China regulators probe liquidity stress that sent rates to record 50%

 China's financial regulators are investigating a month-end liquidity crunch that saw short-term money rates surge to as much as 50%, asking some institutions to explain why they borrowed at extremely high rates, three sources said.

The overnight rate for pledged repo - a short-term financing business - hit a record high of 50% on Oct 31, as a month-end scramble for cash and a flood of government bond sales caused stress in money markets.

The China Foreign Exchange Trade System (CFETS), a central bank affiliate that operates China's interbank market, has asked institutions that settled trades on Tuesday at the 50% rate to submit explanations, according two sources with direct knowledge.

"Anyone who borrowed money at very high rates need to explain to regulators the decision-making and bidding process," said another direct source.

Traders and analysts said an increasing supply of government bonds, and newly approved 1-trillion-yuan ($136.63 billion) sovereign bond issue created unusual liquidity stress at a time when banks need to square their books to meet month-end regulatory requirements.

Authorities also could have wanted to keep yuan liquidity tight to stem the currency's slide against the U.S. dollar in the foreign exchange market, Becky Liu, head of China macro strategy at Standard Chartered said.

A trader said a large number of fund houses, brokerages and trust firms were scrambling to borrow money in afternoon trade on Tuesday to avoid defaults as big banks appeared reluctant to lend.

"Demand for cash far exceeded supply, boosting short-term rates," the source said. "For each individual institution, it was a rational decision."

But regulators on Wednesday told some institutions in a meeting "not to be emotional," another trader source said.

"Everyone is still slightly nervous now. Everyone is prepared and will keep the liquidity ample."

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-regulators-probe-liquidity-stress-082822746.html

Boeing says 'cyber incident' hit parts business after ransom threat

 Boeing, one of the world's largest defense and space contractors, said on Wednesday it was investigating a cyber incident that impacted elements of its parts and distribution business and cooperating with a law enforcement probe into it.

Boeing acknowledged the incident days after the Lockbit cybercrime gang said on Friday it had stolen "a tremendous amount" of sensitive data from the U.S. planemaker that it would dump online if Boeing didn't pay ransom by Nov. 2.

The Lockbit threat was no longer on the gang's website as of Wednesday, and it didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Boeing declined to comment on whether Lockbit was behind the cyber incident it disclosed.

"This issue does not affect flight safety," a Boeing spokesperson said. "We are actively investigating the incident and coordinating with law enforcement and regulatory authorities. We are notifying our customers and suppliers."

Boeing's parts and distribution business, which falls under its Global Services division, provides material and logistics support to its customers, according to the company's 2022 annual report. Some webpages on the company's official website that had information on the Global Services division were down on Wednesday, with a message that cited technical issues.

"We expect the site to be back up soon," the pages said.

Lockbit was the most active global ransomware group last year based on the number of victims, and it has hit 1,700 U.S. organizations since 2020, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

The hacking group typically deploys ransomware on a victim organization's system to lock it up, as well as stealing sensitive data for extortion.

It's unclear what data Lockbit may have stolen from the company. Brett Callow, a ransomware expert and threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft, said that while organizations may pay cybercriminal gangs when demanded ransom, that doesn't guarantee that data won't be leaked.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/boeing-investigating-cyber-incident-affecting-224819464.html

Climate's 'Catch-22': Cutting pollution heats up the planet

 Air pollution, a global scourge that kills millions of people a year, is shielding us from the full force of the sun. Getting rid of it will accelerate climate change.

That's the unpalatable conclusion reached by scientists poring over the results of China's decade-long and highly effective "war on pollution", according to six leading climate experts.

The drive to banish pollution, caused mainly by sulphur dioxide (SO2) spewed from coal plants, has cut SO2 emissions by close to 90% and saved hundreds of thousands of lives, Chinese official data and health studies show.

Yet stripped of its toxic shield, which scatters and reflects solar radiation, China's average temperatures have gone up by 0.7 degrees Celsius since 2014, triggering fiercer heatwaves, according to a Reuters review of meteorological data and the scientists interviewed.

"It's this Catch-22," said Patricia Quinn, an atmospheric chemist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), speaking about cleaning up sulphur pollution globally. "We want to clean up our air for air quality purposes but, by doing that, we're increasing warming."

