EU-wide maximum limit of €10K for cash payments
consilium.europa.eu
consilium.europa.eu
Bizarre how the EU is penalizing everyone in order to 'make it harder for criminals to launder dirty money'.
People pay taxes in order to have their bureaucrats serve them by creating a safe financial and social environment, not to have them assume everyone is a criminal/terrorist and greatly impede access to their assets based on that logic.
The EU (formerly the 'common market') has become an authoritarian, autocratic monster.
It’s the easy way out imo, instead of employing expensive labour to actually catch criminals, and somehow society has been convinced that it’s ok.
I do think it’s a gradient and not black and white. Retail security scanners - ok fine, cameras everywhere - why?
if you usually keep 10k of cash in your pocket, you're probably someone who's not scared by criminals.
And I only know two types of people with those characteristics: corrupted cops and other criminals.
EDIT: it is actually 3 kinds, the third one being taxi drivers, which in my country are mostly low-level criminals.
It is amazing how many hn users appreciate their bank and government to keep track of their purchases and hope more people will become like them - just because they can't imagine buying anything worth 10k.
When even HN is in full swing anti cash - and with current inflation rates 10k probably won't even purchase a propper bike in the near future - we will enter dark times for any privacy loving individual.
To preserve the status quo, you need more regulation to protect the big companies (even if it looks like it's protecting you from them) and you need to kill anything that it is not inside your circle. (ie: trying to make a $10 transaction with imaginary math token to buy a coffee from your bohemian neighbor? -> 10 years jail!)
It's all way downhill from here. You are welcome. You can also come to South East Asia and you can deal crypto/cash/ewallets. Do work without taxes/social security or any of that shit for various "enterprises" here that are doing real useful shit but do not have the competency (ie: hotels, accounting, some translation guy needed something, etc...) Life is cheaper here, and pay is relatively good, so you'll be able to make it.
This likely affects a number of people that is so small, that it's irrelevant. Not sure it makes sense to say that such a law that effects a tiny number of individuals is penalizing everyone.
No. Just no.
Rights are not a for-profit balance sheet, such as when Google support provides crappy service, or ghosts you, in the name of profit.
Rights are rights. Entrenched, untouchable, everlasting. And each loss affects us all, for the next right taken, is from you.
Telling people they must use private enterprise, a third party and pay a fee, to conduct commerce between them, is a fascist act.
And guess what. 30 years from now, when that 10k is like 500, what then?
Because limits like these are never raised.
If it’s illegal then it’s just going to go off the books, at a small cost to taxes and accuracy of records, for some people; but for others it will force them to end this traditional practice, and I can imagine that might cause hardship.
But yeah, Russians under the bed, sure.
We as society are spending literally billions to make our cities and infrastructure accessible for people with disabilities. Their number also very small, but we decided it is well relevant.
That's not how we deal with minorities
Citation required.
But, > money laundering doesn’t work like that. You don’t have large cash payments, you have a ton of smaller cash payments.
> big banks launder money, have better oversight there instead of restricting cash
Those $5 and $10 bills getting laundered started from a $50K transaction getting laundered.
Just imagine one criminal say's to another:
Sorry i cant take those 15k euros, it's illegal didn't you know that???
Anyone involved in the construction business.
But yeah, if you're a wage slave in the tertiary sector, you're very unlikely to realize how and why cash is necessary or even a matter of survival for a large class of workers out there.
If you're paying for a big-ish shop, e.g. over 100chf, the major supermarkets won't blink if you proffer a 1k note because that's how the older generation get their pension. I've personally paid for about 20chf worth of stuff with a 200 note.
Americans should consider having a working bank sector.
My biggest cash purchase ever was a monitor 20 years ago for less than 10% of this limit.
I don't even have cash in my wallet any more, and I don't know anyone who has.
I have never payed more than say $3k in cash. It just doesn’t make sense to do so.
Privacy shouldn’t exist for financial transactions. It makes it easier to launder money or hide wealth. There is no other use for “dark” financial transactions.
