re: How does the U.S. control the value of dollar by soaking up drug trade money?

quote:

---

but is so little/never used that it effectively isn't there?

---

I honestly don't know what that would be. I have a small savings account, less than $40K, that I haven't touched in decades. Is that "effectively" not there? But that savings account is still counted in the Fed's money supply calculation.

The Fed has an estimate for how much currency gets destroyed but if someone is just holding currency for a long time, it's still counted in M1.

You have to remember that actual coin and currency in circulation is a fraction, about 11%, of total money supply.

So whatever currency is buried in backyards is insignificant in any case.