#Development banking

[don-lichterman]

Sri Lanka's political vacuum continues amid economic crisis | Business News

Sri Lanka’s political vacuum continues amid economic crisis | Business News

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[mapsontheweb]

World bank's country classification.

by mapsbyme

[awkward-teabag]

Love (cannot emphasis how much sarcasm there is in that word) that an official Canadian government response to high cellphone rates is to switch carriers.

Switch it to what? We basically have three companies since one was allowed to eat the forth (with the government saying it wasn't anti-competition and the company eating the other pinky promising they wouldn't jack rates up). Even the smaller companies have to rent infrastructure from the Big Three so there's only so much they can do if that rent costs an arm and a leg.

And that's not touching on how many "small companies" are actually just subsidiaries of the Big Three. You may save $5 but you're still with Telus/Rogers/Bell.

Or that the actual small companies tend to have shit coverage because they don't have the infrastructure available to them and are prevented from getting it. Or their traffic is throttled in favour of the Big Three's customers. Or both.

Or that they're extremely regional thus aren't an option for a huge chunk of Canada's population.

We have no true options and the government has shown time and again that they're fine with monopolies, in multiple industries, and don't care when said monopolies jack up prices to make shareholders and the c-suite more money at the expense of everyone else. At most there will be a verbal slap on the wrist and a giftcard for $25 that people have to register for, for a decade and a half of price gouging.

It's not talked a whole lot about outside the country from what I've seen and heard but Canada is a country of monopolies. A handful of companies own nearly everything, every province has a family or two that owns a hell of a lot (Nova Scotia is basically owned by one family at this point), and our government ignores it. Even the branch that is supposed to be against monopolies is fine with mergers and takeovers in most cases.

Because, you know, the company said it totally wouldn't use consumers' lack of options to increase prices.

[mysimsloveaffair]

Here's the official birth announcement for the newest Banks baby (the first birth of Generation 5). I was going to wait to post this with the new updates, but since those are delayed, I thought I'd give you all a little preview of baby Tambara as an infant (just wait until you see her eyes 🥰). Enjoy!

[reasonsforhope]

When William Ruto was sworn in as Kenya’s fifth president in September 2022, he used his inauguration speech to demand an end to humanity’s “addiction to fossil fuels” and reaffirmed Kenya’s commitment to reach 100% clean energy by 2030. Kenya is not far off this target today.

In 2021, 81% of Kenya’s electricity generation came from the low carbon sources of geothermal, hydro, wind, and solar power. Over half of this low carbon electricity came from geothermal energy, which Kenya has in abundance. So much in fact, that excess geothermal energy is released during the night when electricity demand is low. Installed geothermal capacity in Kenya could be increased by at least eightfold, which could open opportunities for scaling up green manufacturing capacity or exporting excess electricity to neighbouring countries. 

Renewable rollouts have substantially improved energy access. In 2013, around 28% of Kenyans had access to electricity. By 2020, this had risen to over 71%. This was achieved as the population grew by over seven million over the same period, while the rate of urbanisation continued to gather pace. According to the World Bank, barely one million Kenyans had electricity in 1990 [which, back then, was approximately just 5% of the population]. 

Ruto’s words, and Kenya’s actions, are timely due to the backdrop they are made against. Amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the vacuum created in global energy markets, European leaders and multinational fossil fuel firms have launched a ‘dash for gas’ across Africa, where a raft of new oil and gas projects, as well as old ones, are being given the green light. At COP27, Ruto kicked back against the dash for gas, stating that “we [Kenya] have taken a position that as a country we are going green and we are well on course.”

-via Rapid Transition Alliance, November 17, 2022

[jinghengs]

trailblazer: you should come visit jing yuan: i would but i'm too busy :( dan heng: you should come visit jing yuan:

[moon-mirage]

Here's my take on Effie Trinket and yes, I wanted her to look a bit off-putting. 😝

I added the rose theme towards the end on a whim - I'm not really good at drawing flowers, especially roses but it it fit the pink vibe so well. The lips are based on the movie make-up but instead of no eyebrows, I went with the highly arched, over-dramatic, thin eyebrows sported by 1930s Hollywood divas.

It was definitely fun to draw her because of the over-the-top fashion and hair. I'll probably draw her some more just because it's so much fun coming up with those outrageous styles. 😄

[tgirljoker]

im being so real i think about this full thing constantly

[pianokantzart]

[palestinegenocide]

Key Developments

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveils “postwar plan” for Gaza, where Israel would control security and play a role in civilian affairs 

Palestinian presidency rejects Netanyahu’s plan, calling for an independent Palestinian state.

