Two dollars too funny

Two dollar bill

I heard this great story on NPR about Ecuador and it's obsession with the two dollar bill. Before we left Boston AL and I went to the bank and stocked up on $2 bills. We have had fun giving them out to "worthy" people and watching their reaction,

Ecuador has used the American dollar as its official currency since 2000, replacing their former currency, the sucre, after it experienced massive inflation in the 1990s. If you think two-dollar bills are rare in the United States, they’re even rarer in Ecuador — and Ecuadoreans love them.

The way that they get their US dollars is similar to how a bank here will order money from the Federal Reserve when they need more fives, 10s, 50s, whatever. The Central Bank of Ecuador will do the same thing, just on a much bigger scale. And $2 bills are not a priority for them, so there’s very little in circulation here.

It's that scarcity that gives the bills their allure, — so much so that there’s even a black market for two-dollar bills. You could sell a very crisp two-dollar bill for three or four times the value.

The two-dollar bill was introduced in the United States in 1862, originally featuring an image of the first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamiliton; Hamiliton was supplanted by Thomas Jefferson in 1869. The bill has been in constant circulation ever since, except for a 10-year gap from 1966 to 1976 when the treasury stopped printing it.

While two-dollar-bills are sometimes considered bad luck in the US, the rare bills are good-luck charms in Ecuador. There’s a superstition that if you possess a [$2 bill], then more [money] will come to you.