Money moves
During a eulogy for his late father in the final season of Succession, Kendall Roy described money as “the corpuscles of life gushing around this nation, this world, filling men and women all around with... desire”. Exactly how those corpuscles work and move, though, is another matter — one that’s changed a lot over the thousands of years that humans have been keeping track of who owns what.
Plastic fantastic
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the big headline is that Americans have been turning away from cash and checks in favor of more modern methods in recent years.
According to an annual study from the Federal Reserve that tracks the instruments that US adults use to pay for day-to-day transactions, 40% of payments were made with “paper” (cash, checks, or money orders) in 2015 — a figure that, just 7 years later, had very nearly halved. Paying with cash specifically has seen a similar fall in that time frame too: just 17% of US payments were made with coins and notes in 2022 after they accounted for a third of all payments in 2015.
Conversely, more and more of us are getting comfortable telling cashiers and clerks to put it on our cards. Indeed, the share of plastic payments is up 13% in the last 7 years, with almost all of that coming from people paying with credit cards, sending total credit card debt soaring above the $1trillion mark for the first time ever in 2023. That shift has been music to the ears of Visa and Mastercard execs, whose companies have stacked stunning profits on a few percentage points here and there of almost every transaction.
Most Valuable Payments
For the above analysis, we looked at the volume of transactions, but when you slice the data by value instead, things look pretty different. On a $-value basis, bank and online payments account for the most actual money changing hands, with some 43% of total dollars spent with the 2 electronic methods in 2022, while cash’s share sinks even further to just 5%.
