And the definition of “cash” widens.
By Don Quijones, Spain, UK, & Mexico, editor at WOLF STREET.
The EU’s Orwellian-dubbed Civil Liberties and Economic Affairs committee has approved tough new rules on cash that travelers might bring into or take out of the bloc. It’s also broadened the definition of cash to include precious stones and metals and prepaid credit cards.
For the moment the new definition does not include Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, for one simple reason: “customs authorities lack the resources to monitor them.”
Most importantly, the draft law will enable authorities to impound “cash” below the traditional €10,000 threshold, if criminal activity is suspected. The new rules would repeal the First Cash Control Regulation (CCR) from 2005, which requires individuals to declare sums over €10,000 when leaving or entering the EU.
The draft law still needs to be approved by the European Parliament. Then the legislation needs to be negotiated with EU governments. If the law is passed, anyone acting suspiciously carrying any amount of cash, whether in notes, precious stones, precious metals or prepaid credit cards, could face having their “money” impounded.
“Large sums of cash, be it banknotes or gold bullion, are often used for criminal activities such as money laundering or terrorist financing,” said Mady Delvaux, the Committee’s co-rapporteur. “With this legislation, we give our authorities the tools they need to improve their fight against those crimes.”
It could be argued that any legislation aimed at disrupting criminal financial networks is, de facto, a welcome move, but that would ignore the fact that many forms of modern-day tax evasion, avoidance and money laundering are conducted without cash through shell corporations located across multiple jurisdictions, including Luxembourg.
But the EU’s anti-cash measures are not aimed at the giant corporations and well-heeled individuals and families, including those that, thanks to their armies of professional lawyers and accountants, get to exploit the loopholes built into the system to stash their wealth far from the prying eyes of European tax authorities. No, the measures are aimed at average Joes and ordinary Janes, and the main objective is to further dampen their ability or willingness to use or carry cash.
This has long been a cherished goal of the EU, which began 2017 by announcing its intention to “explore the relevance of potential upper limits to cash payments,” with a view to implementing cross-regional measures in 2018. Any attempt by the European Commission to set a mandatory continent-wide limit is likely to be met with fierce resistance — at least in countries where cash is still revered, like Germany and Austria. Others are already so far down the path toward a cashless society that they’ll barely notice the difference.
Besides fighting crime and tax evasion, there are myriad other reasons why the EU and the ECB, along with banks, fin tech firms, credit card companies, national governments and UN agencies, want to pull the plug on physical currency:
- Cash has no middleman. One party pays the other party in mutually accepted currency and not a single intermediary (i.e. bank, fin tech firm or credit card company) gets to wet its beak.
- Increased technocratic control. In a world where every transaction must be electronic (i.e. traceable) and where biometric authentication systems have become the norm, the power of banks, corporations, tech firms, and governments over people’s every-day lives would be virtually unlimited.
- The death of financial privacy. Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in 19th century-Russia that “money is coined freedom.” Today, it is one of the last remaining things that gives people a small semblance of privacy, anonymity, and personal freedom in their increasingly controlled and surveyed lives. However, according to the European Commission’s own rulings, privacy and anonymity do not constitute “fundamental” human rights.
- Cash sets a limit on central banks’ monetary experimentation. During this age of out-of-control financial repression, as long as cash exists, there’s no way of preventing depositors from doing the logical thing – i.e. yanking their money out of the bank and parking it where the erosive effects of NIRP can’t reach it. If cash were abolished, just about any fiscal or monetary policy would be enforceable, at least in the short run.
At the same time, the EU hopes to pass a law that will effectively render the act of carrying reasonably large sums of cash — say, anything above €1,000 — across borders enough to get it confiscated. The writing is on the wall, and it’s written in bright, bold letters. By Don Quijones.
War on Cash bogs down, despite best efforts of government, banks, and credit card companies. Read… Spain’s Third Biggest Bank Just Made it Harder to Get Cash
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This would only push more people to cryptocurrencies.