 Israeli Finance Minister Ben Smotrich set to approve more than 3,000 housing units in West Bank as “Zionist revenge” for shooting operation outside Maale Adumim.

Israeli forces launch series of attacks on Central Gaza, killing 40 Palestinians and injuring at least 100 others.

Israeli forces re-enter besieged Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, as aid agencies strategize how to evacuate 140 stranded patients.

Several Israeli human rights organizations call upon countries to restore UNRWA funding. 

West Bank: Israeli forces detain two ten-year-old children from Sinjil, north of Ramallah.

UN Experts: Arms exports to Israel must stop immediately.

Foreign ministers gathered for the G20 summit in Rio De Janeiro to discuss the importance of a two-state solution with an independent Palestinian state.

Israeli Army Radio reports that it is “preparing for war” in Lebanon.

Israeli airstrike kills two paramedics in the town of Bint Jbeil, Lebanon.

[racefortheironthrone]

Could the Iron Throne be able to issue bonds, to finance its expenses, instead of going to the Iron Bank for a loan?

A government issuing bonds is the same thing as the government taking out a loan. The main difference is that, in the case of issuing a bond, the government is spreading out its borrowing between many lenders by selling bonds on the open market to anyone who wants to buy them rather than having that loan owed to a single entity like the Iron Bank. This means that the government is less beholden to any one creditor and it's less likely that the government's creditors can use their economic leverage to affect government policy.

The second advantage of structuring government debt through bonds is that it allows the government to break its total borrowing needs into smaller, more affordable units. Very few financial institutions would have had the capital to finance the £1,200,000 that made up the government's inaugural loan at the Bank of England in 1690 - but a lot more people could afford to lend the government £10, £25, £50, or £100 pounds.

Between this and later innovations in marketing bonds to the general public, the market for government debt was massively expanded. Not only did this create a class of rentiers who were now personally invested in the government's success, but it also immediately deepened the capital markets by creating a large supply of stable assets that could be bought and sold and borrowed against. While some of the shortcomings of the Hamilton musical and Chernow's biography have become more obvious in hindsight, they're not wrong about the impact of Hamilton's policies as Treasury Secretary on the development of the American economy.

The difficulty facing the Iron Throne in adapting an early modern system of government finance is that it doesn't have the state capacity to run this kind of an operation: it doesn't have a central bank to act as the government's marketer, issuer of banknotes, and lender of last resort; it doesn't have a sinking fund to manage the level and price of debt; it hasn't issued charters to merchant's guilds or joint-stock companies that could combine the small capital of individuals and thus more easily afford to buy bonds; and it doesn't have enough literate people who've studied accounting to staff a royal bureaucracy large enough to coordinate and keep records of all of this economic activity.

[candycatstuffs]

👀 does anyone in the cowboy au have wanted posters

Ohhhhhh yea fdhjsfkjfskjd

Honestly pretty much everyone has wanted posters at some point or another, but sonic and eggman have the most. Eggman cuz hes a known criminal, and sonic because eggman keeps making them LMAO

[mostlysignssomeportents]

SVB bailouts for everyone - except affordable housing projects

For the apologists, the SVB bailout was merely prudent: a bunch of innocent bystanders stood in harm’s way — from the rank-and-file employees at startups to the scholarship kids at elite private schools that trusted their endowment to Silicon Valley Bank — and so the government made an exception, improvising measures that made everyone whole without costing the public a dime. What’s not to like?

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/15/socialism-for-the-rich/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

But that account doesn’t hold up to even the most cursory scrutiny. Everything about it is untrue. Take the idea that this wasn’t a “bailout” because it was the depositors who got rescued, not the shareholders. That’s just factually untrue: guess where the shareholders kept their money? That’s right, SVB. The shareholders of SVB will get billions in public money thanks to the bailout. Billions:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/18/2-billion-here-2-billion-there/#socialism-for-the-rich

But is it really public money? After all, the FDIC payouts come from a pool of funds raised from all of America’s banks. The billions the public put into SVB will be recouped through hikes on the premiums paid by every bank. Well, sure — but who do you think the banks are going to gouge to cover those additional expenses? Hint: it’s not going to be the millionaires who get white-glove treatment and below-cost loans. It’ll be the working people whom the banks steal billions from every year in overdraft fees — 78% of these are paid by 9.2% of customers, the very poorest, and they amortize to a 3,500% loan:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#usurers

As Adam Levitin put it on Credit Slips:

They will pass those premiums through to customers because the market for banking services is less competitive than the market for capital. In particular, the higher costs for increased insurance premiums are likely to flow to the least price-sensitive and most “sticky” customers: less wealthy individuals. So average Joes are going to be facing things like higher account fees or lower APYs, without gaining any benefit. Instead, the benefit of removing the cap would flow entirely to wealthy individuals and businesses. This is one massive, regressive cross-subsidy. It’s not determinative of whether raising the cap is the right policy move in the end, but this is something that should be considered.

