Mobile Payments
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@scottalanmiller said in Mobile Payments:
@zachary715 said in Mobile Payments:
So you're saying banks weren't actually holding a bunch of sh!t mortgages that they had given to underqualified individuals who couldn't afford them, and then let it spiral out of control?
First - the banks affected by the seizures often weren't even mortgage banks. We were not, we were an investment bank at record profits. Second, that crap mortgages existed was totally legal and ethical. That people accepted loans that they had no intention or realistic ability to pay is not the fault of the bank unless they lied about it, which is an unrelated matter.
Are you really blaming banks for giving loans? That's not a reasonable thing. Banks had zero responsibility to determine if a house was the right choice for you, only if the loan was acceptable to the bank. It is unethical for people to put that kind of demands on a bank who has no idea or responsibility or knowledge to do so.
Yes it was legal. Banks had been loosened and encouraged to give out more loans to less qualified people for political reasons. It started with Clinton and then Bush put the cherry on top. "The American Dream begins with home ownership" is always the big mantra, so let's get as many people into homes as we can and not worry about if they can afford it.
Ethical is another question. I place blame on both parties here. Banks have a responsibility to evaluate risk for their business and ensure that they aren't taking too many of these crappy loans because it puts them in a vulnerable state, which was at its peak in the '08 crisis. Individuals have a responsibility to understand what they can and can't reasonably afford and make the right decisions for themselves. Both failed in this scenario.
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@scottalanmiller said in Mobile Payments:
Traditionally, the "poor", meaning those with less than $1m in liquid investment capital, invest via standard vehicles like banks, mutual funds, and so forth. Because the poor have so much wealth to invest as a group (mostly in IRAs, pensions and so forth) the highest paid fund managers and financial experts worked for the investment banks because even though individual customers were small, their total size was quite large. So this is where the money was. So the poor got the best investment skills that the rich could not afford at their smaller sizes.
So what was done? Once the government nationalize the banks, they used that position to claim that financial advisors were being paid way too much. They never talked about how they earned that money, only stated huge salaries and convinced the public to put caps on their earnings - punishing the people who were helping them most or cutting off their noses to spite their faces. It is a common factor in American ethics that we tend to value fairness over both total value or self preservation. Most Americans would vote to hurt people they see getting ahead unfairly, even if it hurt everyone innocent in the process, rather than see everyone benefit from one person getting away with something. It's not wrong, but it is unique to American thinking.
So what was the result? The top financial advisors had to move to hedge funds (which legally require $1m in cash to use) so that the top talent in the industry was available exclusively to the ultra rich (even an average millionaire can't produce $1m in cash all at once) and the poor using investment banks had to make do with the second string people who weren't good enough to work at the high paying, unregulated hedge funds. It was a coup. The rich managed to get the best talent while the poor lost their top resources for gaining retirement wealth. But it all happened at the will of the poor, so the rich didn't have to feel bad about it.
I'm one of those people who moved from the investment sector to hedge funds. I used to head cash exchanges for the US government, but after that move, they couldn't afford me and had to hire a team of people to replace me at much higher cost and hedge funds got me instead where they couldn't attract me before.
It was just a thinly veiled ploy to use government intervention to keep the best of the best for the richest of the rich, while getting the public to decide to do it thinking that they were "sticking it to the man."
This is honestly an explanation I have never heard before. Your claim is that the banks were "nationalized" for the sole purpose of benefiting the rich, and not due to the fact that these banks were going under and the whole credit system was about to collapse.
But yes that's a common theme these days. (Insert individual here) makes too much money and there's no reason anyone should make that much money, let's cap earnings at $XXX because FAIRNESS. Majority of this is BS if you ask me.
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@zachary715 said in Mobile Payments:
Ethical is another question. I place blame on both parties here. Banks have a responsibility to evaluate risk for their business and ensure that they aren't taking too many of these crappy loans because it puts them in a vulnerable state, which was at its peak in the '08 crisis. Individuals have a responsibility to understand what they can and can't reasonably afford and make the right decisions for themselves. Both failed in this scenario.
This is the problem... lots of people took these loans and didn't fail, only some did. And lots of banks gave these loans and didn't fail. At least one bank and several people did fail, but many that were punished weren't the ones that failed.
