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India demonetisation fails to purge black money

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Re: India demonetisation fails to purge black money

#3
It's one of the most expected outcomes. But still for the government to go ahead and do this was primarily two reasons:

1. PR:

The current Indian Govt was suffering from Beefgate and PM Modi was criticised for not making any comments on it but touring the world. While Modi was seemed to be an economic reformer, nothing of that sort happened until that. Hence this Demonetisation came up to showcase "PM Modi has done that no one would dare to do" headlines. It's also notable that the Prime Minister himself appeared on Media and announced this, while a right approach would be the man who signs on the currency: RBI Governor to do. A PR win it was!

2. Digitisation:

One of the big concerns with Digital Currency (a non-decentralised one) is that it's really really hard to be private anymore. We'd just end up as another data point in someone's table and that's exactly what happened. This was very well explained in the recent SAS Forum happened in Mumbai, India. Data Scientists of Income Tax dept wanted data for analysis but didn't have one and got what they wanted with Demonetisation.

So, that's obvious! A win-win for govt!

Re: India demonetisation fails to purge black money

#6
No scheme can eliminate the evils 100%. However, overall it had pretty strong positive impact on economy. Many of the roadside merchants who used to be exclusively cash only, have started accepting dizital payments. All those on-record transactions are now part of formal banking system, instead of earlier don't-bother-about-tax approach.

Combine this with the recent roll out of GST, we are on a very progressive path and with good momentum.

Re: India demonetisation fails to purge black money

#7
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1xf7GB...

utterly terrible idea. I was in india in Dec/Jan and the amount of chaos resulting from demonetisation was immense. The outcome was obvious - noone was ever going to let a high value bank note become obsolete. Worst case is you sell it for close to face value and some poor person stands in line for 6 hours to be able to deposit it.

It really speaks to the masochistic nature of the indian people that despite the whole exercise being pointless and stupid, they still supported Modi here because his heart was in the right place. Sorry but when people were literally dying as a result of the chaos, having good intentions does not cut it.

Re: India demonetisation fails to purge black money

#8

No scheme can eliminate the evils 100%. However, overall it had pretty strong positive impact on economy. Many of the roadside merchants who used to be exclusively cash only, have started accepting dizital payments. All those on-record transactions are now part of formal banking system, instead of earlier don't-bother-about-tax approach. Combine this with the recent roll out of GST, we are on a very progressive path…

yeah I think thats the best outcome of the whole exercise. I went to India in the middle of that shitstorm and it was really painful to travel around. Currency exchanges/banks only gave 2000 rs notes the nobody wanted to accept.

Re: India demonetisation fails to purge black money

#9
As far as I can tell this is simply what success looks like.

Depositing the money is just phase 1 and worked as expected. Phase 2 is tracking back large or unusual deposits to find criminals. Phase 3 is to discourage other from trying to doge taxes in the first place.

Even if they only catch say 5% of people and don't directly gain money from this exercise, the indirect effect of scaring that many people is huge.

Re: India demonetisation fails to purge black money

#10
I would not be surprised if one of the unstated goals was the removal of counterfeit high denomination notes from circulation. High denomination notes are the most attractive to counterfeit and such counterfeiting is often done by state level actors with budgets sufficient to produce high quality notes. The actual number of notes taken out of circulation is 1% of legitimate notes plus the number of counterfeit notes in circulation because the number of notes in circulation prior to the transition included counterfeit notes.
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