The Harvard Mark

What do you know about the line "..at least for the foreseeable future" when you hear it?

It never becomes foreseeable. Now another Harvard elitist, economist Ken Rogoff, no stranger to dictating what the world needs now, you included, wants to do in not just your access to $100 bills, but $50s and $20s. In other words, a cashless society masqueraded as "a less-cash society" and here's that phrase again, for the foreseeable future.

These Harvard boys and girls never get tired of telling the rest of us how and what and, soon, where we ought to be living our lives. Most of this language is ensconced in how we need to protect you all from the evils that cash allows, like having any free choice in what you do with yours. So he throws a phony morsel to the anti-immigration folks--believing as is that of his kith and kin--they're too ignorant to see through his ploy.

Next he cites the benefits of "small transactions." That used to be something less than $10,000. Now it's suddenly shrunk to less than $20 bucks. If his semantic tactics were any more naked they'd be a nude model in a college art class. "There's little debate," he cites, "among law enforcement agencies that paper currency, especially large notes such as the U.S. $100 bill, facilitates crime...."  It also facilitates legitimate business transactions daily.

You can recognize these elitists by their arrogance and contempt. They constantly appear with their elementary school playground psychology and scaremongering, sure of themselves that you are so uneducated, one of their favorite terms, you will swallow it all without benefit of a chaser. What Mr. Rogoff apparently ignores is there's little debate, too, academic of otherwise, between arrogant elites like him and the rest of us. And because of people like him and his ilk, it's a growing global chasm that more and more people unlike him are welcoming. We have said this before and we'll repeat it. It's getting clearer and healthier by the day.

Six months since Larry Summers first suggested "it;'s time to kill the $100 bill," and three months after The ECB actually killed the €500 Note, another Harvard 'scholar' is reinvigorating the war on cash. Amid claims that paper money fuels corruption, terrorism, tax evasion, and illegal immigration, Ken Rogoff (ironically of "It's Different This Time" infamy) says the US should get rid of the $100 bill (and $50s and $20s) proposing, in his words, "a 'less-cash' society, not a cashless one, at least for the foreseeable future."
According to the esteemed ivory tower academic, paper currency lies at the heart of some of today’s most intractable public-finance and monetary problems. As Rogoff explains in The Wall Street Journal, getting rid of most of it - that is, moving to a society where cash is used less frequently and mainly for small transactions - could be a big help.
Rogoff's begins by stating factoids as facts...

There is little debate among law-enforcement agencies that paper currency, especially large notes such as the U.S. $100 bill, facilitates crime: racketeering, extortion, money laundering, drug and human trafficking, the corruption of public officials, not to mention terrorism. There are substitutes for cash—cryptocurrencies, uncut diamonds, gold coins, prepaid cards—but for many kinds of criminal transactions, cash is still king. It delivers absolute anonymity, portability, liquidity and near-universal acceptance. It is no accident that whenever there is a big-time drug bust, the authorities typically find wads of cash.

Cash is also deeply implicated in tax evasion, which costs the federal government some $500 billion a year in revenue. According to the Internal Revenue Service, a lot of the action is concentrated in small cash-intensive businesses, where it is difficult to verify sales and the self-reporting of income. By contrast, businesses that take payments mostly by check, bank card or electronic transfer know that it is much easier for tax authorities to catch them dissembling. Though the data are much thinner for state and local governments, they too surely lose big-time from tax evasion, perhaps as much as $200 billion a year.

Cash also lies at the core of the illegal immigration problem in the U.S. If American employers couldn’t so easily pay illegal workers off the books in cash, the lure of jobs would abate, and the flow of illegal immigrants would shrink drastically. Needless to say, phasing out most cash would be a far more humane and sensible way of discouraging illegal immigration than constructing a giant wall.

So to clarify - Cash (and Donald Trump) are at the center of all of America's and the world's ills and therefore - as a PhD who knows best - we must destroy it (for your own good)...

More: zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-27/harvard-professor-launches-war-paper-money.

Forget Zoro. It's the mark of Harvard.