'By limiting large cash payments, the EU will make it harder for criminals to launder dirty money. '
Bizarre how the EU is penalizing everyone in order to 'make it harder for criminals to launder dirty money'.
People pay taxes in order to have their bureaucrats serve them by creating a safe financial and social environment, not to have them assume everyone is a criminal/terrorist and greatly impede access to their assets based on that logic.
The EU (formerly the 'common market') has become an authoritarian, autocratic monster.
This approach of treating everyone like criminals is pervasive in current times. Look at all the cameras on the streets. The logging of all internet data. The CSAM crap on iPhones. Even security scanners in retail which have been around at least 20 years.
It’s the easy way out imo, instead of employing expensive labour to actually catch criminals, and somehow society has been convinced that it’s ok.
I do think it’s a gradient and not black and white. Retail security scanners - ok fine, cameras everywhere - why?
Remember about 10 years ago when Cyprus started confiscating money held in private bank accounts to settle government debts and the people holding cash kept their money because it was physically in their possession and harder to confiscate?
Remember earlier this year when people in Lebanon had to hold bank managers at gun point to try and withdraw money from their own accounts so they could buy basic goods as the economy collapsed?
The "CaSh hAZ nO PuRpOSe eXCePt fOR cRImE" crowd in this comment section have massive blind spots due to a general ignorance of monetary history. I'm not surprised politicians are laughing while taking advantage of it.
"Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rode to power on pledges to clean up the Eastern European country, but the Pandora Papers reveal he and his close circle were the beneficiaries of a network of offshore companies, including some that owned expensive London property."
The hn responses are stunning. It is insane that a pro privacy crowd supports the removal of freedoms, such as cash payments.
It is amazing how many hn users appreciate their bank and government to keep track of their purchases and hope more people will become like them - just because they can't imagine buying anything worth 10k.
When even HN is in full swing anti cash - and with current inflation rates 10k probably won't even purchase a propper bike in the near future - we will enter dark times for any privacy loving individual.
The people of HN is now made up of highly paid Software Engineers which have jobs that are 1. "legal", 2. pays taxes+social security and 3. pays to your bank account. Their mother-company might be dodging taxes and doing shady deals but it's providing them with a high standard of living and an easy job to do.
To preserve the status quo, you need more regulation to protect the big companies (even if it looks like it's protecting you from them) and you need to kill anything that it is not inside your circle. (ie: trying to make a $10 transaction with imaginary math token to buy a coffee from your bohemian neighbor? -> 10 years jail!)
It's all way downhill from here. You are welcome. You can also come to South East Asia and you can deal crypto/cash/ewallets. Do work without taxes/social security or any of that shit for various "enterprises" here that are doing real useful shit but do not have the competency (ie: hotels, accounting, some translation guy needed something, etc...) Life is cheaper here, and pay is relatively good, so you'll be able to make it.
The European crowd on HN in general is very much in favor of big government. I assume GDPR is very popular here despite making software development a huge pain, for example. Americans on HN (and ironically a lot of Germans on here) seem to be much more libertarian in their sensibility.
You guys are unbelievable. Of course GDPR makes some things harder. It’s the whole point. GDPR is probably one of the biggest pro-freedom laws of the last years. Not big corp freedom for sure, but people freedom, and that’s GOOD. But Americans with their skewed vision of freedom just can’t see it I guess.
Honestly if GDPR pisses off Americans, it probably means it hit on the nail.
We just define freedom differently than you do. I honestly think your version is weird and totalitarian, exactly the way you think mine is.
Here's mine: "Freedom" is what you have in the absence of coercion. The freest state of being is being the last person alive on Earth. Freedom gives you nothing, because if freedom gave you something then someone else would have been coerced into giving it to you. Freedom also gives you the chance to do everything you need to do to survive and thrive.
In a society, we necessarily give up some freedom because my freedom to have stuff is threatened by your freedom to take it when I'm not looking (you would not have had that freedom in isolation). In more recent times, we have started to give up freedom in exchange for security, too, and everyone thinks that is worthwhile, although we disagree on how far you should go. The US military budget and all the government healthcare programs in the world are this kind of trade.
That's what GDPR is: it's a trade of freedom for the security of European sovereignty and European business (notice how I didn't mention privacy or user security). It's not about the "little guy" vs the "big corporations," the big corporations have plenty of money and lawyers they can use to comply. The people that all of these laws hit are the startups and small companies. This philosophy is why there are no European unicorns. Europe as a whole has given up the freedom to "start up" without compliance with a huge number of rules and regulations (or money to pay bribes). Uniquely, GDPR goes a step further and tries to impose this burden on everyone in the world, not just people and companies that have signed up for the European project.
In the European worldview, there seem to be a lot of "rights" exemplified by the UN human rights charter. These include things that nobody had 25 years ago, like "the right to high-speed internet." These "rights" and "freedoms" really aren't freedom: someone has to pay to provide them at the end of the day. For those of us across the pond, these are weird trades: you voluntarily pay incredibly high tax rates and huge administrative burdens for these supposed "rights," some of which look like luxuries to us, and feel as though they don't make you any less free.
> Uniquely, GDPR goes a step further and tries to impose this burden on everyone in the world, not just people and companies that have signed up for the European project.
This is precious! The US has imposed their views on the internet for the past 30 years. How is GDPR unique? The difference is once again that GDPR is favorable to EU citizens (because yeah, GDPR only applies to EU citizens) and your laws (Cloud Act, DMCA, and basically all your copyright laws that stole us our fair use rights and allow for tech behemoths to grow and exist) just favor big companies, and only them. Don’t confuse freedom and extreme liberalism.
> Europe as a whole has given up the freedom to "start up" without compliance with a huge number of rules and regulations
Yes. This is a good thing. The end doesn’t justify the means. We still have unicorns and well doing companies.
> notice how I didn't mention privacy or user security).
In the case of the cudgel that is the GDPR, distinct from EVERY other data governance rule, there are two unique things:
1. It applies to everyone, with no thought of company residency or size.
2. It applies to all forms of "personal information" and "processing," defined ridiculously broadly.
This means that the following things are technically illegal by the text of the law:
* Storing the email address of an EU-based customer of your consulting shop on a private server not in the EU, and (God forbid) using it to send a sales email to that person.
* Storing the IP address of an abusive user of a SaaS website (in order to block them) if that user happens to be in the EU and your server is not.
Yes, of course they should be illegal. Why should US companies have the right to harvest our private information for profit and cause damage by mishandling it without oversight?
So sending a single email to a single EU customer from a non-EU server amounts to "harvesting your private information for profit" and merits a $20 million fine?
I have no problem with the GDPR that you wish you had, by the way. My problem is with the one that exists. It neither stops the wholesale harvesting of information nor actually benefits privacy.
Not all Europeans thank goodness. Switzerland and Germany are usually careful with big government. Even France was the birthplace of libertarianism and has a healthy ancap scene. I only wish they weren't so quiet, because so many people give up their power to the state here.
What's respectful about presenting you with a wall of text T&C document, giving you a checkbox to indicate you read it, and mining the crap out of your data on a server located in Europe? GDPR allows that - in fact, it assumes that you will want to mine the crap out of user data and specifies where.
GDPR has a few good ideas about encrypting data buried in its ~170 articles, but most companies were doing that already because data breaches are expensive.
The rest of GDPR is about (essentially) trade protectionism: they want you using European servers to store and process data. They want that data in easy reach of other EU laws and enforcement agencies.
There are a lot of other clauses than just the cookie banners. In fact, the cookie banners are far from the most annoying part if you want to be compliant.
I would go so far as to say that most startups which don't do 100% of their compute within European borders are likely non-compliant with GDPR by the law as written.
Edit: To be clear, I would have no problem with the level of trade protectionism if it only applied to companies that do $X million of business in the EU. That's how every other data residency law is set up. If you want to force series E+ companies through weird hurdles, have fun.
>I would go so far as to say that most startups which don't do 100% of their compute within European borders are likely non-compliant with GDPR by the law as written.
What personal data do the startups require that's hard to rein?
GDPR is actually pretty damn decent to deal with. Saying that while the company has legal obligations to retain a lot of personal data - anonymize, encrypt, report (AML being a part, too), forget (incl. personal encryption keys) and what not.
"Bizarre how the EU is penalizing everyone in order to 'make it harder for criminals to launder dirty money'."
This likely affects a number of people that is so small, that it's irrelevant. Not sure it makes sense to say that such a law that effects a tiny number of individuals is penalizing everyone.
Gosh I hope it will be overturned. My impression as an outsider is that banning large cash transactions is yet another step down a slippery slope of increasing authoritarianism in Europe. I hate to make this style of argument, but: after anonymous transactions, what will be next, restricting anonymous discussions online?
The Cold War days seem so nostalgic; it seems there was a shared camaraderie between Europeans and Americans as "Westerners", all on the same team, etc. Now as an American I feel increasingly like Europe and the U.S. are drifting apart, and policies like these are additional wedges driving the split.
Inflation will take care of that. Also, you can't convert that money to Gold or Crypto and a house is too damn expensive to buy. So someone with 20k Euros will end up with 2k euros in value.
At 4% a year, it will be roughly 70 years before 10000 euros have become 600 euros of today (which is still above the size of a typical cash transaction).
The problem with your thinking there is that you're making an assumption that removing rights is automatically a bad thing or a loss that affects us all, which is quite simply not true.
Removing rights can be a good thing.
Shall we bring back the right to have slaves? Shall we bring back the right to murder those we don't like? Removing those rights from people has only made the world a better place.
In some parts of the EU, it’s still pretty common to do the down payment of a private real estate transaction in cash, and that can easily exceed €10K. I’ve done it myself and I’m not even a local.
If it’s illegal then it’s just going to go off the books, at a small cost to taxes and accuracy of records, for some people; but for others it will force them to end this traditional practice, and I can imagine that might cause hardship.
Even if no one is affected today it does not mean many won’t be affected tomorrow. What if your government decides to take all your money from you for no good reason?
If I'm a dissident running from the government I probably don't want the attention generated by bringing 10k Euros in cash into a business to buy something.
Government is under no obligation to make it easy for you to overthrow it (which is by definition, a criminal enterprise).
You want to avoid problems? Get involved in local politics, or start a media publication or literally any one of a thousand things you could do right now which is going to be a lot easier then "become an off the grid fugitive dissident".
>"You want to avoid problems? Get involved in local politics, or start a media publication or literally any one of a thousand things you could do right now which is going to be a lot easier then "become an off the grid fugitive dissident"."
It isn't as easy as you are saying. If it was this easy, there would be no issues, no poverty, no refuge etc.
Common bartering trick is that you don't keep all your money in your wallet. Then you pull it out and say "golly gee, I can only afford to pay X", and you can bypass some of the back and forth. Similar technique would let the dissident avoid raising suspicion. Keep a few hundos in their wallet, a thousand in a different pocket, rolled up in their socks, stuffed in a bra, etc etc
Let’s assume that there was no cash limit, a malicious government could still achieve the same result by changing the currency or even just issuing new notes and instructing banks not to accept old notes.
I guess you would have an underground economy for a while by those that are willing to be old-cash only, but good luck paying tax and other items that require the new currency/notes.
> This likely affects a number of people that is so small, that it's irrelevant
We as society are spending literally billions to make our cities and infrastructure accessible for people with disabilities. Their number also very small, but we decided it is well relevant.
No citation needed. It doesn't take much brain power to know that certain things are or aren't likely.
It would be like asking me to prove that not many people have done the calculation of 15435 divided by 12.5 in their life. I can just tell you from basic logical thinking, that it's not likely that many people have.
Really? Using $10,000 in cash is like doing a very specific math problem?
A lot more people have used large quantities of cash for non-criminal activity. The few times I have used huge quantities of cash, it has been for stupid reasons: someone doesn't take credit cards or bank transfers, and won't trust a check until it clears, so it's easier to just use a pile of cash. By the way, I keep plenty of cash around so I can still pay for stuff even if the internet goes out regionally.
Also note that this does not really stop criminals or rich people from moving money around: there are plenty of ways around these laws.
Explain a single scenario of how one acquires large amounts of cash that:
1. Isn’t easy to provide provisions for.(which is how cash payments can be made legal).
2. Doesn’t require criminal activity in Europe.
I think a lot of people are thinking about this with the US tax system in the back of their minds.
The tax system in many European countries is very different. We pay WAY more income tax.
That means that the incentives for tax avoidance are much greater. As a result tax avoidance is a European pastime.
I think that a more transparent financial system is a great thing to strive for. Less financial privacy is is likely to lead to.
1. less money going toward lobbying.
2. Less tax avoidance
3. Less hidden wealth.
4. Less/more expensive money laundering.
It might someday even lead to successful taxation of wealth instead of income.
> someone doesn't take credit cards or bank transfers
That will change with this law, finally. Or put them out of business. That's a good thing, don't you agree?
> so I can still pay for stuff even if the internet goes out regionally
If you having to pay transactions >10k frequently enough that network outages block you, I'd wager you're doing exactly the kind of something this law should prevent.
> there are plenty of ways around these laws.
Sure, but now there's an instrument in the toolbox which wasn't there before.
Or are you arguing that outlaws gonna outlaw no matter what, so why even try?
>That will change with this law, finally. Or put them out of business. That's a good thing, don't you agree?
Or here's a novel idea: Try not to support coercive laws and rules that seek to stamp out the possibility of people having unorthodox or somewhat unusual voluntary payment preferences, just because you don't personally like them.
>If you having to pay transactions >10k frequently enough that network outages block you, I'd wager you're doing exactly the kind of something this law should prevent.
Because somebody has cash and payment needs, or levels of preparedness that your own narrow thinking doesn't digest isn't a good reason to automatically assume that they're probably a criminal who should be targeted by invasive and authoritarian controls. Frankly, it's something of a sick mentality to immediately treat with suspicion of criminal activity those who support or personally prefer conducting their financial affairs differently from how you do.
As for your final comment, People wanting to transact privately aren't nuts and bolts to be removed from the scene by some nasty, dirty little toolbox of edicts by politicians who regularly protect corruption on larger scales. It's absurdly malicious, or at least plain ignorant to think that way. There are much more fundamental and obvious reasons underpinning the fight against parasitic, invasive financial laws. Read a little about both modern politics in much of the world and modern history even in Europe itself to at least slightly understand the basis for resisting these rules on cash.
Have you ever spent time in Germany? It is a very cash-based culture because people are understandably worried about government surveillance of their financial transactions.
Germany initially wanted there to be 10,000EUR notes for this very reason.
There are a whole lot of people there that want to pay cash for everything, including things like cars and houses.
I know tons of people who have either bought used cars or sold a car at least once. A decent chunk of those transactions would've been more than 10k euros at current exchange rates.
$10,000 in US $20 bills weighs about 1 pound. In $100 bills, it fits nicely in your pocket or in a small purse. I assume 100 euro notes are about the same.
It's not, though. I remember carrying that much cash when I saved up for a summer to buy some computer components. They didn't take checks, and at the time I was like 19 and my debit card didn't have a high enough limit to buy the items I wanted (a couple of high end workstations, nothing super fancy- computers used to be expensive!)
It's actually pretty common to need to buy things over $10k. It's pretty common for vendors to not take checks. It's pretty common to not have high enough credit limits to cover these types of purchases.
There still isn't any way to do this other than cash.
It's unusual to carry around this much cash every day, but it's totally normal to carry this much cash sometimes for specific large purchases.
> It's actually pretty common to need to buy things over $10k. It's pretty common for vendors to not take checks. It's pretty common to not have high enough credit limits to cover these types of purchases.
That's a very USA-centric comment. Checks are virtually unheard of in Europe and no one would pay so much money in cash. You would do a wire transfer or a card payment for that.
Payments in cash to a professional from a French citizen have been capped at 1000€ in France for years with virtually no impact. I have never seen or heard of someone attempting to use that much cash.
I personally don't have enough fingers to count the number of times I've carried around a huge amount of cash. Buying computers, cars, and collectibles can all involve a ton of money. Also, when I was playing poker a lot, that wasn't an unreasonably large amount to have on hand.
Right but you don’t make a large “payment”. You break down the large sun into a smaller one outside the system. When it enters the legal system, the amount is smaller. Unless of course, you use banks.
Not always. A popular step is to buy an expensive car in Germany using cash, then bring it to another country. Germany is central to many money laundering schemes because of the prevalence of cash payments there.
that isn't laundering money. Laundering money is when you take black market money and try to turn it into white market money. The conversation you hold up as a straw man to mock this legislation is taking black market money and transitioning it into: black market money.
if a criminal gives another criminal money then the money is still black. You need to launder it to make it white. Now its harder to launder large quantities because you have to turn it into even smaller chunks.
I seriously don't understand what point you're attempting to make here. This legislation will make it harder for people to simply launder money. Yes, you are right that it won't stop people from complicatedly laundering money but that's not the point of the legislation.
The "Vatican" bank would still need to comply with all the AML laws to take the cash. Carrying the cash (as notes) to Vatican alone would still be an issue. Indeed, a proper straw man argument.
Too bad eh? But schengen..and thinking about it switzerland too, hey criminals! You are once again welcomed to give us (switzerland) the money, because you cant use it somewhere else....what a excellent idea.
>I seriously don't understand what point you're attempting to make here.
I don't understand why try to defend a law that is as effective as german power production.
I feel like you're not actually interested in this specific subject but rather just have an anti-EU axe to grind. That's a tiresome way to be and I would suggest you try to hold in your urges and stay on subject. There's plenty of time and space to have these discussions but railroading any discussion about the EU into angry Farage-esqe diatribe is the domain of demagogues.
Why is your default to disallow it? I understand there is the interest of society and all in preventing crime but a reporting requirement like in the US would do the exact same thing and produce useful intelligence instead of just making all large cash transactions go underground.
It's not rare, happens every day. How else are you going to buy it from another private person safely? You want to have an instant transaction. You give somebody money and get a car, thats the safest transaction for both sides. Are you going to wire somebody 10k+ for a car you can't have instantly? (note real time bank transactions are only now becoming a real widespread thing around here in Germany)
> How else are you going to buy it from another private person safely?
SEPA transfers take 30 seconds to clear.
> You give somebody money and get a car
or you give them the money and get back nothing, because "what money are you talking about?"
> thats the safest transaction for both sides
that's literally the less safe!
> Are you going to wire somebody 10k+ for a car you can't have instantly?
If you are buying something worth more than 10k and you need it now, something's obviously not right.
Keep in mind that to actually have more than 10k cash immediately available it means you only deal with cash and keep them somewhere they are less safe than a bank or cost you a lot more than a bank.
Which, again, is already very suspicious.
And no, it's not about regular people, median account balance in Germany is less than 5.000 euros but suddenly there's a need to pay 10k in cash to buy cars that you need right now and you casually had the money in your pocket, because it's a common thing to do.
not entirely true, there are several countries in europe in which a SEPA transfer is shown in the beneficiary the next day, the most famous one being Italy.
Italy also being the one with specific laws against mafia and terrorism, therefore such transfer would require you to add some additional papers.
> > thats the safest transaction for both sides
> that's literally the less safe!
well so it's a bank transfer because once the money has been sent you cannot get it back, the bank acts only on specific cases.
there's literally a million of cases of scams via ebay or similar that involved bank transfers and for which the bank was just "sorry".
> If you are buying something worth more than 10k and you need it now, something's obviously not right.
you are confusing "out of the ordinary" with "not right" and i'd like to remind you our legal systems in EU are still based on "innocent until proven guilty" principle.
I don't think I have ever paid for anything over a few hundred in cash. Criminalising the use of cash seems a bit authoritarian, but I don't think there is any legitimate reason to pay for anything in cash with that amount that couldn't be done by a BACS transfer.
In the UK you have to register with HMRC under money laundering supervision regulations if you are a business or trader that takes in cash payments over 10,000 euro.
If I'm transferring €10k to someone I don't want it to be anonymous. I want to know who got my money so I can go after them if it turns out to be fraudulent.
It's free in most EU countries. I've never paid for a bank transfer. The third party doing the transaction gives me some protection that I wouldn't otherwise have.
Can't argue against the anonymous part of it but when the transaction is between me, the seller and the bank, I'm not sure why it would need to be anonymous.
unless you print the money at home, it always gonna involve three parties.
I believe that by anonymous you meant secret.
It's not anonymous, the person who sold the item already learned a lot of things about you and you about the buyer, including your faces and what was the transaction about, which is often more than enough to identify people.
What difference does it makes if the bank knows about the transaction?
And why you wanna hide it from the bank?
There's probably a good reason, but it raises more questions than it's worth, so the reason must be veeeeeery good.
