Tim Harford, what a great idea! Let see if I can find some Turkers willing to lend me a researching hand, hopefully pro-bono.

Sir, I do of course not have the financial resources of the Basel Committee, the Financial Stability Board, the Fed, FDIC, IMF, ECB, BoE, World Bank or other institutions that are interested in research applicable to bank regulations.

And since none of those previous listed have shown any interest in my concerns about current regulations, it was with great interest that I read Tim Harford’s “Can we trust young Turkers?" October 11.

I will immediately try to enlist their help, hopefully even pro-bono, on trying to research the following issue:

Bankers always use perceived credit risk to set their interest rates and amount of exposures; and currently the regulators use the same perceived credit risk to set their capital requirements for banks.

That means that perceived credit risks get a 200% weighting.

And it is my firm opinion that a banking system that weighs perceived credit risk that much, dooms itself to: a) lend dangerously much to The Safe, like to the infallible sovereigns and the AAArisktocracy, and b) to lend way too little to The Risky, like to SMEs and entrepreneurs, which is of course fatal for the real economy and therefore also to the banks.

That kind of distortion seems clearly to be happening, we have seen how banks got excessively exposed to AAA rated securities and Greece; and we hear of the increasing difficulties of The Risky to obtain a fair access to bank credit.

I sure hope that since for instance even FT has been unwilling to voice my concerns, I do not know why, I can enlist some Turkers to lend me a hand in helping me to accumulate the evidence that I know exists, that would prove me right.

If the Turkers are “young”, so much the better, since it is the young who most will suffer from the basically too sissy risk adverse bank regulations. 

Of course, meanwhile I will keep on doing my best efforts to establish a direct contact with those who decide. This week I did so by means of a public letter to Mr. Stefan Ingves, the current chair of The Basel Committee.

@PerKurowski © J

They pay just 0.0025 to 0.02 cents of a dollar per advert to reach me online? No way! I am worth much more!

Sir, I refer to Tim Harford’s “Online ads: log in, tune out, turn off” April 4. It contains some very enlightening data for someone not in the business of targeting ads but only being a target of ads. Harford mentions that the rate for cheap advert may be as low 25 cents of a dollar per 1000 views, while good adverts may pay the publisher 2 dollars per 1000 view.

So that means that someone reaching me with a cheap advert pays for that 1/40th of a cent of a dollar while someone reaching me with a good advert pays 1/5th of a cent of a dollar. What a shocker, I thought getting my attention span was worth more than that. De facto I am a Mechanical Turk working at the receiving end. Not only do I perceive any income for that, zero salary, but, to add insult to injury, they are valuing the access to my attention span at ridiculous low rates.

It is clear that I urgently need someone to develop an App that will only allow ads that produces me an income of X dollars per hour of my attention span to reach me. The provider of that service, in charge of collecting my earnings, would have to work on a commission basis, so that I can be sure we are both targeting the same end results.

Since now and again I would wish to see a little of what is available in the cheap advert markets, occasionally I authorize allotting some of my valuable attention span, on a pro-bono basis.

PS. That X dollars per hour of my attention span will fluctuate according to market conditions.

@PerKurowski