Government bureaucrats, central bankers, and Wall Street executives all have their own reasons for hating the cash in your wallet. So, no surprise, they are working closely together to rid you of it.

The war on cash is intensifying and bullion investors are wondering what the transition to a “cashless society” might mean. We’ll cover that, but let’s first recap why these organizations are, once again, allied together to the detriment of your ability to transact privately.

The self-interest of bureaucrats is one factor. They don’t like privacy. They dream of the day when they can access all of your spending with just a few keystrokes. The knowledge will help them more aggressively tax and regulate.

Central bankers want something a bit different. The policy du jour among these central planners is NIRP – negative interest rate policy.

Bankers in Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, and Japan have already launched NIRP. Their counterparts elsewhere, including the U.S., are planning for it.

The challenge is to create an environment where customers must either spend their savings or pay their bank interest to hold deposits. To succeed, the government must corral citizens into purely electronic money. Otherwise many will simply withdraw cash and hide it under a mattress. When you have to pay a bank to borrow your money, holding physical cash gives you a higher yield, i.e. 0% interest is a higher yield than negative 1%!

Bank executives are licking their chops at the potential for all transactions to be done electronically. They stand to rake in processing fees every time you use your card or cell phone to make purchases rather than using cash. Plus, they will gather a larger deposit base as customers no longer have the option of holding paper money outside the banking system.

People need to keep these motivations firmly in mind, because politicians and bankers aren’t going to be honest about why they want to eliminate cash. Wall Street wants you to focus instead on the convenience of electronic payments. And bureaucrats are busy stigmatizing cash as a tool for drug dealers, tax cheats, and terrorists.