Pubs replaced banks in Ireland for several months in 1970 (2016)
businessinsider.comThe article really wants to imply that because this worked, we shouldn't be afraid of "too big to fail", but it doesn't dare say that and kinda of ends up sitting between two chairs.
"I'm not saying that banks crashing isn't bad, but it wasn't a problem for Ireland to have banks disappear"
but the thing is, according to the article, trust in banks never disappeared, neither did the banks. People kept writing cheques against their bank accounts. There was a clear expectation that banks would open with all money intact and cheques would be processed.
That is a very different scenario from a bank failing.
This is a huge equivocation by TFA. When we think of banks failing we typically think of situations where banks can no longer honor deposits.
What the article describes is nothing of the sort. It was a strike, which is a breakdown of operations, not insolvency.
How were bankers not skinned alive?
If someone owes you or I money and then suddenly they go on strike there will be a vicious reckoning.
50 years after the civil war, Ireland would not particularly keen to start up the random violence again.
I suspect everyone assumed normality would resume "tomorrow", for a lot of tomorrows. Which is the other reason you can't just start up the lynchings, this isn't America and you'll have to live with these people and their families on a comparatively small island.
>Which is the other reason you can't just start up the lynchings, this isn't America and you'll have to live with these people and their families on a comparatively small island.
By this logic neither the Troubles nor the Irish Civil War would never have occurred in the first place. Yet they did.
(And the latter was more fierce than the war that forced London to acknowledge the Republic's independence.)
50 years is a looong time. I don't think that was it.
Most people, presumably, aren’t as bloodthirsty as you; strikes, no matter how inconvenient, rarely result in mass murder of the strikers by the general public. Sometimes by the state, in totalitarian systems, but not by random people.
Only in totalitarian systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_Unite...
> In the summer of 1921 in Mingo County, hundreds of miners were arrested without habeas corpus and other basic legal rights.
I mean, er, yes, sounds like it.
First of all bankers on strike isn't a normal strike. It's like parents going on strike and leaving their kids to die.
Think about it... I steal all of someones money and promise to pay them back later and they're just going to be nice about it? If this happened to a person... likely he will hunt me down and "extract" the money out of me through any means available.
Why? because typically survival depends on a persons' ability to spend money.
I am not bloodthirsty. Theft in any society typically results in extreme measures of punishment including forcefully kidnapping people and confining them in inhumane conditions (it's called prison). Additionally, when the "theft" involves survival, getting violent is a normal thing. This is not just a "totalitarian" measure.
What's going on here seems to be a social phenomenon because theft and a sketchy promise of repayment is essentially what happened. The only reason why the system remained stable was because people still accepted checks.
I mean would you accept an IOU as payment if you know the issuer essentially stole the money and won't return it when asked for it? Typically no.
There were a lot of strikes in Ireland in the 1970’s, including a rent strike at one point.
As an Irish person, I would not _particularly_ recommend Ireland in 1970 as a model to aspire to.
And even given that, the banks did not actually fail, they just weren’t operating, and the expectation was that they would start back up again at some point. When Ireland actually faced the banks failing, in 2008, we bailed them out and nationalised most of them, at a cost of almost 10,000 euro per capita.
Arguably the only reason it worked out fine (for some value of fine) in the 1970’s was because everything being a shitshow was the generally accepted state of affairs, and for a lot of normal working people being paid cash was still normal.
Patrick Boyle did a video on it a little while ago:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFIQWWt4UaA
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_bank_strikes_(1966–1976)
For 21 minutes and 53 seconds, I highly recommend this video. It gives so much context and describes the situation in as neutral of a tone as it's possible with a sprinkle of dry humor. Also, Patrick takes it a step further by answering the question if something like this could work again as well as discuss how this system that emerged compares to modern day cryptocurrency systems.
Flagging this article for being too stupid to warrant reading. In 1970, nobody was afraid their savings disappeared; when a bank fails, people would lose their savings unless the government insures or rescues the bank.
Given the extremely low quality of this article, and given that the author is a finance editor rather than some freelance contributor to Business Insider, I very much hope that HN readers would stop upvoting submissions from Business Insider in the future.
> [...] almost the entire banking system of Ireland went on strike after an industrial dispute in 1970. The strike lasted nearly six months, yet the economy escaped unscathed.
Getting people to strike isn't trivial, but this is the first time I learn about bankers striking.
The banking system in 1970 was much more labor-intensive. This was before ATMs and online banking, or even computers — a small local bank in Ireland probably didn't have an IBM mainframe at that time.
So there were clerks and cashiers at every level pushing paper, crunching numbers, handling cash. These people were clearly working class, not the later Wall Street image conjured by the word "banker".
