War On Cash 2- Is India’s War on Cash Paying Off?

Is India’s War on Cash Paying Off?
Central bank says it cut borrowing plan after reviewing cash position

Indian people lined up outside the Reserve Bank of India in Mumbai to deposit old rupee notes in late December.
Indian people lined up outside the Reserve Bank of India in Mumbai to deposit old rupee notes in late December.   Photo:  European Pressphoto Agency 
By
Anant Vijay Kala
Updated Jan. 4, 2017 2:36 p.m. ET

 India lowered its borrowing plan for the year ending March 31 by 4.2%, in a sign that the government’s crackdown on tax evaders is helping to increase New Delhi’s coffers.

The government says it plans to cut the amount it borrows by 180 billion rupees ($2.64 billion) from its earlier estimate of about 4.25 trillion rupees.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi in November announced a plan to withdraw and replace 500- and 1,000-rupee notes in an effort to cut tax evasion, terrorism and government corruption.

The government wasn’t more specific about India’s cash flow, but some bond-market analysts said the plan is helping to catch tax evaders, make them pay and increase government revenue.

In India, bonds are issued by the government, but the Reserve Bank of India conducts the sales processes, acting as a fund manager for the government. The RBI and the government said they cut the borrowing plan “after reviewing the cash position.”

As people lined up at banks to deposit wads of notes in November, the government also offered a tax amnesty on unreported wealth. Indians can avoid prosecution by paying half of the amount in tax and penalties, while depositing another quarter as an interest-free loan with the government for four years.

The government hasn’t revealed how much money has been deposited so far, and the amnesty program is open until March. But economists say revenue could rise to several billions of dollars, which would be welcome bounty for the government.

“The income-disclosure scheme was not budgeted. That could have provided an additional push” for revenue, said Madan Sabnavis, chief economist at Care Ratings. Overall tax collection has been rising since the economy strengthened in early 2016, which has also helped the government cut borrowing.

The currency decision created a cash shortage that sparked widespread disruption to the economy, affecting payments from factories to farm-supply chains. On Wednesday, a gauge of services activity showed a second straight monthly contraction in December, as new orders fell to their weakest level in more than three years.

Economists widely predict that growth in India’s economy, which has held steady at more than 7% in recent years, could slow to about 6% or even lower if new currency isn’t pumped in quickly to end the shortage.

Last week, while countering criticism that the economy was suffering from the war on cash, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said tax figures told a different story.

He said income tax revenue rose 14.4% through Dec. 19, although he didn’t specify if he meant for the fiscal year or thus far in the demonetization program. Indirect taxes—including excise, and custom duties and service taxes—also rose a collective 26.2% up to Nov. 30, he said.

“What comes into the banking system gets identified with the person and therefore its impact on taxation and revenue collection is already being seen,” Mr. Jaitley said.

The fact that other important sources of government revenue have been lagging indicate that the decision to cut borrowing is a result of the increased tax revenue, said Soumyajit Niyogi, an associate director of credit and market research at India Ratings & Research.

“It’s because of the tax amnesty scheme or the demonetization that the government would be expecting to get some bonanza through tax penalties,” Mr. Niyogi said.

The government has raised 214.32 billion rupees with stake sales of state-run companies this financial year, which was less than half of the full-year target of 565 billion rupees. With just a quarter left in the fiscal year, some economists say they believe New Delhi will miss its disinvestment revenue target by a significant margin.

Write to Anant Vijay Kala at anant.kala@wsj.com

War on Cash-1 The Secret Meeting

Published December 07, 2016
The Secret Meeting That Accelerated the War on Cash
Editor’s note: The War on Cash is heating up.

If you read yesterday’s Dispatch, you know the War on Cash is basically an effort to eliminate paper money. Politicians tell us this will make society safer.

Of course, we know this is pure propaganda. The War on Cash is really about control. You see, if the government gets rid of paper cash, all that money will be trapped inside the digital banking system. This will allow the government to track and tax our money at will.

Clearly, this is a serious threat to our wealth and personal privacy. Yet, almost no one takes the War on Cash seriously. Many people even see it as progress, since cash feels antiquated.