There is no tyranny in making finances of everyone transparent. It doesn’t force anyone to make different choices about WHAT to do with their money. It makes what people pay for auditable.
This makes a very tenuous assumption that government is always justified in any money it seeks to take away or trace, or that nobody ever has a good and even moral reason for hiding their money from a hungry state.
That's an awfully narrow view of reality or even the long history of governments becoming downright predatory.
Yes, privacy absolutely should exist for financial transactions. It's flat out naive, or elitist and authoritarian to believe that the state deserves a constant right to know where every penny you have goes and how to confiscate it whenever it pleases.
Especially on bullion items, there's very narrow margins, and I'd expect a high transaction-reversal risk (i. e. demanding refunds or charging back if the price of gold dropped after purchase).
In practice, this means that many dealers will charge a higher price for using non-cash payment systems. At least in the US, some dealers will even be explicitly cash-only.
Six one-ounce gold coins would get you over USD/EUR 10,000, and isn't that exotic of a purchase in that context.
A documented payment system might be viable for that scenario, if it was completely zero-cost to merchants and consumers, although some dealers might still not want the reversal risks. However, conjuring that would require major state intervention.
Let me quote someone smart on privacy topic:
> Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
Cash = privacy. I dont want to get stripped from privacy by anyone for any reason.
I'd rather say: the EU is penalizing a very few people who usually pay €10k cash.
People that legitimately need to make cash payments for more than 10k represent probably less than 1% of the population. And I'd be surprised even most people that can do it would do it.
So?
It doesn't affect anyone. No one in Europe uses cash for anything more expensive than maybe 200 euros. Of course in some countries like Sweden and the Netherlands no one uses cash any more at all, and almost all ATM machines have been removed. I believe cash-only places are now outlawed. The reason for this is because of the small stores run by immigrants that does you-never-know-what with the money you give them.
> People pay taxes in order to have their bureaucrats serve them by creating a safe financial and social environment
Safe in this case means eliminating those shady cash-only stores. Here in Europe the cash-only stores (nowadays outlawed) were mostly run by immigrants. We're talking pizzerias, barber shops, fast food trucks, corner cafes. Places where a lot of cash is laundered.
God riddance to those places.
That is absurd. People regularly pay for things like new computer with cash.
And family member was buying a flat recently - seller wanted cash, so transaction took place in a bank. Cash was withdrawn (around 90 000 euro?), exchanged when sale was notarized and deposited.
As I understand, this would not be legal anymore?
In my one visit to the Netherlands I had to use cash because small places wouldn't take Visa/MC because it was too expensive for them. They had no problem accepting cash tho.
Which Netherlands have you been to?
LOL, you have clearly never had to build a house.
Or if the banks all decide to introduce very high fees for transactions?
Sold a used car just last year, got 2700€ in cash for it.
Much easier than doing a bank transfer (which takes 1 day to arrive, if you're unlucky, and can be rolled back), or a paypal transfer (which can be undone) or anything else between to individuals.
For b2c or b2b I agree, nobody pays that much in cash, but for individuals transacting with one another, it still seems the easiest option.
I just ask people to consider that even though we all have bank accounts and we take that for granted, there _are_ actually people who don't, and they're not operating a criminal enterprise.
My grandparents came as refugees. My grandfather has never had a bank account. He bought a car with $50 bills once. It was so funny, they were all stuck together and the clerk had to sit their and peel them all apart one by one.
He needs expensive surgery soon which isn't covered by medicare. He's going to pay for that with cash, too.
If a ban prevented him from paying for that surgery with cash, he just wouldn't get the surgery. Or, he'd give my mum wads of cash and make her pay for it (and then she'd have to explain that to the tax office, and he'd have no privacy).
In his home country, you couldn't trust the banks, so people hid their money. Of course that kind of thinking is silly in Australia, but good luck explaining that to someone with war-trauma.
A lot of these old Europeans are like that.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-07/cash-ban-law-10000-do...
Not too long ago we saw the Canadian government freeze bank accounts of people for protesting the Covid measures. Don’t think that it cannot happen in your country.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergency-bank-measures-fin...