The removal of the air pollution - a term scientists call "unmasking" - may have had a greater effect on temperatures in some industrial Chinese cities over the last decade than the warming from greenhouse gases themselves, the scientists said.

Other highly polluted parts of the world, such as India and the Middle East, would see similar jumps in warming if they follow China's lead in cleaning the skies of sulphur dioxide and the polluting aerosols it forms, the experts warned.

They said efforts to improve air quality could actually push the world into catastrophic warming scenarios and irreversible impacts.

"Aerosols are masking one-third of the heating of the planet," said Paulo Artaxo, an environmental physicist and lead author of the chapter on short-lived climate pollutants in the most recent round of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), completed this year.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/climates-catch-22-cutting-pollution-011110697.html

How Companies Use AI to Grade Candidates—and Even Potential Locations

 AI is everywhere, whether we realize it or not.

That’s the sentiment held by Liz Nguyen, an advisor to emerging biotech companies who previously worked as the senior vice president of talent and culture at the biotech Surrozen. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is already operating behind the scenes in many aspects of business, including recruitment and retention of employees within biotech.

“AI is part of our LinkedIn platforms and our social media,” Nguyen said. Right now, a number of applicant tracking systems are using AI to help source positions for companies and shoulder some of the administrative burden, handling tasks such as scheduling interviews, crafting language for email replies and producing first drafts of onboarding materials such as employee handbooks.

At the same time, many emerging companies have yet to adopt such tools, she noted. And many of these tools produce work that still needs to be edited or reviewed by a human. Tools such as ChatGPT can help emerging companies get started on tasks like writing job descriptions, but “they still need to be personalized,” Nguyen said.

Higher volume businesses like Takeda also use AI for screening resumes. The goal is to help companies fill positions faster and more efficiently, a benefit for both applicants and employers, said Jimmy Zhang, vice president and head of global talent at Takeda.

The tool the company uses “looks at the content of the resume that’s being submitted, looks at the content of the job and actually rates those resumes to different letter categories,” Zhang said. “Based on that, we prioritize how we reach out. And what we saw was, depending on the letter grade—we actually did a deep dive data analysis—the higher graded categories of people tend to stay longer [in their job] versus lower categories.”

Reprogramming Bias

Some regulators and others have voiced concerns about the potential for AI tools to perpetuate cultural biases in recruiting. But Zhang said that one of the benefits of using AI for resume scoring is that it has the potential to remove the biases that creep into human screening. It’s theoretically easier to recode or reprogram a bias out of an AI program than it is to eliminate a person’s learned assumptions.

“Resume scoring systems actually remove a lot of the biases that we have seen before,” Zhang said. He used education as an example: People might have biases around graduates of certain colleges and universities based on their lived experiences. But he said these AI scoring systems don’t look at that.

“The only thing that it’s looking at is the potential,” he said. “It’s not looking at your name, it’s not looking at [where you got your] education, your pedigree, and so on anymore, which is making the process more effective, in my mind. It’s actually providing more concrete descriptions on the work that you do with your resume.”

Location and Talent Scouting Using AI

Some larger companies are also using AI in a more proactive way to find and recruit new talent. For example, Takeda is using an AI software vendor, Terrain Analytics, to not only identify how many software developers or scientists might be in an area the company is considering expanding into, but how good those people are at their jobs, Zhang said. Johnson & Johnson also uses Terrain Analytics, according to Terrain CEO Mark Jacobson.

“We’re looking at how do we actually identify, not just quantity of . . . the market players, but also the quality,” Zhang said. “We found that to be extremely useful to us.”

Terrain Analytics uses 80 different sources of publicly available data on 570 million people and 65 million companies around the world in its models, Jacobson said. This data includes things like professional social media profiles, rate of promotion within a resume, lists of authors of scientific publications, patents and their authors, code collaborations and government data.

“When we get that data, we anonymize it,” Jacobson said. “So we’re not taking names, home addresses, personal emails, but we do understand titles and we understand companies.”

Once Takeda gets that data, it uses it to decide whether to build out in a new location, and then to do a more detailed mapping and brand awareness campaign to try to amplify the brand as a preferred employer.

“The types of analytics we have provided to Takeda run the gamut . . . from doing global assessments on its own global talent footprint . . . as well as competitor analysis,” Jacobson said.

