Map the Banks

http://mapthebanks.com/

by chippy • 12 years ago

323 96 12 years ago

mapthebanks.com

dev1n• 12 years ago

when I click the "sign up for a mission button" it sends me to an unsecured page to create a profile. should be

https://missions.opencorporates.com/

inglesp5• 12 years ago

Thanks for reporting this -- we'll get this fixed soon.

jdmichal2• 12 years ago

Unless I'm not seeing some other visualization of the data, I don't really see how correlating companies to physical locations helps a whole lot, and was not what I expected to be the goal when I started reading. The pain point that needs to be addressed is "too big to fail", but mapping to physical location does nothing to help that.

A more conceptual map showing, for instance, the players in the mortgage space, their relative size, and how they generally interact would actually be a step towards solving the problem. Now how to gather information like THAT is a whole other question.

As a concrete example: Most of the major home insurers have offices in Florida, but don't actually write policies. Who is actually writing these policies? If we have everything tracing back to a single policy writer, then we have a major problem.

andrewstuart2• 12 years ago

This is apparently only the first step.

Governments and regulators are releasing huge amounts of data. Collecting, publishing & linking it to company data will give us the global picture of the finance sector.
OpenCorporates' mission is to bring this data into the open. This is a gargantuan task, so we thought we'd start with a single step: gather data about which companies are permitted to carry out what financial activities, where.

jdmichal2• 12 years ago

Ah, thanks. I did miss that indicator that this is only the first step.

shampine• 12 years ago

Great example of this was the map they built that show links to subsidiaries and others: http://opencorporates.com/viz/financial

BrandonMarc• 12 years ago

I agree with addressing the "too big to fail" pain point, and I think a conceptual map to help with that ought to include:

* industry players & interactions

* political donations

* relationships between corporate executives, K street (lobbyists), congress critters, legislative staffers, interns

* relationships between regulatory agency executives, K street, congress critters, legislative staffers, interns

* former (and potential) primary candidates in the congress critters' districts

* a scatterplot of how a given congress critter voted on various related issues, as well as which of their votes (related or not) are out of sync with the voters in their district

Now that's a useful tool right there. Probably a pipe dream ... ah well.

sailfast• 12 years ago

This seems like a good idea, but when I look for source data for the United States I'm seeing state-level groups and no "missions" to parse additional U.S data.

Anybody know if there's a plan to use the more available Federal regulatory data for places such as the United States? Example: https://www2.fdic.gov/idasp/warp_download_all.asp

ChrisTaggart3• 12 years ago

[Chris from OpenCorporates] This mission is specifically about bank and financial licences, as opposed to physical bank branch locations, which is slightly different (though related). We think this dataset is an essential foundation for such datasets, and others. It also links the banks to company records, and from that to potentially other data, from political contributions/lobbying to corporate networks (see https://opencorporates.com/viz/financial/index.html -- some of this data came from the National Information Center, which is a joint project of the US banking regulators).

However, if you think there's a company-related government dataset that should be scraped, please do go ahead and use turbot.opencorporates.com for that -- it's already been used for everything from civil aircraft registrations to mining licences to NHS Providers.

drcode3• 12 years ago

Any entities that earn undeserved profits (and some will argue many financial institutions fall under this umbrella) want to stay invisible and opaque to maximize these earnings. I think a case can be made that a substantial percentage of profits earned by the financial industry derive from economic "rent seeking" and are not materially contributing to productivity in society.

I like this attempt to disinfect this mess with some sunlight, though at the end of the day the only way to truly solve these problems (as they may exist) will be for all of us to stop being willing participants in the system. I believe strongly that technology will offer solutions for this in the near future.

branchless2• 12 years ago

Agree with the sentiment. Not sure about the tech bit. Tech has allowed banks to industrialize rent-seeking.

drcode3• 12 years ago

I agree technology can make things go either way and the jury is still out.

5252• 12 years ago

Having technology perform many of the functions that front-office staff have traditionally done, allows banks to improve their efficiency - industrialise as you say.

However, it also allows the financial industry to become commoditiesed and lowers the barriers to entry. You only need to walk down the City of London to see the sheer number of banks form all over the world. They all compete (except when they collude) and drive down prices. Secondly, you also start seeing large corporates doing their own banking - what does a bank to that BP can't do on their own?

minimax• 12 years ago

I think a case can be made that a substantial percentage of profits earned by the financial industry derive from economic "rent seeking" and are not materially contributing to productivity in society.

