The 2008 financial crisis caused huge and lasting damage to a lot of people’s trust in the banking system. But not everyone everywhere lives like that.Įven in the US, trust can be fragile. Most people in the US, most days, live in a high-trust world, where it’s easy and reasonable to trust that the intermediaries who run the databases that shape our lives will behave properly. There are social media companies you can’t trust not to freeze your account arbitrarily. There are governments you can’t trust not to seize your money from the banks, or falsify election results, or change the property registry and take your house. There are banks you can’t trust to hold your money for you and places where you can’t trust the rule of law to regulate them. Saying that modern life is lived in databases means, most of all, that modern life involves a lot of trust.īut we don’t always trust them, and they’re not always trustworthy. A system of impersonal banking in which the tellers are strangers and you probably use an ATM anyway requires trust in the system, trust that the banks are constrained by government regulation or reputation or market forces and so will behave properly. A system in which your trusted banker holds on to your sacks for you and writes you letters of credit, and you can draw on those letters at branches of the bank run by your banker’s cousin-that’s pretty good, though it relies on trust between you and the banker, as well as the banker and the banker’s cousin.
Sacks of gold are a fairly straightforward form of it, but they’re heavy. If you revoke the permission, you can go to the government, and it will-subject to landlord-tenant law, etc.-kick the person out. You can rent out the house: Someone else can move in with your permission. But if they’re bigger than you, now they own the house.Ģ You don’t need to live there, because the government’s knowledge is sufficient. What could it mean to own a house? One possibility is the state of nature: Owning a house means 1) you’re in the house, and 2) if someone else tries to move in, you’re bigger than them, so you can kick them out. It’s far more convenient for the money to be computer entries than sacks of gold or even paper bills. Some of this stuff has to do with computers. It’s not quite true that your social life and your career and your reputation consist of entries in the databases of Meta Platforms and Google and Microsoft, but it’s not quite false, either. A bank will want to make sure you have the title before giving you a mortgage a buyer will want to do the proper procedures to that record before paying you for the house. But in many other ways the important thing is the entry in the database. (It’s not a very good database.) In many ways the important thing here is the house: You have a key to the front door your stuff is there your neighbors will be unsurprised to see you leaving the house in the morning and would be surprised to see someone else coming back in. But your ownership of that house is probably written down in some database in the US this often means there’s a record of you buying the house-your title-in a filing cabinet in the basement of some county clerk’s office. If you own a house, things are slightly different. If you own stock, what you have is an entry on DTCC’s list entitling you to some of the shares DTCC holds, and it has an entry on a company’s list of how many shares it owns.
Joel Weber, Editor, Bloomberg Businessweekġ These intermediaries include the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., which owns most of the shares of most US companies on behalf of everyone else. What follows is his brilliant explanation of what this maddening, often absurd, and always fascinating technology means, and where it might go.
Which is why we asked the finest finance writer around, Matt Levine of Bloomberg Opinion, to write a cover-to-cover issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, something a single author has done only one other time in the magazine’s 93-year history (“ What Is Code?,” by Paul Ford). And if crypto isn’t going away, we’d better attempt to understand it. But crypto has dug itself into finance, into technology, and into our heads. If you’re a skeptic, this upside-down world is just a modern Ponzi scheme that’s going to end badly-and the recent “crypto winter” is evidence of its long-overdue ending. If you’re a disciple, this new dimension is the future. There was a moment not so long ago when I thought, “What if I’ve had this crypto thing all wrong?” I’m a doubting normie who, if I’m being honest, hasn’t always understood this alternate universe that’s been percolating and expanding for more than a decade now.
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