Guillaume’s blog

In Andrew Niccol (Gattaca) latest dystopian science-fiction movie “In Time”, money is time, quite literally: money is measured in seconds, minutes, hours, centuries and beyond 25, people need to earn and buy themselves time, every minute of their life, or die in an instant.

A very privileged few have enough to buy themselves immortality.

Will Salas: Quality time… There really is a man with a million years.

Philipe Weis: It’s my first million. It won’t be my last.

Will Salas: You know how much good it could do?

Philip Weis: I know how much harm it could do.

Philip Weis: Even if you give a year to a million people, you are just prolonging their agony.

Sylvia Weis: We are prolonging their lives.

Philip Weis: Flooding the wrong zone with a million years, it could cripple the system.

Will Salas: Let’s hope so.

Sylvia Weis: We are not meant to live like this, we are not meant to live forever. Although I do wonder, father, if you’ve ever lived a day in your life.

Philip Weis: Is that so? You might upset the balance for a generation or two, but don’t fool yourself, in the end nothing will change. Because everyone wants to live forever. They all think they have a chance at immortality even though all the evidence is against it. They all think they will be the exception but the truth is for a few to be immortal many must die.

Will Salas: No one should be immortal even if one person has to die.

In Time (2011)

Without having to go in a far and dark future, the connections between money and life or death are many.

• If wealth is what sustains life, in our industrial society, money is pretty much the only way to access wealth and survive.
• Moreover, money is already a way to prolong life. It can’t prolong it forever, but it can significantly increase the probability of a longer life.
• Money is also a way for us to at least convince ourselves that we can conquer death by minimizing its unavoidable effects. In the past, the belief was that giving to the clergy would buy yourself a ticket to paradise “what you give in this life will be returned to you to a thousand times in paradise”. Nowadays, the belief is that the state can maintain and ever growing set of public services as well as keep financial markets stable enough that our financial life insurance products can be relied upon to provide for our loved ones in the event we die.
• Modern money itself is backed by the sovereign’s ability to force us to accept coins, pieces of paper and bits in exchanged for real wealth, including labor and sometimes life itself. Ultimately this force comes from the legitimate use of the threat of death.
• Last, money like death, is something that our society tries to hide. We no longer use envelopes to wrap dirty cash, and don’t even need to pay with a cold, business card-like plastic card, we can just say hi and act as if what we just ordered we got for free. Death is just like that, something terrible that no one should talk about anywhere, as if it’d never happened, and instead revere youth.

What this intimate connection between money and life/death mean is that while there may be a bright future for all kinds of new currencies, there is still also a bright future for currencies that can truly guarantee you a future, and in some case help you overcome death.

These currencies will likely place a particular focus on:

• privacy: few people other than ourselves will know, and it will not be used for daily transactions.
• security: they will be very difficult to misappropriate.
• high trust: they will rely on a framework that we know will survive us well after we are gone.
• redeem-ability for goods and services that can keep you safe from harm, save your life or simply help prolong it.

For instance: healthcare savings account + life insurance policy + access to a large network of healthcare, fitness, safety/security services.

Repost from another list.

Starting a community currency does feel sometimes like going against the current. It’s ironic and I don’t think such initiatives should require massive exertion of will, selling, convincing, showing. To me these are symptoms of a design process that failed to progressively engage the community, starting with the very simple before moving to the ever more complex.

To be concrete, trying to replace our current medium of exchange is very complex because ensuring reciprocity is hard and I don’t think this should be the starting point.

On the simple end, I see for instance: starting a group for your community where people are encouraged to share stories, pictures for the simple purpose of seeing what they do acknowledged by others in a way that’s recorded and semi-public. Over time, these acknowledgements can be formalized from plain english comments to more formal hence accountable forms of expression such as hashtags or “like” buttons, to which the community collectively assigns meaning over time.

So how we move from the simple currency of ideas/stories to the more complex currency of reciprocity/exchange?

Next week is an important week for the US economy. The Fed has probably its last opportunity to make bold announcements before staying mum for the presidential election. This is why it’s important to re-read the speech Bernanke made about fighting deflation years ago, which many see as the roadmap followed by the Fed Chairman in combating deflation in the US.

