151–160 of 327 posts
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In many countries in Europe you can't use cash for large sums. We generally use bank transfers to buy cars.
>We generally use bank transfers to buy cars. It's actually the only possible way to buy a new car. If you don't believe me, go try and buy a car with a credit card in the EU, see what happens.
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You tend to run into the problem that forging large notes has a much greater return on investment. People get nervous about accepting them. In the UK this definitely kicks in around the £50 mark.
There's no denomination larger than £50 in England, right? Scotland and NI have £100 which probably adds to the confusion.
This problem has probably been exacerbated by the fact the the $500 euro note has not been issued since 27 April 2019[1]. I wonder if making storing euros in cash 2.5 times harder (500 versus 200 euro notes) was part of the reason the 500 euro was retired. [Edit] The legal storing of cash. The stated reason was the criminal use of cash. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/500_euro_note
The United States used to print $100,000 notes. They were only available to banks for moving from bank to bank, I believe, and so were useful for reducing the number of notes that needed to be stored by banks, while keeping them out of the hands of criminals.
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I really hate this idea that everyone needs to just constantly be spending. It's useful but there is nothing wrong with having a slow stable fincal conscious ecconomy.
National economies are not households. My spending is your income, and your spending is my income. You can talk about "investment" all you want but without consumer spending there's never any return on that investment and so no one will bother. Having household savings is good but at a certain point it bottlenecks the economy.
Looking back at the past half century the big variables that have changed to get us here seem to be A) lack of world wars to devastate Europe B) rising automation leading to skyrocketing worker productivity C) society's wealth becoming increasingly concentrated within a billionaire class and D) relatively flat wage growth to spite B. There are also probably a few other's I'm missing too.
TLDR seems like there's a bigger picture to the macroeconomic situation than just spending and saving at the moment. I'm really curious to see how this will shake out going forward.
This problem has probably been exacerbated by the fact the the $500 euro note has not been issued since 27 April 2019[1]. I wonder if making storing euros in cash 2.5 times harder (500 versus 200 euro notes) was part of the reason the 500 euro was retired. [Edit] The legal storing of cash. The stated reason was the criminal use of cash. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/500_euro_note
next thing will be 200 euro bills revoked, then the base rate can go down to around -1%.
This problem has probably been exacerbated by the fact the the $500 euro note has not been issued since 27 April 2019[1]. I wonder if making storing euros in cash 2.5 times harder (500 versus 200 euro notes) was part of the reason the 500 euro was retired. [Edit] The legal storing of cash. The stated reason was the criminal use of cash. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/500_euro_note
the real reason why the 500 euro bill has been revoked was that for storing physical money (for banks, in those quantities) would become more expensive in order for the ECB to lower the interest/deposit rate. next thing will be 200 euro bills revoked, then the base rate can go down to around -1%.
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Is it possible to buy with cash?
Not sure about other countries, but in Spain you can't pay anything above three thousand euros (IIRC) in cash. People downvoting others in disbelief should try to find a source by themselves before.
https://www.agenciatributaria.es/AEAT.internet/Inicio/_Segme...
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I'm genuinely curious. Do you need to go to a physical bank location to do this? How do you buy a car in the evening or a Saturday afternoon, when a bank is closed?
Direct account-to-account transfer is supported between all major EU banks. It takes a couple of seconds at most, and it's free.
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500 euro was (and is) essentially not used for any day to day payments - i.e. the most important reason for having printed paper as money.
True. But it is nice to have large bills when buying something that costs a lot, like a used car. I recently did that in the US and if I had some $500 or $1000 bill things would have went a bit smoother at that nervous time in the transaction when you are handing over to a person a big chunk of money.
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Buying a car in Europe is a complicated affair, and certainly not something that can be concluded in an afternoon.
What? You go to a car dealer, sign, pay and drive away.