Category: money

He’s part of those arguing “the chaos caused by the global IT outage last week underlines the risk of moving towards a cashless society,” writes the Observer:

Authorities in China and the US have fined businesses for not accepting cash. Delnevo said the U.K. should have a law requiring all businesses to take cash. Martin Quinn, campaign director for the PCA, said using cash allowed for anonymity. “I don’t want my data sold on, and I don’t want banks, credit card companies and even online retailers to know every facet of my life,” he said. Budgeting by using cash is also easier for some, he added.

The article includes some interesting statistics from a U.K. bank trade association. “The number of people who never use cash, or use it less than once a month, reached 23.1 million in 2021, but declined to 21.6m last year.”

The GMB [general trade] Union said the outage reinforced what it had been saying for years: that “cash is a vital part of how our communities operate”. “When you take cash out of the system, people have nothing to fall back on, impacting on how they do the everyday basics.”

Online fraud and digital crime in Sweden have surged, with criminals taking 1.2 billion kronor in 2023 through scams like the one Bagley fell for, doubling from 2021. Law-enforcement agencies estimate that the size of Sweden’s criminal economy could amount to as high as 2.5% of the country’s gross domestic product. To counter the digital crime spree, Swedish authorities have put pressure on banks to tighten security measures and make it harder on tech-savvy criminals, but it’s a delicate balancing act. Going too far could slow down the economy, while doing too little erodes trust and damages legitimate businesses in the process.Using complex webs of fake companies and forging documents to gain access to Sweden’s welfare system, sophisticated fraudsters have made Sweden a “Silicon Valley for criminal entrepreneurship,” said Daniel Larson, a senior economic crime prosecutor. While the shock of armed violence has grabbed public attention — the nation’s gun-homicide rate tripled between 2012 and 2022 — economic crime underlies gang activity and needs to be tackled as aggressively, he added. “That has been a strategic mistake,” Larson said. “This profit-generating crime is what’s fueling organized crime and, in some cases, leads to these conflicts.”

Sweden’s switch to electronic cash started after a surge of armed robberies in the 1990s, and by 2022, only 8% of Swedes said they had used cash for their latest purchase, according to a central bank survey. Along with neighboring Norway, Sweden has Europe’s lowest number of ATMs per capita, according to the IMF. The prevalence of BankID play a role in Sweden’s vulnerability. The system works like an online signature. If used, it’s considered a done deal and the transaction gets executed immediately. It was designed by Sweden’s banks to make electronic payments even quicker and easier than handing over a stack of bills. Since it’s original rollout in 2001, it’s become part of the everyday Swedish life. On average, the service — which requires a six-digit code, a fingerprint or a face scan for authentication — is used more than twice a day by every adult Swede and is involved in everything from filing tax returns to paying for bus tickets.Originally intended as a product by banks for their customers, its use exploded in 2005 after Sweden’s tax agency adopted the technology as an identification for tax returns, giving it the government’s official seal of approval. The launch of BankID on mobile phones in 2010 increased usage even further, along with public perception that associated cash with criminality.The country’s central bank has acknowledged that some of those connotations may have gone too far. “We have to be very clear that there are still honest people using cash,” Riksbank Governor Erik Thedeen told Bloomberg.

“This multi-year agreement will also provide certainty for private-sector partners to help with their future Free File planning,” Corbin added. IRS Free File remains open through the Oct. 15 federal tax extension deadline. You can use Free File for 2023 returns with an adjusted gross income of $79,000 or less, which is up from $73,000 in 2022. Fillable Forms are also still available for all income levels.

“For them, you know, hearing from their experience, they didn’t feel like they were exploited! They felt like, ‘Oh my god, this was the biggest gift, all of a sudden I could create something, I had millions of users, I made so much money I could retire.’ So I focus more on the amount of money that we distribute every year to creators, which is now getting close to like a billion dollars, which is phenomenal.”

At this point the PR present during the interview added that “the vast majority of people that are earning money on Roblox are over the age of 18.” “And imagine like, the millions of kids that learn how to code every month,” Corazza said. “We have millions of creators in Roblox Studio. They learn Lua scripting,” a programming language, “which is pretty close to Python – you can get a job in the tech industry in the future, and be like, ‘Hey, I’m a programmer,’ right? “I think that we are really focusing on the learning – the curriculum, if you want – and really bringing people on and empowering them to be professionals.”

Prices seesaw all the time on the sites of online retailers like Amazon that use algorithms and artificial intelligence to monitor competitors and glean insights into individual shoppers, adjusting prices depending on interest in the product or in the brand, said Timothy Webb, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware’s hospitality and sport business management program. Coupons and other offers are also routinely dangled in mobile apps to encourage people to make purchases. “A lot of this stuff is already happening even if you don’t realize that it is happening. If you have the Starbucks app and I have the Starbucks app, we probably have different offers,” Webb said. “We might not be in the drive-through and they just increased the prices, but we are already paying different prices for the same products.”

