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And that's where I found this article the other day.
Very interesting thing.
A well-kept open secret.
Washington is behind India's brutal experiment of abolishing most cash.
This by a German writer named Norbert Herring.
Welcome to the show, Norbert.
How are you doing, sir?
I think I'm fine.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show today and writing this up in English in the first place for me.
Wow.
So what an important story.
I haven't really covered this on the show at all.
I think probably most of my audience has at least heard.
We've seen the headlines that they instituted this crazy sounding policy.
I don't know exactly what all it means for the people of India, but they've abolished.
Is it fair to say?
Terrible for most people in India because India is 97 percent cash or has been and ninety seven percent.
Their economy is ninety seven percent cash.
You said their economy is a ninety seven percent cash economy.
Yeah.
That's the result of a study of those people who are behind that thing.
They found that out before and they wanted to change that by just taking away the cash.
And so people don't have cash anymore.
OK, now.
Now, how does this work?
Because, of course, in America, we have, you know, fives, tens, twenties, fifties, hundreds.
And they pretty much abolished five hundred dollar bills and thousand dollar bills, more or less.
But so, like, can you make a comparison?
This is the same as if they had outlawed fifty and hundred dollar bills, basically.
No, that's the same as if outlawing everything down to like five or ten dollar bills.
Oh, wow.
So even 20s.
Eighty percent of cash is gone.
Eighty percent.
OK, so and now I'm just totally guessing, but I would bet twenty dollar bills would be, you know, 90 percent of American cash transactions are in 20s rather than hundreds or tens.
Right.
Twenties.
So that's what you're.
This would be like if they abolished twenty dollar bills, fifties and hundreds just all at once in the United States of America.
That's what's happening in India.
And this is a land, I don't know, a country.
This is a land of a billion people, a seventh of the population of the planet Earth lives in India.
So now go ahead and tell us the whole story.
Well, first of all, I guess.
Yeah.
Tell us about what this has meant for the people of India first so we can kind of get a handle on it and then we'll get back into who did it to them.
Yeah.
I mean, half the population doesn't have a bank account.
Very many of them don't have a bank nearby in like rural India or regions where there's no bank.
So they don't have any access to to even the new cash that is coming out.
And most people are working in the informal sector, which is totally cash based.
And they they sort of scrape a living and suddenly nobody has money to buy from them anymore.
They have people have to go into the big chains and do their shopping there because they can pay with their cards if they have any.
They can't pay from the informal vendors that they pay that they bought their stuff before.
So these people only can't make a living anymore because nobody has money to to to spend right now.
And that's disastrous for money for for very many people.
And it's great for land grabbers because the farmers have to sell their land just just to get by.
Well, now, so what you're saying here is, I mean, this is basically a society where people only have, you know, are not not only but to a great degree, people are buying and selling their foodstuffs at these kind of open air markets like what in Texas we would call a flea market kind of a thing where there there is no supermarket.
There is no smart card reader.
There is no infrastructure.
You say a 97 percent cash economy.
You're saying the virtually the entire population of India is dependent on, you know, the most I don't want to say like primitive, like it's not barter, but it's it's one step above barter in the sense that in a way nobody's paying enough.
Nothing is so expensive that you would even need bank accounts worth of money for the transfers.
Right.
We're talking about just day to day people trying to survive as for regular Indian people for the majority of the people.
Certainly for the for the middle class in the big towns, it's different.
But that's only a fraction of the population.
So these people are hurt.
And I mean, it has nothing to do with barter.
It's regular money.
And these institutions who have done it, who are behind it, they have analyzed the situations where reports are there and they've said there is a cash ecosystem which keeps us from penetrating it with our digital monies.
And we wanted to destroy that.
And that's what they did.
So that everybody who can possibly get access to digital money, to cards and such, traders that so far haven't found it useful for them to buy card readers and stuff.
They have to do that now.
Everybody who can.
So it's a quantum leap for them in terms of getting, making their way in, because they have been very frustrated that they couldn't get in very well in India and it's such a big market.
Yeah.
Now, I mean, this is amazing, because I guess I would just assume that this will have to fail, that they have to take this back.
Well, I'm sorry, I want you to get into naming names of who's behind this in a second.
But I'm just in my imagination, I'm just saying, in my imagination, I'm looking at, without a lot of, you know, informed news commentary that I've read or anything, I'm just imagining the entire society falling apart.