My conclusion at this point is that the Fed is likely to not commit on a quantity of money (as it did in “Quantitative Easing 1″ and 2) but focus on an inflation or interest rate target, leaving open the quantity and type of assets it will buy to achieve that goal. This is what will give them the most flexibility over the next year as the election unfolds. This is what analysts have referred as “interest rate caps“.

Of course, I’m highly skeptical of the actual benefits of this action for the real economy, unless it can be focused on assets that will create local jobs and restore confidence in the future, and unless it can limit the abuse of free money. But this would be quasi-fiscal policy. I also think that the Fed is experiencing diminishing returns on their actions (QE2 was less effective than QE1 from a Main Street economy standpoint), and their credibility in actually fighting deflation may start to be put into question by markets.

Noteworthy excerpts of the speech below.

So what then might the Fed do if its target interest rate, the overnight federal funds rate, fell to zero? One relatively straightforward extension of current procedures would be to try to stimulate spending by lowering rates further out along the Treasury term structure–that is, rates on government bonds of longer maturities.⁹ There are at least two ways of bringing down longer-term rates, which are complementary and could be employed separately or in combination. One approach, similar to an action taken in the past couple of years by the Bank of Japan, would be for the Fed to commit to holding the overnight rate at zero for some specified period. Because long-term interest rates represent averages of current and expected future short-term rates, plus a term premium, a commitment to keep short-term rates at zero for some time–if it were credible–would induce a decline in longer-term rates. A more direct method, which I personally prefer, would be for the Fed to begin announcing explicit ceilings for yields on longer-maturity Treasury debt (say, bonds maturing within the next two years). The Fed could enforce these interest-rate ceilings by committing to make unlimited purchases of securities up to two years from maturity at prices consistent with the targeted yields. If this program were successful, not only would yields on medium-term Treasury securities fall, but (because of links operating through expectations of future interest rates) yields on longer-term public and private debt (such as mortgages) would likely fall as well.

If lowering yields on longer-dated Treasury securities proved insufficient to restart spending, however, the Fed might next consider attempting to influence directly the yields on privately issued securities. Unlike some central banks, and barring changes to current law, the Fed is relatively restricted in its ability to buy private securities directly.¹² However, the Fed does have broad powers to lend to the private sector indirectly via banks, through the discount window.¹³ Therefore a second policy option, complementary to operating in the markets for Treasury and agency debt, would be for the Fed to offer fixed-term loans to banks at low or zero interest, with a wide range of private assets (including, among others, corporate bonds, commercial paper, bank loans, and mortgages) deemed eligible as collateral.

The following is interesting in the context of the recently announced collaboration between central banks to address the US dollar demand of European banks. Of course, the plan announced by the Fed is unlikely to be specifically linked to this, since this type of operation is politically difficult.

The Fed can inject money into the economy in still other ways. For example, the Fed has the authority to buy foreign government debt, as well as domestic government debt. Potentially, this class of assets offers huge scope for Fed operations, as the quantity of foreign assets eligible for purchase by the Fed is several times the stock of U.S. government debt.

This part is interesting in the context of Jobs plan that Obama recently announced. But the plan is unlikely to be in effect in time for the Fed to play its role, if it is voted at all, so it’s unlikely that the Fed actions will be directly linked to it.

the effectiveness of anti-deflation policy could be significantly enhanced by cooperation between the monetary and fiscal authorities. A broad-based tax cut, for example, accommodated by a program of open-market purchases to alleviate any tendency for interest rates to increase, would almost certainly be an effective stimulant to consumption and hence to prices.

[...]

Of course, in lieu of tax cuts or increases in transfers the government could increase spending on current goods and services or even acquire existing real or financial assets. If the Treasury issued debt to purchase private assets and the Fed then purchased an equal amount of Treasury debt with newly created money, the whole operation would be the economic equivalent of direct open-market operations in private assets.

It’s this time of the year again when we have to vote for SXSW panels. Here’s a selection of panels related to the future of money/currency.