Today, we're featuring an interview with Crisis Investing editor Nick Giambruno, where he explains why this kind of thinking is so wrong. As Nick explains, the government’s latest war could eventually rip apart the fabric that binds our society.

The good news is that you still have time to protect yourself. Nick explains two simple ways to shield yourself from the War on Cash today. 

[This interview originally appeared on our partner site International Man on June 22, 2016. The transcript is from an interview with Scott Horton of The Scott Horton Show, which Nick describes as a must-listen podcast.]

Scott Horton: Happy to have you back on the show, Nick.I’m looking at one of your articles in Casey Research’s International Man and I like the title: "Revealed: The Hidden Agenda of Davos 2016." Can you tell us about it?

Nick Giambruno: Yes. There’s an annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Leaders in business, government, media, and even some celebrities go to these events to discuss the big issues of the day. This conference happens every year in the open. But this year, I think a secret meeting took place during the conference behind the scenes, with huge historical significance…
Immediately after the conference, there was a big acceleration to eliminate paper cash, or at least high-denomination currency notes. A flood of articles from The New York Times, The Economist, Zero Hedge, and other publications picked up on this.

For example, a few days after Davos, the head of the Japanese central bank implemented negative interest rates for the first time ever. This was after he repeatedly denied that he was planning to use negative rates. It seems like something might have changed his mind at that conference. But that’s not all.

After the conference, the CEO of Deutsche Bank called for the elimination of cash. Norway's biggest bank essentially did the same thing.

Bloomberg published a piece called "Bring on the Cashless Future." Financial Times published something very similar. Then Harvard put out a paper talking about the need to eliminate high-value paper currencies, like the $100 bill and the €500 note.

Negative rates and the War on Cash really went into overdrive after this Davos meeting. I can't conclusively prove that a secret meeting took place, but there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that points to it.

SH: The ideas of negative interest rates and outlawing cash sound like crankery. Plus, we're talking about the most powerful people in the world, their representatives in media, and their lackeys in government proposing this. This is something to take very seriously.

My question is, if the banks are so powerful, why are they allowing the government to engage in this policy? It seems like it’s tailor-made to destroy their business.

NG: It is horrible for the banks, which earn a big part of their revenue charging interest. But they tolerate it because there’s another component of this. It’s the evil twin brother of negative interest rates... the War on Cash.

With negative interest rates, a lot of people would rather take their money out of the bank and put it under a mattress than suffer a penalty or a tax on saving money.

The economic central planners know this, and that's why the War on Cash has been really ramped up along with the spread of negative interest rates around the world.

The banking system is very fragile. There's not a lot of actual paper cash in banks. It’s mostly digital bytes on a computer. So if people start pulling paper money out of the banks en masse, it won't take much to bring the whole system down.

Their solution is to make accessing cash harder, and in some cases, illegal. Take France, for example. It’s now illegal to do cash transactions over €1,000 without documenting it properly. That keeps cash in the banking systems. That makes the banks happy because if you can’t withdraw your cash, there can’t be a bank run.

SH: You cite Ron Paul here saying, "The cashless society is the IRS's dream come true: total knowledge of, and control over, the finances of every single American."

Negative interest rates and the War on Cash sounds like a big joke. It’s a world where nobody can buy or sell anything to anyone without it going on their permanent record.

NG: Yeah, it's truly horrifying. But this is what it's coming to. It's the government's dream. They're saying, "Oh, well, terrorists use cash and drug dealers use cash, so we have to get rid of it or make it harder to use." It's completely ridiculous, and anybody who can think critically and independently can see right through this.

Privacy is a fundamental human right. It's necessary to keep human dignity in a free society, and unfortunately, a lot of people have forgotten that.

SH: Now, Nick, I'm not an international man or an investment adviser, so you’re going to have to help me understand.

These guys want to implement negative interest rates. Not only are they paying you almost nothing in interest, but they're actually going to punish you for keeping money in your account. Then they're going to blackmail you into keeping your money in your bank account by trying to outlaw cash and make it impossible for you to take out large bills.

Doesn’t that completely defeat the whole point of negative interest rates in the first place, which is this stupid policy of trying to stimulate the economy by forcing people to spend the money?

