Dollars and Sense

And in other news, Sweden plans to be entirely cashless by 2030. More people than not are using plastic to pay for goods and services, and I admit, I count myself among them—for big ticket items that require some time to pay off in full. (Remember, I live from paycheque to paycheque.) And though my Starbucks card is on automatic renewal, I prefer to use cash for my café habit. Small amounts call for a fiver, or coin of some kind … and what about the office water club? I manage that account, and I can’t see me going wireless to collect dues, even though most of the members must make a special trip to the bank when I send out the bi-monthly bills.

Is it good to abolish cash in favour of electronic transactions? If money makes the world go around—and it does—I hesitate to entrust all of mine to technology. Aside from the familiar glitches that occur when Mercury is in retrograde or the network crashes due to high volume usage, what happens when the power goes out? I saw Goldeneye. I know what an electromagnetic pulse is. We depend so heavily on electricity, and now we’re practically helpless without our computers. A systems hiccup recently sent all the folks in my office to an early lunch because we couldn’t do our jobs with dead rigs.

I, Robot indeed.

Years ago, during a treatment  with my voodoo medicine man, he told me of a town in Japan where they have no technology at all, where transactions are handwritten on paper and people actually speak to each other instead of texting or emailing or whatever. His point was the irony of such a backward community existing within the borders of a technological superpower, but I stumped him.

I said, “That’s brilliant. If I wanted to rule the world, I’d make sure my people could function without the technology I sold to everyone else, then I’d do the EMP thing and kill all access to, heck, everything.”

Money has not always come in the form as we know it, but there has always been a tangible way to pay for goods and services. Debit and credit cards do not deal in tangibles, so when global systems crash for whatever reason, be it terrorism or act of God, the world had better have stashed some cash in the vault or we won’t be able to buy our morning coffee.

And that will make us all very crabby.

Billions and Billions

It’s taken me a few days to process this headline:

“Canadians are Hoarding $75 Billion in Cash”.

We are? I dunno about you, but I live from paycheque to paycheque. The only bills I hoard bear no likeness to monarchs or prime ministers; they’re all stamped with corporate logos and bear a “balance owing” at the bottom of the page.

Yet a recent report issued by CIBC Economics claims that Canadians are losing money because we’re saving rather than investing.

Question: How can we lose money that we haven’t made?

Answer: We can’t.

When the CEO of a money-grubbing corporate giant says we’re losing money, he means we’re losing the potential for money. How the number 75 billion was arrived at, I have no idea. I’m no economist. I have no degree in financial engineering. I just know that cash works, and when I don’t have a lot to spare, I’m less likely to entrust what remains to a smiley smooth-talker who promises to invest it for me, then up and disappears with the proceeds, leaving me with less than I had when I started.

I can be a little cynical about these things.

According to the CIBC report, cash holding by Canadians has increased by 11% since the Wall Street crash in 2008, and it’s hurting our economy.

In the first place, can you blame us?

In the second, uh … no. The people who run the economy are hurting our economy.

Fact: the economy is not an act of God. It is controlled by humans; a chosen and mysterious few fat cats who probably earn more in a day from other people’s investments than the investors do.

I’m not saying that all financial institutions are evil. Then again, the days of the Bailey Brothers Savings and Loan are long gone. With all the bank/investment company merging going on, it’s inevitable that all the money in the world will eventually be ruled by a single global entity, probably based in Greece to help them feel better about going bankrupt last year.

What grinds my gears is the twist on the truth employed by gigantic money-making agencies to fool us into parting with our cash. My first glance at that headline had me asking where the dollars had gone. Losing $75 billion is a whopping big accounting gaffe—until I realized that the funds aren’t really lost. They have yet to and may never exist. I’m sure as heck unlikely to see any of it in my savings account anytime soon.