Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pubs replaced banks in Ireland for several months in 1970 (2016)

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 96 posts

Re: Pubs replaced banks in Ireland for several months in 1970 (2016)

#51

Post by rsynnott »

ehnto wrote: post #21
terminous wrote: post #9

> "I deal only with my regulars … I refuse strangers." > ‘They are mostly strangers to us, and we just have to play it by ear in deciding whether to accept a cheque’, said an official.” Sounds like a recipe for discrimination and inequality, which isn't mentioned in either article.

1970s Ireland was very homogenous, which is to say white. It wasn't until the 90s that immigration began flowing in the other direction to a meaningful degree. So while I agree with you, it was unlikely a problem at the time. Although that doesn't cover gender or class discrimination so I suppose that was still an issue.

Oh, we absolutely still had discrimination, particularly against Travellers, but also there was very strong though largely unacknowledged classism. And then of course there were _women_; after a good start (Ireland was one of the first countries to grant equal universal suffrage), we spent the next few decades barely acknowledging that women were people.

However, in 1970, people here just weren’t all that ‘banked’; when I was a kid in the late 80s/early 90s, it was still fairly common for people to not have bank accounts, and certainly in 1970 postal savings accounts would have been more common than bank accounts. Today they’re ~universal (very few employers would consider paying by any means other than bank transfer) but it was a different story 50 years ago.

Re: Pubs replaced banks in Ireland for several months in 1970 (2016)

#52

Post by fullspectrumdev »

rsynnott wrote: post #47

As an Irish person, I would not _particularly_ recommend Ireland in 1970 as a model to aspire to. And even given that, the banks did not actually fail, they just weren’t operating, and the expectation was that they would start back up again at some point. When Ireland actually faced the banks failing, in 2008, we bailed them out and nationalised most of them, at a cost of almost 10,000 euro per capita.

Arguably the only reason it worked out fine (for some value of fine) in the 1970’s was because everything being a shitshow was the generally accepted state of affairs, and for a lot of normal working people being paid cash was still normal.

Re: Pubs replaced banks in Ireland for several months in 1970 (2016)

#53

Post by rsynnott »

kmonsen wrote: post #36
ehnto wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1970s Ireland was very homogenous, which is to say white. It wasn't until the 90s that immigration began flowing in the other direction to a meaningful degree. So while I agree with you, it was unlikely a problem at the time. Although that doesn't cover gender or class discrimination so I suppose that was still an issue.

Or more importantly in Ireland, religions based discrimination

This is about the Republic of Ireland, where that wasn’t a huge factor (there was definitely some; comments in the newspapers from 1961 when Dublin got a Jewish mayor are eyebrow-raising, but it wouldn’t have been a huge issue for something like this). You’re thinking of Northern Ireland.

That said, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Ireland in 1970 certainly did have other forms of discrimination which would’ve been much more relevant here.

Re: Pubs replaced banks in Ireland for several months in 1970 (2016)

#54

Post by AnthonyMouse »

pierat wrote: post #39
robertlagrant wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this simplification is that it ignores risk. Being an employee means you get paid, and can change job it the business fails. Bring an owner/investor means you might lose all your money if the business fails. That is massive risk, and entirely ignored by the above characterisation.

Oh please. And you're up-playing risk. Let's talk local. We have lots of cheap shit 3 story stick built apartments. ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-13/why-ameri... ) The ones opened are charging half of Boston for rents. And I'm not even in a megacity or state capitol. The same apartments are getting 10 year tax abatements, because they are "good for business" aka trickle-down. During the pandemic,…

> The same apartments are getting 10 year tax abatements, because they are "good for business" aka trickle-down.

This promotes new construction. Not as well as zoning reform, but it does. Which lowers the rent (or at least makes it go up less fast).

> And landlords are usually smaller, but again, they're another reason why housing is stupid priced: it's common to see a rental of a home priced at mortgage+30% .

Well of course they are. The landlord is taking on the maintenance of the property, insurance, the risk of a housing crash (look at housing prices FFS), the risk of a vacancy or destructive or non-paying tenant, legal expenses associated with operating a business etc. And on top of that, they have to pay the mortgage.

They do turn a profit, because of course they do, why else would they do it? And with that they slowly buy the property from the bank, at which point the interest on the value of the property goes to the landlord instead of the bank, the same as it would if they sold the property and invested the money in something else.

The problem with landlords is not that they turn a profit -- they always will or they'd sell the property instead.

It's that they lobby for zoning restrictions that limit the housing supply to increase rents. But homeowners do the same thing, to the detriment of both renters and prospective homeowners.