This is a hugely popular sentiment in the wake of the financial crisis, but do you actually have some examples of rent seeking activity by banks in 2014 that is emblematic of this? Your modern megabank takes in billions of dollars in profits per quarter and I'm just curious where the rent seeking shakes out in all of that.

pyre• 12 years ago

I'm not sure if I would call it "rent-seeking," but there is still stuff like this[1] turning up...

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/id/101482959

lmm• 12 years ago

This is a hugely popular sentiment in the wake of the financial crisis, but do you actually have some examples of rent seeking activity by banks in 2014 that is emblematic of this?

The Goldman LME aluminium warehousing, where they paid people to deposit aluminium with them to inflate the length of the queue to get aluminium out, so that the queue was longer and they could charge more (literal!) rent before people eventually got their aluminium out.

Your modern megabank takes in billions of dollars in profits per quarter and I'm just curious where the rent seeking shakes out in all of that.

I have a thesis that every megacorp turns to rent seeking, because they're too rigid to innovate. But yeah, I suspect it's a small proportion of the profit of the financial industry as a whole. A lot of people want to buy and sell stuff, so there's a lot of money to be made in even a slim margin there.

danielnaab• 12 years ago

This doesn't directly address your question, but the "financialization" [0] of the economy has gotten us to the point where 9% of GDP (as of 2012) is consumed by the finance sector [1].

It's certainly conceivable that the risk management Wall Street provides has led to economic growth, but considering the systemic instability that led to the 2008 crash, I take that claim with a grain of salt.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization [1]: http://tcf.org/blog/detail/graph-how-the-financial-sector-co...

rcarrigan872• 12 years ago

LIBOR manipulation (which many banks confessed to), FOREX manipulation (ongoing scandal), Goldman's Aluminum debacle and other commodity rigging.

These are just the ones I'm familiar with. I believe it's 80-20. 20% of banks profits are rent-seeking behavior. If we compare this with megacorps in general I'm sure some of their bottom-line is also from rent-seeking behavior.

Edit: additional thought: Rent-seeking is child's play when you consider too-big-to-fail, too-big-to-jail.

driverdan• 12 years ago

Any entities that earn undeserved profits (and some will argue many financial institutions fall under this umbrella)

Some people will argue for just about any absurd personal opinion. It doesn't mean it's correct or that it has any merit.

I think a case can be made that a substantial percentage of profits earned by the financial industry derive from economic "rent seeking" and are not materially contributing to productivity in society.

Even if this is true so what? What's your point? A lot of businesses don't contribute to productivity nor do they need to.

jevgeni5• 12 years ago

Absolutely this.

001sky• 12 years ago

Not so fast. Banks are in positions of trust which are easy to abuse. That is a different animal than some ex-im guy selling widgets at a huge market to people who don't know better. Not onlly are they in positions to exploit their delegated trust in the information flow of major economies, they are also in positions that allow them to exploit both their data and verious mechanisms of market micro-structure through the revolving door relationship with the regulatory infrastructure. In other words, nobody outside of finance really has a clue about how to regulate a bank...and 9/10 bankers barely have a clue about anything in the bank that they don't directly deal with. This limits the amount of people that are feasible to regulate these banks. Which means that being a senior executive is in an of itself a pathway to exploit this type of second derivative opportunity that comes from holding onto a scarce commodity that is on the one hand in high demand by the enforcemnet patrons in government, and on the other hand, can be exploited in and of its own right through various commercial channels both legitimate and less so.

drcode3• 12 years ago

Well, banks are earning money, and if it ends up this money is essentially just a "gift" to banks from the rest of us in society, that's a problem.

If you object and say "but they deserve these profits!" then you're arguing that they are contributing to productivity (and then the profits would be fine)

crimsoneer• 12 years ago

If there was such a thing as "undeserved profits", then we'd all be getting in line to grab some...

harkyns_castle• 12 years ago

I'm not clear on how this helps. I mean, the corrupt machinations would happen on the level of mouth-to-mouth conversations, I would guess, and not reported on a website. Won't this just show a massive blob of datapoints near Wall St and anywhere Goldman Sachs et al have metastasized? Not sure how, or what, connections will be shown/determined. I suspect they're pretty good at hiding things by now and have regulated away any glaring holes that might've been in the public domain.

chippy3• 12 years ago

It's transparency, it all helps (especially when the data is there but no one has made the connections before).