Thats what they want. With one condition of course. Eventually you will ONLY be allowed to use state issued cryptocrrency. (Printed at state will, making you esentially a slave workng for free)
Yes i know, “people will never give up bitcoin and such”
But, eventually all non state issued cryptocurrency will become a huge crime. They catch you with some kind of illegal drugs 1-10 years prison. They catch you with illegal cryptocurrency: 10-30 years of prison. This is just an make up example, but you get the idea.
Thats what they want. With one condition of course. Eventually you will ONLY be allowed to use state issued cryptocrrency. (Printed at state will, making you esentially a slave workng for free)
Yes i know, “people will never give up bitcoin and such”
But, eventually all non state issued cryptocurrency will become a huge crime. They catch you with some kind of illegal drugs 1-10 years prison. They catch you with illegal cryptocurrency: 10-30 years of prison. This is just an make up example, but you get the idea.
How many will be willing to take a risk in a society where you will not be able to hide any more, no privacy….
Read The Mandibles. The book is fiction but got the economics right.
You summarise quite well my entire thesis for “Bitcoin eventually going to zero.”
Not that I would ever “short” or otherwise trade it. Because you cannot, really, on any methodical basis.
The Crypto (formerly gold) stackers will always eventually run into the issue of the effective “on/off switch.” Who – by definition – is the only party able to lay hands on such a switch? Yes, the evil government they so hate and fear. That’s who.
The problem that emerges is the reclassification legally of Bitcoin. Because it is pretending to be a currency rather than a stock, governments can simply take the latest print and declare that to be a profit and tax you on that number. If the governments would accept Bitcoin as legal tender in payment of taxes, that would be fine. However, if they demand their own currency (dollars) which then forces one to sell Bitcoin to pay the tax, then the price will collapse and they will force you to pay the tax on the inflated number. You can claim you lost money selling it below that figure and they then allow a tax credit but spread out over 10 years. Bitcoin should swap everything to shares and that will eliminate the clash with the government.
Bitcoin is already taxed like a stock in the US. People may not report it, but the govt is asking for disclosures and reporting from platforms like Coinbase.
If you’ve held it long term (more than a year) it is 15% capital gains tax on your profits for most people. If you hold it less than a year, it’s counted as income and taxed at your normal income tax rate.
It is taxed when you convert from coin to dollars, btw.
It’s taxed on every transaction as the IRS deems it a conversion to cash and then a purchase. At least that’s is there current stance. Hasn’t been challenged in court, that I am aware of.
Pay for some cloths with Bitcoin, you effectively have 2 transactions, 1) convert bitcoint to cash, 2) exchange cash for cloths. Step 1 is taxable exchange. LT / ST depends on holding time.
Switzerland allows payment of taxes.in bitcoin. My understanding is that it is treated as a foreign currency.
Crypto Currency holders forget that the banks don’t like Crypto currency and nor do the governments.
So there will be legislation that banks will not be able to convert crypto currency back to FIAT or there will be disclosure and a holding tax for sure in the future.
Crypto currency is too volatile to be used seriously for business where people have margins of less than 15% in most sales nowadays with Amazon and the likes.
Banks might create their own crypto for security because I am sure that a lot of banks are having hackers steal more than reported and the block chain could resolve that.
I’m starting a new business: Drones Sans Frontiers, with the catch phrase “No money satchel is too big”
Or maybe a Drone ICO, a.k.a. DroneCoin.
Precisely,Cash smuggling will be a huge business just like Gold smuggling is a large industry in India. I don’t think they will ever be able to control eight billion people as much as the global Apparatchiks will try. it will ultimately fail just as Prohibition failed. BTW,cross border confiscation laws exempt personal Jewelry,so this is how you bring cash abroad. once they start ripping Gold chains off old lady’s necks… well at that point we have BIGGER problems….
Even worse, those same old ladies trafficking afghans across borders.
Once it was punishable by DEATH in china to settle any transaction in Gold or anything else other than the Emperors worthless printed used toilet paper.
That Emperor came to a sudden end.
Revolutions solve nothing generally taking society’s and counties far backward each cycle.
Removing peoples ability to move, or have, hand held money, where and when they want it, without the state and banks taking a piece of every transaction and recording it.
Is a great way to start a Very Violent REVOLT with very negative consequences for that society and region.
The chinese Administrators. Print money with Abandon, and allow the People to Hold it.