NG: Well, no, they'll just spend the money through electronic means that are tracked, controlled, and taxed to the maximum. If you lose 50 bucks a year for keeping a thousand in the bank, you're going to spend it.

SH: So the point isn't whether you're keeping your money at the bank; it’s whether you're spending your money through the bank using their card to do it?

NG: Correct. Think of the information that's available to governments if no one can buy or sell anything without going through a bank. It's big government’s dream come true.

SH: You know, it probably sounds stupid, but I used to be so paranoid about this kind of thing. The idea that every time you buy anything, it has to be on the record or else you could be in for a full-scale investigation. It reduces anybody who wants to be free to a barter economy and poverty. But here it is.

NG: Well, the good news is they haven't won yet. We've seen counter editorials in big newspapers, like The Wall Street Journal, come out and say that this is ridiculous and make the same criticisms that you and I would make.

And they haven't gone forward with some of these ideas yet. We can still use the $100 bill. We can still use paper cash. But it's clear where things are headed.

There's still time to take action to protect yourself. The simplest way is to own physical gold and silver.

Gold and silver are real money. They aren’t susceptible to the sting of negative interest rates. They’re accepted anywhere in the world. And they can’t be devalued by insane government policies.
SH: It sounds like this could cause financial bubbles, possibly even in precious metals.

NG: That’s possible, although gold and silver are a long way from being bubbles today. We'll have to see how this plays out over the next few years. For governments to consider such a radical and extreme thing as banning cash shows they're desperate. This is not a move they would consider if they were confident in the economy and their grip on it.

Another thing to watch is the psychological component to this War on Cash. A few weeks after the Davos conference, the makers of the classic board game Monopoly announced that it will no longer feature paper cash. You're going to have an electronic “bank card,” like a debit card, instead. I think they’re trying to get people used to not using paper cash anymore.

SH: You can certainly see how this would form the basis for a total police state, where all your information is readily available at the click of a button. The cops or the government can just type in your name and hit enter.

NG: True. But technology is also a very good thing for the individual. Look at things that move toward decentralization like Bitcoin, encryption, and 3D printing. It’s a tug of war. I don't think the outcome is certain nor do I think it's completely hopeless.

SH: These kinds of technologies seem like they’ll make cash and banks obsolete. Why do we need them at all when we can trade gold and silver coins with each other and instantly know what they're worth?

NG: Exactly. The solution is not to restrict options for the money people can use. Everyone should be free to use any kind of money they want. We need to get rid of these ridiculous legal tender laws that force you to use Federal Reserve Notes.

I think if we did that, we would definitely see alternative forms of money in everyday use. It could be gold, silver, or a mix between a cryptocurrency and a commodity currency.

SH: It certainly points to making big banks like Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase obsolete.

NG: Oh, absolutely. That's a wonderful thing because at this point, these big banks are just appendages of the U.S. government. They're not entities of the free market. They're entities of crony capitalism and economic fascism. So anything that does away with them, the better.

SH: Thanks very much for coming back on the show, Nick. Good to talk to you.

NG: Anytime, Scott.

Editor’s note: Casey Research founder Doug Casey is deeply troubled by the War on Cash, too.
To see why, listen to this brand-new interview. In it, Doug explains how the Federal Reserve has been quietly working on a secret currency project, one that could eventually end paper dollars.
Most Americans don’t realize this. They view the War on Cash as a foreign affair. They assume their money is safe.

But Doug, an expert on global currencies, sees things differently. He says the U.S. government is losing its grip on the global financial system. Unless this changes, the Fed could soon do something desperate, like introduce its own digital currency.

You can learn about this disturbing project by watching this interview. You’ll also learn the four steps Doug’s taken to protect himself from the War on Cash.

மோடி இந்திய தேசத்துரோகி!

About the Trump-Russia Dossier - New York Times

What We Know and Don’t Know About the Trump-Russia Dossier

President-elect Donald J. Trump leaving a meeting in Manhattan last week. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

By SCOTT SHANEJAN. 11, 2017

How did American intelligence officials come to brief President Obama, President-elect Donald J. Trump and lawmakers about supposed Russian plans to try to blackmail Mr. Trump? There are far more questions than answers. But here is a look at the story so far.

