A while back, my old chum Ed Conway from Sky TV (better known for his foreword to Identity is the New Money, of course) ran a nice story about the British cash paradox. It turns out that since the #Brexit vote, the amount of cash “in circulation” has soared (it’s gone up by nearly two billion quid since B-day, as I call it). While the use of cash for transactions has continued to fall, the amount of cash just generally hanging around has continued to rise.
The growth rate of cash in circulation has more than doubled since January, when it was running at 4% a year, with a sudden acceleration in the weeks following the EU poll.
Ed asks whether the cash has been hoarded, stashed or exported. I wrote about this following the Bank of England’s analysis of the situation last year, noting that
The interesting question that the Quarterly Bulletin article by Tom Fish and Roy Whymark stimulates is straightforward: “if the majority of Bank of England notes are not being used for everyday transactions in the domestic economy, what are they being used for?”
From Where is the aggregate demand for cash coming from? | Consult Hyperion
Since the Bank of England’s own estimate is that about a quarter of the cash out there is used for “transactional purposes” and since the size of the black economy can be reasonably estimated, the answer seems to be that they are mainly used for tax evasion (primarily by SMEs), money laundering (only 0.75% of money laundering flows in the UK are intercepted), drug dealing and corruption.
We see the same phenomenon in America. The amount of cash out there continues to rise but the use of that cash continues to fall.
The use of cash has fallen more than 50% in the last four years and is projected to continue to fall as consumers look for faster and secure means of paying options. With a high degree of smartphone penetration in the US market, mobile and digital payments are rapidly gaining a market share in digital payments.
So we that that in the US, as in the UK and many other countries, the rise of contactless and mobile payments means that the use of cash for retail transactions is falling steadily. (Contactless transactions have now reached £2 billion per month in the UK.) It is interesting, however, that in the US there seems to be much more resistance to cashlessness than in the Netherlands or Denmark or elsewhere. In his new book “The Curse of Cash”, former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff says (page 111) that in America “people pay by cash for small transactions to avoid credit card theft”. Is this true? I realise that in America they still use magnetic stripes (which is why America accounts for half of all the card fraud in the world although it is only a fifth of the volume). I always use cards in the US — since I don’t care if the card details get stolen as it the banks’ problem and not mine — and I get really annoyed when I go to a coffee shop or something and it doesn’t take cards. But perhaps our American correspondents could enlighten us on this.
Snippings 