03 January 2017
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"To its growing army of critics, cash is a pointless relic. It is costly and inefficient, both to manufacture, process and protect. Even worse, it mainly exists to facilitate crime, to finance the black economy, and to help people avoid tax. On top of that, it prevents central banks from driving interest rates significantly below zero, and so traps the economy in a recession. The sooner we get rid of it, the better.
The trouble is, ordinary people don’t seem to see it that way. They like cash more than ever. A new study of 18,000 people in seven countries in the International Journal of Central Banking found that cash was still overwhelmingly the dominant method of payment.
(...)
Finally – and admittedly this is conjecture – people sense that purely electronic money hands too much power to governments and regulators, and hang onto cash because they value its relative freedom. Cash is not just relatively secure compared with the alternatives, it is also very hard to trace. Not many of us are money launderers or drug dealers.
But lots of people might well have a sense that a world where there was no cash, and every payment was made by card or on the phone, would also be one where everywhere they went and everything they did was logged and recorded. They don’t feel comfortable with that – and rightly so. People like cash – it just won’t be possible to get rid of it."
See the full text: The war on cash has already been lost (Money Week, link)
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