As they understand what will happen to them, if they try to take it away.
The Arrogance in Brussels, In League with the Bank’s and card companies, is incomprehensible.
They screwed the entire WORLD with the USD scheme and you are telling us that freedom is plausible and imminent LOL? They did it once and nobody even bleated too much (maybe the French). In fact nowadays they love the scheisse dollars LOL.
And that was the old fashioned way analogue. Digital vaporbux is going to be sooooo much more tantalizing.
“They screwed the entire WORLD with the USD scheme and you are telling us that freedom is plausible and imminent LOL? ”
You think “They screwed the entire WORLD with the USD scheme”.
Nobody likes policemen or tax collectors. Everybody knocks the People at the top.
Some blame them for everything as its easy and make them feel good.
“and you are telling us that freedom is plausible and imminent LOL?”
I dint say that.
I said taking the hold-able money away, will lead to “Revolt”.
Revolts and Revolutions. Regularly replace the current oppressor, with a worse one.
This is one case where we have to be grateful for the “criminal elements” in society and even for crooked officials. Since they all would want to get paid in non traceable cash, they will quietly pull their corrupt strings behind the scenes to thwart the even larger crooks in charge at the top who want to 1984-er-ize everything. When the price of safety is your liberty, the price is too high. There does need to be a non decentralized, non state controlled currency, however bitcoin fails because of its value instability and the massive amount of electricity used to “mine” it : https://www.businessinsider.com.au/bitcoin-mining-electricity-usage-2017-11 … all a state would need to do is control electricity to control such a power-greedy technology. With the privacy invading enforced roll out of spying (so-called) “smart meters”, that ability is far closer than people think! Control financial transactions, control electricity, control information (social media), control water (already a serious problem in many parts of the world) and you are well down the track to Soviet Socialist Republic Version 2.0
If having “too much” cash is suspicious, why isn’t having a bank account in a tax haven equally suspicious. If you can confiscate the cash why not the cash in the accounts in the tax havens? And if the new regulations include pre-paid credit cards it seems any lawyer worth their salt could stretch the definition for that to include a bank account.
I know it sounds like I probably wear a tinfoil hat when I say it, but this seems just like another step in the effort to consolidate all the money in the hands of a few.
“…why isn’t having a bank account in a tax haven equally suspicious.”
Oh it is much more suspicious, but you can’t have them chasing down wealthy elites now can you?
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/magazine/how-to-hide-400-million.html
finally the perps lawyers bailed on him
Most certainly NOT !! / sarc –
But I recall reading ?? last year ?? that an American State used their civil forfeiture _laws_ and a persons’ debit card to seize all the money in the bank account of that person, who had been stopped at a traffic roadblock, and not ultimately charged with any crime.
John in Indy
The whole point of putting one’s cash in a tax haven is that it’s impervious to confiscation.
The plan is to consolidate all the rents in a few hands.
You must take your wheat to the lord’s mill, and have it ground there.
If a supposedly wealthy individual owns 90% of widget prod. which is in high demand and no widget can be sold because no funds are available for the purchase at any price. How wealthy is this individual? How will he pay back his mountain of dept. We are getting there like a speeding locomotive.
Government officials create and remove laws as they see fit. These politicians often use tax havens to hold their own money. So if they would create laws against tax haven users, they would penalize themselves.
If they didn’t gain anything from it, they would police it. Just basic human instincts. Both in Canada and the US the leaders claimed to target the wealthy with tax increases, once in office they both sang a different tune.
Politicians can change, but politics doesn’t.
The EU that was sold to Europe does not look like the EU they actually bought. The Brits saw the light and left town. Others will do the same when the weird gets too weird. No guns are holding the EU together. Only slithery bureaucrats. That’s pretty weak glue. I love hearing them yelp and threaten.
Debit cards and pre paid credit cards are fundamentally different. There is a reason why they prefaced prepaid. However if a prepaid credit card is cash wouldn’t a cheque be one too? Especially if they can be endorsed and passed on. What about 1 cent promissory notes I mean postage stamps? Do we need to start enhance screening all stamp collectors?
We all need to push back.
It’s all about the fact that .. there are those who cannot stand the thought that The Sacred Almighty currency is in the hands of the unworthy.