A perfect example of my favourite part of any "class warfare" talk. Even for the "capital" class, the system isn't necessarily in their favour. It's only when you're at the absolute peak that you get the benefits. Everyone else is perfectly disposable, society just runs smoother when society believes that 6 figure salaries puts someone on the other side of the fence.
The class divide isn't based around an arbitrary salary, or specific job positions. It's whether you have hire/fire powers and you make money off of other people's labour, rather than selling your own. Hollywood actors and famous football players are often very rich, but they sell their labor to get by. They don't own the means of production
> Hollywood actors and famous football players are often very rich, but they sell their labor to get by.
But there's a key difference. They don't need to continue to sell their labor, they can stop at any time and live on e.g. income from dividends. Or maybe they have enough cash they could literally not even invest it and still live fine.
Although they may not own the means of production right at this moment, they easily could at any moment, it's a choice.
You tomorrow could start out as a carpenter, buy a hammer and own the means of production. It's not a high bar to clear.
Ironically it's more often governments that interfere with this. Go to the library and read some books and you can learn how to be a plumber or an electrician, buy a toolbox and you're on your way. Presumably there is some kind of licensing exam?
No, first you've got to find an existing tradesperson and apprentice under them, even if you could already pass the exam on your own. For a few weeks is it? Years, typically. To become a journeyman. Still can't work for yourself, now you have to work under them for a few more years.
Figure out how to file papers for an LLC. Maybe you need a lawyer. Tax accounting will be fun too. Do any of the cities you operate in have a different sales tax rate? Which of your business expenses can be deducted in the current year and which have to be depreciated? Is that the same for things you resell?
Guess what happens if you want to move to another state.
It's not ironic - governments are the main source of power behind protectionism in all its forms. More regulations are good for incumbents.
More regulations as determined with a tape measure across the law library, sure. Each rule is another cost of entering the market.
The hard part is how to take a scalpel to them. Okay, 95% of them are inefficient, granted. Which 95%? You don't want the government to ban tall buildings or adversarial interoperability or to subsidize corn syrup or prohibit farmers from selling their crops or the Jones Act or rent control or de facto caps on the supply of doctors or certificate of need laws or taxi medallions. But you probably want the government to ban leaded gasoline.
So how do you get them to do the few narrow things they need to do but not all the rest of it?
No idea. I'm just saying it's not ironic.
A hammer is a poor example of the means of production now that they're so easy to come by. The chokepoint is elsewhere.
A more relevant example would be influence over the information that people consult when they're deciding which carpenter to hire. You need both a hammer and a place to swing it that gets you paid--and nobody is trying to restrict access to hammers to protect their position.
This is why many of our most valuable companies are ad companies--you operate at a disadvantage unless you give them a cut of your profits.
In your example the means of production is an advertisement? How would the worker own the means of production? Hammer and newspaper? Or hammer and all the newspapers?
Who's going to hire a carpenter who picked up a hammer yesterday? You can't just hammer away in your yard and expect income.
It's not a trivial bar to clear, if you want to own the means of production that happens to be a viable livelihood.
> if you want to own the means of production that happens to be a viable livelihood
If the means of production is now a livelihood, I have to say that this is a great example of how "means of production" is an insufficiently-precise phrase. It means all things to all people.
Marx seeing his mate's factory and thinking "it'd be nice if the workers owned that" and coming up with a generic-sounding equivalent phrase isn't really good enough to define a real concept.
Which is why people who use the phrase "means of production" seem to all mean different things. Owning a hammer is owning the means of production. It's just the means of production isn't enough.
I do agree that "means of production" is quite vague and too varied. But still, from a practical perspective, if the phrase is to have any meaning at all, I'd say that it would be enabling some form of "production" to be done by whoever owns that thing.
In a carpenter's hand, a hammer is a mean of production. Whereas owned by someone incapable of producing what can be considered work of carpentry, it wouldn't be.
If the phrase refers to literally a tool which that can be used by some arbitrary somebody --- not necessarily the owner --- to produce something, then we're all in possession of "means of production", by simply having a body with basic I/O, which enables us to be a freelance CEO.
I find that to not be a very practical definition, and probably not the meaning used by whom your first reply was directed to.
Means of production, for Marx, means any instrument which builds something other than the user who uses it. If I use a walking stick to walk, it is not means of production because the object is building my ability to move. Neither if I use a house for living. But if the house is mine and I rent it, then it is not building my subsistence, it is building rent.
Even Marx agreed that people have access to some means of production: the carpenter owns the hammer. However, after capitalist development, the major means of productions that produce the majority of wealth (like the industries that produce most GDP for a country) are indeed outside the reach of most people and this creates a division between people who gets money because they labor and people who gets money because they own capital and relevant means of production.
