It’s time to kill the $100 bill

Now come the calls for the slow death of cash in America:

 

Harvard’s Mossavar Rahmani Center for Business and Government, which I am privileged to direct, has just issued an important paper by senior fellow Peter Sands and a group of student collaborators. The paper makes a compelling case for stopping the issuance of high denomination notes like the 500 euro note and $100 bill or even withdrawing them from circulation.

The War on Cash Is Going Completely Nuts in Europe

Austria is where the Sovereign Debt Crisis began with a bank failure in 1931. Today, Austria continues to have a raging controversy over the abolition of bank secrecy. Just look at how far they are going against the citizens because of bank mismanagement, once again, and it is scaring the hell out of a lot of people behind the curtain. The government is monitoring taxpayers in a manner that will lead to the elimination of all private rights in the future. They are now introducing new laws, which forces all taxpayers to submit their fingerprints, as well as their IP e-mail addresses, to the tax office so that the government can track every piece of loose change.

Game changer: Swiss banks ditch secrecy

Switzerland, the world’s largest offshore wealth center, worth an estimated $2.2 trillion in assets, has signed an agreement to share financial information with nearly 60 other countries, which could completely change the country’s financial landscape.

The country has made a giant leap towards banking transparency after it signed a convention with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) agreeing to exchange data with 60 member countries.

Special Report: The battle for the Swiss soul

It has come to this: Swiss banks, under pressure from countries such as the United States, France and Germany, have been giving up their secrets, in some cases handing foreign tax authorities the names of their account holders. To avoid being blacklisted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Swiss government has agreed to share more information with foreign authorities hunting tax cheats.

The foreign assault has opened up a huge rift inside the fiercely independent Alpine nation.

Some bankers, as well as many academics and centrist and left-leaning politicians, think the country should bow to the inevitable and abandon strict secrecy. The pragmatists include big banks like UBS AG and Credit Suisse Group AG, which argue that to survive they have no choice but to surrender more information about their customers and close the accounts of those who won’t come clean.