Most of the time I use this column to recommend policy changes that I believe would make the world a better place. This time I am saluting a policy change I believe will have significant benefits — one that carries with it important lessons. The decision of the European Central Bank last week to stop producing €500 notes permanently is a triumph of reasonable judgment over shameless fearmongering… High quality global journalism requires investment.

First, the world should demand that Switzerland stops issuing SFr1,000 franc notes. After Europe’s bold step, these notes will stand out as the hard-currency world’s highest denomination note by a wide margin. Switzerland has a long and unfortunate history with illicit finance. It would be tragic if it were to profit from criminal currency substitution. Second, the question of the facilitation of criminal activity should be placed prominently on the agenda of the Group of 20 leading nations.

It gets worse:

There would be a strong case for stopping the production of notes with value greater than, perhaps, $50… The political criminal states that his reason for calling for the elimination of high denomination notes is to prevent non-political crime and, well, no one needs to use large amounts of cash anyway: There is little if any legitimate use for €500 notes. Carrying out a transaction with 20 €50 notes hardly seems burdensome — and this would represent more than $1,000 in purchasing power. Meanwhile, 20 €200 notes would represent close to $5,000 in purchasing power. Who in today’s world needs cash for a legitimate $5,000 transaction?

A cashless society is a very bad idea. It would mean a society where the government would be able to track all our transactions - and thus control activities, Summers' aggressive advocacy that is moving the world toward a cashless society makes him one of the most evil economists living today.

"We as a company are neutral - we have not and will not use our products in a way that attempts to influence how people vote." That is a quote from a Facebook spokesperson given in response to a leaked internal poll which asked what responsibility Facebook had in preventing Donald Trump from becoming the next president. In light of the fact that a former employee is now admitting Facebook routinely suppresses conservative news stories from its trending news section, we're curious if that same response will be used.

An individual who worked on the project told Gizmodo that Facebook prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the trending news section. Additionally, several former Facebook "news curators" as they are known internally, told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially "inject" stories into the news flow, even though they weren't popular enough to be included.

As Gizmodo reports, Facebook's "news" team is just a group of young journalists educated at Ivy League or other private East Coast universities injecting their liberal views into a news stream that 167 million in the US alone are reading at any given moment.

The Middle East, North Africa and Asia-Pacific regions will also experience a persistent rise in conflicts. This increasing trend in instability promises billions of dollars of profits for global defence firms, concludes the report, published last month by Infiniti Research Ltd, a market intelligence firm whose clients include Fortune 500 companies.

“Protests, riots, and demonstrations are major issues faced by the law enforcement agencies across the world,” said Abhay Singh, a leading defence technology analyst at the firm. “In addition the increase in incidents of civil wars in countries such as Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt along with an increase in the global defence budget will generate demand for riot control systems.”

Trevor Maynard, Lloyds head of exposure management and reinsurance, said: “The report suggests that instances of political violence contagion are becoming more frequent and the contagion effect ever more rapid and powerful.”

Scientists suggest moralising religions - Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism - emerged due to growing differences between wealthy elites and poorer general populations. By setting out a moral framework for people to live by, these religions helped to level the evolutionary playing field as people's lifestyles changed.

According to evolutionary psychologist Dr Nicolas Baumard, at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, affluence causes humans to switch to a slower lifestyle where they have babies later and fewer children. Around 2,500 years ago it was just the elite members of the Egyptian and Sumerian civilisations that emerged in the eastern Mediterranean who adopted this lifestyle.

The rest of the population, however, continued to live fast and die young, which left the wealthier people at a competitive disadvantage from an evolutionary perspective, explained Dr Baumard. As a result the elite promoted moralising gods as a way to ensure the more sexually active and aggressive general populous did not usurp them. But now, as affluence becomes more ubiquitous around the world, this could ultimately lead to the downfall of moralising religions too, Dr Baumard wrote in New Scientist.

He said: 'As more and more people become affluent and adopt a slow strategy, the need to morally condemn fast strategies decreases, and with it the benefit of holding religious beliefs that justify doing so. If this is true, and our environment continues to improve, then like the Greco-Roman religions before them, Christianity and other moralising religions could eventually vanish.'