Do you not think that straight up robbing somebody requires a different level of commitment than fraud?
The guy using a fake app to pretend that they didn't receive a wire transfer isn't going to end up in a fight, the guy robbing someone of their cash might.
Not only that, bank transfers do not protect you from robbery. You can be forced to make a wire transfer, just as you can be forced to hand over cash.
I don't know what kind of prehistoric banking system exists in the US, but that just won't happen. The buyer has a bank transfer id and both parts can check the status with their bank.
There are also instant transfers that cost around 1€ of fixed commissions. They complete in about ten seconds after which the other side can check their account and the money will be there.
And finally you can use a money order if you really don't want to do a bank transfer and prefer paper.
>I don't know what kind of prehistoric banking system exists in the US
I wouldn't know, given that I am European.
> The buyer has a bank transfer id and both parts can check the status with their bank.
Generally there is no quick and easy way to verify that the beneficiary has actually received their funds.
>There are also instant transfers that cost around 1€ of fixed commissions. They complete in about ten seconds after which the other side can check their account and the money will be there.
So what? There are lots of banks which do not support instant transfers, sometimes instant transfer money just doesn't show up instantly and there's very little visibility that end-users would have into that.
How could that work? There's no way to tell if the sender or recipient is being dishonest.
Another common scam involves the buyer using a fake bank app to pay for goods, seller sees the money transferred right in front of them but never receives it.
> In what circumstances have you or someone you known ever needed to pay for something over €10k in cash?
Anyone involved in the construction business.
But yeah, if you're a wage slave in the tertiary sector, you're very unlikely to realize how and why cash is necessary or even a matter of survival for a large class of workers out there.
Why not a BACS or any other type of bank transfer for that industry/sector? It sounds like a good way to do tax evasion if you just take cash in hand payments.
I know someone in Switzerland who bought a car in cash, 12x 1k chf notes.
If you're paying for a big-ish shop, e.g. over 100chf, the major supermarkets won't blink if you proffer a 1k note because that's how the older generation get their pension. I've personally paid for about 20chf worth of stuff with a 200 note.
And why do you need to justify that something should be made illegal just because your personal circumstances don't include it as an experience in your life? Unless something is explicitly (or sometimes implicitly) harmful to others, it should not be banned just because you don't live it. Part of even a basic respect for un individual freedoms means not automatically trying to ban things that don't rigidly fit a common notion of how you "should" live.
I'm still not sure who buys a car that expensive with cash, seems sketchy, inconvenient and unsafe. I wouldn't take cash if someone wanted to pay me that much, in fact someone did, they paid me for a contract with $5000 in used 20s and it was really fucked up, I didn't know how to get it into a bank or use it for anything without setting off alarms.
Cash is king. If you are buying a non running classic car and have a tow vehicle and trailer ready you can drive a hard bargain in the moment.
Suggesting laborious bureaucratic transactions over several days removes this common occurrence in that world, along with at many other gatherings of specialists - antiques, pedigree animals, whatever
"Cash is king. If you are buying a non running classic car and have a tow vehicle and trailer ready you can drive a hard bargain in the moment."
If I send a 10k payment to someone via bank transfer it's in their bank account in 10 seconds. Maybe you live in a country where there are much harsher restrictions?
I live in the US and UK/Europe. The vast majority of older people at a swap meet or similar are not going to trust smartphone app transactions. Cash is king.
They don't trust a smartphone app provided by their banking provider but they trust a random bloke they've never met with 10k in their back pocket. Right. Makes sense.
Scenario one - Person A bank transfers Person B $10,000 for their classic car at the car show. Person A leaves, and then several days later the money is clawed back from Person B's account as it turns out it was sent from a stolen/compromised account. They now have no money and no car.
Scenario two - Person A gives Person B $10,000 in cash for their classic car at the car show. Person A leaves, and Person B could give a shit about anything to do with Person A as soon as they are out of sight.
It is about speed. If someone offers 10k in cash and someone talk about wire transfer blahblah, sellers will always prefer the buyer just paying in cash.
If they pay by transfer they can charge back, the bank might cancel for some credit reasons, might flag it as they want to verify first why it was made, and so on. Cash is problem free if you live in a low crime area.
I do myself all higher priced purchases in cash, even go to the bank and withdraw the money to go to the shop next door. For the same reason I use a VPN. My provider and my bank have no right know what I do or not do.
I'm always taking the wire transfer any day of the week. Nowadays, I generally straight up refuse payment in cash. Far too much of a hassle to handle. I think there is a major cultural divide between some parts of Europe and the USA on this subject which is partially due to how behind its time the USA banking system used to be.
I bought a somewhat rare car with cash several years ago. The seller had a buyer lined up across the country (and showed me evidence), but said that if I could bring him cash he’d sell it to me instead. I went to the bank, brought him an envelope of $100 bills, and it was mine.
The seller can turn around and spend the cash instantly, anywhere, whereas the cashier’s check takes at least a day to clear, and in theory the bank could hold the funds for some period of time while it investigated the transaction for fraud. https://www.helpwithmybank.gov/help-topics/bank-accounts/cas...
Why? Just take it to the bank and give them the envelope(s). That's not a large amount of money to a bank. They drop it in a counting machine, and it blitzes through that amount in a few seconds.
It's probably a good idea to have some reasonable amount of cash on hand for times when electronic payments aren't available for whatever reason (natural disasters, for example).
I don’t see how limiting cash payments is “penalizing” anyone.
I have never payed more than say $3k in cash. It just doesn’t make sense to do so.
Privacy shouldn’t exist for financial transactions. It makes it easier to launder money or hide wealth. There is no other use for “dark” financial transactions.
There is no tyranny in making finances of everyone transparent. It doesn’t force anyone to make different choices about WHAT to do with their money. It makes what people pay for auditable.
>Privacy shouldn’t exist for financial transactions. It makes it easier to launder money or hide wealth. There is no other use for “dark” financial transactions.
This makes a very tenuous assumption that government is always justified in any money it seeks to take away or trace, or that nobody ever has a good and even moral reason for hiding their money from a hungry state.
That's an awfully narrow view of reality or even the long history of governments becoming downright predatory.
Yes, privacy absolutely should exist for financial transactions. It's flat out naive, or elitist and authoritarian to believe that the state deserves a constant right to know where every penny you have goes and how to confiscate it whenever it pleases.
One real-world scenario is the numismatics and bullion world.
Especially on bullion items, there's very narrow margins, and I'd expect a high transaction-reversal risk (i. e. demanding refunds or charging back if the price of gold dropped after purchase).
In practice, this means that many dealers will charge a higher price for using non-cash payment systems. At least in the US, some dealers will even be explicitly cash-only.
Six one-ounce gold coins would get you over USD/EUR 10,000, and isn't that exotic of a purchase in that context.
A documented payment system might be viable for that scenario, if it was completely zero-cost to merchants and consumers, although some dealers might still not want the reversal risks. However, conjuring that would require major state intervention.
> I have never payed more than say $3k in cash. It just doesn’t make sense to do so.
Let me quote someone smart on privacy topic:
> Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
Cash = privacy.
I dont want to get stripped from privacy by anyone for any reason.
People that legitimately need to make cash payments for more than 10k represent probably less than 1% of the population. And I'd be surprised even most people that can do it would do it.
> Bizarre how the EU is penalizing everyone in order to 'make it harder for criminals to launder dirty money'.
It doesn't affect anyone. No one in Europe uses cash for anything more expensive than maybe 200 euros. Of course in some countries like Sweden and the Netherlands no one uses cash any more at all, and almost all ATM machines have been removed. I believe cash-only places are now outlawed. The reason for this is because of the small stores run by immigrants that does you-never-know-what with the money you give them.
> People pay taxes in order to have their bureaucrats serve them by creating a safe financial and social environment
Safe in this case means eliminating those shady cash-only stores. Here in Europe the cash-only stores (nowadays outlawed) were mostly run by immigrants. We're talking pizzerias, barber shops, fast food trucks, corner cafes. Places where a lot of cash is laundered.
> No one in Europe uses cash for anything more expensive than maybe 200 euros.
That is absurd. People regularly pay for things like new computer with cash.
And family member was buying a flat recently - seller wanted cash, so transaction took place in a bank. Cash was withdrawn (around 90 000 euro?), exchanged when sale was notarized and deposited.
Entire transaction took place in bank - and cash was immediately deposited into bank and never even left bank building. Not entirely sure why it would be a problem or enable anything?
(and obviously, seller wanted cash)
(and it is possible that I misunderstood something)
And I would do the same - just to avoid worrying that maybe transfer is not going to arrive or get reverted or something (that is 100% hypothetical, I do own any housing).
This sounds like how you would buy a flat where you didn't want to make a paper trail.
In the real (non-criminal) world you would have a conveyancing solicitor handle it, and he would take care of the contract, the transfer, checking for liens, stamp duty etc.
How do you even know the seller owns the flat when you do everything in cash?
Paper trail was fully present - with notary certifying that transaction took place and updating records in land registration, preparing tax stuff to pay and record.
I expect that they also checked at least basic status of that property and that it had no mortgage, encumbrances etc recorded in the land register.
Why involve, trust and pay an extra fee to a 3rd party when you can just use cash? It seems like it's not fishy in this case since it all happened within a bank.
Last time I had to do something like this I used a "certified check", which in the EU country I live is a mechanism where a bank effectively prints non-anonymous money that can be exchanged physically.
It would have worked just as well in you example transaction where both parties were in a bank. In my example it worked by exchanging this piece of paper while at the notary.
(This is my understanding on how most of the house sales work in Italy)
What you said doesn't make sense. The seller requested the buyer to pull the money out of the bank into cash and then immediately deposited that cash into their bank account. What would be the reason for doing that?
Doesn't make sense unless you've worded what happened incorrectly by accident.
It's a perfectly legal way to buy a property in Germany. Of course this gets abused to launder money because you can also buy a house worth a million in cash.
In my one visit to the Netherlands I had to use cash because small places wouldn't take Visa/MC because it was too expensive for them. They had no problem accepting cash tho.
Visa/MC is not so widely accepted in smaller shops/stores. However, if you have a maestro debit card you basically have no need to carry cash. I live in Holland and never carry cash, even when going to food markets or when going out for far cycling trips to village areas. Only reason I carry cash (and I specifically have to go to the ATM for this) is when I go to my barber, of which it is obvious, they only accept cash so they can pay some of their employees under the table (something I don't really care about tbh).
Foreigners in the Netherlands must use cash at Albert Heijn, the major grocery store, as they do not accept credit and essentially only accept Dutch debit cards (ie, Maestro).
Ethnic restaurants in Amsterdam, say around De Pijp, often force payment in cash.
Are you sure you really want to pay for items at a 'coffee shop' in Amsterdam by card?
We dont use cash very often, but we have our own separate payment networks called Maestro and V-Pay. So tourists nearly always have to resort to cash transactions.
I haven't seen Maestro-exclusive terminals for 10 years, at least with support of Mastercard, but the survivorship bias is hard because my country was a playground for all new tech of both Visa and MC.
The issue is that Albert Heijn, and many other stores in the Netherlands, will not accept credit cards. And then American-issued debit cards do not seem to work either (eg, Bank of America shows the symbol "Debit Visa"). Perhaps debit cards from say Austria work (they're often on similar networks as the Dutch banks).
> Businesses in Denmark and the EU may not charge a fee for your payment with Dankort, Visa/Dankort, Visakort, MasterCard and other ordinary payment cards issued in the EU.
> Company cards are exempt from the ban. Shops may charge a fee if you use a payment card issued to a company or public organisation.
This is not to be celebrated. It's regulatory, capture plain and simple. Cash purchasers are subsidizing those with credit cards (and the pithy rewards they pay).
> It doesn't affect anyone. No one in Europe uses cash for anything more expensive than maybe 200 euros.
Sold a used car just last year, got 2700€ in cash for it.
Much easier than doing a bank transfer (which takes 1 day to arrive, if you're unlucky, and can be rolled back), or a paypal transfer (which can be undone) or anything else between to individuals.
For b2c or b2b I agree, nobody pays that much in cash, but for individuals transacting with one another, it still seems the easiest option.
I sure wouldn't want to risk discovering I'd been paid in high-quality counterfeit notes. Accepting 2700€ cash feels insane to me.
In Europe do you not have cashier's checks? That's what we use in the US for something like a used car, since most people don't want to carry around a car's worth of cash, even for a short period of time.
You go to the bank, and get a check drawn on the bank for the amount. The person receiving it can call the bank to verify it's valid if they don't trust it. And if you get robbed (or lose it) you can have the check cancelled.
I wouldn't accept a cashiers check for a car in the US right now, unless the seller met me at their bank so I could cash it. A very popular scam at the moment is to buy a car with a fake cashiers check, then disappear with the car, and a couple days later the check comes back as fake.
Scammers will just fake a check from an out of town bank and make excuses that they can’t meet during regular business hours. I certainly won’t fall for any of these scams but it shouldn’t take a security specialist to not be defrauded.
I would not take the risk selling expensive items with digital transactions for the counterparty to file a fictitious Paypal dispute or credit card chargeback.
They're not used frequently -- really only for things like closing a bank account, buying a used car, putting down an apartment deposit and first month's rent, that kind of thing.
I haven't written a personal check in close to 20 years either, but I've certainly needed to use a cashier's check a handful of times!
We have money orders, they count basically the same as cash but they are exempt from this law. I saw three in my life. I was given one when I was paid my first salary and didn't have a bank account, and I requested one twice to buy a car in 2011 and 2014.
Yup, that's the same idea. Only real difference here in the US is that a cashier's check is drawn on a bank, while a money order you get at the post office.
Largely depends on which banks are talking between each other.
For many banks and large transfers you need to wait an hour or so for it to go through.
You notice it most when buying a house and you sit awkwardly in a room with the seller waiting for the money to be transferred so you can leave with the keys.
Santander to HSBC is a pretty slow one for some reason.
I’ve had some slow transfers from HSBC to Barclays too.
In Sweden it took about an hour for Handelsbanken to Nordea, so I’m comfortable saying that there’s some kind of threshold that’s universally accepted for large bank transfers during working hours.
I just ask people to consider that even though we all have bank accounts and we take that for granted, there _are_ actually people who don't, and they're not operating a criminal enterprise.
My grandparents came as refugees. My grandfather has never had a bank account. He bought a car with $50 bills once. It was so funny, they were all stuck together and the clerk had to sit their and peel them all apart one by one.
He needs expensive surgery soon which isn't covered by medicare. He's going to pay for that with cash, too.
If a ban prevented him from paying for that surgery with cash, he just wouldn't get the surgery. Or, he'd give my mum wads of cash and make her pay for it (and then she'd have to explain that to the tax office, and he'd have no privacy).
In his home country, you couldn't trust the banks, so people hid their money. Of course that kind of thinking is silly in Australia, but good luck explaining that to someone with war-trauma.
> In his home country, you couldn't trust the banks, so people hid their money. Of course that kind of thinking is silly in Australia, but good luck explaining that to someone with war-trauma.
Not too long ago we saw the Canadian government freeze bank accounts of people for protesting the Covid measures. Don’t think that it cannot happen in your country.
For people not familiar with Canadian politics, this summary missed some important nuance. Bank accounts were frozen for some people who donated money to support an illegal occupation of part of Canada's capital city, Ottawa. The occupation was a mix of people protesting COVID measures and others demanding that Justin Trudeau resign.
Yes, the people with power to declare stuff illegal can always say that whatever you’re doing is illegal before freezing your bank account. Was your comment meant to reassure me?
It wasn't, no. It was meant to clarify for other readers that people didn't have their bank accounts frozen for protesting COVID; they had their bank accounts frozen for financially supporting or participating in an illegal occupation of a city centre.
Your point stands that governments/courts decide what is illegal and that they have the power to freeze bank accounts when those accounts are used to fund illegal activities.
This is one of those 'it's ok when we do it' scenarios. Where its okay when occupy wallstreet, Antifa or another leftist cause occupy somewhere 'illegally', but not those damn truckers.
> Bank accounts were frozen for some people who donated money to support an illegal occupation of part of Canada's capital city, Ottawa. The occupation was a mix of people protesting COVID measures and others demanding that Justin Trudeau resign.
There's certainly ... nuance you're taking for granted in declaring a mix of political protest and political protest illegal.
We're getting pretty off topic, but it wasn't what they were protesting that was illegal, it was how they did it. For a US comparison, First Amendment rights don't include a right to occupy city streets for weeks, even if you're doing it to protest the government.
What they did was illegal, therefore it’s totally justified for the state to bypass the existing justice system and just ask the banks to them shut down, right?
> For a US comparison, First Amendment rights don't include a right to occupy city streets for weeks, even if you're doing it to protest the government.
That’s interesting to hear, because a group of political activist have occupied a couple of city blocks in my city for a couple of weeks, declared independence, intimidated and harassed residents and businesses, and murdered a bunch of people there, but nobody has ever been arrested or prosecuted for any of that (including murders). Maybe the Canadians have heard the story of CHAZ and thought they their government will also be as lenient. Turns out that they were very wrong.
>Bank accounts were frozen for some people who donated money to support an illegal occupation of part of Canada's capital city, Ottawa.
Were they a designated criminal group at the time of donation? It seems strange to go after the donors rather than freezing the bank accounts of the recipients. The way I see it, there are only two possibilities:
1. the groups in question were declared criminal organizations, and therefore their bank accounts should be frozen and future donations should be blocked/banned
2. the groups in question weren't declared criminal organizations, and therefore it should be okay to donate to them.
>1. the groups in question were declared criminal organizations, and therefore their bank accounts should be frozen and future donations should be blocked/banned
Should criminals be denied all access to the financial system?
Even if the criminal is not receiving money for criminal cause?
they do, but that right also comes with responsibility, which by virtue of them committing a crime, they have to answer for. If they escape the authorities, freezing their financial accounts is not completely out of the ordinary, and forces them to confront the authorities.
So yes, they have the right to buy food, but also the obligation to answer for their crimes in an open court. Can't have one without the other.
Please read the article and avoid the spread of more misinformation. Donor names were NOT provided by the RCMP. The frozen accounts were holding funds that were donated:
> In a statement released Monday, the RCMP said it only provided banks with the names of convoy organizers and the owners of trucks who had refused to leave the protest area. The RCMP said it did not release an exhaustive list of every donation made.
> "At no time did we provide a list of donors to financial institutions," the statement said.
The only reports of accounts being indiscriminately frozen came from hearsay:
> Some Conservative MPs have said constituents have reported that their bank accounts were frozen after they made donations to the convoy protest through one of its crowdfunding campaigns.
Most of the reports were fictitious constituents that "lost bank account access to buy groceries". Nobody was able to independently confirm any of these claims.
> In his home country, you couldn't trust the banks, so people hid their money. Of course that kind of thinking is silly in Australia
If I had to choose between the two positions, one of implicit trust and another of implicit mistrust towards banks, I would consider the latter choice to be the saner and safer one.
The push for no cash is real, and it’s becoming more real with every constriction of cash transactions and with every CBDC trial.
As the BIS chairman said, the goal is total knowledge of every financial transaction. Fanfares about financial inclusiveness seem to me little more than marketing quips, the actual goal being zero financial privacy.
Now, one may wonder, why would a law-abiding citizen require any modicum of privacy - have they anything to hide? After all, “transparency” is a nice notion, right?
I think the answer is that privacy is a fundamental right, something that all the scaremongering about criminal enterprises is used to corrode.
Not to mention that “transparency for thee but not for me” isn’t real transparency.
There is similar law in Ukraine for quite a long time. Everyone just ignore this law..
I bought flat for cash in USD not even in local currency. Car were bought in cash in severL transactions to be below limit. Part of payments were in foreing currency.
It only consumers who became affected. Less protection from law in case of fraud. By documents car price were 10 times less You pay.
Meanwhile this law has not prevent any corruption or apply any incovients to local barons.
The documented price is important when you have to return the car 3 days later because it is badly broken and you were scammed. It happened to a friend of mine. He was screwed because the seller offered to return all his money based on the price on the invoice.
Well, let's not forget that USD is the actual true "национальная валюта" (national currency) of Ukraine. /s
On a serious note, it is almost impossible for me to declare and legalize my hard-earned money while living in Ukraine, so I hope that this EU law will not be effective, just like previous efforts were not.
Unfortunately we wouldn't move forward as a society if we didn't do things that affected people that didn't want to progress with modern ways of living.
This. There's an energy crisis going on, and as late as a few days ago, Finnish news warned that there's a non-zero chance of rolling two-hour power outages as early as next week. If that happens, cash and paper invoices will be crucial to keep society running properly.