> However, after capitalist development, the major means of productions that produce the majority of wealth (like the industries that produce most GDP for a country) are indeed outside the reach of most people and this creates a division between people who gets money because they labor and people who gets money because they own capital and relevant means of production
I'm always fascinated by this sort of thing. What do you mean "after capitalist development"? Do you think once upon a time people owned factories together, and capitalism came along and stopped all that?
Of course not. Factories are a product of capitalist development. But this monopoly of means of production is a necessity for capitalism, because without it, there is no salaried work. Therefore, we had things like the enclosure of communal lands in Europe that were instrumental for deprieving people of means of production.
Why do you think that in American continent we had slave labor? How do you convince someone to work in your land if the person is able to simply go and easily take for herself vacant land and produce for herself instead of producing for someone else and get a salary smaller than her production? Slavery was how you deal with the problem forcing people to work. Later (and usually before the enslaved people are freed), the land becomes a commodity and then nobody can so easily simply take land for herself.
It's whether you have hire/fire powers and you make money off of other people's labour
I think creating a hierarchy of managers and workers is just another tool that the people with power use to control everyone else.
Surely my direct manager has more in common with me than the CEO? Am I wrong to think this? Wouldn't the CEO see both managers and their teams as mere workers?
100% correct. That was the gist of my original point. In Corporate America, unless you're in the C-suite or sitting on the board, you're not in the club. The corporate ladder makes it seem as though the middle management levels are on the path to being upper class, but they're in the same position as everyone else. They just drive a nicer car while doing so.
Technically CEOs are also working class, since they mostly live off of their salary. A lot of this is voluntary, since with a bit less spending I'd imagine most BigCo CEOs could easily cope on capital income from the investments their salaries have afforded them. I wonder how that affects their classification...
I see the divide as being between those of us who created wealth by working vs. those who do not create wealth and instead play zero sum and negative sum games.
That's something else entirely.
You could have someone who is solidly in the investment class and only works three hours a year, but during those three hours they tell their pet executives to put the capital into energy storage tech and new housing construction and do a lot of good in the world.
You could have a low-level white collar worker who isn't making very much money at all, all of it in wages, who decides to screw over the company's customers with something economically inefficient because it gives them some advantage in internal corporate politics.
> You could have someone who is solidly in the investment class and only works three hours a year, but during those three hours they tell their pet executives to put the capital into energy storage tech and new housing construction and do a lot of good in the world.
If they're making skilled capital-allocation decisions that most people couldn't, that's work. If they're being charitable in the allocation of their ill-gotten gains, that doesn't make them any less ill-gotten.
Rentiers inherently make their money in a zero-sum way; it's perhaps not the only way to be zero-sum, but it is a major one.
> If they're making skilled capital-allocation decisions that most people couldn't, that's work. If they're being charitable in the allocation of their ill-gotten gains, that doesn't make them any less ill-gotten.
Why do they have to be ill-gotten gains? Someone could invest money they've earned through productive work.
And could invest it in something charitably while still making money, e.g. you have the option to make 10% doing something anti-social or 5% doing something socially beneficial and you consciously choose the latter knowing you could make more by being less charitable.
> Rentiers inherently make their money in a zero-sum way; it's perhaps not the only way to be zero-sum, but it is a major one.
Do they? Suppose you have some money and you put it in some investment fund and then live off the earnings while having no real involvement with how the fund is managed. Meanwhile the businesses you invested in are off doing productive net-positive things with your money that wouldn't have been possible had you stuffed it in your mattress, while yielding you a positive return which is nonetheless smaller than the total amount of net good created by the business.
The best you can say is that the returns are zero-sum, even if the act of investing is positive sum. But isn't that true of anything? If you get a raise, that's zero sum. Someone else would have had the money in the alternative.
> Why do they have to be ill-gotten gains? Someone could invest money they've earned through productive work.
Because your hypothetical was specifically about someone who doesn't do productive work?
> Suppose you have some money and you put it in some investment fund and then live off the earnings while having no real involvement with how the fund is managed. Meanwhile the businesses you invested in are off doing productive net-positive things with your money that wouldn't have been possible had you stuffed it in your mattress, while yielding you a positive return which is nonetheless smaller than the total amount of net good created by the business.
You're begging the question - why was it your money in the first place?
If it's value you've produced, yes you can partner with someone else to compound it. But if it's just privilege that you had, then you don't get any credit for allowing it to be used productively.
> The best you can say is that the returns are zero-sum, even if the act of investing is positive sum. But isn't that true of anything? If you get a raise, that's zero sum. Someone else would have had the money in the alternative.
