Why doesn't Japan just divide the Yen by 100?
I think the tradition within the country would outweigh any convenience it would have for the rest of the world.  The US hasn't even been able to switch to the Metric system, even though it's taught in school and used in math / science.  The costs involved with changing price tags, and re-organizing everything in their world would be pretty crazy. So their programmers don't have to deal with floating point arithmetic. This is why they're so far ahead in technology! "Currently, there is simply no reason to do so. It's not a problem. It is no more of a problem or effort to denote ""5,000"" than it is to denote ""50.00"". But if there were a reason to do so, it wouldn't be all that difficult. Of course there would be some minor complications because some people (mostly old people presumably) would take time getting used to it, but nothing that would stop a nation from doing so. In Iceland, this has happened on several occasions in the past and while Iceland is indeed a very small economy, it shouldn't be that difficult at all for a larger one. A country would need a grace period while the old currency is still valid, new editions of already circulating cash would need to be produced, and a coordinated time would need to be set, at which point financial institutions change their balances. Of course it would take some planning and coordination, but nothing close to for example unifying two or more currencies into one, like the did with the euro. The biggest side-effect there was an inflation shot when the currencies got changed in each country, but this can be done even with giant economies like Germany and France. Cutting off two zeros would be a cakewalk in comparison. But in case of currencies like the Japanese Yen, there is simply no reason to take off 2 zeros yet. Northern-Americans may find it strange that the numbers are so high, but that's merely a matter of what you're used to. There is no added complication in paying 5.000 vs. 50 at a restaurant, it merely takes more space on a computer screen and bill, and that's not a real problem. Besides, most of the time, even in N-America, the cents are listed as well, and that doesn't seem to be enough of a problem for people to concern themselves with. It's only when you get into hyper-inflation when the shear space required for denoting prices becomes a problem, that economies have a real reason to cut off zeros." "Think about moving the decimal point in a bunch of accounting software and price stickers. Think about getting confused, ""is that price in old yen or new yen?"" - not just immediately, but every time you hear a historical price figure. Think of the inconveniences. How many billions of yen would that cost the Japanese economy? It could be a lot. How many billions of yen would the Japanese economy save by enacting such a conversion? Because I doubt it's anywhere that much." Another possibly significant issue, is that the number ten thousand is very important in the Japanese language.  In Japanese, you count in ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, BUT instead of a 'hundred thousand', you have ten ten thousands.  and then one hundred ten thousands, and then a thousand ten thousands.   The ten thousand yen note, equivalent roughly to the $100 bill, is the main base of Japanese currency.  If you go to the bank, for example, you will almost always take out your money in ten thousand yen notes.   Knowing a little about the language, i would say it would become quite strange and un-natural to suddenly start using a hundred as the main note value.  I doubt the Japanese people would ever even consider that, and my guess is the only people who are even put out by the large number of zeroes are foreigners who are used to dealing in dollars and cents. A Yen is like a penny.  Buy a chocolate bar 100¥ or £1.00.  Should the UK get rid of pennies and only price things to the pound? What benefit vs. what cost? Benefit - none that I can think of. Cost - massive. Every system that handles money would need to re-value overnight, every store would need to re-price. In many ways it would be simpler and maybe even cheaper to introduce a new currency. Some answers already informed about denomination. There are currencies, doing the cut off of two digits, for example the french franc. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_franc#New_franc  When you look to old french movies, they often talked about 'old franc' when talking about values (at least in French original, I don't know what happens in English translations).
