War on Cash Puts ECB, EU on Collision Course with Germany

Bundesbank: It’s a war on personal freedom and choice.
By Don Quijones, Spain & Mexico, editor at WOLF STREET.
Relations between Germany, and the ECB have curdled in recent times over a key issue: the role of cash. Germans have a soft spot for physical lucre while the ECB and Europe’s executive branch, the European Commission, have openly expressed their desire to suppress, or even punish, its use.
For Germany’s central bank, the Bundesbank, the war on cash is a war on personal freedom and choice, in the name of saving a financial system and its absurd negative interest rates. Last year Bundesbank president Jens Weidmann warned that it would be ‘disastrous’ if people started to believe cash would be abolished – an oblique reference to the risk of negative interest rates and the escalating war on cash triggering a run on cash.
In Germany, trust in Europe’s financial institutions is already at a historic low, with only one in three Germans saying they have confidence in the ECB. That was before ECB president Mario Draghi gave an infamous speech in May last year laying much of the blame for the Eurozone’s weak economy on Germans’ proclivity to save, rather than splash out on foreign imports or invest in the stock market.

This post was published at Wolf Street by Don Quijones ‘ Apr 7, 2017.