EU-wide maximum limit of €10K for cash payments
consilium.europa.eu
consilium.europa.eu
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.
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
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?
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.
I would not feel at ease walking around with 10k€
In fact I would find it extremely suspicious if someone told me it's their preferred method to get paid. I would totally expect a mugging.
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.
Would a certified check so the same trick?
Cash can be faked too
Cash can be faked but it has good anticounterfeiting features, unlike checks.
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’d prefer to still have the option of a cash payment, even if it’s one I’d rarely if ever utilize.
Just a bank transfer.
Which is not free, anonymous, and require a third party.
sine intelligentia non sunt secreta
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.
Regarding anonymous part, there are some people life refuge/dissidents who might wanna hide their expenditure?
Also, I don't wanna give any data access to government because I don't trust them simply.
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.
Buying a car with a bank transfer is a great way to get scammed by someone selling the same car multiple times.
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 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.
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.
you, if you transferred the money.
the seller, if you did not.
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 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.
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.
I call it BS!
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.
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.
Americans should consider having a working bank sector.
My biggest cash purchase ever was a monitor 20 years ago for less than 10% of this limit.
I don't even have cash in my wallet any more, and I don't know anyone who has.
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.
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.
God riddance to those places.
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.
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.
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.
However I have received them from HMRC for refunds.
It's a cashier's check.
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!
cashier checks are equivalent to cash and follow the same limits.
You don't need to visit the bank, just phone. There's no reason you should fall for a scam like that.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/10/26/eu-pushes-for-banks...
where did the buyer kept the money?
> which takes 1 day to arrive
you're saying it like it really makes a difference or like cash is safer and easier to handle.
How much time does it take to deposit the money to your bank account?
Is your time free?
Do you like to lose money and time so that other people can use cash coming from who knows where?
> but for individuals transacting with one another, it still seems the easiest option.
back to question #1 again: what kind of people keep thousands of euros at home?
I know no one who does it.
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.
Which Netherlands have you been to?
You mean Mastercard's brand?
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?
They're legal stores, not some heavily armed pot dealer in an alley. Why not?
Tbh I didn't even think of trying the legal weed when I was in NL.
> 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.
https://taenk.dk/privatoekonomi/gode-raad/gebyrer-paa-betali...
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.
As I understand, this would not be legal anymore?
Really sounds like your family member accidentally helped launder money.
(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).
So I am mildly unhappy that it gets outlawed.
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)
Doesn't make sense unless you've worded what happened incorrectly by accident.
I would be really anxious if I would be selling something worth 80% of my wealth.
Maybe the entire thing was hilariously pointless? But neither buyer nor seller was expert on this stuff.
(unless seller was hiding really well and it was some 6D chess)
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?
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.
I bet that bank also recorded that transactions.
LOL, you have clearly never had to build a house.
Or if the banks all decide to introduce very high fees for transactions?
Just imagine one criminal say's to another:
Sorry i cant take those 15k euros, it's illegal didn't you know that???
Yes i buy drugs and sell them...i don't think the mafia has anything against that money, they will then just give it to the Vatican bank to wash it.
If you really don't understand that this i just a excuse....
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.
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.
So you accept that your tangent is not relevant?
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.
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.
Citation required.
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.
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.
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.
Moreover there are some countries (like Germany) where people routinely use a lot of cash to (say) buy a car or a business.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
No. Just no.
Rights are not a for-profit balance sheet, such as when Google support provides crappy service, or ghosts you, in the name of profit.
Rights are rights. Entrenched, untouchable, everlasting. And each loss affects us all, for the next right taken, is from you.
Telling people they must use private enterprise, a third party and pay a fee, to conduct commerce between them, is a fascist act.
And guess what. 30 years from now, when that 10k is like 500, what then?
Because limits like these are never raised.
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.
As you say, rights are rights.
Removing those rights from people has only made the world a better place... ...
There are many non-constitutional rights (such as this one) that are not everlasting and laws can also be adapted.
