http://www.safehaven.com/article/40227/ ... epocalypse
... When hitting the zero bound failed to lift economies that crashed in the Great Recession, some central banks moved to force negative interest rates on people who save their money in banks.
Charging people to keep their money in the bank is hard to do so long as cash is available, as people may just withdraw all of their money from those banks in the form of the national cash and squirrel the cash away. In order to penetrate the twilight zone of economics, central banks need to abolish cash to terminate this escape route. Then they can force savers to spend, thereby increasing the flow of money through the economy, by raising the cost of holding money in a bank account as high as it takes to get people to spend their money. No sense letting perfectly good money waste away in an expensive bank account.
Transitioning into a cashless society is the ultimate central planner's dream as it gives central banks total control over money, and money is their proprietary product. ...
I know parts of Atlas Shrugged are a slog (at least in my view) but when you get into it is eye-opening (ignoring the soap opera romance and Utopian conclusion) that Ayn Rand predicted those trends in the midst of the 1950s. While she doesn't include this specific event, it's completely consistent with her book and if she had known of the technology changes coming I'm sure she would have included it.