• Can Geeks Re-Wire Your Money?
• The new age of money
• Inventing currency: future of Internet-based money.
• Credits Coins Cash: Social Currency & Finance 2.0

A comment I published on a skype group. I thought I’d publish here more widely:

I don’t want to try to defend the Fed, but I don’t think we should claim a false public and a real hidden purpose. I think the purpose of the Fed is simply to provide and manage the liquidity in a member-only fiat/credit network. I think the Fed’s role is – through its theoretical independence – to build confidence that the Treasury will not abuse its force to spend more than the economy can take. The Treasury doest not need the Fed to monetize spending: the Treasury has simply ageed to do so as a confidence-building trick, in exchange for the ability to provide stability backed by the full credit of the US to the banking system in times of crisis. All that said, I think what is legitimate to point out is that their mandate is difficult if not impossible, their power enormous, their independence … theoretical, and the unintended consequences of their actions enormous as well. Chief problem with the Fed is the belief and expectations by each and everyone on capital markets that they can and should try to solve every problem.

Thoughts Offerings blog has an interesting piece on how QE actually does not encourage traditional bank lending via deposit creation, but instead encourages lending through security issuance. I recommend the reading, it ties a lot of things together neatly.

If we take this post a little further, given that lending via security issuance is currently frozen on the consumer debt side, those benefiting from QE are those with access to capital markets: large corporations, financial intermediaries (who take fees on issuing, buying/selling securities), and the Government, but not the consumer or small business (except as recipient of Government welfare or subsidies). As a result, domestic demand is poor, which leads companies to invest and grow their revenues abroad (BRIC in particular), bringing rampant inflation in emerging economies and taking the dollar down. This is a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

Two things follow:

1. the biggest risk to this growth is a slowdown in BRIC countries, China in particular. The reflation trade could easily morph into a vicious deflationary force as dollars are repatriated, assets sold, debts paid back, preference for safety over risk, short-term duration over long-term, returns.
2. with consumer and small business loans still going down, paradoxically encouraged by QE as the Thoughts Offerings post expose, there is a major opportunity for peer-to-peer lending and crowdfunding. This is an area where lawmakers could have a huge impact with no dollar spent, just a regulation signed. Maybe they could even win an election with this one!

Webisteme started a thread on A broader definition of currency, which prompted me to dedicate a post to the topic. My definition has certainly evolved since March 2009, so I wanted to share it here:

A currency is an attributable symbol whose meaning is common – consistently accepted, acknowledged – within a group of people, and over time.

The commonality, commonplace of a symbol is what distinguish a currency from other symbols. Currency is etymologically what runs, what is everywhere, not necessarily because it measures a flow, but  rather because its meaning is everywhere. I would argue that the existence of currency precedes in time the flow of wealth it may at some point trigger. I would also argue that a currency can but does not have to be formal, agreed upon, well-defined, it can be instead informal, emergent.

For a symbol to become currency requires either (or combination of):

• force: this is the easiest. someone forces onto others the meaning of the symbol, such as is the case of the Government legal tender laws and monetary policy.
• emergence: this is the most fascinating, because it is uncontrollable and can result in very quick social changes. An example is: having a Web site, blog, LinkedIn profile, twitter stream is a currency, if you don’t have one, it will raise strong doubts from a hiring manager.
• agreement: this is probably the hardest. A group of people decide together that something will be used as currency.

Clearly, understanding how a currency emerges, and designing for a symbol to emerge as a currency seems to me to be a potentially very powerful piece of knowledge that I feel isn’t much written about in the Internet literature.

A Credit Union in France just announced the opening of a new online agency called Tookam. Besides a number of innovation related to social networks, the new agency provides a virtual currency that helps businesses engage their customers with charitable rewards, that is: rewards that can be turned into donation in government money to a charity chosen by both the business and the customer.

It’s an interesting variant on the “donate 1$ and our business will match it”, instead: “give us $x of your business and we will donate $1 to one of the charities we support”

It works as follows:

1. The business establishes a rewards program in Tookets and pre-defines a number of charities that the tookets can be converted in Euros and donated to.
2. Customer earns the tookets as they do transactions with the business.
3. The customer can then turn some of the tookets into Euros and donate them to one of the charities pre-selected by the business.

What’s interesting here is the alignment of values that it creates between the business and the customer. By looking at the list of charities that the business’ rewards program support, the customer can decide whether to increase or stop shopping at this particular business.