If you do something that produces real value in the world then that's positive sum - if you turn some planks and nails into a table, that table is more valuable than the stuff that went into it, the world is better off.
> Because your hypothetical was specifically about someone who doesn't do productive work?
That's anybody who has enough money that they don't have to work. It doesn't tell you anything about where they got it.
> You're begging the question - why was it your money in the first place?
What if you found it in the street? Would that affect whether or not the business you invest it in produces a net positive as a result?
> But if it's just privilege that you had, then you don't get any credit for allowing it to be used productively.
That doesn't seem right. You could have spent it on drugs and sex. Your choices matter.
> If you do something that produces real value in the world then that's positive sum - if you turn some planks and nails into a table, that table is more valuable than the stuff that went into it, the world is better off.
Suppose the planks are the status quo. You're getting paid $10/hour to make tables. Now you get a raise and get paid $12/hour to make tables, but you still only make exactly the same number of exactly the same tables as you did for $10/hour. The extra $2/hour is zero sum, isn't it? Why should you get it instead of the boss or the customer?
> What if you found it in the street? Would that affect whether or not the business you invest it in produces a net positive as a result?
Does finding a large amount of money in the street make someone more deserving that someone who found a smaller amount of money in the street?
> That doesn't seem right. You could have spent it on drugs and sex. Your choices matter.
So you put part of it back into circulation and kept the rest for yourself. You're still not doing any better than morally neutral.
> Suppose the planks are the status quo. You're getting paid $10/hour to make tables. Now you get a raise and get paid $12/hour to make tables, but you still only make exactly the same number of exactly the same tables as you did for $10/hour. The extra $2/hour is zero sum, isn't it?
Well where did the value that it corresponds to come from? (I assume you're not just talking about inflation, or labour being scarcer or anything like that - but in that case the raise won't have come from nowhere). If you're making better or more tables through your own skill, you've earned it. If the boss has made production work better or got better machines or something, maybe he's earned it. If it was previously just economic rent that the boss was extracting then yes it's zero sum because it was zero sum to start with.
> Does finding a large amount of money in the street make someone more deserving that someone who found a smaller amount of money in the street?
Does being tall make someone more deserving of a basketball scholarship than someone born with different genetics?
> So you put part of it back into circulation and kept the rest for yourself. You're still not doing any better than morally neutral.
You're not giving it away, you're exchanging it for something that you consume. You're causing some chemist to make recreational drugs instead of medicine, or causing someone to do sex work when you could have paid someone to build housing. That's not morally neutral.
> Well where did the value that it corresponds to come from? (I assume you're not just talking about inflation, or labour being scarcer or anything like that - but in that case the raise won't have come from nowhere).
Inflation is boring because then the real value would be the same. Labor being scarcer, on the other hand, is a perfect example. Some new large employer moves into town and your boss gives you a raise rather than see you quit and have to pay retraining costs for someone they'd still have to pay the extra $2 to. You haven't done anything different, why do you "deserve" any more money?
> If it was previously just economic rent that the boss was extracting then yes it's zero sum because it was zero sum to start with.
Suppose the boss was getting it, but as compensation for labor rather than economic rent. The boss found a source for the wood and lined up customers and all of that but now has to pay you more out of his own pocket because local labor demand increased while demand for tables is the same because they're sold into a national market.
And yet, even by paying you the extra $2, the boss is still receiving a net benefit from operating the business, as were you when you were working for the original wage. Changing the amount is zero sum, but the activity it's compensating isn't, so how do you want to call it?
> Does being tall make someone more deserving of a basketball scholarship than someone born with different genetics?
If being taller leads to better basketball that more people will enjoy watching, yes. I'm not convinced that sports leagues aren't a zero-sum blight, but certainly someone whose fortunate genetics mean they're genuinely producing more for society (e.g. a stronger porter who carries more stuff further, or a more intelligent scientist who does better research, or a singer with a beautiful voice who is more rewarding to listen to) deserves to reap at least some of the fruits of that.
> Labor being scarcer, on the other hand, is a perfect example. Some new large employer moves into town and your boss gives you a raise rather than see you quit and have to pay retraining costs for someone they'd still have to pay the extra $2 to. You haven't done anything different, why do you "deserve" any more money?
Because what you're doing - and it's something you're actually doing, not something you happen to be holding - is worth more. The price of labour is going up because the amount of real-world value produced per hour of labour is going up.
> And yet, even by paying you the extra $2, the boss is still receiving a net benefit from operating the business, as were you when you were working for the original wage. Changing the amount is zero sum, but the activity it's compensating isn't, so how do you want to call it?
Either the value produced is being divided fairly among those who are producing it, or it isn't. Someone who is producing value might certainly be getting paid more (or more commonly less) than they are fairly earning, and that part is zero-sum. But if someone isn't producing value, then necessarily all of their income is from the zero-sum part.