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2023/03/the-regressive-cross-subsidy-of-uncapping-deposit-insurance.html

The SVB apologists display the most curious and bizarre imaginative leaps…and imaginative failings. For them, imagining that regulators will just wing it to the tune of hundreds of billions in public money is simplicity itself. Meanwhile, imagining that those same regulators would say, “Not one penny unless every shareholder agrees to sign away their deposits” is literally impossible.

This bizarrely inconstant imagination carries over into all of the claims used to justify the SVB bailout — like, say, the claim that if SVB wasn’t bailed out, everyone would pile into too big to fail banks like Jpmorgan. This is undoubtably true — unless (and hear me out here!), regulators were to use this failure as a launchpad for public banks, and breakups of Jpmorgan, Wells Fargo, Citi, et al.

This is a very weird imaginative failure. America operated public banks. It had broken up too big to fail banks. These weren’t the deeds of a fallen civilization whose techniques were lost to the mists of time. There are literally people alive today who were around when America operated nationwide public banks — a practice that only ended in 1966! We’re not talking about recovering the lost praxis of the druids who built Stonehenge without power-tools, here.

The most telling imaginative failure of SVB apologists, though, is this: they think that people are angry that the government saved the janitors at startups and the scholarship kids at private schools, and can’t imagine that people are angry that America didn’t save anyone else. If you’re a low-income student at an elite private school, there’s billions on hand to save you — but not because the government gives a damn about you — saving you is a side effect of saving all the rich kids you go to school with.

Likewise, the startup janitors aren’t the target of the bailout — they’re overspill from the billions mobilized to rescue the personal fortunes of tech billionaires who supply VCs’ investment capital. If there was a way to bail out the startups without bailing out the janitors, that’s exactly what would happen.

How do I know this? Well, first of all, the “investors” who demanded — and received — a bailout are on record as hating workers and wanting to fire as many of them as possible. As one of the loudest voices for the bailout said of Twitter employees, in a private message to Elon Musk following the takeover: “Day zero: Sharpen your blades boys 🔪”:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/21/tech-workers/#sharpen-your-blades-boys

But there’s even better evidence that the bailout’s intended target was wealthy, powerful people, and every chance to carve out working people was seized upon. When regulators engineered the sale of SVB to First Citizens Bank, they did not require First Citizens to honor SVB’s community development obligations, killing thousands of affordable housing units that had been previously greenlit:

https://calreinvest.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Community-Benefits-Plan-SVB-CRC-GLI.pdf

Tens of thousands of people wrote to regulators, urging them to transfer SVB’s Community Benefits Plan obligation to First Citizens:

https://www.dailykos.com/campaigns/petitions/sign-the-petition-save-affordable-housing-keep-the-promises-silicon-valley-bank-made

As did Rep Maxine Waters, the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee:

https://democrats-financialservices.house.gov/uploadedfiles/318_cwm_ltr_fdic.pdf

But First Citizens — a bank whose slot in America’s top-20 banks was secured through a string of exceptions, exemptions and waivers — was not required to take on SVB’s obligations to carry out loans to build thousands of affordable housing units in the Bay Area and Boston, including a 112-unit building for people with disabilities planned for a plum spot across from San Francisco City Hall:

https://www.levernews.com/regulators-stiffed-low-income-communities-in-silicon-valley-bank-bailout/

All those people who wanted SVB’s community development obligations to carry forward vastly outnumbered the people calling for billionaires portfolio companies to be saved — but they merely spoke on behalf of people who sought the most basic of human rights — shelter. No one listened to them. Instead, it was the hyperventilating all-caps “investors” who spent SVB’s no-good weekend shouting on Twitter about the fall of civilization who got what they wanted, with a bow on top, and a glass of publicly funded warm milk before bed.

The US finance sector is reckless to the point of being criminally negligent. It constitutes an existential risk to the nation. And yet, every time it gets into trouble, regulators are able to imagine anything and everything to shift their risks to the public’s shoulders.

