How the Fed Distributes Billions of Dollars in Cash

We all know that the Federal Reserve tries to stabilize the economy by raising or cutting interest rates to balance inflation and unemployment. But the central bank’s mandate actually goes beyond monetary policy. The Fed is also responsible for reviewing and distributing billions of dollars in cash to banks all over the US. In this episode, we go deep inside the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago to see how physical money actually gets moved around. Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee is our guide for the tour, and you’ll hear how the central bank gets its cash, how it checks it for authenticity and condition, and how it gets currency to where it needs to be. Read more: Fed’s Goolsbee Sees Uncertainty Driving Shallower Rate-Cut Path Odd Lots is going to Washington, DC! Get your tickets here. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finance is increasingly being built on digital rails. But as the adoption of virtual assets, tokenization and stable coins grows, can regulation not only keep pace but help accelerate it? Find out more later in the podcast.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  But according to recruiters, advisors and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company. And Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com.

• 1:39Tracy Alloway?

  Hey there, Odd Lots listeners. It's Tracy Alockway.

• 1:42Joe Weisenthal?

  And Joe Weisenthal.

• 1:43Tracy Alloway?

  We are very excited to announce that Odd Lots is going to Washington.

• 1:48Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right. For the first time, we are going to do a live public Odd Lots recording in our nation's Capitol. That's going to be March 12th in Washington DC at the Miracle Theater. And guests will be announced in the coming days, but in the meantime, you can find a ticket link at Bloomberg.com/oddlots.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news.

• 2:19Speaker 04

  Go forward until the other door shuts.

• 2:27Speaker 05

  There's gonna be one more we gotta go through, so come on in.

• 2:29Speaker 06

  Oh, wow.

• 2:32Speaker 06

  You could definitely get trapped in here.

• 2:34Speaker 04

  This is the trap. And everyone must come in and the door must shut.

• 2:39Speaker 05

  Very well.

• 2:40Speaker 04

  Now we can go to the next door.

• 2:43Joe Weisenthal?

  Deep underground, coming through elevator, the sort of monochrome quietness, the uniforms. It kind of reminds me of Severance a little bit. Has anyone made that observation before?

• 3:04Tracy Alloway?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. Is this the one where we get severed, Tracy? My name is Joe Weisenthal and I freely consent to being severed. Joe, we are not getting the severance procedure, but we are about to go to a place that not many people get to see. We are going deep into the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago to tour its cash operations and get an inside look at how money is actually distributed. All right, yes. Okay, welcome to cash. In this episode, we take a walk through the basement of the Chicago Fed and we learn all about how the central bank processes and delivers cash.

• 3:44Tracy Alloway?

  Cash operations, while not quote, highly classified, like in the inner workings of the office and the show Severance, they're well beyond the public eye for obvious reasons. So this is a rare look or a listen, I guess, at the inside. Yeah, and you're not actually allowed to take any pictures or videos inside the vaults. So an audio format actually does pretty well here. And this is all really interesting because we're used to thinking about the Fed in terms of monetary policy, raising or cutting interest rates to try to keep inflation in check and unemployment low. And there's stuff like bank regulation, of course, we talk a lot about that on the show. All of that can feel very theoretical, but there's this very physical side to the Fed as well.

• 4:28Joe Weisenthal?

  That's totally right. The cash in your wallet has got to come from somewhere, right? And a lot of it comes from the Fed, or at least it moves through one of the 12 Federal Reserve banks. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing actually makes the money, and then it gets delivered and processed through the Fed banks.

• 4:44Tracy Alloway?

  And the Chicago Fed building itself, I mean, it kind of looks exactly like how you might picture an old fashioned bank. It has these giant, beautiful neoclassical columns on the outside, and inside, inside is where the magic happens.

• 5:05Speaker 04

  We set up a system in the United States with 12 Reserve Banks around the country because in 1913, as today, people were deeply uncomfortable with the financial system being run exclusively by New York City and Washington DC. So they wanted input from all around the country. And one component of the job is monetary policy, like we talk about all the time.

• 5:35Joe Weisenthal?

  That's Austin Goolsbee, President of the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank. And you've probably heard him on the podcast a couple of times before, very recognizable voice. And he's usually, you know, talking about the macro environment, monetary policy, things like that.

• 5:50Tracy Alloway?