I didn't even know anybody was trying to remove the right for Manitoba to be a province of Canada.
If I had to choose between the two positions, one of implicit trust and another of implicit mistrust towards banks, I would consider the latter choice to be the saner and safer one.
The push for no cash is real, and it’s becoming more real with every constriction of cash transactions and with every CBDC trial.
As the BIS chairman said, the goal is total knowledge of every financial transaction. Fanfares about financial inclusiveness seem to me little more than marketing quips, the actual goal being zero financial privacy.
Now, one may wonder, why would a law-abiding citizen require any modicum of privacy - have they anything to hide? After all, “transparency” is a nice notion, right?
I think the answer is that privacy is a fundamental right, something that all the scaremongering about criminal enterprises is used to corrode.
Not to mention that “transparency for thee but not for me” isn’t real transparency.
I bought flat for cash in USD not even in local currency. Car were bought in cash in severL transactions to be below limit. Part of payments were in foreing currency.
It only consumers who became affected. Less protection from law in case of fraud. By documents car price were 10 times less You pay.
Meanwhile this law has not prevent any corruption or apply any incovients to local barons.
On a serious note, it is almost impossible for me to declare and legalize my hard-earned money while living in Ukraine, so I hope that this EU law will not be effective, just like previous efforts were not.
I don't think that's obviously silly. Look at Canada (which has similar values as Australia) where the government seized money from private bank accounts just for protesting or donating to someone who protested.
He can go to a bank with the cash and do a wire transfer.
I don’t trust banks either. I don’t trust the Canadian government anymore as of last winter either.
But if I need surgery and I have the means then I make it happen. I figure out the banking system and I get surgery.
Australia is introducing (or may have already passed?) a similar Act with an AU $10K limit on "unapproved" cash transactions.
Over the limit you'll need approval.
Of course the usual loophole for the weathy applies, 3x $3,000 face value gold bullion coins [1] is under the cash transaction limit, although at a kilo each and ~$88K per in valuae, that's almost $300K in value technically under any travel or transaction declaration "$10K face value" limits . . .
[1] https://www.perthmint.com/shop/bullion/bullion-coins/austral...
If I understand correctly you're saying: there is a coin that I can buy for $100,000 (because of its weight in gold) yet it is stamped with $1, which is its face value.
As such it only counts as $1, and this thus is not reportable?
If you use it to pay $88k then the transaction is obviously $88k although you've then paid in gold, not cash.
I feel that this is a "you can't have your cake and eat it too" situation.
Assets are zero sum - if i sell you my car, i no longer have that asset. Money is not zero sum. It is created and destroyed as loans are made and repaid. Which kinda frazzles people’s minds when they hear it. I know it certainly did mine when i first learned.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm
I don't think this is true. Every transaction, even the ones that take place in the rows of a bank's database and not with physical money, involve an amount added to some account and an identical amount subtracted from another account. Even loans don't create money: the issuing bank have the amount subtracted from its reserves the exact moment the loan is made available to you.
The only method to create money would be writing a check with no date on it, which is illegal in many countries.
The point the GP is trying to make is that they want to further restrict the usage of cash in economic transactions, & that CBDCs further help in that regard. There's a difference between:
"3% of money is available as paper cash"
and
"Paper cash is banned under all circumstances"
Money is zero sum because almost all money is created through debt. Sum up all money and debt and you get roughly zero excluding central bank money and cash.
Money being backed by debt makes sense because it solves the "acceptance problem", that is, how do you make sure the money you have can actually buy things?
Of course that means there is no limit to how much money there is in the system.
For some definitions of money. Definitely not true of M0.
Etc.
Don't worry, the water around us that's heating up is for our own good and not at all to cook us.
But much more importantly, inflation means 10K is less and less every year.
You probably shouldn't finance a vehicle you can afford with current interest rates, and you may not want to give your debit card to a secondhand dealer for processing.
