Forced vacations are a fraud control

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his Bits about Money essay "Financial systems take a holiday" (originally published February 2024), prompted by a conversation with a prior guest about how even exchanging calendars between financial institutions is hard. He explains why banks run at something closer to "five twos" of uptime than Google's five nines, using Japanese banks' idiosyncratic, company-specific "Company Foundation Day" to show how a holiday can be entirely real and consequential while appearing on no official list anywhere. Along the way he covers how Black Friday and Cyber Monday pushed roughly $40 billion through Stripe alone in 2025 while the banking system settling it is mostly closed for the weekend, and why some banks deliberately force employees to take vacation as a control against insider fraud. – Full transcript available here: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/forced-vacations-are-a-fraud-control/    – **Presenting Sponsors:** Mercury **&** Granola Complex Systems is presented by Mercury—radically better banking for founders. Mercury Spend hands your team and agents their own cards with limits you set once, so nobody waits on you to approve a SaaS invoice and nobody chases a receipt. Apply online in minutes at https://mercury.com/.  If meetings consistently leave you with hazy action items and lost context, Granola handles the transcription so you can actually participate and gives you searchable notes afterward. Try it free at granola.ai/complexsystems with code COMPLEXSYSTEMS – Links: - Source essay: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/financial-systems-take-a-holiday/ - Alex Elliott on Complex Systems: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/two-banks-cant-agree-on-fourth-grade-math/ – Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (01:31) Financial systems take a holiday (03:29) What is a holiday, anyway? (10:33) Fun operational consequences of holidays (15:07) Sponsor: Mercury | Granola (18:27) Fun operational consequences of holidays (cont’d) (21:29) "This is crazy. Let's get rid of holidays" (26:31) Will this change? (27:55) Wrap