Tim Cook and Apple Wallet

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Silicon Valley is obsessed with a particular part of the finance business that involves sending cash to friends using an app. That’s led to a flurry of options that often aren’t profitable because they charge little to no transaction fees. PayPal and its subsidiary, Venmo, are among the most popular, though they face a growing list of competitors, including Google, Facebook, and Square.

Apple plans to get in on the action, too. The world’s most valuable technology company has been talking with banks about introducing its own feature to Apple Pay that will allow users to send money to friends, a person familiar with the plans told Bloomberg last month. If Apple hopes to compete, it will also need to make its service free to use with debit cards, according to analysts.

Well, Tim, you told us that the Apple phones were unbreakable.  Why does Tim need banks to cover the peer to peer exchanges?   These exchanges should work just like handing over cash, no bank required. So  dufas apple engineers cannot figure out how to emulate ink and paper with their software.

 What do the Kanosians say?  Here is Greg Ip:

Last week the House of Representatives passed a bill that would bring about the most sweeping changes to the Federal Reserve since the 1930s. At the heart of the bill is a requirement that the Fed set interest rates according to a quantitative rule.

Like advocates of the gold standard, proponents of the bill blame many of the economy’s ills on the Fed exercising too much discretion because it succumbs to economic expediency or political pressure. Many see the Fed’s emergency lending during the crisis and its bond-buying since then as bailouts for big, reckless banks and a profligate federal government. They want rules to circumscribe such discretion.

But history shows that discretion is unavoidable no matter what sort of standard a central bank uses. “The practical difficulties of life cannot be met by very simple rules,” Walter Bagehot, an early editor of The Economist, wrote in “Lombard Street.” “Those dangers being complex and many, the rules for encountering them cannot well be single or simple. A uniform remedy for many diseases often ends by killing the patient.”

OK, so I am confused.  If Apple hires an engineer with an IQ greater than 100, then  we get pure cash, no central bank,   All this grand theorizing by Greg hangs on one prior, namely that Apple will get no clue.  A good assumption, but what about Facebook, they get clues all the time.