While I do have fond memories of paying less than $10k for a beater, those days may not be coming back. In 10 years, high-end phones and computers could easily fall outside that limit too.
Even limiting things to strictly “financial freedom” - while more germane to the cashless question and also happen to stick the US above all of Europe save Switzerland - are highly questionable due to the inclusion of weird subjective metrics like “labor regulations = less freedom”
There are very few remaining instances in the region where people still pay large sums in cash. Transaction costs are so low (and mostly nonexistent) that cash remains in use either in very specialised circumstances or as part of “grey economy” activities.
We had instances where a government blocked bank accounts of protesters, in democracies and autocracies alike. This is unacceptable. No government in the world should be able to restrict what people can do with their own money. And with this EU-wide limit, we are one step closer to nothing else orwellian authoritarianism.
It's not just "grey economy" how you call it. It's part of an essential freedom that has been taken away from the people.
You're talking as if introducing a nationwide speed limit is equivalent to banning cars. The regulation of a given operation is not akin to outright banning it and to assert that is hyperbole.
Remember earlier this year when people in Lebanon had to hold bank managers at gun point to try and withdraw money from their own accounts as the economy collapsed?
The "CaSH hAZ nO PuRpOSe eXCePt fOR cRImE" people in this comment section have massive blind spots. I'm not surprised politicians are taking advantage of it.
In the cases of the banks and my business friends, I'm more worried the banks are extremely over leveraged and don't want to part with any cash (like 2008 on steroids).
- reposting this comment from another article on nigerian cash limits
I decided to withdraw $10k just in case and they told me maximum they can do is $1k per day and this story repeated for many months.
If you have a bank account, you can always withdraw your savings (at least up to the amount insured, in the event of a bank collapse). But there has never been a guarantee that you can walk up to a teller and leave with your life savings in a bag; you should always call ahead and coordinate with the bank to ensure that they have the physical paper available. In many cases, they'll redirect you to a specialized or more central branch.
>> https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/04/global-megabanks-are-...
Um, why not?
Did the bank not have the cash on hand?
Were they over some standard limit, like FDIC?
I think this quote from Paulo Freire is pertinent
> The former oppressors do not feel liberated [once the people with less power than them are given more]. On the contrary, they genuinely consider themselves to be oppressed. Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression. Formerly, they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven; while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor travelled, much less listened to Beethoven. Any restriction on this way of life, in the name of the rights of the community, appears to the former oppressors as a profound violation of their individual rights – although they had no respect for the millions who suffered and died of hunger, pain, sorrow, and despair. For the oppressors, 'human beings' refers only to themselves; other people are 'things'.
Or is it that the welfare state is collapsing on its own and grasping at straws?
I also imagine the people that may be most likely to take their capital to another country aren't worried about capital controls like this. Surely they have much better ways of transferring their wealth than 10K cash payments at a time, but I'm not rich enough to know for sure.
I am not critiquing financial repression. It is probably the only feasible way to reduce government debt compared to say austerity measures. We would all be better off if economic growth could overcome government debt, but the Eurozone lacks the demographics to make this happen. Italy in particular is a basket case in that regard. One point to make however, is that the severe degree of inflation in Europe seems at least partly due to asinine energy policy. If that had been better handled, then the pain wouldn't be so great. Europeans may therefore be less happy to accept inflation denuding their lifestyles as an 'inevitable' condition of living in social welfare states.
It would be quite easy for the government to look at this list and decide that there's no reason they can't be done by BACS and then introduce this law.
There's a lot of replies that are quite shocked, but in the EU and the UK it is very unusual to use cash for high value payments. For example, you would not be able to buy property in the UK with cash. Even if you had the cash and put it into a bank account for the sole purpose to send to your solicitors, this would get flagged and you would not be able to proceed with the purchase.
There's a lot of money laundering, and laws like this don't really affect the average person, they would disproportionately affect people trying to commit fraud though.
The majority of people won't even have 10,000 euro in savings, let alone want to make purchases above this amount in cash.
These laws are old and stem from a time when $10k was equal to around $70k now (edit: someone else points out "Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 sets reporting at $10K which would be ~$80K today"). They've simply never been updated.
