{"id":17937,"date":"2016-02-18T11:21:41","date_gmt":"2016-02-18T16:21:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=17937"},"modified":"2016-02-18T11:34:44","modified_gmt":"2016-02-18T16:34:44","slug":"this-is-the-real-reason-for-the-war-on-cash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=17937","title":{"rendered":"This Is The Real Reason For The War On Cash"},"content":{"rendered":"

This Is The Real Reason For The War On Cash<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Originally posted Op-Ed via The Wall Street Journal,<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n
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These are strange monetary times, with negative interest rates and central bankers deemed to be masters of the universe.\u00a0So maybe we shouldn\u2019t be surprised that politicians and central bankers are now waging a war on cash.<\/strong>\u00a0That\u2019s right, policy makers in Europe and the U.S. want to make it harder for the hoi polloi to hold actual currency.<\/p>\n

Mario Draghi<\/a>\u00a0fired the latest salvo on Monday when he said the European Central Bank would like to ban \u20ac500 notes. A day later Harvard economist and Democratic Party favorite Larry Summers declared that it\u2019s time to kill the $100 bill, which would mean goodbye to Ben Franklin. Alexander Hamilton may soon\u2014and shamefully\u2014be replaced on the $10 bill, but at least the 10-spots would exist for a while longer. Ol\u2019 Ben would be banished from the currency the way dead white males like him are banned from the history books.<\/p>\n

Limits on cash transactions have been spreading in Europe since the 2008 financial panic, ostensibly to crack down on crime and tax avoidance.<\/strong>\u00a0Italy has made it illegal to pay cash for anything worth more than \u20ac1,000 ($1,116), while France cut its limit to \u20ac1,000 from \u20ac3,000 last year. British merchants accepting more than \u20ac15,000 in cash per transaction must first register with the tax authorities. Fines for violators can run into the thousands of euros. Germany\u2019s Deputy Finance Minister Michael Meister recently proposed a \u20ac5,000 cap on cash transactions. Deutsche Bank CEO\u00a0John Cryan<\/a>\u00a0predicted last month that cash won\u2019t survive another decade.<\/p>\n

The enemies of cash claim that only crooks and cranks need large-denomination bills.<\/strong>\u00a0They want large transactions to be made electronically so government can follow them. Yet these are some of the same European politicians who blew a gasket when they learned that U.S. counterterrorist officials were monitoring money through the Swift global system. Criminals will find a way, large bills or not.<\/p>\n

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

This Is The Real Reason For The War On Cash Originally posted Op-Ed via The Wall Street Journal, These are strange monetary times, with negative interest rates and central bankers deemed to be masters of the universe.\u00a0So maybe we shouldn\u2019t be surprised that politicians and central bankers are now waging a war on cash.\u00a0That\u2019s right, […]<\/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":[2,6],"tags":[56,124,1839,282,305,333,359,4549,1464,451,452,3284,1264,1068,861,4318],"class_list":["post-17937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","tag-bank-of-england","tag-central-banks","tag-deutsche-bank","tag-european-central-bank","tag-federal-reserve","tag-france","tag-germany","tag-gross-domestic-product","tag-italy","tag-janet-yellen","tag-japan","tag-larry-summers","tag-recession","tag-swift","tag-wall-street-journal","tag-zerohedge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17937","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=17937"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17938,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17937\/revisions\/17938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}