management, the market place

He began arguing that the inflation had nothing to do with him, that he was a passive bystander to the whole process, that his task was simply to make enough money available to grease the wheels of commerce, and if business required a trillion more marks, then it was his job to make sure they were run off the presses and efficiently distributed around the country. On August 17, 1923, he delivered his annual report on economic conditions before the Council of State:The Reichsbank today issues 20,000 milliard marks of new money daily, of which 5,000 milliards are in large denominations. In the next week the bank will have increased this to 46,000 milliards daily, of which 18,000 milliards will be in large denominations. The total issue at present amounts to 63,000 milliards. In a few days we shall therefore be able to issue in one day two-thirds of the total circulation. Here was the president of the Reichsbank, whose principal obligation was supposed be the preservation of the value of the currency, proudly proclaiming to a group of parliamentarians that he now had the capacity to expand the money supply by over 60 percent in a single day and flood the country with even more paper.

The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America by Warren E. Buffett, Lawrence A. Cunningham

book value, business logic, buy and hold, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, corporate governance, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, fixed income, George Santayana, Henry Singleton, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, junk bonds, large denomination, low cost airline, Michael Milken, oil shock, passive investing, price stability, Ronald Reagan, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Teledyne, the market place, transaction costs, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

If current interest rates are, say, only 6% or 7% when these coupons come due, the holder will be unable to compound his money over the life of the bond at the advertised rate. For pension funds or other investors with long-term liabilities, "reinvestment risk" of this type can be a serious problem. Savings Bonds might have solved it, except that they are issued only to individuals and are unavailable in large denominations. What big buyers needed was huge quantities of "Savings Bond Equivalents." Enter some ingenious and, in this case, highly useful investment bankers (led, I'm happy to say, by Salomon Brothers). They created the instrument desired by "stripping" the semi-annual coupons from standard Government issues.

The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy by Matthew Hindman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, bounce rate, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, fault tolerance, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the telescope, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, lake wobegon effect, large denomination, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, New Economic Geography, New Journalism, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pepsi Challenge, performance metric, power law, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Robert Metcalfe, search costs, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, sparse data, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, Thomas Malthus, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Pages views are most helpful when used comparatively, in understanding the relative audience that two sites have. The page-view numbers we are most interested in are fractional—the portion of the total online audience, or the portion of news traffic, or the portion of just local news traffic. It should be remembered that each of these fractions has a very large denominator. One disadvantage of page views as a metric, however, is that they can be impacted by site architecture. Changes in the page layouts can increase—or decrease—the number of page views recorded. Some news sites are notorious for spreading short articles or photo slide shows over multiple pages in an attempt to maximize page views.

Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War by James Risen

air freight, airport security, banking crisis, clean water, drone strike, Edward Snowden, greed is good, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, large denomination, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, Stuxnet, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, WikiLeaks

All told, he deposited more than $440,000 in fresh $100 bills. Fuller was a pilot, not a money laundering genius. He didn’t realize that repeatedly depositing large amounts of cash in amounts just below the $10,000 limit is considered suspicious by banks, especially when the money is all in uncirculated, large-denomination bills. Fuller was arrested. Yet there was not enough evidence for federal prosecutors to prove that Fuller had obtained his money illegally through his work in Iraq. He agreed only to plead to purposefully seeking to structure deposits in federally insured financial institutions to avoid the $10,000 limit.

One Up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch

air freight, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Boeing 747, book value, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, fixed income, index fund, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, large denomination, money market fund, prediction markets, random walk, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Teledyne, vertical integration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

On the other hand, if interest rates go in a direction that works against the bondholders, the bondholders are stuck with the bonds. Since there’s very little in the corporate bond business that isn’t callable, you’re advised to buy Treasuries if you hope to profit from a fall in interest rates.) LIBERATING THE PASSBOOKS Traditionally bonds were sold in large denominations—too large for the small investor, who could only invest in debt via the savings account, or the boring U.S. savings bonds. Then the bond funds were invented, and regular people could invest in debt right along with tycoons. After that, the money-market fund liberated millions of former passbook savers from the captivity of banks, once and for all.

