Loan Calculator Quotes

But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you? People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it's to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.

A return to classical bank policy would deem loans fraudulent and annul debts when creditors do not lend with any reasonable calculation of how the debt can be paid in the normal course of economic life. Loans made without such a calculation should be considered predatory. The natural check on such behavior is to permit mortgage debtors to walk away from their homes, free of the debts attached to them, letting title revert to the banks that over-lent.

Fiat-money! Let the State 'create' money, and make the poor rich, and free them from the bonds of the capitalists! How foolish to forego the opportunity of making everybody rich, and consequently happy, that the State's right to create money gives it! How wrong to forego it simply because this would run counter to the interests of the rich! How wicked of the economists to assert that it is not within the power of the State to create wealth by means of the printing press!- You statesmen want to build railways, and complain of the low state of the exchequer? Well, then, do not beg loans from the capitalists and anxiously calculate whether your railways will bring in enough to enable you to pay interest and amortization on your debt. Create money, and help yourselves.

In 1962, the clouds of war against China darkened the nation. I got a call from the Prime Minister’s office asking me to come to Delhi for an urgent meeting. Also present at the meeting were some Generals and a senior bureaucrat, Shivaraman. I was informed that the Indian Army needed milk powder, and they asked me how much we could provide and how soon. I said, ‘A thousand tons and within six months.’ One of the Generals looked at me and said, ‘That’s not enough.’ I said, ‘Okay, then 1,500 tons.’ They said that, too, was not enough. ‘I suppose we stop wasting time, and you tell me the quantity that you need?’ I asked. ‘We need 2,750 tons,’ came the reply. I asked for a piece of paper as an idea began forming in my mind. I was aware that there was another milk powder plant in Rajkot, which belonged to the Government of Gujarat. It was a small plant, but I knew that if we put together all the powder and gave it to the army, sacrificing the entire civilian market, then we could fulfil this commitment in six months. So I did a swift calculation on a piece of paper and said, ‘It will be done. Now, can I go?’ The General expressed apprehension, ‘Supposing you let us down?’ ‘That is not the way to speak to Mr Kurien,’ Shivaraman said. ‘We have the highest regard for his words. If he says that he will do it, he will certainly do it. And besides, may I know what other alternative you have?’ That quietened the General. Then Shivaraman asked me, ‘What can the government do for you?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Loans? Grants? Anything you want?’ I said, ‘Mr Shivaraman, you said there is an emergency, and if Amul uses this emergency to squeeze money out of the government, then it is an unworthy organisation. I want nothing.’ From that day onwards, Shivaraman was an ally.

[on interest from loans] Now that I have loaned you them (100 gulden), you cause me a double loss due to my not being able to pay on the one hand nor buy on the other, so that I have to lose on both sides, and this is called duplex interesse, damni emergentis et lucri cessantis.... on hearing that John sustained losses on his loan of 100 gulden and demands just damages, they rush in and charge double on every 100 gulden, such double reimbursement, namely, for the loss due to non-payment and to inability to make a profit on a bargain, just as though these 100 gulden had the double loss grown on to them, so that whenever they have 100 gulden, they loan them out and charge for two losses, which they have not at all sustained... Therefore you are a usurer, who takes damages out of his neighbour's money for an imaginary loss that you did not sustain at all, and which you can neither prove nor calculate. This sort of loss is called by the jurists non verum, sed phantasticum interesse. It is a loss which each conjures up for himself... It will not do to say, therefore, that there could have been losses because I could not have been able to pay or buy. Else it would mean ex contingente necessarium, which is making something out of a thing that is not, and a thing that is uncertain into a thing that is absolutely sure. Would not such usury devour the world in a few years? ... If an unhappy accident befalls him against his will, and he must recover from it, he may demand damages for it, but it is different in trade and just the reverse. There they scheme to profit at the expense of their needy neighbours, how to amass wealth and get rich, to be lazy and idle and live in luxury on the labour of others, without any care, danger, and loss. To sit by the stove and let my 100 gulden gather wealth for me in the country and yet keep them in my pocket, because they are only loaned, without any danger or risk; my friend, who would not like that?

