Published On : Mon, Oct 30th, 2017

Was Washington, DC, behind Modi Sarkar’s demonetisation move?

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As we approach the first anniversary of a decision on whose efficacy the jury is still out, here’s Norbert Haering, a German financial journalist and a PhD in economics, writing in ‘George Washington’s Blog’ on zerohedge.com:

‘Not even four weeks before this assault on Indians, USAID had announced the establishment of “Catalyst: Inclusive Cashless Payment Partnership’, with the goal of effecting a quantum leap in cashless payment in India. The press statement of October 14 says that Catalyst “marks the next phase of partnership between USAID and Ministry of Finance to facilitate universal financial inclusion’. The statement does not show up in the list of press statements on the website of USAID (anymore?). Not even filtering statements with the word “India’ would bring it up. To find it, you seem to have to know it exists, or stumble upon it in a web search. Indeed, this and other statements, which seemed rather boring before, have become a lot more interesting and revealing after November 8.’

Further, he writes: ‘Who are the institutions behind this decisive attack on cash? Upon the presentation of the Beyond-Cash-report, USAID declared: “Over 35 key Indian, American and international organizations have partnered with the Ministry of Finance and USAID on this initiative.’ On the ominously named website http://cashlesscatalyst.org/ one can see that they are mostly IT- and payment service providers who want to make money from digital payments or from the associated data generation on users. Many are veterans of what a high-ranking official of Deutsche Bundesbank called the “war of interested financial institutions on cash’ (in German). They include the Better Than Cash Alliance, the Gates Foundation (Microsoft), Omidyar Network (eBay), the Dell Foundation Mastercard, Visa, Metlife Foundation.’

You can read the full post, here.