welcome to the cashless utopia comrades and comradettes!

i need to cogitate on this a bit more, but i’ve come to the conclusion that ‘Wealth’ is the production of Concrete products. Debt ( the promise to pay for existing Production ( concretized ) with future Production ( abstracted ) ), and specifically Fractional Reserve Fiat Money, are Abstract concepts.

“Banking” seems to be a business model founded on the literal concept of Something for Nothing ( because the promise to “gladly pay for my hamburger tomorrow if only you’ll let me eat it today” is an entirely different thing than producing the production tomorrow to pay for that hamburger ) … which is great work if you can get it.

amusing that the Bible also stands explicitly and foursquare against lending at interest …

But anyway, on to the observations.

Even in tourist areas, at least 90% of transactions are still in cash. The problem is, you cant get your own money out of the ATMs half the time to pay for anything. I walked to 5 different machines across town one day, and none of them could dispense money. They were either broken, out of cash, or gave random error messages.

When one works, the whole town ques up for cash and you can be waiting for over an hour. The amount of cash you can get is only 4000INR max/day, despite what they say. Most days youre lucky to even get cash. You often cant get currency at money changers before going, since theres a huge shortage of the new 2000INR bills.

There are many articles on how badly demonetization was implemented, how thousands have probably died, and how the next farming season will likely result in mass starvation. Also of interest, USAID was pushing for demonetization in India just months before Modi announced the surprise move. If anyone is interested, I can dig them up.

Based on my time there, this would be my advice for what to do in anticipation of capital controls.
– Secure free access to clean water (bottled, berkey filters, boiler etc)
– Load up on non perishable food (rice, tinned meats, etc)
– Load up on bars of antibacterial soap
– If you can, bog rolls, coffee, etc.
– If you can, be ready to pack it all into a car and hit the road in a few minutes notice

That takes care of the necessities.

The guys who were still doing well were the small convenience stores which sold lots of cheap items which sold for less than 500INR. So a good business might be a mom and pop 7 eleven type store, or a dollar store.

Its good to be the butcher shop guy, but what will his customers buy the kilo of meet with when they have no cash?

Fruit and vegetables were dirt cheap when I went since people no longer had the cash to buy them. Farmers sold their produce for whatever cash they could get.