Irish bank strikes

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pages: 326 words: 91,532

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

Sources Chapter 1 For more on Penywaun and access to cash in south Wales, see University of Bristol report: ‘Identifying Vulnerable Communities in a Case Study of South Wales’, January 2020, https://cpb-eu-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.bristol.ac.uk/dist/3/599/files/2020/01/2020-0l-Geographies-of-Access-to-Cash.pdf For the story on van Halls, see: https://toritto.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/banker-to-the-resistance-walraven-van-hall/ and the 2018 film, The Resistance Banker [Bankier van het Verzet] (www.imdb.com/title/tt4610378/). Twain, M. (1893). The Million Pound Bank Note. Berlin: Langenscheidt ELT. For more on the Irish banking strike, see: Krüger, M. (2017). ‘Money and Credit: Lessons of the Irish bank strike of 1970’. ROME Discussion Paper Series ISSN 1865-7052, No. 2017-13, June. Kyotaki, N. and Moore, J. H. (2002). ‘Evil is the root of all money’, American Economic Review, 92(2), 62–6. Chapter 2 For the story on the London bus ticket, see: www.ft.com/content/e8a177d4-dfae-11e9-9743-db5a370481bc ‘It’s time to talk about money’, speech delivered by Sir Jon Cunliffe, Deputy Governor Financial Stability, Member of the Monetary Policy Committee, Member of the Financial Policy Committee and Member of the Prudential Regulation Committee, at the London School of Economics, 28 February 2020; see: www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2020/jon-cunliffe-speech-followed-by-panellist-at-chinas-trade-and-financial-globalisation-conference Chapter 3 The valuation of Stripe is based on a November 2020 financing round through which the company was seeking investors at a valuation of $70–100 billion.

With inside help at the central bank, he removed 50 million Dutch guilders (close to half a billion dollars in today’s money) in promissory notes from the vault and replaced them with forgeries. He then sold the original notes for cash, which was used to fund the resistance. After the war all the loans were redeemed properly.5 During the Irish banking strike in 1970, the Republic’s economy survived largely on the basis of uncashable cheques. For more than six months, the population effectively printed its own money. In the first half of 2020, after the Covid-19 pandemic erupted, cash ran out in parts of Papua New Guinea and residents resorted to ‘tabu’, strings of marine snail shells, measured in an arm’s length.

Christensen) 217 instant payment systems 81–6, 144 Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX) 245 interchange fees 42–4, 51, 57, 98, 162, 163 interest charges 7, 13, 90, 99, 212, 215 on credit cards 90 earning 17, 215 margins on account balances 92–3, 100 on overdrafts 99 rates 67, 90, 92, 99, 133, 183, 212 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 66 International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) 151 International Herald Tribune 250 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 17, 202 Interpol 3, 111 The Interview film 112 investment apps 77 invoice payment flows 120–1 iPhones 223–5, 269–70 Iran 64, 243–5, 248–9, 251–2, 262 Iran–Contra scandal 65, 264 Iraq 25 Irish banking strike 8 ISIS 266 Italy, medieval banks in 13–14 iTunes accounts 171, 172 J Jacobsson, Victor 174 Japan 17, 247 JCB cards 55, 78 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) 243–4, 252, 254 JPM Coin 207–8 JPMorgan 56, 133, 150, 158, 206–8, 211, 222, 248, 260, 267 JPMorgan Chase 55 K Käärmann, Kristo 146 Kaspersky Lab 107 Kelly, Jemima 11 Kenya 73–5, 78 KfW 131–2 Khomenei, Ayatollah 64–5 kidnap ransom payments 27–8, 195 Kim Jong-il 30 Kim Jong-un 112 Kissinger, Henry 237 Kiyotaki, Nobuhiro 10 Klarna 162, 174–5, 181, 183, 241 know your customer (KYC) checks 263, 266 Kodak 157 Kontantupproret (Cash Rebellion) 35 Korean War 249 L Latin America 101, 213 Latvia 260 lawsuit against Visa and Mastercard, US retailer 56–7 Laybuy 175 Layfield, Diana 127, 169 Lazarus Group 112–14, 233 ledger entries 11–13 Lee, Aileen 146 legacy infrastructures 72, 156 legal definition of payment 5 Lehman Brothers 55, 131–2, 134, 247 Leoni AG 111 Letter of Credit 149–51 letters of undertaking, Indian banks’ 115 libertarians 204 Libra Association 201, 211–12 Libra/Diem 63, 201–2, 204–6 Lieftinck, Piet 16–17 Link network 59 LinkedIn 110 liquidity 14, 15, 16–17, 19, 121, 122, 126–7, 130–1, 132, 133, 145, 208, 213, 214–15, 217, 231, 247, 272 loans 13–14, 77, 178–9, 215 see also credit cards ‘lock in’ effect 71–2 London Clearing House 118 loyalty programmes 219–20 M M-Pesa 74–5, 78 Ma, Jack 76, 272 Macao 249–50 MacLeod, Henry Dunning 9 Maestro 90–1 magstripe 47, 49, 109 mail order catalogues 50 Major’s Cabin Grill, NYC 40 malware 110, 113–14, 200 Manchester to Liverpool railway 68, 71 Marshall Plan 17 master merchants 164–5 Mastercard 3–4, 41, 42, 50, 53, 55, 56, 57–9, 90–1, 102, 161, 162, 174, 202, 204, 223, 269 Mazur, Robert 255, 263 McCrum, Dan 166 McKelvey, Jim 155 McNamara, Frank 40 medieval banks 13–14 medium of exchange, money as a 202 Melton, Bill 48 Meng Wanzhou 251–2 merchant acquiring 162–7 merchant discount fees 43, 44, 57, 162, 163, 174 Merchant of Venice (W.


