European Central Bank to withdraw €500 note

You should be worried less about traceability, and more about negative interest rates turning you into an economic slave in the pursuit of unattainable growth.

A lot easier to chip away at your savings if they're bits in the bank versus notes under the mattress.

In the UK de facto we only go up to £20 (about $29)

The £50 note exists, but is seldom accepted because it's so rarely seen that the average person wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the genuine article and a parody £50 note, never mind a competently produced counterfeit. Pretty clear that British idiosyncrasy is driven by individuals not wanting to deal with large denomination bills rather than state malfeasance though.

I doubt it. The EUR 500 bill would raise more eyebrows. I 've never seen one. Banks will never give you one (not even E 200 bills).

Yes, the 500€ I can understand

Eliminating the 50£ and $100 is just a sad joke

The point is to eventually get rid of cash.

I travel frequently between three countries, with three different currencies. For me, the larger demoninations are very useful -- say you need $5000 spending money for your trip to Country Two. If you can take 50x$100 it's pretty easy to manage; if you can only take $20 bills it becomes at least five times harder to manage.

This is a very real thing for many people with modest, entirely legitimate needs. People for whom the bank fees and profit-seeking exchange rates are a significant burden.

Unless things have changed in the last 4 years I've been abroad, £50 notes are basically unused/deprecated anyway. In my entire 25 years I was living there I had never received one from an ATM, and even when I withdrew large quantities of cash from the bank branch itself it was always denominated in 20s and 10s. I've seen people trying to pay with them (usually foreigners, having exchanged the notes in their home country) and getting denied because cashiers are unfamiliar with them and couldn't tell a fake from a real note to save themselves. If you put a gun to my head I couldn't tell you what a Bank Of England 50 looks like without googling it - pink maybe? Only reason I know the Bank of Scotland one is because it won some award a couple years back (if you're into pretty banknotes take a peek here http://www.theibns.org/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&v...)

That said, removing them would be kinda silly IMO. It may solve the awkward "tourist buying a £3 beer with a £50 note" scenario, but you have that pretty much everywhere. I kick myself when I forget to hit the "Select bankotes" option at ATMs here because a 2000 CZK note is pretty tough to spend. That's maybe more because Czech bars/shops are awful at stocking their cash registers with enough notes for the day and the cashiers just simply do not have the change available.

$100s are terribly useful. A majority of work I do with contractors I have to do in $100s because of check scams and because of credit card fees. Cash allows the transaction to happen without fear of fraud nor without losing 3-6% in cc fees.

I'd feel very weird carrying bricks of 20s from the bank.

I noticed while living in Germany (this was just before the euro was introduced) that Germans love to pay for things in cash.

I was in line at Media Markt waiting to buy something and was a bit surprised to see the person in front of me pay for a computer with cash. It cost 2200 DM (this would have converted to 1100 euros), and he gave the cashier two 1000 DM notes and a 200 DM note. I was surprised to see so much money in cash form, but the cashier acted like it was normal.

I was told that transactions of this sort were common in Germany. Someone I knew told me they had witnessed someone paying for a car with cash, and although this was more unusual, it was not unheard of.

When I cashed out my bank account, I ended up with a 1000 DM bill, with a nice picture of the Brothers Grimm on it. It was weird to have so much money in one bill. Deutschmark notes became larger as the demonination increased, so that 1000 DM bill was huge. It didn't fit in my wallet, that's for sure.

I wonder if Germans still love paying for high value items in cash. I could certainly see them using 500 euro bills for purchases.

As far as I know, the "Bin Laden" nickname was because "everyone knew that they (he) existed, but nobody knew where they (he) was (were) / nobody had sen them (him)".

> Seems like the mere existence of the 500 euro notes and those stupid enough to use them presents a pretty good profiling opportunity.

But...it doesn't. 90% of those sold being in the hands of organized crime doesn't mean 90% of times a 500 euro note is used it is used by organized crime. If most of it is used to store reserves of organized crime, it might make up a very small fraction of all exchanges of the notes (and even smaller if you exclude exchanges between organized crime participants.)

So, it might not be very a good profiling opportunity.

Someone is stupid because they use a certain banknote?

I wouldn't go that far, but removing large notes is definitely a worrying sign of further ratchets in negative interest rate policy.

May I ask why?