A Vision of Monetary Hell …
… Troubles Our Sleep …
It is the vision of what the United States will be like when the authorities have obliterated almost three millennia of monetary progress and have their boots on our necks.
Here’s Peter Bofinger, a leading German Keynesian economist, in Der Spiegel magazine:
“With today’s technical possibilities, coins and notes are in fact an anachronism. They made payments incredibly difficult, with people wasting all sorts of time at the cashier as they wait for the person ahead of them to dig through their belongings to find some cash, and for the cashier to render change (rather than, for example, waiting for someone to find the right credit card, complete the transaction, and wait for approval).
[…]
But the additional time is not the largest benefit of the elimination of cash. It dries out the markets for moonlighting and drug trafficking. Almost a third of the euro cash in circulation consists of 500-euro notes. No one needs those for shopping; light-shy figures use them for their activities. [Also] it would be easier for central banks to impose their monetary policies. At this time, they cannot push interest rates appreciably below zero because the savers would hoard cash. If there is no cash, the zero bound is eliminated.”
They said they were going to make me an advisor ... Bofinger discovers they lied to him.
A Slide Back into Prehistory
Yes, dear reader, it seems to be coming – a dreadful slide back beyond the darkest ages and into the mud and slime of prehistory. Back then, modern “money” had not been invented. Using rudimentary credit and barter systems, you could only trade with people you knew – and on a limited scale.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