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@zachary715 said in Mobile Payments:
This is honestly an explanation I have never heard before. Your claim is that the banks were "nationalized" for the sole purpose of benefiting the rich, and not due to the fact that these banks were going under and the whole credit system was about to collapse.
Given that banks that weren't involved in mortgages, didn't give any loans, and were at record profits were caught up in the sweep, it's easy to show. The credit system wasn't involved in much of it.
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@zachary715 said in Mobile Payments:
But yes that's a common theme these days. (Insert individual here) makes too much money and there's no reason anyone should make that much money, let's cap earnings at $XXX because FAIRNESS. Majority of this is BS if you ask me.
Yeah, shareholders may CEOs ridiculous money out of their own pockets for a reason - because they believe that he or she is worth that much more than the next available candidate. CEOs take huge risks, give up insane amounts of their lives, and do generally really unique things that can't easily be replaced. People like a free market till they see someone else getting more out of it than them.
Oddly, I've had homeless people mock me for being so foolish as to go to work.
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@scottalanmiller said in Mobile Payments:
@zachary715 said in Mobile Payments:
Ethical is another question. I place blame on both parties here. Banks have a responsibility to evaluate risk for their business and ensure that they aren't taking too many of these crappy loans because it puts them in a vulnerable state, which was at its peak in the '08 crisis. Individuals have a responsibility to understand what they can and can't reasonably afford and make the right decisions for themselves. Both failed in this scenario.
This is the problem... lots of people took these loans and didn't fail, only some did. And lots of banks gave these loans and didn't fail. At least one bank and several people did fail, but many that were punished weren't the ones that failed.
Because the gov't stepped in and didn't allow them to. The entire credit system would have collapsed.
They "nationalized" them by pouring money into them, even the ones who weren't in trouble like Wells Fargo at the time because the gov't didn't want it to be discriminatory. Then they forced other banks to merge to resolve their financial issues. So now we have even bigger banks and fewer. -
@zachary715 said in Mobile Payments:
@scottalanmiller said in Mobile Payments:
@zachary715 said in Mobile Payments:
Ethical is another question. I place blame on both parties here. Banks have a responsibility to evaluate risk for their business and ensure that they aren't taking too many of these crappy loans because it puts them in a vulnerable state, which was at its peak in the '08 crisis. Individuals have a responsibility to understand what they can and can't reasonably afford and make the right decisions for themselves. Both failed in this scenario.
This is the problem... lots of people took these loans and didn't fail, only some did. And lots of banks gave these loans and didn't fail. At least one bank and several people did fail, but many that were punished weren't the ones that failed.
Because the gov't stepped in and didn't allow them to. The entire credit system would have collapsed.
There is no reason to believe that.
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@zachary715 said in Mobile Payments:
They "nationalized" them by pouring money into them, even the ones who weren't in trouble like Wells Fargo at the time because the gov't didn't want it to be discriminatory. Then they forced other banks to merge to resolve their financial issues. So now we have even bigger banks and fewer.
"Pouring money in" that was forced, and pay backs of those reckless loans that were also forced. There was no innocent saving of the system here.
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@scottalanmiller said in Mobile Payments:
Oddly, I've had homeless people mock me for being so foolish as to go to work.
My brother mocks you - thinks his free time to play disc golf everyday and garden is more valuable than all your money stock pile, etc.
I just laugh at him.
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@scottalanmiller said in Mobile Payments:
@zachary715 said in Mobile Payments:
They "nationalized" them by pouring money into them, even the ones who weren't in trouble like Wells Fargo at the time because the gov't didn't want it to be discriminatory. Then they forced other banks to merge to resolve their financial issues. So now we have even bigger banks and fewer.
"Pouring money in" that was forced, and pay backs of those reckless loans that were also forced. There was no innocent saving of the system here.
Well I'll be taking this additional info and adding it to my research. This is all completely against, or at least doesn't align, with everything else I've seen out there in regards to what happened and how everyone responded. Considering you were there when it happened, I will take this into serious consideration (not that my opinion matters much on the issue in the overall scheme of things). But either you have a special inside scoop that almost no one else realizes happened, or this is a conspiracy on Wall Street to make themselves look like the victim in this situation. Either way, interesting info.
