26 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2025
  2. Oct 2024
  3. Aug 2023
    1. highlights the dire financial circumstances of the poorest individuals, who resort to high-interest loans as a survival strategy. This phenomenon reflects the interplay between human decision-making and development policy. The decision to take such loans, driven by immediate needs, illustrates how cognitive biases and limited options impact choices. From a policy perspective, addressing this issue requires understanding these behavioral nuances and crafting interventions that provide sustainable alternatives, fostering financial inclusion and breaking the cycle of high-interest debt.

  4. Aug 2022
  5. Jun 2022
    1. Loans in the crypto world tend to be overcollateralized, requiring users to put up more value in crypto than what they receive in a loan. Although this works reasonably well for users who have already accumulated capital and want to use that capital in a different format (i.e. borrowing fiat currency against their crypto holdings), it doesn’t work well for the more standard reason people take out loans: because they don’t already have the money they need. Needless to say in an ecosystem whose advocates like to promise will “bank the unbanked” and help the marginalized, this is a bit of a setback. The need for these overcollateralized loans again stems from a lack of indicators to a person’s trustworthiness like those that are used in traditional finance, such as credit scores or banking records. Overcollateralized crypto loans are also made even more necessary on some anonymity-preserving loan platforms that choose not to require know-your-customer (KYC), who otherwise would see an influx of anonymous users borrowing money and making off with it.

      A consequence of not being able to narrow down who is behind an address is that the risk of loaning that address money goes up. This is expressed in highly collaterized loans.

      The permissionless network lowers the barrier for entry for people around the world to get access to finance, but the lack of a barrier increases the risk for the one granting a loan.

  6. Mar 2022
  7. Mar 2021
  8. Feb 2021
  9. Jul 2020
  10. Aug 2019
  11. Sep 2018
  12. May 2018
    1. However, although these sub-optimal choices are less prevalent among our sample, once again, they are disproportionately made by those who hold student loans and work the most. Indeed, one can easily conceive of a negative cycle wherein the need to work more hours in order to pay for tuition and textbooks necessitates taking fewer courses, an outcome that delays graduation and requires taking on more student loan debt. Alternatively, cash-strapped students might elect to do without one or more required textbooks. However, in this scenario it would not be surprising for them to perform more poorly (as was reported by nearly a third of respondents in the present study), an outcome that might necessitate repeating a course, once again resulting in a delayed graduation and the accumulation of more student loan debt.
  13. Apr 2018
  14. Jan 2018
  15. Feb 2017
  16. Jan 2016
  17. Feb 2014
    1. As long as the income was incoming, we were happy to trade funding our institutions with our money (tuition and endowment) for funding it with other people’s money (loans and grants.) And so long as college remained a source of cheap and effective job credentials, our new sources of support—students with loans, governments with research agendas—were happy to let us regard ourselves as priests instead of service workers.