691–700 of 1001 posts
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I've been receiving my payments digitally from employers in the US for almost 20 years now. I've never in my life received a wage in cash, as in, hard dollars.
...but with days of delay, where someone else is keeping the interest. And maybe charging a transaction fee.
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…
It's true that America is very far behind now but they're also the ones who started creditcards all the way back in the 1950s. Anyway I have a theory: big countries are too far up their own ass to notice or care what the rest of the world is up to. Compare a small, international oriented country like the Netherlands or Denmark to sleepy provincial Germany.
This is really concerning. I wonder why they couldn't have looked into what (if anything) prevents the private sector from offering this service, and fixed those obstacles instead? It seems to me like a government run shoe factory, or a government run mail service.
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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?
But we don't, and never will again, for very complicated reasons.
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Your employer doesn't pay you in food stamps, they pay you in money you can use to buy anything you need in the entire world. The government provides coupons that allow you to buy food which is remediated to the seller in dollars. The authority and funding to provide that service is something that voters can impact or change. These are very different things, not "that already exists" at all.
> they pay you in money you can use to buy anything you need in the entire world. This is an primarily American phenomenon though and it's only really true because of the dominance of the US and US petrodollars over global society. It's probably not easy to spend Turkish lira in Madagascar, for example. Yes there are banks which will exchange approved currencies, but that's one step removed from being paid in a globa…
If anyone ever mentions petrodollars, CBDC, or crypto to you, they are crazy and I recommend stealing their wallet. (Since they're into crypto they're used to it.)
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I had to read this twice - is it really not like in the UK? Is this the first US implementation of "Faster Payments"? Sure people in the UK sometimes use PayPal, Revolut, but most of the time its always just a friend gives (and you save on your banking app) their bank account number and sort code, and you instantly send it across. edit: with no fee
I can think of 0 occasions where I’ve given anyone my bank account info who isn’t a commercial organization (employer, electric company, etc). I had no idea it was the opposite in the UK. Edit: with the exception of writing physical checks, of course. I use those when the receiver doesn’t accept Venmo or Apple Pay.
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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.
This also depends if by "audits" you include every kind of correction letter the IRS sends you.
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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?
It sounds very much like some of the Interac services that we have here in Canada (and have had for ages). We can do what is called "email money transfer" where as long as I know your email address I can go into my bank app, transfer money to you and it will automatically show up in your bank account.
The interface is very weird. Many people can't figure out how to use it. I ended up having to set up new email addresses and assign them to different bank accounts in order to distinguish my accounts.
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
Powell has mentioned[0] that the Fed is unable to affect fiscal policy, which is the fastest and best solution to certain economic crises. Does this bring the Fed closer to being able to simply give people money? [0] https://rollcall.com/2020/06/16/feds-powell-urges-congress-t...
The main problem stopping the government from giving you money is that it doesn't know where you'd want them to send the money to.