You have obviously never dealt with a German person.
Why keep money on you?
Cash promotes tax evasion and money laundering, plain and simple.
"Why would you want a contingency plan?" seems an odd take on a forums primarily composed of IT professionals. "I oppose you having contingency plan" seems downright hostile.
I am sure there are some benefits to living into this system, doesn't mean it's a good idea to do it.
From the point of view of the state, tax evasion these days is by far the highest priority.
Yes, because people taking a bribe would definitely care that it’s illegal to have a cash transaction over €10k
This is for poor schnucks and the occasional scapegoat.
Maybe you prefer to keep paper receipts for tens of years and prove they are legit, I honestly don't.
This implies, no record of personal purchases around.
The current "fight against cash" goes in direction of that risk.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/only-0-15-total-crypto-174206...
The share of illicit activities for cash is around ~5%, 33x more than cryptos.
I'm surprised by the amount of negativity around this news really.
I now understand why some people in the states walk around openly carrying firearms, exercising their rights.
Pushing them to NEED to use a profit driven banking system. Forcing them to be tracked. To have data mined and sold. To rely on “too big to fail” banking systems that practically schedule economic downturns every 20 years or so.
Profit driven, but available literally for free for an account and transfers (depending on the bank).
> To have data mined and sold.
GDPR says no.
> To rely on “too big to fail” banking systems that practically schedule economic downturns every 20 years or so.
We're talking about the EU here, not the US. There are a ton of challenger new banks.
So not for free. It would be one thing if banks had to guarantee those transactions being free but many banks want % of transaction in fees
GDPR isn't infallible. The EU and its individual countries have plenty of controversies.
>ton of challenger new banks.
Ton is a gross overstatement. It's a few that are truly independent from anyone else. The remainder are puppet / daughter banks.
Their existence barely influences the status quo and it certainly doesn't prevent outrage whenever banks used by over half the country's population threaten to fall.
Source ?
"To have data mined and sold."
Which is completely illegal according to GDPR.
"Name one practical reason to pay amounts higher than 1.000€ in cash." – unknown progressive
If a government can differentiate between a regular person and someone rich and powerful, neither of them have any privacy. There has to be invasive monitoring of the regular person to ensure they aren't stealthily becoming rich.
Wealthy, well connected people, politicians and businesses already can and do transfer and launder money on industrial scales, with only minimal worry about rules like this one, which doesn't even really affect their ability to launder or evade. They can instead use armies of lawyers, accountants, political connections for the high levels at which their laundering and tax evading happens. And if those fail, they can then simply pay whatever fines as a cost of doing business while minimizing convictions of real, actual people behind a business structure.
This cash prohibition rule on the other hand turns many average people across the EU, possibly millions of them in total into potential lawbreakers just because any number of normally, morally non-criminal random circumstances or worries about digital finances being frozen make them want to have and use cash for modestly large transactions.
All of this aside from the flawed reasoning that the state has an innate right to completely strip away financial privacy for the sake of taxes or KYC. It should not have such a right. Tax collection and financial auditing are contextual and imperfect necessities in the context of imperfect government and society, they should not be treated as divine rights of power, to ever be increased without recourse against them.
it's 10.000 euros, you're off by an order of magnitude.
Can you name one practical reason to pay more than 10k cash?
Have you ever bought a used car? Or played relatively high limit at a casino?
It’s perfectly normal to take 6 figures cash to a casino if you’re playing high stakes poker, for example.
And there are plenty of other reasons.
Mostly coz many banks take % cut on big money tranfers so taking it out and just giving it to someone in a bag is sometimes tens of thousands cheaper
Things like using car washes to launder money are pretty much a dead thing because it's one of the worst ways to do it.
ban hairdressers and car washes?
But then t'is the same old story, repeated over the ages: you get the governments you deserve.
Most of them introduced them to decrease tax evasion, not money laundering.
You can still have that much money in cash, just not pay with it one transaction.