What We Know
 

• Last year, a Washington political research firm, paid by Mr. Trump’s Republican rivals, hired a retired British intelligence officer to investigate the candidate’s ties to Russia.

• After it became clear that Mr. Trump would be the Republican nominee, Democratic clients began to pay the firm for this same “opposition research,” standard practice in politics.

• The former British spy, who had long experience in Russia and a network of connections there, compiled dozens of reports detailing what he heard from his contacts. The memos he wrote, mostly one to three pages long, are dated from June to December.

• The memos contain unsubstantiated claims that Russian officials tried to obtain influence over Mr. Trump by preparing to blackmail him with sex tapes and bribe him with business deals. They also claim that the Trump campaign met with Russian operatives to discuss the Russians’ hacking and their leaking of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta.

• The Washington firm and the former British spy, not identified here because of a confidential source agreement with The New York Times, gave the memos first to their clients but later to the F.B.I. and multiple journalists at The Times and elsewhere. The memos, totaling about 35 pages, also reached a number of members of Congress.

• Last week, when the F.B.I., C.I.A. and National Security Agency gave a classified report on the Russian hacking and leaking and efforts to influence the presidential election to Mr. Obama, Mr. Trump and congressional leaders, they attached a two-page summary of the unverified allegations in the memos.

What We Don’t Know

• Whether any of the claims in the memos are true. American intelligence agencies have not confirmed them, and Mr. Trump has said they are a complete fabrication. In addition, one specific allegation — that Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, met with a Russian official in Prague in August or September — has been denied by both Mr. Cohen, who says he has never been to Prague, and the Russian, Oleg Solodukhin.

• Who concocted the information in the memos, if it is entirely false or partially so, and with what purpose. Did the British intelligence officer accurately report what he heard? Who gave him the information that, if false, amounts to a very sophisticated fabrication?

• What exactly prompted American intelligence officials to pass on a summary of the unvetted claims to Mr. Obama, Mr. Trump and Congress. Officials have said they felt the president-elect should be aware of the memos, which had circulated widely in Washington. But why put the summary in a report going to multiple people in Congress and the executive branch, virtually assuring it would be leaked?

• What will happen now. The F.B.I. has been investigating the claims in the memos, and Democrats are demanding a thorough inquiry into the reports that Trump representatives met with Russian officials during the campaign. But as of Jan. 20, Mr. Trump will be in charge of the bureau and the other intelligence agencies, and he may not approve such an investigation.

Questions You May Be Asking

• Everyone is talking about this document and passing it around online. Why can’t I read it on your website?
 Because the 35 pages of memos prepared as opposition research on Mr. Trump contain detailed claims that neither the intelligence agencies nor The Times have been able to verify, the editors decided to briefly summarize the claims and not publish the document.

• Why did The Times and other outlets report extensively on the hacking of Democratic National Committee and Podesta emails before the election, but not this?

 The Times did report before the election that the F.B.I. was investigating claims about Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia – an article that resulted from an extensive reporting effort. The Democratic National Committee and Podesta emails were public, their authenticity was not in doubt and they contained newsworthy information.

• Why did James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, write two letters about Ms. Clinton’s emails before the election, but not about this?

 That is a question Mr. Comey may eventually have to answer. His two public statements about the bureau’s investigation of the Clinton emails were highly unusual and a break with long F.B.I. tradition.

• There are reports that many people in the news media knew about this opposition research on Mr. Trump and Russia for months, but it was never raised during the campaign. Why not?
 Many reporters from multiple news organizations tried to verify the claims in the memos but were unsuccessful. That does not mean that none of the claims are true, but most news organizations choose not to publish damaging allegations against a public figure unless they believe them to be true.

• So what changed on Tuesday? Why is this now being reported and discussed by every news media organization?

CNN broke the news that a summary of the memos had been attached to the classified report by the F.B.I., C.I.A. and National Security Agency on the Russian hacking and leaking during the presidential election and that it was given to Mr. Obama, Mr. Trump and Congressional leaders last week. That level of official attention prompted news media organizations to decide to inform the public about the memos.

• The president and president-elect were given a two-page report, but there is a much longer document on BuzzFeed. What’s the difference?

