ALMOST anything can be bought and sold online. Even so, sales of ordinary banknotes at a big premium are puzzling. On a newish e-commerce site in Japan called Mercari, ¥10,000 ($ 90) notes were on sale earlier this year for as much as ¥13,000. So bizarre was the phenomenon that it created a furore, leading the firm to ban such deals in April. A rival site, Yahoo Auctions, soon followed suit. The buyers were not indulging a passion for rare banknotes. They simply wanted the money. In need of emergency finance, and having used up all their bank limits, they resorted to buying cash with their credit cards.
The ban has prompted some crafty work-arounds. “Valuable portraits” of Yukichi Fukuzawa, a thinker revered as a guiding light of Japan’s 19th-century modernisation, have been on sale for as much as ¥15,000. That is a hefty premium to the highest-denominated banknote, ¥10,000, which happens to be adorned with Fukuzawa’s likeness. Or take the bottles of water claiming to…
The Economist: Finance and economics