Terrain Analytics currently provides talent rank in three categories: software engineers, hardware engineers and life science research talent.

Jacobson said it’s easier to create a defensible AI model ranking worker contributions for these science-based skills than it is for categories where softer people skills are more important, such as HR, legal or sales.

“There’s so much information, historically, in recruiting that has been local knowledge, tribal knowledge or kind of lost within people’s emails or even worse, notebooks. The benefits of applying technology are: you can interpret much, much larger volumes of data; you can do it with greater accuracy; and you can do it much faster,” Jacobson said.

Streamlining Still Needed

Barriers for the use of many of these AI tools in recruitment include cost and the lack of streamlined, multifunctional software tools.

“Right now AI is still in the nascent stage, and it’s expensive,” Nguyen said.

For Takeda, a bigger issue is lack of efficiency.

"There’s actually too many AI providers and vendors out there right now,” Zhang said. Recruiters are logging into as many as 15 different systems to do their day to day work, he said, and each of these are great tools that solve for a specific need. But toggling among this many systems creates its own problem.

“We’re trying everything we can to have a more integrated experience,” Zhang said. “And I would say that’s probably pretty unique to Takeda, because a lot of the frustration I’m hearing from other companies is they are still trying to pull in additional tools.”

Nguyen thinks the shift into a more AI-driven recruitment process will happen eventually, but it can never replace human interaction.

“It’s not going to change the impact that you would have, having coffee with someone or meeting with them, getting to know them or the personal touch,” she said. But she doesn’t see that as a knock against AI. “In fact, by having AI manage all the administrative pieces, it gives you more time to connect with people personally." 

“I think it’s really going to help evolve how we think," she said, "and how we connect with people, as an enabler versus as a replacement.”

https://www.biospace.com/article/how-companies-use-ai-to-grade-candidates-and-even-potential-locations/

Limousine Liberals: Dem Tax Policies That "Fight Inequality" Help Left's Wealthy Voter Base

 If you're wondering where the term "limousine liberal" comes from, it might have something to do with the fact that Democratic policy - despite a sustained PR campaign to make it look as though it benefits the poor - actually benefits the rich.

That was the takeaway from Reason this past week, who wrote about how Democrats, despite beefing up the IRS and posturing that they want all Americans to "pay their fair share", are actually enacting legislation that eases the tax burdens of their high income voters.  

As the report notes, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act instituted a ceiling of $10,000 on the State and Local Tax (SALT) deductions that can be taken from federal taxable income. This limitation largely impacted affluent individuals residing in states with hefty tax burdens, many of which are bastions of Democratic support such as New York and California.

It's a tax increase on the wealthy, something Democrats typically champion. However, by advocating for the repeal of the SALT cap, they're now fighting to reinstate tax benefits for the affluent. When wealthy residents in California and the Northeast felt the squeeze, Democrats suddenly became tax relief enthusiasts, the report says.

Reason writes that in 2021, 17 out of 19 New York Democratic representatives were willing to torpedo their own party's infrastructure legislation unless the SALT cap was fully lifted. It exposes Democrats' eagerness to protect tax advantages for affluent voters in blue states, they argue. 

Moreover, expansive government often disproportionately benefits those with hefty financial resources. Numerous tax incentives and subsidies essentially funnel billions to high-earners purchasing luxury electric vehicles, or to major corporations engaging in "green" projects or semiconductor production they would have pursued regardless.

Despite populist rhetoric, many expansive government measures disproportionately burden middle-class and low-income Americans. Case in point: Democrats' steadfast refusal in Congress to tackle the unsustainable trajectory of entitlement programs. This effectively endorses a massive financial shift, via regressive payroll taxes, from younger and less affluent individuals to older and wealthier ones.

Additionally, Reason notes that Democrats' call to hike the corporate tax rate from 21% to 25% contradicts their populist image, as economists agree that such taxes mostly depress middle-class wages. The party's inconsistent stance on taxes also emerges in other examples. Notably, Democrats, including liberal icons, advocated for repealing a 2.3% excise tax on medical devices, originally part of the Affordable Care Act, due to its impact on the industry.