A rich man does not like his money to be handled by the lowely & unworthy.
Old fashioned but true.
And especially when they themselves experience belt tightening.
Oh, for the outrage of it all.
It’s The Adventures of Biggles – come James Bond 007 type sentiment in play.
The British Royals should have been sent packing along with their parasitic bottom feeders, a long time ago & the place would have moved on into a new day, as it is they are still in Alice Through The Looking Glass mode.
Backward & bankrupt & looking to who else they can steal from.
better declare your CC since these are nearly always over $12,000EU
Yet another example of big government always looking out for the little guy. /s
There will be one day when they will use the system against us. Confiscating gold. You own it and don’t declare it, you are a criminal now. Desperate measure for desperate times.
Is there a limit on cash you can bring in-out of the US?
As a UK person, if I’d had a go on the state lottery for example in the US and won the money would have to stay in the US.
Aside of the theories on cash, part of the problem especially in Southern Europe has been tax evasion and not declaring truly what you’ve earnt, especially in cash businesses.
It seems in the EU now if you carry more than $ US 1000.00 in cash Or equivalent ( Metals, Jewellery, debit cards, Etc), you are a criminal, and it can be confiscated.
Many countries still have exchange controls, on how much of their currency you can remove in cash. Most do not restrict, how much foreign cash you can bring in, or take out.
Global ceiling used to be, declare over $ US10,000.00 In or out.
This has morphed in many places to 10,000.00 local currency value.
“part of the problem especially in Southern Europe has been tax evasion and not declaring truly what you’ve earnt, especially in cash businesses.”
This is not about Tax Avoidance this is about engineering a system where the bank’s and state get a bite of every transaction that takes place, and have a record of Every transaction.
Further in such a system you cant be financially neutered, with a single keyboard entry.
The State can and banks can claim, You we and take it, straight from your digital account.
Leaving you to pay to fight them, to prove you don’t owe, and claim it back.
As we have seen in the US, with asset confiscation, the cost of attempting to recover illegally confiscated. Property/Cash, 99 times out of a hundred.
Is greater than the value confiscated.
Which the people who confiscated it, were fully aware of, when they illegally took it.
They are referring to taking cash out There is no restriction on the amount you can wire transfer abroad from the states As long as theres a paper trail you are fine
Have you tried to wire transfer overseas lately?
I sent money for daughter’s tuition and it was like an anal exam
The last time for me was 2015 and I had no problems whatsoever
You know this whole think is a con. Example: Lets say you are in America and someone leaves you US$20,000 in a Will. Now 20,000k in the USA is not a lot of money. But that 20,000 in Philippine peso becomes 1 million peso and for that kind of money you can buy a lot, a house or a farm.
Suddenly from 20,000 that is not enough to even start a business in the USA you can have an asset/s that are generating income.
So in the USA that amount is nothing but a life changer in another economy.
So telling people they can’t carry cash above a certain amount is rubbish and its just a way to turn the world into a cashless society so all can be tracked and traced.
Can’t have us plebs raising our heads above the base mark now can we.
Soon you will see money velocity go negative in this country. The Fed will not be able to print money as fast as it leaves the economy. So far the stock market has been a global bank, taking new deposits, however when the bank closes its doors (unable to pay interest, or dividends) that money will go to cash or gold, although Rickards may be right and the USG will set the gold price much higher, dissuading people who watched the bitcoin farce from changing money into gold. But there will never be enough gold on the planet for that, and CBs can print money and buy gold. So its you and your stack of C notes. Brave new world.
It is important for us to keep exercising our right to use cash whenever possible. I regularly use cash when paying for mundane items and services just to make sure merchants will continue to accept it.
Similarly, we need to spread our credit $s around the on-line merchants. We do not want to live in a world that is run by giant monopolies.
Strawman alert! All this means is undeclared(!!!) cash will be cracked down upon more.
If you want to get €100,000 from an ATM or you got an equal sum in cash from your grandma (and declared it as a family gift to your friendly local tax man), you can still do so without hassle. They will need probable cause to confiscate your cash, and none is given in the above case. (Do bring a tax receipt or whatever though, as these situations probably never ever happen in the real world, so it would be suspect on its face).