Through a very obscure logic, since payment cap cannot exclude unregistered payments.
There are close to 20 billions $ of Russian oligarchs frozen assets now - I bet almost none of it was acquired in cash.
While of course there are some that do use cash, the bigger offenders are not - so it may be a good idea to start with the real problems…
Based on?
But more seriously, based on the fact that that represents really a lot of banknotes - and those assets are bought from real companies - which would then need to deposit say 100M in cash in their bank - doesn't seem hard to track I guess.
Even though it has a facade of protection, this isn't about protection against criminals; it's about control and being able to track citizens.
A deposit is not a "cash payment". You are not paying your bank.
And people talk about the trucker protests like it was this unprecedented thing. That's just the tip of the iceberg. There's a company called World-Check and if you ever end up in the World-Check database you will never get a bank account again except maybe if you're an ultra high net worth individual.
"I don't believe it'd be realistically possible to stop this from occurring." - It already happens and is already stopped so you're wrong on that one.
Yet another example why cash has to be limited as much as possible.
I can't speak for all of EU, but here in Austria tax evasion is very common.
For example, it's still extremely common to pay contractors under the table. They will ask you if you need an invoice, and the price will be a lot lower if you don't.
Another example are restaurants. For a few years it has been required that restaurants always provide you with a receipt, but especially asian restaurants still don't do so.
All that untaxed revenue costs the state billions in missing taxes.
If you limit cash payments, then you make it at least slightly harder for someone to eg. buy a car with that untaxed money.
I really don't see any reason why you would need 10k€ cash payments if not for tax evasion.
To avoid banking fees?
(I understand in this tree the '/S' is taken for granted.)
This sort of rule, as usual, affects only small players and normal people. If you're rich and well connected, you're allowed to wash money.
Or is this just meant for cases where the business is already under 24/7 survailance and they could point to not enough people coming by?
That's what would be stopping you; existing anti-money laundering systems.
This is then how things like this are enforced.
Same way the law about having the correct plate on your car is. Nobody's stopping you, but if you're caught, you go to jail and/or get a fine.
As such it is important for organisations such as the EU to try to re-assert their control over private interests to prevent the loss of control that has occurred over recent decades from making democratically run organisations completely impotent in the long run.
This narrative has not a great deal to do with the linked article and everything to do with the discussion on here. A discussion that seems to completely ignore these changes that have happened to our societies in recent decades while holding an irresponsible view that financial regulation is tyranny and that taxation is theft. It is _critical_ to our democratic values that our institutions that are accountable to the people, are able to control private interests that grow too large and are able to raise tax receipts from those that wish to try and hide. That includes the black market.
If private interests can't operate outside the country's border, then these people have the money to simply manipulate the media, the politicians and therefore the policies and democracy itself to suit them.
Now child abuse flourished until very very recently, indeed none of above tools had been used to really fight it.
Instead these tools where used to been politically unwanted people.
Who smells the same with this EU cash limit fighting “terrorism” (as per the article)? Who sees the parallels?
If it becomes illegal for me to eat breakfast, I'm not going to stop eating breakfast.
I'm sure that if we all gave up breakfast we could like, squeeze a few more humans onto the planet or something.
I'm still gonna eat my breakfast, you can come and arrest me.
I don't "need" breakfast. I want it. It works for me.
Same as cash works for me.
Germany - I believe - has no set limit, Greece has 500 Euro.
The anti-laundering (and anti-terrorism) usefulness of limiting the amount of cash per payment has some merit, but (IMHO) it won't affect at all the illegal transactions (to evade taxes and VAT), it is news of these days of an ex-member of the EU parliament arrested in Bruxelles (in connection with presumed bribes related to the Qatar football world championship) arrested and found in possession of around 600,000 Euro cash.
https://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-police-raid-gulf-lob...
I thought it was the case in France, too, but as it turns out that's the limit only when one party is a company. There's no limit for transactions between individuals (with a few exceptions).
https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F10999?...
To get a PSD2 "Open Banking" license one needs to KYC every user and keep every transaction that passes through the system, for 5 years, including the KYC data.