(Obviously if we zoom in on the details there's a spectrum - some labourers earn more than they should through rentiering aspects, and even those who live large off of economic rents are likely doing some minimal amount of productive labour. But I suspect the distribution is pretty bimodal)
Yes and no. The lines get blurry when you’re looking at doctors/plumbers/etc that own their practice. They are making money from their labor but they can also sell their company to someone else.
Major actors are really leveraging a brand not just selling their labor. Athletes have a similar dynamic where the very best compensated are making more from endorsements than playing football. And of course the richest examples all end up investing well.
> They don't own the means of production
They literally own the means of production, their bodies and minds. No one is forcing them to sign contracts for a million dollar salary, they can do the exact same acting/athelete-ing with a $100 smartphone.
Relax AI are now in the verge of evening the playing field for actors. Athletes not yet, unless we have AI starting to generate completely made up sporting events.
The later is extremely possible given how much data there is and how similar it all is.
A fair while back I was actually reading about a proposed system for literally CGI/virtual horse racing specifically for gambling purposes, backed by gambling industry money.
Unsure if it ever went anywhere, I kind of mentally filed it as “insane gambling nonsense”.
What's the means of production for a footballer? A football?
Themself - the ability to attract a paying audience.
But the paying audience is got there through TV rights, TV building, comms infrastructure, stadium building and maintenance, ticketing services, etc etc. The footballer by himself has no paying job.
And so much of our society is bound by who you work for: medical insurance, social standing, etc.
And so many people just don't understand that there's really 4 classes: poverty, able to live, owner/landlord, royalty. (The USA has the politician class in place of royalty.)
Note I didn't say "middle class". That term originally was the constructed 'rich merchant non-royalty" class that was founded out of mercantilism into capitalism. The Middle Class is now the landlord and managerial class for most of the western countries.
But back to the topic, a Starbucks worker, a IT worker, a sex worker, and a MD all must sell their time and body to live. It's only when you start buying others labor/property cheaply and selling it expensively do you become a capitalist. Anything else, and youre just in the labor class.
The problem with this simplification is that it ignores risk. Being an employee means you get paid, and can change job it the business fails. Bring an owner/investor means you might lose all your money if the business fails. That is massive risk, and entirely ignored by the above characterisation.
Oh please. And you're up-playing risk.
Let's talk local.
We have lots of cheap shit 3 story stick built apartments. ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-13/why-ameri... ) The ones opened are charging half of Boston for rents. And I'm not even in a megacity or state capitol.
The same apartments are getting 10 year tax abatements, because they are "good for business" aka trickle-down.
During the pandemic, pandemic "loans" were given to hundreds of businesses in the local area. And those loans were turned into grants (not have to pay back).
And landlords are usually smaller, but again, they're another reason why housing is stupid priced: it's common to see a rental of a home priced at mortgage+30% . The landlord gets their principal covered, keeps the property, and raises costs for everyone.
None of these apply to me or my family, sans the whole big $1200 relief check. I have no tax abatements, and pay taxes in full every paycheck and when I buy stuff. And local governments usually allow whatever by companies unless there's a big fuss. And, those corporate promises about hiring people or bringing in business? Yeah, not actually enforced.
And I didn't even discuss "too big to fail", fed govt propping up industries, and the like.
> The same apartments are getting 10 year tax abatements, because they are "good for business" aka trickle-down.
This promotes new construction. Not as well as zoning reform, but it does. Which lowers the rent (or at least makes it go up less fast).
> And landlords are usually smaller, but again, they're another reason why housing is stupid priced: it's common to see a rental of a home priced at mortgage+30% .
Well of course they are. The landlord is taking on the maintenance of the property, insurance, the risk of a housing crash (look at housing prices FFS), the risk of a vacancy or destructive or non-paying tenant, legal expenses associated with operating a business etc. And on top of that, they have to pay the mortgage.
They do turn a profit, because of course they do, why else would they do it? And with that they slowly buy the property from the bank, at which point the interest on the value of the property goes to the landlord instead of the bank, the same as it would if they sold the property and invested the money in something else.
The problem with landlords is not that they turn a profit -- they always will or they'd sell the property instead.
It's that they lobby for zoning restrictions that limit the housing supply to increase rents. But homeowners do the same thing, to the detriment of both renters and prospective homeowners.
Mortgage is not a cost accounting wise. Interest is a cost, but capital repayment is already "profit" which the landlord will keep at the end of the loan.
Let's say rent is mortgage + 30%. If we assume all the risks and costs (maintenance, insurance, etc) are eating up all of that 30%, they still make a whopping 200%+ profit in the long run.