BuzzFeed made the  controversial decision to publish the opposition research memos in full, despite the fact that their reporters had not confirmed or disproved the claims in them. The two-page document is a summary of the claims in the series of memos.

WHY USA WAGING A GLOBAL WAR ON CASH

Washington Is Behind India’s Brutal Demonetization Project

Norbert Häring is an economist and business journalist.

A Well-Kept Open Secret: Washington Is Behind India’s Brutal Demonetization Project

In early November, without warning, the Indian government declared the two largest denomination bills invalid, abolishing over 80 percent of circulating cash by value. Amidst all the commotion and outrage this caused, nobody seems to have taken note of the decisive role that Washington played in this. That is surprising, as Washington’s role has been disguised only very superficially.

US-President Barack Obama has declared the strategic partnership with India a priority of his foreign policy. China needs to be reined in. In the context of this partnership, the US government’s development agency USAID has negotiated cooperation agreements with the Indian ministry of finance. One of these has the declared goal to push back the use of cash in favor of digital payments in India and globally.

On November 8, Indian prime minster Narendra Modi announced that the two largest denominations of banknotes could not be used for payments any more with almost immediate effect. Owners could only recoup their value by putting them into a bank account before the short grace period expired. The amount of cash that banks were allowed to pay out to individual customers was severely restricted. Almost half of Indians have no bank account and many do not even have a bank nearby. The economy is largely cash based. Thus, a severe shortage of cash ensued. Those who suffered the most were the poorest and most vulnerable. They had additional difficulty earning their meager living in the informal sector or paying for essential goods and services like food, medicine or hospitals. Chaos and fraud reigned well into December.

Four weeks earlier

Not even four weeks before this assault on Indians, USAID had announced the establishment of „Catalyst: Inclusive Cashless Payment Partnership“, with the goal of effecting a quantum leap in cashless payment in India. The press statement of October 14 says that Catalyst “marks the next phase of partnership between USAID and Ministry of Finance to facilitate universal financial inclusion”. The statement does not show up in the list of press statements on the website of USAID (anymore?). Not even filtering statements with the word “India” would bring it up. To find it, you seem to have to know it exists, or stumble upon it in a web search. Indeed, this and other statements, which seemed rather boring before, have become a lot more interesting and revealing after
November 8.

Reading the statements with hindsight it becomes obvious, that Catalyst and the partnership of USAID and the Indian Ministry of Finance, from which Catalyst originated, are little more than fronts which were used to be able to prepare the assault on all Indians using cash without arousing undue suspicion. Even the name Catalyst sounds a lot more ominous, once you know what happened on November 9.

Catalyst’s Director of Project Incubation is Alok Gupta, who used to be Chief Operating Officer of the World Resources Institute in Washington, which has USAID as one of its main sponsors. He was also an original member of the team that developed Aadhaar, the Big-Brother-like biometric identification system.

According to a report of the Indian Economic Times, USAID has committed to finance Catalyst for three years. Amounts are kept secret.

Badal Malick was Vice President of India’s most important online marketplace Snapdeal, before he was appointed as CEO of Catalyst. He commented:

 Catalyst’s mission is to solve multiple coordination problems that have blocked the penetration of digital payments among merchants and low-income consumers. We look forward to creating a sustainable and replicable model. (…) While there has been (…) a concerted push for digital payments by the government, there is still a last mile gap when it comes to merchant acceptance and coordination issues. We want to bring a holistic ecosystem approach to these problems.

Ten months earlier

The multiple coordination problem and the cash-ecosystem-issue that Malick mentions had been analysed in a report that USAID commissioned in 2015 and presented in January 2016, in the context of the anti-cash partnership with the Indian Ministry of Finance. The press release on this presentation is also not in USAID’s list of press statements (anymore?). The title of the study was “Beyond Cash”.

“Merchants, like consumers, are trapped in cash ecosystems, which inhibits their interest” in digital payment it said in the report. Since few traders accept digital payments, few consumers have an interest in it, and since few consumers use digital payments, few traders have an interest in it. Given that banks and payment providers charge fees for equipment to use or even just try out digital payment, a strong external impulse is needed to achieve a level of card penetration that would create mutual interest of both sides in digital payment options.