> Of course that kind of thinking is silly in Australia
I don't think that's obviously silly. Look at Canada (which has similar values as Australia) where the government seized money from private bank accounts just for protesting or donating to someone who protested.
A lot of eu countries have a threshold of how much you can pay in cash, and it works just fine. No one is missing hospital treatment because of it and even illiterate folks can use banks and open accounts.
Well, tell that to Russian war emigrants. Opening bank account in EU for non-residents is a hard endeavor right now. Those who did it before the hot part of war started in February often finding their accounts frozen and literally were unable to receive their paychecks.
I can confirm this. I devoted a section of my website (about immigration) to immigrant-friendly banks.
Many banks have restrictions that make it hard for immigrants to open an account, even though they're entitled to one by law.
For example, many banks use the same ID verification services, and those don't recognise Indian passports. Others refuse Americans because they're a bureaucratic nightmare to deal with. Others require a registered address which is hard to get without a bank account. Others require a residence permit or even permanent residency. You usually need a bank account before you have either.
There is significant (up to 9 months, from friends' experience) gap between fleeing to the country and getting legal residency (work permit, visa D, blue card). But even that doesn't make opening bank account much easier, there are banks that doesn't open accounts for holders of Russian passports (or even Russian names, believe me or not). Also, like I said, lots of EU banks froze or restricted accounts of Russian citizens in Feb 2022, even if those individuals were legally in EU for months or even years.
Bottom line: it's surprisingly easy to become unbanked in EU.
> Bottom line: it's surprisingly easy to become unbanked in EU.
If you move money from a country that threatens europe with nukes. But i see your point. The issue is how can banks separate genuine refugees from people taking advantage of the situation and trying to move illegally acquired money?
Not only Europe, the whole world, but that's not important for the discussion.
There's almost no way just to open account at all, to put some cash there, have a plastic card and use it to buy tickets or pay for Netflix subscription. Moving money is a separate quest, that I can tell from the first hand experience.
I am not saying that banks should have some kind of obligation to open account for everyone. I am just showcasing the importance of cash transactions.
And being unbanked means, for example, inability to buy property, which is, in turn, may be a condition of getting residency in the first place. Not everyone possess IT skills to get work visa.
Australia is introducing (or may have already passed?) a similar Act with an AU $10K limit on "unapproved" cash transactions.
Over the limit you'll need approval.
Of course the usual loophole for the weathy applies, 3x $3,000 face value gold bullion coins [1] is under the cash transaction limit, although at a kilo each and ~$88K per in valuae, that's almost $300K in value technically under any travel or transaction declaration "$10K face value" limits . . .
If I understand correctly you're saying: there is a coin that I can buy for $100,000 (because of its weight in gold) yet it is stamped with $1, which is its face value.
As such it only counts as $1, and this thus is not reportable?
That reminds me of the old argument that laws prohibiting same sex marriage or prohibiting engaging in homosexual sex do not discriminate against gay people since they prohibit both gay and straight people from marrying someone of the same sex or engaging in homosexual sex.
I mean, if the thing you are trying to work around is a law preventing you from paying 300K in cash, I don't think using bullion changes much about how wealthy you are.
Wouldn't you need to use that $3000 coin to pay $3000, ie use it for its face value, for this loophole to 'work'? In which case it would not be very useful...
If you use it to pay $88k then the transaction is obviously $88k although you've then paid in gold, not cash.
I feel that this is a "you can't have your cake and eat it too" situation.
Just hypothesizing, do not actually know if this is the mechanism, but it is entirely possible that by storing gold with a broker could allow them to access the value in order to make other investments. Essentially, having cash as collateral means having it in a bank and subject to these restrictions whereas gold in a 3rd party vault might not be but still give you the same access to credit.
Every time the Australian government does something authoritarian I double my Monero holdings (I'm about to have to give that strategy up :[, unfortunately). If the government starts spinning out of control to the point where people actually need to start dodging these invasive financial laws, those gold coins are going to get seized.
France requires that you declare all funds or “digital accounts” (assets, not only currencies) owned overseas, and made it legal to impose a one-off seizure on all accounts above 100k€ overnight, like they did in Cyrpus. The world behaves as if countries were going to seize all privately-owned assets and make you live on salary.
" and made it legal to impose a one-off seizure on all accounts above 100k€ overnight" please give a source or at least detail the conditions it can be applied. The way you phrase it sounds like it can be completely arbitrary
Well it’s not that. Everything is seized because the money in your bank isn’t technically yours. This is the same wherever in the world. However, there exists a public fund that guarantees that, in case of a bankruptcy of your bank, you’ll be compensated by this fund up to 100k€.
So it’s technically impossible to lose anything if you don’t have more than 100k€ in a checking account. Which, even if you were rich, would be a rather stupid move because you don’t earn any interest on this. If your patrimony is superior to 100k€, you probably own financial assets rather than money in your checking accounts. And since you own your financial assets and your bank is only doing the management for you, they can’t be seized because they aren’t owned by the bank.
So it’s blatantly false to say that you can be seized of anything above 100k€. You’ve got to manage your money really badly to be bitten by this.
> The new EU anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) rules will be extended to the entire crypto sector, obliging all crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) to conduct due diligence on their customers. This means that they will have to verify facts and information about their customers.
Yes it’s called ‘structuring’ or smirking and is variously restricted in many places since it’s an obvious on-ramp to money laundering and tax evasion.
This is obviously the first part of a major push to force us to use Central Bank Digital Currencies. Now that they are banning cash, we will be controlled like never before. This is the beginning of the end of freedom.
You don’t need CBDC, just the existing system today. Here in the UK something like 3% of money is available as paper cash. The rest is just a row in a database.
Assets are zero sum - if i sell you my car, i no longer have that asset. Money is not zero sum. It is created and destroyed as loans are made and repaid. Which kinda frazzles people’s minds when they hear it. I know it certainly did mine when i first learned.
Yup, this shock comes from the wrong idea of money as some kind of a physical object that you obtain by performing work, whereas it's more of a different name for debt. It's a social construct. Also, you absolutely do not need any kind of banks for this to emerge, in fact it's pretty much inevitable unless you always barter (for other goods or so called "hard currencies" like gold) and do so immediately. Immediacy is surprisingly important too.
> Money is not zero sum. It is created and destroyed as loans are made and repaid.
I don't think this is true. Every transaction, even the ones that take place in the rows of a bank's database and not with physical money, involve an amount added to some account and an identical amount subtracted from another account. Even loans don't create money: the issuing bank have the amount subtracted from its reserves the exact moment the loan is made available to you.
The only method to create money would be writing a check with no date on it, which is illegal in many countries.
What you are stating was perhaps the previous orthodoxy, but in the last few years even major institutions[1] have come to agree that banks do indeed create money when they create certain kinds of loans; the upshot of which is that 90%+ of money in circulation in western countries has been created through mortgage issuance.
Imagine the whole world has 1,000,000 dollars right now. This is made up of all cash.
You have 100,000 of those dollars. You decide to buy a car for $10,000 from a friend. You go look at the car, like it, and agree to buy it. You sign the necessary paperwork and you tell your friend that you will bring him the 10,000 cash tomorrow. You drive home.
You just created 10,000 out of thin air. The world right now has 1,010,000 of money. It is made up of all that cash, and the debt you owe your friend. The debt you owe your friend is an asset. If it was drawn up more formally, it can be used to buy things, similarly to how the greenbacks in your pocket buy thing.
Now you might be thinking that this money does not exist because of the offsetting liability. You are right that in a ledger it nets out to zero. However, “money” is not the net balance. Money is the cash, and unpaid loans side of the ledger.
Every dollar that exists was “loaned out” into existence by the government, banks, companies, and people. It will be destroyed the moment it gets paid back.
Don’t confuse money with net balances or with pieces of paper with green ink on them. Those are the things that we colloquially think of as money. But when you dig to really understand money, you eventually get to the fact that it’s all stacks of debt.
It might be helpful to expand the example to make it even clearer.
Until you repay the debt to your friend, you can spend the 10,000, because you hold it in your pocket. But your friend can also spend the debt you own him, for example, by asking another person to get a loan on that loan.
So yeah, "free money"! Until one creditor somewhere in that long chain asks the debitor to pay up their debt...
>> Even loans don't create money: the issuing bank have the amount subtracted from its reserves
Not even the old system (fractional reserve) referred to in the fed link above works that way. The new system deletes what was left of fractional reserve policy.
> You don’t need CBDC, just the existing system today. Here in the UK something like 3% of money is available as paper cash. The rest is just a row in a database.
The point the GP is trying to make is that they want to further restrict the usage of cash in economic transactions, & that CBDCs further help in that regard. There's a difference between:
Assets aren't zero sum because you can produce more cars, etc.
Money is zero sum because almost all money is created through debt. Sum up all money and debt and you get roughly zero excluding central bank money and cash.
Money being backed by debt makes sense because it solves the "acceptance problem", that is, how do you make sure the money you have can actually buy things?
Of course that means there is no limit to how much money there is in the system.
>> Assets aren't zero sum because you can produce more cars, etc.
I’d need to exchange other tangible assets (raw materials) and labour to produce the next car, I can’t just make a car, a tangible asset, by declaring a new one exists.
I’m creating more value than the raw materials worth when i assemble them into a car - maybe the idea of value creation is what you’re digging at here and I’m misunderstanding?
In either case it’s zero sum. I have some form of asset or I don’t. The value of an asset is not the price of its raw materials, it’s whatever i can convince someone it’s worth. But valuation is nothing to do with the zero sum notion of transferring ownership of assets.
>> Money is zero sum … excluding central bank money and cash
That’s a contradiction. It’s either zero sum or it’s not.
But besides that it’s missing what zero sum means. The bank issuing a loan has provided you with value in the form of the loan funds but it hasn’t exchanged any tangible asset to provide you that money. It just created an asset from thin air (your loan is its new intangible asset). They can sell your loan to a pension fund but they they won’t own that asset anymore. You won’t have to repay 2 creditors if they sell your loan.
There’s a complication when you spend your loan with a merchant banked by another bank. Your bank will now have to transfer reserves at the central bank from their account to the merchant’s bank’s account at the central bank. If they don’t have enough reserves to cover this transfer, the central bank will create reserves and lend them it at the base rate.
>> Money being backed by debt
It’s not backed by anything, it’s just a promise
>> Of course that means there is no limit to how much money there is in the system
In theory true but in practice people will stop accepting your money if you hyperinflate it
Are you sure? M0 includes reserves - as in money deposited at the central bank by commercial banks. Reserves are increased by quantitative easing, the source of the additional reserves is nothing other than a decision.
Assets are luckily not zero-sum, that'd be horrifying. If I write some software, nothing has "disappeared". If you copy me a movie, you still have the movie. If I make a painting of build a table, a new asset has been created.
You’re talking about intangible assets. For better or worse, usually it’s a licence or contract that exists to artificially limit your ability to copy. When you’ve sold your licence to use the software, the software is effectively gone. It’s not always as simple as that. E.g. my brand is an intangible asset.
>> If I make a painting
That’s just a regular asset, once it’s sold you’ll need to paint a new one.
> For better or worse, usually it’s a licence or contract that exists to artificially limit your ability to copy.
I can assure you I didn't have to issue manual licenses or make manual copies for the millions of downloads that my open source software had this year. When someone downloaded it, no one found it missing from their project.
> once it’s sold you’ll need to paint a new one
Hence is not zero-sum, I can keep making them and the amount of assets keep increasing (non-zero sum). Zero-sum means that "whatever is gained by one side is lost by the other." By creating a new painting nothing is lost.
You did - if it was open source, you issued a copyleft licence that uses the system of copyright to disclaim your rights. It’s a licence.
Maybe you didn’t specify a licence, depending on your jurisdiction then perhaps the work is classed public domain automatically or more likely you’ve created a situation where technically your users are breaching your copyright.
>> I can keep making them
Sure, you can exchange some assets (paint, a canvas) and your labour to make a new asset (a painting).
>> By creating a new painting nothing is lost.
You’ll no longer have the paint or the canvas, you’ll have a painting. Zero sum.
> You did - if it was open source, you issued a copyleft licence that uses the system of copyright to disclaim your rights. It’s a licence.
I mean I didn't manually make each license, it's COPIED without nothing being removed from me. I can copy it once or a million times, nothing is removed and value is added, hence non-zero sum.
> You’ll no longer have the paint or the canvas, you’ll have a painting. Zero sum.
No, it's not the same, a painting has more value than the paint and canvas; hence not-zero sum. It's ridiculous to claim zero sum, that'd imply we cannot advance as a species and would still be dealing with pebbles.
Manually or automatically issuing is insignificant. Your work was automatically copyrighted when you wrote it, if you did nothing else - such as agreeing to exchange those rights for a salary from an employer, or declaring the software as licenced under specific terms, or performing the necessary actions in your jurisdiction to enter the works into the public domain, if you did none of these, then it’s yours to claim as an asset if you want.
>> nothing is removed and value is added
No asset was removed - ownership of the copyright of the software still remains unchanged when people copied your open source software.
However, no new asset was created. They derived value from your software hopefully but they didn’t gain a new asset.
What if you licenced it under a really permissive licence like apache? It’s still the same story. someone else can create their own asset by changing your apache licenced software and distributing it as theirs. They’re in breach of that particular licence if they try to redistribute completely unchanged work under a different licence.
>> a painting has more value than the paint and canvas
You’re conflating valuation with accounting. The value of an asset is a different and often subjective concern, from the accounting of ownership of it.
A painting has more value than it’s raw materials (hopefully!), but that tells us nothing about how to account for ownership of the asset.
If i have a case of beers that i bought for $50 and i take it to the beach and sell it for $100 to a group of thirsty friends, the valuation changed but the chain of custody of the asset was zero sum all through.
HN is no different than any other place on the internet. People on here are still just as gullible and manipulatable as any other person you encounter online.
Horrible take. 10k is a pittance. Small business owners, farmers, people buying and selling vehicles, etc. It’s not a large amount of money. If you go down to the apple store and buy a couple well specced computers the bill is going to be over 10k.
I very much doubt there are money people that walk into an apple store with 10k in their back pocket to pay for some computers.
Same with farmers. How many farmers living in this modern age are walking around with 10k in their back pockets? In the vast majority of cases, I would argue that people just use their bank account for such large payments these days.
For most businesses, cash is a far more likely point of failure.
Taking in large amounts of cash is ripe for robbery. It's also why a lot of places don't accept $100's after a certain time and etc because it gets really risky for the employees.
Government has control of your cash just as well.
If the central bank decides your bills are not recognized anymore, or that they want to print 1000% more of it, your cash value changes.
Which is Mutually Assured Destruction. I can't think of many occasions in which financial elites would destroy their own wealth in pursuit of political (?) goals.
The point is that you cannot do any meaningful amount of business if “the system” prevents you from banking, or malfunctions in some way that locks you out. Or more insidiously, if someone in power prevents you from banking because they do not like what you have to say. There is no longer a gray market relief valve. All unbanked business activity is illegal.
Blocking domestic and international commerce, and more importantly access for emergency services, goes a little beyond just "protesting" as most people see it, and it also probably isn't protected by whatever right to assemble/protest people have in Canada, if any(?).
Blocking domestic and international commerce, and more importantly access for emergency services, goes a little beyond just "protesting" as most people see it,
Blocking emergency services is a very, very weird thing. Loads of protests do so. Parades do so.
That said, the problem isn't "was it a protest or not", the problem is judicial oversight was suspended, by employing what used to be called The War Measures Act.
Yes, only some of the powers were used. Yet those powers were used to bypass all legal and constitutional protections, and snoop into bank accounts, and freeze bank accounts, again... all without judicial oversight.
None of these people had been charged. To this day, most of those who had their bank accounts snooped in, and frozen (and later thawed), were never charged with a crime.
This is not possible in Canada, legally, without using one of the most powerful laws at our disposal. And regardless of the protest length, or type, it wasn't an emergency.
Blockades at the borders, and in Alberta were cleared without issue, before the act was declared.
Lastly, compared to protests in some other democratic countries? It was nothing. Meaningless. Tiny. Trivial.
But again, most importantly -- agree or not, like or not, even if you hated those truckers, having the government declare an emergency, for something that was not? Then having that government use those powers to bypass the judicial branch?
Insane. Wrong. Horrifying.
Such laws should absolutely not be used to punish your political rivals!
It depends on how they got their income in the first place. My family are dairy farmers and frequently trade cattle at local auctions. This is still a cash based society (rural Ireland), it does not take many heads of cattle to make up 10k, many other deals are done informally (e.g. my grandfather buying cows from a neighbor without auction) with a value that is of that order. The money may hit a bank account if something more formal needs to be bought (insurance, new machinery etc) but those are not all that common.
As a child I would always remember my grandfather carrying (at least in the house) large rolls of bills.
A new Macbook Pros can easily be over $6k (16", upgraded ram, upgraded hard drive, etc). $10k is not that much money. People do pay for these laptops in cash.
A phone has cost over $1k for years. Think of the present rate of inflation. $10k is nothing, particularly a decade from now. Then think of two decades from now and this silly law still on the books.
I did exactly this at the Apple store for a 5k+ purchase. I do these things out of principle to make it harder to create profiles and support cash. It is the same why I prefer https over http.
Very few (if any) Apple stores will accept that amount in cash. A lot of stores and businesses (also the likes of Carrefour and Albert Heijn) have been phasing out setups needed for cash payments. Even if you find a way to pay cash, it will be on a separate (long and slow) queue or they will need to exceptionally call their supervisor to handle the payment.
They do accept that amount of cash. They do a dance where they take your cash, convert it to Apple gift cards at about $1k (or $2k?) each, then they apply those gift cards towards your purchase. Afterwards, they throw away the gift cards.
Large denomination Cash handling for legitimate businesses has been a hassle for a long time already. I’m not sure how many businesses want to handle large cash amounts.
Honestly, I feel like so much of the crypto space is due to that. Even in Brazil we have a pretty simple inter-bank transfer system used by virtually everybody. You just have to know an email or a phone.
A significant portion of the US population uses cash for everything. Only about 2/3 of Americans use traditional banks for their finances. Most of them are poor, so they're not making many transactions over 10k, but those people will pay for cars, rent, etc in cash.
Neither them nor Europeans are used to less benign governments.
And the problem with good governments (and fair elections and other properties of decent democracies) is that they can accidentally let bad actors in (populism is one helluva drug for the masses), and bad actors may attempt to undermine the institutions, turning democracies into kleptocracies and dictatorships if they succeed.
Then all those safeguards in the name of all that's good become perfect tools for abuse in the name of all the control over whoever dares to oppose the established order.
You'd also need the routing number for the bank as well as the name on the account, at a minimum. And what you're thinking of is ACH, which goes between institutions, not between individuals.
The routing and account numbers are on all paper checks you write. You can use them to set up ACH transfers to/from that account, with pretty minimal checks.
Those transfers have to go through heavily regulated institutions, however, all of whom have strict KYC laws. Of all the ways to try and steal someone's money, this would be fairly low on my list.
USA doesn't even have a standard way of normal humans transferring money electronically to each other, leading to a plethora of competing apps that try to solve this.
The US has a couple of ways that normal humans can transfer money electronically to each other. But they're old school (and require bank accounts) and that's why there are newer systems that people use instead.
There are upsides and downsides. Having an additional degree of separation is nice when I'm doing transactions with strangers. I prefer to use Venmo instead of Zelle for precisely that reason.
A guy bought a house in berlin. In cash. Actual cash. Nobody suspected anything because in Germany, cash is king. Of course there was money laundering, tax avoidance and all the common suspects on it.
There is no way I'm going to show up to buy a vehicle with that kind of cash on me, it's asking for a robbery.
The last time I saw someone use that much cash it was to buy a house in Amsterdam in the mid 80's, and even then it was frowned upon by the notary and the recipient. The notary made them deposit it into their bank account first and probably had to report the deal as 'unusual'.
I’d imagine it’s fairly unlikely you’re paying cash for that large amount, most people would choose a more convenient form of transfer surely?
How much time is wasted in these transactions just counting and verifying the money?
Also what if lots of people decided to transact like this. It’s not like the banks have paper to back all your deposits, they’d need time to go physically print paper if it became that popular a medium.
The solution is to make larger denominations, not ban cash sales. But then the government would give up power, so that isn't going to happen.
US dollars say explicitly "THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE", it would be ridiculous to say 'under $10000'.
Once the government has control what's to stop them doing like China has proposed, and make your virtual currency have velocity, meaning if you spend it today, it's worth $1, next week .9, and next month .5?
>Once the government has control what's to stop them doing like China has proposed, and make your virtual currency have velocity, meaning if you spend it today, it's worth $1, next week .9, and next month .5?