I really don't understand the value of your post as it sounds like speculation based on wrong preconditions.
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.
the right to use large amounts of cash is a fictional right.
By forcing the use of 3rd parties, to be able to trade, for people to sell goods they craft and create, there is an abridgement of multiple rights.
This will be overturned.
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.
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.
They will succeed? With or without this limit, you're fucked.
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.
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.
But yeah, Russians under the bed, sure.
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.
With medical breakthroughs increasing the age of life too, this is only likely to increase with time
That's not how we deal with minorities
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?
if you usually keep 10k of cash in your pocket, you're probably someone who's not scared by criminals.
And I only know two types of people with those characteristics: corrupted cops and other criminals.
EDIT: it is actually 3 kinds, the third one being taxi drivers, which in my country are mostly low-level criminals.
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.
https://www.occrp.org/en/the-pandora-papers/pandora-papers-r...
"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."
But, > money laundering doesn’t work like that. You don’t have large cash payments, you have a ton of smaller cash payments.
> big banks launder money, have better oversight there instead of restricting cash
Those $5 and $10 bills getting laundered started from a $50K transaction getting laundered.
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.
Honestly if GDPR pisses off Americans, it probably means it hit on the nail.
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.
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).
Well, your mistake.
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.
Should these be illegal?
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.
Digital Services Act - great
Chat control and all the other pushes for increased surveillance - terrible, don't these guys know history?
There is no need to applaud/reject them all.
> I assume GDPR is very popular here despite making software development a huge pain
If it creates a huge pain, then the data probably wasn't handled in a respectful way in the first place.
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.
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.
What personal data do the startups require that's hard to rein?
So definitely - not pain.
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.
So?
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.
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.
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.
You are not allowed to hide such transactions by law in the country where I am from.
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.
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.
I'd rather say: the EU is penalizing a very few people who usually pay €10k cash.
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.
A lot of these old Europeans are like that.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-07/cash-ban-law-10000-do...
Can you imagine that old people, homeless or even small kids that want buy a candy will not be able to buy anything?
Keep your benefits for yourself.
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?
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.
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.
Bureaucracy gets messy at the edges.
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.
Those are not the same thing.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergency-bank-measures-fin...
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.
There's certainly ... nuance you're taking for granted in declaring a mix of political protest and political protest illegal.
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.
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.
Should criminals be denied all access to the financial system?
Even if the criminal is not receiving money for criminal cause?
Do criminals have the right to buy food?
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.
Is it ok to prevent an innocent person from buying food?
That seems like an incredibly disproportionate response, and makes me think that Canadian banks really are unsafe
> 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.
I didn't even know anybody was trying to remove the right for Manitoba to be a province of Canada.
He can go to a bank with the cash and do a wire transfer.
I don’t trust banks either. I don’t trust the Canadian government anymore as of last winter either.
But if I need surgery and I have the means then I make it happen. I figure out the banking system and I get surgery.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 . . .
[1] https://www.perthmint.com/shop/bullion/bullion-coins/austral...
― Anatole France
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.
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.
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?
Good thing about cars and houses is that you can pay some amount officially and then pay more money under the table.
Etc.
Perfect example. I wouldn't do that, no, but I wouldn't want it to be illegal.
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 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.
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.
Yup, and now they are _forced_ to. Its a single point of failure. One which the government conveniently has control over.
I'm surprised the HN crowd isn't grasping this more clearly. Backups are important.
You can have more than one bank account.
People locked out of their accounts. For protesting!
Which is 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!
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.
The one incident I can think of didn't end well.
As a child I would always remember my grandfather carrying (at least in the house) large rolls of bills.
Unfortunately when you don't move with the times, it ultimately catches up with you and forces your hand eventually. No matter how hard you try.
You're simply prolonging the death with no benefit of doing so other than to pat yourself on the back.
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.
You can’t even buy a car in cash here any more.
The only large exception I am aware of is dispensaries because banks don’t want potential drug money laundering charges.
