Sweden spent two decades becoming the world's poster child for a cashless future. Coin slots disappeared from parking meters and newspaper boxes. Card readers and the bank-backed mobile app Swish became the default even for a single coffee. Cash in circulation as a share of GDP fell to among the lowest levels anywhere. Convenience and modernity were the selling points: faster checkouts, less theft, cleaner accounting, and a sense that physical money was simply obsolete.
Then reality intervened. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the rise of hybrid threats, Sweden's central bank reversed course in practical terms. Riksbank Governor Erik Thedéen and the bank now recommend that households keep roughly 1,000 Swedish kronor (around €85–90) per adult in physical cash at home, enough for about a week of essential purchases, in multiple denominations. They urge people to use cash occasionally so the infrastructure does not atrophy. The government has moved toward requiring staffed grocery stores and pharmacies to accept cash. The same authorities that watched cash use drop from roughly 40 percent of in-store purchases fifteen years ago to around 5–10 percent recently are now telling citizens to keep the paper and coins they once treated as unnecessary.
The reasons are straightforward and not accidental. Digital payments depend on electricity, networks, servers, authentication systems, and the continued functioning of private processors and card networks. A power flicker, a cyberattack on critical infrastructure, a prolonged outage of payment processors, or even a local systems failure at a supermarket, can render digital balances unusable. An ATM that is dark is an inconvenience; an entire retail economy whose terminals and backend systems are offline is a halt in purchasing power. Cash requires none of that. It settles immediately, offline, between the parties present. It does not need permission from a bank, a card issuer, or a government database to change hands.
This is not merely a wartime contingency. Everyday fragility already appears in ordinary disruptions. When card systems go down, stores that have retained the ability to take cash can still operate; those that have not simply close the till. Sweden's own officials have noted the circular problem: the less people use cash, the more the supporting infrastructure (ATMs, cash-in-transit, bank handling) shrinks, making cash less available precisely when it is most needed. The recommendation to hold and occasionally spend physical money is an attempt to keep that option alive rather than let it vanish through neglect.
Privacy and control follow the same logic. Every digital transaction leaves a permanent, queryable record. Convenience comes packaged with surveillance capacity, by banks, processors, advertisers, and states. In ordinary times this is often invisible or accepted. In abnormal times, or under policies that treat certain purchases or persons as disfavoured, the record becomes a lever. Cash does not create that record by default. You own the note; you do not need to ask a third party whether you may spend it. For the elderly, the unbanked, those in temporary exclusion, or anyone who simply prefers not to route every cup of coffee through a corporate or governmental ledger, the difference is practical rather than theoretical.
Critics correctly note that cash has its own frictions: loss, theft, and limited use in pure online commerce. Large criminal transactions favour it too, which is why some jurisdictions impose high-value cash limits. None of that erases the resilience case. Diversification is the ordinary response to single points of failure in every other critical system: power, communications, food supply. Payments are no different. Sweden's earlier trajectory treated the elimination of cash as pure progress. Its current advice treats the near-elimination of cash as a vulnerability that must be mitigated. The second view is the more realistic one.
Digital systems will remain dominant for speed and convenience in normal conditions. That is fine. The error was treating them as a complete replacement rather than a layer on top of a simpler, permissionless fallback. Cash does not need electricity, a network, or anyone's approval. When the lights stay on and the servers respond, most people will ignore it. When they do not, the people who kept a modest store of it will still be able to buy food, medicine, and fuel. Sweden's central bank has effectively conceded the point. Other countries that treated cashlessness as an unalloyed good would do well to notice. And that is looking at us, Australia