If you break down any transaction, it has three components. First, there is the agreement to trade some goods and services for some price. At this moment two debts are created. One is to deliver the money. The other is to deliver the goods and services. The 2nd and 3rd component is the delivery of the money and the delivery of the goods and services.
If you for a candy bar in cash all three happen at the same time. When you buy something and pay later, or pay up front and get something later, it’s easier to see the different components. When you buy stocks via a broker, it’s even more apparent.
I don’t think “need” is a good reason here or for anywhere else. You don’t need to pay for things in cash, you don’t need to make more money, you don’t need to play soccer.
What I mean is that for that sort of money, it would be somewhat strange to "want" to pay in cash. You wouldn't walk 200 miles on foot to go meet a friend when you had a car on the driveaway?
True but would you want it to be illegal if the vast majority people that did walk 200 miles on foot instead of driving, did it because they were doing it to get away with committing a crime?
I would not want walking far on foot to be illegal just because most people who actually did that were doing so to further a criminal goal, no. That is how we slide into authoritarianism.
It's the same reason I want a right to privacy; you could argue that most people who want to hide something from the state want it because they're doing something illegal, but I still find it valuable that I can do things without being tracked. It's the same as the right to go outside without any form of ID; most people who aren't up to anything illegal could make sure to always bring valid ID at all times, but I value the freedom to not be forced by the state to bring something. It's the same reason I would oppose a law that you must wear a GPS tracking device on you at all times; most people do it willingly with their phone and watch these days, and the only people the law would really affect would be criminals, but I value the freedom to go somewhere without being tracked.
I currently make all payments electronically, but I value the freedom to be able to transfer money without leaving traces of the transaction, even though I don't currently exercise that freedom. Because the state doesn't have any business micro-managing individuals' behaviour like that.
So make the criminal act at the end of the journey illegal, not the act of walking 200 miles on foot.
This feels like the question of Blackstone’s ratio: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” I’m not an absolutist about these things, but I take Blackstone’s side of this (very difficult) question.
It's not your money. It's partly mine and everyone else's in the country. Just like my money is partially yours. It's my business that you're paying your way in society in a correct manner so that I and others can benefit as part of a collective.
(Not that it's always fair but that's a different argument.)
Ah, so that's why the cops figure that having more than a few hundred in cash means it's partly theirs. Well, not partly, they generally seem to think is completely theirs.
At the current pace of inflation, in 20 years €10k won't even pay a month's rent for a house or decent flat. Demonetization laws with fixed monetary amounts under inflationary systems are tyrannical.
You probably shouldn't finance a vehicle you can afford with current interest rates, and you may not want to give your debit card to a secondhand dealer for processing.
While I do have fond memories of paying less than $10k for a beater, those days may not be coming back. In 10 years, high-end phones and computers could easily fall outside that limit too.
> I don't know anybody in real life who accesses their money via a phone.
I don't know anybody that doesn't. And that includes 80+ year olds... mobile gear is how people interact with the internet around here and the internet is how people interact with their banks.
I'm a relative old-timer, so have lived through plenty of times when electronic payments weren't commonplace, and have also bought a number of second-hand cars. I never used cash - I used banker's drafts, because I didn't want to be mugged and the untraceable cash to go missing. (And even then, they were all worth under €10k).
I'm not sure in a modern society why I would pull out $10k from my bank account to then pay a person $10k cash for a second hand car, so the answer is no.
Yeah this is pretty much the reason cops seize money from unbanked people who try to use their life savings to buy something decently expensive. Because who could possibly be dealing in that amount of cash legitimately, it must be criminal.
> Yeah this is pretty much the reason cops seize money from unbanked people who try to use their life savings to buy something decently expensive.
I think it's going over most people's heads that buying and selling cars on Craigslist isn't like buying a car from a dealer. I could potentially use bankers drafts but many sellers know this is a commonly forged document and the risk isn't acceptable to them. Almost every single company/bank digital payment service is reversible or able to be cancelled (I naively was not aware of this until I was a part of the early bitcoin-otc community and got to witness the myriad of scams people ran once the other medium wasn't actually reversible).
Right. But that is illegal and in my view also immoral. If you want to change the law campaign for it. But breaking tax laws is not a victimless crime. You are freeloading/stealing from the rest of us.
Edit - ah, I think you mean politicians? My comment still stands though. I don’t know the polling in the US, but spending on social programmes in Europe is broadly inline with public opinion, so the insunuation of a democratic deficit is misplaced, at least here.
Where I live people in my generation have been primarily cashless at least the last quarter of a century, and yet we still significantly outrank the US in the freedom indexes, which isn't exactly a high bar these days, but still serves to underline that the typical American centrist argument that using primarily paper cash somehow improves freedom is wrong.
The major “freedom indices” are polluted neoliberal ideological wankery that shouldn’t be used to settle a bar argument let alone decide that it’s totally fine to do away with large cash transactions.
Even limiting things to strictly “financial freedom” - while more germane to the cashless question and also happen to stick the US above all of Europe save Switzerland - are highly questionable due to the inclusion of weird subjective metrics like “labor regulations = less freedom”
evidence suggests the optimal amount law breaking is non-zero. that’s going to be very difficult against a regime that can track the movements of all money.
I'd be interested to see what freedoms you think you have that don't exist in the US. This is such a popular thing to say that I imagine it can be easily described.
There are very few remaining instances in the region where people still pay large sums in cash. Transaction costs are so low (and mostly nonexistent) that cash remains in use either in very specialised circumstances or as part of “grey economy” activities.
WHO CARES if it "only has a few instances". I will never understand where people will say that having our right LITERALLY REMOVED somehow isn't eroding our freedom. It simply is, you are objectively less free now.
The uppercase tells me you have strong feelings about this and maybe I’m missing something obvious. Would you explain why my freedom will be diminished by this? I can still pay and buy whatever I want. It just happens faster and more secure.
A common tactic of centralized control is to "boil the frog," so to speak. Start with a control that seems to most people to be lax enough to be "not that big a deal," and then later -- maybe years -- tighten the control once enough people are acclimated to the existence of the control in the first place.
If the government were to come along and say, "If you are female and are purchasing travel tickets between a state where abortion is illegal to a state where abortion is legal, we want to know about it, so we're requiring that you use a traceable method of payment," then the problem may become more obvious to you.
If instead the government says, "We're requiring that you use a traceable method of payment," but doesn't disclose a specific reason why, and later decides to use it to determine when females travel to states where abortion is legal, that's not as obvious a problem. At first.
In this case, it could be, "We're requiring that you use a form of payment that we can easily monitor when engaging in transactions over $X." After about 5 years or so of people getting used to that, they can move the threshold to something like $(X/2). Then after a few more years, make it mandatory for anything over $50 or $20.
You don't even have to move the threshold. Inflation will eventually take care of it. At the current rate of inflation in some EU countries it would only take 5-6 years for the value of money to be $(X/2).
That's a big claim. Can you put a guarantee on it? Seems like when your only option is to use a tightly regulated system that has opinions on how much you can spend, every time you do you are granted permission. Some day they may say no. What is your recourse when they do?
Maybe you do, but not all countries function as well as yours. I'm Greek, and I remember a few years ago when we could only withdraw 50 euros a day from ATMs.
You're on the happy path, and wondering why anyone would complain when the path is so happy. The problem is what happens when that breaks down, and when that happens you definitely want to be able to use cash.
Thank you. "the happy path" is the best way to put it I have heard in a while. I genuinely feel that people having that level of naivete is the result of them living in a fairly stable country for far too long.
Dear people who come up every time with their own version of "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear", break your bubble sometimes, talk to your work colleague from outside of America (or "the west"), ask them what it's like to live in a country where you cannot trust your own government. What it's like to live in a post-communist country, what it's like to live in a country with central planning.
Exactly, it's the same as "if you have nothing to hide". No, sometimes I need to hide things for legitimate reasons, and sometimes I want to buy weed and I should be allowed to.
There may be not many instances, but this is simply not an argument. That is irrelevant. People should be have the freedom to use cash.
We had instances where a government blocked bank accounts of protesters, in democracies and autocracies alike. This is unacceptable. No government in the world should be able to restrict what people can do with their own money. And with this EU-wide limit, we are one step closer to nothing else orwellian authoritarianism.
It's not just "grey economy" how you call it. It's part of an essential freedom that has been taken away from the people.
You're talking as if introducing a nationwide speed limit is equivalent to banning cars. The regulation of a given operation is not akin to outright banning it and to assert that is hyperbole.
Remember about 10 years ago when Cyprus started confiscating money held in bank accounts to settle debts and the people holding cash kept their money because it was physically in their possession and harder to confiscate?
Remember earlier this year when people in Lebanon had to hold bank managers at gun point to try and withdraw money from their own accounts as the economy collapsed?
The "CaSH hAZ nO PuRpOSe eXCePt fOR cRImE" people in this comment section have massive blind spots. I'm not surprised politicians are taking advantage of it.
Fortunately this will also make it more difficult for North Korea to employ compulsory labor of NK civilians in the EU, which is one of the principal contributing factors to the regime's continued ability to act as a source of instability in the SCS region. There is a 45 minute documentary by Deutsche Welle (DW) on YT that informs on the issue.
Anyway, as the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions, this one at least won't be one to benefit primarily the children. At least one hopes.
Not sure how thats an excuse to make these kinds of changes in europe - it seems like an attempt to being emotion into a topic that shouldnt be emotionally charged
I've noticed some similar in America recently. I've got friends who move 5-6 figure sums for various personal businesses, and their banks have been extra critical of their transactions. One bank got so annoying, that my friend tried to close the account, and couldn't!
Lately hearing more and more stories about people getting de-banked, as been making me feel a little nervous.
In the cases of the banks and my business friends, I'm more worried the banks are extremely over leveraged and don't want to part with any cash (like 2008 on steroids).
- reposting this comment from another article on nigerian cash limits
I saw plenty of reporting on this, and nearly all of it was editorialized: it was being treated as evidence that customer savings weren't available, when the actual reason is that bank branches simply don't keep massive vaults of money on hand.
If you have a bank account, you can always withdraw your savings (at least up to the amount insured, in the event of a bank collapse). But there has never been a guarantee that you can walk up to a teller and leave with your life savings in a bag; you should always call ahead and coordinate with the bank to ensure that they have the physical paper available. In many cases, they'll redirect you to a specialized or more central branch.
I used to work for a bank in the US as a teller before 2019.
You absolutely can walk in and ask for 12K in cash. That amount is normal.
If you’re asking for 30-50K then coordination is needed, and its not because money is not available, simply because youd need to open the vault and that takes time.
I think there's a large degree of variance here: I've been in places that would have struggled to hand over $1000 in cash, since they might have had only 2-3 times that total on hand for the entire week.
That was in a small town, but that's my point: anecdotes about being unable to withdraw money are more about logistics than a banking collapse being hidden from the public.
This was in a branch that before pandemic would fork out 10k easily. I’m not the only one who experienced this - my friends experienced this across different banks in different states.
This doesn't contradict what I've said, and doesn't imply financial instability: it's not particularly surprising that banks weren't receiving as many cash deliveries during the first year of the pandemic, or that demand for cash withdrawals was higher than normal.
No, it’s that it is incredibly rare for someone to actually want to liquidate their account because the reason people do is usually to move banks and that use-case is better served with a cashier’s check. It’s not at all surprising that random branches don’t keep that much cash.
You can always liquidate your account. What you can't do is make it some random branch's problem in a spur-of-the-moment decision; you have to plan it with them.
No, that doesn't follow. You can definitely remove large amounts of cash, you just have to think ahead a little. Also, you have overlooked the fact that for many people a cashier's check is more convenient than a large wad of cash, especially if their sole object is to deposit it at a competing institution.
There is not an issue with the safety of banks. There was an issue with the amount of physical cash in the right place - during the pandemic (like any panic, recession etc) lots of people rush to cash and there isn’t enough of it. May mean the same thing when you can’t get the cash but it’s an important distinction. Ultimately very few people use cash so why have massive stocks everywhere, use it or lose it people…
This is not very surprising since there was a run even on toilet paper in March 2020. (I remember the empty shelves in Manhattan, and my relatives in Finland told the same story.)
If people will buy stacks of toilet paper they don’t need, of course they would empty the cash machines too.
If the reason to pull out 1K/day is a 1K/day limit imposed by the bank, then the reason is obviously not to avoid reporting requirements and therefore it cannot be considered structuring.
During COVID I had no trouble withdrawing $7k from my local credit union for a car purchase, it just took a minute for them to get a manager to look over the transaction
"In the fall of 2019 there was no war in Ukraine, there was no pandemic. But for still undisclosed reasons, the Fed decided to funnel trillions of dollars in cumulative repo loans to the trading units of U.S. megabanks and their foreign counterparties. The Fed’s repo loans stretched from September 17, 2019 through July 2, 2020."
You have to analyse at the population here; capital controls are useful for preventing people who have accumulated sizeable asset holdings in country X from moving them to a jurisdiction Y where there are effectively no taxes. Of course this reduces the freedom of the people who control these assets, but there is a common fallacy (usually introduced by the very same people) where they claim that liberty (in the abstract, without the very important qualification that this is _their_ liberty) is being surpressed while not noting the very important fact that _they are the most powerful members of society_ and that preventing them from moving their assets means that a whole lot of good (social welfare) cna be done for other people, without substantially impacting the material qualiy of their lives (the wealth/"improves my life" is pretty logarithmic IME, e.g. moving from 20,000 EUR -> 30,000 EUR of income a year makes a huge difference, moving from 30,000 EUR -> 130,000 EUR still makes a big difference, but 130,000 EUR -> 1 million EUR probably does not bring a concomitant increase in happiness).
I think this quote from Paulo Freire is pertinent
> The former oppressors do not feel liberated [once the people with less power than them are given more]. On the contrary, they genuinely consider themselves to be oppressed. Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression. Formerly, they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven; while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor travelled, much less listened to Beethoven. Any restriction on this way of life, in the name of the rights of the community, appears to the former oppressors as a profound violation of their individual rights – although they had no respect for the millions who suffered and died of hunger, pain, sorrow, and despair. For the oppressors, 'human beings' refers only to themselves; other people are 'things'.
> The tax-man and the police state are the oppressors
The oppressors _of whom_? For example taxing billionaires is not "oppression". I completely agree that modern tax policy is much too burdensome on relatively poor individuals in comparison to relatively wealthy ones (certainly given the amount of money spent on policing petty crime compared to catching large-scale tax evasion), but that isn't to say we shouldn't have taxes!
Taxes aren’t an inherent ethical imperative, and certainly not something for which we should accept endless government intrusion in service of the collection thereof.
Taxes are an imperfect mechanism for funding an imperfect state, not an innate moral right to spend the fruits of others’ labor.
You said this before but which taxed people and which prosecuted are you thinking of?
> Taxes aren’t an inherent ethical imperative
Even if this is not true, there are certainly a number of pragmatic reasons to support them (it turns out it's much nicer to live somewhere where there is a fair and just judicial system, a functioning education system, roads/bridges/etc, internet, clean water, sewage systems and social protection for the less fortunate and well off).
taxation is not oppression, it is the means of seeking to fund the government. Taxation is applied in almost every EU nation on a sliding scale that almost entirely ensures that it is evenly applied to every single citizen. I would argue that formulating this scenario as "oppression" demonstrates that you do not accept the democratic mandate of government and view government as an enemy which you should hide your earnings from.
The same argument of diminishing returns, that quality of life doesn't improve much when going from 130k€ to 1M€ can be applied to capital controls. Is this 10k€ limit really what is needed to save the welfare state? Were the previous controls not enough?
Or is it that the welfare state is collapsing on its own and grasping at straws?
> Or is it that the welfare state is collapsing on its own and grasping at straws?
I think you just reached the conclusion? These things never worked (look at history), but usually are implemented by the incompetent (which got us here in the first place).
This definitely makes sense, but my initial gut reaction of not liking this is still strong. I just don't trust that this will be used to meaningful ways.
I also imagine the people that may be most likely to take their capital to another country aren't worried about capital controls like this. Surely they have much better ways of transferring their wealth than 10K cash payments at a time, but I'm not rich enough to know for sure.
> I also imagine the people that may be most likely to take their capital to another country aren't worried about capital controls like this. Surely they have much better ways of transferring their wealth than 10K cash payments at a time, but I'm not rich enough to know for sure.
Yes of course, this is just an argument about capital controls in general (the really problematic cases are people who own a lot of capital, e.g. factories, power plants, internet businesses, etc. moving it around, which they definitely don't do with cash!)
I would characterise it differently. The aspect of financial repression that hurts the middle classes the most is letting inflation run. This is because they tend to have cash assets and their way of life is in many ways predicated on the idea that working hard ensures a certain buying capacity. It is also hard for them to move to Panama, for many obvious reasons. It is more that in the current world, there are many options for moving money around, so it harder for a government to ensure they have a captive audience for financial repression in terms of cash reserves.
I am not critiquing financial repression. It is probably the only feasible way to reduce government debt compared to say austerity measures. We would all be better off if economic growth could overcome government debt, but the Eurozone lacks the demographics to make this happen. Italy in particular is a basket case in that regard. One point to make however, is that the severe degree of inflation in Europe seems at least partly due to asinine energy policy. If that had been better handled, then the pain wouldn't be so great. Europeans may therefore be less happy to accept inflation denuding their lifestyles as an 'inevitable' condition of living in social welfare states.
There already exists laws where you have to register with tax authorities to receive payments in cash over 10,000 euros.
It would be quite easy for the government to look at this list and decide that there's no reason they can't be done by BACS and then introduce this law.
There's a lot of replies that are quite shocked, but in the EU and the UK it is very unusual to use cash for high value payments. For example, you would not be able to buy property in the UK with cash. Even if you had the cash and put it into a bank account for the sole purpose to send to your solicitors, this would get flagged and you would not be able to proceed with the purchase.
There's a lot of money laundering, and laws like this don't really affect the average person, they would disproportionately affect people trying to commit fraud though.
The majority of people won't even have 10,000 euro in savings, let alone want to make purchases above this amount in cash.
In the US, you have to fill out a form that gets sent to the FBI and IRS if you use over $10,000 cash in one transaction. It's still legal. I think this is a much better solution than banning cash transfers over $10,000.
Form 8300 must be filed and is sent to various agencies for multiple cash payments over $10k as well, which includes, for example, paying for a car or paying for rent.
These laws are old and stem from a time when $10k was equal to around $70k now (edit: someone else points out "Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 sets reporting at $10K which would be ~$80K today"). They've simply never been updated.
As someone who once had their bank accounts closed on a Friday afternoon with no information from the bank, I will always have cash. If I hadn't had cash at the time from a recent car sale, I would have been unable to pay for rent, food, utilities, etc.
"Why would you want a contingency plan?" seems an odd take on a forums primarily composed of IT professionals. "I oppose you having contingency plan" seems downright hostile.
Nothing to do with "fighting corruption" (or else a literal convicted felon wouldn't be head of ECB, - lol, lmao even) they just want to monitor you more.
It's a form of social credit system, china style. You cannot live without a bank account these days, but if you piss off the governemnt, they will take it away from you, like Trudeau did.
I am sure there are some benefits to living into this system, doesn't mean it's a good idea to do it.
Specifically Christine Lagarde was found guilty of 'carelessly' giving a massive payout of taxpayers’ money to controversial French businessman Bernard Tapie.
Tax levels are high and tax are being collected. Governments aren't short of money because of tax evasion.
Tax evasion is not a top priority however you look at it... the argument sounds like "but think of the children" to justify things that are actually motivated by other aims and/or ideological reasons.
My country loses about €32 billions in yearly income due to tax evasion. That's the amount of money that could change many lives if used right. Instead we're cutting benefits to the poor bto reduce our deficit. Tax evasion is a top priority.
Another solution is to just increase taxes until you end up with €32 billion in increased revenue. An advantage is also that this solution is actually _possible_ (as opposed to getting rid of all tax evasion).
But then you are just punishing those that actually pay taxes by making them pay more, while those who evade keep doing it. Also I doubt it would be possible, as raising taxes in the current economical and political climate is a political suicide.
Personally I think you just have the wrong perspective. Increasing enforcement to decrease tax evasion _is_ raising taxes. And affected groups will fight very hard against enforcement so I don't really see why you think that approach is somehow easier.
And you seem be talking about the elimination of tax evasion as if it's actually possible. Clearly it is not. The amount of tax evasion can potentially be decreased through policy and effort and we just need to decide how much we accept. Maybe the current level _is_ acceptable? In any case, some level must be acceptable. What level is acceptable to you?*
*This is a trick question. It's basically unanswerable without knowing the cost of enforcement (which increasing asymptotically as the amount of evasion goes to zero). But it is a reality that everyone should probably come to terms with.
