Coppola Comment

This is a slightly amended version of a keynote speech I gave on 14th April 2023 at the University of Ghent, for the Workshop on Fintech 2023.  The crisis that has engulfed crypto in the last year is a crisis of fractional reserve banking. Silvergate Bank and Signature Bank NY were fractional reserve banks. So too were Celsius Network, Voyager, BlockFi, Babel Finance and FTX. And still standing are the crypto fractional reserve banks Coinbase, Gemini, Binance, Nexo, MakerDAO, Tether, Circle, and, I would argue, every one of the DeFi staking pools. All of these are doing some variety of fractional reserve banking. Custodia Bank and Kraken Finance claim to be full-reserve banks – but 100% reserve backing for deposits is both hard to prove and not a guarantee of safety. What do I mean by “fractional reserve banking”? My definition might surprise you. For me, fractional reserve banking simply means that the composition of a bank’s assets is less liquid than that of its liabilities. Fra

This is the story of a bank that put all its eggs into an emerging digital basket, believing that providing non-interest-bearing deposit and payment services to crypto exchanges and platforms would be a nice little earner, while completely failing to understand the extraordinary risks involved with such a venture.  On 1st March, Silvergate Capital Corporation announced that filing of its audited full-year accounts would be significantly delayed , and warned that its financial position had materially changed for the worse since the publication of its provisional results on January 17th, when it reported a full-year loss of nearly $1bn. The stock price promptly tanked, falling 60% during the day:   Platforms, exchanges and other banks halted or re-routed transactions on Silvergate's SEN payments network, and customers that had other banking relationships removed their deposits. In response, Silvergate halted the SEN network. A banner on its website now reads: Effective immediately

  It's now widely accepted, though still not universally, that banks create money when they lend. But it seems to be much less widely known that they also create money when they spend. I don't just mean when they buy securities, which is rightly regarded as simply another form of lending. I mean when they buy what is now colloquially known as "stuff". Computers, for example. Or coffee machines.  Imagine that a major bank - JP Morgan, for example - wants to buy a new coffee machine for one of its New York offices (yes, it has more than one). It orders a top-of-the-range espresso machine worth $10,000 from the Goodlife Coffee Company, and pays for it by electronic funds transfer to the company's account. At the end of the transaction JP Morgan has a new coffee machine and Goodlife has $10,000 in its deposit account.  What exactly is this money, and how is it created? I had a long argument with people on twitter who insisted that JP Morgan would pay for the coffee ma

The video blogger Crypto Eri (@sentosumosaba) thinks she has evidence that the American Bankers' Association (ABA) wants the Federal Reserve to adopt Ripple/XRP as its cross-border settlement system. She has found a letter from the ABA which makes three requests to facilitate faster interbank settlement: A liquidity management tool Interoperability Access for chartered financial institutions Hey hey everybody, this looks just like Ripple's bag, doesn't it? "You are going to see how perfectly matched XRP is to meet their request," she says . I've tracked down the ABA's letter to which she refers. It responds to a Federal Reserve request for comment on proposals for actions to support interbank settlement of Faster Payments. Faster Payments are domestic online and automated payments, not cross-border payments in foreign currencies. A bridging currency such as XRP is completely unnecessary for domestic payments. Indeed, it adds complexity and

The geeks to whom my post on probability was addressed responded exactly as I expected. "You don't understand the tech", they said. And they went on about network routing protocols and Dijkstra's algorithm . Someone even sent me a spec for an onion routing protocol for the Lightning network. I read it and sighed. They had completely missed the point. To be sure, I had made an incorrect assumption about Lightning. I assumed that Lightning devs respected property rights. It turns out that they don't even know what property rights are, let alone respect them. They see Lightning's pathfinding problem as entirely a technical matter. If it were, then solving it would simply involve developing algorithms to oversee the network and find the most efficient payment paths. I did mention this possibility in my post, in relation to recursive payment paths (emphasis not in original) : Payment routes could become very long and very complex without anyone knowing. Th

London's buses have gone cashless. From July 6, you can't use coins or banknotes on buses – you can only use the capital's “ Oyster” prepaid smartcards, its short-term general travel tickets known as “Travelcards”, or contactless bank cards. You can still buy Travelcards and top-up Oyster cards with cash, of course. But paying the driver of the bus with the last of your small change is now a thing of the past..... Find out about the implications for the future of cash here  (Forbes).

Glass-Steagall is dead. Rather like Soviet-era Communist leaders, it has been officially dead since 1999, and actually dead for much longer. Though there was no state funeral, the body was not embalmed or put on display and few people mourned its passing. Well, not at the time. But fast forward to 2008 and suddenly the Western world - not just the US - exploded in a paroxysm of grief over the demise of Glass-Steagall. "If only Glass-Steagall hadn't been repealed!" people cried. "Glass-Steagall would have prevented all these banks failing. Glass-Steagall would have stopped all these derivatives being created. Glass-Steagall would have protected everyone's money". Glass-Steagall, it seems, could have prevented the entire financial crisis. Never mind that Lehman, Bear Sterns and Merrill Lynch were pure investment banks, with no retail deposits to put at risk. Never mind that AIG was an insurance company and Fannie and Freddie were government-sponsored enterp