This is a extremely complicated subject, but I assume you want a very simple answer (otherwise I'm not qualified to answer). The value of most currencies is closely tied to the economy of the county, so if China were to print a huge amount of yuan, then since the value of their economy has not really changed, the international currency markets would devalue the yuan to compensate. (This is rather like, if have shares in, say Apple, and they were to issue an extra billion shares, then the value of your shares would fall (by half), rather than for Apple to be suddenly be worth twice as much) Print too many notes and your currency basically becomes almost worthless, which is what happened to the Zimbabwean dollar. I like the idea of China skipping crate loads of actual yuan or dollars notes to America, but in practice, the borrowing is just a paper exercise, rather like an IOU. As to whether America owes Yuan or dollars, the answer is whatever has been agreed. Assuming the currencies are fairly stable, then since each country has more control over their own currency, it is natural for them to prefer their own currency. However, if America believes the value of the dollar will increase, they may prefer to pay back in Yuan (costing them less dollars), and if China believes the value of the dollar will decrease they may agree to that. Japan has not implemented the IBAN system (yet), at least according to the Wikipedia list. IBAN is a European thing, slowly spreading around the globe, and hasn't reached Japan and many other countries yet. SWIFT is your friend here. Adoption of the IBAN at various levels (as of January 1, 2014): weird holdover from the bad old days when you had to do arithmetic by hand I would guess.  Stocks used to trade in 1/8ths, so bonds trading in even smaller increments makes sense.  Also (and I am unsure if this is still true) U.S. bonds trade on a 360 day year (or used to anyway) for the same reason... 360 divides well into months and quarters (for easier math) whereas 365 is considerably harder.  Most of the world now trades in decimals and 365/365 years so I am unsure why the U.S. doesn't.  Institutional inertia I would guess. "Wikipedia has a nice list of currencies that use ""cents"" and currencies that use 1/100th division that is not called ""cent"". Cent means ""100"" in Latin (and French, and probably all the Roman family of languages), so if the currency is divided by 100 subunits - it will likely to be called ""cent"" or something similar in the local language. The list of currencies (on the same page) where it is not the case is significantly shorter, and includes countries with relatively ancient currency units that were invented before the introduction of the decimal system (even though now they are in fact decimal they still kept the old names, like the British ""pence"" or the Russian ""kopek""). The point is that ""Dollar"" and ""cent"" are not directly related, many currencies that are not called ""Dollar"" are using cents as well (Euro, among others). It just means ""1/100th"", and it is safe to assume that most (if not all) of the modern currencies are divided into 1/100th." I guess other than tradition and inflation, probably because the merchants want them.   In the US, what currently costs $2.00 used to cost $0.10.   So 75 years ago, those individual cents made a pretty bid difference.  Inflation causes prices to go up, but doesn't get us to just change our currencies patterns. In your example, you are assuming that in an average day, the rounding errors you are willing to accept happen a couple of times.  2 or 3 cents here and there mean nothing to you.  However to the merchant, doing hundreds or thousands of transactions per day, those few cents up and down mean quite a bit in terms of profit. To an individual, looking at a time frame more than a single day (because who only participates in economies for a single day) there are potentially millions of transactions in a lifetime, mean potentially giving away millions of dollars because they didn't want to wait. And as for the comment that people working each 3 cents every 10 seconds, I would assume at least some of the time when they are waiting for rounding errors, they are not at work getting paid.  That concept is assuming that somebody is always willing to pay them for their time regardless of where that person is in the world; I have no facts and wild assumptions, but surely that can't be true for even a majority of workers. Finally, you should be happy if you happy to have an income high enough that you don't care about individual cents.  But there are those business people who see opportunity in folks like you and profit greatly from it.  I personally worry very much about who has my money; gov't gets paid to the penny and I expect returns to the penny.  A super polite service employee who smiled a lot serving me a beer is getting all the rounding errors I have. There's a concept called interest rate parity, which sort of says that you cannot profit on the difference in interest rates. This difference accounts for the predicted movement in exchange rates as well, along with the stability of the currencies. Fist money does not have legal tender.  And technically there are thousands of people willing to fight for bitcoin, who can be seen as an army so in that logic bitcoin has some intrinsic value.  But both don't have intrinsic value. Most sources on the internet I can find agree with that. Wikipedia, investopedia and many others.  Not that money needs intrinsic value. If the market value is 1000 times above the intrinsic value then the intrinsic value is not even relevant. But 1000 * 0 = 0 and the intrinsic value of the dollar itself (not coins) will always be 0. Same for the EUR and then YUAN. "The best I could come up with would be to simply ask for the amount of ""notes"" and ""coins"" you would like, and specify denominations thereof.  The different currency labels exist for the reason that not all of them are valued the same, so USD 100 is not the same as EUR 100. To generalize would mean some form of uniformity in the values, that just isn't there." I am just a C student with no hope for grad school, so you are going to have to walk me through this... The ECB (until recently), Japan, and the Swiss have been running QE programs equal to that of the Fed's in 2009 for the last couple of years.  That's an extraordinary amount of money being created... what's more, is that the Swiss are even buying shitloads of American equities with it.    Perhaps my understanding of M2 is flawed, but how would the Swiss national bank buying $63B in equities change M2?  It's not like the fed is printing the money specifically for the transaction.  The amount of QE being pumped into a healthy economy over the last couple years should be concerning, if only because it's unprecedented, especially since some of it is being directly invested into equities.  