In other words: "Follow the money"

chippy3• 12 years ago

This site is from OpenCorporates - have a look at their mission here: https://opencorporates.com/info/principles

Edits: Here is the blog post announcing the project:

http://blog.opencorporates.com/2014/12/10/launching-map-the-...

From the post:

* Which companies have debt collection operations in other jurisdictions? Even with the small amount of data already collected, we know there are at least 178 financial services companies from India that operate in the US.

* Which countries have the most financial services outsourced to them?

* What companies are licenced to operate in the largest number of countries worldwide?

* Which US bank has the most consumer credit licences in Asia?

* Which organisations appear to operate like financial services companies, yet aren’t regulated as such?

* Where are credit unions being dissolved or created the fastest?

7Figures2Commas• 12 years ago

We believe there is a social contract between citizens (represented by the state) and companies. The state permits companies to carry out activities like banking or debt collection; in return, these companies agree to meet certain standards of behaviour: for example, only lending to people who can afford the debt, or backing their promises with a certain amount of assets.

This is a bizarre statement that simply isn't true. Historically, the state has just as frequently encouraged lenders to lend to people who couldn't otherwise afford what they were purchasing. This has been done through legislation like the Community Reinvestment Act, as well as government-sponsored entities such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And the state is still doing it[1].

[1] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/feds-hope-3-down-mortgages-...

JackFr2• 12 years ago

Historically, the state has just as frequently encouraged lenders to lend to people who couldn't otherwise afford what they were purchasing.

Most often that person was the state itself . . .

solaarphunk• 12 years ago

This seems a little misguided, seeing as how the financial crisis had many actors including regulators, home loan originators, academics which attributed far too much strength to certain portfolio management methodologies and models. Certainly there were actors within banks who were also corrupting the financial system, but in no way were they alone in the destruction of wealth.

xnull2guest• 12 years ago

And the rating industry, and geopolitical actors, and the World Bank, and hedge funds, etc, etc. I absolutely agree. But I'm afraid this could get into perfect being the enemy of the good territory. Unfortunately no model is going to be complete - even including these primary actors you would need to eventually model entire populations to capture macro-scale effects of the markets at play.

I don't think they need to be so perfect, however. Teasing out this sort of information ('mapping it') is not going to be a panacea that can detect all fraud. But it will probably be a useful tool to human experts who can combine knowledge from a partial map with information from other sources and a generally mature understanding of the industry.

bicknergseng• 12 years ago

From another comment:

>It's transparency, it all helps

Sorta pedantic and not picking on that comment so much as the CA Prop 65/label GMOs/Citizens United world that we live in: transparency might not be a real solution or means of achieving some goal. Increasing transparency and generating more data when there is already a very low signal to noise ratio and an even lower impetus to act on actual signal feels like a waste of time and energy. For example, we don't need any more data about NSA privacy invasions or CIA torture or effective criminal wrongdoing on the part of the financial industry; we know there is willing, flagrant illegal activity, yet modern society (not just American society, mind you) is unwilling or incapable of doing anything about it.

So what will more data get us? Seems like a waste of time if the desired outcome is change.

chippy3• 12 years ago

So the rationale is that if you want change the first thing is to identify what needs changing. If you want changing in the world of international banking, you should understand the world of international banking, right?

Now, that does depends on the level of "change" as revolution can simply ignore the current state and wipe the slate clean, but I would imagine that understanding how the system operates is not a waste of time if you want to change the system (and not remove it).

notahacker• 12 years ago

The cynic in me thinks that despite the tone of the presentation, this dataset and the way it's structured is vastly more useful for creating marketing plans to sell services to the financial sector than for encouraging responsibility in the financial sector.

jevgeni5• 12 years ago

In all honesty, I can't think of how this data can be used for anything else.

cm2187• 12 years ago

I am skeptical too about the relevance of this effort. But there is one thing it can be useful for, is to track the size of the shadow banking sector which is growing on the back of tougher regulations that force banks out of many activities.

But the shadow banking sector is already on the regulators radars so I am not sure what this is going to achieve.

pyrocat• 12 years ago

http://mapthebanks.com/#section-why-does-this-matter

first time I've seen CSS3 columns in the wild, pretty neat.

johnlbevan2• 12 years ago

https://www.google.com/maps/search/bank

reqres2• 12 years ago

I'd love to contribute to this project, especially since I wasted years of my life mining and forecasting data on financial institutions - it would be nice to put that skill to a good cause. But if the goal is really to make financial institutions more accountable, my years of experience working in the industry tell me this will be a largely fruitless exercise. I expect the yield on mining public data for that nugget of information to nail a financial institution is going to be extremely low if not nil.