  But now you're going to hear him talk about something very different, being the bank behind the banks, the one that actually provides them with cold, hard cash.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  We're also a real, live, working bank. And we got 17, 1800 employees. We are a bank. To banks and they have a master account. We pay interest on their deposits into that account, which are bank reserves. And we provide Fedwire, we do ACH direct deposit, we do Fed Now. And one of the things we do is cash. It's one of the Fed financial services. And so if one of our member banks wants cash for their ATMs, they'll send in and say, just like you, in your account, you go down the ATM, you take some cash out.

• 6:43Speaker 04

  They say, we want cash to put in our ATM, so take that out of our master account. They send a Brink's truck over here and we can, they, they place an order. We count it out, we give it to them. If they have too much currency, they send it to us in the same Brink's truck. We take it in, we run it through machines, we count it, we pull out anything that's been signed or somebody spit on it or, you know, it's, it's dirty and shred it. We process it, put it in our vaults, send it out the next day. And we get a bunch of shipments of brand new money from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. So it's a very live operation and you're going to see it.

• 7:28Speaker 04

  There are a lot of people work there, there's a lot of machinery and it's, it's pretty neat.

• 7:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Pretty neat is putting it mildly because it turns out that Austin loves giving the tours of the cash shop, something that was totally evident while we did it. I think most people in finance and economics love money, but Austin really loves money.

• 7:50Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, so join me and Joe and Austin on this special edition of Odd Lots as we follow how money actually moves through the Federal Reserve system.

• 8:06Tracy Alloway?

  We are standing in the lobby of the Chicago Fed Building. There's a beautiful staircase and a balcony that looks down on this gorgeous atrium. Apparently there used to be machine guns mounted up there and now there's security guards at the entrance, the Fed's own police force.

• 8:23Joe Weisenthal?

  And as Austin mentioned earlier. The Chicago Fed was established in 1914. And back then, investors didn't have much reassurance that their bank deposits were, you know, actually safe. And after months of back and forth, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, establishing the Federal Reserve system and the 12 reserve banks that cover the entire country.

• 8:42Tracy Alloway?

  And the Chicago Fed covers parts of Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, and the state of Iowa. And as we've said before, we are used to talking about whether the Fed is doing a good job on things like inflation and unemployment, but we don't actually talk that much about its other big job, which is managing the money.

• 9:01Speaker 05

  We know when we're doing a good job, when you can go to an ATM and there's money in it, you can go to a grocery store and you can pay in cash and they have change to give you in currency.

• 9:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Mike Kepler is an executive vice president of the district's cash operation and the Chicago Fed Central Bank service area.

• 9:20Speaker 05

  So essentially, I oversee the full currency operation between our Chicago and Detroit offices. That includes everything from processing the currency on the high-speed machines to paying out orders to financial institutions in our district and taking money in.

• 9:36Tracy Alloway?

  Even though we live in a world that's full of digital payment systems, cash still plays a role in everyday transactions.

• 9:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Cash is lindy.

• 9:45Tracy Alloway?

  That's right, Joe.

• 9:46Speaker 05

  It's extremely important. So, you know, think about things like hurricanes or weather-related events or power outages where electronic payments don't work. In fact, I was in a store the other day and their credit card system was down. And fortunately, I had cash in my pocket, so I was able to jump the line and get my stuff and get out the door while we're kind of waiting for the credit card machine to pop back up. So it is very important. And not all consumers use just one payment type. So in fact, you can imagine in today's times, electronic payments, debit cards, credit cards are the primary two vehicles that folks use for transactions. But cash is a third, a very close third for payments.

• 10:25Joe Weisenthal?

  And look, the thing is, as the share of payments that are made electronically, mobile banking, using cards rises, people have this tendency to say, oh, well, there is no cash. I don't even see cash.

• 10:41Speaker 04

  If you go look, and you can look on Fred, it's on there. Currency in circulation as a share of GDP is over 10%. And that's among the highest percent on record, or at least since the 1980s that you could find on Fred. That's double what it was in 2008. That's like four times higher as a percent than it was 40 years ago. And it's shockingly large per person. It's like $4,800 per person on average in money.

• 11:24Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, I don't know about you, but I always keep $4,800 in cash just in case I have to spontaneously buy, like, I don't know, a MacBook Pro or something.

• 11:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Emergency lumber purchases, maybe 1,000 chickens for you.