In a fair business relation with 20-30% profit, the landlord would actually loose cash each month until the mortgage is over, with the expectation to realize profit when the property is sold. This rarely happens.
> Mortgage is not a cost accounting wise. Interest is a cost, but capital repayment is already "profit" which the landlord will keep at the end of the loan.
Only a small sliver of the first mortgage payment is principal. Most of it is interest and the escrow for the property tax and insurance. By the last mortgage payment most of the interest has been replaced with principal, because by then the landlord is the one who owns the property instead of the bank, so now they get what used to be the interest. The property tax and insurance payments never go away, they just stop going through the bank.
The question you have to ask if you think they're overcharging is, why don't more people do it? If it got higher returns than other investments, why wouldn't people sell their stocks and buy real estate? The answer is that they do, until it doesn't anymore. And then it doesn't anymore, because the price of real estate goes up until investing in real estate no longer has above-market risk-adjusted returns.
We have pretty good numbers on this: Here's a common real estate ETF, it's basically "be a landlord, but as a stock", 10-year average return 5.49%:
https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profi...
S&P 500 ETF, 10-year average return 11.86%:
https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profi...
If the landlords are making so much money, how come they're not making so much money?
It’s uncommon in the US for reasons. It’s a thing in Europe.
1970 Ireland isn’t exactly an example of a modern or booming economy.
But… what happened there should give pause when financial bros get weepy and pat themselves on the back about their sacred duty to provide liquidity at all costs. (And take a vig)
Back in the 90s in Ireland, my mother would occasionally cash a cheque at the pub - if it's not crossed payee a/c only, the bearer can generally cash it themselves.
Going further back, pubs were the local shops for general dry goods, particularly in rural communities. I recall some dusty window displays in some pubs even in the 1980s, when I was a kid.
Recently I found that in a few of the more touristic areas in Ireland (which I rarely visit, being from here, was showing friends some places), a lot of pubs will offer a foreign exchange service of dubious legitimacy with debatably fair rates.
Same thing in the border counties up north - you can often spend or exchange Sterling and Euro currency, but the rates will suck.
In the 1990’s where I grew up, one of the two shops in the village was basically a room off one of the pubs. The other, larger shop was also the post office, hardware store, etc.
This is common in tourist-y areas everywhere. I was in Lisbon recently, and saw a number of places advertising that they accepted Sterling… at a rate of 1:1 with the Euro. A mere 15% FX fee.
What struck me as interesting is that one could do FX easily in a pub out in Blarney near the castle, while there’s not a single FX place in Cork City itself. Same thing in Galway - can’t find a FX place anywhere in the city, but if you head out to one of the tourist destinations you can do so at the pub.
You can’t do foreign exchange at a bank or credit union anymore without an account.
There are 3 or 4. You may need to search "bureau de change"
Most post offices will do it, I think. I bought dollar notes in one a while back without any difficulty. But yeah, it’s not really a business banks would want to be in; if you’re doing it honestly it’s not very profitable, and it can be quite… money-launder-y. Best bet for non-eurozone tourists would be to use a neobank (Revolut etc)/pseudo-bank (Wise etc) that offers fair FX rates, and then use an ATM.
If your home bank isn't too nickle and dimey and is not super tiny, you can probably use ATMs to get cash in foreign countries at decent rates.
You might do better with something FX oriented, but the difference might be small enough to not care.
> You can’t do foreign exchange at a bank
(Somewhat rant, not really at you, just...What?) It's difficult to believe I'm even reading that. An institution that only deals with currency, and literally has almost no downside to accepting any customer for currency exchange ... won't accept currency exchange?
Most banks have far more resources that an FX stall to verify whether you're handing over junk.
There was a story last month about how banks are the only people left who can even determine whether "fake" Euro coins are fake because they're too high quality "fakes". Counterfeiters are cranking out magnetic, weight matching, material matching, currency that's nearly mint quality. And banks won't even do ForEx? People over in Eastern Europe have just given up. Don't even bother using banks, cause the banks will just tell you all the money's fake.
(TLDR; Feel free to ignore, this entire situation seems idiotic. Like humans just keep rushing towards dumb results.)
> and literally has almost no downside to accepting any customer for currency exchange
So, there are a few things going on. First of all, there are downsides; in particular, it’s a money laundering risk. But also, it’s logistically expensive; the bank has to keep a stock of foreign money, and occupy an actual human dealing with it, and, these days, the rates they can reasonably charge for it are pretty low.
