651–660 of 1001 posts
I think this is a case where setting a standard and requiring payment processors to adhere would have been a much better idea. More centralizing of power is not what we need right now.
Just in time before they layoff 5% of the staff.
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> in most countries, those services are provided by banks, not the government That's something I always point out when telling others how awesome the Brazilian Pix system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system) is. It's not a private initiative by a bunch of individual banks, but rather a zero-fee payment system managed by the country's central bank: https://www.bcb.gov.br/en/financialstability/pixfaqen .
And it seriously rocks. It has been such a tremendous change to everyday life.
Just last year, the Canadian government weaponized "debanking" in an effort to quell peaceful protests against vaccination mandates. They restricted the bank accounts of people who peacefully disagreed with government policy stances. And that was just with the status quo of deputizing private banks to enforce the sanctions against the individual citizens - imagine how much more systemized and effective it would be as a coercion measure if the bank accounts were directly managed and controlled by the government.
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> they'll eventually run into legal troubles from the damage they cause to innocent people Which is how this sort of thing ought to be handled, in stark contrast to "Chrystia Freeland sends an email to the heads of major banks to get troublemakers debanked with zero transparency or due process."
Like the person I was responding to said, there are thousands of banks. If not a single one wants to do business with this organization, that's not a first amendment issue and you don't need to lose sleep over it. Being so unpopular that nobody with a shred of decency will do business with them is not a rights issue.
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Alternatively, everyone not taking advantage of the credit card protections isn't taking advantage of what's offered around them. Everyone should be subsidizing everyone else, because no one should be using a debit card to make direct consumer purchases in 2023. It's too fraught with risk comparatively, and even the scummiest of the sub-prime credit cards give you a grace period to not accrue interest.
> …isn't taking advantage of what's offered around them. is that not an absurdly slippery slope? what if rather than anyone having to take advantage of anything, things just worked better, and everyone agreed that such things matter?
In lieu of that, how would you envision any society arriving at such an end state?
For those curious, it is really using IBM MQ[1] under the hood and uses a bespoke flavor of the ISO 20022 specification. The FedNow Service itself is the tip of the iceberg in terms of what actually happens from an end-to-end perspective. We've been working to become a Certified Service Provider so feel free to ask me anything. I'm happy to share anything that is not under NDA. [1] https://www.ibm.com/products/mq
Is the eventual end-game that I can send money from my account at Bank A, to a friend's account at Bank B to split a check at dinner without using a third party like Venmo?
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Alternatively, everyone not taking advantage of the credit card protections isn't taking advantage of what's offered around them. Everyone should be subsidizing everyone else, because no one should be using a debit card to make direct consumer purchases in 2023. It's too fraught with risk comparatively, and even the scummiest of the sub-prime credit cards give you a grace period to not accrue interest.
This argument makes sense if you don't consider the large portion of the population for whom credit cards are unavailable.
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Isn't it the case that you still have to have a relationship with a bank to have an account to transfer into or out of via FedNow in the first place? In that case I don't think this would change the picture at all. It's not the intention to help the unbanked pariahs, that's for sure.
There are still almost 5k banks in the US. Unlike Zelle, if this opens to all of them, all you need is one bank.
Bank gets bailed out? That's a dire sign for the fundamental value of the dollar to regular people if this is a regular practice.
Bank gets bought up? Well we don't really have 5k banks anymore do we?
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…
I think KiwiFarms is a cesspool and I think Null in particular is an extremely crappy human, but despite that I disagreed with the credit card processors pulling them, because they really did have a near-monopoly for online payments, meaning that this could be considered stifling of free speech. However, I think I'll have less of an issue for it if there's the government-backed means in which to send them money; at t…