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22nd February 2016 11:34
Link to Post #41
Avalon Member
World Says YES to Cash
THE WORLD SAYS YES TO CASH!
Good news on the banksters' Orwellian push for a cashless world:
Guardian: German plan to impose limit on cash transactions met with fierce resistance
“It would be fatal if citizens got the impression that cash is gradually taken away from them.” -- Bundesbank President Weidman.
"In Germany, such measures clash with deeply engrained habits and social attitudes. According to a recent Bundesbank study, 79% of payments in Germany are made in cash – compared with only 48% in Britain. Even among 14- to 24-year-olds, two-thirds say they prefer paying in cash to electronic means. In a YouGov survey, 72% of Germans said they considered it safer to pay in cash."
As War on Cash Escalates, Cash Lovers Fight Back
"Germany’s neighbor to the south, Austria, has similar reservations about the EU’s plans to suppress cash. The Deputy Economy Minister Harald Mahrer recently said that Austrians should have the constitutional right to protect their privacy."
“We don’t want someone to be able to track digitally what we buy, eat and drink, what books we read and what movies we watch,” Mahrer said on Austrian public radio station Oe1. “We will fight everywhere against rules” including caps on cash purchases, he said.
"Meanwhile, in tech-obsessed Japan, the country that first popularized mobile wallets and smartphones, cash is king. It is offered and excepted reverentially even when paying for groceries. Every ¥10,000-note is treated with utmost care. As a rule, they’re pristine. Demand for cash remains solid, to the increasing consternation of global credit card companies. In a 2013 report, MasterCard estimated that 38% of the total value of the country’s retail transactions were in cash. That’s almost twice the rate in the U.S. and five times the rate in France."
Greek Attempt To Force Use Of Electronic Money Instead Of Physical Cash Fails
"The government has told taxpayers that they will have to spend up to a certain amount of their incomes via bank and card transactions in order to qualify for an annual tax-free exemption."
"Greek businesses are not ready for the expansion of plastic money through the compulsory use of credit and debit cards for everyday transactions....an estimated half of all businesses do not have card terminals. "
In the United States Cash Continues to Play a Key Role in Consumer Spending: Evidence from the Diary of Consumer Payment Choice
"Evidence from the Diary of Consumer Payment Choice (DCPC), conducted in October 2012 by the Boston, Richmond, and San Francisco Federal Reserve Banks suggests otherwise. Not only is cash a very different payment instrument than checks, but consumers choose to use cash more frequently than any other payment instrument, including debit or credit cards. Cash plays a dominant role for small-value transactions, is the leading payment instrument for many types of purchases, and stands as the key alternative when other options are not available."
"In October 2012, the average American consumer had 59 transactions, including purchases and bill payments, and 23 of these 59 payments involved cash."
Last edited by TrumanCash; 22nd February 2016 at 12:05.
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1st March 2016 06:41
Link to Post #42
Avalon Member
Re: War on cash
Cash is the Currency of Freedom
As Fed inflates away dollar's value, government gains more control to manipulate taxpayers and savers
Former Treasury secretary Larry Summers wants to get rid of the $100 bill. But I think he has it exactly backward. I think we need to restore the $500 and $1000 bills. And the reason is that people like Larry Summers have done a horrible job.
Summers wrote recently in The Washington Post that the $100 bill needs to go. The reason, he says, is that it’s a favorite of criminals, along with the 500 euro note, which is likely to be discontinued. The New York Times editorialized in agreement, writing: “Getting rid of big bills will make it harder for criminals to do business and make it easier for law enforcement to detect illicit activity. ... There is no need for large-denomination currency. Britain’s top bill is the 50-pound note ($72), which has been perfectly sufficient. The United States stopped distributing $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills in 1969. There are now so many ways to pay for things, and eliminating big bills should create few problems.”
Reading this got me to thinking: What is a $100 bill worth now, compared to 1969? According to the U.S. Inflation Calculator online, a $100 bill today has the equivalent purchasing power of $15.49 in 1969 dollars. Likewise, in 1969, a $100 bill had the equivalent purchasing power of $645.55 in today’s dollars.
So even if we brought back the discontinued $500 bill, it wouldn’t have the purchasing power today that a $100 bill had in 1969, when larger denominations were discontinued. And carrying around a $100 bill today is basically like carrying around a $20 in 1969.
And although inflation isn’t running very high at the moment, this trend will only continue. If the next few decades are like the last few, paper money in current denominations will become basically useless.
Of course, as CATO Institute analyst Daniel J. Mitchell writes, to our ruling class this isn’t a bug, but a feature. Governments want to get rid of cash for two reasons. First, it gives them more control over citizens: They justify it in the name of fighting terrorists and organized crime, but what they really care about is making sure that nobody escapes their scrutiny, for purposes of taxes, regulation and political finagling. Second, if you’re stuck putting your money in a bank, they can force you to spend it (and thus “stimulate” the economy) by subjecting you to negative interest rates, in which money that just sits in the bank shrinks away, providing an incentive to spend.
The Federal Reserve and various other financial regulatory bodies were sold politically in no small part as protections against inflation. But inflation has run rampant. According to the inflation calculator, today’s $100 bill is worth only as much as $4.18 in 1913, the year the Federal Reserve was established. When you realize that inflation helps debtors and that governments are the world’s biggest debtors, this makes a certain amount of sense — for them.
But at a time when, almost no matter where you look in the world, the parts of it controlled by the experts and technocrats (like Larry Summers) seem to be doing badly, it seems reasonable to ask: Why give them still more control over the economy? What reason is there to think that they’ll use that control fairly, or even competently? Their track record isn’t very impressive.
Cash has a lot of virtues. One of them is that it allows people to engage in voluntary transactions without the knowledge or permission of anyone else. Governments call this suspicious, but the rest of us call it something else: Freedom.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.
Last edited by TrumanCash; 1st March 2016 at 06:43.
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15th March 2016 16:46
Link to Post #43