Seventy percent of those sampled by the ‘German Infratest dimap pollster’ for the public broadcaster ARD said the TTIP deal would be disadvantageous for Germany, with only 17 percent having a favorable opinion of the deal. The same poll revealed on Wednesday that 79 percent of the German public feared the pact would weaken consumer protections. Eighty-three percent of respondents said that talks on the secretive deal should be conducted in the open.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said last week that she hoped the negotiations on the agreement to expedite trade in goods and services across the Atlantic would be wrapped up soon, possibly by the end of 2016.

"We won't sacrifice our high food safety standards in a barter trade for approval of European car blinkers," he said. While both amber and red car blinkers are allowed in the US, the exact specific color of "amber" differs slightly between the markets. This can be viewed as an illustration of the extent of "concessions" proposed in TTIP.

This trade agreement has been backed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel who claimed she "will do anything to conclude negotiations" before the end of this year. Such support was called "really striking" by Austrian politics expert Stefan Haderer.

Earlier, French politicians joined hands in their struggle against the agreement, with French President Francois Hollande going as far as threatening to reject the agreement in its current form, because it promotes "unregulated free trade". According to French environmentalists, should France sign the agreement, it will "sacrifice French agriculture to get access to the US procurement market."

Mr Cameron today highlighted the UK’s role in bringing peace to Europe as he hit the referendum campaign trail - just hours before a rival speech by Boris Johnson. In a key speech at the British Museum in London, the PM told pro-EU campaigners: "Can we be so sure peace and stability on our continent are assured beyond any shadow of doubt? Is that a risk worth taking? I would never be so rash to make that assumption."

And he said: "What happens in our neighbourhood matters to Britain. That was true in 1914, 1940, 1989… and it is true in 2016." Both the Prime Minister and his Brexit -backing Tory rival were making speeches this morning in the countdown to the June 23 vote.

Debt relief demanded by the International Monetary Fund will also be on the agenda at the talks, which come after Greece was this weekend forced to stomach a sudden three-day general strike in protest against plans to increase taxes and revamp pensions. Greece’s next hard deadline looms in July, when it is due to repay €300 million to the IMF and €2.3 billion to the European Central Bank.

Finance minister Euclid Tsakalotos this weekend warned that “another Greek crisis” could be on the horizon if his economic programme was not approved. In a letter, he wrote: “Nobody should believe that another Greek crisis, leading perhaps to another failed state in the region, could be beneficial to anyone.”

It comes after analysts warned that the EU will be desperate to keep quiet any suggestion of another Greek crisis ahead of the Brexit referendum in the UK. David Owen, a Jefferies economist, said the fear of Brexit would give “the rest of Europe and the IMF far more to worry about than whether Greece stays in the euro area.”

Erdogan is now free to push for a change in the constitution that would transfer more power to himself. But this act also highlights his growing political isolation, which many believe will spell the end of his career — an outcome of great concern to the US and its European allies.

Western leaders desperately need Turkey to remain stable. As a key NATO ally in a volatile region — NATO’s second-largest army, in fact — and the country that is supposed to protect Europe from another flood of refugees, a lot is riding on Turkey’s stability. But the oppressed half of the country does not share the same sentiments, and talk of a possible coup against Erdogan is growing louder. Put simply, Erdogan may be turning into more of a liability for the West than a solid defender of NATO’s eastern flank that he was once touted to be.

Internationally, he stands accused of supporting Islamist extremists (possibly all the way up to colluding with ISIS), helping Iran avoid international sanctions, trying to maneuver NATO into a conflict with Russia, and extorting European leaders over the refugee deal. More recently, he has even tried to persecute critics in Germany and elsewhere.

Newsweek unleashed a political storm in Turkey when it republished the analysis of a former Pentagon official who concluded that, should elements in the Turkish military stage a coup, they would “get away with it.” The mere utterance of the word coup in a country that has a long history of them sent shockwaves through the Turkish establishment.

The country’s military, its memories fresh of the time Erdogan jailed the equivalent of an entire army college of top officers for allegedly plotting against him, issued an uncharacteristic denial. Nevertheless, just days ago, the top appeals court released all 275 suspects in that affair, possibly elevating the army’s political fortunes once again.