I don't think there is a viable argument that can truthfully say that it isn't a pretty large variable in the market today.... but I could be wrong.  Also, I've read enough, and heard enough, on how the inflation rate is measured to cultivate a healthy skepticism for the entire metric. The way they choose baskets, while obviously the best possible, is not something that lends itself to precision.    Please be kind to my grammar. The dollar is the reserve currency of choice because the full faith and credit of the US is big, liquid, and stable compared to any currently-available alternative.   The Euro and Yuan are big enough to displace the dollar (and maybe the Yen), but any fears about the dollar being subject to fickle whims of politics and policy are significantly worse with those options. I think the government has no real monetary constraint at all. There's pretend constraints like an arbitrary debt ceiling, but not a real insurmountable constraint.  There's not really a necessity to issue debt, the money could just be spent into the economy and no debt issuance conducted. Just run into negative equity.  There's an inflation constraint in terms of how many real brains / hands / tractors are available, but it isnt 1:1 automatically.  The talk of 'debt' is idealogical in my opinion. If Japan voids debt, it's not a problem. They seem to understand exactly how the financial system works and don't seem constrained politically to pulling the levers that deliver the best outcomes. They don't spend enough IMO, but at least they don't run around crowing about debt in a nonsensical way to score politically. I recently bought a stock -  which was priced exactly as your question ponders, to the 1/100 cent. I happened to buy 2000 shares, but just a round lot of 100 would be enough to create no need for rounding.  It's common for industry to price this way as well, where an electronic component purchased by the thousands, is priced to the tenth or hundredth of a cent.  There's nothing magic about this, and you'll have more to ponder when your own lowest unit of currency is no longer minted. (I see you are in UK. Here, in the US, there's talk of dropping our cent. A 5 cent piece to be the smallest value coin. Yet, any non-cash transactions, such as checks, credit card purchases, etc, will still price to the penny.) To specifically answer the question - it's called decimal currency. 1/10, 1/100 of a cent. Wiring is the best way to move large amounts of money from one country to another.  I am sure Japanese banks will allow you to exchange your Japanese Yen into USD and wire it to Canada.   I am not sure if they will be able to convert directly from JPY to CND and wire funds in CND.  If you can open a USD bank account in Canada, that might make things easier. "Currencies that are pegged or fixed require that foreign currencies are held by the central issuer at a proportional amount. This is analogous to having a portfolio of currencies that the central bank issues shares from - in the form of its own currency. We will continue with this analogy, if the central bank says these ""shares"" are worth $1, but the underlying components of the portfolio are worth $0.80 and decreasing, then it is expensive for the central bank to maintain its peg, and eventually they will have to disregard the peg as people start questioning the central bank's solvency. (People will know the $1 they hold is not really worth what the central bank says it is, because of the price changes people experience in buying goods and services, especially when it comes to imports. Shadow economies will also trade using a currency more reflective of labor, which happens no matter what the government's punishments are for doing so). Swiss National Bank (central bank) did this in early 2015, as it experienced volatility in the Euro which it had previously been trying to keep it's currency pegged to. It became too expensive for it to keep this peg on its own. The central bank can devalue its currency by adjusting the proportions of the reserve, such as selling a lot of foreign currency X, buying more of currency Y. They can and do take losses doing this. (Swiss National Bank is maintaining a large loss) They can also flood their economy with more of their currency, diluting the value of each individual 1 dollar equivalent. This is done by issuing bonds or monetizing goods and services from the private sector in exchange for bonds. People colloquially call this ""printing money"" but it is a misnomer in this day and age where printers are not relevant tools. The good and service goes onto the central bank's balance book, and the company/entity that provided the service now has a bond on its book which can be immediately sold to someone else for cash (another reading is that the bond is as good as cash). The bond didn't previously exist until the central bank said it did, and central banks can infinitely exchange goods and services for bonds. Bond monetization (also called Quantitative Easing) is practiced by the Federal Reserve in the United States, Bank of Japan, European Central Bank and now the Central Bank of the Republic of China" "First, congratulations on the paycheck!  :-) On the holds: Is it possible that by allowing your account balance to go negative (into overdraft) that you triggered such treatment of your account?  Perhaps the bank is being more cautious with your account since that happened.  Just how long did you have their $150 on hold?  ;-) Or, perhaps it's not you specifically but the bank is being more cautious due to credit conditions that have been prevalent these last years.  Consider: allowing you to cash a check immediately – when it technically hasn't cleared yet – is a form of credit.  Maybe it isn't you they don't trust well enough yet, but the company that issued the check?  Checks bounce, and not by fault of the depositor. I once had a new account, years ago, and discovered a 5 day hold on deposits.  The irony was it was a check drawn on the same bank!  I called my banker and asked about it – and suggested I'd take my business back to my old bank.  I was in the process of applying for a mortgage with the new bank.  Holds were removed. But you may have some trouble with the ""I'll walk"" technique given the climate and your recent overdraft situation and no leverage – or if you do have some leverage, consider using it. But before you assume anything, I would, as JohnFx suggested, ask your bank about it.  Pay your branch a visit in person and talk to the manager.  Phone calls to customer service may be less successful.  If it's not a big issue and more a minor technical policy one, the bank may remove the holds.  If they won't, the manager ought to tell you why, and what you can do to solve it eventually."