{"id":17186,"date":"2016-01-31T16:07:00","date_gmt":"2016-01-31T21:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=17186"},"modified":"2016-01-31T16:07:00","modified_gmt":"2016-01-31T21:07:00","slug":"what-a-cashless-society-would-look-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=17186","title":{"rendered":"What A Cashless Society Would Look Like"},"content":{"rendered":"

What A Cashless Society Would Look Like<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Calls by various mainstream\u00a0economists to ban cash transactions seem to be getting\u00a0ever louder, while central bankers have unleashed\u00a0negative interest rates on economies\u00a0<\/a>accounting for 25% of global GDP, with $5.5 trillion in government bonds yielding less than zero. The two policies are rapidly converging.<\/p>\n

Bills and coins account for about 10% of M2 monetary aggregates\u00a0(currency plus very liquid bank deposits) in the US and\u00a0the Eurozone. Presumably the\u00a0goal of this policy is to bring this\u00a0percentage down to zero. In other words, eliminate\u00a0your right to keep your purchasing power in paper currency.<\/p>\n

By forcing people and companies to convert their paper money into bank deposits, the hope is that they can be persuaded (coerced?) to spend that money rather than save it because those deposits will carry\u00a0considerable costs (negative interest rates and\/or fees).<\/em><\/p>\n

This in turn could boost consumption, GDP and inflation to pay for\u00a0the massive debts we have accumulated (leaving aside the very controversial idea that citizens should now have to pay for the privilege of holding their hard earned money in a more liquid form, after it has already been taxed). So at long last we can\u00a0finally get out of the current economic funk.<\/p>\n

The US adopted a policy with similar goals in the 1930s, eliminating\u00a0its citizens\u2019 right to own gold so they could no longer \u201choard\u201d it. At that time the US was in the gold standard so the goal was to restrict gold. Now that we are all in a \u201cpaper\u201d standard the goal is to restrict paper.<\/p>\n

However, while some economic benefits may arguably accrue in the short-run, this needs to be balanced in relation to some serious distortions that could rapidly develop beyond that.<\/em><\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What A Cashless Society Would Look Like Calls by various mainstream\u00a0economists to ban cash transactions seem to be getting\u00a0ever louder, while central bankers have unleashed\u00a0negative interest rates on economies\u00a0accounting for 25% of global GDP, with $5.5 trillion in government bonds yielding less than zero. The two policies are rapidly converging. Bills and coins account for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[54,57,1035,1034,130,12097,285,305,1167,452,4520,12096,659,669,679,12098,1031,4318],"class_list":["post-17186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-bank-failures","tag-bank-of-japan","tag-cash","tag-cashless-society","tag-china","tag-erico-matias-tavares","tag-eurozone","tag-federal-reserve","tag-greece","tag-japan","tag-m2","tag-monetary-aggregates","tag-purchasing-power","tag-reality","tag-reserve-currency","tag-sinclair-co","tag-yuan","tag-zerohedge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17186"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17187,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17186\/revisions\/17187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}