• 11:36Tracy Alloway?

  That's right.

• 11:41Speaker 06

  Hi. How are you? Hi, Tracy. Nice to meet you. Amy, nice to meet you.

• 11:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Hi, I'm Joe.

• 11:45Speaker 06

  Joe.

• 11:46Joe Weisenthal?

  Great to meet you.

• 11:46Speaker 04

  You can meet the AAA, the amazing Amy Alvarado.

• 11:50Speaker 06

  Welcome to Cash. We're glad you're here.

• 11:52Tracy Alloway?

  Getting into the basement where the Chicago Fed's cash ops actually are is a process.

• 11:58Speaker 04

  There's a lot of cameras, there's a lot of security, and there's a lot of rules. So don't, don't go fishing in your pockets. Don't pull out your wallet while we're...

• 12:06Tracy Alloway?

  Right, so there's no putting your hands in your pockets and you're not allowed to carry anything with you after going down in the elevator. I'm not even sure what floor we're actually on. And we have to pass through multiple security doors before we get here.

• 12:20Joe Weisenthal?

  But when we do get there, it's pretty cool. We're in the transfer area where money comes in and processing begins. And let me tell you, there is money everywhere.

• 12:30Tracy Alloway?

  So we're standing next to a big box filled with cash. How much would be in something like that?

• 12:37Speaker 06

  A full container of 20s is roughly 8.5 million.

• 12:41Tracy Alloway?

  Wow. Joe, grab it quickly. No, don't.

• 12:44Speaker 06

  You'll see a lot of money as we walk around today.

• 12:47Joe Weisenthal?

  That's Amy Elverado, the bank's vice president of district cash operations. She oversees the entire process.

• 12:53Speaker 06

  Our team will go in the room and check all of the bags as the armored carriers drop them off. We'll make sure all the bags are intact and sealed and everything. We'll count them. We're doing this bag count and then we're signing off on it. That's when we would release the carriers. And that's the transfer process coming in.

• 13:15Tracy Alloway?

  There's a long hallway stretching out in front of us. The walls are white and there's rooms on either side that have large windows and glass doors. In fact, one of the most striking things about this place is just how much you can see.

• 13:28Joe Weisenthal?

  Everything is see-through, even the doors. Amy and Austin tell us that transparency is paramount to the security of the whole operation, given that they're dealing with, you know, cash.

• 13:38Speaker 06

  A reason why these doors are clear is because we are never in the room with these carriers at the same time. The carriers will come in onto the concourse. They will unload their currency bags onto rolling screens, as we call them. They will put them in the room. They will go back out the other side of the room. When our team comes in the room, they're supposed to watch us flip all those bags because it's still theirs at this point. And once we do that, we'll bring the work in. But when we transfer work back out to them, same process happens. We go in the room, we drop off the currency, we come out, they come in. So we all need to be able to see through the glass of the transfer process happening.

• 14:20Joe Weisenthal?

  All of these security rules apply to employees, too.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  People wear smocks. There are no pockets when they go in. The colors indicate who's doing what role. And we have very, very good hygiene in an accounting sense.

• 14:35Tracy Alloway?

  And it's a tough job. Cash, as it turns out, is pretty heavy when you're piling up millions of bills, millions of physical bills. The Chicago Fed processes something like 5.5 million pieces a day, and the actual currency value of that can be higher depending on the denomination of the notes.

• 14:54Joe Weisenthal?

  Once the money comes into the Fed, the cash is brought into a receiving room. Which is down another floor of the basement. This room looks very similar to the transfer room.

• 15:04Tracy Alloway?

  And getting cash into the Fed is just the first part of this process.

• 15:08Speaker 06

  We would now open the bags and make sure we have the correct amount of bundles in each bag. And a bundle, as I'll point out, is what you see in these containers. They look like little bricks.

• 15:18Joe Weisenthal?

  It's like a brick of cash.

• 15:19Speaker 06

  Like a brick of cash. And it is 10 straps of 100 notes, so 1,000 notes per bundle, or brick, as it looks like. And so we open those deposits up. We make sure we have the correct number of bundles. And this is where we're entering in the deposit ticket and we're making sure that all of the accounting is correct at the bundle level. And then all of the work out of these rooms gets stored by denomination into containers where they will be stored in vaults until it's time for their piece count verification.

