First up, Semafor, December 14:
Albania plans to use ChatGPT to speed up its application to join the European Union by translating thousands of pages of legal documents.
Prime Minister Edi Rama reportedly said this week that the country will partner with OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot, to translate complex EU legal measures into Albanian, detail what changes need to be made to existing local laws, and then analyze the impact of those adjustments. Albania has been trying to join the EU for 14 years.
It’s the latest example of AI’s increasing presence in government globally, as calls grow for more oversight of the technology.
It’s smart for Rama to stay on top of new developments in AI, but using ChatGPT in this way could backfire, the head of an AI-and-governance research program argued. ChatGPT is known to occasionally produce false information, and is more likely to actually prolong the ascension process, “as government officials may blindly follow the wrong instructions and information,” Medlir Mema wrote in A2, Albania’s CNN affiliate. He also raised concerns about data privacy, and questioned whether Albania is taking a flashy route without focusing on the content of the reforms needed to join the bloc....
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And from Der Spiegel, February 8, 2010:
How Goldman Sachs Helped Greece to Mask its True Debt
Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules. At some point the so-called cross currency swaps will mature, and swell the country's already bloated deficit.
Greeks aren't very welcome in the Rue Alphones Weicker in Luxembourg. It's home to Eurostat, the European Union's statistical office. The number crunchers there are deeply annoyed with Athens. Investigative reports state that important data "cannot be confirmed" or has been requested but "not received."
Creative accounting took priority when it came to totting up government debt. Since 1999, the Maastricht rules threaten to slap hefty fines on euro member countries that exceed the budget deficit limit of three percent of gross domestic product. Total government debt mustn't exceed 60 percent.
The Greeks have never managed to stick to the 60 percent debt limit, and they only adhered to the three percent deficit ceiling with the help of blatant balance sheet cosmetics. One time, gigantic military expenditures were left out, and another time billions in hospital debt. After recalculating the figures, the experts at Eurostat consistently came up with the same results: In truth, the deficit each year has been far greater than the three percent limit. In 2009, it exploded to over 12 percent.
Now, though, it looks like the Greek figure jugglers have been even more brazen than was previously thought. "Around 2002 in particular, various investment banks offered complex financial products with which governments could push part of their liabilities into the future," one insider recalled, adding that Mediterranean countries had snapped up such products.
Greece's debt managers agreed a huge deal with the savvy bankers of US investment bank Goldman Sachs at the start of 2002. The deal involved so-called cross-currency swaps in which government debt issued in dollars and yen was swapped for euro debt for a certain period -- to be exchanged back into the original currencies at a later date.
Fictional Exchange Rates
Such transactions are part of normal government refinancing. Europe's governments obtain funds from investors around the world by issuing bonds in yen, dollar or Swiss francs. But they need euros to pay their daily bills. Years later the bonds are repaid in the original foreign denominations.
But in the Greek case the US bankers devised a special kind of swap with fictional exchange rates. That enabled Greece to receive a far higher sum than the actual euro market value of 10 billion dollars or yen. In that way Goldman Sachs secretly arranged additional credit of up to $1 billion for the Greeks.
This credit disguised as a swap didn't show up in the Greek debt statistics. Eurostat's reporting rules don't comprehensively record transactions involving financial derivatives. "The Maastricht rules can be circumvented quite legally through swaps," says a German derivatives dealer....
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