It turned out in November that the declared “holistic ecosystem approach” to create this impulse consisted in destroying the cash-ecosystem for a limited time and to slowly dry it up later, by limiting the availability of cash from banks for individual customers. Since the assault had to be a surprise to achieve its full catalyst-results, the published Beyond-Cash-Study and the protagonists of Catalyst could not openly describe their plans. They used a clever trick to disguise them and still be able to openly do the necessary preparations, even including expert hearings. They consistently talked of a regional field experiment that they were ostensibly planning.

“The goal is to take one city and increase the digital payments 10x in six to 12 months,” said Malick less than four weeks before most cash was abolished in the whole of India. To not be limited in their preparation on one city alone, the Beyond-Cash-report and Catalyst kept talking about a range of regions they were examining, ostensibly in order to later decide which was the best city or region for the field experiment. Only in November did it became clear that the whole of India should be the guinea-pig-region for a global drive to end the reliance on cash. Reading a statement of Ambassador Jonathan Addleton, USAID Mission Director to India, with hindsight, it becomes clear that he stealthily announced that, when he said four weeks earlier:

India is at the forefront of global efforts to digitize economies and create new economic opportunities that extend to hard-to-reach populations. Catalyst will support these efforts by focusing on the challenge of making everyday purchases cashless.

Veterans of the war on cash in action

Who are the institutions behind this decisive attack on cash? Upon the presentation of the Beyond-Cash-report, USAID declared: “Over 35 key Indian, American and international organizations have partnered with the Ministry of Finance and USAID on this initiative.” On the website catalyst.org one can see that they are mostly IT- and payment service providers who want to make money from digital payments or from the associated data generation on users. Many are veterans of,what a high-ranking official of Deutsche Bundesbank called the “war of interested financial institutions on cash” (in German). They include the Better Than Cash Alliance, the Gates Foundation (Microsoft), Omidyar Network (eBay), the Dell Foundation Mastercard, Visa, Metlife Foundation.
The Better Than Cash Alliance

The Better Than Cash Alliance, which includes USAID as a member, is mentioned first for a reason. It was founded in 2012 to push back cash on a global scale. The secretariat is housed at the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDP) in New York, which might have its reason in the fact that this rather poor small UN-organization was glad to have the Gates-Foundation in one of the two preceding years and the Master-Card-Foundation in the other as its most generous donors.

The members of the Alliance are large US-Institutions which would benefit most from pushing back cash, i.e. credit card companies Mastercard and Visa, and also some US-institutions whose names come up a lot in books on the history of the United States intelligence services, namely Ford Foundation and USAID. A prominent member is also the Gates-Foundation. Omidyar Network of eBay-founder Pierre Omidyar and Citi are important contributors. Almost all of these are individually also partners in the current USAID-India-Initiative to end the reliance on cash in India and beyond. The initiative and the Catalyst-program seem little more than an extended Better Than Cash Alliance, augmented by Indian and Asian organizations with a strong business interest in a much decreased use of cash.

Reserve Bank of India’s IMF-Chicago Boy

The partnership to prepare the temporary banning of most cash in India coincides roughly with the tenure of Raghuram Rajan at the helm of Reserve Bank of India from September 2013 to September 2016. Rajan (53) had been, and is now again, economics professor at the University of Chicago. From 2003 to 2006 he had been Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington. (This is a cv-item he shares with another important warrior against cash, Ken Rogoff.) He is a member of the Group of Thirty, a rather shady organization, where high ranking representatives of the world major commercial financial institutions share their thoughts and plans with the presidents of the most important central banks, behind closed doors and with no minutes taken. It becomes increasingly clear that the Group of Thirty is one of the major coordination centers of the worldwide war on cash. Its membership includes other key warriers like Rogoff, Larry Summers and others.

Raghuram Rajan has ample reason to expect to climb further to the highest rungs in international finance and thus had good reason to play Washington’s game well. He already was a President of the American Finance Association and inaugural recipient of its Fisher-Black-Prize in financial research. He won the handsomely endowed prizes of Infosys for economic research and of Deutsche Bank for financial economics as well as the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Prize for best economics book. He was declared Indian of the year by NASSCOM and Central Banker of the year by Euromoney and by The Banker. He is considered a possible successor of Christine Lagard at the helm of the IMF, but can certainly also expect to be considered for other top jobs in international finance.

