In the Citibank case, the beneficiaries were entitled to the money because they were the original lenders, and did not know that (what appeared to be) the repayment had been accidentally wired.
Correct. This is equivalent to you paying your bills early. Sure, it sucks to be stuck in a money crunch if you found it out later, but your financial mismanagement doesn't automatically mean that the you have the right to ask your utilities to return the money.
hmm i don't know. generally speaking, money today is not the same as money tomorrow. and so,
if you think about money as a commodity, to be consumed, transformed, redeployed, similar to let's say... corn. what would you do, as a grain processor, if your supplier decided to show up with 500k bushels six months too early?
I think that the analogy is reasonable, mainly because both examples are the type of debts that can be serviced (i.e. repaid) anytime (unless your utilities needs to be pre-paid before you can use it, which in case it breaks down because it becomes a bought thing, not a borrowed thing). There are recommended schedules to pay them, as well as a hard deadline, but you can usually pay them early (and sometimes those early payments can be rewarded, for example by reduced interests).
Your example mainly deals with futures (a type of financial instrument), mainly because you have agreed to pay within a tight schedule, which does not allow you to service them too early nor too late. Also, you forgot that money was invented to be widely fungible (okay, you can argue if this is true in this age but I argue it's still largely is) meaning that it can be (relatively speaking) easier to convert to corn, stocks, or generators (for example), which is different from corn which is only usable to a subset of people, meaning that you can only deal with those people which needs or wants corn (for example, you cannot easily get generators with corn).
a couple thousand dollars here and there might be fungible, but at some scale it's not true that money today is money tomorrow. there generally needs to exist some method of transforming money today into money tomorrow, through various mechanisms that are broadly called "carry", and there also exists the possibility that these mechanisms become momentarily unavailable.
additionally, the lenders to revlon took on both an expectation on money in the future and a non-zero default probability. maybe you can say it is fine for money in the future to be money in the present, making the layman assumption that the carry mechanism exists every single day from the date of accidental payment to the date of actual payment, but the lenders cannot also give up the non-zero default probability. that's their obligation in return for full future payment. but since payment and the obligation are inseparable, i personally see no difference between early payment with no obligation and shylock's taking of a pound of flesh and all the blood along with it.
If you think of money as corn, then of course you get a different answer. But money is not corn; it is money.
Money is not a commodity; it's a quantity of fungible tokens (plus the other stuff that makes it money). Money doesn't expire; the closest thing is tax. Yes, it's worth a different amount as time goes on, but debts are generally money debts rather than value debts.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-laws...