But, he says, Wendy’s fans will likely see moderate, not massive, price swings during periods of peak demand. “It’s not like $200 or $300 on a flight. This is a hypercompetitive industry. If Wendy’s goes up $2 to $3 on a burger at dinner time, I would be shocked. People have too many options. They will just walk down the street and eat at Burger King instead,” Webb said. “There will just be little price changes here.”

“After months of prayers and cues from God, he was going to start selling cryptocurrency, he announced in a YouTube video last April.”

The Signature and Silvergate banks had collapsed weeks earlier, signaling the need to look into other investment options beyond financial institutions, he said. With divine wisdom, he said, he was “setting the rails for God’s wealth transfer.” Shortly afterward, Regalado and his wife, Kaitlyn Regalado, launched a cryptocurrency, INDXcoin, and began selling it to members of his Victorious Grace Church and other Christian communities in the Denver area. They sold it through the Kingdom Wealth Exchange, an online cryptocurrency marketplace he created, controlled and operated.

The Regalados raised more than $3.2 million from over 300 investors, Tung Chang, Securities Commissioner for Colorado, said in a civil complaint. The couple’s sales pitches were filled with “prayer and quotes from the Bible, encouraging investors to have faith that their investment … would lead to ‘abundance’ and ‘blessings,'” the complaint said. But Colorado state regulators say that INDXcoin was “essentially worthless.” Instead of helping investors acquire wealth, the Regalados used around $1.3 million of the investment funds to bankroll lavish expenditures, including a Range Rover, jewelry, cosmetic dentistry and extravagant vacations, the complaint said. The money also paid for renovations to the Regalados’ Denver home, the complaint said.

In a stunning video statement posted online on January 19 — several days after the civil charges were filed — Eli Regalado did not dispute that he and his wife profited from the crypto venture. “The charges are that Kaitlyn and I pocketed 1.3 million dollars, and I just want to come out and say that those charges are true,” he said, adding, “A few hundred thousand dollars went to a home remodel that the Lord told us to do….”

Regalado also said that he and his wife used about half a million dollars of their investors’ funds to pay taxes to the IRS.

CNN reports that in videos Regalado explains how God “convinced him that it was a safe and profitable investment venture.” (“You read it correctly. God’s hand is on INDXcoin and we are launching!” explains the launch video’s description.)

“The Regalados used technical terms to confuse investors and misled them into believing that the coins were valued at between $10-$12 even though they were purchased for $1.50 or, at times, given away, the complaint said.”

Over his 54 years as a financial analyst, Richard X. Bove perfected the art of grabbing attention… American Banker once called him “the country’s most quotable bank analyst.” Last week, a few hours after completing a spot on Bloomberg television, the 83-year-old announced his retirement. He took that weekend off — and then jumped right back in. In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Bove (pronounced “boe-VAY”), who goes by Dick, shared a dire outlook on the U.S. economy and his former profession.

“The dollar is finished as the world’s reserve currency,” Mr. Bove said matter-of-factly, perched in an armchair outside his home office just north of Tampa, from which he predicted that China will overtake the U.S. economy. No other analysts will say the same because they are, as he put it, “monks praying to money,” unwilling to speak out on the mainstream financial system that employs them…

As he spoke, a technician was trying to restore his home internet after his final employer, the boutique brokerage Odeon Capital, pulled the plug on his last day…

He sees the offshoring of American manufacturing as the ultimate threat to the financial sector and the dollar, because “the people making the goods elsewhere are getting greater and greater control of the means of production and therefore greater and greater control of the world economy and therefore greater and greater control of money.”

The article notes that Bove was once called “The Loneliest Analyst.”

“One way that’s still true is that he endorses cryptocurrency — an area that few other financial analysts will touch — which he sees as a natural beneficiary of the decline of the dollar.”

According to the company, the new payment service will “showcas[e] the power of living more of your life in one place,” as owner Elon Musk continues to promote X as a future “everything app” capable of handling social media, video and other original content on the same site. X Payments has registered to do business in at least 32 states, according to public records, and has acquired a money transmitter license needed to process payments in 10, TechCrunch reported in December.

Social media giant Meta, which pivoted its focus on building metaverse technologies in 2021, has forecast the tech would eventually replace mobile as the main computing platform. In a separate report, Meta said the European Union may see an increased economic opportunity of up to 489 billion euros ($538.29 billion) in annual GDP by 2035 or about 1.3%-2.4% of its total GDP. The metaverse could contribute between C$45.3 billion ($33.88 billion) and C$85.5 billion to Canada’s annual GDP by 2035, Deloitte said. Last year, a Meta-funded report estimated that metaverse adoption would contribute $3.01 trillion by 2031.