As a Central Bank Governor, Rajan was liked and well respected by the financial sector, but very much disliked by company people from the real (producing) sector, despite his penchant for deregulation and economic reform. The main reason was the restrictive monetary policy he introduced and staunchly defended. After he was viciously criticized from the ranks of the governing party, he declared in June that he would not seek a second term in September. Later he told the New York Times that he had wanted to stay on, but not for a whole term, and that premier Modi would not have that. A former commerce and law Minister, Mr. Swamy, said on the occasion of Rajan’s  departure that it would make Indian industrialists happy:

I certainly wanted him out, and I made it clear to the prime minister, as clear as possible. (…) His audience was essentially Western, and his audience in India was transplanted westernized society. People used to come in delegations to my house to urge me to do something about it.

A disaster that had to happen

If Rajan was involved in the preparation of this assault to declare most of Indians’ banknotes illegal – and there should be little doubt about that, given his personal and institutional links and the importance of Reserve Bank of India in the provision of cash – he had ample reason to stay in the background. After all, it cannot have surprised anyone closely involved in the matter, that this would result in chaos and extreme hardship, especially for the majority of poor and rural Indians, who were flagged as the supposed beneficiaries of the badly misnamed “financial-inclusion”-drive. USAID and partners had analysed the situation extensively and found in the Beyond-Cash-report that 97% of transactions were done in cash and that only 55% of Indians had a bank account. They also found that even of these bank accounts, “only 29% have been used in the last three months“.

All this was well known and made it a certainty that suddenly abolishing most cash would cause severe and even existential problems to many small traders and producers and to many people in remote regions without banks. When it did, it became obvious, how false the promise of financial inclusion by digitalization of payments and pushing back cash has always been. There simply is no other means of payment that can compete with cash in allowing everybody with such low hurdles to participate in the market economy.

However, for Visa, Mastercard and the other payment service providers, who were not affected by these existential problems of the huddled masses, the assault on cash will most likely turn out a big success, “scaling up” digital payments in the “trial region”. After this chaos and with all the losses that they had to suffer, all business people who can afford it, are likely to make sure they can accept digital payments in the future. And consumers, who are restricted in the amount of cash they can get from banks now, will use opportunities to pay with cards, much to the benefit of Visa, Mastercard and the other members of the extended Better Than Cash Alliance.

Why Washington is waging a global war on cash

The business interests of the US-companies that dominate the gobal IT business and payment systems are an important reason for the zeal of the US-government in its push to reduce cash use worldwide, but it is not the only one and might not be the most important one. Another motive is surveillance power that goes with increased use of digital payment. US-intelligence organizations and IT-companies together can survey all international payments done through banks and can monitor most of the general stream of digital data. Financial data tends to be the most important and valuable.
Even more importantly, the status of the dollar as the worlds currency of reference and the dominance of US companies in international finance provide the US government with tremendous power over all participants in the formal non-cash financial system. It can make everybody conform to American law rather than to their local or international rules. German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has recently run a chilling story describing how that works (German). Employees of a Geran factoring firm doing completely legal business with Iran were put on a US terror list, which meant that they were shut off most of the financial system and even some logistics companies would not transport their furniture any more. A major German bank was forced to fire several employees upon US request, who had not done anything improper or unlawful.

There are many more such examples. Every internationally active bank can be blackmailed by the US government into following their orders, since revoking their license to do business in the US or in dollars basically amounts to shutting them down. Just think about Deutsche Bank, which had to negotiate with the US treasury for months whether they would have to pay a fne of 14 billion dollars and most likely go broke, or get away with seven billion and survive. If you have the power to bankrupt the largest banks even of large countries, you have power over their governments, too. This power through dominance over the financial system and the associated data is already there. The less cash there is in use, the more extensive and secure it is, as the use of cash is a major avenue for evading this power.
 

The original source of this article is Norbert Haering

Copyright © Norbert Haering, Norbert Haering, 2017

புத்திர சோகம் சம்பந்தனுக்கு இட்ட சாபம்!

 

 

 

* '' எங்களுக்கெல்லாம் அள்ளிவைச்ச நீ நாசமா போ`` !

