First They Came for the Pennies

Don Quijones post at Naked Capitalism

Good stuff in it that hits on many of my thoughts.

Unfortunately there is the ambiguity of cash and currency that is illustrated in the post as well as the comments.  It is analogous to Internet and WWW.  Using one to mean the other is inaccurate as well as confusing the issue.

Using Pennies in the title of the link sets it in the frame of currency.  Physical money in the hand.  Coins and Greenback US dollar bills.  Cash on the other conceptual hand is an a numerical amount of money value in an account maintained by a bank or other institution that may exchange physical currency for an equal value of "money" expressed in an account to be used as cash from which a payment from the account can be deducted.  Might even be airline points paid for in currency or cash from a bank account.  I don't know where I would go to buy airline points with currency.  Not possible I think.  Only by cash from an account?

A cashless monetary system is meant to mean a currency-less system as opposed to cash in the bank.  Cash in the bank is not a cashless system but is a system to which negative interest rates can be applied that cannot be applied to currency.

Please, oh please.  Money is an important matter that is muddied by inaccurate use of what it is in its various forms.  The vernacular use of the term for money is ambiguous!

Cash

Currency

Mumbo Jumbo words when one is used interchangeably with the other, especially in the Information Age where conceptual things carry forward their physical connotation and meaning by their physical  properties that they shed in transition from physical to logical entities.

The related things that Don Q's link hit on are numerous.  One of them being the monetizing of the information data base by banks (and other banking like money account institutions) that know everything we do with money in our accounts, when and where it is spent to buy what.

Many excellent reader comments on the link.  Wish I had all day to go into it all.

This is enough for a Sunday.

I got up at 5:30.  Its noon.  Where has the day gone?

Into cyberspace....