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They can't control the black market in drugs, what makes them think controlling a black market in cash, which is a million times more desirable, will be any more successful? There's the small matter of millions of undocumented migrants entering Europe who will be trapped in this now-illegal-cash underclass, and these financial oppression laws just incentivise and create criminal networks to facilitate basic economy. This is financial oppression that totally demoralizes their society as a means to dissolve it.

It's not a lot of money, and given inflation, diminishingly so. This is targeted at law abiding smallholding farmers where roadside transactions are often done in cash and farmers everywhere have a lot of tax relief precisely because they provide food security for nations - and it's to the benefit of criminal networks to top it off. The architects of this policy are disgusting.

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> They can't control the black market in drugs, what makes them think controlling a black market in cash, which is a million times more desirable, will be any more successful?

Well, for one, they control cash production

> It's not a lot of money, and given inflation, diminishingly so. This is targeted at law abiding smallholding farmers where roadside transactions are often done in cash and farmers everywhere have a lot of tax relief precisely because they provide food security for nations - and it's to the benefit of criminal networks to top it off. The architects of this policy are disgusting.

Do you have any actual example of that ? What transaction do small farmers need to do along roadside for thousands of eur ? As kid of small farmer I don't remember anything like that ever happening.

- paying a team of day labour workers

- hay / feed delivery

- combine/equipment rental

- equipment resale

- livestock

- farm vehicle sales / repair

It's probably fine, and I hear you can eat bugs.

> - paying a team of day labour workers

It's illegal to pay minimum wage in cash, due to employers abusing and underpaying vulnerable people. (Any amount over the minimum wage can be paid cash, but there has to be a bank payment made for at least the minimum wage.)

Source: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/aanpak-schijnconstr...

> - hay / feed delivery

> - combine/equipment rental

> - livestock

> - farm vehicle sales / repair

B2B transactions like that are done by billing. The other side wouldn't normally be very receptive to a cash payment.

> Any amount over the minimum wage can be paid cash, but there has to be a bank payment made for at least the minimum wage.

Interesting. In France, you can ask for your wages to be paid cash, but only if it's not more than €1500. Minimum wage as of May 1st 2023 is €1383.08.

Tell me you don't know much about how payments are done outside USA without saying so directly.

All of the above are very likely done electronically in Netherlands.

Denmark has an even lower limit (€2700) and there has been no problems with this. Denmark no longer supports payments using checks.

I've never heard of anybody being paid wages in cash in Denmark. It's so uncommon that the Danish IRS even had to explain it is actually possible to do so.

I’m pretty sure the 3000 limit is not at all a huge issue in any of those cases pretty much anywhere in Europe and bank transfers are also cheap and instant.

Not that I agree with this ban. I really don’t but focusing on farmers specifically is very strange when farming is so heavily commercialized, especially in the Netherlands.

Bank transfers are cheap and instant when both parties in the transaction have a working bank account, which means they had a residence where they could receive mail, which means they had government identification, etc.

EU is working towards requiring banks to provide homeless EU citizens with a bank account. Some countries have already implemented this. https://koronapay.com/transfers/europe/en/blog/how-to-open-a...

For paper mails some shelters allow for picking up post and in some countries you can get the mail as "Poste Restante" (i.e. pick up at post office).

You can get a functioning bank account usually in less than 30 minutes by downloading an app as long as you have a valid ID (no verified address is needed)

But yeah, if you’re not a citizen and don’t live in the EU it might be tricky (then again AFAIK bringing large amounts of cash from a third country is not that straightforward either).

What does this have to do with Dutch farmers, though?

Then people will surely use bank transfers voluntarily, eh? Why make them illegal?

having an address and ID is not so much a problem, it is keeping your address and ID valid once a few dozen people in authority can live for years by charging money for lots of reasons to renew them, and perhaps also problems for you if you do not behave.

This is as old as countries themselves. You must be intellectually dishonest to ignore these historically crucial patterns.