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.
I'm pretty sure Europeans have heard of Hitler and Stalin and their ilk.
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.
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?
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.
Isn't this literally what inflation is?
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'.
Don't worry, the water around us that's heating up is for our own good and not at all to cook us.
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).
(Not that it's always fair but that's a different argument.)
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. They can do it via a computer, but most people I know don't have laptops.
Most people I know over 70 have internet banking on their phones. Every adult I know under that age does.
Where do you live where this is incredibly rare?
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.
But much more importantly, inflation means 10K is less and less every year.
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.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm
For some definitions of money. Definitely not true of M0.
>> If I make a painting
That’s just a regular asset, once it’s sold you’ll need to paint a new one.
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.
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.
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.
[1] The Bank of England: Money creation in the modern economy https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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:
"3% of money is available as paper cash"
and
"Paper cash is banned under all circumstances"
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.
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.
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.
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.
So we may want to not tolerate the activity at all, on principle. RMS' The Right to Read* is in orbit around the general theme, I think. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
* hysterically, Bing prominently provides results about locking down documents when I search it for "rms right to read"
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?
Are you sure about that?
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/gun-shops-and-customers-...
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 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.
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”
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 decided to withdraw $10k just in case and they told me maximum they can do is $1k per day and this story repeated for many months.
If people will buy stacks of toilet paper they don’t need, of course they would empty the cash machines too.
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.
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.
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.
ATM limit of 1k is common.
My small local credit union keeps about 10k in each of the tellers drawers . So you should be able to easily go up to 50k cash withdrawal .
If it’s a large multinational , 100k I suspect.
Also why not just go 10 days in a row and pull out 1k?
In the US, this could be considered "structuring" to avoid reporting requirements which is a federal crime with a sentence of up to 5 years in prison.
>> https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/04/global-megabanks-are-...
Um, why not?
Did the bank not have the cash on hand?
Were they over some standard limit, like FDIC?
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 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!
The taxed and the prosecuted.
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).
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
Why keep money on you?
Cash promotes tax evasion and money laundering, plain and simple.
"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.
You have obviously never dealt with a German person.
This is for poor schnucks and the occasional scapegoat.
From the point of view of the state, tax evasion these days is by far the highest priority.
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.
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.
So no...
Yes, because people taking a bribe would definitely care that it’s illegal to have a cash transaction over €10k
I am sure there are some benefits to living into this system, doesn't mean it's a good idea to do it.
Maybe you prefer to keep paper receipts for tens of years and prove they are legit, I honestly don't.
This implies, no record of personal purchases around.
The current "fight against cash" goes in direction of that risk.
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.
Thanks, but no thanks.
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.
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.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/only-0-15-total-crypto-174206...
The share of illicit activities for cash is around ~5%, 33x more than cryptos.
https://www.quora.com/My-son-is-using-Lunix-an-illegal-hacke...
I'm surprised by the amount of negativity around this news really.
I now understand why some people in the states walk around openly carrying firearms, exercising their rights.
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".
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.
Profit driven, but available literally for free for an account and transfers (depending on the bank).
> To have data mined and sold.
GDPR says no.
> To rely on “too big to fail” banking systems that practically schedule economic downturns every 20 years or so.
We're talking about the EU here, not the US. There are a ton of challenger new banks.
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.
So not for free. It would be one thing if banks had to guarantee those transactions being free but many banks want % of transaction in fees
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 ..."
If you're talking about fees I thought those were capped a while ago and haven't increased.
(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.
Also is "u" standing for a specific currency, or what?
Source ?
"To have data mined and sold."
Which is completely illegal according to GDPR.
"Name one practical reason to pay amounts higher than 1.000€ in cash." – unknown progressive
it's 10.000 euros, you're off by an order of magnitude.
Can you name one practical reason to pay more than 10k cash?
So he is.
But then again, what's the practical reason to pay more than 1k cash?
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.
Just that.
