A library of snippets
Matt Stoller
large banks diverted roughly $1 trillion from American consumers to themselves by keeping savings rates artificially low, even as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates and allowed banks to hike their lending rates. It’s just a pain to change bank accounts because we have a lot of financial data associated with our accounts, from bill pay to transaction lists. And so most of us didn’t change our savings accounts, even though we could have gotten higher rates elsewhere.
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Confirmation of Payee in the UK has been extended to cover almost 99% of all transactions made through Faster Payments
From: Confirmation of Payee reaches almost all transactions in the UK.
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The UK Finance data this week showed losses due to APP fraud in the first half of this year were down 11 per cent year-on-year to £214mn with the total number of APP cases falling 16 per cent to 97,000.
However, the same data showed cases of unauthorised card payment fraud — where the account holder does not authorise a payment — had increased.
In the first six months of the year, losses from unauthorised card payments, covering payment cards, remote banking and cheques, totalled £358mn, up 5 per cent year-on-year. Over the same period the number of cases climbed 19 per cent to just over 1.5mn.
From: Card fraud scourge prompts fresh call for social media action.
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The just over $1bn in ransomware paid out by businesses in 2023 has helped fund a tech upgrade by criminal gangs. The increasing use of artificial intelligence enables hackers to industrialise and personalise attacks.
From: Cyber security companies are thriving — even when they fail.
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A Russian plan to break the grip of the U.S. dollar through a new international payments network met a cool reception at the BRICS summit in Kazan this week. Despite all of the talk of new reserce currencies, the greenback’s supremacy may be strengthening because of an entirely different monetary innovation: dollar-backed stablecoins.
The CEO of Stripe, Patrick Collison, recently called stablecoins “room-temperature superconductors” for financial services which may be far less hyperbolic than it actually sounds, since the ability move money around without friction will undobtedly reshape the global financial system.
In response to mounting financial pressures of Western sanctions, Russia enacted significant legislation legalizing cryptocurrency mining and permitting the use of cryptocurrency for international payments. The bills, signed into law on August 8th by President Vladmir Putin, are a significant departure from the government’s previous stance in the country, where the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) had pushed for a complete ban on cryptocurrencies as recently as 2022. The new laws will enable Russian businesses to engage in international trade using cryptocurrencies and authorize approved entities to mine digital assets.
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Retail banking is not only harder than it looks but also heavily regulated by watchdogs who take their duties very seriously. That can put the regulators at odds with buccaneering entrepreneurs who want to shake up existing ways of doing business.
From: The cautionary tale of Goldman and Apple’s credit card.
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Charlestown Historical Society President Julie Hall
The business that began by shipping 130 tons of ice in 1806, 50 years later shipped 363 cargoes consisting of 146,000 tons of ice. The destinations that year included Charleston, Savannah, Key West, New Orleans, Galveston, Havana, Saint John’s, Barbados, Buenos Aires, Valparaiso, Ceylon, Calcutta, Bombay, Singapore, Manilla, Canton and Australia, among many others.
From: Historic Houses of the Month Frederic Tudor and Charlestown’s Ice Trade.
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The genius of the Tudor ice shipping scheme centered on three simple principles. First, the ice was free and was harvested locally from Fresh Pond, Walden Pond and other ponds and lakes in the area. The only cost was the labor to cut the blocks. Secondly, after much trial and error, Frederic discovered that layering sawdust between the blocks of ice provided the best insulation for the journey. Sawdust was the byproduct of the local sawmills, again free. Lastly, ships often left Boston Harbor empty, heading to the West Indies to pick up exotic produce and goods. Filling the holds with Tudor ice for the voyage south allowed Tudor to negotiate better shipping prices.
From: Historic Houses of the Month Frederic Tudor and Charlestown’s Ice Trade.
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Snippings