The Bank of England published in its quarterly bulleting an update on cash. The headlines were that cash has made a partial recovery.

Two MBA students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wanted to give a percentage of their income in cash to impoverished people. They had studied the impact of government schemes in Mexico and Brazil and the results led them to want to take the same approach.

An article by Tristan Dissaux - ‘The Social Role of Money in an Age of Digitalisation' - pulls together much of the debate and thinking around the payment tension created by digitisation. As we end 2022, it is a good time to reflect on this.

Italy’s new government intends to scrap the requirement to accept electronic settlements for purchases below €30 and to raise it to €60, according to a draft of its 2023 budget recently approved by the cabinet.

Given how much cash is issued but held as a store of value, a paper entitled ‘Cash Money as a Saving Mode’ from Tampere University in Finland is useful and interesting.

In late April, Germany’s federal administrative court pronounced its judgment in the legal challenge against the Hessischer Rundfunk, a German public broadcaster, for its refusal to accept payments for an obligatory fee in euro cash.

Despite headline currency in circulation at near record levels, substantially less cash is being used in Australia.

Professors Gerhard Rösl and Franz Seitz have written a paper in which they compare the handling of the 1929 depression, the 2008/9 recession, India’s demonetisation exercise and Greece’s experience in their sovereign debt crisis and financial challenges starting 2009 until today.

A website, Scitechdaily, has written about what they refer to as the ‘cashless’ effect, the increased willingness to buy things when physical cash does not change hands.

At the Intergraf conference the Banque de France presented on the access to cash situation in France and how it has changed since 2018. The good news is that access to cash remains good throughout France. However, there are indications of change.