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford

airport security, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital Maoism, Google Glasses, hive mind, index card, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, large denomination, new economy, new new economy, Norman Mailer, online collectivism, Plato's cave, plutocrats, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

The speed of play has been accelerated with some fairly straightforward innovations over the years, such as replacing the mechanical pull handle of slot machines with an electronic push button (which you can rest your hand on constantly), which was followed by the mechanically spinning reels being replaced with a video screen. Once the machines accepted bills (in large denominations), one no longer had to insert coins laboriously into the machine; merely eliminating this fumbling generated a 30 percent increase in the amount of money played. Experienced video poker players (you may have seen one hunched at a terminal at a bar or gas station, waving fingers over a touch screen in a blur that rivals the best typists) can complete up to 1,200 hands per hour; the rate of play on video slots is similar, up from about 300 games per hour a couple of decades ago.

The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life. by Robin Sharma

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, dematerialisation, epigenetics, fake news, Grace Hopper, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, index card, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Rosa Parks, telemarketer, white picket fence

Relate peacefully, as much as possible, with everyone. Even one enemy is an enemy too many. Pass through life gracefully, taking the high road when conflict shows up. Should someone do you wrong, let karma do the dirty work. And let a world-class life be your revenge. Clipped to the sixth letter in the metal safe box was paper money of a large denomination. It had been folded into a triangle, for some cryptic reason unknown to the entrepreneur and the artist. This letter was longer than the others. It said: The Billionaire’s Maxim #6 Money Is the Fruit of Generosity, Not Scarcity. Be not misled by the dominant philosophy of the world. Poverty is the consequence of an inner condition, not an outer situation.

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World by Michal Zalewski

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, bank run, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carrington event, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, deep learning, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, dumpster diving, failed state, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, housing crisis, index fund, indoor plumbing, information security, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, John Bogle, large denomination, lifestyle creep, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Modern Monetary Theory, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral panic, non-fungible token, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, passive investing, peak oil, planetary scale, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, supervolcano, systems thinking, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Tunguska event, underbanked, urban sprawl, Wall-E, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Of course, all kinds of valuable physical goods can be used to the same effect, but none are accepted as widely as cash. Alas, because of its utility in evading taxes and court judgments, many governments would rather have this antiquated payment instrument go away. In the United States, many large-denomination bills, such as the $1,000 banknote, were effectively removed from circulation and are probably not coming back. Any commercial cash transactions over $10,000 need to be reported to the Internal Revenue Service on Form 8300 too. Meanwhile, in parts of Europe, it’s flat out illegal to use paper money for most transactions in excess of a threshold as low as €1,000.17 As the percentage of underbanked populations around the world is shrinking rapidly, some economists and policymakers are openly talking about a cashless future where no transaction can escape government oversight.

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

The banks had no choice but to shut down access to cash and credit until their status was clarified. ATMs stopped providing cash to Greek cardholders (travelers with non-Greek debit cards could get some cash at Athens International Airport). Greek credit cards were declined by merchants. Greeks drove to neighboring countries and returned with bags full of large-denomination euro notes. The Greek economy reverted to cash-and-carry and quasi-barter almost overnight. Coming so soon after the Cyprus debacle, the Greek version of ice-nine served as a cautionary tale. Depositors now realized their money in the bank was not money, and not theirs. Their so-called money was actually a bank liability and could be frozen at any time.