Most states are complex structures largely manipulated by a tiny number of people for the benefit of themselves and the top echelon so as to capture the vast majority of the wealth created by everyone for a minority of nonproductives whos contribution is owning things as opposed to doing useful work. Erasing every obligation they presently possess to the functional state that enabled the nonproductive to live in wealth and luxury seems like an incredibly bad idea for them and us.
Everyone deserves health care, fire suppression, police to respond to criminal behavior, courts, a national defense and a defense of democracy against terrorists and would be fascists and others who would overthrow it.
Some things like health care can be provided albeit exceptionally poorly with a ridiculously bad ROI by a mixed private / public system. Others are ridiculous to imagine. For example if you privatize the military you create a single concentration of power that could trivially be bought out by anyone wanting to shitcan democracy tomorrow.
If it were possible to effectively run a large society like that one would suppose that in thousands of years one would have been so constituted.
I do realise that. I’m not against all (or fair) taxation. I just sympathize with people who manage to get away with tax evasion.
Sentences like “the state lost €30bn of revenue because of tax evasion” rubs me the wrong way. It’s not too far off from saying “mugger lost €500 of revenue because the potential victim ran away”.
I do realise it’s a fallacy—it’s just not too far off.
It's not "not far off" It's a defective fantasy. You are part of a society entirely based on pooling money through taxation and using it to pay for the things that make your entire life possible. The only people in a position to meaningfully move the needle as far as tax evasion are the rich who overwhelmingly are the folks who benefit from tax evasion and the people most harmed by austerity are the poor who lose benefits essential to their continued existence.
Tax evasion is overwhelmingly the rich stealing from the poor.
There is a ton of corruption going on at much higher dollar values and governments do very little about it - corrupt businessmen tend to be the most reliable donors.
> This implies, no record of personal purchases around.
What's stopping peoole to do it?
I regularly pay my drinks cash.
I never paid a beer more than 10k though...
> The current "fight against cash" goes in direction of that risk.
I'm glad that when I pay someone for something they can't say I didn't do it and ask for the money again.
That includes the State.
I paid my taxes, here's the proof.
I already paid my energy bill, here's the statement from the bank, have a good day.
Besides, what you are talking about has nothing to do with limits to cash transactions, I am honestly scared by the idea of going around with 10k in a bag to pay for something
only a fool or a criminal would actually do it and feel comfortable about it.
it's betting against bad luck and I an quite sure that I would not win.
Are you sure that you are going to the appointment with the seller with 12k in cash and they are not showing up with guns and rob you?
And what would you do then?
Go to the police? that first thing will do is ask you why you were going around with that much cash in a bag.
Bad question. Good question instead: "What seems to be the trend which may be at some point stop people from doing it".
> what you are talking about
You do not get the point. Of course one is glad to have the ability to prove transactions that one wants to be recorded; the issue is with the threats to the ability of carrying on transactions that one does not want to be recorded.
> What seems to be the trend which may be at some point stop people from doing it
very easy answer: progress.
same reason why people don't use shells as coins anymore.
> the issue is with the threats to the ability of carrying on transactions that one does not want to be recorded.
As the philosopher Jägger once said
You can't always get what you want
It's a fundamental principle of any community that ever existed, apparently in some parts of the richest World people are incapable of understanding that me is much less important than everyone.
Imagine a World where I say "I don't want to have an ID with my picture on it" but I also want to travel around the World freely, because I don't like explaining myself to random strangers in uniforms.
There are easy solutions to what you are looking for, Theodore Kaczynski is a notorious and virtuose example on how to pull it off, but none of them involve large amounts of cash spent in a single transaction, which is fishy per se because it requires two or more parties agreeing to do something that has virtually no advantage, except the most common: hiding something. I would like to understand what that something is, because the most obvious conclusion is "something shady". We all agree on that, let's be real.
I understand if protesters in HK buy tickets for the subway in cash to not get tracked by the Chinese government. Chinese are famously a little bit repressive.
I don't understand why someone in the US, living in the best and freest country in the World, the greatest democracy ever, the place where dreams come true, a Country where, unlike China, they give protesters a price in the form of a few days in jail, would like to spend large amounts of cash instead of using more modern systems to hide from their government and the IRS, two of the things that define "the most civilized place on the Planet", according to its citizens.
Something's doesn't add up here.
If it wasn't about the US, that we all know is heaven on Earth, one might be inclined to think that it's the reaction of a cynical, narcissistic, money driven, trigger-easy population to a government that has only one way to make people behave like they live in a single united Country and belong in a modern society, not tribes: violence and tyranny.
But that's obviously false for the US.
You know, as European, the many flaws of Europe are an advantage.
Even if the government wanted to track me and all my expenses, they are so incompetent that I'll probably be dead before they realize that I bough a new electric bike with my CC. I live dangerously, I know.
This new EU regulation has nothing to do with preventing terrorism or money laundering, but rather paving the way for its CBDC. This is about power and surveillance.
What the hell is "freedom to pay in cash" even supposed to mean.
Why would I, a buyer, have any reason to want to receive large sums of money phisically rather than digitally if it's not for tax evasion? Having lots of money on you is dangerous and a hassle.
There's literally no good reason for this "freedom" that isn't tax evasion, money laundering or paranoid "being controlled".
It genuinely blows my mind that there are people like yourself who seem to act like they do not understand the concept of oppressive governments. It's all well and good to have this stance now, but what happens when you are the oppressed? I doubt you'd be singing the same tune
Sending or receiving money digitally generally requires entrusting that money to a bank, and some people don't trust banks or can't easily get a bank account.
I've always found it astounding how majority of people will readily accept the anti-terrorist argument as a reasonable one, without any scrutiny whatsoever. I'm imagining a situation in which a bunch of terrorists are planning a bombing attack, but then having to scrap it because explosives would cost more than 10k EUR. "Pack it up guys, they got us this time, no possible way we can go through with the plan now".
With inflation, “worker shortages”, and prices rising - 10,000 will soon become within reach for lots of normal people.
Pushing them to NEED to use a profit driven banking system. Forcing them to be tracked. To have data mined and sold. To rely on “too big to fail” banking systems that practically schedule economic downturns every 20 years or so.
10000€ will soon be 5000€, then 2500€... make absolutely no mistake it's all about replacing cash with "Digital Euro", something the EU will have entire control on.
The slippery slope is, quite truly, how nation states operate. If they were worried abt terrorism, they’d stop terrorists. But this “change” … treats innocent people with the brush they use for terrorists… it’s a slippery slope by design.
Usually they allow inflation to slowly bracket creep which has the same effect. For example the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 sets reporting at $10K which would be ~$80K today. I've seen legislation for fines that has built in modifiers for inflation so the government knows how account for it.
Yes. Good old "look where the trend is going, foresee the risks".
Ah, remembering the surprise of upset people when they did not raise a suspect in front of bank clerks telling you "It's contactless, limited risk, 25u per transaction" (and already then the child-basic retort is "Times by how many transactions?"), and then were reached by the bank information that "owing to progress the limit is now raised to 50u / 100u / 150u ..."
> the amount you could do in a single contactless transaction
(Certainly not me: I will not accept embedded fixed NFC - not in documents, not in bank cards, not in general.)
Yes. I will rephrase: people were told, "Here are the details of the system: if anything goes wrong, it can only be for 25u". Some people trusted that as a fixed contract. Then, some received the (expectable) communications that the formerly established limit will change. Depending on the country and system, some doubled, some were raised to 150u (if I remember well), with promises to arrive soon at 500u (if I remember well).
Other details are not different in nature: if the PSD2 imposed that the via-PIN "signature" has to be provided every 5 transactions, that does not mean that at a later stage this will not be modified to 500.
The point is: if it is intrinsic to the system that the configuration can be globally changed, expect it.
About the logic: you have to foresee them "slopes", when you see they /are/ "slippery". The fallacy is in assuming the future. It is on the opposite _duly_ to consider the chances.
But I hope you realize you're citing a type of payment system being repeatedly made more convenient to support the idea of a payment system being repeatedly made less convenient. And I don't know why people would expect a security feature to never allow more.
Also is "u" standing for a specific currency, or what?
That's what i mean, bank transactions in the SEPA space are free at the point of use. The only exception is certain banks add fees for SEPA Instant (transfer time in seconds instead of days) and fees for exchanging between currencies.
GDPR isn't infallible. The EU and its individual countries have plenty of controversies.
>ton of challenger new banks.
Ton is a gross overstatement. It's a few that are truly independent from anyone else. The remainder are puppet / daughter banks.
Their existence barely influences the status quo and it certainly doesn't prevent outrage whenever banks used by over half the country's population threaten to fall.
I just love how the grandstanding of European green-progressives of the past, when they positioned themselves as champions of privacy, completely flipped once they came to power.
"Name one practical reason to pay amounts higher than 1.000€ in cash." – unknown progressive
That is a lot like asking for a form of secure end-to-end encryption which law enforcement can monitor server-side.
If a government can differentiate between a regular person and someone rich and powerful, neither of them have any privacy. There has to be invasive monitoring of the regular person to ensure they aren't stealthily becoming rich.
No it really is not. E2E encryption requires this property because everything happens over a channel which everyone (or, a lot of people) can listen into and the protocol is not really based on trust. Meanwhile the financial system is entirely based on trust (between individuals, banks, individuals and institutions, etc) and people have to place their trust in someone at some point (even very rich people doing very dodgy things with their assets have to trust their bankers at e.g. - perhaps somewhat unwisely - Credit Suisse et al.)
The cryptocurrency crowd would like to avoid having to trust anyone ever (but, well, if you look at the systems they design, they're very centralised and rely on networks of trust between lots of people; even within the supposedly iron-clad set of technical rules it's impossible to encode reality, hardly surprising that it's impossible to even encode mathematics in a set of logical rules).
The thing that we're missing is that (at least in my opinion) the reason privacy is important to people is that it is a necessary condition for expressing their personality; ability to buy a sex toy without anyone else knowing about it - sure? Same thing about e.g. visiting a gay club and buying a drink if you live in a very (conservative) Christian community. Ability to move a billion dollars into an offshore jurisdiction to avoid paying on tax on it? I personally wouldn't say this is integral to the right to self-expression.
> If a government can differentiate between a regular person and someone rich and powerful, neither of them have any privacy. There has to be invasive monitoring of the regular person to ensure they aren't stealthily becoming rich.
This is not really true; you don't have to start with the person and locate all their assets. Instead you start with the _assets_ and locate the people who own them (e.g. you see a mystery yacht, and you try to trace the owner).
I don't see how it is. This isn't about differentiating between rich and poor, nor about monitoring people becoming rich. It's about making sure that the kind of transaction that no normal person would ever do in cash, cannot be done in cash. It targets rich crooks not by identifying them, but by targeting the kind of transaction that only they would ever do.
Are you aware that millions of currency transaction reports and form 8300s are filed in the US every year and that a vanishingly small fraction of those lead to any law enforcement followup? The vast majority of economic activity including cash based economic activity is legitimate. If you want to balance the interests of law enforcement or whatever then just make it required that the transactions are reported but just banning large cash transactions will not stop money laundering and at best will just be another charge to stack on someone convicted of other crimes.
I don't see how any of that is relevant. They're not targeting the majority of economic activity, nor even the majority of cash transactions. They're only targeting cash transactions so unusually large that it's hard to imagine a legitimate purpose for them. Small cash transactions are unaffected.
> They're only targeting cash transactions so unusually large that it's hard to imagine a legitimate purpose for them.
I am saying that millions of cash transactions of this size take place every year and that the majority of them are legitimate. Whether or not you can think of reasons why people would use cash in that amount is sort of irrelevant.
Can you give me an example of a common, legitimate $10,000+ cash transaction? Elsewhere I gave the example of my mom transporting transporting a ton of money in cash for the initial down payment of a house, but that was 40 years ago. Nobody does that anymore for good reason; there are far easier, safer and more practical ways to handle that kind of transaction.
This is absolutely laughable. The very opposite is the case:
Wealthy, well connected people, politicians and businesses already can and do transfer and launder money on industrial scales, with only minimal worry about rules like this one, which doesn't even really affect their ability to launder or evade. They can instead use armies of lawyers, accountants, political connections for the high levels at which their laundering and tax evading happens. And if those fail, they can then simply pay whatever fines as a cost of doing business while minimizing convictions of real, actual people behind a business structure.
This cash prohibition rule on the other hand turns many average people across the EU, possibly millions of them in total into potential lawbreakers just because any number of normally, morally non-criminal random circumstances or worries about digital finances being frozen make them want to have and use cash for modestly large transactions.
All of this aside from the flawed reasoning that the state has an innate right to completely strip away financial privacy for the sake of taxes or KYC. It should not have such a right. Tax collection and financial auditing are contextual and imperfect necessities in the context of imperfect government and society, they should not be treated as divine rights of power, to ever be increased without recourse against them.
This is for transactions over 10k. That's not "moderately large". The only time most people make transactions that size is for buying a house, car or life insurance. Those are not transactions that normal people do in cash, and all of them already require significant paperwork anyway.
> All of this aside from the flawed reasoning that the state has an innate right to completely strip away financial privacy for the sake of taxes or KYC. It should not have such a right. Tax collection and financial auditing are contextual and imperfect necessities in the context of imperfect government and society, they should not be treated as divine rights of power, to ever be increased without recourse against them.
Is that a fancy way of saying tax evasion should be legal? Any transaction of that size represents a significant piece of income for someone.
I strongly support the right to privacy, but I'm not naive about the need to fight money laundering or collect taxes.
you're presupposing that your experience of cash transactions is and should be everyone's experience of cash transactions. Yes, many normal people sometimes conduct business with larger amounts of cash over 10k euros, which by the way isn't all that much anymore. And even if this is unusual, banning the unusual is a terrible way to run laws. If you defend financial privacy, I can't see how you could defend such an idiotic and intrusive law.
>Is that a fancy way of saying tax evasion should be legal? Any transaction of that size represents a significant piece of income for someone.
No, it's a way of defending the basic idea that the state's right to squeeze every penny and justify any law in the name of being able to do so shouldn't be automatically unquestioned. You saying that this cash amount represents a significant piece of income for someone takes as given that the cash in question is being laundered or used for evasion. Do you really believe that this should be a default assumption, or that it's right for the government to assume such guilt just because money is present in someone's daily business? Imagine if all legal issues were handled in such a disgusting way. For some reason, too many people put on emotional blinders and with tax law, ignore how barbarically stupid that is if any respect for presumptions of innocence exists.
You are certainly naive about how reliable government is about being able to pry into everything financial, or how absolute should be its right to squeeze for any amount of money.
10k used to be the price of a new car, now it's the price of a used car. With a few more years of inflation, it will be the price of a used bicycle but the 10k limit will still be a 10k limit.
Virtually nobody in Europe uses checks (in my country they are explicitly banned as a tender). It’s either cash or a bank transfer, and for such purchases, most people really prefer cash.
> And we’re talking about how it can impact real people here, not the 0.1% who gamble 10 years’ minimum wage at the casino in one evening
Most professional poker players are staked. They aren’t gambling with their money. It’s a job. A high risk, high reward job, but still a job. And it was just an example, and a perfectly valid at that.
I don't think I would accept to sell my house to soneone who pretends to pay cash, I wouldn't want to deal with that much money and all the risks involved, including the fact that there's no guarantees that the money is actually not fake.
Besides, money transfer is so cheap that it hasn't been an issue since at least 30 years ago.
We are taking about Europe here.
If you knew someone who buys houses in cash, can you swear your first question would not be "where did that much money in cash comes from?"
This doesn't apply to most EU countries. (Nuance: I'm not well versed in the legal system of countries part of the Bucharest Nine group, hence my "most")
In most of the EU, buying land and houses is done through a notary services. Depending on the country, you either do a SEPA transfer directly to the notary, and they then send it to the other party. Or, in other countries, you do the SEPA transfer to the other party, and then the notary approves the ownership-transfer once both parties confirm the money-transfer is complete.
Estate ownership is not proved by a piece of paper like with American "titles", they're backed with government-kept records, which only a notary can change. (and that's what you pay them for, in addition to taxes)
Nothing is happening in cash, because many EU governments want to be able to follow the money used to buy estate. Notaries usually report the transfer to the tax authorities. If the money cannot be justified, the notary must cancel the transaction, and some financial investigators will follow up.
There are no fees, as opposed to what many other HN commenters says. Because if your bank has fees for SEPA transfers, you can always switch to virtual-cross-EU-online banks which have no fees for SEPA transfers.
However, you will be notary fees, which most of it is just plain tax.
Two examples from my European Country, where the practice is spread and people believe they are smart but are really not.
---
a lot of people did it here, especially in the 80s-90s. Then we started building high speed 4 lanes highways and high speed trains. You know how much the State paid for the land used to build those infrastructures?
EXACTLY!
The nominal values, so basically people got compensated for a tenth of the actual price.
The State also explained publicly that most of the land in straight flat paths, was chosen using their market value. If it's worthless, nobody will protest, on the contrary, they will be happy that someone is buying it for a price.
Some of these people were so stupid that sued the State. Of course the State won and also discovered the fraud, collecting even more money in the form of fines.
---
Recently a campaign of subsidies to improve energy efficiency of buildings was launched. The benefits are up to 110% of the total costs. Yep, 110%.
So my parents, who always did everything by the book, and got called foolish by their neighbors for years, got for free a 45k photovoltaic system and the renewal of the shed, while most of the requests were rejected because various irregularities were in place. Which again did the government a tool to investigate who committed a fraud in the past and fine them.
---
Personal advice: unless you're Bezos level rich, don't try to outmsart the government. Chances are your children will have to pay for your assholeness.
use of cash is not prohibited, the proposal forbids it for amount larger than 10k in a single transactions unless authorized
A notary signing an agreement between a buyer and a seller is a legitimate reason to spend all that money in cash.
Which is very rare though, I only know old cow farmers in little towns close to the mountains here that deal with much cash (for lack of near bank offices and their lack of a driving license)
He is not. In Spain, for instance, it is already illegal to pay with cash costs above 1.000€ in any commerce. You are forced to buy it using a credit/debit card.
The government knows that you own a motorbike, you can't go around with an unregistered vehicle, you have to sign documents that prove the transfer of ownership, you also have to pay insurance on it, it's mandatory where I live in Europe.
It makes sense: if I buy a motorbike from you using cash and nobody knows about it, when I am going to rob a bank with it, the police would come knocking at your door. Would you like that just to let me use cash instead of any other system available because we are normal people that live in societies not in a lawless imaginary city in a western movie (west was not lawless, properties where already registered 4 thousands years ago by Egyptians, it's nothing new)
Simpler yet, if the police stops you and there isn't your name on the certificate of ownership , you have to justify why is that.
Again, it makes complete sense. It could have been stolen and you could be the thief.
A washing machine costs 250 euros, you can pay it in cash.
The limit is 10k, it's 40 washing machines.
The washing machine comes with a warranty, warranty is valid only if you put your name on it.
Only a fool would renounce to 2 years warranty to pay cash and not let the government know that they do laundry, like literally everybody else, I'm quite sure the government doesn't care if you own a washing machine, but then again I live in Europe, probably the CIA does and it's a big deal there.
I really don't understand how people feel comfortable going around with thousands of euros in cash in their pockets to buy stuff that they could have comfortably and safely bought from their couch using a free and immediate bank transfer that guarantees both parties against fraud, and theft and that have no handling costs.
American paranoia about government will be the worst heritage of these last two decades.
But probably even worse is the idea that your freedom means I have to pay the price for it.
Wanna pay a house or a car in cash, without any record of the transaction?
Go buy it from a criminal, because I am not selling it to you. Nobody would. Unless they are being paid to accept all that cash in one transaction.
The limit is for a single transaction, not for your entire life.
If they can freeze your money in the bank, they can also freeze the cash you keep stashed in your room.
paranoia is stupid.
I am all in favour for protester not living tracks, it doesn't involve money transactions over 10k in cash though. I don't see how the two things relate.
Your personal devices are already linked to your name.
Do you really believe you are anonymous?
SIM cards are not, for example, since forever here in Europe.
warranty certificates must contain all your personal data to be valid.
You would renounce to free 2 years warranty only to pay cash?
Why?
what's the deal with that laptop, what's the reason to keep it secret?
Suddenly your secrecy it's much more interesting for the shop owner than you paying with a bank transfer or credit card like any other person would do and not raise any suspicion.
If I was them I would alert someone, in case you'd do something illegal with it, just to be on the safe side.
