UnNews:Europe to ditch €500 bills
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| Europe to ditch €500 bills | 
|
15 February 2016
FRANKFURT, Germany -- European economic wizard Mario Draghi said the central bank might get rid of the €500 (US$550) bill.
Draghi complained that the only thing you can do with the €500 is hoard it, which keeps money out of circulation, or use it in big drug deals. He said the bank would only make the move to fight drug-dealing, and not to fight hoarding, as hoarders could use the €200 in the months before the central bank ditches it as well.
"The €500 note is viewed increasingly as an instrument for illegal activities," Draghi said. In contrast, it is never viewed as a consequence of an economy where it is pointless to save money, earn money, or above all spend money hiring someone to do work.
Draghi pointed to the free-wheeling American economy, where people have nothing more useful than the $100 (€90) bill, a common greeting is, "Are you carrying the department payroll or are you just happy to see me?" and Americans who have more than thirty $100s in their wheelbarrows are supposed to file a U.S. Treasury form inviting the government to hit them with a three-year tax audit. Germans wary of the Nazi years clung to their 1000-mark notes, as they did not want to be tracked. This is why it was necessary to print the €500 as an equivalent, and assure them that the people tracking them were not Germans but "Europeans" and there were no dopey toothbrush mustaches anywhere in sight. Greece has myriad currency controls that keep its citizens from evading its myriad other controls and especially from getting their money out of the country, controls that surely are to be credited for Greece's current prosperity.
Draghi suggested that the European Central Bank might sell its stock of €500 bills to the United States for the benefit of Americans who want larger bills. However, euro notes contain pictures of nonexistent bridges between barely-existent nations, while the U.S. Government has stated that its future banknotes will bear portraits of women — though Americans also find Animatronic geckos very persuasive.
Apart from hinting that the Bank would next target crayons — which are sometimes used to scrawl the note passed to the teller during a bank hold-up — Draghi could not discuss the topic further, as he was off to a job interview with Wikia, which is always looking for executives with innovative ways to deny large numbers of people access to useful tools to try to keep anything bad from happening.
Sources[edit]
- Staff "ECB considers scrapping 500 euro note". Reuters, February 15, 2016
- Craig Stirling "Draghi Denies ECB Waging War on Cash With Big Banknote Review". Bloomberg, February 15, 2016