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics by William R. Easterly

Andrei Shleifer, business climate, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, endogenous growth, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Money creation, Network effects, New Urbanism, open economy, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

This serious offense required a trip to the station house (my Mexican friends told me, ”Never let them get you to the station house”). I offered to pay the fine for my outrageous offense on the spot, and that resolved matters. (I’m embarrassedto tell you howmuchI paid for the bribe. I got caught with only large denomination notes on me.) After that I developed several techniques for evading police sting operations. I continued toact like an idiot as far as comprehensionof Spanish went whenever the policeman was on foot. The next time I encountered a motorized policeman, I simply refused to pull over and kept driving until I got to the private university I was going to.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

Owing to mistrust in banks, financial crises, threats of negative interest rates, and illegal operations (especially terrorism), the circulation of cash has actually increased in Japan, Switzerland, the EU, and the UK (Tett, 2016). But the future seems poised to change some parts of this trend. Growing dangers of terrorism and crime are urging policy makers to remove large denomination bills. As of May 2016, the ECB has stopped the production and issuance of the €500 banknote in an attempt to address these illegal activities. But apart from the reasons stated by Haldane and the motivations of the ECB, there are other reasons why moving to a cashless system could be beneficial to society.

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism by Kevin Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency peg, diversification, Doha Development Round, energy security, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mobile money, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

But although Bush appealed to these regions as a cultural outsider, he evoked neither economic populism nor its memories. What counted much more was culture and religion—not just his own born-again beliefs but his frequent faith-based rhetoric and his links to well-known conservative preachers, religious Right groups, and large denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention and the Pentecostal Assemblies of God. Those ties, in turn, had been reinforced by late-1990s domestic politics—the dislike for Bill Clinton and his moral values by some 70 to 80 percent of southern white churchgoers—and even more by global events. These trends accelerated with the evangelical and fundamentalist focus on the Middle East spurred by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Gulf War of 1991, the demonization of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, the late-decade launch of the Left Behind book series about the imminent end-time, the sense of the great biblical battleground taking center stage again with the approach of the millennium, and then the good-versus-evil confrontation framed by the events of 9/11.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

affirmative action, cognitive bias, Columbine, Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, deindustrialization, desegregation, different worldview, ending welfare as we know it, friendly fire, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, land reform, large denomination, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, power law, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

However, as legal scholar David Cole has observed, “in practice, the drug-courier profile is a scattershot hodgepodge of traits and characteristics so expansive that it potentially justifies stopping anybody and everybody.”28 The profile can include traveling with luggage, traveling without luggage, driving an expensive car, driving a car that needs repairs, driving with out-of-state license plates, driving a rental car, driving with “mismatched occupants,” acting too calm, acting too nervous, dressing casually, wearing expensive clothing or jewelry, being one of the first to deplane, being one of the last to deplane, deplaning in the middle, paying for a ticket in cash, using large-denomination currency, using small-denomination currency, traveling alone, traveling with a companion, and so on. Even striving to obey the law fits the profile! The Florida Highway Patrol Drug Courier Profile cautioned troopers to be suspicious of “scrupulous obedience to traffic laws.”29 As Cole points out, “such profiles do not so much focus an investigation as provide law enforcement officials a ready-made excuse for stopping whom-ever they please.”30 The Supreme Court has allowed use of drug-courier profiles as guides for the exercise of police discretion.

The Ten Million Dollar Getaway: The Inside Story of the Lufthansa Heist by Doug Feiden

air freight, Ayatollah Khomeini, large denomination, planned obsolescence, urban decay

Only an idiot would try to deal jewelry and securities and canceled traveler’s checks from Bolivia by himself—what if he sold to the wrong person? For a haul of any size, he’s got to have an excellent fence. And that is where the mob has him. He’s paid in five minutes, and he’s paid in clean, untraceable, large-denomination bills, and his worries are over. It’s generally considered a smart move among thieves. A lot of them do it free-lance, but when they’re connected to a big shot, they don’t have to, and they’re crazy if they do. It’s a form of protection. If they ever need a favor, or if there’s ever a big score again, they’ll probably get it.)

