A library of snippets
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Schoar said that just because transaction data is available on the blockchain, that doesn’t make it 100% transparent and it does not level the playing field for all investors.
From How crypto investors behave — and why the industry needs regulation | MIT Sloan.
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Wealthier, more sophisticated investors were the first to exit and experienced much smaller losses, whereas poorer, less sophisticated investors ran later and recorded larger losses.
From How crypto investors behave — and why the industry needs regulation | MIT Sloan.
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The Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the agency in charge of money printing operations in the US, created 756.09 million new $50 bills in 2022, reports CNN.
The pile of fresh cash is worth about $37.8 billion.
According to the San Francisco Fed, the printing is due to a rise in demand for physical cash in the US, despite a decreasing use of cash for payments.
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The issue of cash and cashlessness continues in the United States continues to divide opinion. Many jurisdictions are passing laws to force merchants to accept cash. I’m very curious about this debate and so I try to listen across the spectrum of opinon on the topic. For example, I was just listening to a Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) report on a bill in their state legislature that will force businesses to accept cash for all transactions under $2,000.
One of the people interviewed on WPR was Ursula Darlinghouse, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Ripon College. She made the interesting point that while safety is key reason why businesses refuse cash although there are risks with digital payment mechanisms too. Indeed there are. But if your shop is robbed and cash is stolen, that’s your problem (or your insurance company’s problem, if you can find one to insurance cash on premises) but if the bank gets robbed, that’s their problem. As a merchant, if you take a contactless payment or a chip-and-PIN payment, you have no liability for fraud, but if you accept a fake $100 bill then the loss is wholly yours.
(I heard someone say something about giving consumers the choice of how they pay, but that’s not really the issue, since no-one is passing laws forcing merchants to accept checks or cowrie shells.)
Why is it that merchants don’t want to accept cash though? Merchants are not in the habit of turning away sales, so there must be good reasons for them to decide not to accept. Crime is one of them. I notice that several businesses in and around Downtown Sacramento have gone cashless in recent months due to crime, with some citing repeated break-ins, and counterfeiting. If these businesses are forced to accept cash again, then their costs will go up. They will have to eat the counterfeiting losses, or buy a machine (some merchants buy two) to check on the cash being tendered.
What about the rest of the developed world? Cash, and in particular, high-value notes are a problem everywhere In the UK, for example, most merchants are suspicious of customers who pay with £50 notes, associating them with drug dealers. and are concerned about accepting fakes.This is true for high-value notes in the UK as well: most merchants are suspicious of customers who pay with £50 notes, associating them with drug dealers. and are concerned about accepting fakes.
(I have no idea what a £50 note looks like, I never see them. If someone offered to pay me with one, I’d have to escort them to a bank branch and have it paid directly into my account.)
In the UK overall there was a small (7%) rise in the number of cash payments made last year. There were 6.4 billion cash payments, a rise on 2022. However, given the overall rise in the number of payments, the share of payments made with cash actually fell again. Ten years ago over half of all payments in the UK were made the cash, it’s now a seventh and still falling. Some parts of the country are already cashless. When I go into London, I never even see cash, much less use it. How long before the rest of country follows?
At the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, John Cryan (then the co-CEO of Deutsche Bank AG), said that cash could become history “
within a decade ”, going on to note that it supports the underground economy. The Bundesbank, for example, estimate that only 10-15% of the cash in Germany is used to support the needs of commerce and this tallies with the Bank of England’s estimates of the cash used for what they call “transactional purposes”.
Germany is actually a rather interesting case study. In 2019, the Bundesbank conducted a study on the extent of domestic “illicit cash use” which conluded that without more in-depth analysis it was “impossible to distinguish those stocks of banknotes that are being held as a store of value from illicit banknote stocks”. In other words, they could not distinguish hoards from stashes, but did find that the average German has more than 1,300 euros at home or in a safe deposit box. Bundesbank figures also show that nine out of every ten euro banknotes issued in Germany are never used in payments. Not “rarely used”. Not “infrequently used”. Never used. Those notes are held in hoards or stashes, not wallets or purses. One notable side effect of the German’s addiction to cash is that it has become ground zero for ATM attackers. Nearly 500 cash machines were blown up there last year, which in many ways is not surprising, because there are 55,000 ATMs in the country and they are stocked with high-denomination banknotes, meaning that the average haul is around €100,000. The scale of the losses mean that the ATMs in bank foyers are now closed at night.
The fact is that cash is not free. The distribution and acceptance of cash cost money. Where cashless merchants are forced to accept cash, then their costs will go up. But how much of a burden are regulators imposing on businesses with these laws. Well, of course the overheads will vary by business, but here is a data point: Paul Dolan, owner of the Barn restaurant in Ireland is quoted saying that after a number of years of accepting cards only he would never go back to accepting cash and that “handling, lodging and withdrawing cash adds around 9% to overheads of a large restaurant”.
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Digital wallets are also predicted to play a key role for users navigating Web3, the emerging decentralized internet built on distributed ledgers controlled communally by participants.
There’s a lot at stake for banks. When mobile wallets first came to market, many stakeholders tried to take over the market. Banks fought toe-to-toe against retailers, wireless carriers and tech giants. Ultimately the victory went to Apple, Google and Samsung, which preload their respective “Pay” wallets on the handsets they sell.
“Identity wallets, crypto wallets and mobile payments for EV charging, parking and tolls all represent interesting use cases that could lead to potentially different wallets than what we see today,” said Zilvinas Bareisis, an analyst with Celent.
From: Will banks win or lose in the new generation of digital wallets? | PaymentsSource | American Banker.
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The sprawl has become disorienting. Some of my peers in the media have written about how the internet has started to feel “placeless” and more ephemeral, even like it is “evaporating.” Perhaps this is because, as my colleague Ian Bogost has argued, “the age of social media is ending,” and there is no clear replacement. Or maybe artificial intelligence is flooding the internet with synthetic information and killing the old web. Behind these theories is the same general perception: Understanding what is actually happening online has become harder than ever.
From: Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online Anymore – The Atlantic.
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Collins, the doctor who had her image stolen, says she is concerned that it will become easier for scammers or people looking to undermine health care professionals to do so as image generation with artificial intelligence becomes more available. “As AI gets even better, they can go beyond just taking your picture off of a website, and actually potentially make a video of you talking,” Collins says. This will make it “really hard for an average person to sort out if this is a fake account or not.”
From: Scammers Are Tricking Anti-Vaxxers Into Buying Bogus Medical Documents | WIRED.
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NatWest expects Big Tech firms to continue driving innovation in several other ways across the payments landscape, with digital wallets specifically highlighted as having an influential impact on consumers’ relationship with financial services.
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In the United States, the average consumer has four credit cards, and the total credit card debt is nearly $1.1 trillion, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
From Consumers Pick National Banks Most for Primary Credit Cards.
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Although the share of adults holding a primary credit card issued by a national bank has declined from 76% to 68% since 2020, these FIs are still the dominant issuers of consumer credit cards in the U.S.
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Innovations such as digital wallets aim to form the foundational technology that will allow governments and businesses secure digital identities.
“We never really thought about what does it mean to identify a person on the internet in a way that is portable and doesn’t require you to rely on a single private platform,” Mike Brock, CEO of Block’s TBD, said in an interview with PYMNTS.
From New Car Sales Expected to Reach Highest Level Since 2019.
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