A couple of years ago, the EU (through the ECB) decided that they'd dump the 500-Euro bill. The chief reason? A fair perception that it was readily used by criminals. You'd still have the 100 and 200 Euro bills around.
It came up this week (via a Focus article) that the Bundesbank of Germany kinda disagrees with this logic of dumping the 500-Euro bill.
Some thoughts are that there's more security being added into the bill process and that customers (at least in Germany) want the 500-Euro bill to return.
There's a study mentioned in the middle of this article....65,000 Germans surveyed, and around 20-percent admitted that they handled 200/500 Euro bills on an occasional basis. These people still wanted access to the bills.
What was really behind the dumping originally? Some folks think that money-laundering, under-the-table payments, and black-market activities. By dumping the 500-Euro notes, you simply pushed all the activity down to the 200-Euro level. I'm not sure that really fixed much of anything.
No comments:
Post a Comment