Snippings

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A Pittsburgh couple’s dog got himself into some big trouble after wolfing down the most expensive dinner of his life.

The dog’s name is Cecil. His owners said he is a well-behaved dog, and he never did anything bad until he chowed down on dozens of $50 and $100 bills.

Clayton Law put an envelope with a wad of cash on his kitchen counter in early December. He and his wife, Carrie, needed the cash to pay for a project at their home in Pittsburgh’s Point Breeze neighborhood.

From: Pittsburgh family dog eats $4,000 in cash – CBS Pittsburgh.

I am surprised that their contractor was unable to accept Zelle, Venmo, CashApp, FedNow, Visa Direct

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The campaign, launched by the right-leaning news outlet in June 2023, focused around a petition calling for the UK government to protect the status of cash as a form of legal tender and payment until at least 2050.

From: GB News cautioned by Ofcom over ‘Don’t Kill Cash’ campaign.

There is no problem at all about protecting the legal tender status of cash until 2050, but it’s important to remember that legal tender doesn’t mean what people think it means. 

As many people (including, I have to say, me) thought the shiny new bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETF) are not bringing in new money from retail investors but providing a haven for speculators getting out of other products. In a J.P. Morgan report on this topic, their analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote “We are skeptical of the optimism shared by many market participants at the moment that a lot of fresh capital will enter the crypto space as a result of the spot bitcoin ETF approval”. Similarly, 

 

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Newly launched bitcoin exchange-traded funds enable the cryptocurrency to be bought as easily as stocks, but a top Goldman Sachs executive said digital currencies are still more like roulette than anything that should be in your retirement account.
“If you want to go to Las Vegas, great,” said Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani, who leads the investment strategy group at Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management.
“People can use it if they want for total speculation, but it is not an investment and people should not be investing in cryptocurrencies, in bitcoin, in the ETF, as part of an investment portfolio.”
Mossavar-Rahmani, who helps advise the firm’s wealthy clients, said the problem with cryptocurrency is that there’s no real value to it—except for criminals. She compared crypto unfavorably to artificial intelligence, source of a separate speculative frenzy.

From: Goldman Investing Chief: ETFs Don’t Make Bitcoin an Investment.

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Private cryptocurrencies have failed the basic test of digital money and are likely to be in decline in the near future

This is the view of Ravi Menon, retiring head of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) who belives he is not the only one on the way out.

Despite the savage criticism of private crypto, Menon was more positive about the potential of stablecoins and tokenisation.

The regulator has recently granted in-house approval to three firms issuing stablecoins – StraitsX SGD Issuance, StraitsX USD Issuance and Paxos Digital Singapore.

From MAS chief rubbishes private crypto in speech.

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Well, indeed.

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CaixaBank is the world’s first bank to create ATMs with effortlessly and securely integrated biometric technology.

From CaixaBank deploys ATMs with facial recognition technology throughout Spain:

Excuse me, but I don’t think so. When my sister worked for Nationwide Building Society, she loved using their cardless biometric ATM and that was more than two decades ago! But actually there’s another reason why this headline caught my eye, and it is this: as the COVID crisis has accelerated the trend toward a cashless economy (apparently the average Brit has now gone 44 days without using cash) so making fancy additions to ATMs starts to look a little like designing new deckchairs on the Titanic.

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Could digital wallets be the West’s answer to the super-app? Evolving beyond their traditional role, digital wallets now offer a range of services, including digital identity management, and much more, as David Birch points out in this article

“The transition from physical wallets to digital wallets is underway for sure. But if you think that those wallets are about payments, I think you are missing the big picture.”
Additionally as highlighted by Brett King as a quote in the recent Samlink – A Kyndryl Company report – The Samlink Equation 2024, many have started to have a preference for digital wallets over their traditional banking apps when it comes to managing daily financial matters. Open banking and embedded finance further enhances this trend, allowing digital wallets to offer a consolidated view of a user’s financial life.

From: (6) My Super-App is bigger than your Super-App! | LinkedIn.

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A good deal of sharing that once took place publicly — within the Facebook News Feed, for instance — now occurs within messaging apps.

From: WhatsApp is Finally Starting to Dominate in the United States. Here’s Why..

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More than half of the $1.3 billion contract budget is earmarked for offline payments development.

From: ECB Shows It’s Serious About Enabling Offline Use of Euro CBDC.

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It’s a far more modest plan than the grand design X touted a few months ago to build “a global payments system” within a year, but it’s a crucial — and most importantly, a realistic — first step.

From: Why Elon Musk’s X narrowed its focus to peer-to-peer payments | PaymentsSource | American Banker.

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I happened to be listening to the fascinating Patrick McKenzie talking with Tyler Cowan when he was asked the interesting quesiton “why is it you still have to sign the back of your credit card?”, a question that I used to enjoy teasing American audiences with. (Here’s a Talmudic take on the issue from a few years ago.)

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“The counterfeiter probably didn’t realize that that coin didn’t exist,” Dr. Ortega said.

From: The Mystery of the Coin That Shouldn’t Exist – The New York Times.

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Coins are so interesting, such an important element of cultural heritage, it will be a shame to see them go. But go they must.