DAVID CHAPLIN: Afterpay, the payment system that ‘isn’t’

Wed, 15 Jul 2020

How much for cash?In the good old days, your plumber would have an answer to that question. But the demise of physical money, a sustained regulatory crack-down on the ‘black economy’ and a surplus of anti-money laundering rules have rendered the ‘cashie’ obsolete: a piece of financial nostalgia on a par with cheques and positive interest rates.Trying on the cash question, though, wasn’t just about tax avoidance. In many cases, cash buyers were able to extract upfront, tax-compliant discounts from vendors,...

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