Farming is under attack all throughout the EU, especially the Netherlands.

How?

Also, again, how is this specifically harming farmers more than anyone else?

If someone is paying for farm equipment, vehicles or livestock with tens of thousands in cash, you can absolutely be certain something very, very dodgy is going on. At the very least someone is doing some serious tax evasion.

So sounds like exactly the kind of transaction this law is supposed to block. working as intended.

You might be surprised by the volume of agricultural transactions settled in cash. Not sure about the Netherlands specifically.

Not from the Netherlands but from a small third world country: farmers around here like to buy things on spot doing handshake deals and carrying bags of cash. I've heard them buying a lot things from cattle to agricultural supplies and even vehicles.

Mind you, this is a poor country. The middle class in the capital city can't even dream of making what these farmers make.

I still see this in rural America. Guys show up and transfer the title on the car for an envelope of cash and a signature.

Same for livestock, butchering, services and so on.

I've done this myself many times. No one wants a check (especially not a probably-fake cashier's check) and no one wants to take the time to go to a bank, and why does the bank need to be involved or aware at all.

> and why does the bank need to be involved or aware at all

In the EU you can transfer the money instantly using your phone.

Not that I agree with the ban but a lot of the issues people are discussing here are only relevant in the US (checks? lol.. what is this the 60s?)

You can in the U.S. as well, with the security nightmare that is Zelle.

Doesn't even have to be rural America. I bought my car for $6000 cash off Craigslist, and I'm in the bay area

Done this for over 20 cars, not rural, or old. You sound like you have never bought a car without a loan.

>Do you have any actual example of that ? What transaction do small farmers need to do along roadside for thousands of eur ? As kid of small farmer I don't remember anything like that ever happening.

While each transaction might be <3000, on a good weekend, I could see it totaling to be over that amount. At this point, would it be illegal for the farmer to show up to his bank to deposit 3001? Does the farmer now need to waste time to make 2 separate trips to make each deposit < 3000? Maybe take the spouse and kids along so they each make a smaller deposit? Does this require visiting multiple branches?

A cash deposit into a bank isn't a payment.

That's a very strange question. Obviously businesses are still allowed to deposit more than 3000€ to their bank accounts.

How would supermarket function otherwise?

The farmer isn't an individual, it's a business as well.

Doesn’t this only apply to individual transactions?

Only it’s very weird to just assume that this might apply to bank deposits…

>Only it’s very weird to just assume that this might apply to bank deposits…

Is it? I find it weird you think so. If you and I exchange > 3000 between us, nobody will ever know, so the law is pointless. The one place that this can be policed is at the bank level. You're assumption seems to be that if you gave me 3000, I'd just keep it in cash.

In the US, if you make a deposit > $10,000, the bank is regulated to report it. It doesn't matter why you are making that deposit, it gets reported. Applying the same thing to Euro markets only seems natural.

Edit: Actually, even car dealerships have to report someone showing up to buy a car with >$10,000 in cash as well.

> Is it? I find it weird you think so.

We might focus on the law itself and not some hypothetical situation.

> nobody will ever know, so the law is pointless.

You can’t sign a contract for anything worth more than €3000 if you want to pay in cash. If you want to declare your income, pay taxes, prove that you obtained the money legally when you later want to deposit it to an bank, during a tax audit etc. Of course it won’t affect transactions which are already done illegally so it depends on what do you mean by ‘pointless’.

The $10k limit is also a thing in Europe, the exact amount varies by state though (I think).

You can deposit whatever amount you want into your bank account, they just might ask questions regarding where the money came from, and if you show that you sold products there's zero issues.

> show that you sold products there's zero issues

well, there might be one small issue!

how can you 'show you sold products'? after all, you sold them!!

isn't the cash sufficient to show you sold products? hasn't it been sufficient for thousands of years?

This isn't the gotcha you think it is. As for all businesses transactions, you should file it in your accounting software and make sure you pay taxes, vat etc on it. This law changes nothing in that regard.