“As the credit cycle ages, following years of record-setting bond issuance, there are growing concerns about signs of stress in corporate balance sheets,” said the Institute of International Finance in Washington. The body flagged a double threat: a five-fold rise in company debt to $25 trillion in emerging markets over the past decade; and record junk bond issuance in US and Europe, along with shockingly irresponsible levels of US borrowing to buy back shares and pay dividends.

The warning came as the Hong Kong Monetary Authority aired its own grim concerns that the global system is dangerously over-stretched after years of easy money, with Asia’s entire financial edifice potentially in danger. “We are far from out of the woods, given new risks and headwinds on multiple fronts,” said Howard Lee, the body’s executive director. "There is the threat of a disorderly pullback in capital out of the region."

The US billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller warned this week that China has stoked an “extremely rare and quite dangerous” debt boom all too like the US subprime mania in character, but greater in scale. “They do not need more debt or more houses. They already have way too much of each,” he said at the Sohn investment forum.

The IIF estimates that China’s total debt has reached 295 percent of GDP, and is still rising fast. This is unprecedented for a developing economy that lacks deep capital markets or layers of accumulated wealth, and that now has a shrinking workforce as well.

The poll was conducted to shed light on what many in the public think of the recent debate between the mainstream politicians and the anti-mass migration Alternative for Germany (AfD). It was former German President Christian Wulff who typified the mainstream political opinion when he said, “Islam is a part of Germany,” a claim later repeated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. This is a view that has been rebuffed by the AfD who have recently voted on a new platform at their recent party conference which states clearly that Islam is not a thoroughly German belief.

A similar poll was conducted in France earlier this week which saw French from the left and right end of the political spectrum reject the idea of Islam in general, following the Paris and Brussels terror attacks. The poll showed a huge change of attitudes in France compared to the past. In 1989 when a similar poll was conducted around 33 per cent of those surveyed were favourable to new mosques being built compared to now when the number has shrunk to only 13 per cent.

In Eastern Europe Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban rejected the idea of Islamisation in his country entirely. He said that the constitution of Hungary forbids Islamisation saying it protects Hungary’s culture and language and added, “we have the right to choose whom we want and don’t want to live with.”

“Today, when our warriors take part in combat operations in the Middle East, we know that this is not an aggression, occupation or an attempt to impose some ideology on other people, this has nothing to do with supporting certain governments,” Patriarch Kirill said as he held the Friday mass at the major Moscow memorial to those who fought in World War II. “This is the fight against the fearsome foe that is currently not only spreading evil through the Middle East but also threatening the whole of mankind.” He added: “Today, we call this evil terrorism.”

The Patriarch also said that terrorists were targeting innocent civilians to intimidate their opponents and to crush any resistance to their doctrines, causing a great number of casualties and human suffering. “This is why the war on terrorism today is the holy war today. I pray to God that people all over the world understand this and stop dividing terrorists into good and bad ones as well as connecting the war on terror with their own goals, that are often non-declared yet strongly present on the political agenda,” the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church said.

He also told Orthodox believers to pray for the Russian military to remain faithful to the spiritual course that only allows the use of armed forces against evil, for justice and to save human lives. In February this year, the chief foreign spokesman of the Russian Orthodox Church said in a press interview that global leaders should overcome political dissent and unite in fighting international terrorism as the challenge to mankind at large.

But a commitment to remembrance spread far beyond the community of those most affected by the Nazis’ industrial-scale campaign to eradicate the Jews. In recent decades, Holocaust commemoration, particularly in the West, became a widespread cultural phenomenon. Countless books, lectures, and documentaries have been devoted to the topic. Academia is replete with Holocaust studies programs.

The world’s conscience was shocked, after the fact, by the scope and ferocity of the Holocaust. In the face of such monumental evil, “Never Forget,” like “Never Again,” may have seemed the only possible decent response. “After the war,” Elie Wiesel said, “we reassured ourselves that it would be enough to relate a single night in Treblinka… to shake humanity out of its indifference and keep the torturer from torturing ever again.”

But it wasn’t. Accounts of what was done in Treblinka did not prevent mass murder in Cambodia or Bosnia or Rwanda. Holocaust remembrance has not inoculated human beings against treating other human beings with brutality. Museums and films and college courses about the Shoah have not made genocide unthinkable — not even another Jewish genocide, as the regimes in Iran and Gaza frequently make clear.

Holocaust remembrance has not prevented the onset of Holocaust forgetfulness.