Tag: ban cash

Jim Grant Rejects Rogoff’s “Curse Of Cash”, Warns “Government Wants To Control Your Money”

Authored by Jim Grant, originally posted at The Wall Street Journal,

If there is a curse between the covers of this thin, self-satisfied volume, it doesn’t have to do with cash, the title to the contrary notwithstanding. Freedom is rather the subject of the author’s malediction. He’s not against it in principle, only in practice.

Ken Rogoff is a chaired Harvard economics professor, a one-time chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and (to boot) a chess grandmaster. He laid out his case against cash in a Saturday essay in this newspaper two weeks ago. By abolishing large-denomination bills, he said there, the government could strike a blow against sin and perfect the Federal Reserve’s control of interest rates.

“The Curse of Cash,” the Rogoffian case in full, comes in two parts. The first is a helping of monetary small bites: a little history (in which the gold standard gets the back of the author’s hand), a little central-banking practice, a little underground economy. It’s all in the service of showing where money came from and where it should be going.

Terrorists traffic in cash, Mr. Rogoff observes. So do drug dealers and tax cheats. Good, compliant citizens rarely touch the $100 bills that constitute a sizable portion of the suspiciously immense volume of greenbacks outstanding—$4,200 per capita. Get rid of them is the author’s message.

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Larry Summers Launches The War On Paper Money: “It’s Time To Kill The $100 Bill”

Could these fucking elitist douchebags be any more blatant in their attempt to fuck us over? Eliminate cash, introduce negative interest rates, tax every electronic transaction, outlaw gold and force us to spend our electronic currency before it evaporates. There will be blood.

 

Tyler Durden's picture

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/16/2016 08:45 -0500

Yesterday we reported that the ECB has begun contemplating the death of the €500 EURO note, a fate which is now virtually assured for the one banknote which not only makes up 30% of the total European paper currency in circulation by value, but provides the best, most cost-efficient alternative (in terms of sheer bulk and storage costs) to Europe’s tax on money known as NIRP.

That also explains why Mario Draghi is so intent on eradicating it first, then the €200 bill, then the €100 bill, and so on.

We also noted that according to a Bank of America analysis, the scrapping of the largest denominated European note “would be negative for the currency”, to which we said that BofA is right, unless of course, in this global race to the bottom, first the SNB “scraps” the CHF1000 bill, and then the Federal Reserve follows suit and listens to Harvard “scholar” and former Standard Chartered CEO Peter Sands who just last week said the US should ban the $100 note as it would “deter tax evasion, financial crime, terrorism and corruption.”

Well, not even 24 hours later, and another Harvard “scholar” and Fed chairman wannabe, Larry Summers, has just released an oped in the left-leaning Amazon Washington Post, titled “It’s time to kill the $100 bill” in which he makes it clear that the pursuit of paper money is only just starting. Not surprisingly, just like in Europe, the argument is that killing the Benjamins would somehow eradicate crime, saying that “a moratorium on printing new high denomination notes would make the world a better place.”

Yes, for central bankers, as all this modest proposal will do is make it that much easier to unleash NIRP, because recall that of the $1.4 trillion in total U.S. currency in circulation, $1.1 trillion is in the form of $100 bills. Eliminate those, and suddenly there is nowhere to hide from those trillions in negative interest rate “yielding” bank deposits.

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