Re: Pubs replaced banks in Ireland for several months in 1970 (2016)

#55

Post by fullspectrumdev »

corethree wrote: post #27
wodenokoto wrote: post #22

The article really wants to imply that because this worked, we shouldn't be afraid of "too big to fail", but it doesn't dare say that and kinda of ends up sitting between two chairs. "I'm not saying that banks crashing isn't bad, but it wasn't a problem for Ireland to have banks disappear" but the thing is, according to the article, trust in banks never disappeared, neither did the banks. People kept writing cheques…

How were bankers not skinned alive? If someone owes you or I money and then suddenly they go on strike there will be a vicious reckoning.

There were a lot of strikes in Ireland in the 1970’s, including a rent strike at one point.

Re: Pubs replaced banks in Ireland for several months in 1970 (2016)

#56

Post by rsynnott »

fullspectrumdev wrote: post #50
barrkel wrote: post #29

Back in the 90s in Ireland, my mother would occasionally cash a cheque at the pub - if it's not crossed payee a/c only, the bearer can generally cash it themselves. Going further back, pubs were the local shops for general dry goods, particularly in rural communities. I recall some dusty window displays in some pubs even in the 1980s, when I was a kid.

Recently I found that in a few of the more touristic areas in Ireland (which I rarely visit, being from here, was showing friends some places), a lot of pubs will offer a foreign exchange service of dubious legitimacy with debatably fair rates. Same thing in the border counties up north - you can often spend or exchange Sterling and Euro currency, but the rates will suck. In the 1990’s where I grew up, one of the two…

This is common in tourist-y areas everywhere. I was in Lisbon recently, and saw a number of places advertising that they accepted Sterling… at a rate of 1:1 with the Euro. A mere 15% FX fee.

Re: Pubs replaced banks in Ireland for several months in 1970 (2016)

#57

Post by fodkodrasz »

rsynnott wrote: post #49
corethree wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How were bankers not skinned alive? If someone owes you or I money and then suddenly they go on strike there will be a vicious reckoning.

Most people, presumably, aren’t as bloodthirsty as you; strikes, no matter how inconvenient, rarely result in mass murder of the strikers by the general public. Sometimes by the state, in totalitarian systems, but not by random people.

Only in totalitarian systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_Unite...

Re: Pubs replaced banks in Ireland for several months in 1970 (2016)

#58

Post by _cs2017_ »

Flagging this article for being too stupid to warrant reading. In 1970, nobody was afraid their savings disappeared; when a bank fails, people would lose their savings unless the government insures or rescues the bank.

Given the extremely low quality of this article, and given that the author is a finance editor rather than some freelance contributor to Business Insider, I very much hope that HN readers would stop upvoting submissions from Business Insider in the future.

Re: Pubs replaced banks in Ireland for several months in 1970 (2016)

#59

Post by rsynnott »

fodkodrasz wrote: post #57
rsynnott wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people, presumably, aren’t as bloodthirsty as you; strikes, no matter how inconvenient, rarely result in mass murder of the strikers by the general public. Sometimes by the state, in totalitarian systems, but not by random people.

Only in totalitarian systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_Unite...

> In the summer of 1921 in Mingo County, hundreds of miners were arrested without habeas corpus and other basic legal rights.

I mean, er, yes, sounds like it.

Re: Pubs replaced banks in Ireland for several months in 1970 (2016)

#60

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mlyle wrote: post #41
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This problem is far worse with a concentrated system than a decentralized one. If there are five local pubs and one of them won't have you, well, still four more. If there is only one bank and their loan officer doesn't like the cut of your jib, or their algorithm has decided to have a false positive, you're done. Though of course the modern problem isn't that there is only one bank, it's that there is only one bank…

> This problem is far worse with a concentrated system than a decentralized one. They can break in different ways. If you're in an out-group or unpopular, it's not clear whether you're better off with n local pubs making a decision to accept your money informally or n/2 national banks making a decision while subject to oversight. In any case, this is a false premise: it's not like you're choosing from 5 local pubs. T…

> If you're in an out-group or unpopular, it's not clear whether you're better off with n local pubs making a decision to accept your money informally or n/2 national banks making a decision while subject to oversight.

What is clear, however, is that you're better off with both systems existing in parallel because then you can use either one, rather than having the informal one prohibited by law so that you're forced into the other one whether it works for you or not.

> it's not like you're choosing from 5 local pubs. The question is whether the pub you attend likes you enough to take your check.

You are choosing from 5 local pubs. Even if you don't attend one regularly, it's in the same town. You could have mates there who vouch for you. Or you go to the pub of the person who wrote the check, they confirm that they actually wrote it and then it gets cashed on the basis of their standing rather than yours.

> Far better to have things work okay without any other entity being involved, sure. But there are reasons why banks exist.

You want a regulated and insured entity where you can safely store your money, sure. That doesn't explain why they should have a monopoly on various other aspects of finance though. Or why they would even need a monopoly on that -- if you want the assurances you get from a regulated bank, there they are. If you want a permissionless money transfer system that anybody can use and nobody can be refused, why shouldn't that exist too?

Post reply on HN