So now you're bringing in your accounting software and tax records to the bank to make the deposit?

Every single country in the EU has VAT. If you’re yearly revenue is to low (not that likely for commercial farmers) you still have to give out receipts for every sale.

Also have you heard about bookeping? It’s also a thing that has existed for thousands of years.

So a farmer is giving out receipts; how does that help the farmer at the bank?

To sum up, what is the standard of records that the bank will accept? Is there one?

does the bank say, "we see you wrote that you sold 20 boxes of produce on Saturday"

Presumably you have to pay taxes so the standard is probably somewhere in between what the tax authorities acquire and no questions asked.

Buy yeah, some banks in the EU might be overzealous and small/medium businesses can often run into issues related to their idiotic fraud prevention systems. But I don’t see how is that an issue with the system itself and not with the implementation.

> Does the farmer now need to waste time to make 2 separate trips to make each deposit < 3000?

In the US, that's called structuring and will result in some very uncomfortable conversations.

Do you not see difference between paying for service and depositing account ?

Right, but they don't control the distribution and transaction of cash. They may stop producing €500 notes—for example, but there is nothing they can do to stop these farmers or undocumented immigrants from bundling together >€3000 in smaller notes for use in paying rent, buying cars, or investments.

Fyi production of 500 euro bill was halted over three years ago.

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> if they find more than 3000 eur in one place that is not pre authorized, they will confiscate it all and punish the people who had that kind of cash; it's becoming 'the law'

Can you please not make shit up to be obsessed about?

No need to curse to make your point, especially since this is a burgeoning area of both criminal and civil law in western countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture#European_Unio...

So you need to be convicted by a court and the government needs to be able prove the money was obtained from illegal sources?

How is that unreasonable and more importantly what does it have to do with the €3000 limit discussed in this thread?

It can simply be seized.

Whether a conviction occurs in court is largely irrelevant, because it's in excess of the 3000 limit that this law actually puts in place, and therefore de jure illegal.

In the U.S., no conviction of the owner is even necessary, since the conviction is of the cash itself. This is likely coming to EU as well because it's a easy way for the enforcement state to increase its coffers and, in theory, stop money laundering.

> because it's in excess of the 3000 limit that this law actually puts in place, and therefore de jure illegal.

I don't get it, do you not understand the difference between possessing a certain amount of cash and making a single payment over a certain amount in cash?

How do you make a logical leap from the latter to the former?

Similar laws in the US have readily morphed into we're going to hold it until you prove it's not from illegal sources. Googling it will provide many examples.

I don’t care about examples from the US. How is that relevant or at all related to this specific ban?

> So you need to be convicted by a court and the government needs to be able prove the money was obtained from illegal sources?

The way you read laws isn't how the enforcers need to read it. That isn't a US specific issue.

Follow up, the EU is pretty much on the same page as US authorities. No convictions needed.

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=1acd50be-5237...

No need to add irrelevant links to make no point, there's nothing in the draft that prevents you from possessing >€3k.

> they find more than 3000 eur in one place that is not pre authorized, they will confiscate

Any sources which would substantiate this claim?

> Well, for one, they control cash production

They have the euro as do most countries in the EU so they don't control cash production.

> This is targeted at law abiding smallholding farmers where roadside transactions are often done in cash

Where (in NL) do you find farmers who routinely need to accept >3k in cash and are (somehow?) unable to accept electronic payments? Pretty much everyone everywhere can accept at least one form of electronic payments. That's a legal requirement for any business in Belgium, and I can't imagine the Dutch being that far behind on that ...

Even if you can't take card or contactless payments or apps, you can do instant bank transfers with most banks within the EU ("Instant Payments"), either free of charge or pretty cheap. There's no excuse for being unable to accept non-cash money. There are, however, plenty of reasons to be unwilling, but that's another story.

Why does the NL want to kick down at the farmers so badly? Don't they know where real food comes from?

