A consortium of powerful interests that include Visa and Mastercard, the International Monetary Fund, billionaire Bill Gates and the US Treasury have been slowly lobbying for cash to be abolished worldwide and replaced with digital only currencies.

by Mohamed Elmaazi

Norbert Häring holds a PhD in economics and is co-founder and co-director of the World Economics Association, the second largest association of economists worldwide. Dr Häring is a financial journalist, blogger and author of popular books on economics.

His two most recent books covered the campaign to abolish cash. The latest “Schönes neues Geld” (Brave new money) published in German in 2018 just came out in Chinese.

Dr Häring initiated a lawsuit in 2015 for the right to pay his fees to public broadcasters in cash, which has since made its way to the European Court of Justice (CJEU)…

What the campaign to abolish cash is all about and who the main players are

Norbert Häring: Starting about 2005 the “war on cash”, as they were calling it, was just a declared business strategy of Visa and Mastercard to push back [against] the use of cash, because they see it as the main competitor for their credit cards. From about 2011 this kind of talk stopped completely.

Instead they entered into a coalition with the US-government, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Citibank and formed the Better Than Cash Alliance to pursue the elimination of cash. But now, they do it under the pretended goal of helping the poor by financially including them.

There are very many academic institutes, standard-setting institutions and governments that have been enlisted in this fight against cash, either with the money of Gates and the other members of the Better Than Cash Alliance or with the diplomatic muscle of the US-government, or both.

Why are they doing this?

Norbert Häring: The interest of the financial sector in selling their own products instead of cash is obvious. The IT-companies want the data that [goes] with digitalisation [of cash] and the US-government wants the surveillance and sanctioning power that goes with digitalisation of payments. The other countries that co-operate also like the aspect of gaining more surveillance power over their populations.

Sputnik: You’ve written about how India was used as a large-scale “guinea pig” in eliminating cash. Can you briefly describe what happened there and who was behind it?

Norbert Häring: In November 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi went on TV declaring all but the smallest denomination banknotes “demonetised” with only 4 hours’ notice. This meant you could not pay with them anymore. You had to bring them to the bank. This led to days of chaos and months of extreme dearth of cash in a country where half the population does not even have a bank account and 90 percent of payments are done in cash.

The pretended goal was to hurt those who hoarded [money from the black market]. That failed completely. Within weeks the government switched to the declared goal of “financial inclusion” and modernising the financial system. They planted stories in the media to make it seem that it was a small group of Indians around Modi who thought of this.

However, on my blog and in my book, I pointed to a host of very close “financial inclusion” cooperation of the Indian central bank with the Gates Foundation, the US-government and other US-anti-cash institutions.

Sputnik: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation appears to be one of the key actors in this push for a cashless world. Do we know why they seem so committed to this project?

Norbert Häring: If you think of Gates as a Microsoft person, there is the interest of Microsoft, and other US-IT-companies that are involved, in digitalising everything to do more business and to get more data. Financial data is among the most valuable data.

Bill Gates is also a prominent participant in many national security groups and gatherings. He clearly is a patriot, who holds US national security interests very close to his heart. And these are understood to be furthered by more data and more control about what the rest of the world is doing.

Are COVID-19 and ‘The Great Lockdown’ being used to further push the “war on cash”?

Norbert Häring: Yes, of course, it is used very much in this respect. Banks are running mailing and internet campaigns, telling their customers that cash is dirty and cards or mobile payment solutions are not. They do so despite the lack of any evidence that the virus can be transmitted via cash. Most health experts say that [cash] is not a relevant channel [for the virus].

Sputnik: What are your concerns about the world shifting away from cash. Isn’t it more convenient if we can all hold and make use of our currency digitally?

Norbert Häring: Sure, it is convenient. Nobody is keeping anybody from using digital money. I use it too. Only some businesses, who consider the fees of the financial institutions too high, will not accept digital money. That’s one reason, why these financial intermediaries want to do away with cash. So that they can raise their prices, which is not in our interest.

More importantly: everything that we pay [for] digitally is recorded, seen and stored by various service providers and ends up in our bank account information. If there is no possibility of using cash any more, our bank account information will be a near-complete log of our life. Anybody with the power to look into it, who develops an interest in us at any time, can see where we have been and what we did for every day and hour, decades into the past.

Many people correctly think that nobody with the power to do this will ever develop enough of an interest in them. However, they have to realise that it means something for them, too, if they have to live in a society, in which every person of any importance is totally transparent for the powerful and can thus be blackmailed or destroyed by them at will. This is inconsistent with democracy and a free society.

Sputnik: You are directly involved in a legal challenge over the ability to pay for the obligatory fee to the public broadcasters in Germany by using cash. The case will soon be heard by the European Court of Justice’s Grand Chamber. Can you briefly explain the significance of this case and why you have taken it to the EU’s highest court?

Norbert Häring: I did not quite take it to the ECJ myself. The case went up to the highest administrative court in Germany, the Bundesverwaltungsgericht. They agreed with me as regards German law, but were unsure about how German law conforms with European law and thus put the case in front of the highest EU court.