Being PSD2 licensed doesn't even make you a bank. Just imagine what an actual bank has to keep around...
Also every business has to keep invoices and transaction data around for tax audits, usually 7 years. So you can GDPR delete request all you want, but the shop where you bought that thing still has to legally know you've bought it.
Europeans often explain that they see the need for strong privacy laws because of their experience with totalitarianism (Nazi and Communist regimes). But most of those laws regulate private-sector databases and private-sector data collection, not law enforcement or intelligence; and many of them actually contain explicit exemptions for governments.
Clearly, governments have made lots of use of private-sector databases, so it's not as though they're not a risk if you're concerned about totalitarianism. But wouldn't it make sense to focus more on the state than on the private sector?
I know Europeans (especially in the 2000s) have been quicker than people elsewhere to endorse the idea that all state activities (including those of security agencies) need a legal basis and should comply with necessity and proportionality. So that's cool. But I still don't see how the intuition works like "the SD / Stasi / KGB were spying on everyone and that was awful, so we obviously see it's important to restrict ... private-sector databases! but not (as much¹) state access to financial, travel, location, and communications data".
¹ clearly there are some regulations, and they get fought over in constitutional and European courts, but there's also a ton of "we have to make sure the state can monitor people" initiatives all over Europe!
What GDPR gives you, is to know which data is kept, for how long and with access to whom. It also forbids for a bank to give your these information to Google or Facebook, for example.
Reminds me a joke. What is difference between conspiracy theory and reality? Approximately one year.
This is just a side show to the real issue however, the issue of rights. Our rights are something that limits the power of the government, that protects us from the government. It is not immediately obvious that we should need rights - in well-functioning societies like the EU, the government is overall a benevolent entity, using its power to aid citizens and protect them from bad actors. We give power to the government because it is good to us, so from a first-order evaluation, limiting the government's power seems counterproductive. Yet we know from thousands of years of experience in statecraft that things do not pan out this way. Governments make mistakes. The whole of the government can be good while parts of it are bad. The government can be good at one time, and then turn bad at a later time. The government is often good to most people while being bad to some, and these people are often the marginalized and invisible.
Digital transaction afford the government (and other powerful actors in the system) two important powers: surveillance and the ability to freeze or confiscate assets. Especially the freezing of assets is devastating when done to individuals. And these things can and do happen illegitimately. Unethical mass surveillance and the freezing of assets of protestors, journalists and other political undesireables is not a theoretical possibility but a real reality. We are lucky that in the west this is mostly limited to canary-in-the-coalmine people on the margins, people whose speech is so extreme that few of us can find it in themselves to feel sympathy for them. But it doesn't take much democratic backsliding for things to get much worse. I think it's important for us all to really internalize the fact that politics does not always move in the direction of freedom and progress; things do regress, as recent history should have made more than clear to us all. We need backstops, ways for people to live lives at odds with the government. You can't live in modern society without being able to transact.
Make no mistake, by the way; these kinds of laws very much do lead to the end of cash. These kinds of laws (and laws in general, actually) tend to only get stronger, seldom weaker. Even just leaving this law on the books without doing anything else slowly squeezes the noose tighter. Ten thousand euros today are worth only about half as much as ten thousand euros thirty years ago. I am personally of the opinion that all laws should have an expiry date and all sums of currency in law should have automatic inflation adjustment, but that is a story for another time.
If you would speak about doing transactions in gold, or having a farm to trade animals in case of collapse of the bank system, like some survivalists do, I would understand more.
Didn't they literally last week make a law to make this harder?
...and this is what they seem to suggest in this paragraph, which is a clear reminder of this event:
> Member states should ensure that any natural or legal person that can demonstrate a legitimate interest has access to information held in the beneficial ownership registers, and such persons should include those journalists and civil society organisations that are connected with the prevention and combating of money laundering and terrorist financing.