Is the only way to buy "real food", to buy it in chunks of 3000+ EUR paper money?

That sounds pretty expensive and a lot of "real food" for the average person.

And if it is a business transaction sounds like a suspicious business transaction.

Wow megabrain. A farmer could easily sell a truck of produce for well more than 3k

Why do you assume this proposal is targeting farmers specifically?

How does this affect farmers specifically? In fact, it does not.

Only way to reduce the population. Restrict the food supply

People who can independently produce food have a form of real power that is very hard to resist.

The measures used to keep various peasant and serf classes under control were so extreme in history because if they became able to exercise that power the social order was overturned.

There are for sure tradeoffs here, but in Germany for example they recently made paying in cash for real estate illegal because it was obvious that almost all those cash transactions involved crime money of some sort. Edit: As noted below cash here refers to paper money. The same law also prohibits real estate purchase with gold, silver, diamonds or crypto currencies.

So people were handing over suitcases containing millions in cold hard cash!? Is there ever a legitimate reason to do that?

Yes.

One of my banks forbids making bank transfers of over 10,000 EUR. The other is not far behind.

Even then, sometimes they simply decide that they're not going to allow you to make bank transfers to certain perfectly legitimate accounts. There is no way to override that.

For the past couple of days I've been trying to set up an automatic monthly transfer for paying my rent and my bank is not allowing me because it's "exceeding the allowable daily limit", even though I haven't done any transfers or significant payments lately, and my rent is way below the 10,000 EUR limit.

You also can't withdraw large sums of money easily.

Furthermore, even when they allow these large transfers (which presumably would require you to physically visit a branch which might be in a different country or even continent), it's not uncommon to charge a not insignificant percentage of that money as a fee. This is significantly more common for large transfers than for small ones.

Large inbound transfers can be even more of a hassle, as banks often require you to provide documents justifying why you're receiving that money, which not only might be difficult in some cases (even when you're not doing anything illegal), but also invades your privacy and can be a significant security risk in some situations.

All of this basically makes banks a prison for your money, which not even you can access easily.

And besides, all that is assuming that you are even able to open a bank account.

There are many reasons for why opening a bank account is hard or even impossible in many cases.

And believe me, this doesn't happen in just one or two banks, it's quite common procedure in practically every bank, and increasingly so.

Where is this? I doubt that it's legal for a bank to actually prevent you from transferring money. Yes, I also have a limit, but if I call my bank and tell them I need to transfer 500,000 to buy a house they will allow it. The limit is there is to prevent fraud.

> Where is this?

It's in the two countries in Europe where I've lived.

> if I call my bank and tell them I need to transfer 500,000 to buy a house they will allow it

What you're saying is not possible in the banks I've used.

To buy houses in recent years, I've had to set up appointments and physically go to the central office of one of the banks, and to a local branch of another. They provided me with a special bank-issued cheque for the transaction.

In one of the cases, this required me to travel to another country just for this purpose.

It was a significant hassle and even then I was lucky that this was in an adjacent country. It could have easily been in the other side of the world.

> The limit is there is to prevent fraud.

Right... fraud... of course!

Is that why one of the banks only allows me to set up a 5 digit password (yes, only numbers) to access my account? And why the other one only allows me to set up a 6 digit password (again, only numbers)?

Is that also why they require me to dictate this same password (as well as other personal details) over the phone when I want to make a large transaction? So that other people who are physically near me can hear the password easily?

And that's even assuming I typed their phone number correctly in my phone, otherwise I would be giving my password to strangers unknowingly!

Look, I really don't care if it's fraud, or money laundering laws, or because the Pope mandated it. I've never been a victim of fraud, it's extremely unlikely for me to ever be a victim of fraud in the future, I'm not doing anything illegal and it's my money.

There are many other ways to deal with fraud, such as having most of the money locked (e.g. in a separate account, with more restrictions or delays), providing notifications, using two-factor authentication, calling the customers to confirm the transaction, etc, etc.

