Economist and potential future Federal Reserve Chairman Larry Summers has called for the $100 dollar bill to be phased out of circulation, becoming the latest prominent voice to advocate the elimination of cash.
In an article for the Washington Post entitled It’s time to kill the $100 bill, Summers, former Chief Economist for the World Bank, calls for “a moratorium on printing new high denomination notes” in the name of stopping crime and corruption.
More specifically, Summers wants to do away with Benjamins and even has his sights set on eliminating lower denominations, advocating, “a global agreement to stop issuing notes worth more than say $50 or $100.”
Summers also hails the ECB’s recent move to scrap the €500 euro bill, and calls for others to follow suit.
“If Europe moved, pressure could likely be brought on others, notably Switzerland,” he writes.
As Zero Hedge points out, the surface justification that eliminating cash will eradicate crime and, in the words of Summers, “make the world a better place,” is merely a ruse for the real agenda.
“For central bankers, as all this modest proposal will do is make it that much easier to unleash NIRP (negative interest rates), because recall that of the $1.4 trillion in total U.S. currency in circulation, $1.1 trillion is in the form of $100 bills. Eliminate those, and suddenly there is nowhere to hide from those trillions in negative interest rate “yielding” bank deposits.”
“So with one regulation, the Fed – if it listens to this Harvard charlatan, and it surely will as more and more “academics” get on board with the idea to scrap paper money – could eliminate the value of 78% of all currency in circulation, which in effect would achieve practically the entire goal of destroying the one paper alternative to digital NIRP rates, in the form of paper currency.”
The move to ban cash has been accelerating over the last year, with numerous prominent officials echoing Summers’ sentiments.
– France introduced laws last year which restrict French citizens from making cash payments over €1,000 euros. Italy, Russia, Spain, Mexico, and Uruguay have all introduced similar laws that ban cash payments over a certain amount.
– Earlier this week, the ECB Council voted to scrap the €500 euro bill, a decision that would reduce the amount of physical cash in circulation by around 30%, despite the fact that such a move “would be negative for the currency,” according to a Bank of America analysis.
– Last month, Norway’s biggest bank DNB called for eliminating cash to “cut down on black market sales and crimes such as money laundering.”
– In August last year, the Financial Times published an ediotorial which called for the abolition of cash altogether to, “Make life easier for a government set on squeezing the informal economy out of existence.”
– At a secretive meeting in London last year, Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University and Willem Buiter, the Chief Economist at Citigroup met with top central bankers to discuss phasing out cash.
– Former Bank of England economist Jim Leaviss penned an article for the London Telegraph last April in which he said a cashless society would only be achieved by “forcing everyone to spend only by electronic means from an account held at a government-run bank,” which would be, “monitored, or even directly controlled by the government.”
– The ultra-powerful Bilderberg Group also discussed the agenda to ban cash during its 2015 confab in Austria, a conference attended by numerous prominent bankers.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.
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