Show me the money
In 2016, the latest year for which information is available, cash was used for 44% of all consumer transactions in the UK. That was down from 50% the previous year and from 68% a decade earlier. Victoria Cleland, Chief Cashier at the Bank of England says that the value of notes “in circulation” has been increasing year on year for the past decade or so and that “we are still seeing growth in total demand for cash.”
What on Earth are these notes being used for if they aren’t being used to buy things? This isn’t a UK problem. The latest figures from the Bundesbank show that nine out of every ten euro banknotes issued in Germany are never used in payments but hoarded at home and abroad as a store of value, the Bundesbank has found. Not “rarely”. Not “infrequently”. Never. The notes are not in circulation at all but are stuffed under mattresses.
Down under, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) Bulletin for September 2017 notes that the value of notes “in circulation” has gone up 6% per annum for the past decade while the use of has collapsed (from two-thirds of consumers payments down to one-third) over the same period. It goes on to note that higher cash usage may be concentrated in groups not included in the survey of consumers (who may well use cash more often than the average consumer) as well as the shadow economy.
Aha. The shadow economy.
A couple of years ago I was at an event where the Chief Cashier said that only about a quarter of the cash the Bank put’s into circulation is for “transactional purposes" (i.e., used). They have a richer categorisation than the Bundesbank for the rest of it, saying that it is either shipped overseas (i.e., exported), kept outside of the banking system (i.e., hoarded) or used to support the shadow economy (i.e., stashed).
Aha. Stashed.
I wrote a comment piece on this for The Guardian, looking at what the key drivers in each of them might be. The first, cash that is used, is easy. We know that the driver is technology but that the impact is weak. In other words, new technology does reduce the amount of cash in circulation, but very slowly. Moving on to the next category, I know it’s a rather simplistic analysis, but if the amount of cash that is being hoarded has been growing then that would tend to indicate that people have lost confidence in formal financial services or are happy to have loss, theft and inflation eat away their store of value while forgoing the safety and security of bank deposits irrespective of the value of the interest paid. If, on the other hand the amount of cash that is being stashed has been growing then the Bank of England is facilitating an increasing tax gap that the rest of us are having to pay for. In this context cash is a mechanism for greatly reducing the cost of criminality while it remains a penalty on the poor who have to shoulder an unfair proportion of the cost of cash. In this case, we should expect to see a strategy to change this obviously suboptimal element of policy.
The amount of cash that is being exported is hard to calculate, although the Bank itself does comment that the £50 note (which makes up a fifth of the cash out there by value) is “primarily demanded by foreign exchange wholesalers abroad”. I suppose some of this may be transactional use for tourists and business people coming to the UK, and I suppose some of it may be hoarded, but surely the strong suspicion must be that these notes are going into stashes. Note “primarily”.
My personal feeling is that stashes have grown at the expense of hoards. In a fascinating paper by Prof. Charles Goodhart (London School of Economics) and Jonathan Ashworth (UK economist at Morgan Stanley), they note that the ratio of currency to GDP in the UK has been rising and argue that the rapid growth in the shadow economy has been a key cause. If you look at the detailed figures, you can see that there was a jump in cash held outside of banks around about the time of the Northern Rock affair, but as public confidence in the banks was restored fairly quickly and the impact of low interest rates on hoarding behaviour seems pretty marginal, there must be some other explanation as to why the amount of cash out there kept rising. Two rather obvious factors that do seem to support the shape of the curve are the increase in VAT to 20% and the continuing rise in self-employment (this came up a couple of times in comments to The Guardian piece), both of which serve to reinforce the contribution of cash to the shadow economy.
There are a awful lot of people not paying tax and simple calculations will show that the tax gap that can be attributed to cash is vastly greater than the seigniorage earned by the Bank on the note issue. Cash makes the government (i.e. us) considerably worse off. In summary, I think think the Bank’s view on hoarding is generous and that it is the shadow economy fuelling the growth in cash “in circulation”. There’s something wrong about this, especially when we know that the cost of cash falls unfairly on the poor. It is time for Bank of England to develop an active strategy to start reducing the amount of cash in circulation, beginning with £50 notes.