Brief Comments On Libra And Online Commerce — Brian Romanchuk

Facebook has led a consortium which has unveiled a white paper on a proposed Libra cryptocurrency. It is described as being backed by a multi-currency portfolio of government bonds, and so it might be looked at as a currency basket. I am not an expert on Libra, but I just wanted to comment on the pros and cons of such a basket for small online commerce players (such as BondEconomics.com). I also conclude with a short discussion of systemic risk posed by this platform....

Bond Economics 

Brief Comments On Libra And Online Commerce
Brian Romanchuk

RT — Alibaba’s Jack Ma wants to create 100 million jobs

Alibaba is a company aiming to help solve social problems. In 20 years, we hope to serve two billion consumers around the world, empower 10 million profitable businesses and create 100 million jobs,” wrote Ma in the annual letter to shareholders, stressing that the group would be in for an even more difficult journey than the one it has gone through.

Ma expects three more decades of fast technological change across industries. The change will include transformation of traditional retailers in a multi-trillion dollar market.
“Throughout history, technological disruptions have followed similar trajectories: 20 years of technological disruption followed by 30 years of further rapid change as new technologies are applied throughout society,” the letter says.

Alibaba aims to invite retailers to join its system of online selling platforms, advertising tools as well as cloud computing offerings.

“We are working to create the fundamental digital and physical infrastructure for the future of commerce, which includes marketplaces, payments, logistics, cloud computing, big data and a host of other fields,” the CEO wrote, adding that the company didn’t try to switch transactions from offline to online.

RT
Alibaba’s Jack Ma wants to create 100 million jobs

China Daily — Alibaba sets world record for auto sales in one day

Singles Day in China is the new Black Friday. Looks like the Chinese are gearing up to outshop Americans.

"Awesome" may be a cliche now, but it isn't in this case.

China Daily
Alibaba sets world record for auto sales in one day

Glyn Moody — Fallout from EU-US Safe Harbor ruling will be dramatic and far-reaching

In the wake of last week's dramatic judgement by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which means that transatlantic data transfers made under the Safe Harbour agreement are likely to be ruled illegal across the EU, there has been no shortage of apocalyptic visions claiming that e-commerce—and even the Internet itself—was doomed. Companies are already finding alternative, if imperfect, ways to transfer personal data from the EU to the US, although a very recent data protection ruling in Germany suggests that one approach—using contracts—is unlikely to withstand legal scrutiny. But what's being overlooked are the much wider implications of the court's ruling, which reach far beyond e-commerce.

The careful legal reasoning used by the CJEU to reach its decisions will make its rulings extremely hard, if not impossible, to circumvent, since they are based on the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. As the European Commission's page on the Charter explains: "The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU brings together in a single document the fundamental rights protected in the EU." Once merely aspirational, the Charter attained a new importance in December 2009: "with the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon, the Charter became legally binding on the EU institutions and on national governments, just like the EU Treaties themselves."

By anchoring its ruling in the principles underlying the Charter, the CJEU has cleverly ensured that it cannot be overturned simply by bringing in new laws, since those laws must themselves comply with the Charter.

Liberalism hoist by its own petard. 

TIPP and TISA in question legally as well as a whole lot more.

Ars Technica

Fallout from EU-US Safe Harbor ruling will be dramatic and far-reaching

Glyn Moody

ht Don Quijones at Naked Bull-Shit

RBTH — China wins online sales in Russia

Chinese online vendors have won the lion’s share of Russia’s cross-border e-commerce business over competitors from Europe and the U.S., spurred on by the ruble’s continued decline and a recession that has prompted Russians to shop for less expensive items.

Chinese firms took 65 percent of Russian online orders from abroad in 2014, according to a report by the East-West Digital News.

“In 2014, Russians placed about 50 million orders from Chinese online stores, up 40 percent from the previous year,” said Evgeniya Arnautova, press officer for the Russian payment platform Yandex.Money.

Chinese vendors’ success in Russia comes amid double-digit growth of e-commerce sales in Russia. The cross-border segment of the Russian e-commerce sector expanded by 70 percent last year to reach total sales of $5 billion….

Russia Beyond The Headlines

China wins online sales in Russia

Matthew Zeitlin — Alibaba Sells More Than Twice As Much Amazon And eBay Combined

Enter the dragon.

The Chinese e-commerce site is just huge, with 307 million customers in the last year. Its Taobao mobile app has more users than the population of Texas.

Buzz Feed News
Alibaba Sells More Than Twice As Much Amazon And eBay Combined
Matthew Zeitlin

Izabella Kaminska — The time for official e-money is NOW!

A chief attraction of Bitcoin is as an alternative payments system that greatly reduced transaction costs. That is to say, it is more economically than conventional payments systems and also as secure as cash (see Bitcoin: Marc Andreessen Explains It All for You — A web visionary makes the case for virtual currency having world-changing implications by Harry McCracken). As a result, this is definitely going to happen, all the negatives notwithstanding because as long as Bitcoin is instantaneously convertible. Governments should just catch up with technological innovation. That could reduce or eliminate even the small transaction costs involved with converting Bitcoin. These transaction costs are unnecessary and unproductive economic rent. They need to go and if government won't act, then the market will.

The Financial Times | FT Alphaville (free registration required)
The time for official e-money is NOW!
Izabella Kaminska

Paul Smith — TrustCloud: The Path to Establishing Trust Online?

Read it at Shareable:WORK & ENTERPRISE
TrustCloud: The Path to Establishing Trust Online?
by Paul Smith

You thought your agency credit rating was all there was to it? Think again.