This program fits in the larger trend of rewarding real-life purchases with virtual currency. By defining what their rewards currency can be converted in, the business has another opportunity to express their mission and connect meaningfully with their customers.

There is no reason that this model be limited to charities: rewards could for instance be converted to donations to specific projects, such as the ones found on SpotUs or Kickstarter.

I’ve been thinking about the recent rise in subscription models for content such as The Daily or the New York Times paywall. Alan’s recent invitation for thoughts on his related post gave me the perfect reason to write something.

I’m in the camp of those who think that good content is independent content, produced without influenced from advertisers, and authored by dedicated people who spend precious time to research. I also think that good content is accessible content: available to many, if not to anyone, to read, correct or comment on. It’s content I can share, content that I don’t need to pay for before I read.

I believe the pragmatic short-term solution to these challenges is to combine the use of appreciation currencies like Facebook likes, twitter RTs or Google recent +1 with content aggregators.

Growing up in France, I remember being explained that public channels weren’t really free: for each TV set you’d buy, you would pay a yearly tax called “redevance” or television license to the state. In turns, the state would use audience tracking service to figure which channels were most watched, and would split the reveneus of redevance accordingly to the channels.

I don’t know what the status of redevance is, and I am no fan of statism. That said, I do like the idea of paying a monthly fee that gets split into what you actually consumed and liked. This is what Flattr does, but it works on a voluntary basis, which effectively limits its potential.

For such a system to work, you need:

• a way charge a subscription to a large enough collection of private content,
• a way for subscribers to rate and share content with their friends who are on the same network,
• a transparent allocation of revenues to the content producers according to audience metrics.

I don’t know if NetFlix uses a similar model to compensate content providers, but if not, this could work for them, right now. They could literally open their doors to many short or long form content creators and provide them a share of their monthly subscription fees based on audience metrics.

Think NetFlix + Vimeo + Flattr.

I attended tonight a panel on the interchange rules that will be proposed by the Fed by April 2011 and enforced by July 2011. The panel was composed of representatives from issuers (Bank of the West) acquirers (WestAmericaBank), Prepaid (Mastercard, Plastyc), Alternative Payments (Bling Nation).

There were many disagreements on what the impact will be on the many entities composing the complex card payment ecosystem. If there was one agreement it is that this regulation will have unintended consequences and possibly backfire on the government’s good intentions. But the positive outcome is that it may act as a trigger to force participants to innovate above what may quickly become a commodity: moving money.

Examples of unintended consequences:

• Free checking is likely to disappear. This may increase the population of banking dropouts: “formerlybanked”.
• Savings may not be transferred to consumers.
• Merchants might start to discriminate between cards issued by issuers who are exempt from the Durbin amendment (FIs with assets of $10B or less). “Citi or BofA cards only please” “You came from Redwood Credit Union? we can’t accept that card”. Note that while some Visa rules in theory prevent this, some participants in the audience have argued that these rules don’t have much court value.
• Banks moving to unregulated a.k.a. (yet) unregulated payment networks to drive revenue. “We are interested in you because you are not regulated”.
• Banks will likely move increasingly in the prepaid area, pushing high debit customers into new products like segmented spend, allowance cards. With the right prepaid product, banked employees might switch to prepaid.
• Banks may consider charging for ACH.
• The Fed may end up having to regulate many more players such as Google/PayPal, which may unfairly benefit from such rules.

On the innovation side, Bling Nation’s Wences Casares compared the current payment ecosystem to the telco ecosystem in the late 80s. Everyone back then was focused on voice. Then suddenly voice become a commodity and everyone had to come up with new products. He believes that payment business is in a similar situation of becoming a commodity very quickly as a result of such regulation, which may trigger a wave of innovation on top of the payment layer that can drive revenue.

Patrice Peyret of Plastyc was quick to remind that this analogy breaks down when you look at the current protocols, which are simply flawed at heart. New protocols, designed with security and real-time are likely to be required for innovation to be unleashed.

Towards the end, Wences reminded the audience that contactless has little benefit for the merchant or the customer, that the true revolution in mobile payment is in the new things that can be built on top, starting with but not limited to: Loyalty, rewards, deals, social, etc. I completely agree with this.