The US government should launch their own stablecoin. A digital US dollar is a national need that shouldn’t be managed by a corporation in my opinion.
If you withdrew your life savings in cash, that cash couldn’t become corrupted, unless by physical damage. Your life savings in cash would also be large enough that you wouldn’t be likely to lose it, or have the container it sits in easily stolen or accidentally smashed. You also are not very likely to forget or misplace the password to your cash.
Or, you could just use a credit card and have fraud protection.
"Specifically, a household is categorized as underbanked if it had a checking or savings account and used one of the following products or services from an alternative financial services provider in the past 12 months: money orders, check cashing, international remittances, payday loans, refund anticipation loans, rent-to-own services, pawn shop loans, or auto title loans."
I used a money order a few years ago, so that year I was officially underbanked, despite being educated/wealthy (I have a PhD and I'm an accredited investor.)
[0] https://www.fdic.gov/householdsurvey/2017/2017report.pdf
In part they don’t have bank accounts because they’re poor, so they don’t have money to put in them. If they weren’t broke they’d have bank accounts. IMO this is more a function of wealth inequality in the US than of banking.
Think about it, you’ve got $0. Now I give you a fee free bank account. You’ve still got $0. You’re no more included in the financial system.
Low income folks get wrecked disproportionately by the high fees associated with physical retail banking (including ATMs). They charge flat fees (like Cryptos incidentally) which function as a regressive tax on the poor. Digital banking, by virtue of not having to deal with real estate and physical assets is more efficient and cheaper.
Finally, all the popular stable coins are literally indexed to the US dollar, so you can’t say USDC/USDT is great then whine about the USD right?
C'mon. We all know why the Fed targets a relatively consistent rate of inflation. It's because deflation suppresses consumer spending. Not what you want in a consumer economy.
Buy Treasuries. Or shares of stock. This is the point of inflation: it forces savers to invest time into productively allocating capital.
There, we just saved you from having to go to an Econ class :P
How much do you lose in fees when you buy crypto? 1-2%? Plus insane volatility. If you’re low income that volatility is crippling.
Below is a list of 590+ failed fiat currencies, 150 caused by hyperinflation. Seems the Straw Man argument is yours alone.
Inflation does mean that the spending power of a currency decreases. No argument there. But guess what! Wages increase(d) relatively in line with inflation. If a snickers bar used to be $1 when the average salary was $10000; and now it's $2 when the average salary is $20000, then the actual cost of a Snickers bar has not changed, in simplified terms. I see no problem here. It also intuitively makes sense, that as the population of capital producing workers grows, so too does the GDP. These people need currency issued, too, otherwise, the currency would be deflationary. So new currency is issued to prevent deflation (just 1 example of why it's issued) and keep the currency in circulation in line with production.
> 150 caused by hyperinflation.
Like, for example, the Bolivar? or the Mark? That's actual hyperinflation. ~2% inflation YoY doesn't mean hyperinflation. This is Econ 101.
Below is a list 1000+ cryptocurrencies, 99.9% of which no one has heard of, many of which have lost 90%+ of their value in a matter of months.
Most of the cryptocurrencies out there have lost that much value since January.