Category Archives: Payment system

Financialization and its Discontents

Untangling the credit versus money focus in the critiques of financialization.

Global Money: A Work in Progress

Bagehot outlined some of the requirements for global money. Are we closer to a solution?

Should Banks Be Worried About Apple Pay?

Will Apple Pay eat retail payment systems?

Cyber Security and the Financial System – What Do Governments Want from the Banks?

Governments are combining aggressive, ambitious talk with a curious helplessness in warning banks they really should be Doing Something about terrorist risk.

Eurobanks: The Probable Point of Failure as Systemic Stress Rises

Why Eurobanks are the most likely fracture point if current economic stresses continue.

Money and Banking – Part 3

How the Fed balance sheet works and why what we, the public, consider to be money is a debt of the Federal Reserve. Part 3 of a series.

Why Bitcoin is Not Disruptive

Get a cup of coffee. This is a deep dive into how Bitcoin works from a payment systems perspective, and why the failure of promoters and journalists to look at it in those terms has led them to greatly overestimate its significance.

Money and Banking – Part 2

How the Fed balance sheet works and why what we, the public, consider to be money is a debt of the Federal Reserve.

Gaius Publius: Wall Street Reviews What Sanders Plans for Wall Street

An overview of the Sanders Big Finance reform proposal, and some of the ways it has been caricatured or flat-out misrepresented

“Failed: What the ‘Experts’ Got Wrong about the Global Economy”

An excerpt from CEPR co-director Mark Weisbrot’s important new book, Failed.

Don Quijones: “First They Came for the Pennies…” in the War on Cash

Governments and central banks must do away with the last remaining thing that gives people a small semblance of privacy, anonymity, and personal freedom.

Fight Over Postal Service Board Heats Up as Labor/Consumer Advocates/Minority Coalition Opposes Payday Lender Lobbyist, Privatization Backers

A broad coalition has taken the unusual step of opposing all of Obama’s five nominees to the Postal Service Board of Governors. But it’s the right move, given how terrible they are.

Chris Hedges and Leo Panitch: We are All Greeks Now

Leo Panitch and Chris Hedges discuss how nature of imperialism today is financial power.

More on Why Bank IT and Payment Systems Matter

The IT challenges of a Grexit are important not only in and of themselves, but as a window into the creaky state of bank IT and the systemic risk it poses.

Perry Mehrling: No One Has a Good Idea of How to Keep the Fed From Having to Rescue Mr. Market Again

Perry Mehrling’s post on the Fed’s progress in dealing with future market crises is damning, despite its “give everyone credit for what they have done” recap.