A SIGN on the door of a Wild Bean café in Zurich shows the nine different cards accepted for payment inside. Below the logos is a picture of a purple bank note, crossed out in red. From behind the counter, Aymen Kandil explains that for everyday transactions, “thousand-franc notes are not so good”.
Although many merchants will not accept them, the SFr1,000 ($1,000) note makes up over 60% of all Swiss cash in circulation. It is the most valuable banknote issued by a Western country and is worth twenty times its weight in gold. Rather than being a way of paying for things, it is meant to act as a convenient store of value. In 2008, as banks were failing and the value of most assets collapsed, demand for the SFr1,000 note jumped by 16%, having grown by only 1-4% in previous years.
Yet lawmen suspect that most high-denomination notes are in the hands not of jittery savers, but of criminals. Good data on the use of such notes are scarce—their anonymity is one of their attractions. But a report in 2010 from a British police unit that focuses on organised crime claimed that only 10% of €500 ($542) notes were used for legitimate purposes. A...Continue reading
Source: Business and finance http://ift.tt/1TVeT31
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