MIT Technology Review
"You may not have any in your wallet, but $100 bills make up an astonishing 80 percent of the U.S. currency in circulation. In his new book, The Curse of Cash, Kenneth Rogoff . . . proposes a plan to phase out most paper currency in the United States and other economically advanced nations, keeping only low-denomination notes to create what he terms a ‘less-cash' society."
From the Publisher
"Winner of the 2017 PROSE Award in Economics, Association of American Publishers"
One of Bloomberg’s Best Books of 2016
One of Financial Times (FT.com) Best Economics Books of 2016
Selected for Canada’s Financial Post Best Personal Finance and Economics Books of 2016
Longlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2016
Cover Drive
"Raising challenging questions, this book provides thoughtful insights on a subject that is likely to engage monetary policy arena for time to come."
Choice
"Recommended for readers who seek a greater understanding of negative interest rates and the possibility of eliminating cash."
Kirkus Reviews
2016-07-19
A noted economist imagines a modern society that functions without paper money and coins.As former International Monetary Fund chief economist Rogoff (Public Policy/Harvard Univ.; co-author: This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, 2009, etc.) notes, though the drift of modern economies is to provide alternate means of account to the paper-and-metal exchange of old, we are still awash in cash. There was enough of it outside of banks, he writes, for each man, woman, and child in the U.S. to have $4,200, mostly in big bills, which, he adds, “is a nearly universal problem in advanced economies.” Though it will likely be a while before we can see our way clear to adopting a system such as that used by the entrepreneurial Ferengi of the Star Trek franchise, who used a substance called latinum so volatile that it had to be encased in worthless gold, there are good reasons, by Rogoff’s argument, to want to do so. The first prong of the argument is easy enough to follow: cash enables crimes such as money laundering and tax evasion, and doing away with it serves justice. The second broad component is more rarified, involving the goal of zero inflation via negative interest, a matter so unthinkable recently that, as the author notes, the theory is just beginning to catch up to an increasing fact. Naturally, the speculators will be a step ahead of the economists, and there are ways to game even the negative interest system for profit; tax laws can be modified accordingly, though “the objective of negative interest rate policy is primarily macroeconomic stabilization, not raising revenue.” Rogoff strives to write accessibly, but such matters are so heady and technical that the latter portions of the book will be daunting to those without training in economics. Money geeks are the primary audience, to be sure, but futurists and trend-watchers will also take interest in the author’s proposals for phasing out cash.
