The IMF Blog publishes International Monetary Fund staff posts on monetary policy, global debt, digital money, crypto, and economic growth.
HN links it for IMF data and analysis, such as global debt figures. One commenter notes a linked post mostly summarizes a longer working paper.
The article is about a post on the IMF's blog by Arnoud Boot, Peter Hoffmann, Luc Laeven, Lev Ratnovski [1], which itself is basically just summarizing a more detailed working paper by the same authors [2].
The working paper doesn't really contain any original research (at least on this topic); they cite a single paper by Tobias Berg, Valentin Burg, Ana Gombović, Manju Puri [3]. The IMF working paper/blog post concludes, on the basis of this paper, that a system "powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning" (ugh) can improve credit assessments using features such as "the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet".
I feel kind of depressed that this needs to be said, but...
1. There is no causal link between user-agent and loan repayment.
2. Attaching high-value signals such as credit scores to such easily spoofed data as user-agent and browsing history has some amazingly obvious problems that are never mentioned.
The level of technological and statistical incompetence on display here is rather astounding, and it's difficult for me to take any of this seriously even before the ethical questions begin.
This is part of an ongoing trend I've noticed: the quality of human capital in financial services seems to be in rapid decline. The cream of the crop was scraped off by huge tech companies on the industry side. On the academic side, all the top students are choosing CS PhD programs instead of econ/finance and top-tier faculty are leaving core…
https://blogs.imf.org/2019/01/02/new-data-on-global-debt/
"The private sector’s debt has tripled since 1950. This makes it the driving force behind global debt. Another change since the global financial crisis has been the rise in private debt in emerging markets, led by China, overtaking advanced economies. At the other end of the spectrum, private debt has remained very low in low-income developing countries.
Global public debt, on the other hand, has experienced a reversal of sorts. After a steady decline up to the mid-1970s, public debt has gone up since, with advanced economies at the helm and, of late, followed by emerging and low-income developing countries."
-> Debt owned in the private sector isn't just about stock market but about all the small businesses which in the US are 99.9% of them (see https://www.chamberofcommerce.org/small-business-statistics/ )
-> Public debt is debt that we all deal with, and it might come as a surprise to you but a majority of people aren't actually rich
What I'm trying to say here is that you can play on the technicality of the amount of people under poverty thresholds not being in debt because they can't even access debt, but it's not really changing anything about the people who ARE in debt being in significant amounts people who might not have the shoulders to take it on but are trying to get by and doing so as a requirement to get by.
The IMF has suggested that new forms of information such as search and browsing history, purchase history, and ISP to determine credit worthiness. Link to blog post below quotes:
>> The use of non-financial data will have large effects on the provision of financial services. Traditionally, banks rely on the analysis of customer financial information from payment flows and accounting records. The rise of the internet permits the use of new types of non- financial customer data, such as browsing histories and online shopping behavior of individuals, or customer ratings for online vendors.
>> Fintech resolves the dilemma by tapping various nonfinancial data: the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases. Recent research documents that, once powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, these alternative data sources are often superior than traditional credit assessment methods, and can advance financial inclusion, by, for example, enabling more credit to informal workers and households and firms in rural areas.
[0] https://blogs.imf.org/2020/12/17/what-is-really-new-in-fintech/
I guess that we both agree that you need resources to create wealth. Without resources, wealth cannot be created. I guess, that we both agree that you need education, knowledge and science to use that resources in an efficient way. That technology+resources create wealth.
My argument, for which I provide some links, is that you need to redistribute that wealth so everybody profits form it for that wealth to be sustainable:
"Economic growth provides the basis for overcoming poverty and lifting living standards. But for growth to be sustained and inclusive, its benefits must reach all people."
* https://blogs.imf.org/2017/09/20/growth-that-reaches-everyone-facts-factors-tools/
* https://www.oecd.org/newsroom/inequality-hurts-economic-growth.htm
But, maybe we have different values and that is the root cause of our disagreement. I think that giving everybody enough to cover their needs is the goal of society. To remove poverty is a goal to achieve. Higher economic output is not a goal, but a means to achieve the goal of humans well being. Improving the economy is a means for humans to live better.
The International Monetary Fond, not known to be populated by treehugging hippies with naturalistic fallacies as a major character trait, published this beautiful graph: https://blogs.imf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/eng-april-4-cotw-solar-1.png
Nuclear now costs three times as much as solar & wind! And that data ist from 2017. Both technologies are also not showing any slowdown in improvements, while nuclear tends to get more expensive.
The trend for batteries happens to be extremely similar.
Nuclear is dead. Maybe people arguing against it in the 1980 were wrong. Maybe it’s safe. None of that matters, because it’s simply too expensive. And, increasingly, it’s also just too late: a nuclear power project takes 15 years, which is twice as much as we have.
The only energy that still keeps it in the news is this weird tie-in with the culture wars, where, apparently, a certain segment likes nuclear power because it’s big, ugly, dangerous and sciency. They are living the future of the past.
Partly basing it on other discussions around it: https://blogs.imf.org/2019/02/05/cashing-in-how-to-make-negative-interest-rates-work/
And yes, the article absolutely does mention it:
"CBDC Public Policy Rationale
Advocates of CBDCs suggest that they are necessary, certainly useful, in addressing multiple issues emerging across the global financial system of late. These issues include: ...
Zero-lower bound interest rates (i.e., negative interest rates) – the existence of physical cash results in the severe curtailment of the ability of central banks to lower official interest rates below the zero bound (i.e., implement negative nominal interest rates) given the risk that citizens are likely to withdraw from the financial system by hoarding physical cash if negative nominal interest rates are implemented[12].
"
If that's part of the rationale, what do you think is implied about the continuing existence of physical cash?