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Comment by H8crilA | Hacker News Reader

Remember that when it comes to personal credit scores (or even pricing of corporate debt) the IMF is no more important than, say, the Harvard econ department. They have no authority over such matters. It's just research.

Pricing of sovereign debt, particularly of more "problematic" countries, yeah - that's their purpose/business.

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>They have no authority over such matters. It's just research.

You are right. They do not, directly. But, never underestimate bureaucrats hunger for control. This "just research", if it can be used as a cudgel, it will. The IMF dictates many many things through its financial tentacles that impacts individuals to the extreme. Just look talk to some who are from countries where IMF came and helped out.

Yes, and it gives us a view into the headspace of the people in the finance industry. It’s true, these researchers don’t have direct power, but they do have influence. And that can be dangerous too.

This quote from the article is very illustrative:

> institutional banking system is facing a serious threat from tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple. The researchers identify two key areas in which this is true: Tech companies have greater access to soft-information, and messaging platforms can take the place of the physical locations that banks rely on for meeting with customers

This tells me that there are people in the finance industry that think that they are the underdog. They just want the same access to information big tech companies already have so that they could cut the little guy a better deal. If only governments and regulators could see that. Wouldn’t we live in a better world?

They don’t think that this could usher in a financial version of 1984 because they’re optimistic in the same way that Mark Zuckerberg was optimistic that making a social networking site to connect people together would be utopian.

These researchers are going to impart this idea on students and their colleagues, eventually someone is going to go into government with complete faith that giving financial institutions very fine grained information on citizens is in everyone’s best interests. That is what is dangerous about this.

The reason why credit rating agencies have strict limits on what kind of information they can use is because for the first 50-75 years they were totally abusive. What the IMF want's isn't a return to that, but something worse. Where a mere interest in a subject has an effect on your finances.

Currently: Friend of mine had HepC. And then liver cancer. Reading up on that online? The blowback was just some annoying targeted ads.

IMF Future: You get denied a loan or have to pay higher rates because you were reading up on HepC.

The IMF is hardly the "finance industry". It deals exclusively with countries, and serves as the lender of last resort to nations denied by the private markets, or who want better rates in exchange for structural adjustment.

There are no 'students' at the IMF, and their 'colleagues' (e.g. the World Bank staff) similarly do not deal with the internal policies of first world nations.

Simply put, this isn't a slippery slope to anywhere, its just a research paper.

They have quite a pull in influencing governments, and if IMF will say "you need to implement social credit system if you want our help", there is not a lot of governments that will say no. Especially in "problematic" countries.

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