Financial institutions only have to disclose the highest, most superficial levels of information to the public when it comes to the breakdown/allocation of their assets and liabilities. If you open up central bank data or the notes to a FI's financial statements, you will not find a meaningful delineation of where a banks assets are or what risk profiles they have.

Having worked in a very large commercial/investment bank and directly with the CFO, I know first hand that although banks avoid doing anything illegal, they will have no qualms with bending the rules in their favour. Most well run banks know exactly which rules are being bent and they will know exactly how to classify it in any public submission to prevent any smell. They have large finance and investor relations teams who pore over every decimal point in any report and have prepared answers to virtually all regulator questions.

The information you need to properly regulate banks are not in the public domain.

Take the last financial crisis for example. I don't think any publicly available financial statement or report would have told you that banks were holding onto a tremendous volume subprime mortgages classed as 'AAA'. This only emerged when huge holes appeared in balance sheets when the US economy slowed and a whole bunch of assets had to be written off.

The kind of remedy required to mitigate the chance of another crisis is a systemic overhaul of how banks are allowed to operate and how they are regulated. I'm sorry, but holding them to account with data provided by banks themselves will not yield much result.

EDIT: Sorry for being a jerk/cynic about this effort. I'm actually a big fan of OpenCorporates. But I'm still a bit disillusioned having quit in 2011.

5252• 12 years ago

Things are changing. If I understand Dodd-Frank/EMIR correctly, every OTC derivatives trade now has to be reported to the regulator within something like 15 minutes (or was it 15 days?).

Anyways, the regulators now will have a pretty complete picture of what each bank holds, at least for a single asset-class.

Though, I suspect information on exchange traded stocks, and centrally cleared swaps are also available to the regulators, via the respective exchanges and execution facilities.

dodders2• 12 years ago

15 minutes for electronically confirmed swaps.

In reality, the swap data repositories are finding the data submitted by each institution very difficult to reconcile - it's a step in the right direction but the goal of constructing a full representation of each financial institution's derivatives exposure is still a way off.

nl• 12 years ago

This is absolutely true.

But that doesn't make it useless. Merely having lists is an important step.

For example, I do a lot of work with unstructured text (eg, news reports, transcripts). Having a list of names of financial entities means it is possible to link statements made by office holders to their entities much easier.

But again, this doesn't fix the financial disclosure problem..

ypeterholmes• 12 years ago

I agree. The real benefit here will be a more coherent and digestible understanding these entities and their relationships, such that other actions can build off it. Using this data itself to litigate is a non-starter.

chernevik• 12 years ago

This.

Banks are inherently opaque -- in many cases their own management doesn't understand their own balance sheet.

One of the great changes over the past few decades has been the migration of investment banks from partnerships to public equity structures. When an investment bank was a partnership, its "shareholders" were bankers and former bankers, with a deep understanding of the assets and liabilities _and_ of the ways in which management could manipulate their accounting. Those owners were highly incentivized to make sure the bank was properly run, as much of their wealth was tied up in that equity, which was in an illiquid form that couldn't easily be sold or hedged.

The commercial banks were always public equity, but until a few decades ago generally took considerably less risk.

Investment bank managements have since discovered that the public markets were willing to provide plenty of capital, with much less rigorous and careful oversight. So they've migrated those partnership structures to public equity, which enables much larger and riskier balance sheets.

If we were seriously interested in regulating these institutions, we'd require them to be partnerships in the old form. Nothing unconstitutional about it, the Fed could make such structure a requirement for access to its desk. Yes, we'd have much smaller banks, and less liquid markets, but their self-regulation would be far better.

MaysonL• 12 years ago

although banks avoid doing anything illegal

And how many billions of dollars in fines and settlements have all those big banks paid in the past year for all those legal acts they've committed?

At the end, many of the "AAA" mortgage-backed securities were fraudulent: backed by "liars' loans" backed by fraudulently inflated appraisals, and fraudulent statements of buyers' ability to pay.

reqres2• 12 years ago

Contrary to media perception, the FI I worked with did put a huge amount of resources into preventing illegal activity. Of course trying to avoid legal trouble doesn't necessarily prevent it.

