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Sweden's Cash-Free Future Looms -- and Not Everyone Is Happy About It
HughPickens.com writes: Liz Alderman writes in the NYT that bills and coins now represent just 2 percent of Sweden's economy, compared with 7.7 percent in the United States and 10 percent in the euro area and this year only about 20 percent of all consumer payments in Sweden have been made in cash, compared with an average of 75 percent in the rest of the world. "Sweden has always been at the forefront of technology, so it's easy to embrace this," said Jacob de Geer, a founder of iZettle, which makes a mobile-powered card reader. In Sweden parishioners text tithes to their churches, homeless street vendors carry mobile credit-card readers, and even the Abba Museum, despite being a shrine to the 1970s pop group that wrote "Money, Money, Money," considers cash so last-century that it does not accept bills and coins. "We don't want to be behind the times by taking cash while cash is dying out," says Bjorn Ulvaeus, a former Abba member who has leveraged the band's legacy into a sprawling business empire, including the museum.
But not everyone is pleased with the process. Remember, Sweden is the place where, if you use too much cash, banks call the police because they think you might be a terrorist or a criminal. Swedish banks have started removing cash ATMs from rural areas, annoying old people and farmers. Credit Suisse says the rule of thumb in Scandinavia is: "If you have to pay in cash, something is wrong." Sweden's embrace of electronic payments has alarmed consumer organizations and critics who warn of a rising threat to privacy and increased vulnerability to sophisticated Internet crimes. Last year, the number of electronic fraud cases surged to 140,000, more than double the amount a decade ago, according to Sweden's Ministry of Justice. Older adults and refugees in Sweden who use cash may be marginalized, critics say, and young people who use apps to pay for everything or take out loans via their mobile phones risk falling into debt. "It might be trendy," says Bjorn Eriksson, a former director of the Swedish police force and former president of Interpol. "But there are all sorts of risks when a society starts to go cashless."
But not everyone is pleased with the process. Remember, Sweden is the place where, if you use too much cash, banks call the police because they think you might be a terrorist or a criminal. Swedish banks have started removing cash ATMs from rural areas, annoying old people and farmers. Credit Suisse says the rule of thumb in Scandinavia is: "If you have to pay in cash, something is wrong." Sweden's embrace of electronic payments has alarmed consumer organizations and critics who warn of a rising threat to privacy and increased vulnerability to sophisticated Internet crimes. Last year, the number of electronic fraud cases surged to 140,000, more than double the amount a decade ago, according to Sweden's Ministry of Justice. Older adults and refugees in Sweden who use cash may be marginalized, critics say, and young people who use apps to pay for everything or take out loans via their mobile phones risk falling into debt. "It might be trendy," says Bjorn Eriksson, a former director of the Swedish police force and former president of Interpol. "But there are all sorts of risks when a society starts to go cashless."
If you don't know why they're doing this, you haven't been paying attention.
This is how the government manages to track and control every aspect of your life, and I do mean every.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
i just want to buy stuff - anonymously, without the shop-keeper knowing my name and other personal details just because i bought a fucking coffee or a hamburger or something.
lack of privacy and anonymity are the main reasons i dislike online shopping and use it only very rarely - delivery of the purchased goods requires that i give the vendor my personal details which they then immediately assume they are entitled to store in a database, use to spam me, and sell, trade, or give to third-parties.
even when they have a checkbox option saying "don't spam me" or similar, some arsehole in their marketing department will take it upon themselves to decide that i didn't really mean that, or make some exception for their super-important spam (spammers always say "my spam isn't spam") or their database will frequently have that field "accidentally" cleared.
Sure. And there is no law of any kind that requires me to do business with any specific store of business, either, so one way or another I can vote my preferences with my dollars. If the grocery store I habituate decided tomorrow to start taking plastic only, I'd find somewhere else to shop on principle alone. On a related subject I'd also stop shopping anywhere that required me to have one of their 'club' discount cards, because I know damned well that the implied EULA you're agreeing to by accepting it gives them the power to specifically track your purchases for marketing purposes, and I'm firmly against that, too.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
What happens when some hack group decides to target the phones and network infrastructure and your card or apple pay doesn't work to purchase your gasoline or groceries or diapers or whatever? What happens when same group transfers all your money from your accounts into some unclaimed fund or encrypts the banks computers and holds your accounts hostage and you have to wait 2 weeks until it gets sorted out?
There are downsides to everything. If cash was still around, an ATM could work from a cached balance and distribute some money, friends could loan others some money until things come back up.
If the rest of the world has 75% of transactions being paid in cash ( seems legit, if maybe even a tad low ) how will people that come to Sweden for tourism pay for anything?
Seems like a great way to insulate yourself from the rest of the world and have your economy grow stagnant to me...
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
the founders of the US explicitly rejected, but their great-grandchildren stupidly have adopted. Central Banks provide paper money in place of something of real inherent value like gold or silver, and in doing so provide a means of manipulating and robbing the public by inflating or deflating the value of that paper money by printing more of it or taking some of it out of circulation. Going cashless, where the individual no longer has ANY physical thing but rather just some digits stored in a computer will only further enable the corruption and resulting hazard for the individual. Consider:
The founders of the US rejected the idea of a Central Bank because such banks were one of the mechanisms that the governments of Europe had used to rob the average citizen. First, government ordered the people to use money printed by their Central Banks, then they had the Central Banks print lots of fiat currency to pay for wars and palaces etc, which allowed the leaders to buy what they wanted but diluted the value of each unit of currency. This functioned as a huge hidden tax on the general public. The founders of the US rejected this hidden form of taxation/robbery and thus rejected the Central Bank idea as the primary enabler of it. Sadly, the US now has a Central Bank - The Federal Reserve Bank, which is a private entity whose owners and managers are extremely secretive and capable of using their power to manipulate the government or be manipulated by the government with little or no oversight or insight by the public.
The "Cashless society" is simply a further bite into the rotten apple of Central Banks. Once the individual has no actual physical currency, the banking and governing interests can completely manipulate the value of a unit of currency and even make it appear or disappear directly in bank accounts with ZERO transparency, ZERO accountability, and without the public even knowing if, perhaps, the Central Bank is doing something hyper-evil like manipulating the currency of only members of certain political parties, or people who frequent certain establishments, etc. In a cashless society, freedom and liberty must necessarily disappear - as users become concerned that various actions they take leave them vulnerable to having their individual assets manipulated, they will naturally find that they must go all-in on political correctness for the safety of their families. If you are shocked by governments ordering ISPs to turn over the records of users and ordering those ISPs to not tell their users, just imagine a world where those same governments order a bank to manipulate somebody's account and not tell anybody they are doing it...
Paper money was the initial dangerous step. Digital money is the final dangerous step to enabling every evil thing governments desire.
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered...I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies... The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." - Thomas Jefferson
"If ever again our nation stumbles upon unfunded paper, it shall surely be like death to our body politic. This country will crash." - George Washington
“History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and it’s issuance.” - James Madison