The article claims Swedes and Sweden "are making the shift". That's currently false, but it's something that could happen. Perhaps I'm reading it too strictly, but as they were mentioning the National bank of Korea in the same paragraph.. The current set of laws and regulations in Sweden mandates that cash are legal tender and that there is an obligation for the Riksbank (National bank) to make sure there is "enough cash" available.
There is currently no proposed changes to those laws in the direction of scaling down cash. There are however proposed changes in the making that will make cash more available than they currently are. The chief of the Riksbank (National Bank / "Federal reserve") have an article in one of the major newspapers about this very subject, published today [1].
If you read the linked article it's more about a social shift than driven by law. I.e, many individuals are foregoing cash for cards, to the point where churches and 'homeless' now accept cards.
I have read the linked article and I know it talks about the social aspect - that card usage is very high.
What I'm saying is that the way the paragraph is currently written is not clear on that and could be interpreted as Swedish abolishing or thinking of abolishing cash from a legal perspective - especially if you do not read the linked NyTimes article.
"Stefan Wikberg, 65, was homeless for four years after losing his job as an I.T. technician. He has a place to live now and sells magazines for Situation Stockholm, a charitable organization, and began using a mobile card reader to take payments, after noticing that almost no one carried cash."
This excerpt is from the article [1] linked in the Bloomberg article [2]
There is currently no proposed changes to those laws in the direction of scaling down cash. There are however proposed changes in the making that will make cash more available than they currently are. The chief of the Riksbank (National Bank / "Federal reserve") have an article in one of the major newspapers about this very subject, published today [1].
[1]: http://www.dn.se/debatt/bankerna-maste-ansvara-for-kundernas... (In Swedish)