Should We Kill The $100 Bill?

Editor's note: This is an excerpt of Planet Money's newsletter. You can sign up here.

Today's newsletter is adapted from Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing, a new book by Planet Money co-host Jacob Goldstein.

Since the coronavirus pandemic hit, it feels like cash has disappeared. We shop online when we can. We avoid paper money because lucre seems filthier than ever. And nobody wants to go into that tiny, airless ATM room to get cash.

But!

Since the pandemic hit, the amount of paper dollars out in the world — roughly than there was at the start of the year. This bump was partly driven by pandemic panic, but not entirely. For years, as our daily use of cash has declined, the amount of paper money floating around has grown faster than the overall economy. And it's largely hundreds. There are more $100 bills than ones — enough to give every person in America $4,000 in hundreds.