It was just two days ago that Bloomberg implored officials to “bring on a cashless future” in an Op-Ed that calls notes and coins “dirty, dangerous, unwieldy, and expensive.”
You probably never thought of your cash that way, but increasingly, authorities and the powers that be seem determined to lay the groundwork for the abolition of what Bloomberg calls “antiquated” physical money.
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
Systemic fragility doesn't respond to central bank jawboning or Keynesian claptrap; unlike those "policy tools," fragility is real.
There will be two key themes for investors seeking to shake off the abysmal "as goes January" blues:
Now that the Bank of Japan has joined other central banks such as Denmark, Sweden, the ECB, and Switzerland into pushing its rates into what until just two years ago was considered the monetary twilight zone below the zero bound, and in the process sending a record $5.5 trillion in government bond yields negative...
... which quickly puts into in context all the recent warnings about physical cash being eliminated (because as a reminder negative rates and cash simply can not coexist as the latter provides a ready immunity from the former), such as the following:
The Federal Reserve seems to have been caught off-guard by the recent turmoil on the markets. As the Chinese economic growth seems to be slowing down, all of the Western central banks need to re-think their plans, and the Federal Reserve will have to kneel in the dust.