Now about those mobile payments.....
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@zachary715 said in Mobile Payments:
But either you have a special inside scoop that almost no one else realizes happened, or this is a conspiracy on Wall Street to make themselves look like the victim in this situation.
Never jump to conspiracy where "self preservation and gain" makes perfect sense. It was totally logical why letting the government take over got little push back. Because...
- It gave banks literally at record profits the right to blame the government for canceling bonuses (basically the bank was allowed to steal from the workers, thanks to the government intervention.) As banking salaries are roughly 30-50% bonus, this was like cutting staff costs in half, with no culpability.
- It forced the investment banks to lower the pay to their top performers, but required that their competitors do the same. Since everyone was capped, no one suffered in comparison to the others. So the result was higher profit margins to the banks at the expense of the public. Of course the banks didn't complain, it was the public losing money.
- Likely the banks had gag orders put on them. But it was in no one's interest to expose it, this is the nature of the system. Everyone either won (banks, the rich, the government) or lost but felt that they won (the voting public.) Everyone thought that they had made out at the expense of someone else.
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@zachary715 said in Mobile Payments:
Well I'll be taking this additional info and adding it to my research. This is all completely against, or at least doesn't align, with everything else I've seen out there in regards to what happened and how everyone responded.
Which is what you'd expect given how the change of financial resources was engineered. The whole point of the move was to make it look like one thing to the public and have another result in the end. It's just marketing done well like we see in any field, just on a bigger scale. Convince people of X, let the people decide to fix it by doing Y, no one mention that Y creates Z which was the goal all along.
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Trying to get back on track, is there a consensus that mobile payments (I'm specifically referring to Android, Apple, and Samsung Pay) are more secure methods of payment than a regular credit card transaction at a retailer? Convenience not as large a concern here as I think the convenience factor won't be that much of a difference. As long as it isn't drastically slower, then I'm just looking at security mostly. What am I missing in this equation?
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@zachary715 said in Mobile Payments:
Trying to get back on track, is there a consensus that mobile payments (I'm specifically referring to Android, Apple, and Samsung Pay) are more secure methods of payment than a regular credit card transaction at a retailer?
Yes, the consensus is that they are quite a bit more secure.
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@zachary715 said in Mobile Payments:
d Samsung Pay) are more secure methods of payment than a regular credit card transaction at a retailer? Convenience
I don't agree with Samsung pay, assuming they are using the magnetic field solution, because it's not a unique token approach, it just replaces swiping your card. (at least I don't think it uses a unique card number each time).
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@dashrender said in Mobile Payments:
@zachary715 said in Mobile Payments:
d Samsung Pay) are more secure methods of payment than a regular credit card transaction at a retailer? Convenience
I don't agree with Samsung pay, assuming they are using the magnetic field solution, because it's not a unique token approach, it just replaces swiping your card. (at least I don't think it uses a unique card number each time).
So either Apple or Android pay then?
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@jmoore said in Mobile Payments:
@dashrender said in Mobile Payments:
@zachary715 said in Mobile Payments:
d Samsung Pay) are more secure methods of payment than a regular credit card transaction at a retailer? Convenience
I don't agree with Samsung pay, assuming they are using the magnetic field solution, because it's not a unique token approach, it just replaces swiping your card. (at least I don't think it uses a unique card number each time).
So either Apple or Android pay then?
Yes
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I had a big intention to use Android Pay regularly but have found myself using mostly just to touch in/out for travel lately. It just hasn't progressed much in terms of features other than contactless which every single other card I have has.
I'm now looking more at the cards that banks/sudo-banks are releasing, those that
- Allow me to combine multiple cards into one, giving me a physical card, letting me to change the card used to another after the purchase (Curve)
- Support crypto currencies (Wirex - 25% discount link) (TenX) (Monaco)
- Support for multiple currencies and low xfer rates (Revolut)
- Let me create a business account in minutes (Tide)
- Intelligent banking apps (Tandem)
- Bankless Banks (BABB)
- Banks for Banks (ClearBank)
- Or just new banks in general (Monzo) (Starling) (Atom) (Monese) (Pockit)
