Australia and Argentina: Cash and Chaos

Dateline: Berlin, 14th March 2024.The Reserve Bank of Australia’s Consumer Payment Survey showed that in the past three years the percentage of Australians paying with cash has halved from around a quarter of total payments to just one eighth. A great many Aussies never use cash from one month’s end to the next: for example Ellysha Gillespie, who received thousands of dollars in cash when she got married: She quickly banked all the money, saying the only time she uses cash is when the POS machine at her nail salon has stopped working.(If I was running a nail salon I wouldn’t bother with a POS at all, I’d just use a softPOS on my phone, but that’s for another day.)With cash payments vanishing you would think the amount of cash out there would be collapsing. Indeed, in a speech last year, the Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe noted that while the value of cash withdrawals was down by 17 per cent from where it was three years ago, during which time nominal spending in the economy had risen by 27 per cent. So cash is vanishing? Well, no. According to the Reserve Bank’s own data. there are now more than two billion Australian Dollar out there, around A$4,000 per Aussie.Subscribe nowShow me the MoneyIt’s the same in many other countries where people are beginning to question what all this cash is being used for, when it is being used less and less for transactions. Luke Raven, senior anti-money laundering compliance manager at Cabital,…Australia and Argentina: Cash and Chaos