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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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Also, this is not a website that I expect anyone to particularly like this line of reasoning (I don't myself), but the reason we don't have bills higher than $100 is that law enforcement and governments in general dislike high value bills due to their use in crime - untraceable cash and all that. The ECB massively regrets putting out a 500EUR note and only printed them for a decade before stopping and trying to take them out of circulation.

FATF delenda est

My understanding is that at the time the EUR was introduced in 2002, Germany still had sufficiently backward payments tech (for similar reasons to the US - basically a lot of small state-licensed banks and a culture that wanted to protect them against competition from large national banks with proper IT departments) that sometimes the only way to get a large transaction through on a same-day basis was to use a wad of 1000 DM notes. The 500 EUR note was a like-for-like replacement, and was no longer needed once Germany developed a nationwide electronic payments system that actually worked.

Yeah there's a general global effort to sunset large bills.