See? even if you are a criminal using cash just for the sake of using cash it's stupid.
Most shops don't even accept large amount of money in cash, it's dangerous for them and costs them a lot more to handle and keep safe.
even many bank offices or postal office don't keep cash to avoid being robbed. It's for employees safety.
> Your personal devices are already linked to your name
It is hoped that nobody is so stupid to try that.
> Do you really believe you are anonymous?
I radically believe on that right of so being.
> You would renounce to free 2 years warranty only to pay cash?
Very certainly.
> Why?
Because that is what a Man does.
> what's the reason to keep it secret
Basicmost principle.
> interesting
Monkeys surely are intrigued when they see men acting: they cannot understand. If they had been part of a Civilization, they would know that a Man does not concede on the side of privacy.
> even if you are a criminal
Very obvious, it is expected that criminals be on FB and Tw and smile at Sino-Thatcherian cameras etc.
Nothing new, it is part of the scheme: criminals have something to hide; Men have everything to hide; subjects have nothing to hide.
There are people that believe in a magical being with long blonde hair that died and resurrected 3 days later.
That doesn't make it real.
I know a few people that cannot be tracked by the usual means, you would never survive living their life.
> Basicmost principle.
I'm sure police will understand when they stop you with 15k euros in your backpack and no justification for it.
> Monkeys surely are intrigued when they see men acting
No, they are not.
Privacy is closing the door when you go to the bathroom, what you are talking about is secrecy.
Which is why the CIA is called a secret service and not a privacy service.
To commit crimes unpunished, you need secrecy.
Interestingly, monkeys do understand that, some people don't.
> Very obvious, it is expected that criminals be on FB and Tw and smile at Sino-Thatcherian cameras etc.
It's exactly what they do. One of them bought Twitter. Another was best friend and producer of all the Hollywood celebrities. Another one won the presidential elections in the United States of A.
if someone has 10k cash they will not buy a used car, they will buy a new car, pay it in the next 5 years 200 euros a month and then sell it to a used car reseller.
No sane minded person would sell their more than 10k worth car in cash to an unknown party who shows up with a bag full of 50 euros bills.
BTW this position comes from people who regularly see cash as a form of freedom from oppression and support the use of crypto, which is digital assets that cannot be bought in cash.
So the options are logically 2: it's people that are not right in their mind or it's people who love cash because they don't pay taxes.
10k in cash is an unreasonable amount of money for 99.999% of the population.
I am an investor in my country in bars and restaurants and we're so happy that younger generations virtually use zero cash.
It freed me and my employees from having to deal with cash, bank deposits, handling and transferring money safely, theft, counterfeit money and many many other issues that the stone age money brings.
It also made it much easier to handle payments, I can tell the bank to pay and they will, instantaneously, while before we obviously used the money from the cash register to pay, to spend the cash money and avoid going to the bank to deposit it and had to trust the delivery guy, who changed frequently, to actually not steal the money and disappear (it happened several times over the past 25 years).
It made possible for young people, especially girls, to go around safely with no money on them and still live a full life while also keeping much more control on their expenses.
There's no better way than cash for large transactions between private persons. All the apps have limits of a few thousand and bank transfers take a business day (in Switzerland). No one wants to transfer 5 figures to a random person and wait a day before taking possession of the car. Sellers don't want to give the car before the money is in their account.
So cash it is.
Used cars go for way more than 10k. I bought my current car for 35k used. If you go to used car dealer, the average price is nowhere near 10k.
> There's no better way than cash for large transactions between private persons
For small amounts? maybe.
Assuming you like bringing money with you and your time is free and you like to pay two times: the first time when you pay in cash, the second time when you have to waste time to get the money from an ATM.
There are much better ways to solve these issues and I use cash only with people I already know, other than to pay drinks and cigarettes.
For large amounts?
Absolutely not.
Unless the transaction is between two people with something to hide, of course.
Ironically, this is why Europe wanted to put a limit on cash transactions [1]
There's absolutely no obligation to pay in one transaction.
Even with raising interest rates, it's still more convenient to lend the money from the bank and pay monthly, instead of giving away 10k that could be invested in something much more profitable than a used car.
You can easily repay the loan in 5 years with < 200 euro/month even at rates around 5-6%.
> I bought my current car for 35k used.
That's a very expensive car and this [2] is 35k euros cash.
Not exactly "the best way" to pay. Honestly someone who pays a car with 35k cash, can only look like this in my mind [3]
This how I actually do it [4], paying monthly rates, very cheap interests, thanks, but no thanks.
On the block where I live there are a couple of hairdressers all empty and also a café owned by shady 20 year old Albanians.
A bunch of shops for construction gear where there is nobody etc. It's possible that it's a bad way to launder money but it does still exist.
No good solution existing doesn't mean we should implement useless measures that restrict freedom.
Assuming a similar percentage of car washes and hairdressers launder money( similar to how many >10k cash transactions are for money laundering) we could ban hairdressers and car washes from using cash all together. To fight corruption...
I think the problem we should fight, if any, is not the laundering. I simply can't imagine a good return on the investment in terms of fought-corruption vs permanently removed rights.
I also don't get the argument of "very few people it" against cash. Sure, the usage is low, but why would we then take away the right? To me this is like taking away the right to protest because 99% of people are almost never on the streets(made up statistic). Restrict people's bank accounts and see how quickly they will start using cash instead; I've seen this happen. Similarly, restrict people's rights and they will head for the streets.
> Assuming a similar percentage of car washes and hairdressers launder money( similar to how many >10k cash transactions are for money laundering) we could ban hairdressers and car washes from using cash all together.
And how many >10k cash transactions are for money laundering exactly?
I am amazed at the number of folks in this thread who are clearly happy about this trend without realizing that are surrendering a fundamental freedom to their nanny state, one probably as deeply important a freedom of speech.
But then t'is the same old story, repeated over the ages: you get the governments you deserve.
They point is making it hard for the tax evaders to spend their cash (which they cannot deposit in the bank since it's way more than they officially earn) in law abiding shops.
Thank you for the clarification, Ultimo (so there is at least two of us), but the rationality of the measure is still doubtful.
This starts making half-sense - it is not to curb the possibility that the merchant evades, but to hinder spending earning coming from evasion. Unfortunately, that money that may come from evasion is the same money that comes from normal earnings: so the damage is spread, not surgical. For example, now Men (is it just the two of us?) in Spain cannot purchase, say, a Macbook (the threshold there is reportedly at 999€).
It seems like one of those generalizing measures like "Populations labelled as irresponsible socially extroverts as an aggregate will have individuals bound to confinement in case of epidemic", which even when they work as an effect involve massive lateral damages.
Like for other measures, especially in the past few years, measures are taken and justified though a broad vague irrational paternalistic shout ("For the children"), and we are left with the unduly burden of trying to reconstruct the logic (if any plausible exists).
It's a pity that the venn diagrams of people who understand the need for private money transactions and people who understand the macroeconomic need of (occasional) negative interest rates do not in practice seem to overlap.
The usual argument for why negative interest rates might be needed is to prevent deflation. But in a fiat currency system like we have, it is always extremely easy for governments to reduce the value of the currency (ie, stop deflation). They can just print more money. In detail, they can just finance government expenditures with money created out of nothing, if necessary cutting taxes to provide more need for money to be created that way. This is in fact what has happened many, many times. It's not some strange fringe theory. There is no doubt whatever that it works. There is no need for negative nominal interest rates.
It's a pity because we should be seeking solutions for both problems, money system allowing negative rates and private transactions. They should not exclude each other because both are important for different reasons.
all fiat currencies have number-go-down technology. look at a graph of purchasing power vs time for any fiat currency. It always trends towards zero.
start using a currency with number-go-up technology. look at a graph of bitcoin. instead of going down, the number goes up. you should adopt this type of currency.
I am aware this sounds stupid. I am also 100% convinced that it is true.
But more seriously, based on the fact that that represents really a lot of banknotes - and those assets are bought from real companies - which would then need to deposit say 100M in cash in their bank - doesn't seem hard to track I guess.
Let me give another perspective. The freedom to operate in cash is the freedom to be anonymous and is much like to freedom of speech or freedom from surveillance. I just want to have a right to use my money without my bank or my government knowing all the details. We became too used to license plate and, recently, face tracking by everpresent CCTV, but this is not normal.
American perspective: There are lots of conspiracies out there about CBDCs but in my opinion CBDCs would be preferable to the current banking system. Right now banks can arbitrarily decide to freeze your account for "compliance reasons" and there is nothing you can do about it. They can deny you service because you were born in a country they don't like. They can deny you service because they don't like your business regardless of whether it's legal or not (https://www.wsj.com/articles/gas-station-atms-are-a-banking-..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point). A government run CBDC would offer constitutional protections and replace this weird arrangement we have where anti money-laundering enforcement is outsourced to banks and banks fear of being fined leads them to being petty tyrants.
And people talk about the trucker protests like it was this unprecedented thing. That's just the tip of the iceberg. There's a company called World-Check and if you ever end up in the World-Check database you will never get a bank account again except maybe if you're an ultra high net worth individual.
I know someone in England who paid for their houses construction by going to an ATM and maxing out the cash withdrawal per card, putting the cash in a bin bag, and giving it to the builders on a daily basis. I don't believe it'd be realistically possible to stop this from occurring.
Your friend is lying to you. If you do this enough times, the bank automatically flags the account for money laundering. It's very basic and standard money laundering procedures.
"I don't believe it'd be realistically possible to stop this from occurring." - It already happens and is already stopped so you're wrong on that one.
1/ he never said his friend’s account was not flagged. It may take some time. 2/ his cash was already clean, so it’s not part of money laundering, if anything it’s called criminal/terrorism funding.
There is no such thing as "already clean" money from a banks perspective. Money in a bank is constantly and always monitored as if it's potentially dirty.
Being flagged for money laundering and it actually being money laundering are two different things.
Obviously it would then lead to them asking why he was choosing to pay the builder in such a manner, rather than just doing a bank transfer. Ultimately could lead into an investigation of some sort.
Money laundering is when you can't justify the origin of the money. Not when you withdraw them to pay cash. You may spend them in prostitutes, or just giving them away. The bank has no business in asking you what you do with them, aside from putting some fail safes to makes sure no one is stealing from your account.
Mob boss has lots of money and needs to launder it.
Mob boss starts a building company, paying the employees with dirty cash (but hey, no income tax, so no ones complains).
Building company charges customers, but asks for it in cash.
Dirty money goes out to construction employees, clean cash comes in from customers. The Bank flag is just saying there is laundering occurring near the money.
If all revenue is in cash, and all payments are also in cash he doesn't need a Bank in the first place.
Laundering money is almost always done through b2c businesses where it's harder to trace all the customers. You start a cafe, and then you say you had 1.000 customers daily when you really had 100. You pay the tax for the remaining 900 coffees and now your money are clean.
If he was laundering money he would prefer to be paid by check or wire but would pay employees in his ill gained cash. Customers paying with cash would just introduce the same problem of having a bunch of cash around.
My typical month I pull about $2k from the ATM. Some months I pull as much as $8k in a single day from the ATM when dealing with larger purchases. I've been doing that for years.
Then again, my ATM withdrawals are in another country, so maybe it's treated differently since it looks like a remittance.
I'm pretty sure a big goal is to fight tax evasion.
I can't speak for all of EU, but here in Austria tax evasion is very common.
For example, it's still extremely common to pay contractors under the table. They will ask you if you need an invoice, and the price will be a lot lower if you don't.
Another example are restaurants. For a few years it has been required that restaurants always provide you with a receipt, but especially asian restaurants still don't do so.
All that untaxed revenue costs the state billions in missing taxes.
If you limit cash payments, then you make it at least slightly harder for someone to eg. buy a car with that untaxed money.
I really don't see any reason why you would need 10k€ cash payments if not for tax evasion.
I have not seen a SEPA wire transfer cost more than 1€ since SEPA wire transfers have existed. Which would make the fee at most 0.01% for >10k€ payments.
The most that I have ever payed is 1€. I have been paying 0€ for the last 5 years or so. Is that still a fee?
"Oh lultimouomo", you say, "the were transfer might be nominally free but sure having a bank has other costs involved". No fixed cost, yrgulation, so by the very fact of having a bank account, depositing money in it and taking it back by wire transfer or ATM you are never paying a fee.
Also, cash has a cost. You risk being mugged, you risk getting a wrong change by the cashier, the store risks a robbery / break in (and most often pays expensive insurance to protect itself against this)
Not sure why you are getting downvoted. The government of cyprus did seize bank deposits during the 2013 crisis. In some european countries i spoke to people who worried the same will have happened during the onset of covid and then the war started by russia.
At least with CBDC there seems to be a way planned for anonimity:
> There are two types of retail CBDCs. They differ in how individual users access and use their currency: // Token-based retail CBDCs are accessible with private/public keys. This method of validation allows users to execute transactions anonymously // Account-based retail CBDCs require digital identification to access an account // The two types of CBDCs, wholesale and retail, are not mutually exclusive[ - i]t is possible to develop both and have them function in the same economy
Pretty important, because currently having anonymous electronic transaction is heavily difficult.
By the time Madame Lagarde is done a lot of people will be praying to still have something in the bank to pay negative interest for.
With the current inflation €10.000 will be worth far less in the near future, and I'm certain the amount won't be updated yearly to account for that. This 10k "magic number" has stayed the same for a long time. This isn't about money laundering as much as about control over even relatively low value cash transactions.
Lagarde is a criminal with connections...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38369822
"A French court has found International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde guilty of negligence but did not hand down any punishment."
They do this while looking the other way when "art" valued in the dozens of millions moves from one hand to another even though no opposite movement of money has happened.
This sort of rule, as usual, affects only small players and normal people. If you're rich and well connected, you're allowed to wash money.
Can someone explain to me how this 10K EUR limit can be enforced? What will stop the launderer from selling an item/service valued at 1K to a thousand anonymous customers who paid with cash? Surely they're not going to demand KYC for every tiny cash transaction? If they aren't, I can't see a limit to the number of fake customers you can come up with.
Or is this just meant for cases where the business is already under 24/7 survailance and they could point to not enough people coming by?
It prevents people with lots of dirty money from paying expensive-but-unregistered-goods (i.e. not cars and houses) with cash from law abiding citizen; if they want the expensive stuff, they'll have to either find some other dishonest businessman to sell it to them (might be hard, depending on what you're buying, and increases the risk of being caught) or deposit the money in a bank to pay for it electronically (which will raise flags since you are not officially earning that money)
I think you raise a good point. In an ideal world this would mean that only more sophisticated criminals with access to money laundering would be able to use large amounts. An unsophisticated criminal can't just buy stuff from a law abiding citizen.
Remains to be seen how this will work out in practice. My guess is that most law abiding citizens won't even know that such a law exists. Your point still stands though.
You open a bank account and start "selling an item/service valued at 1K to a thousand anonymous customers who paid with cash" and you'll come up against KYC and have your account flagged regardless.
That's what would be stopping you; existing anti-money laundering systems.
You mean a bank will demand to know information about the customers of a business that has an account with them?
I personally already run a business and my bank has never wanted any info from me about my business's customers. Sure they know me well, but not my customers.
The bank reports your bank transactions to the tax authority, who compare them with your tax returns. If there are significant discrepancies you'll probably get asked questions about your customers.
Well in Estonia (an EU state) this certainly doesn't happen with any regularity. The tax authority has the possibility to ask for bank statements, but they are required by law to inform the account holder of this check up. It only happens for cases where you're already under a tax authority investigation.
I know though that this is the case in more government-happy states like Denmark, where the banks send this data more liberally.
Anyway even if all the data would go automatically to the tax authority, that doesn't reveal anything. The company would be paying tax properly on all of this, that's the whole idea of laundering. To get the money into the legal system.
What happens when you limit the amount that can be made in a singular cash transaction, is that you then severely limit what businesses that you can use to launder it through.
If you can pay $100k in cash for a gold bar, it only takes 20 transactions to launder $2 mill. That's not all that suspicious.
With this new limit, you've now turned that into 200 transactions needed. Now the business stands out more because they tend to use business averages/data to spot things.
If you're moving that much money around at some point that money has to flow into a legally operated financial provider/service for you to use it for any good means.
You could launder $100k through the means you mentioned with Bitcoin through illegally operated exchanges for example but then what? You can't use it to buy a property that way.
Do people in other parts of the world use bank transfers to buy property or what? I'm genuinely curious. Where I'm from it's often a cash transaction, unless it's a mortgage.
Money laundering was already against the law. The whole premise of this 10K limit is that it will somehow stop money laundering. The way I see it, at best it creates some hassle.
The hassle is quite important as 1) It limits the business models it can be done through and 2) It means the business models you can still launder it through are much more noticeable.
It's easy to launder $2 million selling gold bars. It's much harder to launder $2 million through a car wash without red flags showing.
Greater international freedom for private interests as a consequence of globalisation and digitalisation has grown significantly over the past few decades and represents a keen threat to our democracies. Some of those that profit the most and can afford to pay the most, utilise their new found freedoms to avoid paying as much as possible. This leaves democratically elected governments as hollow shells only able to effectively tax those that those who can afford it the least and thus; cannot hide.
As such it is important for organisations such as the EU to try to re-assert their control over private interests to prevent the loss of control that has occurred over recent decades from making democratically run organisations completely impotent in the long run.
This narrative has not a great deal to do with the linked article and everything to do with the discussion on here. A discussion that seems to completely ignore these changes that have happened to our societies in recent decades while holding an irresponsible view that financial regulation is tyranny and that taxation is theft. It is _critical_ to our democratic values that our institutions that are accountable to the people, are able to control private interests that grow too large and are able to raise tax receipts from those that wish to try and hide. That includes the black market.
The thing is, democracy hasn't demonstrated that it can combat private interests.
If private interests can't operate outside the country's border, then these people have the money to simply manipulate the media, the politicians and therefore the policies and democracy itself to suit them.
> The thing is, democracy hasn't demonstrated that it can combat private interests.
Sure but I don't get the rhetoric on here where when the EU attempts to combat malicious private interests via financial regulation everyone starts trying to cast it as a tyrannical evil empire.
One could as easily state that the EU is attempting to stand up for democratic interests, which is why I have added that comment making that argument.
In Italy it is 2,000 Euro, the current governement proposal is to raise it to 5,000 and there was a lot of debates about it (according to previous measures it should have become 1,000 Euro in 2023).
Germany - I believe - has no set limit, Greece has 500 Euro.
The anti-laundering (and anti-terrorism) usefulness of limiting the amount of cash per payment has some merit, but (IMHO) it won't affect at all the illegal transactions (to evade taxes and VAT), it is news of these days of an ex-member of the EU parliament arrested in Bruxelles (in connection with presumed bribes related to the Qatar football world championship) arrested and found in possession of around 600,000 Euro cash.
I thought it was the case in France, too, but as it turns out that's the limit only when one party is a company. There's no limit for transactions between individuals (with a few exceptions).
Everyone saying "muh GDPR" has no clue none of it applies to financial transactions.
To get a PSD2 "Open Banking" license one needs to KYC every user and keep every transaction that passes through the system, for 5 years, including the KYC data.
Being PSD2 licensed doesn't even make you a bank. Just imagine what an actual bank has to keep around...
Also every business has to keep invoices and transaction data around for tax audits, usually 7 years. So you can GDPR delete request all you want, but the shop where you bought that thing still has to legally know you've bought it.
I think I've asked this in many prior threads, but maybe I'll repeat it here.
Europeans often explain that they see the need for strong privacy laws because of their experience with totalitarianism (Nazi and Communist regimes). But most of those laws regulate private-sector databases and private-sector data collection, not law enforcement or intelligence; and many of them actually contain explicit exemptions for governments.
Clearly, governments have made lots of use of private-sector databases, so it's not as though they're not a risk if you're concerned about totalitarianism. But wouldn't it make sense to focus more on the state than on the private sector?
I know Europeans (especially in the 2000s) have been quicker than people elsewhere to endorse the idea that all state activities (including those of security agencies) need a legal basis and should comply with necessity and proportionality. So that's cool. But I still don't see how the intuition works like "the SD / Stasi / KGB were spying on everyone and that was awful, so we obviously see it's important to restrict ... private-sector databases! but not (as much¹) state access to financial, travel, location, and communications data".
¹ clearly there are some regulations, and they get fought over in constitutional and European courts, but there's also a ton of "we have to make sure the state can monitor people" initiatives all over Europe!
"GDPR delete request" is only allowed for treatments based on consent, which is only one of the 6 legal basis in the regulation. So you won't never be able to delete a credit card transaction.
What GDPR gives you, is to know which data is kept, for how long and with access to whom.
