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Assorted links
On cutting Russia off from SWIFT, Noah Smith says “there’s a huge, huge loophole.” If you have some time to spend, you may also want to check out this 200-page book on SWIFT.
Here’s Scott Sumner on why central bank digital currency would sound the death knell for deposit insurance. Don’t mind the title of his blog post.
“In this post, we explain why we believe stablecoins are unlikely to be the future of payments.” Rod Garrett et al wrote this for Liberty Street Economics, a blog from the New York Fed.
The EU was going to restrict cryptocurrencies that rely on proof-of-work consensus protocols, but European Parliament postponed the vote indefinitely.
Patrick McKenzie is quite possibly the best public intellectual in payments. Here’s a piece from him on why finality doesn’t exist in payments. I can’t think of anyone better.
Crypto isn’t totally trustless? The value of Wonderland’s TIME tokens fell after it was discovered that a core member of the team was the co-founder of Quadriga, the infamous cryptocurrency exchange whose other co-founder mysteriously perished—and, with him, knowledge of the keys to the wallets.
Policy Options is doing a series on reforming the Competition Act.
Are antitrust reformers overestimating the sophistication of market actors? Maybe. Here’s what Economic Forces has to say.
A New Industrialist movement has been taking shape in the United States. Maybe I’m just jealous, but where are all the distinct intellectual movements taking shape in Canada? To the extent there’s movement here, it often seems to merely import schools of thought already formed in the United States. Readers, can you send me some stuff to prove me wrong?
Matt Clancy wrote about why patenting yesterday predicts patenting today.
Sometimes, you’re selling social status
This month, we wrote about the history of Diners Club—something like a credit card provider, which was founded in the 1950s, and which was the antecedent to Visa and Mastercard and American Express.
Spoiler: the history of Diners Club tells us that the future of financial services is going to be cool and weird. Unless you’re a behemoth of a company, benefiting from network effects, economies of scale, economies of scope, or some combination of the three, you’re going to have to get cooler and weirder.
Supplied by a reader, here’s one way of being weird:
That’s a picture from this story about an artist who placed $11.7 million worth of gold cube in Central Park to promote their cryptocurrency.
A few other readers sent me stories about Klarna’s new BNPL card. Everything old is new again.
Our institutions are sclerotic
We also wrote a short hot take about how Canada even found itself in a place where invoking the Emergencies Act seemed the only way out.
Because this is a newsletter about the intersection of fintech and public policy, the Retail Payment Activities Act makes a special appearance. But this is about so much more than the RPAA.
Here’s smart and thoughtful commentary about our the capacity of our institutions and the alternative tools the government is opting to use:
Akshay Singh and Jessica Davis explain how Canada’s capacity for dealing with foreign interference is limited, despite the risk of such interference to be “high”.
Channeling Tommy Douglas, Geoff Sigalet likens the invocation of the Emergencies Act to using a sledgehammer to smash a peanut.
Howard Anglin says we need to think seriously about digital jail, as he explores the link between our increasingly digital world and what you might consider liberal democracy.