If it is not absurd to talk about digital money, it certainly isn't absurd to talk about digital credit ratings. In fact, there are good reasons to move towards a digital credit rating system sooner rather than later. Here are three:- Digital talks to machines as...

Last week, a press release announced the launch of a credit scoring application of AI to natural-language processing and news media text analytics. Reading it, I wondered how many people had the confidence in their judgment to parse the offering. Just because a tool uses...

In a recent Thomas Day posting about the recent bond sell-off triggering concerns about the maturing low IG debt at the median of the issuer distribution for US, European and other credit markets. Is it really still BBB? Was it ever really BBB? asks Dr. Chris Donegan CDO markets around...

Charlan Nemeth teaches graduate level psychology at UC Berkeley. She has conducted scholarly research on the psychology and impact of dissent on decision-making in different professional settings (courtroom, laboratory, new business ventures) for decades. In 2018, she published the definitive synthesis of her findings in a...

In his autobiography, Henning Mankell as he was battling cancer wrote of a famous family portrait from the early 1770s. Gathered around Gustaf Frederik Hjortberg are his wife Anna Helena and their fifteen children, including the ones already dead. Mankell wrote,  Their brief visit to this earth was...

To Boomers, shave and a haircut, two bits brings back memories of Looney Tunes. It's also the essence of what is wrong with structured finance credit ratings. Wait, do structured finance credit ratings still need fixing? Many assume the answer is "no" because the causes of the GFC are no...

Michael Bright, the incoming president and CEO of SFIG, the U.S. securitization lobby, has pledged "to provide meaningful education, advocacy, and connection for our members across all aspects of securitization.” The former EVP and COO of GNMA established his mortgage credentials working for former Senator Corker...

There are a lot of theories being floated on how to effect financial system stability. Most involve separating money from finance. Reverence for money or cash is evident in the Chicago School of economics and neoliberalism, where value theory is based on price. It also underlies theories that equate banks...

ABSTRACT: Sylvain Raynes experimented with a method developed by Goya and Boyarski (1993) to standardize the synthesis of conditional Markov transition matrices for deal entry in our automated re-rating system, ABSTRAK®. In the analytical literature, the reverse-engineering of a Markov matrix from its spectral-radius eigenvector is referred to as the Inverse Perron-Frobenius...