In my brief and painful experience, FIs genuinely do avoid breaking the law. But they don't mind breaking the spirit of the law by finding a way around it.

rcarrigan872• 12 years ago

Bankers don't really care about fines. Sure $16B here or there hurts, but as long as no one goes to jail most of those losses are absorbed by shareholders. Top management already got their bonuses.

I've seen some argue that the sheer volume and complexity of financial law actually makes it easier for bankers to find loop-holes and insulate themselves. I'm not familiar enough to truly judge the truth in that theory.

ogig• 12 years ago

I'm positive banks here in Spain were doing illegal stuff. And most likely still are if you ask me.

Just google about the very recent case of Rodrigo Rato and Bankia. That man was our Minister for Economy for 8 years and also head of the FMI for a smaller period. Bankia faked its own accounts prior stock listing at IBEX, among other beautys. It's a comic read if you are into that kind of stuff.

I understand what you ment, it just doesn't apply here. In fact, i think there is a market with reclamations to banks on behalf of clients.

lifeisstillgood• 12 years ago

I am interested in "no-one" knew versus my (anecdotally limited) understanding of "well we the ratings agencies all knew we just were not allowed to tell by our bosses"

It seems the sub prime mortgage problem was an industry open secret, it's just that short of regulator action it was not clear what to do. And as we prosecuted nobody the next crises will have fewer whistleblowers.

But I am interested in what might be solutions to regulation - should global financial transparency be a goal? Should removing excess profit from banking be a goal?

I look forward to Lord Turners book.

patrickdavey• 12 years ago

Yip - may I recommend "Treasure Islands" : http://www.amazon.com/Treasure-Islands-Uncovering-Offshore-B...

Really really interesting, and quite disheartening.

crucialfelix• 12 years ago

True, but this project is mapping that public opaque surface and providing a foundation for examining other datasets.

Imagine if in the future there is leaked dataset. That can then be analyzed using the subsidiary and location information assembled here. Or to note what the public financial statements were and to notice anomalies compared to the leaked dataset.

Its really about keeping track of who all the players in the game are and tracing connections between them.

yourapostasy• 12 years ago

Your input is absolutely spot-on. IMHO, MapTheBanks should be enticing people to join to make it faster and easier to perform the kind of Palantir-like big data intelligence analysis upon relationships between entities that make it feasible to identify influences. Hoping to "nail" someone for their part in the crisis is interesting and looking to the past that cannot be changed.

More forward-looking is the following. Make it easy for the public to formulate queries and datamine against a structured dataset and unstructured data to accrete competing, evolving intelligence analysis models (that square off in prediction markets for rankings) of market entities (including individual executive participants).

This could be a far more powerful deterrent against activities that have bad optics than any regulatory framework. It can also drive a useful feedback mechanism to tell the regulators (via a mass of competing models all screaming for it) what objective data is needed to refine the models' predictive capabilities when backtesting revealed data in the aftermath of market failures like 2008.

OpenCorporates could get some funds by running the exchange services for the prediction markets, and/or setting a small fixed cut for supplying the platform to intelligence analyst teams that use the system for selling competitive intelligence analysis services to anyone who wants them to focus on a specific detail using their specific model (perhaps through metering API access to the data and processing instead of only GUI-level notebook-style access).

jmnicolas• 12 years ago

There was this French lottery slogan which roughly said "100% of our winners tried their luck".

If we don't try to make financial institutions accountable, one thing is certain : it will not happen.

ha292• 12 years ago

naive nonsense

inglesp5• 12 years ago

Hi HN,

I work for OpenCorporates, the team behind this, and we were planning to do a "Show HN" in the next couple of days, once we'd got a few wrinkles sorted out.

In the meantime, I'll be around for a bit and try to answer any questions.

samstave2• 12 years ago

So tangential, but germane: What if anything have you learned about all the banker deaths in the last ~24 months. Do you think, as some do, that its just given the population-size of the banking sector, these deaths are all normal? Or do you think there is a wider story here? Or do you not know what I am talking about? [1]

[1]This is not an authoritative list, and I have never read this particular site, but its one of the first on google: http://www.hangthebankers.com/48-suspicious-banking-deaths/

imron• 12 years ago

One of those wrinkles is the mobile experience of your site, which is currently almost unusable - a big chunk of navigation always taking up the top 3/4 of the screen, and then a tiny fraction of scrollable content.

inglesp5• 12 years ago

Yep, we know!

moriokumura• 12 years ago

What' the source of world map? I'm surprised you are listing Somaliland and Northern Cyprus as an independent nation, but not listing some little nations. (e.g. Vatican, Andorra)

mipapage2• 12 years ago

I'd like to follow you somehow (no time like the future!), but no email signup and no sign of twitter. Suggestions?

inglesp5• 12 years ago

We're @opencorporates on twitter, and I'll make sure we add a link to that from mapthebanks.com later today.

