Читать книгу CryptoDad - J. Christopher Giancarlo - Страница 11

First, consider that America's physical infrastructure—its bridges, tunnels, airports, and mass transit systems—that were cutting edge in the last century but have been allowed to age and deteriorate in the current one.

Sadly, the same is true about much of our financial infrastructure, both in the United States and in many developed Western economies. Systems for check payment and settlement; shareholder and proxy voting; investor access and disclosure; and financial system regulatory oversight—once state-of-the-art and global models in the twentieth century—have fallen behind the times in the twenty-first century. In some cases, embarrassingly so.

This aging financial system puts developed economies like the United States at a competitive disadvantage to the likes of China that are building new financial infrastructure from scratch with twenty-first century digital technology. Here's a good example: it typically takes days in the United States to settle and clear retail bank transfers. In many other countries it takes mere minutes, if not seconds. It also takes days to settle securities transactions and weeks to obtain land title insurance. It is still often faster to move money around the globe by stuffing cash in a suitcase and carrying it on a plane than it is to send a wire transfer.

Nothing better reveals the limits of our existing financial system than the US government's initial financial response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020. Tens of millions of Americans had to wait a month or more to receive relief payments by paper check. More than a million payments were made to people who were dead.