Posted on 12/17/2019 8:37:59 AM PST by SeekAndFind
You had one job.
Technically, bankers have a lot of different jobs, but in the end, they all come down to one basic skill: Knowing where all the money is, all the time.
The big vaults? The armed guards? The monthly statements? The paperwork... the endless paperwork? All of those things, and even the serious suits they wear, are supposed to send a message: We can account for your money, right down to the penny.
Things get more complicated at the macroscale, where the Federal Reserve and other nations' central banks operate. Their job is to know so much about the economy that they can reliably change the number of dollars, and their value and flow, in order to keep things running as smoothly as possible. If the Fed prints too many dollars, we might get a nasty bout of inflation. Too few, and nobody can take out a loan to buy a house or start a new business. They fine-tune interest rates, they provide liquidity when needed, and soak up excess liquidity when that's called for. Sometimes they just conjure up a few trillion dollars without ever bothering to print them, in order to paper over bad times without any actual paper money. Weird, eh?
ASIDE: Whether central banks are any good at this, or whether any organization anywhere should have that kind of power, is a discussion for another day. Central bankers are, at least in theory, some very smart and extremely knowledgeable people. So what's a central banker to do when they print up a few hundred billion dollars and then watch them... vanish?
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
This phenomenon isn’t limited to the U.S., either. In the same report, WSJ’s David Winning and James Glynn tell the story of Philip Lowe, governor of Australia’s central bank, who “estimated that about $2,000 in printed bills exists for every Australian.” Where most of it actually is, is the mystery.
I don’t think I’ve ever even seen that much cash all at once, outside of a mobster movie. And yet there are approximately 51,104,400,000 Australian dollars floating around out there, somewhere.
New Zealand’s central bank can only account for the whereabouts of about a quarter of the country’s cash holdings. The rest is... elsewhere.
Well, a small portion of it, anyway...
“She’s so fine, there’s no telling where the money went”
George Soros.
The wealthy are hiding it. Ask Lizzie or Bernie.
I swear...I’m NOT hiding the missing cash. Honest!
LMAO.
A lot of someones doesn’t trust electronic systems it would seem to me.
Piles of literal paper money sitting in private vaults around the world.
Not an encouraging thing to hear, but I can’t say I blame them, whoever they are.
We’re not out of the woods yet from what began in late 2007, may not be in our lifetimes.
I was at a Trader Joe’s Grocery store last week - it was 11:00 AM and my Cashier said she did not have one cash sale that day. 100% payments by Credit Cards.
1.7 Billion in CASH went to Iran.
Maybe they should look there.
TITLE: China’s march to be the world’s first cashless society
(EXCERPT)
China, the nation that introduced the world to banknotes, is now setting the pace in the competition to become the first cashless society.
Already by 2017, more than three-quarters of Chinese people were using digital payments in preference to cash, and the number was rising fast.
Now, the central bank and other financial authorities have announced they want to spread the benefits of going cashless to the four out of 10 people in China who still live in rural areas.
The focus on agricultural communities will put a further dent in the perception that electronic payments are the preserve of prosperous urban millennials.
In global terms, China is behind Sweden, which aims to go completely cashless as early as 2023. However, the growth in non-cash payments in China is much more significant, given its population size.
The Chinese have, to an extent, leapfrogged the credit and debit card revolution that overtook advanced economies in the last century, with most of new adopters using mobile technology to go cashless.
As payments processor Worldpay said in its 2018 global payments report highlighting China’s boundless growth opportunities in the sector: “China presents a payment landscape shaped by consumers that came of age in a digital and mobile-first world. Mobile wallets dominate Chinese payments unlike anywhere else on the planet.”
The report noted that almost two-thirds of online sales and more than one third of payments in stores were now made through leading mobile wallet operators including Alipay and WeChat Pay.
OK. I confess. It’s me. I’ve got all the money. I was hoping they wouldn’t notice it was missing.
A lot of it is still sitting on pallets in Tehran.
I have lots of clients with cash businesses. Couple I know real well have $75-100k in home safes. Some use it to buy stuff like antique cars or large gun collections and they pay cash.
A barber friend of mine owns his own shop, said every 3rd haircut he pockets the cash.
Obama sent plane-loads of cash to Iran.
Hey TexasKamaAina, great to hear things are going well for you! Can we meet for coffee? I have some good investment ideas to discuss! ;-)
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