Cross-border payments route through a clunky US-controlled cascade of intermediaries
Evidence
To see the global significance of this, consider Jürgen, a Hamburg-based factory owner using raw materials supplied by Xiu’s factory in Guangzhou to manufacture ship propellers, which Jürgen then sells to a shipyard owned by Ai near Shanghai. To wire payment for his raw materials to Xiu, Jürgen visits his German bank’s website, fills out the necessary digital form and presses Enter. The specified number of euros leaves his bank for the Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, before passing through to the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. The European Central Bank then converts Jürgen’s euros to US dollars which it subsequently channels to the People’s Bank of China via a US-controlled international circuit. Once at the People’s Bank of China, its functionaries convert the money into yuan and wire it to Xiu’s bank. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 603
Categorization
- DEFINE: Concrete walkthrough of the actual cross-border payment plumbing, which is central to understanding where platform rent hides.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 603
- XREF: connects to: Inefficient payment intermediaries persist because their cuts generate collective rent — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 606; Cross-border data flows replicate colonial patterns and concentrate through the United States — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 332
Broader Connections
- Cross-border data flows replicate colonial patterns and concentrate through the United States
#expands(0.82) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 332