The campaign against extreme cash is gaining momentum

I’m veery much in favour of getting rid of “extreme cash”. What I mean by this is cash at the extremes of the value range: the small coins and the big notes. In the UK, this means getting rid of the coppers and the largest banknote. So… hurrah! I read that the UK government is considering phasing out 1p and 2p coins, as well as £50 notes, in a bid to tackle tax evasion, money laundering and waste.

Since I’ve been going on about this for more than two decades I’m delighted to see that the government is finally coming around to my way of thinking. I read some newspaper reports that the government is to begin consultations on the subject, but I haven’t heard from them yet and I can’t imagine who else they might consider asking, so I stand ready to answer the nation’s call when as soon as it comes.

The issue of coins is a no-brainer. Back in 2014, I asked whether it is in the interests of the economy as a whole to continue to produce these small coins, saying that "I have no idea why the Royal Mint are messing about wasting our money on making 1p and 2p coins that nobody uses any more. It’s about time we recognised low-value coins for what they are. Scrap metal”. Five years ago I pointed out that in many countries, merchants and consumers alike had simply given up using small coins (such as the one- and two-cent euro coins) whether the mints produced them or not. When Nigel Lawson abolished the old halfpenny in 1984 it had a purchasing power close to the current 2p and there was no contactless. So I fully expect to see the 1p and 2p vanish, and if the government caves to the metals lobby to perpetuate them, which case I will be outraged.

I think the consultation around the £50 note will be more interesting, since there is "a perception among some that £50 notes are used for money laundering, hidden economy activity, and tax evasion”. I’ll say there is. Of the £ billions of notes and coins “in circulation” in the UK, which were in 2016 growing at 5.7% in a year when the economy grew by about 1.8% and the use of cash in retail transactions (retail spending grew 5.2%) was overtaken by the use of electronic payments, a fifth is in the form of £50 notes, which you never see in polite society. As I have discussed exhaustively and on many occasions, only about a quarter of the Bank of England’s notes are used for transactional purposes so these £50 notes must be disproportionately concentrated in the non-transactional (i.e., largely criminal) uses. As everywhere else, high-value banknotes are a major cause for concern. So why not make crime, terrorism, drug dealing, money laundering and bribing corrupt politicians marginally less convenient and marginally more expensive by getting rid of high-value banknotes? It is not only deranged digital money deviants like me who think this is right path to take, by the way. This kind of thinking is beginning to percolate up to the higher echelons of the financial establishment. Mario Draghi, European Central Bank president, told the European Parliament that “we are determined not to make seigniorage a comfort for criminals". By which he means that the stack of £50 notes underneath the Mafia boss’ pillow are earning interest for the British government. The government is, in a very real sense, living off of the proceeds of crime.

Now, I’m not so stupid that I think that getting rid of the £50 will stop crime! If the government drops the £50, then the criminals will carry on using the $100, €200 and the worst offender, the Swiss Franc. Sooner or later the law-abiding nations of the world will have to institute sanctions against the Swiss. When I last went to Switzerland and I never saw a CHF note or coin: I used cards everywhere, and as far as I could see so did everyone else. Yet Switzerland has a CHF1,000. That’s right: a banknote worth $1,000. And you can spend it, too. Mind you, the Swiss have been cracking down: since 2016, you have had to show ID (how they verify the ID is beyond me) for cash transactions of $100,000 or more (Charles Goodhart, a former Bank of England policy maker, said this limit was so high that it could only be described as a joke).

Am I taking crazy pills? The Bank of England, the Swiss National Bank, the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve should not be competing to be the currency of choice for Mexican drug lords, Albanian people traffickers and Syrian terrorist groups. So yes, let’s ditch the £50 but let’s also spearhead an international campaign to add morality to the cash issue and reduce the maximum value of the circulating medium of exchange to EUR 50, USD 50 and CHF 50. If the central banks won’t do it, then we should prosecute their governors for conspiracy to support money laundering.