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, airline deregulation, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bob Geldof, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, full employment, global village, high net worth, land bank, land reform, large denomination, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

All three factors combined to encourage Third World officials and wealthy elites to move a significant share of their private wealth into offshore foreign assets, even while their own governments were borrowing more heavily abroad than ever before (see Figure 4). Figure 4 Flight Wealth versus Foreign Debt, 1975-2003 (Billions of Dollars, Low- and Middle-Income Countries) Part of the resulting flight wave took the form of large amounts of “mattress money” hoarded by residents of Third World countries in strong currencies and large denominations—especially dollars, Swiss francs, Deutschmarks, British pounds, and, after 2002, 100, 200, and 500 euro notes. By 2006, for example, the total stock of U.S. currency was $912 billion, at least two-thirds of which was held offshore, especially in developing countries with a history of devaluations.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits by Richard Davies

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anton Chekhov, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big-box store, cashless society, clean water, complexity theory, deindustrialization, digital divide, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Global Witness, government statistician, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, it's over 9,000, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, large denomination, Livingstone, I presume, Malacca Straits, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, rolling blackouts, school choice, school vouchers, Scramble for Africa, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, subscription business, The Chicago School, the payments system, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, uranium enrichment, urban planning, wealth creators, white picket fence, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

The US’s indigenous Yoruk people, based in northern California, valued woodpecker scalps highly, and used them in head-dresses. The scalps became a form of currency: the large pileated woodpecker was worth more than the small acorn woodpecker, giving the tribe a currency that had small and large denominations. Others have used any light, durable and divisible commodity: salt was used in Rome, ancient China and modern Ethiopia; the Aztec kingdom of Central America used chocolate (cacao beans). Prisons have a rich tradition of inventing informal currencies too. In London’s Cold Bath Fields prison the ‘vast illicit commerce’ of the nineteenth century was lubricated by using cigarette papers as currency.

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy by Mervyn King

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Doha Development Round, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, large denomination, lateral thinking, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Satoshi Nakamoto, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Could innovations in information technology make money redundant in respect of those two roles? We no longer need cash to buy ‘stuff’ and even the use of cheques to make payments has been rapidly declining. We use electronic transfers instead. So should we stop issuing paper money? There would be some advantages. A large proportion of banknotes, especially those of large denominations, are used for illegal transactions, both to evade tax and for other criminal activities. In the United States, over $4000 in notes and coin circulate for every man, woman and child.33 In Japan, the figure is almost double that. More than 75 per cent of those holdings are in the form of notes of the largest denomination, the $100 bill and the ¥10,000 note.

How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, collective bargaining, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, financial deregulation, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, large denomination, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fragmentation, megaproject, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, purchasing power parity, rent control, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TSMC, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, working-age population

The two big state institutions, Philippine National Bank and Development Bank of the Philippines, wrote down their assets (consisting mostly of loans) by 67 per cent and 86 per cent respectively after years of making ‘behest’ loans to Marcos’s cronies. In 1993, the government moved debts of USD12 billion from the balance sheet of the central bank to that of the treasury. All this was paid for, in large part, by a tripling of domestic government debt in the late 1980s. The debt was deliberately issued in large-denomination bonds, which were beyond the reach of ordinary citizens who continued to keep their funds in the banking system, usually at negative real rates of interest. Banks recovered by borrowing for free from the public and investing the money in high-yield national debt.57 It was much like Park Chung Hee’s interest moratorium in 1972, except that in the Philippines the banking system produced zero developmental upside.

Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales From the World of Wall Street by John Brooks

banking crisis, belling the cat, Bretton Woods, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, Ford paid five dollars a day, Gunnar Myrdal, invention of the wheel, large denomination, lateral thinking, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, short selling, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, very high income

There is little reason to believe that at the beginning of his buying campaign he had any intention of trying for a corner; it seems more likely that his announced motive—the unassailable one of supporting the price of the stock in order to protect his own investment and that of other Piggly Wiggly stockholders—was all he had in mind. In any case, he took on the bears with characteristic zest, supplementing his own funds with a loan of about ten million dollars from a group of bankers in Memphis, Nashville, New Orleans, Chattanooga, and St. Louis. Legend has it that he stuffed his ten million-plus, in bills of large denomination, into a suitcase, boarded a train for New York, and, his pockets bulging with currency that wouldn’t fit in the suitcase, marched on Wall Street, ready to do battle. He emphatically denied this in later years, insisting that he had remained in Memphis and masterminded his campaign by means of telegrams and long-distance telephone calls to various Wall Street brokers.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

