A Cashless Society ???????

[PacoMartin]

Originally Posted by BostonMike7

Not only that, but in a case of a natural disaster, how would you get cash out to buy things?

I was on a small island in Carribbean in 1989 when Hurricane Hugo passed over us with wind gusts in excess of 200 mph. When we crawled out from the broken hotel rooms to the riots I was thinking we had tons of Credit Cards, but people were either looting the food, or selling two pieces of bread with a slice of processed cheese for $4 in cash.

Originally Posted by BostonMike7

I've been good about keeping cash on hand in the house, just in cash we have prolonged power failures and I need to buy things like gas for the generator, or food.

In USA they are circulating $507 in $20 banknotes, $240 in $50 banknotes, and $3,170 in $100 banknotes per capita. Even given that most of the c-notes are circulating overseas, it is still possible for large numbers of Americans to keep a handful of $20 banknotes and $100 banknotes in a lockbox in their house. Furthermore, the US government increases the circulation supply of cash every year, and by a much larger percentage than population growth and any inflation level.

Sweden is eliminating banknotes from circulation. They are down to banknotes worth $631 per capita for denominations above $25. But they have been reducing those numbers steadily and dramatically for over eight years. The overal cash in circulation is now down 37% from it's peak eight years ago, but the largest value banknote (worth $118) is down in circulation over 90% from it's peak. Besides the fact that bank tellers do not accept or distribute cash in the majority of Swedish banks, the ATMs would simply run out of banknotes very quickly if there was a run on cash.

Sweden is only the second highly developed country to work on such little cash per person. Iceland had even less ten or fifteen years ago, but then all the banks in the country ran into trouble at the same time. The government was forced to give in and begin circulating much larger amounts of cash again. Even after the banks were saved, people did not want to give up the cash.

Originally Posted by seain dublin

As I posted earlier I have been in various chain stores where their system was down(about 3 times now) and they have signs up "No Debit, No Credit or EBT", cash only.

In Sweden even street beggars have machines to take cards. You can swipe a card to give money in church. You pretty much can't board public transportation with cash. Every ATM in Sweden went down for about 90 minutes and most people didn't notice.

It was pointed out that without cash as an alternative, you can pretty much bet that banks will no longer pay interest on savings accounts, and may actually do worse than that. One young Swede pointed out to me that Swedes only care about their rising real estate values, and the value of their bank accounts is only relevant for purchases.


So the question is will the experiment in Sweden remain an isolated case, or will other countries begin following their example?