If the bank knows, the government does.
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.
High end electronic equipment, for example.
Or do you by personal devices linking them 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.
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.
Reality beats fiction every time.
Mostly coz many banks take % cut on big money tranfers so taking it out and just giving it to someone in a bag is sometimes tens of thousands cheaper
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.
Yes, notary was involved and it would be invalid if buyer didn't paid, but it was very much a bundle of cash getting exchanged.
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)
So someone might officially pay 20.000€ for a piece of land, pay the taxes and fees based on that price, but pay the remaining 60.000€ in cash.
Obviously this is illegal, but the notaries are in on it.
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.
so you would buy a house in cash?
How much will the personal protection cost?
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?"
Have you ever bought a used car? Or played relatively high limit at a casino?
It’s perfectly normal to take 6 figures cash to a casino if you’re playing high stakes poker, for example.
And there are plenty of other reasons.
A cashiers check costs what? 10, 20 euros?
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
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.
And for pro poker players, they can just wire the money to the casino
Honestly I don’t see any moment in my life in a developed economy where I or anyone around me has needed more than a few hundred in cash
Yes. Virtually nobody uses them in Europe.
for more than 10k?
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.
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.
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]
They probably know their chickens
[1] https://newsrebeat.com/world-news/124305.html
> Used cars go for way more than 10k
So what?
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.
[2] https://storage.ecodibergamo.it/media/photologue/2018/4/5/ph...
[3] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-J_rU5T5QbA/maxresdefault.jpg
[4] https://sg.lendela.com/assets/img/blog-you-can-t-pay-credit-...
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.
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 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.
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.
>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.
ban hairdressers and car washes?
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.
And how many >10k cash transactions are for money laundering exactly?
Things like using car washes to launder money are pretty much a dead thing because it's one of the worst ways to do it.
I have a friend who owns a laundry business and he was approached by somebody who pretty obviously wanted to buy it to … launder money.
But then t'is the same old story, repeated over the ages: you get the governments you deserve.
Most of them introduced them to decrease tax evasion, not money laundering.
You can still have that much money in cash, just not pay with it one transaction.
Through a very obscure logic, since payment cap cannot exclude unregistered payments.
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.
If you want to evade taxes by skimming 5 cents on each coffee, you have to sell 200.000 unregistered coffees to save 1.000 euros.
Which is more than 3 times what an average Italian bar sells every year.
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.
There are close to 20 billions $ of Russian oligarchs frozen assets now - I bet almost none of it was acquired in cash.
While of course there are some that do use cash, the bigger offenders are not - so it may be a good idea to start with the real problems…
Based on?
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.
Even though it has a facade of protection, this isn't about protection against criminals; it's about control and being able to track citizens.
A deposit is not a "cash payment". You are not paying your bank.
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.
Then again, my ATM withdrawals are in another country, so maybe it's treated differently since it looks like a remittance.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Yet another example why cash has to be limited as much as possible.
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.
> 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.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/central-bank-digital-cu...
(I understand in this tree the '/S' is taken for granted.)
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.
To avoid banking fees?
"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)
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.
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?
That's what would be stopping you; existing anti-money laundering systems.
This is then how things like this are enforced.
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.
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.
Are you saying this is an exception?
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.
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.
Same way the law about having the correct plate on your car is. Nobody's stopping you, but if you're caught, you go to jail and/or get a fine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now child abuse flourished until very very recently, indeed none of above tools had been used to really fight it.
Instead these tools where used to been politically unwanted people.
Who smells the same with this EU cash limit fighting “terrorism” (as per the article)? Who sees the parallels?
If it becomes illegal for me to eat breakfast, I'm not going to stop eating breakfast.
I'm sure that if we all gave up breakfast we could like, squeeze a few more humans onto the planet or something.
I'm still gonna eat my breakfast, you can come and arrest me.
I don't "need" breakfast. I want it. It works for me.
Same as cash works for me.
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.
https://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-police-raid-gulf-lob...
