This video was made possible by Hover. Buy your domain for 10% off at hover.com/HAI. So, you know that thing in the US nowadays
where every few months interest rates go like this then the stock market goes like this,
mass panic ensues, but it’s actually a good thing because it signals the economy is strong
and it gives a way to fight economic slowdowns in the future but interest rates haven’t
been raised enough and there are no mechanisms to fight an upcoming recession and we’re
all going to die and panic should start now and you should stock up on gold bars and bullets
and all the money is going bye bye? Yeah, well setting that interest rate is the
responsibility of the US Federal Reserve. The Fed is important not only because it manages
interest rates but also because it manages this—the US dollar. The US dollar is important not only because
it’s whats used in the world’s largest America, but also because a number of other
countries use it with varying levels of officiality. Some countries like Ecuador and El Salvador
and East Timor use it as their actual, official currency while others like Barbados, the Bahamas,
and Belize have currencies tied in value to the US dollar and accept both currencies widely
while almost the whole world uses the dollar for business purposes thanks to its stability. So don’t worry the other 95.7% of the world—you’re
getting mentioned this episode… exactly that one time. As a country that has existed for a medium
amount of time, there have been many iterations of US banknotes and you’ll notice that even
the old ones say something along the lines of, “this note is a legal tender at its
face value for all debts public or private.” There’s no expiration date on this note
which means that, despite it being printed in 1880, it is still a fully legal $5 bill
that you could use anywhere you wanted. Of course its collector value is much greater
than its face value but still, you could rock up to 7/11 and buy some mountain dew with
it. Now, this occasionally leads to issues because
your average 7/11 clerk probably doesn’t know what all the hundreds of different iterations
of US banknotes look like. This is all unlike countries like the UK—oh
wait, yeah I’m sorry I’m going to have to mention the rest of the world again. This is unlike in the UK where this paper
ten pound banknote, printed as recently as 2016, is no longer accepted in stores. You can go to the Bank of England, Scotland,
Ireland, or another of the banks that issue notes to exchange your paper ten pounds for
the new polymer ten pounds but unfortunately you can’t pay for your cheeky nandos with
the lads using them. So that brings us to the big boys of American
banknotes. As any street-based “entrepreneur” knows,
the only banknotes currently being printed in the US are the $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50,
and $100 bills. If you get a $100 trillion note you might
have performed a little too much product testing, walked too far, and ended up in Zimbabwe. Of course, in the days before Venmo, PayPal,
and credit cards banknotes were more important as they were the primary means of paying for
things. Even when buying something pricy like real
estate banknotes were often still used and the US didn’t want every large transaction
playing out like a Mr Beast video with people rocking up with wheelbarrows of $100 bills. Therefore, the US issued, at different times,
$500, $1,000, $5,000, and $10,000 banknotes. Those were and still are fully legal and real
banknotes with which you could pay for anything you wanted… except for happiness. It’s worth noting that, due to inflation,
the earliest $10,000 note, issued in 1863, was at the time worth the equivalent of $200,000
today. In your pocket you could carry enough value
to buy a house, a few cars, or a few dozen textbooks. The other major purpose for these large denomination
banknotes was for transfers between banks. Wire transfers have existed since the 1870’s
over telegraph but they weren’t yet secure and reliable. Therefore, banks still often settled up debts
between each other by sending over cash and these large bills made it quite a bit easier. Of course, there are twelve huge banks across
the US which essentially act as the government’s bank—the Federal Reserve Banks. These biggest of the big boys needed some
big boy bills to transfer money between them and so they printed this—the $100,000 bill. These bills were officially gold certificates—they
represented $100,000 in gold that the fed banks held—and when these were printed in
1934, they had the equivalent value to $1.9 million today. About 42,000 $100,000 notes were printed and
they were used for their money-transfer purpose up until 60’s when they were withdrawn. Unlike normal notes, where the withdrawal
process works by destroying any notes received by banks and therefore notes can stay in circulation
for decades or centuries, these $100,000 notes were able to be repossessed by the government
rather easily since they were exclusively in the possession of the government. While most were destroyed, a few specimens
remain in museums and at fed banks and, since the government has all the surviving notes,
it’s illegal for a person to possess this note since the only way to get it would be
through theft. Of course, we at Half as Interesting are 99.9%
anti-illegalness so if you have a fully-legal $10,000 bill there are a few uses I can suggest:
shredder calibrating, bougie kindling, hoover stuffing, or buying 770 “.com” domains
from Hover. If you have a name for yourself, a current
company, a possible future company, or anything you should buy the domain for it as soon as
possible so someone else can’t. Hover makes this super-simple and inexpensive. They have best-in-class customer service,
the ability to connect to almost any website builder in a few clicks, and the option of
setting up a super-professional, super-cool custom email with your domain. Best of all, you can get 10% off and help
support the show by going to http://hover.com/hai.
Does anyone know what the wallet is @ 2:29?
now I'm wondering what's that 0.1% of illegality in HaI videos
Seems like they would have put someone other than Woodrow Wilson on the largest denomination of currency
he misplaced El Salvador; he put it between Nicaragua and Costa Rica when it's actually between Guatemala and Honduras