And yes, I know in many banks (including mine) they also do a subset of these, but even then the restrictions are still there.

I'm sorry, but fraud alone does not explain what's happening, unless the banks are extremely incompetent (and yes, it's quite possible that they are).

Regardless, the end result is the same: I simply cannot use my money easily, period.

Well there is no reason you shouldn't be able to. Think about how large purchases were made before banking networks existed.

My friend worked for an insurance company that would regularly receive double digit thousands cash payments on policies from pot farms because they can't have bank accounts.

The law was enacted last year to more effectively enforce sanctions against Russian oligarchs...

So if you sell a house and want to buy a new one, you have to pay for a mortgage you don't need?

> So if you sell a house and want to buy a new one, you have to pay for a mortgage you don't need?

You misunderstand.

We are talking hard paper cash here. It might help if we quote a translated excerpt here :

This practice is now being abolished by the introduction of Sec. 16a GwG. From 1 April 2023, it will only be possible to purchase real estate using means of payment other than cash, crypto assets, gold, platinum or precious stones. All parties to the transaction are required to present satisfactory proof of payment, for example a payment confirmation from a financial institution.

(source of excerpt https://www.gvw.com/en/news/blog/detail/prohibition-on-cash-...)

Sounds like a good time to buy silver and palladium.

Cash as in the physical object. Bank transfers are different.

I believe in this case, cash refers to physical bills, not how it's normally used in conversation (at least in the UK) to mean buying without a mortgage (via bank transfer).

Does Germany have no equivalent to a money order?

Cash in this context means literal cash.

Electronic transfers such as ACH would be allowed.

No u have to do a bank transfer -in cash here means literally in cash...

No, you would have money in a bank account, and transfer the money to the receipients bank account. No cash payment needed.

Absolutely not, it simply means the payment must be done via the banking system. Electronic = mostly traceable.

This law is intended to make large amounts of cash less useful without killing the utility of smaller amounts. If large amounts of cash become less useful that makes money laundering a lot harder.

A black market for cash already exists. The people who buy it are called money launderers.

If you want the convenience of a government backed currency you’ll need to do so digitally which makes fraud investigation a lot easier. Don’t like it? Bad luck. This is where every fair economy is heading.

> This is targeted at law abiding smallholding farmers where roadside transactions are often done in cash.

Most EU nations are setting up instant payment systems for these and other "informal" use cases. In Sweden you can buy strawberries at a sidewalk stall and pay through Swish [0]. I should also stress that, no matter how bad Swedish inflation is at the moment, it's very unlikely that you will ever spend >3k EUR (about 35k SEK) on strawberries :)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment)

The EU system is going to be based on Ideal, which is the NL system already in place for instant payments.

> roadside transactions are often done in cash

You're paying 3000 Euro for eggs?

I think GP's intention was to mention the farmers themselves, who would (presumably, I'm neither a farmer nor European) receive above >€3000 in egg-revenue per week/month/annum, and then go deposit that at the bank, use it for mortgage payments, or pay for farm equipment et al. in cash.

No self respecting company buying those goods would do cash transactions to a business in the Netherlands. All perishable goods are tightly regulated and cash payments make that harder to administer.

Paying your various-shades-of-grey farmhands is another story.

AFAICT it doesn't outlaw depositing >€3000 at the bank, it'll just be reported.

And that's what farmers are annoyed at. If they don't deposit it, they can "forget" to report the income themselves, and cheat the tax man.

This doesn't follow; then they could just spend it in increments of less than €3000.

But it's harder to spend.

This proposal does not forbid bank deposits of > €3000.

It might not stop transactions for drugs, but it might make laundering the money harder and more necessary

It makes money laundering harder for low and intermediate level drug dealers. Netherlands is a major importer for drugs: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Hamburg are major ports for drugs. Drug wholesalers in EU would rather transport millions of euros abroad, and use these euros in Africa in order to buy gold and other metals from locals. All of sudden, one ends with gold, sell gold back to refiners and get paid with bank transfers. It is a trade based money laundering. What the West want is to abolish cash everywhere across the world, it is an impossible goal. Even if Zimbabwe wants to abolish cash and use digital transactions, ordinary Zimbabweans don't want to participate in that.

