SRF, Echo der Zeit, May 18, 2015. AUDIO, HTML.
Imperial College London (the business school’s Brevan Howard Centre), CEPR and the Swiss National Bank organized a conference on this topic in London.
Most of the speakers agreed that giving central banks the option to move interest rates much further into negative territory would be valuable; and that deposit rates lower than minus half a percent p.a. are difficult to sustain without triggering major cash withdrawals. There was less agreement on how to avoid such withdrawals. Some favored phasing out cash, as this would also render tax evasion and money laundering more difficult; others were unwilling to sacrifice the privacy benefits of cash. But many speakers emphasized that there are other possibilities to achieve the same objective. (See my earlier blog post.)
Andreas Valda reports in Der Bund about speculation that the Swiss National Bank (SNB) and/or commercial banks may limit cash withdrawals in response to negative CHF interest rates. According to the report, SNB press officer Walter Meier clarified the instruments at the SNB’s disposal as follows:
Die Nationalbank hat sich gemäss Gesetz bei der Ausgabe von Banknoten nach den Bedürfnissen des Zahlungsverkehrs zu richten; sie kann dafür Vorschriften über die Art und Weise, Ort und Zeit von Notenbezügen erlassen. … [Solche Vorschriften] würden gegenüber Bargeldbezügern bei der SNB gelten, also typischerweise Banken und sogenannte Bargeld-Verarbeiter.
VoxEU, January 21, 2015. HTML.
New proposals to phase out cash are set to revive an old debate. Contributions to this debate focus on two related but independent issues: granting the general public access to central bank reserves; and phasing out cash.
Abolishing cash is neither necessary nor sufficient. But allowing the public to hold reserves at the central bank could have substantial benefits. Technical questions need careful consideration.
In the first and third of his Munich Lectures in Economics, Kenneth Rogoff argued in favour of phasing out cash, at least high denominations and in some developed economies. (His second lecture covered financial crises, see my post.)
Rogoff is well aware that cash preserves privacy and he acknowledges that one should have very good reasons to advocate phasing it out. He believes that there are two: Tax evasion and the black economy on the one hand, and the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates on the other.
Based on earlier research (Rogoff 1998) he argues that withdrawing bank notes with high denominations (e.g., USD 100 bills, EUR 500 bills etc.) would increase the cost of evading taxes or engaging in the black economy sufficiently strongly as to raise tax revenues, and that increased tax revenues would more than compensate for any loss of seignorage.
The (close to) zero lower bound on nominal interest rates and the resulting constraints for monetary policy derive from the fact that cash pays a zero nominal interest rate. Rogoff emphasised the seminal contribution of Lebow (1993 Fed working paper) in identifying the problems connected with the zero lower bound as well as possible ways to address them. Rogoff added that earlier writers (e.g., Gesell, Goodfriend, Mankiw or Buiter) who suggested to relax the constraint by subjecting cash to depreciation missed the point. Rather than forcing a negative nominal interest rate upon cash one should eliminate it altogether. He also dismissed shifting to a higher inflation target to avoid the zero lower bound problem, pointing to the huge loss of credibility that central banks would suffer as a consequence. Among factors for the trend towards lower real interest rates, Rogoff emphasised demographics and the asset pricing consequences of rare disasters; he dismissed secular stagnation. He also discussed forward guidance in the form of price level targeting.
Rogoff suggests to replace cash by universal debit cards. He does not expect significant technical difficulties in the process and proposes to subsidise debit cards for low income households.