Recent high-profile cyber security breaches at Equifax and other financial institutions highlight the perils of an all-digital economy. When wealth can be evaporated or expropriated at the stroke of a key, how secure can your finances really be?

Obviously, there is a big difference between wealth you can tangibly hold and wealth that exists only in electronic form.

One advantage of paper cash is that it can’t be hacked or stolen digitally. Paper money isn’t by any means hard money like gold and silver, but it does at least provide some of the privacy and convenience features that come with tangible assets. That’s why bankers and bureaucrats want to ultimately ban the use of paper Federal Reserve Notes and force all cash transactions to go online.

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal suggested, “reducing the supply of cash in the U.S. could help lower crime and make the Fed’s job easier.” Limiting our access to cash... to help monetary central planners do their job – somehow it didn’t occur to the Founders to enshrine that principle into the Constitution!

Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, says eliminating $50 and $100 bills is necessary to reduce tax evasion and black-market transactions.

According to Rogoff, “Another advantage of eliminating large bills would be the effect on monetary policy. The Federal Reserve should be able to implement negative nominal interest rates vastly more effectively in the absence of large bills, which could prove quite important as a stimulative tool in the next financial crisis.”

A negative interest rate policy is effectively a tax on holding cash in a bank. But the policy doesn’t work so well when people can hold paper cash and thus escape the negative rate exaction.

The war on cash is proceeding in small steps, with lots of nudging from corporate America. Visa has launched a “Cashless Challenge” to incentivize small businesses to stop accepting paper currency. “Visa is helping lead the cashless movement by working to reshape how people pay and get paid,” the credit card giant boasts.

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