"Post-westphalian free market blocked from conducting transfers with financial institution investigated for potential top down fraud case related to the 2008 financial crisis"
Articles with misleading or exaggerated information have been flowing from the British press on this topic and is clearly (sorry to use the funny jargon) a "co-ordinated FUD campaign". I'm no fan of binance but where are the articles on lack of action on money laundering in legacy banks in the UK? Or other topics like Standard Chartered links to oil investments?
This hints at anti-competitive sentiments from a group of "traditional" investors/blatant media outlets who can't keep up with the pace of change. Instead of trusting the FT to manipulate your opinion you can now deal with economic media directly and this is best done via MetaMask or many other similar platforms.
It isn't about being anticompetitive, it is about regulation, to protect the average consumer from being taken advantage of by unscrupulous people touting scams, and also to protect the government, as the government guarantees deposits up to £85k per person per institution. 'Retail' banks are required to ring-fence certain deposit funds from their more risky investments in an attempt to provide a buffer in the event of another financial crisis and to avoid the need for the government to bail out another bank like Northern Rock. This is on top of the usual requirements for a banking license, rules on capital leverage and the many and varied other rules banks must comply with.
Banks are required to and have large audit functions and have automated systems for flagging potential fraud to these teams, and are independently audited as well. This is why they enforce rules like KYC and so on. No system is perfect and certainly some level of money laundering will always slip through, but the idea they are not acting at all is pure fiction, as the regulator has teeth.
As sibling comments have pointed out, plenty of 'challenger banks' exist in the UK, e.g. Monzo, although they are not the only one, innovating just fine within the confines of 'legacy' banking.
Given the scam that is tether, and the atrocious transaction throughput all cryptocurrencies vs say just the Visa network, plus the fact that through Faster Payments I can move significant sums to any UK account within seconds, I am curious why you feel UK Financial institutions are not keeping up with 'the pace of change', particularly when bitcoin types are shilling a system that reinvents all the problems in the financial system regulation has been enacted to protect against, with no backing and terrible volatility?
The "average consumer" should be educated on different types of financial ownership by the state run media/financial press: custodial-legacy (Barclays), custodial-challenger (Revolut), defacto-custodial(arguably all centralized crypto exchanges..e.g. you can move the crypto off it), non-custodial (Meta Mask) etc. Then they should be allowed to risk or derisk as they see fit by choosing the most competitive option on the market. IMO stability in the economy comes from having a large number of prosumer types who can take activist positions when they need to, simply by quickly switching provider and getting a better deal or supporting something in their interest or to their taste. This is especially important considering the real alternative DeFi provides versus bank based lending and slippery financial constructs endemic in that industry (wasn't it the latter that caused 2008? Nearly any alternative is better than that situation.).
Other points:
- KYC exists on most of the major crypto exchanges with Coinbase and Gemini doing this properly. Proof that it works in the long term is not there yet of course.
- Fraud mostly happens through the traditional banking system. It's more complicated and embedded in how things are done but it's still fraud. The BBC on Barclays role in 2008: "At its worst, for every £100 the banks had lent, if as little as £3 or £4 failed to be repaid, it might be enough to bankrupt them."
- I struggle to see the sharp differences between a Coinbase or Binance (ok minus the overleveraged trading on the latter) and a Revolut or Monzo. Both allow different ways of accessing crypto within custodial model, have KYC, have a debit card. The only difference is how they have each responded to poorly formulated regulatory frameworks (2-3 years ago). Once again, binance sucks in so many ways but there's still something incredibly misleading about the way it is covered.
- Tether is no good but Dai is an excellent alternative. In any case, Tether operates similarly to many banks where 1:1 shadowing of money held/money deposited is obviously never going to work out as a profitable business model. Tether is not viable long term but neither are most banks then.
These things aside, my main overall point here is that:
- UK financial institutions should protect consumers but should not create information asymmetries (via state run media and highly influential financial press) that heavily predispose a certain outcome in the favour of a tiny subset of companies innovating in this space. For example, FUD focussed on a single company that is directly competing with Revolut or Monzo. This is anticompetitive in my view and there is such a lack of clarity on what is acceptable that it is likely to stifle any innovation going forward.
I think educating the average consumer is a good and lofty ideal that we should aspire to. I think that in practice it is not realistic. The truth is that around 99 percent of people would prefer regulations that protect their interests to the time, effort, and cognitive overhead of educating themselves about the arcane workings of banking and finance. Ultimately it is probably more just to cater to their interests.
Its more the case that the FSA (mostly the consumer regulator) has specifically warned that binance is not allowed to do financial services in the UK, because they have not got the correct permissions.
Unlike the USA, there is now a fairly healthy investment and consumer banking industry. There are now a number of challenger banks who are able to out innovate the incumbents.
This is correct but, crucially, not what was conveyed by the reporting on Binance in almost all of the major news outlets.
For example the massively misleading previous headline "Binance banned in the UK" in the FT.
The FCA ruling is not really the problem imo, i'm more reacting to the financial press such as FT and the Economist. Cooling down overleveraged small traders about to lose it all on some bad investment is definitely a good thing. However, intentionally misleading people via major newsites including the BBC is not.
Seems like there's an emerging paradigm for ignoring universities but still doing something of value in the "academic" space. This is just a dumb strategy but based on many examples I've seen recently.
1. Customise a curriculum engaging with younger tutors in niche areas (e.g. youtube, teachable or if theres others comment).
2. Do this for a few years and make sure to meet people/do appropriate things and publish them online. E.g. do a good podcast/lecture series.
3. Publish on Xiv like sites with high quality results/arguments/original ideas or demo/explain things on youtube. If a preprint site doesn't exist for you then make one and contact people.
This might get you x100 the exposure of your average PI and eventually funding will come around to your ideas as universities become a total farce. 10 years down the line the tepid overtures to gitlab and github turn into a full on rejection of high overhead university education. Rental or pooling services for expensive equipment or access to resources would also help immensely.
That's pretty much my stance, the universities are obsolete garbage. I did give them another shot and took as many math classes as possible, but they screwed up and drove me away.
I now do all my math research independent, as the universities are unable to facilitate my math research activity.
Staying at home and playing video games/yield farm is the most incentivised activity right now. This liberal-moral capitalism breaks my heart sometimes lol. Reap what you sow!
Pretty much. The economists created this mess using their magic number science, then look down at the broken scramble and are confused? Assuming rational actors...
Imo, Wyoming or Sweden not something in between. Most economies do something in between and outrageously favour maintenance of large stores of ultimately unworkable existing wealth.
This is probably true but only in the sense that someone designing and building something slightly larger than human scale objects is an architect period. Some of this magazine's readers will be shocked by this because to them architect is a professional stance or practice (aka a cabal of sorts who enforce a certain aesthetic standard emanating from cosmopolitan universities, galleries, and where ever).
Design and architecture are activities and so is engineering. When someone performs the activity to some sort of recognisable standard then it is what it is. In sum, yes, of course he is an architect and its completely unsurprising and not worthy of mention!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51593639