The only people affected by this, are those carrying dirty money. Now I have every respect for some of those people (and others much less so), but they are breaking the law. From the government’s perspective that is bad, and it has nothing to do with an (alleged) crackdown on cash.
I (disclaimer: EU Citizen) applaud this move because it does not affect me (and if it does it is because I am doing something illegal) and it does affect money laundering(,) terrorist networks and the like.
Pros > Cons.
While there may generally be some form of effort to reduce cash’s attractiveness, this move has nothing to do with it.
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
Kipling
Damn!! It’s gonna hurt when they try to impound all of my gold fillings. Best let the European Union rot on the vine and vacation in a more civilized area.
Privacy is not a human right, I like it, waiting for oxygen and potable water to become not a human right. It is laughable how they would say that on the one hand, and on the other condemn companies like Facebook for violating our privacy. Seems like the EU is nothing more than the Soviet Union transplanted into Europe. Comrade Lenin would be proud
And then in 2018 they will start to wonder why tourists are not visiting European countries more.
Great article, but no mention of just exactly where and how perpetual war will “fit into” a cashless US war-based economy. Because in the US perpetual war “fits into” EVERYTHING, I’ll do the fitting.
The first task of we humans should be to get an accurate understanding of the reality around us, but our very-limited, corporate-controlled educations and what we are allowed to see in the corporate-controlled MSM, makes this very difficult, so I will describe the reality that I see and you decide if my description matches what you see better than that of the corporate-sponsored fairy tales.
First and foremost, one Federal Reserve US “dollar” used to be equivalent to a certain weight of pure physical gold. In other words, like “one quart” of milk, “one US dollar” was a QUANTITY of gold. One paper dollar was at one time “as good as gold”. Gold “backed” the US Fed’s paper dollar and, therefore, those who employed it in day-to-day business had “confidence” in the paper US dollar; they were confident that they could exchange their dollars for gold “on demand” and sometimes did so.
In 1971 — 46 years ago– Nixon temporarily (yes, “temporarily”; listen to the Nixon the Great’s words yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRzr1QU6K1o )
ditched the gold standard. After literally the stroke of Nixon’s pen, other countries could no longer return their ever-increasing number of US paper dollars or “US treasuries” back to the US and get gold in return. Nixon did this because there was literally not enough gold in the US gold repositories to continue the US government’s wars of worldwide USD/corporate hegemony. And that’s when the Petrodollar came to the US war-corporations’ rescue.
http://ftmdaily.com/preparing-for-the-collapse-of-the-petrodollar-system/
A few years after Nixon the Great, Carter the Great signed an “executive order” that became known as the “Carter Doctrine”,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Doctrine
in which the US (the US Elite) simply stated:
“Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
Ever since Nixon and Carter’s Elite masters’ short-sighted, inevitably-fatal political/monetary actions, trillions of “by-fiat” USD have been backed not by gold, but by military force and the US’s now-historically-PROVEN willingness to use it.
Therefore, nowadays it is accurate to say that the USD is “on the drone standard”.
George Kennan was an influential US VIP for many years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan
He said the following just a few short years before the end of the Soviet Union.
“Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”
At the time he said it, Kennan meant EXACTLY what he said, and ever since the USSR’s collapse, Kennan’s prediction has been PROVEN to be amazingly prescient. What we average people have a duty to fully realize and fully appreciate is that what Kennan said is EVEN MORE TRUE TODAY than it was in Kennan’s time.
The US literally had no other choice than to CONTINUE its rampage around the world, but economic “things” started to go off the rails in 2007. Elite VIPs Paulson, Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, etc. were ABSOLUTELY CORRECT when they said that the financial system (of a microscopic percentage of the population owning the vast majority of wealth and capital equipment) would have failed had those VIPs not done what they did. By “failure” I mean that that microscopic percentage would have suffered massive losses on their investments; that many of their major banks would have gone out of business and many of the Elite would not have been able to remain the Elite. Most importantly, the US’s perpetual war in support of USD hegemony might have come to a screeching halt along with its catastrophic effect on the US’s war-base economy.
