(Roughly) Daily

Americans are increasingly going cashless. Still, as Marcus Lu illustrates, there’s rather a lot of currency in circulation– almost $2.3 Trillion (of which about a third, an estimated $950 Billion [and here] is outside the U.S.)…

Every year, the U.S. Federal Reserve submits a print order for U.S. currency to the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP). The BEP will then print billions of notes in various denominations, from $1 bills to $100 bills.

In this graphic, we’ve used the latest Federal Reserve data to visualize the approximate number of bills for each denomination globally, as of Dec. 31, 2022…

“Visualizing All of the U.S. Currency in Circulation” from @VisualCap.

* Ray Charles, “Greenbacks”

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As we concede that cash is still king, we might send penurious birthday greetings to Kenneth Rogoff; he was born on this date in 1953. An economist who teaches at Harvard and has served as the Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund, he has been a vocal champion of austerity… thus in conflict with Nobel Laueate and former chief economist of the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz (and radically less consequentially, with your correspondent).

While Rogoff completed his education (at Princeton and MIT), he dropped out of high school at 16 to concentrate on chess (at which time he met Bobby Fischer, who was impressed by Rogoff’s “self-assured style and his knowing exactly what he wanted over the chessboard”). Two years later he returned to school but continued to play competitively. Indeed, In 2012 he drew a blitz game with the world’s highest rated player Magnus Carlsen.

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