Welcome to Money for the Rest of Us. This is a personal financial show on money. How

it works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I'm your host,

David Stein, today is episode 339. It's titled The DeFi Revolution, and how to earn a 9% yield.

My son, Brett, has worked with me part-time for almost three years. I pay him,

I'm just least as a job. He recently switched banks, it took him a while to get that setup,

and so I needed to make a payment, it had been a month or so. I went to wire the funds to him,

and his new bank wasn't set up to receive wires. So then I decided I'll just send an ACH.

Well, my bank wanted me to sign up for a $10 a month service in order to send ACHs.

I then tried Apple Pay. I had to verify my bank account, which required me to call my bank on the

phone to get it set up. I was finally able to get Apple Pay set up, thinking the money would get

there right away, but no, it took several days, even despite all that effort. During this whole

process, I thought it would just be easy to send him cryptocurrency. Then he'd have the money,

but then he'd have to convert it back to dollars, and if I sent him Bitcoin, I'd have to pay taxes

on the gains I had on Bitcoin. It seems like personal finance shouldn't be that difficult,

but we work in a system of centralized finance, where there's centralized control.

We typically only have one bank, maybe two, and switching banks can be a real pain.

In the US, the four largest banks have a 44% share of insured deposits compared to 15% in 1984.

The concentration of banks is even higher in other countries. In our current financial system,

the central bank, the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan,

are highly influential in the financial system from a regulatory standpoint, but also setting

interest rate policy, which can influence other interest rates. Money supply creation,

central banks are very, very involved in that as we have explored in recent episodes.

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