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).
https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F10999?...
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.
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!
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.
Reminds me a joke. What is difference between conspiracy theory and reality? Approximately one year.
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.
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.
Didn't they literally last week make a law to make this harder?
No longer possible for the public to learn who owns a EU company https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33836543
...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.
This has proven very effective against organised crime.
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.
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.
> Any country that considers that a crime or potentially a crime is dystopian.
Then Spain and Greece meet your definition of being dystopian, as their cash payment limits are 1,000 EUR and 500 EUR respectively.
And I agree with you.
Please, don't give them more ideas.
This law makes it not fully legal tender (after amount X). It is disgusting.
Stop pretending the government (any) has the “average” man’s best interest. Stop pretending they care.
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.
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).
Add in the layers of “manufactured consent” and you get… this to help “fight” “terrorism.”
It is always possible I have misunderstood the point too.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Nonsense.
"Average" people don't pay >10k€ in cash. So this measure won't hurt average people and may stop some money launderers / frauders so no issue with it.
And actually most EU countries already have lower limits.
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.
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 ...
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.
I.E.: You got paid in Moneros, etc...
Good luck.
I never had a cheque book in Germany.
Most used cars are bought using loans. I.e. the bank provides a loan specifically for bying that car, directly via the dealership.
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.
And of course, once these rules are in place, they can lower the limit over time. Boiling the frog and all that.
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 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
Yes, now I don't have the freedom to drive over the speed limit. They took that away from me!
This is among the measures intended for the 99%
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/eva-kaili-ar...
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.
Those people hide their assets in swiss banks, along with dictators and corrupt politicians.
Closest I can think of say a bar or something similarly cash heavy getting cash and paying suppliers directly. (which is in itself problematic @ tax)
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.
Buying a car?
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?
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.
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.
And buying a car is not important?
> Only that if they do, there is a limit.
And this limit is below the value of most cars.
Which is what we were discussing in this thread.
That’s why Starbucks can probably get away with rejecting cash in Sweden but a large grocery chain probably can’t and won’t.
Whether people accept large cash payments should be entirely up to them.
> E.g it’s in the interest of society to mandate important functions such as buying food is always possible with cash.
Give it ten years.
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
Cash limits aside, They at least have legal requirements to know their customers and not blindly accept cash without any idea where it came from.
Edit: this isn’t an opinion this is a simple statement of fact.
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 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?
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.
"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.
Overall, the vast majority of retailers do accept cash in some form but not in usual “small transaction” situations like cafes, taxis, smaller shops.
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?
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.
(In English:) https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/payments-in-swe...
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.
Does Sweden accept Visa/MC or they have some weird local card in most places?
Just checking in case i ever play the tourist in Sweden. Had trouble in NL.
I've encountered this from the Bay Area to Bangkok. It's a thing. That bar, or that Starbucks or whatever is card only/electronic payment only.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Criminalizing cash is totalatarian in my view.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This law prohibits paying me for a month in cash.
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.
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.
Why is that illegitimate?
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.
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 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
The people who do write the laws are directly elected at all levels of government.
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).
Like most governments?
> The EU continues its fight to protect EU citizens and the EU's financial system against money laundering and terrorist financing.
The EU has control of the propaganda machine at levels comparable to the Soviet Union. We should've just let them have it.
I wonder how many Europeans are going to get in this thread to tell us Americans how much more privacy they have.
For the west it’s just a matter of money. The demographic crisis in the east is real.
Net emigration & a fertility rate of 1.7 is what I’d call “demographic crisis”
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?
> 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.
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)
You are describing the USA.
Corruption is well obvious. See ursula, the head of the ecb and so on.
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.
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)
Which country may I ask?
Which country again?
"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
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.
Case in point: https://english.radio.cz/fifty-persons-charged-endorsing-rus...
Opinion is now illegal.
There are many many more examples where the Czechs are an embarrassment to the western society they so desperately want to be part of.
Edit: sweet summer children downvoters