• 15:52Joe Weisenthal?

  We make our way through more long, stretching hallways until we get to a room where there are a couple of workers sorting through a bunch of cash and, most strikingly, a big machine that takes up most of the room with a computer on the left side and stacks of money neatly sitting on top of the tables. They call this a high-speed room.

• 16:13Joe Weisenthal?

  That's the sound of cash being counted and measured very fast.

• 16:18Speaker 06

  That is the sound of the currency going into the machine and it's singling those notes. So there's stacks of hundreds, right? They're going into that machine and they're kind of getting stacked on a rake and it is really pulling those notes at rapid pace and then sending them singly, one by one, through the machine.

• 16:37Tracy Alloway?

  So it's not quite Fed money printer go brr, but it is a high-speed money processor go brr.

• 16:43Joe Weisenthal?

  Some people are going to be disappointed that the Fed is not literally printing the cash.

• 16:48Speaker 06

  Certainly, we're imaging every strap that comes in here on the currency. So that information relates back to the banks that sent it in. So we have that information. If there's any disputes, we certainly send that out to our financial institutions. The machine will cut the straps off and then take each individual note, run it through our sensors, and it will make rapid decisions on whether it is fit for circulation or it would be shredded or if it needs to have another look.

• 17:18Tracy Alloway?

  So the sensors would be looking for things like if there's a mark on it or a tear or that sort of thing.

• 17:23Speaker 06

  Correct. It's checking the fitness level, so is it clean, is it soiled? It's checking the authenticity of it. It is checking that it's the correct denomination. So it's looking at all of those things very rapidly.

• 17:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Does human judgment ever come into this or can it just be 100% machine determined?

• 17:40Speaker 06

  So any items that are rejected on the machine will go to a secondary process where the operators will handle notes by hand. They will feed them again through another set of sensors and it'll take that read. But the end determination on things like counterfeits, our staff are trained on counterfeits, they're tested on counterfeits, and they do make those decisions as they're looking at those notes. So as you can see, the large machine, we talked about here at the end of the machine and this tube that's going up into the ceiling, you can see the fluttering in that clear window. It looks like a bank, a drive-up tube or a pharmacy tube. That's where the shreds are exiting our floor to go to our broketer.

• 18:21Speaker 06

  That's what it sounds like when they don't roll straight.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  Notice the wall guards.

• 18:30Speaker 06

  We have our bumpers for a reason.

• 18:33Tracy Alloway?

  What happens to all the shredded money? I know you sell some in like the gift shop.

• 18:38Speaker 04

  Sell, we give it away.

• 18:39Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, you give it away? Oh, well, we definitely want some. But like what happens to the majority of it?

• 18:43Speaker 06

  Here it's sent out for recycling. Most fed offices send it out to be recycled.

• 18:49Joe Weisenthal?

  Recycled back into future bills?

• 18:51Speaker 06

  No, here it's turned into some sort of fuel. We send it out. And at other feds, it's different. I know one of the feds composts.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  What's next for virtual assets? I'm Jacob Rees, host of Economy Scale, a series exploring growth in key global sectors. And this episode, we're diving into the digital forces shaping finance. Sean McHugh from Dubai-based Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority has this to say.

• 19:30Speaker 04

  We're seeing a lot of insocial players come in, digital asset dedicated hedge funds, high-frequency traders and that sort of thing, and folks who service insocial clients.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  As more capital enters the market, adaptive regulation is likely to become increasingly key. Rees-McRae of Ripple says.

• 19:47Speaker 05

  Regulators globally would like to keep the industry at arm's length. That's the opposite here. I think also what you'll find is that regulation and frameworks can come out, but some of them are maybe a slight iteration on some 80-year-old policy and not actually in line with what the technology can do and offer. And again, that's very different in Dubai.

• 20:06Speaker 00

  Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. This series is brought to you by Bloomberg Media Studios and the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Millions of Americans are taking peptides, short strings of amino acids that can act as biological signals for cells. Peptides like insulin can occur naturally in the body, or they can be synthetically introduced to induce a biological process, as happens with semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic. Now Bloomberg's Anika Inam Pooti reports peptides may be exploring their next frontier, the brain. People are taking peptides for mental clarity and cognitive benefits as alternatives to psychiatric medications and to gain a competitive edge or stave off the effects of aging. Both insulin and semaglutide are approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Because importing or selling unapproved peptides for human use is not legal in the US, many people turn to online forums for guidance and overseas vendors with questionable credentials to obtain them. Unapproved peptides, which are marketed as research chemicals, have been circulating in what's become a billion-dollar gray market amid the rise of do-it-yourself medicine as people increasingly turn to social media or artificial intelligence for medical help. Doctors warn against self-experimentation and advise talking to providers before trying any new therapies. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com.