If you’re looking for someone to blame for this, probably primarily blame the free market. Traditionally, banks did physical FX, at rates that were generally a horrendous ripoff, but all consumer FX was a horrendous ripoff so what were you going to do. Today, it’s possible for consumers to do FX with costs in the 0.5% range, lower for large amounts or if they pay upfront for Revolut’s premium plan or something. This doesn’t leave much margin for the banks if they want to be even vaguely competitive, so they’re only going to do it if it’s cheap to do. It is not cheap to do.
This is actually generally a positive outcome for most consumers; FX is much cheaper and more convenient than it used to be for more people; it’s only if you want to exchange physical money that it has become more difficult.
> "I deal only with my regulars … I refuse strangers."
> ‘They are mostly strangers to us, and we just have to play it by ear in deciding whether to accept a cheque’, said an official.”
Sounds like a recipe for discrimination and inequality, which isn't mentioned in either article.
1970s Ireland was very homogenous, which is to say white. It wasn't until the 90s that immigration began flowing in the other direction to a meaningful degree. So while I agree with you, it was unlikely a problem at the time.
Although that doesn't cover gender or class discrimination so I suppose that was still an issue.
Oh, we absolutely still had discrimination, particularly against Travellers, but also there was very strong though largely unacknowledged classism. And then of course there were _women_; after a good start (Ireland was one of the first countries to grant equal universal suffrage), we spent the next few decades barely acknowledging that women were people.
However, in 1970, people here just weren’t all that ‘banked’; when I was a kid in the late 80s/early 90s, it was still fairly common for people to not have bank accounts, and certainly in 1970 postal savings accounts would have been more common than bank accounts. Today they’re ~universal (very few employers would consider paying by any means other than bank transfer) but it was a different story 50 years ago.
Or more importantly in Ireland, religions based discrimination
This is about the Republic of Ireland, where that wasn’t a huge factor (there was definitely some; comments in the newspapers from 1961 when Dublin got a Jewish mayor are eyebrow-raising, but it wouldn’t have been a huge issue for something like this). You’re thinking of Northern Ireland.
That said, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Ireland in 1970 certainly did have other forms of discrimination which would’ve been much more relevant here.
Interesting enough, one of Israel's presidents was an Irish Jew - Chaim Herzog [0]. If you listen to his speeches, you'd think you were listening to an announcer on RTE [1].
This has absolutely no bearing on the article and it's content.
More so an issue in NI than RoI, even back then according to older relatives the division was a lot less in RoI.
This seems like a very very good argument against decentralized currency.
Right, much better for everybody to be screwed in the name of equity.
Could you please stop taking HN threads further into ideological battle? We had to warn you about this just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37699522.
It destroys what this site is for, so we end up having to ban accounts that keep doing it.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
That seems awfully harsh, the comment I replied to had done the usual "let's find some reason this is discriminatory" thing and I was pushing back on it. I'm happy to stop commenting.
It seems to me that your comment clearly broke the site guidelines and the GP comment clearly didn't. That's why I replied to the one and not the other. I also thought it best to note that we've already had to warn you repeatedly, and recently, to make sure that you have that information. I realize it sucks to get moderated, but this doesn't seem particularly harsh to me?
I don't want you to stop commenting! I'm just asking you to stick to HN's rules when you do.
Btw, there's a common bias that distorts basically everyone's judgment about this kind of thing (including mine, clearly): we underestimate our own harshness by, say, 10x, and overestimate the other's by another (say) 10x, and that compounds to a 100x distortion. I'd venture a guess that this is why your comment seemed to you like innocuous "pushing back", while it seemed to me like an obvious breaking of HN's rules. I don't know if that's helpful or not (probably not), but it's what came to mind.
While keeping something running via an informal system is better than nothing, and most people might be okay... if you're just kinda shifty looking or unpopular at the moment in your local pub and have a much harder time than everyone else, that's not exactly great.
That is, it's not only the common experience that matters, but the outliers too. The basic tools of society should be available even if you're ugly, annoying, or a minority.
This problem is far worse with a concentrated system than a decentralized one. If there are five local pubs and one of them won't have you, well, still four more. If there is only one bank and their loan officer doesn't like the cut of your jib, or their algorithm has decided to have a false positive, you're done.
Though of course the modern problem isn't that there is only one bank, it's that there is only one bank regulator which subjects all of the banks to the same incentives, and if those rule you out you're effectively prohibited from using a bank in another jurisdiction with different rules.
What you need for this is something permissionless.
Fun fact for you, a lot of pubs in the UK are shifting to requiring photo ID to enter, and scanning that ID into a centralised system, often as a requirement from the police to retain their license to serve alcohol.
I ended up chatting to one of the bouncers at a bar a while back and he was telling me about how they refused entry to someone not long before because they were flagged as having caused trouble in a bar 70 miles away.
