Snippings

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As a “friend with intellectual benefits” at Palo Alto Research Center from the start of the 1980s, I watched Xerox, PARC’s parent company, repeatedly reject business plans to take the lab’s phenomenal inventions to market. In doing so, it was unwittingly neglecting a unique opportunity to lead the personal-computer revolution. The problem was that PARC, a high-risk venture, had to compete with the near-certain returns from investing equivalent sums in extending Xerox’s patent-protected copier business (for example, by hiring more salespeople or field engineers).

From: Is Techno-Monopoly Inevitable? by William H. Janeway – Project Syndicate.

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Steve Eisman, who famous because of his bet against the US housing market before 2008, which led to his starring role in Michael Lewis’ “The Big Short” was recently asked about cryptocurrency and said that it is just another thing that people like to speculate on because they like to speculate and “That’s its only use. That and money laundering, which is a use“.

Myth 1: Financial inclusion reduces poverty Financial inclusion can have many positive impacts on people on low incomes, but they are not always what might be expected. Contrary to popular belief,

 

financial inclusion has little effect on poverty re- duction. In particular, access to credit – often touted as the most beneficial kind of financial inclusion – has mixed effects. An extensive review article (Duvendack and Mader, 2020) explains that while microcredit certainly provides benefits to some (such as allowing people to start a business or pay school fees) it rarely lifts people out of poverty, and indeed some people get trapped in debt cycles and end up poorer. Instead, decades of analysis reveal that microsavings (ac-counts designed for small deposits) provide the most consistently positive impact, since they provide benefits with few risks. Access to financial services can also help increase people’s incomes, either through receiving remittances or simply by making it easier for people to pay each other.

 

Moreover, the World Bank finds evidence that the use of financial accounts (with a bank, MFI or mobile money provider) supports the development towards broader use of financial tools including saving, borrowing and insurance. This helps people to increase their financial resilience and counteract issues of not being able to manage aspects such as unemployment, medical bills or school fees.

 

We would also add that financial inclusion can substantially reduce people’s stress and make their lives easier – two benefits whose importance cannot be understated. The benefits of financial inclusion for reducing ‘transaction costs’ (usually defined as the time a person spends completing a task) have been noted extensively by researchers working in many different countries. Our research participants in rural Brazil particularly appreciated the arrival of the payments platform Pix because it meant they did not have to travel to town to withdraw cash as frequently. Saving people time and effort can greatly reduce stress because people are often juggling many different activities and struggle to complete them all.

 

This is particularly evident among people who are very poor or lack basic infrastructure such as paved roads, reliable telecommunications

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The salacious WhatsApp messages were sent to Tory and Labour figures, both gay and straight, from a sender posing as ‘Abi’ or ‘Charlie’.

What would start out as claims the pair had met soon escalated to the sending of naked pictures and requesting pictures back.

At least two MPs are believed to have reciprocated by sending intimate pictures of themselves.

The Mail can reveal that the sender claimed to at least one victim that they had previously worked for Mr Wragg – a claim the MP denied.

Last night he revealed the details of his role in the scandal.

The 36-year-old MP for the Greater Manchester seat of Hazel Grove, who is openly gay, said he was ‘mortified’ and apologised for his ‘weakness’.

Mr Wragg, who is a vice chairman of the influential 1922 committee of Tory backbenchers, told The Times: ‘They had compromising things on me. They wouldn’t leave me alone. They would ask for people.

‘I gave them some numbers, not all of them. I told him to stop. He’s manipulated me and now I’ve hurt other people.

‘I got chatting to a guy on an app and we exchanged pictures. We were meant to meet up for drinks, but then didn’t.

From: MPs link Westminster honeytrap plot to Russia and China after leading Tory William Wragg admits giving MPs’ numbers to sex sting plotter he met on Grindr dating app | Daily Mail Online.

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In one of the largest cash heists in Los Angeles history, thieves made off with as much as $30 million in an Easter Sunday burglary at a San Fernando Valley money storage facility, an L.A. police official revealed Wednesday.

From: In one of L.A.’s largest cash heists, burglars steal $30 million on Easter. Mystery shrouds case – Los Angeles Times.

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Anna Wiener, writing for the New Yorker back in 2022, quite accurately observed that the metaverse will reflect its cultural and technological moment, which (given the current tech ecosystem) will probably be “privatized, centralized, and financialized, with rampant artificial scarcity”.

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But here’s the easy way to evaluate the settlement:  are merchants better off than before the litigation? It’s hard to conclude that they are.

When the litigation began in 2005, American merchants paid the highest interchange fees in the developed world. After the settlement, American merchants will still pay the highest interchange fees in the developed world.

When the litigation began in 2005, average interchange fees were 1.75%.  After the settlement, they will be at 2.19% and only held at that level for five years.

From: The Proposed Credit Card Interchange Settlement – Credit Slips.

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The UK was the first into instant payments, with the Faster Payment System (FPS). Launched in May 2008, the system allows for near real-time transactions among participating financial institutions. In contrast to traditional bank transfers that could take up to three working days, FPS aims to processes payments within seconds for 24 hours a day, seven days per week including weekends and bank holidays. Now, because the sheer volume of fraud on FPS, the goverment is proposing to allow participants to delay outbound payment transactions for up to four business days. Welcome to the Slower Payment  System (SPS). Colour me sceptical.

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, aims to tokenize $10 trillion of its assets in partnership with Securitize. I agree with Natalia Karayaneva that this move signals a broader trend that could redefine investment strategies fundamentally, which the rise of Real World Assets (RWA) tokenization.

I had the pleasure of chairing Dwayne Gefferie at Merchant Payments Ecosystem in Berlin this year. He’s a very thoughtful, and very knowledgeable, guy so I always pay attention to his perspectives. When it comes to the issues around the Visa/MasterCard settlement in the USA, he makes some interesting observations that goes on to say that as a former Adyen man “if I were still working for an Acquirer, I would develop a Surcharging API, integrate it directly into the gateway or terminal”. He then goes on to hit the nail on the head by saying that “I would even try to see if I could prompt the customer to use a cheaper card and pass the savings back to them”.

 

“If you use a debit card, I’ll give you an X% discount or extra points. Your choice.”