Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Como improvisar bancos

We can all get by quite well without banks - Ireland managed to survive without them, por Patrick Cockburn  e Money in an Economy Without Banks - the Case of Ireland, por Antoin Murphy.

Resumo breve - em 1970 houve uma greve bancária que durou meses; com os bancos fechados (e num mundo sem multibancos e transferencias eletrónicas de dinheiro), os cheques (incluindo "cheques" improvisados) tornaram-se a moeda corrente:

Undated cheques, often endorsed over to others but never cashed, became a form of currency. When the supply of cheques dried up, people wrote new ones on any available piece of paper, sometimes adding a postage stamp to give it an official appearance. There was talk of some cheques being written on beer mats and lavatory paper. It was a system that worked because it drew on local knowledge and trust. The people exchanging cheques and IOUs knew each other well, and if they did not, they could soon find the necessary information to assess each other’s credit-worthiness. At that time there were 11,000 pubs in Ireland and 12,000 shops that became substitutes for the banks. Antoin E Murphy, who carried out a study on the strike’s effects, found the public’s ability to assess risk “was based on a vast pool of information available to transactors on the credit-worthiness of other transactors”.

[via Jesse Walker]

Aliás, parece que nos últimos meses os cheques pré-datados tem estado também a tornar-se uma espécie de moeda na Grécia.

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