As much as I agree with your post in general, what reason is there for the €500 note apart from stuffing as much value into a briefcase as possible?
Second, with inflation, what seems to be a high sum today may not seem so 15 years down the road.
Third, many suspect that after outlawing largest bills we will go to prohibiting largest remaining, etc.
It's already outlawed in most EU countries. In Italy the maximum cash payment is 3000 euro. In France, 1000 euro. Especially real estate is great for laundering money if cash payment is allowed.
> Second, with inflation, what seems to be a high sum today may not seem so 15 years down the road.
Inflation in the Eurozone is essentially at zero.
I am all for curbing criminal activities (somehow suspecting big ones are few steps ahead anyway), but these things have consequences for rest of the folks too.
Considering how cheques are usually welcomed in France, I strongly disagree with you. And, if a normal cheque isn't accepted, you can step into your bank and ask a bank-cheque, which is the top. Sure, you have to go to the bank, but it's just for big payments, so not that often.
How could this possibly stop any real crime?
Is there example usages of this law?
I've bought computer hardware here that totaled more then 1k when k was setting up a few services. How would that even work since it was online in France?
In France, if you don't have a bank account, you don't exist :-) Seriously, everybody just assumes you have a bank account. Otherwise, it looks fishy.
> How could this possibly stop any real crime?
Directly: hold-up is pointless with no cash. Cheques are useless and credit cards can be easily blocked.
Indirectly: the whole point of banning cash is to prevent untraceable financial transactions from being performed. This is supposed to be annoying for criminal activities.
> How would that even work since it was online in France?
I'm not sure I got your question. Please keep in mind that the threshold is on _cash_ transactions, not on every transaction. As far as it is traceable, no amount is forbidden.
And the maximum withdrawal is 1000 euros. At last, credit cards have begun to spread.
Its because one keeps repeating a lie that it makes it true.
I can't imagine why a government, while deciding its political action, should consider the opinion of someone who doesn't trust them anyway :-)
That said, the €500 note thing is a bit of a red herring (I've never seen one in my life BTW). This is just the thin end of the wedge. The greater goal is to make cash as unattractive as possible to nudge (or force) people to use surveilled electronic cash, so as to better enforce negative interest rates, bail-ins and redenomination.
This is just the thin end of the wedge
Is this paranoia? I don't know, ask the people in Cyprus, Greece and Portugal.
Jokes aside cash is (IMO) very important. If you have cash in your pocket you are not vulnerable to.. how to say this.. "being fucked over" by your government or, as is the case lately, someone else's government or corporation (my mother had this happen with her paycheck). This obviously ensures the basic freedom that is more and more threatened in the modern "civilized" world.
And, again, it feels good to have cash with you. That cash represents your hard work and that hard work is quantifiable by the quantity (and color) of bills.
On a more personal note, i'd like to get paid in cash 'cuz banks are the biggest pieces of.. they are bad people doing (mostly) bad things legally.
edit: Here's a story; We had a debt with a company. That debt we settled quid pro quo as that company did some damage to our apartment. After a while that company got bought by another company and soon after we got a letter that said that we owe them money (with interest calculated in, ofc). That fell on my mother as her name was on the contract. She, being the "don't make trouble" kind of person, didn't want to sue them (and we didn't have much money to pay lawyers at the time), although she would probably win. The way those kinds of debts are payed in my country is by them sitting on your paycheck (you can pay them in cash, ofc). That goes through the government financial agency. Thing is that the amount payed shouldn't go over 2/3 of the pay you get, for obvious reasons. But said agency took her whole pay.
In other words: To whoever downvoted without explaining why s/he downvoted, you are probably a financially safe person that knows what to do (or your lawyer knows what to do) when stuff like this happens. Or in yet other words: go f yourself.
Indeed, exactly the same thing could have happened if you'd paid the debt in cash with no record of the transaction, whereas a recorded bank transfer would be hard for them to conveniently forget about.
Basically any time I've had to use 200€ or 500€ notes they have basically gone quite directly from bank -> my wallet/envelope -> give some guy (buying an used car for example). The same operation could have been done easily with 50€ or 100€ notes. 500€ notes just makes it easier use/harder to spot usage of large amounts of cash. If you are doing it legally you aren't loosing anything by using 20, 50 or 100€ notes.
But I also like to keep an "emergency fund" of high denomination currency in a spare hidden wallet, in that wallet I have 10x£50, 1x€500 and 10x500SEK.
My wallet would be easier to carry if I had just one of each note type instead of 10.
Is this legal?
I ask because usually they have to accept them by law but can refuse change or something like that.
Some places limit the number of coins you can use (there were people paying fines with hundreds of coins).
Stuffing as much in as possible does make sense. In to ATMs. Central banks have crazy trouble bringing new notes into circulation, and it costs as much to fill an ATM with 1000 €5 notes as it does to fill it with as many €20 notes.
Why should a bank fill in ATM with 5s when it can fill it with 20s? Incentives, for sure. IIRC 5s had an average life of 3 months in circulation, though the linked article suggests is is now 6 months. Larger value notes have a longer life (because smaller notes exist).
Banks have a lot of incentive to push higher value notes into ATMs, while central banks have a big desire no not let this happen all of the time.
If you're a larger business and have a good relationship with your bank, you're likely able to gain a discount on fees or the price of cash for your effort to get smaller value money into circulation. For example, if you operate machines that give paper cash in change (depending on country and regulatory environment).
So these people pay everything in cash. While removing the €500 note might not impact them much, I think the €200 and lower notes are very convenient for them.
In India, those numbers would probably be much higher than in most other parts of the world.
The Indian government launched a scheme called Income Declaration Scheme 2016 [0] so that people could declare their undisclosed income.
It was recently followed by a notification [1] stating that taxes resulting from such declarations could be paid in cash.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_declaration_scheme%2C_2...
[1] https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/notification/PDFs/NT623376E...
The alternative to flight is fight.. The more you deprive someone of options in one direction the more often they take options in the other direction. But what kind of cold, sick people would like small arms skirmishes so much that they would fund bias towards them in international policy over decades under the guises like a pathological fear of chemicals?
If you're OK with the government keeping track of all but the most trivial financial transaction to protect against tax fraud and organised crime, why would you not be OK with them keeping track of your phone calls and where your car is (ANPR)?
I paid for my first car in cash because of that. It was idiotic, but physical money beats bureaucratic idiocy.