And once banks receive a deposit, they must lend out the money at a higher rate if they are to make a profit. In the 1970s, the lucky recipients of much of that money were Latin American governments, at a time when they were struggling to balance their budgets. In 1970, total Latin American debt was $29bn; by 1982, it was $327bn.34 This debt was largely denominated in dollars, and thus subject to shifts in US interest rates and changes in exchange rates. As the Fed tightened policy and economies fell into recession, the debt clearly became unsustainable. In 1982, Mexico declared that it could not service its $80bn of debts. Fifteen other Latin American countries followed suit, along with 11 other developing nations.

Alcohol: A History by Rod Phillips

clean water, conceptual framework, European colonialism, financial independence, GPS: selective availability, invention of the printing press, Kickstarter, large denomination, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, New Urbanism, profit motive, restrictive zoning, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

When the British introduced money into the Nigerian economy, they found that the native population was already prepared to grasp the principle that there were 12 pennies in a shilling.13 Even so, the use of money rather than gin was resisted. Gin was so cheap that it was useful as payment for small items, while the coins initially put into circulation were of too large denomination. (The authorities eventually issued a coin worth a tenth of a penny.) Alcohol was a tangible asset with visible exchange value, not like a metal disc or a piece of flimsy paper that was merely reputed to represent some value and could be easily lost or stolen.14 In a sense, the prevalence of alcohol as currency might have been a deterrent to alcohol consumption.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

Soon seven thousand charismatics a week were attending services, and the church started bursting forth spores, reproducing by the hundreds across the country. In the American Protestant way, these new churches were really franchises, sharing a brand—the name, the groovy music, and the belief that God is still granting ordinary folks magical superpowers. And because Calvary Chapel, a large denomination, was created in America during and after the 1960s, it insists it’s “nondenominational”—like American politicians who began insisting at the same time they’re antigovernment. One of those Calvary spores sprouted nearby, in a fancier Orange County town. Its minister, John Wimber, was not just targeting unchurched young SoCal baby boomers: he was their cool older brother, a bearded rock ’n’ roll keyboardist who’d played with the Righteous Brothers and been a Quaker pastor before turning evangelical and then neo-Pentecostal.

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll

airport security, Albert Einstein, Build a better mousetrap, business intelligence, capital controls, cashless society, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, emotional labour, Future Shock, game design, impulse control, information asymmetry, inventory management, iterative process, jitney, junk bonds, large denomination, late capitalism, late fees, longitudinal study, means of production, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, profit motive, RFID, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, the built environment, yield curve, zero-sum game

“This didn’t just slow down the play,” remembered slot machine pioneer Warren Nelson in 1994, “it kind of suggested a closure, an end to the game … it tempted the customer to cease the play and walk out the door with his winnings.”15 Since hoppers could dispense up to two hundred coins into the machine’s payout tray, they increased “the probability that those coins would be played back into the machine” and at the same time ensured that gamblers could gather the wagering momentum critical to the flow of their play experience. The introduction of bill acceptors to gambling machines further sped up play, allowing players to insert bills of large denomination and draw from credits displayed on a digital meter rather than stop to feed coins in one at a time (see fig. 2.1). Dematerializing money into an immediately available credit form not only disguised its actual cash value and thus encouraged wagering, it also mitigated the revenue-compromising limitations of human motor capacities by removing unwieldy coins from the gambling exchange.

Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition by Kindleberger, Charles P., Robert Z., Aliber

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, death of newspapers, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, edge city, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Hyman Minsky, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, junk bonds, large denomination, law of one price, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, railway mania, Richard Thaler, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, very high income, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Stock prices and real estate prices increased sharply in three of the Nordic countries in the late 1980s; with a three-fold increase in Norway and five-fold increases in Sweden and Finland.14 The Kipper- und Wipperzeit This financial crisis occurred with metallic money; credit from banks or other lenders was not involved. Princes, abbots, bishops, even the Holy Roman Emperor debased the subsidiary coinage used in daily transactions (but not gold and silver coin of large denominations) by raising the denomination of existing coins, substituting base for good metals, and reducing the metallic content of coins to extract more seignorage to prepare for the Thirty Years’ War that broke out in 1618. Debasement was limited at first to their own territories. Some entrepreneurial spirit then found that it was more profitable to take bad coins across the borders into neighboring principalities to exchange for good coins with ignorant common people; the good coins were then brought home and debased.

A Life in Secrets by Sarah Helm

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, clockwatching, haute couture, large denomination, old-boy network

The British used cafés openly as letterboxes and meeting places, not thinking that they would be watched, but Kieffer had made sure he had a man in every bar in Paris. Agents could be spotted wearing brogue shoes of a style rarely seen in France or carrying obviously fake ration cards. And the British agents used wads of brand-new large-denomination notes to pay small bills, immediately drawing attention. Buckmaster, after reading some of these stories, wrote sarcastically on one report: “very interesting!” Rose Cordonnier, who cleaned the fifth floor of 84 Avenue Foch, where the prisoners were held, and was the mistress of one of Kieffer's aides, had been interrogated for hours in the hope that she would identify who had been held there and when.

The Rough Guide to Sweden (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

carbon footprint, centre right, congestion charging, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, large denomination, Peace of Westphalia, place-making, sensible shoes, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, urban planning, WikiLeaks

Mastercard, Visa, American Express and Diners Card are accepted everywhere for goods or cash. Traveller’s cheques are a safe and simple way of carrying your money, although there can be a hefty commission when you come to change them. Some places charge per cheque, others per transaction, so it’s common sense to take large denominations with you, or to try to change as much as you feel you can handle in one go. Banks have standard exchange rates, but commissions can vary enormously. The best place to change money is at the yellow Forex offices ( forex.se), which offer more kronor for your currency though also charge commission.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

Axel Weber, the head of the Bundesbank, spoke of a nuclear meltdown (Kernschmelze). Somewhat melodramatically, Germany’s bank regulator, Jochen Sanio, invoked Apocalypse Now.78 What really worried Berlin were rumors that German savers were panicking. As cash withdrawals spiked, the Bundesbank registered unprecedented demand for large-denomination euro notes. Abruptly, less than twenty-four hours after returning from Paris, Merkel decided that she must make a statement. It was all Steinbrück could do to persuade her that she should not do it entirely alone.79 On the afternoon of Sunday, October 5, Merkel and Steinbrück went before the TV cameras.

Reamde by Neal Stephenson

air freight, airport security, autism spectrum disorder, book value, crowdsourcing, digital map, drone strike, Google Earth, industrial robot, informal economy, Jones Act, large denomination, megacity, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, ransomware, restrictive zoning, scientific management, side project, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, South China Sea, SQL injection, the built environment, the scientific method, young professional

Sokolov now moved up and sat in the seat next to the driver. He had his bag with him. He turned on his flashlight and put it in his mouth like a cigar, then shone it down into the bag, which he had zipped open. It was stuffed with a miscellany of junk, but the predominant color was the queasy red/magenta of large-denomination Chinese currency. Much of it was crumpled loose bills, but Sokolov stirred through these and then pulled out a wrapped brick about one inch thick. He let the light shine on it and glanced up at the driver to make sure that it had been noticed. Then he pulled out a plastic sack—a white laundry bag blazoned with the logo of a luxury hotel.

The system of the world by Neal Stephenson

bank run, British Empire, cellular automata, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, high net worth, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, land bank, large denomination, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, place-making, Snow Crash, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

The stupidest imaginable way of handling it would have been to gather together all of the pennies in the countryside, from millions of tributary farmsteads, and physically transport them into London; let the wagon-trains feed and water while the gentlefolk carried out their Intercourse; and then load the coins back onto the wagons and haul them back out to the country again. And perhaps that was how they did it in some countries. But England had obstinately refused to mint coins of large denominations—which was to say, gold coins—in large enough quantities to be actually useful. Anyway, such coins were too enormous for small transactions on farms. Those that were minted, tended to be snapped up by London merchants, and used for overseas trade. The true coin of England, the one ordinary folk used, had always been the silver penny.

