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Crypto Capture of Foreign Aid

https://www.nber.org/papers/w35655
77•bko•2h ago

Comments

raincom•52m ago
It is common to hear phrases such as "Mr 10 percent" as a reference to powerful leaders in various countries. For instance, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari is called "Mr 10 percent". 10 percent cut from every contract. This is not unique to Pakistan. In India, many regional party leaders (basically, they and their family own the political party) want 20 percent cut.

When one hears 2-6%, it is just the floor.

binlog•43m ago
Don’t need to look that far. The person in the White House is doing the same thing.
raincom•36m ago
The corruption elsewhere is of different order. In US, one can bid up four times normal, one at least delivers the quality. Elsewhere, roads fail, buildings fall, bridges collapse, pipes burst upon the first use, ...
glimshe•34m ago
If they are built at all.
vinyl7•31m ago
When was the last time the US built anything at all?
skizm•29m ago
We did just break ground on the new tunnel from NJ to NYC for trains. We'll see how that plays out in the next 1-2 decades.
boc•13m ago
The US manufactures more goods annually than Germany, Japan, and S. Korea combined.
williamtell•30m ago
That's quite optimistic. How many months of further development does a deal usually need to have something sizeable that can collapse?
pestatije•16m ago
during the nineties there was this joke going around in Spain:

the leaders of Germany, France, and Spain meet to discuss infrastructure...says the German chancelor: see this autobahn? 10% in my pocket...comes the French president and says: this autoroute? 20%...ha!, the Spanish prime minister says, you don't see no autopista here do you?

pj_mukh•50m ago
I know nothing about crypto, but wasn't one if its selling points that its "digital gold" for people without stable fiat currencies?

You send aid to a drought-stricken farmer to some sub-saharan region with ample cheap data but no (stable) banks, how...are they supposed to store the money?

satya71•48m ago
World Bank doesn’t typically give money to people. They fund development projects.
cucumber3732842•36m ago
This. All the perverted incentives and money wasting inefficiency of federal grant funded local projects but for poor brown people half a world away.
r721•20m ago
>They fund development projects.

So they fund wages among other things?

rfghy•43m ago
Crypto was DoA as the architect had a delulu view of humanity.
mt_•22m ago
So the best realistic alternative is what, AWS IAM for autonomous economic actors?
boc
netsharc•41m ago
From this exact blurb:

> We estimate an implied leakage ...

So the estimation became almost a fact in the title? What's the equivalent of clickbait in papers?

The rest of that sentence:

> ... of 2 to 6 cents per aid dollar, which amounts to roughly 1.7 to 4.4 billion dollars of aid diversion across the tranche arrivals we study.

BeetleB•37m ago
This submission is not following HN news for submission titles.

This isn't a clickbait in the paper, but by the submitter.

dfpojsdf•36m ago
Why does literally every single item on Hackernews have some replyguy screaming about clickbait? Is there therapy for that? Do you understand how headlines work? What part of 2 to 6 looks like "not an estimation"?
Dylan16807•28m ago
Edit: HN title used to be "Around 2-6% of World Bank foreign aid got siphoned into crypto wallets"

Original post: While you're being rude and it would be worth cutting the first half of your comment, that's a good point that "2-6%" is still clearly an estimation.

xrd•31m ago
This is relevant:

https://theleahfiles.substack.com/p/the-currency-killer-part...

Did you know Tether (cryptocurrency company) is in the top 20 USD treasury holders, more than most countries?

And Lutnick is the manager of those funds, or his sons are (silly mistake!) because he divested completely.

Lerc•17m ago
Does the movement of money increase when foreign aid is distributed? If you were to assume the proposition of the proponents of cryptocurrency that it works in a manner similar to money, wouldn't the evidence provided here also support the conclusion that it is working as intended?

If you can imagine a valid world in which a measure is an indicator of a property and also imagine a valid world in which the same measure is an indicator of its inverse, all you have done is proven that the measure cannot be used to determine the truth of the property.

•
10m ago
May I present to you the humble briefcase full of cash?
phlakaton•16m ago
Crypto has been sold many many ways, but most of it is not a stable store of value.

Stablecoins are what are supposed to be stable sources of value, but Zeke Faux's book Number Go Up points out how opaque and unaccountable the companies managing these currencies are. From his reporting, their "tractor app" appears to be not so much farmers in sub-saharan Africa receiving aid payments but criminals looking for anonymous ways to transfer lots of money.

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Crypto Capture of Foreign Aid

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