PeterisP2• 12 years ago

The site fails to achieve the goal of enticing contribution - the only option to actually contribute is a link to the 'missions' page that has only a single mission regarding Bolivia that doesn't interest me at all.

Furthermore, dedicated crawler isn't needed in many smaller (or more centralised/regulated?) markets where there are only a few players. E.g. in Latvia there are less than 30 credit institutions, and as the published data is freeform, not machine readable (http://fktk.lv/en/market/credit_institutions/banks1/ etc), then simply copy/pasting the info would be much quicker than testing a scraper.

fhadley• 12 years ago

can you explain more about how you want "coders" to do "missions", but you're charging 20k/yr for access to part of the data, and you have an obnoxiously low rate limit? are you bloomberg? I think we should all stick with quandl for now. But seriously though, it's disingenuous to brand yourself as "open data" but not offer bulk downloads and a realistic API limit.

bernardom2• 12 years ago

A really good place to start (before scraping various data sources) would be to explain how the output will be organized.

For example, it looks from the bottom of the map that they're classifying institutions as:

* Consumer Credit

* Other

* Mortgage

* Debt Collection

* Bank/Trust

* Insurer

* Authorized Agent

* Mutual/Co-op/Credit Union

What is the rationale for this classification scheme? Are there going to be second level classifications? For example, most large commercial bank/trusts have mortgage arms, consumer credit arms (credit cards and other lines of credit), consumer debt, wealth management, etc.

Hell, take just one sub-industry: wealth management. A large bank will have a trust department ("private wealth" or "private banking"), a Registered Investment Advisor (RIA), and a Broker/Dealer. They're sometimes completely separately managed. They're different legal entities and regulated by different government organs (FINRA for the broker/dealer and the OCC/SEC for the other two). And that's just wealth management.

Just getting a zoology of financial institutions would be a great start.

ChrisTaggart3• 12 years ago

Hi, Chris from OpenCorporates. We're also getting the native classifications, i.e. those given by each regulators, and in a sense these are mappings. When researching this, the are many, many different classifications (particularly in the consumer finance and shadow banking area), and one of the side benefits this will surface those classifications, laying one of the foundations for a more formal ontology.

samstave2• 12 years ago

Where do I learn more about shadow banking?

bernardom2• 12 years ago

Cool- thanks for the response.

The only thing I'll add is that there are very useful classifications beyond how the regulators see it. That data are much harder to get, but very useful. For example, RIAs are a world unto themselves, but they can be reasonably segmented in a few different ways: subadvisors vs direct advisors, asset gatherers vs. asset managers, use open architecture vs. not.

femto• 12 years ago

Is SIRCA-Tech [1] relevant here? SIRCA is (was?) an Australian university organisation, that collects financial data for research purposes. I gather that it has outgrown its humble beginnings to be come one of the world's largest collections of international financial data. Perhaps Map the Banks could access this data by hitching up with a local university?

[1] http://www.sirca.org.au/

_mikz• 12 years ago

* I missed my mission for Czech Republic

* even when I found the data to be scraped, I did not what/where to scrape

* if you are Czech, I just submitted a mission: https://www.cnb.cz/cnb/jerrs_en

inglesp5• 12 years ago

I don't see your submitted mission in the system, and the link in your post seems broken. Do let me know if you're having any problems.

doczoidberg• 12 years ago

The financial crisis cost society 4 trillion dollars

is there any source for this?

herah2• 12 years ago

We found lots of different estimates ranging from 4 trillion to 12.8 trillion dollars and chose to use the conservative figure.

Better Market estimated at 12.8 trillion: http://bettermarkets.com/sites/default/files/Cost%20Of%20The...

IMF said $4 trillion dollar: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2009/01/pdf/text.pdf

On reflection, Perhps we should perhaps have gone with a higher figure, but chose the conservative figure'. So, we are thinking of increasing the "4 trillion" to "over 10 trillion" to reflect a mid-point between the variation in estimates. Thanks for pointing it out!

