A recent look at some headlines, all less than two months old, gives us a scary view as to what is coming:
- Bring On the Cashless Future – Bloomberg
- China buyers go virtually cashless – The Star
- Norway’s Biggest Bank Calls For Country To Stop Using Cash – Int’l Business Times
- Cashless future underway as Canadian consumers have more credit, debit and app options than ever – CBC
- In Sweden, a Cash-Free Future Nears – NY Times
- Germany proposes new cash ban and capital controls as Europe rushes towards NIRP – Examiner
With the Western World and China in danger of going into deflation, major banks have already started to charge negative interest rates.
Denmark’s central bank was a pioneer when it first cut its deposit rate below zero in 2012, and the trend has now spread to the eurozone and Japan. The Danish deposit rate now stands at minus 0.65 per cent. – Financial Times
Sweden has followed suit. The USA is set to follow. Major Bankers are calling for an abolition of money. It may the only fix left, now that quantitative easing is failing. But no one is going to put their money in banks! Not if it means negative interest rates.
Don’t worry. Governments will rise to the occasion and soon will be making cash illegal. People will be forced to put their money in banks or the market, thus rescuing the central governments and the central banks that are incestuously intertwined with them.
Beyond that, cash is probably the last arena of personal autonomy left. It can be spent any way one pleases, with no one watching. It can be hidden from the government to avoid taxes. It can be used to engage in transactions of a semi-legal nature. It has power that the government cannot control; and that is why it has to go.
Of course, governments will not tell us the real reasons. Might provoke a reaction. We will be told it is for our own “good,” however one defines that. It will be sold to us as a benefit. Millions of smartphone users are being seduced to take advantage of the convenience of Apple Pay; and indeed it is convenient, until you lose your smartphone.
When that day comes — and we may be only one more “market correction” away — the call will go out to have all disposable cash surrendered in exchange for bank accounts or money funds. A time period will be set up. Possibly two months, extended one or two times to make the bureaucrats appear merciful. Fluff stories will appear in the press to ease the process.
There will be stories about a seventy-year-old granny who marches in with a mattress containing $100,000 of her life earnings. She will smile, and tell the announcer, “I was always afraid of a fire; but now I feel safer.” It will look so cute on the Five O’clock Action Report News.
Kids will turn in their piggy banks at school — does anybody still use piggy banks anymore? — for prepaid money cards. They won’t be told the cards depreciate one or two percent a month, if they do not spend it immediately. Remember, that in all of these transactions, the central government/bank wins.
Side stories will inform us that mugging is down. Crime is finally being defeated. What won’t be reported will be that hacking will shoot up. Bank fraud will skyrocket.
Poor people, often liberal voters, will be sold on increased personal safety. A cashless society means less crime in their neighborhoods. No cash puts muggers at a disadvantage. More importantly, they will be told that the rich can no longer hide their money and will be “forced to pay their fair share.”
