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Modern financial economics treats risk as a commodity like milk or coffee.  People have different preferences and capabilities in their approach to risk and their ability to manage it, just as they have different tastes in food, or farm different kinds of land, or hold different agricultural skills.

From Robust and Resilient Finance – John Kay:

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Neha Narula, who is leading Project Hamilton, the name of the Fed-MIT collaboration

But Narula sees the opportunity as revolutionary. “If we were able to create a well-designed interface to a central bank digital currency, we could do for the transfer of value what the internet did for the transfer of information, which is create a platform for innovation,” she said at the recent hearing.

From What is a digital dollar and how does it work? — Quartz:

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The Bank of England is warning that additional policy measures may be required to mitigate financial stability risks from the growing concentration of power in the hands of global cloud providers.

From Bank of England frets over stability of Big Tech cloud providers:

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Users are reporting issues with websites including Airbnb, Fidelity, FedEx, and more.

Downdetector, a site that reports website-user issues, reported numerous sites had experienced outages beginning around 12 p.m. ET on Thursday.

Akamai, a cloud-services company, said in a statement around noon that it is investigating an emerging issue with the Edge DNS service. Nearly an hour later, Akamai said the firm had implemented a fix for this issue and that services on Edge DNS were resuming normal operations.

From Fidelity, FedEx, UPS, Airbnb, and More Websites Down:

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Olga Skorobogatova, first deputy governor of the Central Bank of Russia, told Russia Today late last year the development of digital currencies could eventually make SWIFT redundant.

From 7 big banks sign on for SWIFT’s low-value cross-border offering | Banking Dive:

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The disadvantage to poorer households can be substantial: in India, for example, the cost of suboptimal financial arrangements has been estimated at 10 per cent of the real annual income of a typical middle-class household.

From Technology can help democratise financial services | Financial Times:

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Decentralized exchanges with decentralized governance models were made possible by these smart contracts on Ethereum, creating a new digital land of opportunity which has now expanded into many other smart contract platforms like Binance Smart Chain, Polkadot, and Avalanche.

Protocols like Aave, Compound, Uniswap, and 1Inch.exchange, allow users to earn interest on their funds and trade crypto assets and even complex instruments like decentralized derivatives.

All of these new and exciting products have generated the aforementioned sector known as DeFi which is taking the financial world by storm and giving traditional finance a run for its money.

From Smart Contract Vulnerabilities Are A Ticking Time Bomb Holding Billions of Unsuspecting $$$ Hostage | Hacker Noon:

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The Most Impressive AI Demo I Have Ever Seen
by  Alex Tabarrok August 20, 2021 at 7:25 am in Web/Tech
This is jaw-dropping. It starts slow but watch the whole thing. I don’t think I would have been more amazed had I witnessed the first flight of the Wright Brothers.

From The Most Impressive AI Demo I Have Ever Seen – Marginal REVOLUTION:

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As a consumer, I’d steer away from a business that surcharges. It seems like a sleight of hand to raise consumer costs. The merchant already has an expense for handling cash, as they do with taking any payment form. They do not disclose the cost of goods sold at the point of sale. So why single out the processing cost?  It has more to do with incrementing revenue than it does to reduce expenses.

From I Scream About Credit Card Surcharging | PaymentsJournal:

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D’s Soul Full Cafe in Hoboken, N.J., has offered customers a 5% discount on cash payments for a few years, and had a $5 minimum purchase requirement for credit cards.

After the pandemic began, fewer customers were able to pay with cash simply because they weren’t carrying any, said owner Stephen Bailey. Many customers left the store without making a purchase, he said, prompting it to remove the $5 minimum.

From Paying With a Credit Card? That’s Going to Cost You. – WSJ:

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Karen’s Dairy Grove, an ice cream shop outside of Cleveland, Ohio, charges an extra quarter when customers use credit cards for purchases of less than $5. Owner Karen Morell said she made that decision after cash sales fell and credit-card purchases rose during the pandemic.

From Paying With a Credit Card? That’s Going to Cost You. – WSJ:

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