JackFr2• 12 years ago

Yeah, but the bulk $12 trillion number is unrealized GDP, due to the recession. If your going to count that, you need to count the excess GDP generated in the years leading up to the crisis by free and easy credit as the bubble inflated.

Here's the irony, banks needed to be bailed out because they were sitting on bad assets. The bad assets typically were mortgages which were not being paid. But the loans had been made -- that money was sloshing around the economy all though 2004-2007. That isn't to say people who took vacations on cash-out mortgage refi's are the bad guy. I don't think they are.

My take is the large financial crisis, that is the giant asset bubble which burst in 2008 was ultimate caused by many players, both small and large, making (in retrospect) imprudent decisions in good faith.

I am all for outing fraud and market rigging, and all sorts of other illicit shenanigans, but the crisis itself was brought on by credit and leverage, like every other crisis before it.

suprgeek• 12 years ago

This is a laudable effort to bring more facts to light concerning banks & other financial institutions.

Just don't expect it make a whit of difference to the "Social Contract" that is mentioned.

As long as "Too-Big-to-Fail" and the like exists, Banks & other financial institutions have incredible (almost unimaginable) power & influence over the state [1] at least in the USA. There is revolving door between Federal officials in Treasury and the Federal Reserve etc and big banks such as Citigroup & Goldman Sachs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJpTxONxvoo

p_eter_p• 12 years ago

It seems odd that the source for the completed bots is not available. I would think many of the solutions would be substantially similar. Is there any plan to open source these?

logn• 12 years ago

They're selling API access and the data:

https://opencorporates.com/products

snarkyturtle• 12 years ago

Some of the css is sorta wonky, and moving the map causes it to be cut-off at weird places.

My recommendation is to use calc along with vh:

.map-application { height: 100vh; }

#map { height: calc(100% - 13em); //100% - height of .info-bar }

free2rhyme214• 12 years ago

The Builderberg Group, CFR, TC, RIIA, Club of Rome and the Round Table care 0% if banks are documented. This is nice in theory but there's a reason why no one has been able to do much of anything about this for years now.

The banking industry won't be "disrupted" until the financial system collapses.

jevgeni5• 12 years ago

First of all it's "Bilderberg". Secondly, did aliens really shoot Kennedy?

jevgeni5• 12 years ago

So, I have to write scrapers for someone who would try to "disrupt" banks for free?

collyw2• 12 years ago

You don't have to.

I am thinking about it, as a lot of job ads want to see some examples of your work, and my stuff is all in house. If the code is going to a good cause, why not.

PeterisP2• 12 years ago

This is still closed in-house code - as much as I looked on the site, the code of completed missions isn't actually available to anyone other than the "opencorporates.com" company (Chrinon Ltd - https://opencorporates.com/info/licence), so this wouldn't be useful as 'examples of your work' at all.

They do claim on the legal page that "we agree to make it available via the world wide web or analogous means under a licence with at most share-alike and attribution restrictions" but I haven't actually managed to find any of the code for the completed missions.

Am I missing something?

hessenwolf• 12 years ago

What on Earth is the map supposed to do? I click on it and data appear along the bottom? Am I missing something? Why is it all red? My eyes burn. How useful is this data without quality control? How sustainable is the project? Did it come out of a hackathon, or is it part of an organisation?

rmc• 12 years ago

OpenStreetMap has ~165,000 banks mapped and tagged. http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/amenity=bank

This might be another data source (thought I think the OP knows ;) )

andrelaszlo• 12 years ago

...with boughs of holly?

ErikRogneby• 12 years ago

I wasn't familiar with https://opencorporates.com/ - It looks like a great resource.

known• 12 years ago

Brilliant site

bluishgreen• 12 years ago

To all the naysayers, I say this: Think of this as a data forensics effort rather than just some kind of look up table. When you have massive amounts of data, you can do simple checkpoints like amount of money flowing into any point in the circuit is the amount of money flowing out of it, that kind of stupid validation system alone will uncover a ton of stuff, and imagine doing a little bit more machine learning, you can discover all sorts of stuff, at least a probable cause to alert a govt agency who are both understaffed and clueless at the same time. This is very hard problem and complicated enough that it cannot be trusted to the government alone. I welcome this open source effort to data forensics.

prirun• 12 years ago

I believe the best contribution I can make is to never do business with a bank that is also a primary dealer (US Treasuries). The list is available at:

http://www.ny.frb.org/markets/pridealers_current.html

Map the Banks

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