Many of them aren't even transporting the money thanks to the hawala network around the world. Where I'm from otherwise legit exchange offices have been caught doing this and acting as a sort of bank for criminals, holding millions in safes.

Getting around the limitations of cash is no problem for those on the inside. Just like tax havens are only an option for the super wealthy who wouldn't really need them in the first place.

"It makes money laundering harder for low and intermediate level drug dealers."

Can you explain why this alone isn't a win?

Ideally transactions denominated in Western coin align with western values (Good Things).

You assume that making things hard for low and intermediate drug dealers is inconsequential.

But drug wholesalers only exist thanks to low and intermediate drug dealers.

Have you ever been to the Netherlands? Many people don't even carry cash, never mind people buying goods from farmers. Card payments are so prevalent that some sellers at markets don't even accept cash.

> There's the small matter of millions of undocumented migrants entering Europe who will be trapped in this now-illegal-cash underclass

Are these migrants frequently making cash payments in excess of €3000?

If they want to pay rent or buy a car or any other thing of value, yes.

Also, it doesn't matter whether it's frequent or not. "Let's ban migrants from buying cars because they don't buy them frequently" is not exactly the most convincing argument.

Unregistered migrants cannot buy a car at all, because they can’t register it and get a plate (details differ between countries, but legal residence is a requirement everywhere in the EU). Registered migrants can get a bank account.

Who the hell pays rent in cash? I doubt that’s even an option with any rental company except for shady / illegal slumlords, who will ignore this law anyway.

Also, what kind of illegal immigrant rents a >€3000/month home?

> Who the hell pays rent in cash? I doubt that’s even an option with any rental company except for shady / illegal slumlords, who will ignore this law anyway.

It's not necessarily easy for migrants to open bank accounts. Sometimes it's even impossible.

Even for me, I assure you that opening a bank account would not be easy (or maybe even possible) due to stricter requirements in recent years, even though I've never done anything illegal (to my knowledge) and I'm not a migrant.

I know this because I've looked into many banks with the intention of opening an account and the requirements are all similar between them. This is in two different European countries.

And well, for the past couple of days I've been trying to set up an automatic monthly bank transfer for my rent and my bank is not allowing me because it's "exceeding the daily allowable limit", even though it's way below the daily allowable limit that I've ran into multiple times for normal bank transfers.

So there's that.

> Also, what kind of illegal immigrant rents a >€3000/month home?

Rents have gone up considerably in European capitals and consider that multiple immigrant families can live under the same (larger) roof.

Inflation will also eat up these limits over time, as governments almost never increase cash limits according to inflation (even though they do it for many, many other things).

Also, the limits are lower in some countries (500 EUR in Greece, 1000 EUR in Spain). I know for a fact that it's almost impossible to get a decent place in the center of Madrid for less than 1000 EUR nowadays.

I disagree entirely.

The problem with black markets is they function because the money they trade in has real world value. If you taint significant sums so they can't be used to buy assets (3k is a lot of money for a single transaction, thanks) you make it harder to benefit from crime.

And I don't understand why you're explicitly defending tax evading smallholders. Because farms? Even smallholders can declare and deduct expenses.

On your first point, some countries allow asylum seekers to work, and even if they don't, some tax systems allow them to declare income even if they're not really allowed to have any. I'm definitely in favour of making sure everyone works to the same rule, so everyone can live honestly.

Cash-in-hand work has to die.

How does this target farmers if the tax relief is legitimate? It isn't. The farmers just have a vastly inflated sense of self importance and consider paying taxes to be optional.

Farmers are declaring their own tax relief.

Without a law you can't enforce it.

The results will be known sooner or later.

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