The War on Cash: Who’s behind it and why are they doing it?

Hope — Wed, 08 May 2024 14:00:08 +0000

Cash is very efficient for small transactions. Cash transactions are immediate, flexible and anonymous. Cash does not need a password and can’t be hacked. The usefulness of cash is not dependent on technology that might break down – and sometimes does, creating huge problems.

A benefit of eliminating cash and moving to a digital economy, they claim, is combating crime. However, cash isn’t all that convenient for illicit transactions. It has the disadvantage for criminals of being small-scale. For large amounts of illicit transactions, you need to go digital.

The ideal medium for illicit drug commerce in 2014, for example, was – believe it or not – Amazon gift tokens. More recently, money launderers have used online gambling sites to disguise their shady funds. Cash on the other hand has allowed crimes to be discovered. Not least of all because, unlike digital, cash requires a face-to-face transaction. In 2021, a criminal ring attempting to launder money in Canada was caught when they tried to deposit large amounts of cash with a bank.

So why are they trying to move us into a cashless society? And who is “they”?

At the end of 2019, Kevin Dowd, Professor of Finance and Economics at Durham University, wrote an essay that was published in the Economic Affairs magazine.

You can browse Prof. Dowd’s articles about ‘The War on Cash’ on his website HERE. Our article is paraphrased from a blog he wrote, as published on the Institute of Economic Affairs (“IEA”) website, and his 2019 essay titled ‘The war on cash is about much more than cash’.

His essay details the arguments used by those pushing for a cashless society and a digital economy and why these arguments are faulty if not outright false. At 8 pages long it may seem daunting to some but it is written in an easy-to-read style with ample subheadings to use as markers to pick up where you left off should you choose to read it one section at a time. We encourage our readers to take the time to read his essay in full.

Proposals to abolish cash were first put forward by Kenneth S. Rogoff in 1998. These have subsequently been developed further by other economists as well as by Rogoff himself.

Among the principal benefits claimed for the so-called War on Cash (“WoC”) are that it would help combat crime and it would give central banks additional room for monetary policy manoeuvre. The policy is being promoted by an alliance of big digital payments firms, control ideologues and central banks.

The big digital payments firms promote WoC for commercial reasons: they wish to eliminate a competitor so they can increase the fees they charge on digital transactions. They also benefit from collecting data on our spending habits, data which cannot be obtained if we pay by cash.

The second group promoting an end to cash do so as part of an agenda of increasing state control. They argue that cash should be abolished because “bad guys” – money launderers, drug smugglers and terrorists – use it. Yes, bad guys do use cash, but so do the rest of us. If we should abolish cash because bad guys use it, then the same argument applies to everything else they use including digital money, which is more widely used for criminal activities than cash itself.

The third group promoting the WoC are central bankers. As interest rates have fallen, central banks have seen their ability further to reduce interest rates become severely squeezed. Abolishing cash would enable them to overcome this constraint and allow them to push interest rates deep into negative territory in their efforts to stimulate the economy. The point here is that if central banks were to attempt to implement negative rate policies without first abolishing cash, then people would switch large-scale into cash to thwart their efforts. Thus, cash would need to be abolished to force people into negative-rate assets.

The use of cash confers important benefits that digital money does not. That the War on Cash would deprive us of those benefits is the least of its problems, however.

It also threatens to undermine our privacy by allowing all our spending to be tracked. Once the government has coerced everyone into using electronic currency that it can control, it can then also control how we spend it.

The government then has the power to control … everything. It can identify and block payments to or from individuals or organisations of which it disapproves. Its control of payments would be absolute and it could use that control to go after its enemies – real or imagined makes no difference – and destroy them by depriving them of their sustenance.

Anyone who got on the wrong side of the authorities – political opponents, whistle‐blowers, alleged criminals, anyone – can then be subjected to “cancellation” and made to disappear merely by blocking access to their bank accounts.

A government dominated by health fanatics could then compel us to follow personalised health “recommendations” determined by the latest health fad. A government dominated by environmentalist fanatics could force us to “save the planet” according to the dictates of the latest environmentalist fad. A government dominated by religious fanatics could prevent us from engaging in immoral activities, to save our souls. The possibilities are endless.

You may say that governments wouldn’t act this way. But governments are already well advanced along this path.

In addition to the very real concerns regarding total government control and destruction of our civil liberties, the WoC threatens to undermine our privacy, expropriate large amounts of legitimately acquired wealth, expose us all to the risks of fallible digital systems, inflict severe adverse effects on the vulnerable and enable central banks to embark on dangerous negative interest rate policies.

Source: https://expose-news.com/2024/05/06/the-war-on-cash-whos-behind-it/

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The War on Cash Intensifies: Visa Offers Restaurants $10,000 to Go Cashless

Hope — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 15:00:06 +0000

Your favourite restaurant could be going cash free, and getting $10,000 from Visa to do it. It’s all part of Visa’s “war on cash.“

A customer makes a purchase at the Disney Store in Times Square using Apple Pay.

Visa has declared war on cash and its “opening salvo” is to start paying restaurants $10,000 to go completely cash free.

The credit card giant is this week announcing a new plan to hand out thousands of dollars to up to 50 small food and restaurant vendors if they agree to stop taking cash.

Visa will also upgrade the restaurants’ checkout terminals so they can accept contactless payments, like Apple Pay, and invest in some of the stores’ marketing costs. When you pay at one of the stores you would only be able to do so with a credit or debit card, or via mobile payment. The program participants will be picked from an online application that starts in August.

It’s all part of the trend of moving towards a “cashless” society. Sweden is leading the pack, with that nation already predicted to become the world’s first truly cash-free society; over half the banks there already do not keep any cash on hand.

But the U.S. is catching up: Amazon’s brick-and-mortar retail stores only accept credit cards and mobile payment methods; Facebook recently added a peer-to-peer payment option with its Messenger service; and Apple’s iOS11 will include an upgrade to its ApplePay system that allows users to send money to each other via text message. This is all in addition to services like Venmo, a popular way for consumers — especially the younger generation — to send money to each other easily and quickly.

Cash currently accounts for around 30 percent of U.S. retail personal spending, according to recent Nilson Report data.

“To Visa, a cashless culture means convenience, security and ease of use. That translates to freedom for consumers and merchants alike,” said Jack Forestell, Visa’s head of global merchant solutions, in a statement.

It also translates to a big opportunity for Visa if it can replace consumers’ use of cash with digital transactions. The company can charge processing fees for every purchase, and also bill vendors for using its network as a platform.

“We’re focused on putting cash out of business,” Visa Chief Executive Al Kelly told investors last month, making it clear that cash is in the company’s crosshairs.

Further salvos by Visa include running digital payment acceptance at the upcoming Formula E race in Brooklyn and releasing a report on “Cashless Cities: Realizing the Benefits of Digital Payments” later this year. Preliminary data from the report states that if 100 cities went cashless they would accrue net benefits of $312 billion annually.

“With transactions poised to increasingly move away from traditional point of sale in the future (phones, cars, etc.), Visa believes we are on the cusp of an “explosion” in card acceptance locations,” wrote George Mihalos, an analyst at Cowen and Company, in a recent note to investors.

Source Link: https://worldfreedomalliance.org/au/news/the-war-on-cash-intensifies-visa-offers-restaurants-10000-to-go-cashless/