It's all about the woodrows, baby

Is there anything that makes people so delightfully crazy as money?

I'm talking here about the laws relating to actual physical currency, as opposed to the more generalized root of all evil stuff that I'm sure we're all extremely familiar with. I was poking around reading stuff about the Euro, when I came across the arresting bit of information that there are no banknotes that are legal tender in Scotland. What this means is that a Scottish shopkeeper could refuse to take your money, regardless of whether it was issued by the Bank of England or one of the several Scottish banks that issue their own currency. This is more of a hypothetical possibility than anything else, Scots not generally being noted for their reluctance to take your money, but I find it fascinating. The entire paper economy in Scotland works on a system of IOUs, which I think has a certain 19th century charm.

To compound the weirdness of a country with no legal tender is the fact that these promissory notes have to be backed with something, after all. Which, bizarrely, appears to be Bank of England notes. I find this to be sort of satisfyingly circular: English pounds aren't legal tender, but in order to issue your own pounds in Scotland, you have to be able to redeem them for English pounds.

All of this led to the delightful nugget that the Bank of England, as a result of this goofiness north of the border, has issued notes worth a million and one hundred million pounds for use in intra-bank transactions, which leads to the question of whether such a note would be legal tender in England or Wales. Perhaps it's because I'm a child of the digital age, but I honestly can't see the point of an actual, physical piece of paper worth millions of pounds, or for that matter, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Though it does, I suppose, raise entertaining possibilities for bad heist movies.

The last image all of this raises in my head is the scene in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story where Ben Stiller bribes Vince Vaughn to pull out of the tournament with fifty thousand dollars, opening a brushed steel briefcase to reveal a single bundle of hundreds. I just have this image of someone doing the same brushed steel briefcase routine to reveal a single bill with Woodrow Wilson's visage on it.

Unfortunately, you'd never be able to spend or even deposit your hundred grand, but it's fun to think about. And it would make for some mighty entertaining rap lyrics.

Update: One last bit of numismatic goofiness: United States Notes are a form of obsolete US currency, out of circulation since 1966. But when they were first floated, Congress passed a law requiring there to be 300 million dollars worth of United States Notes in circulation at any given time. So the Treasury department, in order to meet the requirements of the statute, printed 300 million dollars worth of hundred dollar notes and then trucked them around from Federal Reserve to Federal Reserve so that the appropriate amount of money would be in "circulation." This insanity went on for four years until Congress repealed the law. Imagine being on the "pointlessly driving three hundred million dollars across the country" detail.