Unintended Consequences: Daily Payroll

It turns out that its only in the USA where payroll is commonly paid more frequently than once per month. As a business owner, I understand the benefits of monthly payroll, as payroll takes time and effort to process, as well as cash in the bank.

That said, most likely this is soon to be history, as online services like Gusto make paying payroll just a few clicks of effort, including all the calculations, the forms, the filings, and the payments.

Given that, and given the new instant bank-to-bank payment systems launching around the world, I suspect we’ll not only see payroll become more frequent, but I’ll predict that a few pioneering companies will start paying payroll weekly, if not daily.

I don’t expect daily payroll was on the list of use cases for FedNow, but it is an unintended consequence.

There are a lot of great posts buried in this blog’s archives that are still quite apt. Today is another reprise, this time revisiting the (often invisible) tradeoff between efficiency and resilience. Last time I explained that tradeoff with the case study of electricity blackouts in Texas and how that related to Google’s monopoly on search and Amazon’s dominance of eCommerce...

Who invented double entry accounting? The ubiquitous system of general ledgers, income statements, balance sheets, and cashflow statements found throughout businesses and quite a lot of households? This is yet-another of those concept so taken for granted that they seem to have been around “forever”, but thanks to Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance by...

Many of the everyday details in The Work of the Stock Market told in between the history facts are often just as interesting as the history itself. Case in point, if you read the history of time zones, it seemed like the standardization was complete in the U.S. and Europe by the end of the 1800s. Yet in 1922… The difference in time between London and New York is four minutes and one second...

The standard structure for private equity funds (and venture capital funds) is “2&20”, as in a 2% management fee (±1%) and 20% (±10%) of the profits, a.k.a. “carried interest“. Why 20% of the profits? Henry Kravis of KKR explains below, starting at 6:00. TL;DR: Necessity, as he and his partners had no capital to put at risk. Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens...

Why did New York need another stock exchange in 1968? Why was the New York Stock Exchange, American Stock Exchange, and Pacific Stock Exchange insufficient? An unprecedented bull market coupled with paper-based systems. I’m in my 50’s and don’t remember “Wall Street” not having both the NYSE and NASDAQ as the two main exchanges. I am old enough to remember the AMEX...