There are figures that go unnoticed and yet portray a country better than any survey. Families throw in the towel when it comes to saving cash. The latest report of Inverco on Family financial savings shows that The cash held by Spanish families has fallen below 40 billion euros. It is a historic low (well, the previous quarter was even worse) and marks an acceleration in a process that, until recently, was going more slowly. By the way, it is the only item that is losing ground, because the rest (deposits, funds, direct investment…) rises. Only hard cash goes down.
To see such a low figure in the historical series you have to go to 1990. What does this mean? That savers do not keep cash. Cash, that healthy sign of freedomand so wounded to death. While all kinds of obstacles are being put in place, there is talk of digital money, which will give absolute traceability to our income. Just what politicians want, to legislate even more about it.
It can be argued that it makes no sense to accumulate liquidity in cash, given the enormous inflation we suffer, which causes banknotes to lose value in real time if they do not work in it financial marketand it’s true. Inflation comes through monetary policies of central banks, applauded by states, consisting of making money and inflating debt. That is, because of the politicians.
And, of course, it comes through the sick controls by check handling cash. They say it is to “control the fraud«, a mantra repeated ad nauseum, with which all types of abuses are committed against (financial) freedoms, such as not being able withdraw money at ATMs, at the counter, or pay in cash in stores above 1,000 euros. You want to withdraw more than 3,000 euros and you have to put in writing that What do you want to use your own money for?. (And what does it matter to you?).
It may also seem a natural consequence of the digitization: we pay with our mobile phone, with a card, with Bizum; we use less and less banknotes. But interpreting this collapse as a simple technological advance would be a mistake.
In Spain, cash has always been more than a means of payment: it has been a parallel economic infrastructure. Its rapid disappearance does not describe a more modern country, but rather a country whose informal economy—all that small, domestic, flexible activity that never fit well into regulation— is shrinking abruptly.
Spain has historically depended on cash because it depended on activities that they could only survive with cash: the occasional job, the occasional care, the domestic service for a few hours, the small repair, the sporadic jobs, the local economic exchanges… the wedding gift, the little money that a father gives to a son to buy a car, the inheritance, the transfer to a friend to whom you lend money…
A lot of economic activity of very little significance in which the Government (by the way, of the PP) has tried to get its hands in an uncontrolled way.
I’m not talking about the great tax fraud – the one that appears in the headlines – but about the real economyeveryday, which complements salaries, fills gaps and keeps the productive fabric alive in neighborhoods and towns.
Just because cash is sinking does not mean that that activity has been formalized. It means that much of it has disappeared. That what was done before, now stops being done.
While all this is happening, the rent per capita is at levels of the first decade of this century, the salaries go down and the middle class it goes down the drain.
The Spanish economy suffers from the flu, due to the huge tax pressure. When at the beginning of this century Spain was “the European miracle”, with growth rates of around 4%, wage inflation and companies expanding, there was a catch: “but 20% of the economy is black money”.
That fact, although empirically invented, was quite real. And that is what our economy needs now: black money, which greased the economic engine wonderfully. Before half the country tears its clothes, we must insist that this is not the horrible fraud that comes from crime, it is simply money that the state did not put its dirty paws on. It allowed you to grow. Now, with public spending exceeding 40% of GDP, there is no money that escapes and no growth that takes root.
Have degrowth, rules and poverty.
Then they are surprised that there is so much interest in cryptocurrencies.