pages: 275 words: 84,980

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives) by David Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, creative destruction, credit crunch, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, index card, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, Northern Rock, Pingit, prediction markets, price stability, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social graph, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, wage slave, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons

David Graeber makes a case for a simple answer: debt (Graeber 2011b). He observes that the difficulty in the ‘chartalist’ position (from the Latin charta, or token) is to establish why people would continue to trust a token, rather than a commodity, as society develops and points out that the chartalist version of currency (see the later discussion about the Irish bank strike) means providing sufficient token claims against different commodities, whether those are cocoa beans, sea shells, copper axes or anything else. However, in order to allow everyone even in a medium-sized city to be able to carry out a significant portion of their transactions in such a currency would require millions of tokens and associated guarantees (Graeber 2011b).

The store manager at Waitrose can leave the food to rot on the shelves or he can accept a signed IOU. He could accept zero sales because of flaws in the electronic payments system or he could develop a rational fall-back strategy. I discussed this in Identity Is the New Money, with reference back to the already discussed case study of the Irish bank strike. The idea that we must, ultimately, rely on cash because there may be a nuclear war seems out of date. Here’s a quote from an NPR Planet Money podcast on ‘Paper or plastic’: I’m a retail manager. Please, please, please, for the love of god, let cash die already. It’s expensive to store, sort, count, and transport.

In the interconnected future, however, there is every reason to suspect that the social graph will resume its pre-eminent position since, as I will explore, it is the most trustworthy, reliable aspect of a persona. This is where the link with money begins to take shape. Far-fetched? I don’t think so. In 1696 there was no cash in England with the result that ‘no trade is managed but by trust’ (Levinson 2009). With trust, you don’t need cash, as demonstrated by the example of the Irish bank strikes (see page 108). The economy did not collapse in the absence of cash (which soon ran out), as personal cheques and IOUs provided the circulating means of exchange. There were, at the time, some 12,000 retail shops and (perhaps more importantly) some 11,000 public houses that provided transaction services.


pages: 357 words: 110,017

Money: The Unauthorized Biography by Felix Martin

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Graeber, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invention of writing, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, plutocrats, private military company, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart transportation, South Sea Bubble, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail

As with any excavation, the first question is where to dig. We have seen that if money is indeed the operating system on which we run our societies and economies, the challenge of getting an objective view is an imposing one. Locating a case in which the official monetary system took a holiday, as it did during the Irish bank strike, might have been easy enough; and through it we learned something about the extent to which money really depends upon the state. If we wish to delve more deeply, however, we need to achieve an altogether more radical triangulation: we need to explore a time and a place where money never existed.