It also forbids for a bank to give your these information to Google or Facebook, for example.
I think another important thing to mention is that there is a regulation on centralized crypto exchanges about unhosted wallets. Therefore, this regulation is completely against defi I would say.
Combine the limit of 10k with rampant inflation and 10 years from now you won't be able to buy a TV with cash, they won't update the limit based on inflation.
Here in Switzerland we used to use cash for a lot of things, I remember paying my car in cash. It has changed a lot with covid. I do not know the regulation on any limit.
My mother once told me that when they bought their first house in 1980, she had to go to the bank to withdraw the mortgage loan in cash, bicycle to another bank (or possibly the notary?) to pay for the house in cash. She was understandably nervous, carrying that much money around.
A lot of people here say that it's very rare to spend this much money in cash for legitimate purposes as though that is some universal rule and not a cultural happenstance. I'm currently holidaying in Japan and here it is quite common to make large cash transactions and settle things in person with paper money that couldn't be settled easily that way in my home country of the Netherlands. I actually prefer the Japanese system, since digital transactions often fail; it was only a few days ago that I had to try two different credit cards and two different paypal accounts to make a payment for a flight go through, for instance. I really don't understand people who harp on about the reliability of the traditional finance system (also comes up a lot in discussions re: cryptocurrencies), since that is absolutely not my experience nor the experience of people I have personally spoken to.
This is just a side show to the real issue however, the issue of rights. Our rights are something that limits the power of the government, that protects us from the government. It is not immediately obvious that we should need rights - in well-functioning societies like the EU, the government is overall a benevolent entity, using its power to aid citizens and protect them from bad actors. We give power to the government because it is good to us, so from a first-order evaluation, limiting the government's power seems counterproductive. Yet we know from thousands of years of experience in statecraft that things do not pan out this way. Governments make mistakes. The whole of the government can be good while parts of it are bad. The government can be good at one time, and then turn bad at a later time. The government is often good to most people while being bad to some, and these people are often the marginalized and invisible.
Digital transaction afford the government (and other powerful actors in the system) two important powers: surveillance and the ability to freeze or confiscate assets. Especially the freezing of assets is devastating when done to individuals. And these things can and do happen illegitimately. Unethical mass surveillance and the freezing of assets of protestors, journalists and other political undesireables is not a theoretical possibility but a real reality. We are lucky that in the west this is mostly limited to canary-in-the-coalmine people on the margins, people whose speech is so extreme that few of us can find it in themselves to feel sympathy for them. But it doesn't take much democratic backsliding for things to get much worse. I think it's important for us all to really internalize the fact that politics does not always move in the direction of freedom and progress; things do regress, as recent history should have made more than clear to us all. We need backstops, ways for people to live lives at odds with the government. You can't live in modern society without being able to transact.
Make no mistake, by the way; these kinds of laws very much do lead to the end of cash. These kinds of laws (and laws in general, actually) tend to only get stronger, seldom weaker. Even just leaving this law on the books without doing anything else slowly squeezes the noose tighter. Ten thousand euros today are worth only about half as much as ten thousand euros thirty years ago. I am personally of the opinion that all laws should have an expiry date and all sums of currency in law should have automatic inflation adjustment, but that is a story for another time.
The risks you're mentionning are true, but I don't see how it has anything to do with cash.
It's also your government emitting the bills and coins, and controlling its value.
If you would speak about doing transactions in gold, or having a farm to trade animals in case of collapse of the bank system, like some survivalists do, I would understand more.
No, they have not made a new law last week, but one of the highest courts has decided that this data should not be public (as the regulations stand, especially in relation to the GDPR). Nothing prevents the European Union institutions from updating the regulations on the subject.
...and this is what they seem to suggest in this paragraph, which is a clear reminder of this event:
> Member states should ensure that any natural or legal person that can demonstrate a legitimate interest has access to information held in the beneficial ownership registers, and such persons should include those journalists and civil society organisations that are connected with the prevention and combating of money laundering and terrorist financing.
Why should anyone have to prove what’s in their pocket is theirs? Why not have police question people for wearing shoes that are a little too nice or seize expensive watches?
Police actually does that here NL). If you declare hardly any income or posessions on your tax report, yet you drive some very expensive car, you may expect a visit from some fraud investigation unit.
This has proven very effective against organised crime.
They must be front line street thugs or something - any wise guy worth his weight is going to declare enough income to keep the tax authorities off his back. The rest goes into a safety deposit box someplace distant, or gets commingled into a business someplace. Escobar owned a cab company which he claimed was the source of his income - he even had a couple guys who would drive around picking up and dropping off passengers. In modern drug cartels everyone is a lottery winner - they will pay people full value to sign over lottery winnings to them just so they can report it as their source of income.
I literally have the equivalent of $1500 in my wallet right now. Why? Because I withdrew it and might end up buying something with it, either in one big purchase or ration it throughout the month.
Any country that considers that a crime or potentially a crime is dystopian. It’s insane that people think what was the typical way to pay for things a few years ago (and still is in the free world) is some vile action worthy of suspicion.
> Yeah, I am a bit worried that we may be too harsh but these laws combat real issues in our society.
Well, there are many other ways to combat these issues without treating innocent citizens as criminals unless they prove they are innocent.
Believe me, I've been on the receiving end of these laws despite never having done anything illegal, which means that my financial privacy has now been ruined several times and as a consequence, my security and safety and that of my family is now at risk, forever.
To fight organized crime by making life harder for career criminals. And yes they can and do question things which are not cash, especially expensive cars.
> If cash is legal tender, then any amount is, by default, legal.
Cash being "legal tender" means that, if someone sues you and wins a judgment, you're entitled to pay the judgment in cash.
It doesn't mean that anyone willing to exchange a service or item for any random service or item is also compelled to exchange their thing for cash. If they demand a live sheep, you'll give them a live sheep or do without whatever they're offering.
Nobody is talking about being compelled to accept cash - we are talking about cash being used in a manner that is, arbitrarily illegal after a certain amount.
What were you saying "If cash is legal tender, then any amount is, by default, legal" meant? The only meaning of "legal tender" is that someone with a court judgment against you can be compelled to accept legal tender. It doesn't say anything about whether it's legal for you to use it in other transactions.
“ Legal tender is anything recognized by law as a means to settle a public or private debt or meet a financial obligation, including tax payments, contracts, and legal fines or damages. The national currency is legal tender in practically every country. ”
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/legal-tender.asp
I’m sorry my use of the word “legal” in the context of “legally acceptable tender” triggered this response. You’ll have to forgive me: English is my first language.
I will try again:
The use of cash, if agreed upon by parties involved, is legal because it’s a government “backed”/“accepted” item of currency. Tendering cash in this transaction is legal. (You’re not trading a car for $value in meth or guns..)
A gov is now saying, no matter how legal the use of cash is, after a certain amount it is no longer legal.
This is, in my opinion and with my beliefs, an overreach and quite frankly nonsense. It is no surprise, but saddening all the same. That is all.
> The use of cash, if agreed upon by parties involved, is legal because it’s a government “backed”/“accepted” item of currency. Tendering cash in this transaction is legal.
This is false. You immediately provide an example that shows it's false:
> (You’re not trading a car for $value in meth or guns..)
The fact that cash may be provided to settle a debt, even when the creditor doesn't want it, does not mean that it's legal to transact in cash. Meth could be legal tender too, and in that case it would remain illegal to transact in meth.
> I’m sorry my use of the word “legal” in the context of “legally acceptable tender” triggered this response. You’ll have to forgive me: English is my first language.
As another native speaker, I'm sure you're aware that the phrase "legal tender" has no colloquial meaning or use, and while "tender" does, the colloquial meanings are restricted to senses having to do with gentleness or sensitivity to touch.
I am speaking *nothing* about compelling the use of cash between two parties.
My only and consistent point that is that it is silly for a nation to put a ceiling amount on its currency (cash) trading hands in physical meatspace form.
For the amount will stay while inflation will not and the cohort of people “bumping” into this limit will increase over time.
It’s not about compelling cash. Move away from that.
It’s about a nation limiting the amount that can be used in the “name” of “fighting terrorism.”
If stopping crime involves treating normal people (in my country they are called “innocent”) like criminals via a transaction limit that may change with a vehicle so important as cash… then the method is unjust. A nation has no right to, in the name of “fighting terrorists”, accidentally consider or treat an innocent person as a criminal.
That's not what legal tender means, and the expression "boot out of your mouth" is a new one to me. Perhaps you meant the more derogatory "foot out of your mouth"?
> Get the boot out of your mouth. If cash is legal tender, then any amount is, by default, legal.
The concept of what is and isn’t “legal tender” is pretty extreme in the US compared to many other places. E.g many (most?) countries routinely takes bank notes out of circulation and make them worthless. But this isn’t so much about whether is legal tender but more about KYC laws: your €20K is no good to me as payment for a car if my bank won’t accept it in a deposit without a lot of hassle.
> Stop pretending the government (any) has the “average” man’s best interest
I like my government. I believe it operates with the best interest of the majority in mind. Why would they not? I elected them? It doesn’t consist of shadowy bureaucrats with hard- to-decide motives as far as I can see. They usually make laws with public support and have to answer when making impopular laws. The whole “governments are universally bad” thing is sad. Are people accepting living in democracies they experience working so poorly that they believe government has its own - or worse someone else’s - best interest in mind.
> I like my government. I believe it operates with the best interest of the majority in mind.
Yeah, I used to believe that too.
> Are people accepting living in democracies they experience working so poorly that they believe government has its own - or worse someone else’s - best interest in mind.
Yes, unfortunately. And that's something people learn to accept because 1) most people are not aware that governments could work better, and 2) even if they know governments could work better, it's not clear to them how to achieve that, and 3) even when there are governments that already work better, it's not easy to move to another country, be it due to friends, family, lack of jobs in your expertise, language barriers, cultural barriers, different climate, strict immigration policies, etc.
And even when you can move to another country, many countries still have most of the same underlying problems with government, because even when there is genuine interest in solving the problems (which is rare), their root causes are never actually solved (or at least, not effectively).
Adding: most “democracies” are not truly democratic - representative governments are, “proxy” or “hopeful” or “you promised!” democratic but not democratic.
Add in the layers of “manufactured consent” and you get… this to help “fight” “terrorism.”
You’re kidding, right? Average people buy cars with cash: a teen saving from first jobs for a first used car… eventually, “10k” will be where “teen” used cars land … and boom, average person.
A person with a down payment on a house.
…I can go on.
The point is this: casting this wide a net in the name of “fighting terrorists” is absolute nonsense, and not worth what would happen to a terrorist in this net: a few extra “10k money limit” charges… compared to the literal thousands of people this will inconvenience.
Anything a nation does in the name of fighting an enemy that is, in essence, a version of Lacan’s “objet petit a” - is a nation lying to its people.
It's the same in the UK, and has been for years. I'm glad there are people objecting to a limit on transactions made in physical cash, but it feels a bit ridiculous to suggest that such a limit would actually massively inconvenience people in general.
You’ll need to explain where large amounts of cash comes from when depositing, or what it’s for when withdrawing. So in a way the burden is on whoever wants to use large amounts of cash.
Fuck you god damn tyrants. They are desperate to have approval over every transaction. Set some "reasonable limit" that the sheep approve of then you can inflate it away to punish them. No wonder they're pushing inflation harder. In a year's time that limit becomes 9k.
wow, now you can not pay your favourite terrorist anymore in one big cash payment, but you need to do it in smaller tranches, because they make it illegal!
This law will have no impact on any terrorism financing, but it will for sure help the government to better track you and once you have all your money in digital cash it will also be very easy to apply a lot of other measurements, like negative interest charges or wealth taxes. This is just another step forward to gain control ...
What is to stop someone from doing multiple 10k payments to skirt the rule? This is just going to make things more inconvenient for law-abiding citizens, not stop any criminal activity. Typical.
This change would affect Monero too. If you buy Monero through any sort of company that is following the law, they will have to enforce this on their customers.
What would be the point in having large amounts of valuable Monero if you could never use it properly?
As in, if you tried to buy a house, you'd still need to go through money laundering checks. You'd always be limited to small value transactions if you never wanted to pass some sort of KYC/money laundering check at some point.
This will improve democracy and freedom, how? Values both US and EU supposedly stand for.
Bad practices and horrible incentives happen throughout society. It's not just money laundering that's the problem. It's much easier to get wealth and power in exchange for your regulatory actions from powerful actors if you have more control on the citizens. It's much easier to extract wealth and resources from people who have less power over you. The less economic freedom you give people, the less they have incentive to create new wealth.
Stricter money controls will increase political corruption.
Whenever someone introduces new restrictions to freedoms, there is always someone who says, 'relax, it will affect only few people'. Rinse and repeat, and this way, piece by piece, all your freedoms will be taken away.
Remember: Government is not your friend. It needs to be kept in check. Financial freedoms, untraceable transactions, etc help keep government in check. Yes, it allows crime. But guess what, when government has way too much power, opposing it becomes a crime.
I agree with the sentiment in this case, and I do think 10k is ridiculously low for this restriction and the premise of this helping money laundering doesn't sound very convincing to me. But this strawman is IMO the weakest possible argument against the whole "this affects no-one" idea.
I think the more convincing points are
1) it does actually affect many people within specific groups, e.g. business owners
2) there is no alternative that comes anywhere near the features of cash, especially reliability and acceptance combined with instantaneous transfer. I think history gives enough reason to mistrust banks in times of financial crisis, and I literally cannot reliably pay for anything without a card from a bank or credit institute - or cash.
there are more points mentioned in the comments here on HN but I realized I started rambling so I'll just stop here
> Whenever someone introduces new restrictions to freedoms, there is always someone who says, 'relax, it will affect only few people'. Rinse and repeat, and this way, piece by piece, all your freedoms will be taken away.
Yes, now I don't have the freedom to drive over the speed limit. They took that away from me!
If liberty minded people care about these issues, they need to stop shunning the libertarian/right-wing label, and make a concerted effort to get people who share their values and principles on how society should operate into power. Only truly radical candidates, who are willing to replace the entrenched officials who are driving the expansion of the legal apparatus that subordinates individuals to the state, can make a real difference, and any such candidate will face a maelstrom of attacks.
> Terrorists and those who finance them are not welcome in Europe. In order to launder dirty money, criminal individuals and organisations had to look for loopholes in our existing rules which are already quite strict.
Russian mafia is living in billion dollar mansions all around EU in the open, with full knowledge of EU 3 letter services.
Why would anybody go for "retail" laundering when you can buy a bank for a pocket change in Cyprus?
Ways to launder money fully legally are vastly, vastly more widespread than mules with bags of cash, and are protected by connivance of Western governments.
I don't know, as an Italian we have massive issues with tax evasion in Europe, Italy especially. I very welcome limiting cash, I'm sick of paying taxes for all those that don't because they only want cash.
This surveillance thing coming from people shoving all their info online seems hugely overblown.
Yes, it is a violation of privacy. Forcing KYC and ID verification is a violation of privacy. Putting trackers on my wallet is a violation of privacy. I love how Europeans are perfectly content making anti encryption arguments when it means they could get more money out of others. The fact that taxes have anything to do this this at all highlights a bigger issue with taxes. Instead of being a fee the government charges for services they offer, they've become some slice of someone else's wallet you vote to be entitled to. You people talk the loudest about paying the fair share and yet are the last to want to do so yourselves.
European here and I can assure you that more and more people of all walks of life are becoming acutely aware and critical of what's happening right now. CBDCs, the WEF, ongoing attempts at financial repression, etc.
Personally I am looking into immigrating into non-EU countries in South East Asia right now, but that has a lot to do with a desire to explore other cultures and a deeper ongoing dissatisfaction and is definitely not on many peoples' minds. I do believe however that there could be civil unrest soon if it gets worse.
Like in chess, the moves that you could play matter as much as the moves that you do play. So even if I don't need cash, I still appreciate the possibility of using cash in case my bank of government locks me out of my accounts.
For example, the Canadian government froze the accounts of political activists during the Corona crisis. This shocked me. It shows that even countries that are perceived as free and democratic sometimes cannot resist to abuse their power. And the more power we give them, the more likely it is that a politician will abuse his or her power sooner or later.
> Can't really think of any good legitimate use cases for large amounts of cash.
Affluent people tend to diversify where they keep their money. They have a few different checking accounts, savings/money-market accounts, brokerage accounts, assets, petty cash, and probably some other things. If you do not have the level of wealth that gives you the flexibility to keep large sums of money in a relatively inaccessible place (e.g. a brokerage account that might take 1-3 days to liquidate and another day to do a bank transfer), you might opt to keep a few thousand in cash in case something happens with your bank, such as your account being frozen or just drained due to fraudulent activity. It’s always prudent to keep reserves in diversified locations.
I want to be able to pay for at least a year of rent without relying on a bank.
I want to be able to pay for as much as possible without leaving any record with a third party if I don't want to.
I also want to be able to take all of my money out of the bank and keep it for myself, and give it to whoever I want, whenever I want, without having anyone's permission to do so, or reporting that I have done so to anyone.
Because the vast majority of people that want to do those things, are wanting to get away with doing bad things and/or not paying their way correctly in society.
You may be a rare outlier but there has to be precautions.
And someone decided once to put an explosive in their shoe, and now we all have to take our shoes off at the airport. At this rate, our future is looking extremely restricted.
This is an honest answer. Thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt. I don't want to live in the same society as you, or be a part of one where people who share your opinion are the majority who get to make the rules.
Any purchase should be possible with legal tender.
I will keep withdrawing my income in cash and inconveniencing others with cash transactions for every single purchase, including those exceeding this limit, out of principle.
Digital ledgers have proven to be unreliable. Anyone arguing otherwise hasn't witnessed bank runs, withdrawal limits, transaction limits, hyperinflation and war wiping out lifetime savings and destroying people's lives.
And you think a bag full of paper money in your basement will help you once bombs are dropped on your home town? How exactly will that help in war time more than money in your account that you can withdraw once in safety?
If you choose to deal with cash exclusively for the sake of it, so be it. But for everyone else, it’s just a less efficient way to move money from account A to account B.
Money that I have on my person, is always better than money that I cannot access.
There is usually at least a short lag between $DISASTER and $ECONOMY_COLLAPSE during which many people are happy to take cash and provide food, shelter and transport. Often you will have a steep inflation curve and rising transaction costs/exchange rates, but at least you are in control of the money that you have in your pocket.
The same cannot be said about digital money. Even though in theory you have a larger pool of places where you could spend it, money that is in your account isn't guaranteed to be accessible. Banks' infrastructure may be down, whether due to $DISASTER itself or corporate/political decision. The banks may impose withdrawal limits or a complete restriction on withdrawals and transactions. Online transactions may fail at any point in the acquirer-issuer-processor chain. ATM:s are likely to be empty.
Online transactions may be reversed. Even when you manage to "lock in" exchange rate X just before a currency's collapse in value, the merchant can and will cancel your order, make up excuses, and refund you the nominal value at the old exchange rate.
This law prohibits you from doing that without reporting it.
You'd have report that anyway, when filing your taxes, so apart from some extra admin work, that's not much of an extra hurdle, assuming it honest money.
If you receive your €10k as payment for a shipment of cocaine, you probably don't want to report it, so then you'll enter the territories of fiscal crime.
(a) payments between persons who are not acting in a professional function;
(b) payments or deposits made at the premises of credit institutions, electronic money institutions and payment institutions. [...];
(c) central banks when performing their tasks.
It's not that you would have to report it - you just cannot do it.
I can’t imagine a car dealer who would do anything but laugh if I bought a car north of €10k and suggested I wanted to pay in cash. I’m 100% sure they’d rather not sell the car at all. Same if I privately sold a car that expensive and the buyer showed up with cash. The hassle involved with depositing and withdrawing large amounts of cash due to KYC laws already makes this a no go. And for good reason imo.
> can’t imagine a car dealer who would do anything but laugh if I bought a car north of €10k and suggested I wanted to pay in cash.
Doesn't sound like how any car salesman, or any commission salesman I've ever met thinks.
Car ownership is registered with government anyway, so it's not as if anyone can get away with pretending to be poor and owning a bunch of fancy cars anyway.
In my personal experience cash is how used car sales are done between individuals. There is sales tax on used car sales where I'm from. When the sale is agreed the seller and the buyer go to the registry. Say I'm selling you my car for 20k. You don't own the car until I sign ownership to you. I don't get any money until you hand me the cash. So safe thing to do is seller requires buyer to hand cash over and count it in front of the goverment agent. Buyer would prefer seller lie and understate sale price, but seller has no incentive to do that unless buyer gives that cash upfront. Buyer risks seller just saying "nah" and walking away with that cash. So it either requires trust, in which case no scheme the government comes up with can stop us anyway, or one party takes a serious risk, which there is strong disincentive to do.