You can't, you just can't do that.
You can't abolish cash like that.
And especially all at once like this in such a short period of time.
They're going to have to take this policy back and allow people to continue to use paper money.
Right?
We're doing it.
I mean, what they did is they just outlawed the old bills and we're printing new, even larger bills.
They're printing new 2,000 rupee bills, when before the largest was 1,000 and they outlawed the old ones.
So then coming out with the new ones, that goes very slow and nobody has change for it because all the small ones are outlawed, or the next smaller ones.
So over time, cash will come back and will be available.
But that was such an upheaval that they created that they'll force everybody who can to get a card so that next time they do it again, they won't have this catastrophe again of not being able to pay or not being able to take money from your customers if you don't have a card reader.
So it was sort of a shock treatment so that everybody would take part in the digital economy who has any kind of money and access.
All right.
Well, we know that it wasn't the people of India who decided through their democracy that this was a grand experiment they wanted to enter into.
So who did it to them?
Well, it is a mix of what is clear and can be read if you search the internet, although nobody talks about it in India.
They make it seem like it was Prime Minister Modi and he had his extravagant idea and did it.
But there was a partnership between USAID and the Indian Finance Ministry and a couple of other institutions who all have an interest in pushing back cash, which had exactly the goal.
And in September, only four weeks before that grand scheme was announced, only four weeks before that, they put it to a new level, as they said, in a press statement with an institution called Catalyst, which had exactly that goal and USAID paid for it.
So it's clear that that's the official U.S. government development agency.
So it's clear that Washington is involved and that that goes even further back.
And USAID is part of an initiative called Better Than Cash Alliance, where they are together with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Visa Mastercard, who have an obvious interest, the Ford Foundation and other such foundations.
And since 2012, they have been working internationally toward abolishing cash.
So it's like the payment providers who have almost an international monopoly, the U.S. payment providers, together with USAID and the IT groups like Microsoft, also with an obvious interest, who are working on abolishing cash.
And these institutions have been in a partnership with the Indian Finance Ministry to work toward that.
So I can't point to a piece of paper that says, from Washington to India, you do that now, but it's very clear that Washington was involved much more than is admitted or talked about.
Amazing.
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I have to say, it really is just like one of my New World Order conspiracy theories circa 1994, where they abolish, they create these cashless societies where everybody has to spend, at least with their smart card or with their thumbprint, and every transaction is monitored by the central authority.
And here, they're implementing this experiment on, again, this massive society, one-seventh of the world's population, but also a very poor one and a very, very cash-based one.
As you say, they're not, it's sort of like, you know, Marx said he expected Western Europe to go to communism first, that it would be like a final stage thing, whereas Russia went from an agrarian society straight to communism.
It's sort of like that, where it's just, it's such a huge shock.
I mean, I don't know how many people are going to starve because of this, but it's going to be, it already must be a tragedy taking place there.
Let me quote somebody to back it up, what you said about the experiment.
This is Jonathan Adelton, USAID Mission Director in India, U.S. Ambassador.
He said when this catalyst institution was created, a month before the whole thing happens, and I quote, India is at the forefront of global efforts to digitize economies and create new economic opportunities that extend to hard-to-reach populations.
Catalyst will support these efforts by focusing on the challenge of making everyday purchases cashless.
So he talks of global efforts to digitize economies, and India is at the forefront.
So it's clear that they regard India as the guinea pig for these efforts, and also as a message, because it was so disastrous for everybody who didn't have access to digital payments, and the whole world took notice.
So everybody has to be nervous now.
You and I have cards, but in other countries like Bangladesh, or you name it, developing and such countries, people are going to think, traders are going to think, maybe I better get that card readers in case I have the same idea.
And so even if it was terrible for the people, it has worked tremendously well for the digital payment industry.
Yeah.
Well, and and yeah, I mean, that's the thing.
You talk about really the two divided motives here, not that divided.
They dovetail well.
One of them is just to make sure that Visa and MasterCard get a cut, right?
Goldman and Citigroup and whoever else is in on this, that they get a cut out of this.
But also it is, I think you mentioned in here, that it's about surveillance, too.
It's about making every single person, even at the lowest level of the economy, the lowest rung on the ladder of the economy, accountable for everything they buy and sell.
You know, like we're all slaves, that kind of thing.
Yeah.
