[ctdonath2]

Most “money” is debt. Stocks constitute hypothetical value, manifesting ONLY when someone actually sells it to another actually paying money for it. Bonds and other “instruments” are, literally, debt. Even the “cash” in your checking account is debt: the bank owes you, and assumes they’ll actually have cash on hand should you “cash out”.

Old aphorism: “bad money drives out good”. Cash currency is good money; debt currency is bad money. Those holding “good money” want to keep it, so they do everything they can to _not_ hand it over to others. By restricting access to cash (you can’t even expect to walk into a bank and empty your checking account, limited to $X,000/day withdraws), adding fees for handling cash, and otherwise discouraging its use, the banks persuade customers to make “debt money” (reassignment of who-owes-whom numbers) their norm and, thus, the bad money drives out good.

It’s even gotten to the point that a discovery of ANY abnormally large cache of cash is presumed ill-gotten contraband and subject to immediate confiscation, putting burden of proof on the now-denied owner that it is not the result of criminal activity. You can’t keep, say, a year’s salary on hand literally under your mattress.

Darkly amusing: we’ve gone thru this before. Used to be the dollar was gold-backed, with far more paper currency in circulation than the gold available to pay it all off. Finally, after decreasing gold holdings and increasing friction to access it, the link was finally dropped entirely. We survived (for now).

[SkyPilot]

Most "money" is debt. Stocks constitute hypothetical value, manifesting ONLY when someone actually sells it to another actually paying money for it. Bonds and other "instruments" are, literally, debt. Even the "cash" in your checking account is debt: the bank owes you, and assumes they'll actually have cash on hand should you "cash out".

Yes.

And if you go to the bank tomorrow and take out $4,000, I guarantee you the bank will send a report to the Federal authorities. The $10,000 threshold went out the window with the Patriot Act, and Obama's thugs have been threatening banks that don't send alert reports, so the banks send them all the time now for much less amounts. Remember, "structuring" is how they convicted former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. He paid off the blackmail using his own money, but they busted him using "structuring."

"Banks must also report transactions that are less than $10,000 when they believe that the dollar amount of those transactions was specifically chosen to avoid triggering the Bank Secrecy Act. Federal regulations refer to these as "structured" transactions. Withdrawing $9,990 will probably raise a red flag as a potentially structured transaction. In fact, any transaction, regardless of the amount, that the bank deems suspicious can trigger a report."