Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing whether or not Thailand should be canceling 1,000 - and 500-Baht Bank Notes. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article, this was over, apparently it's on the thaiger.com, that's t h a i g e r.com, but I found this, if I recall I think I found this on Twitter. In any event, I'm going to throw this up on screen so everybody can see it. Again, the whole story is over at The Thaiger. thethaiger.com. Quoting directly: "The Thai Pakdee Party announce the plan today to cancel 1,000 and 500 Baht banknotes to dismantle corruption networks in Thailand." - well I just learned one party I am not going to be voting for in the upcoming election, so there's that. That said, quoting further: "Leader Warong Dechgitvigrom aims to force elicit cash flows into traceable digital systems" - oh, but we were never doing that. Remember when all this rolled out and it was oh no we're not going after cash, the digital wallet, you'll have the other option. Quoting further: "disrupting bribery and money laundering." And also completely destroying people's ability to transact privately and frankly, there is a certain point where it's just none of the government's darned business what you're doing. And I don't see the point of this. 1,000 and 500 baht notes - by the way, just for some context here for foreigners, especially those that haven’t been in Thailand or know what the exchange rates are, the current exchange rate on 1,000 baht is about 30 bucks; the current exchange rate on 500 is about 15 bucks. So it would be the equivalent of getting rid of 20s and 50s effectively, not even 50s really, it would be equivalent of getting rid of 10s and 20s in America, okay. We're not talking about huge money here and again, this whole move I have got to be honest with you, I think all of this is not only bad policy, it's going to lead to really bad outcomes for Thailand economically.

There was something that I don't even think policymakers really understood that existed here in Thailand which was ease of banking transactions and privacy of banking transactions here in Thailand that existed up until just a couple of years ago when coincidentally, we saw the World Economic Forum stick in their undue influence into Thailand as well as the OECD, and ever since then all we've seen is rollbacks on basically the banking privacies and conveniences we came to know and depend on you Thailand and it's instead gone in the direction of no privacy in terms of transactions and basically this totalitarian Orwellianism. That said, quoting further: "Warong argued that honest citizens relying on digital banking would be unaffected, while physical cash users could utilize smaller denominations." Oh yeah let's walk around and pay for everything in 100 Baht notes. Are you kidding me? That's completely not feasible; that's just nonsense. The other one is is I love the implicit message of “if you're not doing anything wrong”. Well they can change what's wrong overnight. Overnight for a virus that it didn't call for it, we were all told that we couldn't step into any place without a mask; we were told that we couldn't leave and go anywhere. They tried to put vaccine passports and things on us. So don't give me that “if you're not doing anything wrong” when we dealt with an arbitrary and capricious set of governments worldwide that many of them just dictated what became wrong overnight, and by the way apropos of nothing and it was not based on the science. That is now unequivocally clear. So I'm tired of all of this overreach in terms of surveillance of banking transactions all predicated upon this whole spurious notion of "if you're not doing anything wrong, what are you worried about?" Well we've seen how quickly right can become wrong in these times in which we live. That said, quoting further: "he claims high-value notes are predominantly used to hide assets in secret locations or pay kickbacks." For people to keep their own money, and what is the kickback? How does anybody know? I love that this is all predicated on presumption without any due process, without any sort of adjudication, just "oh people do bad things, therefore you can't have money." It sounds real Communistic to me.

Quoting further: "The proposal includes mandating source declarations for large cash deposits" - you want to seize up the banking system real quick, you want to cause people to completely move over to a parallel system and watch the current system - which was working that was well by the way up until August 2023 - and then thereafter we had all of this WEF intervention and nonsense, but you want to see this thing seize up and then collapse real fast, keep doing this. Why would anybody want to come here and put large amounts of money into this economy if they have to make "source declarations for large cash deposits”. It's like, you know what, I’ll go ahead and use this as the thumb. It's like that scene in Casino where he says, at the end he said, "oh the town will never be the same. Some whale shows up with a million dollars in a briefcase, and some kid is looking for a social security number." The point he is trying to make is this kind of thinking destroys real money being brought into the country. There's just a certain point at which many folks who would otherwise maybe invest just say, “you know what, it's not worth it.” That said, quoting further: "and introducing the death penalty for officials embezzling over 100 million baht." You know what? I have got to be honest with you; I don't want that either. Yes, there's corruption out there. No we are not China. This is what China does, you know. And is anything good coming of any of that? You know I'm just, yeah, corruption is bad. I think for somebody that engaged in honest graft or some kind of political corruption, time in jail is enough. Why would we need the death penalty for that? Quoting further: "This policy forms part of a broader anti-corruption framework released ahead of potential elections." 

Well, this anti-corruption framework looks like a surefire way of really having a negative impact on Thailand's economy and also undermining the basic liberties that I think Thais have always taken for granted. I think this is bad policy. I am very, very hopeful that we do not see anything come of this in the upcoming Parliament.