The Defence of the Realm by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, classic study, Clive Stafford Smith, collective bargaining, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Desert Island Discs, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, G4S, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, information security, job satisfaction, large denomination, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, operational security, post-work, Red Clydeside, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, Torches of Freedom, traveling salesman, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Winter of Discontent, work culture

Del Pozo greatly simplified MI5 surveillance by writing to GW, the double agent whom the Abwehr believed was a fanatical Welsh nationalist recruited for them by SNOW. With the agreement of the Security Service, GW met del Pozo on 10 October at his flat in Athenaeum Court, Piccadilly. To his surprise, del Pozo handed him a talcum-powder tin containing £3,500 in large-denomination banknotes, over £100,000 at current values and probably the largest sum yet handed to a twentiethcentury British agent (other than funds intended for the Communist Party and other organizations). Part of this large sum, GW was told, was for his own personal use; part was to be held in safe-keeping for del Pozo and returned to him as and when required.

Southeast Asia on a Shoestring Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, clockwatching, colonial rule, flag carrier, gentrification, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, large denomination, low cost airline, Mason jar, megacity, period drama, restrictive zoning, retail therapy, Skype, South China Sea, spice trade, superstar cities, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Make sure your ATM and credit cards are not going to expire while you are away; contact your bank at least a month ahead of time to allow enough time for replacement cards to be issued. When exchanging money, shop around for the best exchange rate. Bring cash in crisp, untorn bills and a variety of denominations. Money changers in Myanmar and Indonesia will reject old or ripped bills. Get your travellers cheques in large denominations of US dollars (US$100 or US$50) to avoid per-cheque commission fees. Record which travellers cheques you’ve cashed, and keep this information separate from your money so that you can file a claim in the case of theft of loss. Personal Belongings ❑Clothes Southeast Asia is hot, very hot, so bring a week’s worth of lightweight, light-coloured, breathable clothes that can be washed easily and match everything.

Italy by Damien Simonis

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, bike sharing, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, company town, congestion charging, dark pattern, discovery of the americas, Frank Gehry, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, large denomination, low cost airline, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, period drama, Peter Eisenman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, retail therapy, Skype, spice trade, starchitect, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Travellers Cheques Traditionally a safe way to carry money and possibly not a bad idea as a backup, travellers cheques have been outmoded by plastic. Various readers have reported having trouble changing travellers cheques in Italy and it seems most banks apply hefty commissions, even on cheques denominated in euros. Visa, Travelex and Amex are widely accepted brands. Get most of your cheques in fairly large denominations to save on per-cheque commission charges. Amex exchange offices do not charge commission to exchange travellers cheques. It’s vital to keep your initial receipt, along with a record of your cheque numbers and the ones you have used, separate from the cheques. Take along your passport as identification when you go to cash travellers cheques.

Spain by Lonely Planet Publications, Damien Simonis

Atahualpa, business process, call centre, centre right, Colonization of Mars, discovery of the americas, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, intermodal, Islamic Golden Age, land reform, large denomination, low cost airline, megaproject, place-making, Skype, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent, young professional

The advantage of travellers cheques, of course, is that they protect your money because they can be replaced if lost or stolen. Visa, Amex and Travelex are widely accepted brands with (usually) efficient replacement policies. Remember to take along your passport when you cash travellers cheques. Get most of your cheques in fairly large denominations (the equivalent of €100 or more) to save on any per-cheque commission charges. If you lose your Amex cheques, call a 24-hour freephone number (900 994426). For Visa cheques call 900 948973 and for MasterCard cheques call 900 948971. It’s vital to keep your initial receipt, and a record of your cheque numbers and the ones you have used, separate from the cheques themselves.