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FedNow Is Live

federalreserve.gov

411–420 of 1001 posts

Re: FedNow Is Live

#411

Amazing news. Kinda sad to see that Stripe was not on the list of early adopters but I'm sure they will implement it soon. In Switzerland we build an awesome eBill system ontop of the equivalent thing to FedNow. Its all run by Six Group which is the biggest Stock Exchange but it is jointly owned by the big banks and government. So they all agreed to add this eBilling system. Its so much superior to having paper come…

> Suppliers can assume all possible customers have a bank account that can do this in contrast to the crazy world of sending paper checks by mail.

I wish I, and anyone else, could get a bank account directly with the federal reserve bank.

> According to a 2021 report by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), an estimated 7.1 million adults in the United States do not have a bank account. This number represents about 2.4% of the adult population.

You could even place limits to "child-proof" such accounts. I'd be ok with not allowing the account balance to get below zero or exceed the FDIC insured limit. My only condition is nobody should be banned from it or kicked out for any reason. You could say this account earns no interest (as long as there are no account maintenance fees or transaction fees).

Re: FedNow Is Live

#413
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this end the T + 2day ridiculousness? It should be T + 1millisecond at worst. What does it take to update 2 "balance" values in databases?

T + 2day is ridiculous. T + 1ms is also ridiculous (speed of light and all.)

Apologies if I’ve misunderstood you (edit: I have) but assuming you are saying that 1ms to transfer funds between banks is ridiculously slow, why do you say that?

Light travels about 300km in one millisecond in a vacuum, about 200km in optical fiber. The best achievable theoretical fiber optic RTT for NYC-LA is about 35-40ms. In practice 65ms+ is more realistic due to routing overhead and the fact that cables aren’t always laid in a great circle. This being a financial API with three parties involved in most transactions (the two banks and the fed clearinghouse) there is sure to be more than one round trip involved for TLS establishment, authentication, verification of funds and account availability etc, many of which involve traversing many inevitably complicated systems on each side. It would shock me if such a system could realistically target anything less than 500ms P50.

Re: FedNow Is Live

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two points of context: * the Biden administration is planning to monitor smaller denomination transactions (in an inflationary environment!) * IRS resources historically and presently target low-income, low-wealth households/individuals for audits https://www.cnbc.com/select/irs-600-reporting-rule-delayed/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-audit-eitc-five-times-as-li...

What benefit would targeting low wealth individuals have to the IRS? I worked on a state tax system briefly at Accenture and they offered the product for a percentage of reclaimed taxes. They started with high debts with good credit scores. Since they had skin in the game (which it could be argued the IRS doesn’t), they wanted to maximize the unpaid taxes they collected.

> What benefit would targeting low wealth individuals have to the IRS?

I'll shorten the explanation even further: many more easy/no contest wins.

Re: FedNow Is Live

#415
post #179

Funny thing about topics like this is that people of any given country is oblivious to how other countries have solved that problem, or the challenges other countries face, or inturn the problems that they themselves face. Regarding payment systems specifically, people generally don't realize what they're missing. Pick anybody from anywhere and they'll tell you they've been able to do everything they ever wanted to d…

> Pick anybody from anywhere and they'll tell you they've been able to do everything they ever wanted to do (with regards to payments) using the already-existing systems of their country.

This is like comparing candles and lightbulbs. Sure you can light up your home using both methods just fine, but you end up realizing how inconvenient candles were once you've made the jump to the newer technology.

Re: FedNow Is Live

#416

It will be interesting to see how this affects "toxic," deplatformed, and to some degree debanked (at least from PayPal and CC processors) entities, like the KiwiFarms. While this page is somewhat vague about the private/public status of the Fed: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm it seems pretty well established that federally chartered corporations, like the USPS and Amtrak (e.g., https://en.wikipe…

The Federal Reserve is a private company with a chair that is chosen by the President of the US with advice and consent from the Senate, and serves a four-year term. There is no term limitation for this office. The reason the US government has a national debt is because that debt is owed to the Federal Reserve, which is a private bank that loans the US government money and that sets the US monetary policy.

>The reason the US government has a national debt is because that debt is owed to the Federal Reserve, which is a private bank that loans the US government money and that sets the US monetary policy.

I'm pretty sure every holder of US Treasuries (including me) is owed money by the US government.

Re: FedNow Is Live

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand why ~FedNow and CBDC~ BIG BROTHER are such a big issue in the US. Fixed this for you. I don't really want a gigantic federal agency having insight into every financial transaction I make. Hard, fucking, pass.

Are you under the impression that ACH, the thing FedNow is replacing, is free from government influence? This is what's bizarre to me about the FedNow hysteria. It's not a government system replacing a private market system. It's a government system replacing an older, worse government system. It's like having a panic attack because the Federal Reserve is updating their PCs to from Windows XP to Windows 10.

Because Nacha (and ACH) is explicitly not a government system

Re: FedNow Is Live

#418
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine being paid in a ‘programmable’ currency that your employer (or government) decides cannot be spent on alcohol, meat, or fossil fuels. Meanwhile, wealthier people get paid in ‘unrestricted’ currency.

Why would they want to do that? How would either your employer or the fed have the grounds to justify doing that?

Something along the lines of ‘We face a climate emergency that is even more serious than the Covid emergency, we have to do this, this is about saving lives’?

(I’m not in any way a climate denier, just a huge pessimist when it comes to attempted solutions)

Re: FedNow Is Live

#419
post #15

> Banks and credit unions of all sizes can sign up and use this tool to instantly transfer money for their customers, any time of the day, on any day of the year. Whoa. Is this as awesome as it sounds? Is this akin to government-backed Venmo, or something?

> Is this akin to government-backed Venmo, or something? Yes, exactly. But you have to keep in mind that this is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it's going to be convenient and probably secure. On the other hand, it's going to let the government see every transaction you make, which for some people will be a very high price to pay.

Put the flag of North Korea into the notes of a venmo transaction. You will very quickly find out the extent to which the government knows what you are doing with your money.

Re: FedNow Is Live

#420
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it about CBDCs you find concerning compared to cash?

It's bad enough that banks have virtually unlimited insight into my spending habits that we need to give the Feds the same access. I should have the right to buy a big mac without some government server getting pinged.

I doesn't give the Feds access to anything. Suppose I bank at Wells Fargo and my favorite coffee shop banks at Capitol One. If I pay the shop $4 for a latte, the fed will have NO IDEA who sent that money to whom or for what. All the Fed sees is $4 moving from the Wells to the Cap One Federal Reserve master accounts -- amid a blizzard of millions of other transactions. The difference from ACH is just that these payments are settled in big batches rather than one by one. The Fed will get new and better data on payment volume, but that's all, really.
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