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Message:: [QUOTE="Numbers, post: 1099691, member: 11668"]This is a persistent urban legend, but it's quite far from the truth.  High denominations were withdrawn simply because they were in low demand.  The last printings of $500 and $1000 notes had taken place around 1945, and the usage of these denominations then dropped off so sharply that it wasn't until 1969 that enough of them had worn out that another printing was needed.  At that point, the Treasury and Fed jointly decided that the costs of updating the $500 and $1000 designs for the 32-subject printing process were too high to be justified, for such a small printing.  So the high-denomination notes were discontinued instead.  The press release announcing the decision presented it as a cost-saving measure. Some years later, in the early '80s, Congress considered but rejected legislation that would've discontinued the $100 FRN, in order to combat the drug trade.  That debate is probably what started people thinking that the $500+ were discontinued for similar reasons. As for the $2, many did expect that it'd be discontinued when the supply of 1976 $2's ran out in the mid-'90s.  But the Fed decided to go ahead and order another printing, and we got Series 1995 $2's....  Toward an explanation, notice that the demand for $2's was never anywhere near as low as the demand for $500's (the 575 million 1976 $2's lasted about 20 years, while the less-than-2-million 1934 $500's lasted about 35 years).  Also, the 1995 and 1976 $2's were printed in the same designs on essentially the same equipment, while an update from 1934 to 1969 $500's would've required modification of the designs to change from 12-subject wet-intaglio presses to 32-subject dry-intaglio presses (as well as to add "In God We Trust" to the notes).  So the cost-benefit tradeoff for the $2's looked very different than that for the $500's did....[/QUOTE]

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