In some regards I’m not even against this, if you have a record of attacking women in bars I don’t want you in the bar I’m at, but this does seem incredibly prone to abuse. I can totally see someone who has a grudge getting people banned from every pub in the country.
> This problem is far worse with a concentrated system than a decentralized one.
They can break in different ways. If you're in an out-group or unpopular, it's not clear whether you're better off with n local pubs making a decision to accept your money informally or n/2 national banks making a decision while subject to oversight.
In any case, this is a false premise: it's not like you're choosing from 5 local pubs. The question is whether the pub you attend likes you enough to take your check.
> What you need for this is something permissionless.
Far better to have things work okay without any other entity being involved, sure. But there are reasons why banks exist.
> If you're in an out-group or unpopular, it's not clear whether you're better off with n local pubs making a decision to accept your money informally or n/2 national banks making a decision while subject to oversight.
What is clear, however, is that you're better off with both systems existing in parallel because then you can use either one, rather than having the informal one prohibited by law so that you're forced into the other one whether it works for you or not.
> it's not like you're choosing from 5 local pubs. The question is whether the pub you attend likes you enough to take your check.
You are choosing from 5 local pubs. Even if you don't attend one regularly, it's in the same town. You could have mates there who vouch for you. Or you go to the pub of the person who wrote the check, they confirm that they actually wrote it and then it gets cashed on the basis of their standing rather than yours.
> Far better to have things work okay without any other entity being involved, sure. But there are reasons why banks exist.
You want a regulated and insured entity where you can safely store your money, sure. That doesn't explain why they should have a monopoly on various other aspects of finance though. Or why they would even need a monopoly on that -- if you want the assurances you get from a regulated bank, there they are. If you want a permissionless money transfer system that anybody can use and nobody can be refused, why shouldn't that exist too?
> What is clear, however, is that you're better off with both systems existing in parallel because then you can use either one, rather than having the informal one prohibited by law so that you're forced into the other one whether it works for you or not.
Yes, but we've never had that: pubs don't do banking under normal circumstances because they're outcompeted by the banks.
> If you want a permissionless money transfer system that anybody can use and nobody can be refused, why shouldn't that exist too?
I don't have a big objection to a parallel informal payment system. OTOH, these kinds of systems tend to have the problems that all the reddit alternatives have: they capture the least attractive and most problematic business because they only end up employed by an unusual subset of people.
I guess the closest analog we have of what you describe at scale is hawala.
> Yes, but we've never had that: pubs don't do banking under normal circumstances because they're outcompeted by the banks.
Really what happens is that the banks don't wish to be outcompeted so if something starts taking their business under normal circumstances then it gives them the incentive to fix the problem. But that's exactly why the alternate systems should be permitted -- it gives them the kick in the ass needed to make the banking system fix its shortcomings.
> OTOH, these kinds of systems tend to have the problems that all the reddit alternatives have: they capture the least attractive and most problematic business because they only end up employed by an unusual subset of people.
That's what they're for. They serve the needs of the people who the traditional banking system doesn't serve.
And it's not obvious that this is even the case, if they would be allowed to operate openly instead of being something you only use because you cannot use anything else.
For example, there are different kinds of businesses. In some cases the business itself is questionable, e.g. because it's very small and has no reputation history, and then you want a payment system (like credit cards) that offers buyer protection and chargebacks so the customer can feel confident that if the seller doesn't send the goods they can get their money back.
In other cases the business is perfectly trustworthy but it's the kind of business where the customers like to commit fraud, e.g. because the goods can easily be resold after being purchased with a stolen credit card. For this you want an irreversible payment system so the honest merchant can't get ripped off by these scammers.
Sometimes you want a payment system where the buyer can be anonymous, e.g. so that nobody is tracking what kind of literature you purchase.
You don't want a one-size-fits-all system, you want the diversity. Which you can't have if the law mandates one specific kind of system.
and this is probably why and how it comes to pass that the taxpayer of the future is left holding the bills
The link is extremely light on detail so in skeptical
1. What was the extent of the strike? Did salaries still get deposited? Did inter company transfer go through? Did exchanges stay open? Did lines of credit for businesses small and large stay open?
2. The whole "we knew who had money and we didn't deal with strangers" makes me suspect there's a whole other side of this particular story.
Bank underground view
https://bankunderground.co.uk/2016/01/20/the-cheque-republic...
> They had an informed view of whether the liquid resources of would-be payers were stout or ailing!
Some world-class puns there.
Lots of decisions in the last 50 years have made "the system" more fragile. This makes me realize that outsourcing trust is another one. This would never happen now because businesses have no connection to their customers, either a payment provider or credit bureau does the vouching which becomes meaningless when things don't operate as usual and human judgement is needed
i don't get it, but it sounds like narrowly skirting by disaster