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posted by martyb on Friday March 01 2019, @12:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the think-global-act-local dept.

The amount of $100 bills in circulation is surging. And it's leaving some economists scratching their heads.

The number of outstanding U.S. $100 bills has doubled since the financial crisis, with more than 12 billion of them across the world, according to the latest data from the Federal Reserve. C-notes have passed $1 bills in circulation, Deutsche Bank chief international economist Torsten Slok said in a note to clients this week.

[...] "By eliminating high denomination, high value notes we would make life harder for those pursuing tax evasion, financial crime, terrorist finance and corruption," [former Standard Chartered bank chief executive Peter] Sands wrote.

The global illicit money flows were "staggering" and fuel crimes from drug trafficking and human smuggling to theft and fraud, Sands said. He estimated that depending on the country, tax evasion robs the public sector of anywhere between 6 percent and 70 percent of what authorities estimate they should be collecting. And despite "huge investments in transaction surveillance systems, and intelligence, less than 1 percent of illicit financial flows are seized.

[...] "The Federal Reserve and Treasury make 99 dollars for every $100 dollar bill they print and sell offshore," Colas said. "There's a natural desire to keep printing these things — the U.S. government makes a lot of money selling them."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/27/theres-been-a-mysterious-surge-in-100-bills-in-circulation-possibly-linked-to-global-corruption.html

Superbills?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @05:51PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @05:51PM (#808807)

    Only if you actually get an annual pay increase equal to inflation. This has not been happening for the last decade for most people.

    More like the last several decades. I can't be bothered to look it up but I remember reading somewhere that if minimum wage had kept up with inflation since the 1970s (1960s?) then it would now be around $22/hr. And some fat cats now scream bloody murder at the mere thought of raising minimum wage from $10/hr to $15/hr. And let's not mince words here: keeping minimum wage low is quite effective at keeping everyone else's wages lower too. Just imagine what your life could be like if your salary was roughly doubled.

    That's why the middle class is shrinking.

    Yes, indeed. More and more, I'm becoming convinced that what the CEOs really want is that all the rest of us work as serfs on their personal plantations!

  • (Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday March 01 2019, @06:42PM

    by Unixnut (5779) on Friday March 01 2019, @06:42PM (#808841)

    > More like the last several decades. I can't be bothered to look it up but I remember reading somewhere that if minimum wage had kept up with inflation since the 1970s (1960s?) then it would now be around $22/hr.

    Wages decoupled from inflation roughly when the US went off the gold standard, which was the 1970s roughly. The ability to print money at whim and spend it like a drunken sailor was the start of the decoupling of asset prices from wages.

    > And some fat cats now scream bloody murder at the mere thought of raising minimum wage from $10/hr to $15/hr.

    While I loathe to defend "fat cats", I will point out that the population of the world in 1970 was around 4 billion, but now is around 8 billion. At the same time the push for gender equality has resulted in more females working, while automation and productivity enhancements has reduced the need for jobs, so the population has doubled, the working percentage of the population has increased, but the number of jobs hasn't. As such, the value of an individuals labour has reduced.

    So yes, I can imagine $22/hr being the correct inflation adjusted minimum wage, but that assumes everything else stays the same, from the number of jobs available, to the population, to the %age of population working, none of which has happened. Peoples labour is worth less now than in the 1970s, and if the AI revolution really reaches its promises, wages will drop further, as there will be even less demand for human labour.

    > And let's not mince words here: keeping minimum wage low is quite effective at keeping everyone else's wages lower too. Just imagine what your life could be like if your salary was roughly doubled.

    Life would be exactly the same, because prices would roughly double to compensate. If everybodies wages doubled tomorrow, prices would double too, and nobody would be better off.