To fill this gap in the capital market, Davis and Rock set themselves up as a limited partnership, the same legal structure that had been used by a short-lived rival called Draper, Gaither & Anderson.[18] Rather than identifying startups and then seeking out corporate investors, they began by raising a fund that would render corporate investors unnecessary. As the two active, or “general,” partners, Davis and Rock each seeded the fund with $100,000 of their own capital. Then, ignoring the easy loans to be had from the fashionable SBIC structure, they raised just under $3.2 million from some thirty “limited” partners—rich individuals who served as passive investors.[19] The beauty of this size and structure was that the Davis & Rock partnership now had a war chest seven and a half times larger than an SBIC, and with it the ammunition to supply companies with enough capital to grow aggressively. At the same time, by keeping the number of passive investors under the legal threshold of one hundred, the partnership flew under the regulatory radar, avoiding the restrictions that ensnared the SBICs and Doriot’s ARD.[20] Sidestepping yet another weakness to be found in their competitors, Davis and Rock promised at the outset to liquidate their fund after seven years. The general partners had their own money in the fund, and thus a healthy incentive to invest with caution. At the same time, they could deploy the outside partners’ capital for a limited time only. Their caution would be balanced with deliberate aggression. Indeed, everything about the fund’s design was calculated to support an intelligent but forceful growth mentality. Unlike the SBICs, Davis & Rock raised money purely in the form of equity, not debt. The equity providers—that is, the outside limited partners—knew not to expect dividends, so Davis and Rock were free to invest in ambitious startups that used every dollar of capital to expand their business.[21] As general partners, Davis and Rock were personally incentivized to prioritize expansion: they took their compensation in the form of a 20 percent share of the fund’s capital appreciation. Meanwhile, Rock was at pains to extend this equity mentality to the employees of his portfolio companies. Having witnessed the effect of employee share ownership on the early culture of Fairchild, he believed in awarding managers, scientists, and salesmen with stock and stock options. In sum, everybody in the Davis & Rock orbit—the limited partners, the general partners, the entrepreneurs, their key employees—was compensated in the form of equity.

One of their most famous coups was underwriting a $10 million loan for a growing mail-order house called Sears, Roebuck, headed by Goldman's distant relative. It was the first time a mail-order security had ever been on the market-a calculated risk, but one that paid off.

But the current investment banking model—whether applied in a standalone institution such as Goldman or in a broad financial conglomerate such as Deutsche Bank—is at the heart of the problems the finance sector poses for the real economy. Investment banks today engage in securities issuance, corporate advice and asset management; they make markets in equities and FICC, and trade in these markets on their own account. It is only necessary to list these functions to see that each of these activities conflicts with all the others. Each should be undertaken in distinct institutions. And with lower volumes of inter-bank trading, a diminished role for public equity markets and much more direct investment by asset managers the scale of most of these activities should be much reduced. Among all the actors in the finance sector today, only the asset manager, who typically earns a fee calculated as a percentage of funds under management, is rewarded for idleness. The profits of a segregated deposit-taking bank would similarly depend primarily on the scale of the deposit base, and secondarily on its success in making good loans. Dedicated channels of capital allocation have a more appropriate incentive structure than activities focused on trading and transactions. Whenever

And you told Mr. Marsh at that time that a refinance was impossible, did you not?”      “I did.”      Every teacher of cross-examination points out that you never ask a question that you do not know the answer to, and you never ask the question “why” because that gives the witness the opportunity to answer in a narrative, but Brent wanted the jury to hear the answer to the next question in Bernstein’s own words, so he took the calculated risk.      “Why was it impossible?”      “Because Mr. Marsh was delinquent in his loan payments.”      “But Mr. Bernstein, didn’t you tell Mr. Marsh about six months earlier that, in order to qualify for a loan modification, he had to be delinquent in his loan payments?”      “That’s for a modification, not a refinance, and that was Tentane’s policy…”      “Object