• 21:39Joe Weisenthal?

  Once the cash is all processed and sorted, it gets stored in the bank's vaults.

• 21:43Tracy Alloway?

  And these vaults are huge. They look straight out of a movie. Think Ocean's Eleven, but bigger.

• 21:50Speaker 04

  You've got to lower the floor or the door cannot shut.

• 21:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Each door weighs like 80,000 pounds and you have to drop the floor to actually be able to open and shut them. So you just sort of have to envision that.

• 22:04Speaker 04

  If they tell you to keep your hands and arms inside the car at all times, you do it. This one.

• 22:11Tracy Alloway?

  The vaults are over 100 years old now and it took over 220 trips to transfer the Chicago Fed's entire cash holdings from their previous location to this new site.

• 22:26Speaker 04

  The wheel gets turned and locks it in place. Yeah, it's got kind of a master and commander ship wheel feel to it.

• 22:38Joe Weisenthal?

  What's the combination to a market?

• 22:45Speaker 04

  There's multiple.

• 22:47Joe Weisenthal?

  And then we turn the dials on the combination so that way it sets it back for the next business day so no one can just come in and open it.

• 22:57Joe Weisenthal?

  As we walk around these halls down deep in the basement, there are screens showing live streams of outside of the Fed building. You can see the streets and sidewalks outside the bank.

• 23:07Tracy Alloway?

  Why is that showing a video of the outside?

• 23:11Speaker 06

  So that is what we call the windows to the world because as Austin mentioned, we are in the basement and we want to know if it's raining and instead of calling Austin to ask him if it's raining, we have our own window.

• 23:24Speaker 04

  We don't have windows. We got a second basement, a third basement and you want to know is it sunny or?

• 23:33Speaker 06

  Okay, so we're gonna come around the corner here and then we're gonna step inside. This is considered a working vault. So you follow me in. Into the vaults. My gosh. And so what we have in here are two more paying rooms, just like we talked about outside. And then this vault, it has these working rooms and then we have inventory storage. You can see some of our leadership is in here doing some work right now. But this is where we have the new inventory stored as well as some fit inventory and some of the orders that will go out tomorrow. This is where the smell is the strongest, right?

• 24:14Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 24:14Speaker 04

  You just smell that smell? This is, this is fresh money. That's fresh money. Love the smell of fresh money in the morning.

• 24:22Joe Weisenthal?

  This is probably what I remember most about the experience. The smell of new money. This is where the Fed keeps bills ready for distribution to banks.

• 24:31Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, in a room with millions of dollars in it, that smell is strong. This is the room where you really get to appreciate the physical aspects of money. Because, as it turns out, dollars aren't just green. When they're all stacked up, you start to see there's a whole range of colors in there. And of course, there's that smell.

• 24:50Speaker 04

  That's a good smell.

• 24:53Speaker 06

  And it's funny, for the longer you work here, there is a thing really about nose blind. Because you don't, you don't really pick it up as much anymore as our visitors are always like, what is that smell?

• 25:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I went to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. One of my quests was, where does the smell come in? Is it the paper? Is it the what? And there are big buckets of the green ink and I took it. I was like, that's it! That's the smell.

• 25:21Tracy Alloway?

  And this room is where the FIT money, all the stuff that's been processed by the high-speed machine, gets paid out.

• 25:27Speaker 06

  That machine creates FIT inventory. And that's on the right side of the room here. On the left side of the room are their orders that they're going to be paying out tomorrow. So our allocator will pull the orders, like a grocery list. Those orders get downloaded. We have a list of how many bundles they want of each denomination. We'll fill it like a grocery list. They'll put the inventory on the table. And then the verifier will confirm blindly that count. We'll enter that work in. Once that count is balanced, they will bag it and tag it, put it into their containers by armored carrier. And then that work will get stored in the vaults overnight. And tomorrow we'll be taking it up to where we do our transfer process.