 

* ``எங்கள் பிள்ளைகள் விடுதலைக்கு நல்லதொரு தீர்வைத் தா`` !

 

கொடும் பாவி சம்பந்தனின் உருவம் எரிகிறது (மக்கள் குரல் ஓங்கி ஒலிக்கிறது..)

 

* `` எல்லா News  உம் கேள், எல்லா  Channel உம் பார்`` !

 

* `` எங்கட பிள்ளைகள விடு`` !

 

* `` பொய் கதைக்காதே, உன் வாயில் இருந்து வருகிறதெல்லாம் பொய்`` !

 

* `` வயசு போன நேரத்திலும் பதவி  ஆசை உனக்கு`` !

 

* `` விடு பிள்ளைகளை`` !

 

* `` உனக்கு (அடுத்த) ஜென்மம் ஒன்றையே கடவுள்  கொடுக்கக் கூடாது`` !

 

* `` கடவுள்  கொடுத்தாலும் நாங்கள் விடமாட்டோம் ``!

 

* `` எம் பிள்ளைகளை விடு, இல்லையேல் ஜனவரி 15 இல் எமது போராட்டம் தொடரும் `` .

 

 



புதிய ஈழம்: உயிர் மாய்த்த பாரத விவசாயிகளுக்கு ஈழத்தின் துயர அஞ...

புதிய ஈழம்: உயிர் மாய்த்த பாரத விவசாயிகளுக்கு ஈழத்தின் துயர அஞ...

World War III is on its way, says poll of Western countries

World War III is on its way, says poll of Western countries

 The YouGov survey of 9,000 people across nine countries found popular opinion thinks world peace has rarely been further away.

 © Provided by Independent Print Limited 

World War Three is just around the corner and the planet is teetering on the brink of all-out conflict – according to people in major Western nations, at least.

A new poll shows the public are somewhat gloomy about the future, fearing a “worldwide conflict” is looming.

With superpowers backing different sides in the bloody conflict in Syria, Isis continuing to fight in the Middle East, a spate of terrorist attacks across the globe and Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump both talking a tough game, the YouGov survey of 9,000 people across nine countries found popular opinion thinks world peace has rarely been further away.

People in the US were most likely to predict a world war, while French, German and British people were also pessimistic.

Some 64 per cent of Americans think the world is close to a major war, compared to just 15 who think world peace is likely.

Britons are only slightly more hopeful: 19 per cent believe peace is possible but 61 per cent say war is a distinct possibility.

In contrast, people in Nordic countries including Sweden, Finland and Norway were much less inclined to believe the world is on the brink of war. Denmark had the population most cheerful about the prospects of peace: 39 per cent of Danes predicted world peace compared to 45 per cent forecasting the opposite.

Anthony Wells, YouGov’s director of political and social research, said: “Fear seems the highest in the US and France, but for different reasons.

"American fears perhaps reflect some people’s uncertainly about the impending Trump Presidency.
“For France, I suspect fears are linked more to the threat of terrorism – the French public were the least likely to see Russia as a hostile threat to the EU, but by far the most likely to think that there would be another major terrorist attack on their country in the year ahead."

The same survey revealed people in Europe and America tended to see Russia as a major military threat, with British people the most fearful of Moscow even though other countries polled, such as Finland and Germany, are much closer geographically to the former Soviet Union.

Some 71 per cent of Britons feel threatened by Russia, compared to 59 per cent of Americans – the lowest of all the countries polled.

In every nation except Finland, those surveyed thought a terrorist attack in their country was more likely than unlikely in the next year.

French people were most concerned about terrorism, with 81 per cent believing an attack would happen compared to just 11 per cent predicting there would be none.

An attack was also predicted by a large majority of people in Britain, Germany and the US. In Finland, however, only 26 per cent of people forecast a terrorist strike with 63 per cent saying such an event was unlikely.

© Provided by Independent Print Limited

மார்க்சிய அறிவகம்: Stalin on Sovereignty of the People

மார்க்சிய அறிவகம்: Stalin on Sovereignty of the People: File Photo: J.V.Stalin 1900 J. V. Stalin The Autocracy of the Cadets or the Sovereignty of the People ? March 13, 1907 Who should...