I am doing this because I want to defend the right to use cash and I found that many of the measures that are taken to make cash inconvenient and hard to use are in violation of the status of euro banknotes and coins as legal tender.

If I win, the anti-cash-campaigners will have it harder. Government agencies and offices – including the tax authority – will not be allowed any more to refuse to take cash, or to charge an extra fee for it, as they are increasingly doing. Measures like upper limits on cash payments will become quite questionable, legally, if I win. It might not be possible to introduce new ones, in this case.

How successful has the drive to go cashless been so far, is there resistance to it and if so where is it coming from?

Norbert Häring: It is a successful but slow process in most rich countries with functioning democracies, because people care a lot about their right to use cash. Because of this resistance of the population they can only use indirect measures, like regulations for banks that make cash more inconvenient and expensive for them, a cost, which they pass on to customers. There has even been a paper by the IMF that recommends such indirect measures to get around the resistance of the population.

Because the enemies of cash tread carefully, and politicians always protest that nobody wants to take away our cash, organised political resistance is not a big factor, yet.

On the Right, where people are more suspicious of government, there is some [resistance], because they see the threat to civil liberties. The Left, unfortunately, is totally naive in this regard.

In 2015, Häring initiated a lawsuit within the German court system for the right to pay his fees to public broadcasters in cash. Certain legal aspects of the case made their way to the European Court of Justice (CJEU).

On 26 January 2021, the Grand Chamber of the CJEU made its ruling and Häring spoke with Sputnik to discuss its implications.

What exactly did the European Court of Justice decide in its recent ruling regarding the ability of public authorities to curtail the use of cash?

Dr Norbert Häring: I had sued a public broadcaster for their refusal to let me pay the obligatory fee with the legal tender euro banknotes and coins. The highest German administrative court had asked the CJEU to clarify if national rules regulating the meaning of legal tender are still valid and – if not – what European law would say on the issue at hand.

The CJEU has ruled that national governments remain free to issue laws that would force all public entities, or even private ones, to accept euro cash, but also to pass laws which restrict this obligation to accept cash. The condition is that this cannot be done with the purpose of regulating what legal tender entails. It is a very complex ruling, with very questionable arguments, which I take to be a very political one.

It is best understood from the desired outcome, which is ex-post legalisation of existing restrictions on the acceptance of cash. The ruling is very close to the intervention of the EU Commission during the hearing, which was by far the most hostile to cash of all the interventions that were given. 

Sputnik: Where can we find the submissions made by the EU Commission in your case?

Dr Norbert Häring: The EU-Commission, the ECB and the governments of Germany, Italy and France submitted opinions during the proceedings. These were marked as confidential, so I cannot publish them.

Sputnik: What impact will the European Court’s decision have on the German courts in respect of your case?

Dr Norbert Häring: It is not clear, yet, what the impact on the final ruling of the German court will be. If the Bundesverwaltungsgericht were to follow the arguments of the CJEU very closely I would lose my case, since the CJEU sees a right to pay cash only for those who do not have a bank account. However, I am confident that the German court will judge the question of whether the restrictions to accepting cash are necessary and proportional in a way that is more favourable to my case. We will have to see.

How does this decision impact the “War on Cash” being pushed by the likes of Bill Gates, the IMF and various credit and banking institutions?

Dr Norbert Häring: On the supranational, European level the ruling has opened the gates for more restrictions. The EU Commission has reacted quickly and announced that they intend to push for a uniform upper limit for cash payments in the EU.

Sputnik: Would you consider this decision a victory for those who oppose the push towards a cashless society?

Dr Norbert Häring: Hardly. At best, if the Bundesverwaltungsgericht issues a cash-friendly ruling, the push to abolish cash is held up a bit in Germany. However, the good thing is that, this court case has contributed to bringing the war on cash into the open. In the longer term cash cannot be preserved if there is no public awareness of the issue and no public resistance.

What kinds of policies regarding cash and digitisation might we see emerging, now that the CJEU’s Grand Chamber has made this ruling?

Dr Norbert Häring: On the bad side, the EU Commission will feel emboldened to push for new restrictions [on the use of] cash. I don’t really want to imagine what they might come up with besides cash limits. They tend to be quite creative. On the positive side, the court has made it clear that national and even subnational laws and statutes which force establishments to accept cash are legal from a European perspective. So citizens can push for such laws now, as they have been enacted in various US states and communities already.

Sputnik: Is this the end of the road so far as your legal case is concerned?

Dr Norbert Häring: I am willing to go all the way to the German constitutional court, if necessary, i.e. if the Bundesverwaltungsgericht should not give due consideration to basic rights like privacy, protection of private property and freedom of contract. But I hope that this will not be necessary.

Sputnik: Has resistance to the “War on Cash” increased or changed in any way over the last year?

Dr Norbert Häring: Recently, Bundestag Vice-President Wolfgang Kubicki of the opposition party FDP announced his intention to propose a law, which would make it obligatory in Germany to accept Euro cash for payment. This would be a very useful initiative to get the public debate going about potential remedies to the anti-cash trend, which the majority of the population dislikes. – SputnikNews