What Are $100 Bills All Used For?

3/4s of $100 bills are outside of the US - they are used in countries with fluctuating currencies (Russia was a big user in the 90s and Africa is now) as the $ has generally been stable in the past. It means local wealth can be protected from these fluctuations and still easily converted back into the local currency when needed as $s are accepted worldwide.

The reason its all 100s is because its the largest available US note. The larger the note the better for storing and transporting etc. Surprisingly this has worked well for the US as initially they never expected the notes to get back home so it worked as a huge interest free loan.

More recently though with the Euro becoming known and trusted many people are now keeping 500 Euro notes ($684) instead.

The dollar has also in the past been the chosen currency for shady dealing throughout the world, again because everyone accepts it and it was stable.

How come the $50 bill was discontinued during some runs?

In this day and age, physical movement of bits of paper is avoided if possible. Most high-value above-board interbank and inter-business transactions are electronic.


Some do, but most are content with electronic holdings. Most of the physical notes held by foreign governments would be held by governments unfriendly to the US, such as Libya, North Korea and Iran.

Dollarized economies (countries which have declared the US dollar to be their own currency) would need to acquire supplies of US notes for their own people, but they'd presumably need the same mix of notes the US itself uses, with a few local variations. Ecuador, for instance, hates your $1 note (they simply don't last long enough in circulation under equatorial conditions) and imports quantities of golden dollars to use instead.

Most of the actual physical $100 notes held overseas are in private, not foreign government hands. Besides the drug barons and organized criminals, ordinary wealthy foreigners and legitimate businesses often prefer to store at least some of their wealth in the form of physical US notes rather than their own country's notes, because they trust in the stability of the US dollar more than they do their own country's money... or their own country's banking system.

Haha, I love the Zimbabwean $100,000,000,000,000 note. I wonder how much that costs?

The bills are printed based on demand from the FRBs If the banks arn't asking for them, the BEP doesn't print them. People don't use $50's as much, so there is less of a demand, so fewer are printed.

Look at the production figures for $2. Very little demand for those, so they are only printed every few years. The $2 Federal Reserve Notes have only been printed on 4 different series - 1976, 1995, 2003, 2003A.