Car has book value government agent knows anyway. Also, goverment exempts tax when seller and buyer are related. Government: "lol, you have trust, our despicable cash grab will not work here anyway so let's not bother"
So who cares here? Most big ticket property (eg. Real estate) works like this.
Some things like jewlery can slide through, but without receipts is risky crossing borders, which puts a serious damper status/utility of it, and those industries already get higher scruitiny anyway. And anyway, is it worth giving up our liberty over some tax revenue related to stuff like this?
So why prevent cash payments? The only purpose it serves it to keep the everyman under total control and open him to even more theft of savings via negative interest rates or transaction fees by financial middlemen.
> I don't get any money until you hand me the cash.
Just do a bank transfer to the individual you're buying the car off. Unless you live in a country with incredibly poor payments infrastructure, the funds will be available instantly.
You can't prove that in realtime without a trustee, which is just how things have been done forever. With all due respect, this is how it is in "advanced economies". Where are you personally from where you think anything other than cash provides instant, irreversable, and indusputable settlement in this case?
Car dealers are not the only people selling cars. Anybody who owns a car may want to sell it, and using a credit card is not an option for most private sellers. I can see why the 10k limit makes sense, but it would be dishonest to claim that it won't make private car selling a bit more complicated than it was. Escrow services will now probably pop up to facilitate private car sales, but it may be worth it.
> Anybody who owns a car may want to sell it, and using a credit card is not an option for most private sellers
Most people use bank transfers for this kind of stuff. The seller gives you their bank account number and you put the money in it. I recently bought a new car from a dealer, and I paid my transferring money to the dealer’s bank account. The dealer took credit card for the initial $1000 deposit but not for the full amount - avoids all those merchant fees on the full amount.
Here in Australia, you can now attach your phone number to your bank account (called “PayID”), so the buyer can just go into their Internet banking app, and transfer the money to the seller’s phone number - assuming the seller has set that up. I’ve noticed a lot of people still don’t set it up, often because they just haven’t heard about it
I’d never ever use cash for a private sale - of anything — either regardless of whether it was $100 or $100k. For a large number like $10k, bank transfers work well. For smaller numbers, instant transfers are cheap and nearly 100% of people use them here (and importantly the same service - so I know I can instantly transfer $2 to anyone at any time for free).
When I place an ad to sell a used something for €50 I don’t expect to get cash for it and the seller probably isn’t expecting me to accept cash as payment either.
I haven’t used a banknote for probably 10 years now. I haven’t even seen most of the banknotes in circulation here. This isn’t all positive (for privacy and resilience in a crisis), and the fact that I wouldn’t doesn’t change the equally important fact that I want to be able to do it. And that ability is of course in peril here. But it doesn explain the situation quite well wrt to what the real impact of laws like this would be.
I purchased a car that exceeded that value, in cash. The seller actually worked for a bank’s fraud department.
I didn’t do it because I store a lot of cash in hand but rather because it was a PITA to move large amounts of money with the bank that I was using. The bank wouldn’t even authorise me to transact more than €10k a day via a bank transfer.
It took me a good few hours in the bank - on calls to many departments - just to get access to my money.
I’ve since moved to one of the newer challenger banks and it has been the best decision I’ve made.
Well there is no law forcing a salesperson to accept cash. So the permission here has little to do with the government.
He is no more required to accept my bag of cash as payment than he is my vintage guitar. And while the value might be there, both are a massive hassle for the seller, so they’d simply refuse most likely.
Sometimes, the bank won’t accept your bag of cash.
One time I was in a bank branch sorting out some matter, and I overheard a conversation between the bank staff and another customer. The customer had a bag containing $100K in cash, and wanted to deposit it into their account. The bank staff were on the phone to the bank’s security office, asking for permission to accept it. They said their cash security policy limited how much cash they were allowed to have on premises at any time, accepting this deposit would put them over that limit, so they had to get approval to exceed it before they could do so. You could tell from the tone the staff used, they didn’t appreciate this customer’s behaviour
Another time, my wife went to the bank branch, because her grandfather had sent our son $50 cash for his birthday, and she wanted to put it in his bank account. She stood in line for ages, only to then be told “I’m sorry we can’t accept any more cash deposits, someone just made a big one and now we are at the limit of cash we are allowed to hold in the branch”. My wife objected it was only $50, but the bank staff said “sorry, rules are rules”. I told her in the future, one of us should just transfer the equivalent money into his bank account from our own, and then keep the cash for ourselves
True. Although, from the government’s point of view, surely it would be better for the bank to accept a $100K deposit of dirty money and then immediately freeze it, than refuse the dirty deposit and the customer walks out with it and the government might never see it again
I suspect the people who actually try to deposit $100K in cash at a bank are probably not criminals/etc, they are just people with “more money than sense”. People with something to hide will try to avoid drawing attention to their activities, but turning up at a bank branch with that amount of cash attracts a lot of attention. And the criminals who are actually dumb enough to do that kind of thing get caught very quickly
> And while the value might be there, both are a massive hassle for the seller, so they’d simply refuse most likely.
And the "hassle" is not actually accepting cash, as that's the least of the problems. It's dealing with the risk and consequences of doing business with someone the government doesn't approve of and then getting in trouble for it (even though the car business has nothing to do with that person).
You're arguing like if the salesperson is not accepting cash out of their own free will. But you know that's not true.
Think of this as being similar to the situation where the mafia was keeping tabs on your car business and you decided to do business in a way they did not approve of. What do you think would happen? Would you say the car business isn't being forced to do business in a certain way in this situation?
> You're arguing like if the salesperson is not accepting cash out of their own free will. But you know that's not true.
Whose fault is it? I mean they literally don’t and as far as I know this is because is insecure and expensive. A bag of cash is an expensive liability. They’d prefer I deposited the money and transfered it to them instead. Most restaurants and cafes don’t accept cash either although they are certainly free to do so. But it’s more convenient to just put up a sign saying “no cash” and you have magically cut your cash handling costs to zero and your robbery risk significantly.
> Whose fault is it? I mean they literally don’t and as far as I know this is because is insecure and expensive.
"Under AML regulations, anyone involved in vehicle sales can face significant fines and even criminal prosecution if they fail to detect money laundering. This includes law firms, banks as well as vehicle dealers—who can be any individual or business that trades vehicles or acts as an intermediary in their purchase or sale" [1]
> A bag of cash is an expensive liability.
Not as much of a liability as not selling the car. Unless, of course, the government is threatening to put you in jail, then yes, it's an expensive liability.
> Most restaurants and cafes don’t accept cash either although they are certainly free to do so.
Wait, what? They don't? I've never been to such a restaurant or cafe... and I've been to dozens of countries. I've been in a few restaurants/cafes that don't accept credit cards, that's for sure (mostly because of the fees I suppose). I wonder what's going on where you live.
> But it’s more convenient to just put up a sign saying “no cash” and you have magically cut your cash handling costs to zero and your robbery risk significantly.
Perhaps you should consider living in an area with a lower risk of robbery and/or more effective police?
What you are saying here is not a problem in most of the world. And it has nothing to do with the new law we are talking about.
This is in Sweden. Cash is mostly gone. Restaurants where you eat first and pay later usually accept it reluctantly, unless they made clear up front they don’t (they have no choice then - you already ate and unlike the opposite no-card-situation where you are forced to go to an atm, you can hardly go make a deposit!). But stores, cafes etc are cashless to a large extent (but with lots of exceptions or partial exceptions e.g a grocery store might have 1 register of 10 accepting cash which means you don’t want to use cash).
Overall, the vast majority of retailers do accept cash in some form but not in usual “small transaction” situations like cafes, taxis, smaller shops.
> Most restaurants and cafes don’t accept cash either although they are certainly free to do so.
Ok, so I'm curious about this place where you live where most restaurants don't accept cash, so here's a question:
Let's say you enter the restaurant, eat the food and now you owe payment, but you don't have a credit card (maybe you didn't notice the "no cash" sign).
Legal tender laws say that cash must be accepted as payment for all debts. So how can the restaurant refuse the cash?
That only seems to be legal if the customer prepays for the food, which is not what happens in most restaurants (fast food restaurants notwithstanding).
Is there a special exemption for restaurants where you live, or you don't have legal tender laws, or what's going on here?
> Ok, so I'm curious about this place where you live where most restaurants don't accept cash
This is in Sweden.
> Legal tender laws say that cash must be accepted as payment for all debts.
Yes. But those apparently aren’t absolute and non-negotiable. The Riksbank is actually concerned about this, because it’s affecting the ability for the economy to function in a crisis, as well as the ability to make anonymous transactions, so there might be changes to this coming.
But basically today no, there is nothing forcing any business to accept cash today. And as cash use dwindled, the cost of cash handling ballooned to the point where it’s worth swallowing the card fees over paying for cash management. There is also a very widespread cell phone transfer system both for free instant transfers between individuals and for payments. So it’s a widely accepted convenience. Cash is one of those systems now that everyone agrees should remain for privacy and resilience reasons but few are ready to use it. Forcing everyone to accept cash would mean having lots of cash handling expenses (cash registers etc) but still likely almost no cash in circulation. It’s part of the reason the riksbank is eying a CDBC with privacy features.
And yes if you travel to Sweden and order a meal at a restaurant you’ll probably always get away with cash if that is all you have (that is - they’d sort it out but in certain places it might be a bit awkward). But if you asked first they might say they “prefer card”. But pre-paid situations (e.g ordering a coffee to go) will often show a no cash sign.
The opposite is always true, you’ll never need cash. If you take a taxi it’s card only, nearly no transactions between individuals (used goods, babysitter, beggar(!)…) are cash either.
In total though, the death of cash isn’t that widespread 8-9 of 10 retailers still accepts cash. It’s mostly in smaller shops, cafes and similar services you don’t see it (and taxi have been cash free for more than a decade).
(In Swedish)
https://via.tt.se/pressmeddelande/9-av-10-svenska-handlare-t...
However, that a retailer accepts cash doesn’t mean it’s convenient to use. For example in a large grocery store a small
number of checkouts might accept cash meaning you’ll be waiting in line to pay with cash - so few will.
> Whose fault is it? I mean they literally don’t and as far as I know this is because is insecure and expensive.
That is utterly ridiculous in the case of a car. If that was any concern whatsoever, then the dealer would say "let me drive you to my bank" and accept/deposit it there, which is a very, very common practice when seller is concerned with authenticity of the notes.
It's not an option in low value transactions like restaurant bills but then the risk there is low.
I know there are some places that choose not to accept cash payments to avoid cash accounting risk. That's cool, their choice I walk away... without paying them if they didn't disclose no cash policy clearly up front.
I don’t see how that’s related. It’s one thing to regulate who must and must not accept cash. E.g it’s in the interest of society to mandate important functions such as buying food is always possible with cash.
The law in the article is about a size limit for cash transactions when cash is accepted. It doesn’t have anything to do with who will or must accept cash. Only that if they do, there is a limit.
In terms of resilience to wars, disasters, power outages and similar (which is one of two arguments for cash the other being privacy), I think the key functions are probably food, fuel and similar. That car sales can continue is probably not as important.
That’s why Starbucks can probably get away with rejecting cash in Sweden but a large grocery chain probably can’t and won’t.
Then you have no idea what tyrannical means in practical means and are just gasping at straws.
It's not a matter of permission, nor is having a car a need or a right. Do you also find needing permission (a driver's license) to drive a car tyrannical?
That ship has sailed long ago. I don't know any place where car ownership is not a government registry, and that is surely because the theft of them was so common that something had to be done about it. Correct me if I'm wrong.
The person I was responding to said large sums, not 10k specifically. This bill/rule thing allows member states to have an amount lower than 10k.
If there are prolonged power outages or some sort of disaster, prices will increase for food. Don't forget with the amount of inflation we have also increases prices for food.
Some people like to buy canned food or other food that lasts in bulk to get lower prices.
The EU "government" (a non-directly elected entity) is predictably trying to enforce tax rules.
Even worse is the minimum tax on profits that targets the poorer members by removing one of the ways they can compete with bigger ones.
"...No Ireland, you're not allowed to have low taxes, we the guideposts of EU - France and Germany tax our people and companies up to 30-45%, what's that meager 10% tax you're giving them? ..."
The EU Parliament is composed of 705 members (MEPs). It represents the second-largest democratic electorate in the world (after the Parliament of India), with an electorate of 375 million eligible voters
p.s. even the US president is a non-directly elected entity
Pedantically, in the US, laws are also "written" by court precedent. Consider that prohibition was performed via a constitutional amendment yet drugs are criminalized today without amendment by the controlled substances act, itself allowed to exist due to the expansion of the commerce clause (see Gonzales v. Raich 2005). [0]
While judges in some places are directly elected, at the federal level they are not. Beyond that, enforcement of laws is at the prerogative of the executive. If the laws written by directly elected officials are ignored, that is making law as well in some sense. For instance, marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, but the laws are unenforced and states are legalizing it themselves (contravening federal law).
Well, we do, if you don't like that fact complain to your government.
"Oh look at those EUROPERANS with their fancy PRIVACY, real men get fucked unlubed by corporations and LIKE IT" doesn't help anyone here, the fight here is to make government do well by average citizen, not throwing insults at people that happen to be fucked differently by their government
European here. It's mostly a lure meant to make you docile and content. Same as Musk buying Twitter, so you feel like the "Good Guys" are winning again and you can go back to sleep. :D
Who do you think makes these rules and laws in the EU? Belgians? Reptilians?
It's the elected by the people of each country and the appointed by those elected by the people of each country.
EU is not a subscription provided by 3rd parties, EU is about coordination between the the European countries and any country can veto. That's actually why EU is considered slow and inefficient in some areas.
If EU says no more cash payments over 10K EUR, that means all the member countries agree that no more cash payments over 10K EUR.
> Who do you think makes these rules and laws in the EU? Belgians? Reptilians?
Germany and France, mostly.
> European countries and any country can veto. That's actually why EU is considered slow and inefficient in some areas.
First of all, this is not true. There’s no single party veto on legislation. Secondly, the US states have an even more effective veto, which is just ignoring federal law, because nobody can force them to enforce it.
And having no single-party veto on legislation means that if you’re from a smaller EU country, you’ll never EVER have any meaningful impact on _anything_.
> If EU says no more cash payments over 10K EUR, that means all the member countries agree that no more cash payments over 10K EUR.
As explained before, nope. It’s true that there is single-party veto on certain things (admissions to the Union itself, the eurozone, or schengen, but not for legislation)
And how is that EU’s fault and what makes you think that your politicians were loving the large cash payments but Germany and France made them ban >10K EUR payments?
So you think that Latvia, which has 8K EUR cash limit, is forced by be Germany and France to not allow cash payments over 10K EUR and you are dreaming of the destruction of EU so you can do above 10K EUR cash transactions? Are you counting on Latvia not enforcing its own laws for that? What’s your reasoning here?
Sure but how exactly Germany and France are making Latvia impose 10K limit when Latvia already has 8K limit and what makes you think that abolishment of EU would make Latvia allow over 10K?
It lifted my country as well as dozens of others out of developing world status. There's a huge delta in national wealth between post soviet nations who joined the EU and those that didn't for example. A rising tide raises all boats.
Your reply sounds like a cheerleader chant. :D
Did the common person benefit from this "lift" that you mention or merely the technocrat who was willing to do the bidding of the new master?
Yes, it lifted everyone. Take a look into any stat on minimum/median salary, standard of living, HDI in any Central or Eastern European country that joined the EU against those that didn't - the gulf is massive. Also having lived in one such country before and after joining - yes, the EU helped lift everyone upwards.
The demographic crisis is real in the Eastern European countries not in the EU (Western Balkans, former USSR) too, but at least the standard of living has massively improved in the EU member states.
We don’t even have a true right to free speech. That puts us behind the U.S., because I struggle to think of a “civil right” that we have but Americans don’t.
And before you pull “healthcare”, first of all, it’s got nothing to do with the EU, and secondly, in most EU countries the state-funded healthcare is so abysmal that everyone who can afford it still takes out private insurance.
> and our consumer protections are enviable.
Like GDPR, which is a legislation so fantastic that for most businesses it’s physically impossible to truly comply with it?
> We don’t even have a true right to free speech. That puts us behind the U.S., because I struggle to think of a “civil right” that we have but Americans don’t.
> And before you pull “healthcare”, first of all, it’s got nothing to do with the EU, and secondly, in most EU countries the state-funded healthcare is so abysmal that everyone who can afford it still takes out private insurance.
So free speech is an EU matter but healthcare is a local one? No, both are decided locally with limited EU oversight - e.g. the EU is trying to punish Poland and Hungary's free speech limitations.
> We don’t even have a true right to free speech
Specifically this is a no true Scotsman fallacy. Legislation prohibiting antisemitic speech doesn't make free speech not "truly free", it just makes it not absolute, which is IMO necessary for a civilised developed society, as long as there are controls to ensure it's not abused.
> Like GDPR, which is a legislation so fantastic that for most businesses it’s physically impossible to truly comply with it?
Why do you think that? The majority of business comply with it.
In terms of civil rights we have more than Americans - abortions (in most places, not an EU but local thing), the right not to get murdered by poor policing or overarmed population, consumer protections such as mandatory minimum warranties and return periods. Also there are much better employee and tenant protections.
Also a much better political and judicial system - first past the post? Politically appointed judges?
All in all, the EU is a marvelous thing that has enabled peace and prosperity across a continent, and has done far more good than bad - universal phone chargers, consumer protections at every level (flight delays, warranties, data), the new forced interoperability between gatekeepers, the euro and SEPA, the subsidies that have enabled so much development. Anyone rooting against it probably doesn't understand it all that well, or is an isolationist.
> Also a much better political and judicial system - first past the post? Politically appointed judges?
Much better judicial system? What about not having jury trials is better?
Without having a jury that decides your fate makes the entire process political.
Politically appointed judges? That’s just federal, in the US most state judges are elected. The DA is an elected office. In virtually all european countries they are all appointed offices. Appointed by the politicians in charge.
Justice system in most EU countries absolutely sucks compared to the US. In several EU countries there’s no concept as double jeopardy, because the prosecution can appeal an acquital.
I’d much rather be a defendant in the US, than in any EU country.
> So free speech is an EU matter but healthcare is a local one? No, both are decided locally with limited EU oversight - e.g. the EU is trying to punish Poland and Hungary's free speech limitations.
ECJ explicitly stated that objectionable or hate speech can be banned. So yes, that made it EU matter.
As for the EU doing something about Polands and Hungary’s disobedience? They don’t actually seem to be doing anything, because the EU as an institution is completely impotent, and they can’t risk being tough on their member states, for the Union could actually disintegrate. UK proved that is, in fact, physically possible to leave the EU. So Hungary could do that too, and so could Poland.
I am not sure where you got this idea. In Italy most judges/DAs go through a selection process that is entirely within the judiciary. Only one third of the Constitutional Court is appointed by the Parliament.
- SIM card registration in nearly every member state
- No exclusionary rule in many member states (evidence obtained illegally is admissible in court)
- A "warrant" in the American sense is confined to a set of specific locations that the police think are tied to criminal activity but in many member states are much more general and open for abuse
- Mandatory data retention (until the ECJ struck it down)
- Mandatory key disclosure laws in many member states
- No option of trial by jury in some member states
- Guilt by association crimes in some member states ("mafia-type association" in Italy)
And huge disparity between south, east and west, discrimination, worker exploitation, systemic racism against europe’s minorities, human trafficking and cross border corruption, policies made to serve some countries and not others, and those european countries not within the eu or affiliated effectively isolated.
Here in europe even trying to humanise the roma can be an issue. Those people are so discriminated against that even defending them is looked down upon. Entire countries are maligned simply because they have a large number of this minority. No ethnic group in the us is as discriminated as these folks are in europe. America has not known such racism since the end of slavery.
Corruption is well obvious. See ursula, the head of the ecb and so on.
I'm glad the idiots that run the country I live in who do it so badly are now dictating EU wide policy, they're not competent or experienced enough to be doing this as they've only been their own country for 5 minutes.
This is also the same country implementing laws to curb dissent and deviation from the narrative which is generally indicative as to where the EU is going. Imagine being worse than the UK.
Bizarre how the EU is penalizing everyone in order to 'make it harder for criminals to launder dirty money'.
People pay taxes in order to have their bureaucrats serve them by creating a safe financial and social environment, not to have them assume everyone is a criminal/terrorist and greatly impede access to their assets based on that logic.
The EU (formerly the 'common market') has become an authoritarian, autocratic monster.