No longer possible for the public to learn who owns a EU company https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33836543
This law will have no impact on any terrorism financing, but it will for sure help the government to better track you and once you have all your money in digital cash it will also be very easy to apply a lot of other measurements, like negative interest charges or wealth taxes. This is just another step forward to gain control ...
Good luck.
I never had a cheque book in Germany.
Bad practices and horrible incentives happen throughout society. It's not just money laundering that's the problem. It's much easier to get wealth and power in exchange for your regulatory actions from powerful actors if you have more control on the citizens. It's much easier to extract wealth and resources from people who have less power over you. The less economic freedom you give people, the less they have incentive to create new wealth.
Stricter money controls will increase political corruption.
Remember: Government is not your friend. It needs to be kept in check. Financial freedoms, untraceable transactions, etc help keep government in check. Yes, it allows crime. But guess what, when government has way too much power, opposing it becomes a crime.
This is among the measures intended for the 99%
And of course, once these rules are in place, they can lower the limit over time. Boiling the frog and all that.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/eva-kaili-ar...
Russian mafia is living in billion dollar mansions all around EU in the open, with full knowledge of EU 3 letter services.
Why would anybody go for "retail" laundering when you can buy a bank for a pocket change in Cyprus?
Ways to launder money fully legally are vastly, vastly more widespread than mules with bags of cash, and are protected by connivance of Western governments.
Those people hide their assets in swiss banks, along with dictators and corrupt politicians.
Closest I can think of say a bar or something similarly cash heavy getting cash and paying suppliers directly. (which is in itself problematic @ tax)
For example, the Canadian government froze the accounts of political activists during the Corona crisis. This shocked me. It shows that even countries that are perceived as free and democratic sometimes cannot resist to abuse their power. And the more power we give them, the more likely it is that a politician will abuse his or her power sooner or later.
Affluent people tend to diversify where they keep their money. They have a few different checking accounts, savings/money-market accounts, brokerage accounts, assets, petty cash, and probably some other things. If you do not have the level of wealth that gives you the flexibility to keep large sums of money in a relatively inaccessible place (e.g. a brokerage account that might take 1-3 days to liquidate and another day to do a bank transfer), you might opt to keep a few thousand in cash in case something happens with your bank, such as your account being frozen or just drained due to fraudulent activity. It’s always prudent to keep reserves in diversified locations.
I want to be able to pay for as much as possible without leaving any record with a third party if I don't want to.
I also want to be able to take all of my money out of the bank and keep it for myself, and give it to whoever I want, whenever I want, without having anyone's permission to do so, or reporting that I have done so to anyone.
Why is that illegitimate?
I will keep withdrawing my income in cash and inconveniencing others with cash transactions for every single purchase, including those exceeding this limit, out of principle.
Digital ledgers have proven to be unreliable. Anyone arguing otherwise hasn't witnessed bank runs, withdrawal limits, transaction limits, hyperinflation and war wiping out lifetime savings and destroying people's lives.
This law prohibits paying me for a month in cash.
Buying a car?
The EU Parliament is composed of 705 members (MEPs). It represents the second-largest democratic electorate in the world (after the Parliament of India), with an electorate of 375 million eligible voters
p.s. even the US president is a non-directly elected entity
Like most governments?
> The EU continues its fight to protect EU citizens and the EU's financial system against money laundering and terrorist financing.
The EU has control of the propaganda machine at levels comparable to the Soviet Union. We should've just let them have it.
I wonder how many Europeans are going to get in this thread to tell us Americans how much more privacy they have.
"Oh look at those EUROPERANS with their fancy PRIVACY, real men get fucked unlubed by corporations and LIKE IT" doesn't help anyone here, the fight here is to make government do well by average citizen, not throwing insults at people that happen to be fucked differently by their government
This is also the same country implementing laws to curb dissent and deviation from the narrative which is generally indicative as to where the EU is going. Imagine being worse than the UK.
Case in point: https://english.radio.cz/fifty-persons-charged-endorsing-rus...
Opinion is now illegal.
There are many many more examples where the Czechs are an embarrassment to the western society they so desperately want to be part of.
Edit: sweet summer children downvoters