So the president before Trump and the bone-ignorant US Congress literally forced future US taxpayers to rescue the Elite and the Elite have remained the Elite; the Too Big To Fail (TBTF) banks were born and the US’s global war of USD hegemony has continued unabated.
It is important to fully realize and appreciate that perpetual war and FIAT USD (NOT gold-backed USD) go hand in hand, because domestic and foreign mercenaries paid by fiat USD
“How the US sent $12bn in cash to Iraq. And watched it vanish”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1
now REPLACE US-citizen-draftees. Should those mercenaries “lose confidence in” USD, US citizens and their children are going to have to fight and die for USD/corporate hegemony.
Unfortunately for humanity, what those very few human beings did to rescue the Elite and the TBTF banks was even worse that the actions of Nixon and Carter. Those panicked, impulsive actions steered the traditional capitalist system into what is now essentially a worldwide laboratory experiment, or as one Lord Jacob Rothschild bluntly put it in 2016,
“The six months under review have seen central bankers continuing what is surely the greatest experiment in monetary policy in the history of the world.”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-16/lord-rothschild-greatest-experiment-monetary-policy-history-world
As incredible and ridiculous as it may sound, the model — the experiment — that the increasingly-desperate Elite are trying to foist onto the people of the world all boils down to one thing. Humanity’s ultimate purpose is to SERVE the TBTF banks (more specifically, the Elite that runs and profits from them), NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND — THE WAY THAT THINGS USED TO BE BEFORE this ongoing experiment.
Not so subtly, the Elite are telling us that in order for “us” to avoid yet another “financial crisis”, the Elite’s TBTF banks must FIRST have absolute control over each and every THING and each and every PERSON on planet earth and that WE are going to have to pay THEM a lot more money for their services. The IOER is just a small part of their extortion racket.
Experimental NIRP along with their necessary experimental abolishment of cash, are a last-ditch, now-fully-conscious effort by the inheritance/investment-owners to strip-mine some more profit from the no-inheritance owners, thus momentarily delaying the need for yet another astronomically-expensive and destructive war.
Unfortunately, almost as if by the intentional design of an “invisible hand”, even all of these desperate, experimental measures CAN NOT and WILL NOT garner enough profit for the Elite’s centuries-long accumulation of inheritances/investments. When the panic-inducing pressure of impending loss on those investments inevitably becomes too great for the capitalist system to contain, the world will once again explode into full-scale, all-out war.
The total loss of INDIVIDUAL citizens’ privacy and liberty to an increasingly-secretive, tyrannical, intrusive, inquisitive, lawless, ruthless government/Elite are the inevitable domestic collateral damage caused by that Elite’s foreign policy. Foreign policy has “come home” and become domestic policy. “Threats from within” are becoming the focus of the Elite’s experimental national security state.
The wars of USD/corporate hegemony and supporting MSM propaganda machine, as well as various Fed-funded hand-outs to keep the surfs in a semi-comatose state, are astronomically expensive, but, again, all Janet and Mario’s not-so-invisible hands have to do is hold down their “0” keys for longer and longer periods of time and all of the Elite’s invoices magically get paid and their wealth infinitely increases.
So that’s the US’s new, completely-experimental economic system in a nutshell. Janet (etc.) holds down the “0” key for longer and longer periods of time; the TBTF banks get bailed out by taxpayers time and time again; the US national debt skyrockets and the US’s printed-out-of-thin-air-USD-funded MIC literally terrorizes the rest of the world into accepting those “dollars” as payment for their REAL goods. Any nation that does not comply with US diktat or fails to accept fiat USD as payment for its real products either has its government replaced or is reduced to stone-age chaos.
The TBTF banks’ protective political insulation is very thick and the number of Janet’s (etc.) fiat money is infinite, so, unfortunately, it’s beginning to look like the one and only thing that will stop the US’s new, politically-unstoppable, “whatever it takes” perpetual-war/TBTF-bank-based economic EXPERIMENT will be a nuclear strike undertaken by one or more of the ever-increasing number of nations who are being victimized by it.
The objective of the EC is for capital controls.
They want you to earn your money in the EC and pay tax on it and then charge you VAT when you buy anything in the EC.