A day which some feared would hopefully never come is drawing closer as the Riksbanken of Sweden (the world’s oldest central bank) is reportedly studying a cashless society for the country’s near future.
Already, up to 98 percent of all transactions taking place in Sweden do not involve cash, and the country is one of several Scandinavian nations that have tapered the use of currency to nearly zero through the use of electronic payments, credit cards and digital exchange systems.
Even though Sweden did just introduce a new series of banknotes, people are hardly using them. “I don’t use cash anymore, for anything,” explained Louise Henriksson, a teaching assistant. “You just don’t need it. Shops don’t want it; lots of banks don’t even have it. Even for a candy bar or a newspaper, you use a card or a phone.”
You’re not able to pay for either buses or trains with cash in Sweden, and retailers are legally able to refuse cash payments. Just 1 percent of all transactions in the country last year were paid for with cash; analysts predict this percentage will drop to .5 percent by 2020. For all retail transactions, only 20 percent were executed with cash, compared to 75 percent on average worldwide.
Most telling of all is that more than half of the country’s 1600 bank branches don’t keep cash on hand; they refuse deposits of cash, and many don’t even have ATMs. Niklas Arvidsson, an associate professor at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) specializing in payment systems, predicted, “I think, in practice, Sweden will pretty much be a cashless society within about five years.” Circulation of cash has fallen from 106 billion krona in 2009 to 80 billion in 2015.
Sweden was actually a pioneer in digital payments starting in the 1960s, with corporate employees receiving electronic bank transfers for their wages before most countries had even enabled them for bank-to-bank transactions.
In the 1990s, Swedish banks regularly began to implement fees for the use of checks, so the use of those instruments dropped rapidly. Debit and credit cards now make up the bulk of payment methods, with each card seeing about 207 transactions on average last year.
There are also mobile apps such as Swish, which was developed in unison by all the country’s major banks. It uses phone numbers to allow people to send amounts of money to one another. “Swish has pretty much killed cash for most people as far as person-to-person payments are concerned,” stated Arvidsson at KTH. “It has the same features as a cash payment — real-time clearing, the same as handing over a banknote. And it’s now making inroads into payments to businesses, too.”
Swish is currently used by half the country’s population and records 9 million transactions per month. In Denmark, a similar app, MobilePay, was used in some 90 million transactions last year in a country of 5.6 million people.
Street vendors have apps and accessories that plug into their smartphones that allow them to read electronic cards. Even the churches of Sweden have begun asking their parishioners for their phone numbers. A church in Stockholm last year said only 15 recent of its donations were made in cash.
Privacy advocates have been alarmed by this development as it would allow one central authority — the central bank, a government, intelligence agencies or all three — to oversee everyone’s transactions and to see exactly who was spending money on what and how much everyone’s digital balances were. It would be virtually impossible to hide money from the government or purchase anything “off the books.”
And this would be just the first step. Imagine a world where your digital assets would not be considered active unless you signed certain documents or agreed to let yourself be microchipped by the government. You might have to agree to behave a certain way or to join a political party; the options for totalitarian rule over citizens would be nearly limitless.
Recently, on television’s popular Dr. Oz talk show, host Dr. Mehmet Oz showed a system for microchipping people to “keep them healthier and safer.” Using radio frequency identification (RFID), a tiny implantable chip the size of a grain of rice can be implanted just under the skin of one’s wrist and contain bank, ID, medical, security and qualification information.
According to the segment reporter on the show, more than 10,000 people have already had the chips implanted in their bodies. Left unsaid was whether these people were ordinary citizens of, say, Sweden, or perhaps prisoners of concentration camps in North Korea.
The show tried to present convenience applications for the chips, such as opening electronic doors without a key or being able to be ID’d at a hospital even if you were unconscious, but the few advantages shown were a poor tradeoff for the amount of privacy you’d be expected to give up.
Also left unsaid was that once “chipped,” people would be able to be tracked and recorded wherever they went; unseen scanners could be placed everywhere and could track citizens’ movements virtually anywhere they went.
For authoritarian forces seeking to track people, chipping them would be a dream come true because current smart devices such as fitness trackers, cell phones and smart watches all have one big fallibility — their batteries ultimately go dead.
And so, until those devices get charged up again, their tracking is non-continuous. RFID chips need no batteries; instead, their nearby scanners use power to sense the chips.
All people mindful of their privacy, independence and security should be extremely concerned about these twin developments. Separately, they’re both cause for attention, but taken together, they’re alarming.
It’s clear that globalist forces would like nothing better than for everyone to be tracked, managed and automated like parts in a machine for the benefit of a very few wealthy and powerful elitists who would rule the world through enormous concentrations of computer processing and intelligence.
It’s important that those opposed to such a future actively demonstrate their revulsion to such systems while they’re still freely able to.
Regards,
Ethan Warrick
Editor
Wealth Authority
