Typography

When it comes to financial privacy, good old fashioned banknotes and privacy cryptocurrencies like Zcash & Monero get all the attention. But as I recently wrote for the Sound Money Project, let's not forget about prepaid debit cards. Having written a bunch of posts over the last two years about financial privacy, I recently decided that it was time to step up my own personal financial privacy game. A few months ago I walked into my local pharmacy and bought my first non-reloadable prepaid debit card (i.e. gift card), a Vanilla card. You've probably seen the rack of prepaid cards near the front of pharmacies and department stores. Some of them are closed-loo p cards. They can only be used to buy things at the issuer, say Tim Horton's or Starbucks. But some of them, like my new Vanilla Prepaid card, are open-loop cards. That means they can be used wherever Visa or MasterCard are accepted. In Canada, Vanilla cards are sold in denominations from $25 to $250. The Vanilla c...

In places like the U.S. and Europe, it is actually difficult—if not impossible—for a government to have its central bank pay for government programs. All government spending must be financed by issuing bonds to the public or collecting taxes. Canada, my home country, is an interesting counter-example. The financial relationship between the Federal government and the Bank of Canada—our central bank—is fairly permeable. The government has the authority to ask the Bank of Canada to directly fund a portion of its spending. This avenue is rarely taken, however. Justin Trudeau, our current Prime Minister, currently uses bonds and taxes to fund almost all of the Federal government's spending. Just one small and unknown government program is directly funded by the Bank of Canada: the prudential liquidity management plan , an old Stephen Harper-era program. (I wrote about it here and here ). The goal of the prudential liquidity plan is to provide a cash cushion that the Federal government...

Ok, another Sweden post. I keep returning to Sweden because no country has gone further down the road to being cash-free. Since all of us seem to be following the same trajectory, we should probably be paying attention. Lucky for us, every two years the Riksbank—Sweden's central bank—-carries out a payments surve y and puts the data up on its website. One of the most interesting questions that is asked is "which of the following payments methods have you used in the last month?" I plotted out some of the data and tweeted the result: Sweden is at the forefront of digital payments. I made this chart with data from the Riksbank payments survey: https://t.co/WTZlFYOl2Y : 1. Debit cards are universal, beating out credit 2. Cash use is plunging but still high 3. Swish adoption is exploding 4. Not much bitcoin usage pic.twitter.com/fal0pfYdMz — JP Koning (@jp_koning) February 20, 2019 What follows are a few observations. Swish beats cash Only 61% of Swedes used cash in the las...