Meanwhile, everyday people are frozen out. School lunches? Unaffordable. Student debt cancellation? Inconceivable. Help for the hundreds of thousands of NYC schoolchildren whose schools are facing a $469m hack-and-slash attack? That’s clearly impossible:

https://council.nyc.gov/joseph-borelli/2022/09/06/nyc-council-calls-for-mayor-adams-doe-to-fully-restore-469m-in-school-funding/

When it comes to helping everyday people, American elites and their captured champions in the US government have minds that are so rigid and inflexible that it’s a wonder they can even dress themselves. But when the fortunes and wellbeing of the wealthy and powerful are on the line, their minds are so open that some of their brains actually leak out of their ears and nostrils:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/15/mon-dieu-les-guillotines/#ceci-nes-pas-une-bailout

Every bank merger is supposed to come with a “public interest analysis.” But these analyses are “perfunctory.” They needn’t be:

https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/8305/Kress_Article._Publication__1_.pdf

First Citizens got a hell of a bargain: it paid zero dollars for SVB’s assets, its deposits and its loans. Any losses it incurs from its commercial loans over the next five years will be paid by the FDIC, no questions asked. The inability of regulators to convince First Citizens to assume SVB’s community obligations along with those billions in public largesse speaks volumes.

Meanwhile, SVB’s shareholders continue to claim that their headquarters are a relatively unimportant office in Manhattan, and not their glittering, massive corporate offices in San Jose, as part of their bid to shift their bankruptcy proceeding to the Southern District of New York, where corporate criminals like the Sackler opioid family have found such a warm reception that they were able to escape “bankruptcy” with billions in the bank, while their victims were left in the cold:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/18/2-billion-here-2-billion-there/#socialism-for-the-rich

Contrary to what SVB’s apologists think, the case against them isn’t driven by spite — it’s driven by fury. America’s “socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor” has been with us for generations, but rarely is it so plain as it is in this case.

There’s only two days left in the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

[Image ID: A glass-and-steel, high-tech office building. Atop it is a cartoon figure of Humpty Dumpty, whose fall has been arrested by masses of top-hatted financiers, who hold fast to a rope that keeps him in place. At the foot of the office tower is heaped rubble. On top of the rubble is another Humpty Dumpty figure, this one shattered and dripping yolk. Protruding from the rubble are modest multi-family housing units.]

Image:

Lydia (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vicroft_Court_Starley_Housing_Co-operative_%282996695836%29.jpg

Oatsy40 (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/oatsy40/21647688003

Håkan Dahlström (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/93755244@N00/4140459965

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[mysimsloveaffair]

list 5 facts about a favorite sim of yours, and send this to simblrs whose sims you adore ʚ♡ɞ

Thanks so much for this ask! I've been hanging on to it for a while, so sorry for the delay. I realize that I haven't done one of these for Wade 'Dub' Banks since he was a child (Tumblr link). Let's see how much he's changed...

Dub has over 13 traits earned by gameplay and aspiration rewards. Notable ones include a great kisser, incredibly friendly, and cold acclimation (but you'd never guess the last one from how much he complains about cold weather).

Dub never outgrew the squeamish trait. (Let's wish him luck when it's time to change diapers.)

Dub doesn't watch much TV, but when he does, it'll almost always be a fantasy or action movie.

One of Dub's biggest regrets is welcoming Maia's cat, Luna, to the household. But he loves Maia, so he reluctantly puts up with the cat.

Dub is actively planning a few big surprises for Maia involving their future together.

Poses: Picture Perfect Poses - by ratboysims (Blogspot Link)

[sluggmuffin]

hot take jj and cleo actually have a little bit of chemistry and lowk if they were written to get together I wouldn't bat an eye cuz they're the same people in different circumstances

also hot take I don't think jj and kie are that cute??? like yay!! but also like ???? lowk out of nowhere like they didn't have chemistry until BOOM "oh em geeeeee we need go get Kiara back from singh 😈😈👹👹👹🔥🔥"

[gourde]

Just to clarify, I don't hate Palworld just cause it's clear a fair amount of the designs are stolen assets/AI generated, it's also cause it's got racist adjacent content. That bothers me the most, really. And also people saying "It isn't confirmed that the designs are AI generated" when ummm. Just look at them. There is near no thought put into them with random little "bits" slapped onto them for detail. It's just marketable. That or they steal fan designs. Also the developers previous projects include NFTs and unfinished games, one of which being a BOTW clone. Like IDK the game may be fun but I wouldn't want to support it at all???? I don't get people ignoring all this just cause it's "fun" and 4chan levels of edgy.