Yesterday I came across, I don't know if ever you noticed, a bizarre thing.
It just got published in December, a patent by MasterCard, which we have applied for, where they want to patent their way of guessing from your payment details.
If you pay with MasterCard for clothing or shoes, they guess your height and your weight and they want to sell that to airlines.
It's like clear abuse of your payment data and they even want to patent it.
So it's clear what's, of course, MasterCard is part of this Better Than Cash Alliance that wants to get rid of cash worldwide.
And it's clear what we're going to do when there's no cash anymore that you can go.
Today, if you want to preserve a minimum of your freedom, what to do with your data and who shall see what you buy, you just use cash.
You can't do that anymore, just as you say.
And so already in India, just a month into this thing, there is now a big fight brewing because the card companies suddenly raised the charge on gas traders, on gas stations for card readers.
So they immediately cashed in on the fact that everybody had to pay with card now because there was no cash anymore.
And we'll see a lot of that if cash is not a threat anymore.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I guess I'm interested in your German perspective on this question of whether this is maybe a really bad time for the visas and MasterCards in Washington, D.C. of the world to try to force these policies down the throats of other countries and other societies like the Indians, when really all across the world, parties of right wing reaction against this sort of internationalism, just this sort of destructive government based American empire based interventionism in other people's societies, military and otherwise, seems to be, you know, growing.
In fact, doesn't Modi and his party, don't they kind of represent right wing reaction against just this kind of thing?
I mean, clearly he's going along with this policy this time.
But I just wonder whether, you know, in the politics of things over there, whether maybe they're picking a big fight here that they're going to lose.
Well, I see it more like resorting to power politics.
I mean, going to the U.S. has very big control over the world financial system.
And the more that system is digitalized and the more of it, down to even the poorer people, the more control they have.
And they're not shy to use it.
I mean, there was a story here recently in the main newspaper on how they're just exporting their law worldwide, how people have been put on a terror list for doing perfectly legitimate business with Iran that was conforming in all aspects to German law.
And they had had it cleared before and everything.
And still they were put on a terror list, individual people and companies.
And that means they can't have a credit card anymore.
Many companies won't deal with them anymore because they're afraid of the Americans.
They're basically destroyed economically.
And so that if all banks worldwide have to do what America says, like if America decides that Deutsche Bank has to pay 12 billion, which eventually they didn't, or 14, they sort of discounted it a bit.
But they can bankrupt, basically bankrupt any bank who has any international business because it's in dollar.
And the US can say you can't do that anymore.
So they have very tight control over everything that goes through banks.
And so if they make more of the financial system go through banks, they have more control.
So I think it's a reaction and they want to tighten their control because a lot of things are not going the right way.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, can you give me some advice of where what's a good news source to read about the consequences of this on the ground in India as far as the economic consequences, especially for the poorest people on a kind of ongoing basis?
Oh, that's tough.
Honestly, I mean, the spectacular thing is that what I wrote from Germany really made a huge splash in India and everybody, everybody cited it.
And I had hundred thousands of viewers on my blog, mostly from India, because there was just not very much reporting or hardly any reporting about that.
So it's not a good situation for getting this kind of information.
But yeah, I can't say it offhand.
I have a couple of links that I have stored, but I can't really say it now.
So I can send it to you, but I don't have it ready for your listeners now.
That's OK.
It reminds me, I actually know an Indian libertarian who is very critical of the the left wing, formerly left wing policies and the new right wing government there.
I'm sure he'd have a lot to say about this kind of intervention in the economy as well.
I might try to see if I can get him on the show to talk a little bit more about this.
But this is really great stuff.
And I'm sorry I did not mention at the beginning of the interview, Norbert, the book is Abolishing Cash and the Consequences, published last year for you German readers out there.
And you can find this great blog.
It's at Norbert Herring.
That's H-A-E-R-I-N-G, Norbert Herring dot D-E.
And this great, very important article here.
I hope you guys will take a look at it.
You can find it on my Twitter feed as well.
I guess I'll blog it at the Libertarian Institute.
It's called A Well-Kept Open Secret.
Washington is behind India's brutal experiment of abolishing most cash.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thank you for having me, Scott.
Appreciate it.
All right, y'all.
Scott Horton Show.
Check out the full archives at Scott Horton dot org slash interviews and at Libertarian Institute dot org slash Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
Hey, I'll Scott here.
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