• 26:09Speaker 04

  Mike will have the exact numbers, but we pay out probably 140 million a day.

• 26:14Speaker 05

  135 million a day.

• 26:15Speaker 04

  135 million a day. And we take in 100 million a day?

• 26:19Speaker 05

  119.

• 26:20Speaker 04

  119 million a day. And then you say, wait a minute, how, how can you pay out more than you get? It's because we get new money shipped in from the, from Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

• 26:31Tracy Alloway?

  And it all comes full circle. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing, which has facilities in Washington DC and Fort Worth, prints the money. They ship it to the reserve banks where this whole process takes place. And then those bills go out to banks, ATMs, or wherever you're getting your cash money.

• 26:47Joe Weisenthal?

  The life cycle of a bill is pretty interesting.

• 26:50Speaker 04

  That's where the money is printed. They put it on pallets, they ship it to the reserve banks, and we receive it and you'll see it. It'll circulate for a few times. It will come back to the Fed for processing. As it gets spent, it goes to a bank. The bank puts it in deposit. They'll send it to us and say, "We've got too much currency. Credit our deposit account." We'll count it, run it through the high-speed machine. If it's too dirty, we'll shred it. If it's fine, we'll bundle it up, put it in a package, and send it out to the next bank that needs more cash for their ATM.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  And that's kind of the cycle. The money comes in, gets stuck in the vault, goes out the next day or whenever people want it, and it's supplemented by the new money that comes from Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

• 27:48Speaker 05

  In terms of a lifespan of a dollar bill or currency, it ranges somewhere from the $1 bill, I think, lasts, on average, 6.6 years out in circulation versus, as you can imagine, the $100 bill, less used, probably more of those people that keep it in their homes, under mattresses or whatever. That circulates every 22.9 years. So quite a bit of difference, but it varies based on the denomination.

• 28:12Speaker 04

  There's supposed to be a strip. Yeah, you can see. It's green. If you put the UV light right up against it, it gets brighter. But there's a green strip. I don't know.

• 28:32Tracy Alloway?

  We end our tour at the Chicago Fed's Money Museum, which is both fun, and even though it's about money, it's actually free to enter. And you can learn even more about cash.

• 28:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, so if you're ever wondering which of the 12 Fed banks your money comes from, if you look at the bill, you see a big letter printed on each note. On a $1 bill, it's just to the left of George Washington.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  F. Who's F? That's Atlanta. This is Atlanta money. No wonder it's not. No wonder it's not there. So you can see the letter in the corner. That's the equivalent of the G. So B would be the second district. That'd be New York.

• 29:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, C is New York.

• 29:11Speaker 04

  C would be third district. So is that Philadelphia? I think it might be Philadelphia.

• 29:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Each letter corresponds to the regional Fed that it passed through. So if you're wondering what the Chicago Fed is, that's G. That's Chicago money. So the Chicago Fed will put in an order with the Bureau of Engraving and Printing for new cash, and that money will be made and sent to the Chicago Fed.

• 29:33Tracy Alloway?

  And let me tell you, Joe, I will never look at cash the same way again. I will annoy everyone that I know by telling them which Fed bank their money came from.

• 29:42Joe Weisenthal?

  And with that, our tour comes to an end, and we're thrown back out into the real cashless world, and we are blinded by the sun.

• 29:49Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, but we learned a lot. And how many people actually get to say they've seen billions of dollars in cash without doing something illegal?

• 29:59Joe Weisenthal?

  All right, Tracy, I am ready for my waffles and dance party now.

• 30:02Tracy Alloway?

  Let's go.

• 30:11Tracy Alloway?

  Special thanks to Austin Goolsbee, Mike Kepler, Amy Alvarado, Mark Peters, and the staff at the Cash Operations Department of the Chicago Fed.

• 30:21Joe Weisenthal?

  This special look inside how the Fed stashes cash was written by Tracy Alocke and Carmen Rodriguez. I'm Joe Weisenthal and together with Tracy, we co-host the Odd Lots podcast. Carmen produced this episode with the help of Dashil Bennett and Kale Brooks. Blake Maples is our sound engineer. Brendan Noonan is our executive producer. Sage Bowman is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts.

• 30:43Tracy Alloway?

  If you enjoyed this special Odd Lots episode, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening.

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