In most countries, cheques have “gone the way of the fax machine and the rotary telephone”, says Katie Robertson in Bloomberg Businessweek. But they’re still surprisingly popular in the US.
In 2015, the average American made 38 transactions using cheques, according to the Bank of International Settlements, and although their use has been falling since the 1990s, the rate of decline has slowed in recent years.
In Canada, the average was 18, in the UK a mere eight, and virtually zero in Germany. Indeed, among developed countries, only France has a similar fondness for cheques.
Viewpoint
“The super-stocks that lead a bull market inevitably become priced for perfection… in many cases the companies’ perfection turns out… to be either illusory or ephemeral. Some of the ‘can’t lose’ companies of the Nifty-Fifty were ultimately crippled by massive changes in their markets, including Kodak, Polaroid, Xerox… and Simplicity Pattern (do you see many people sewing their own clothes these days?)… even the successful companies’ stock prices reverted to more-normal valuation multiples, resulting in sub-par equity returns.”
Oaktree Capital’s Howard Marks compares today’s tech giants such as Facebook and Amazon to the “Nifty Fifty” stock bubble of the early 1970s