In 2011, Democrats led the charge to extend payroll tax cuts, diverging from their usual tax philosophy for political gain. As the 2025 expiration of the TCJA's tax provisions approaches—set to raise taxes by about $3 trillion over a decade—it will be intriguing to see Democrats likely extend most of these policies, benefiting even the wealthy, while still faulting Trump's tax cuts for the deficit.

Yet another example of talking out of both sides of their mouths, something Democrats do great.

 https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/limousine-liberals-many-dem-tax-policies-fight-inequality-actually-help-lefts-wealthy-voter

AI chatbots creating ‘plagiarism stew’ as they crib news content, trade group says

 Artificial intelligence-backed chatbots like ChatGPT are creating “plagiarism stew” — responding to queries with “paraphrasing or outright repetition” of text that’s cribbed from copyrighted news articles, according to a prominent trade group.

News Media Alliance — a nonprofit that represents more than 2,200 publishers, including The Post — released a blistering, 77-page report on Tuesday that argued the most popular AI chatbots have been violating copyright law by reproducing entire sections of some articles in their responses.

The report singled out OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s Bing and a more recent AI tool called the Search Generative Experience which can craft responses to open-ended queries while retaining a recognizable list of links to the web.

NMA’s findings claimed that these LLMs — a type of AI that understands and can respond to written text — “are just ‘learning’ unprotectable facts from copyrighted training materials.”

What’s more, since the technology is not actually “ever absorbing any underlying concepts,” its responses are “technically inaccurate,” NMA said.

After analyzing a sample of datasets believed to be used by LLMs, NMA claimed that the AI chatbots produce “unauthorized derivative works by responding to user queries with close paraphrasing or outright repetition of copied and memorized portions of the works on which they were trained.”

The group found that curated data sets used content from news, magazines and digital media publications as much as 100 times more than other generic data sets.

As many as half of the top 10 sites in training sets used for Google’s Bard — which reportedly launched in March despite internal warnings that the techy tool was a “pathological liar” — are news outlets, NMA claimed.

Current and former employees told Bloomberg earlier this year that Google’s push to develop Bard reportedly ramped up in late 2022 after ChatGPT’s success prompted top brass to declare a “competitive code red.”

However, insiders worried that the chatbot was prone to spewing out responses riddled with false information that can “result in serious injury or death” — a concern that Google ignored in favor of a troubled launch that saw Bard emitting erratic feedback.

NMA said it submitted its white paper to the US Copyright Office, “acknowledging that an author’s expression may be implicated both in training … as well as at the output stage because of a similarity between her works and an output of an AI system.”

Robert Thomson, the CEO of News Corp — which owns The Post, as well as The Wall Street Journal and other publishers represented by NMA — has bashed inaccuracies spewed out by AI-generated content as “rubbish in, rubbish out” — even as he warned the technology threatens to kill thousands more jobs across the news industry.

“People have to understand that AI is essentially retrospective,” the media executive said during an appearance at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference in San Francisco last week.

“It’s about permutations of pre-existing content.”

“And so instead of elevating and enhancing, what you might find is that you have this ever-shrinking circle of sanity surrounded by a reservoir of rubbish,” Thomson continued. “So instead of the insight that AI can potentially bring, what it will evolve into, essentially, is maggot-ridden mind mold.”

Journalists have fumed about the use of AI in news reports, including just last week when USA Today staff writers suspected that its parent company Gannett used the tech to generate content for a product review site after mysterious bylines of unknown writers started showing up on articles.

Reviewed, the USA Today-owned shopping recommendation site, published several articles last week with names of reporters that other staffers did not recognize, according to The Washington Post.

Journalists called the prose “robotic,” and seemingly “not even real” after one story reviewing scuba masks juxtaposed text with another article developed to tumbler cups.

It’s not just reporters bashing the intrusion of AI on the industry — well-known authors have also condemned OpenAI for misusing their works to allegedly train ChatGPT, which became the fastest-growing consumer application in history earlier this year, reaching 100 million active users in January only two months after it was launched.

Stand-up comic Sarah Silverman has filed separate lawsuits against OpenAI and Meta, claiming copyright infringement after their AI models allegedly used content from her memoir, “The Bedwetter,” for training without her permission.

In the suit, Silverman, along with authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, allege that OpenAI and Meta’s respective AI-backed language models were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing the authors’ works.

The complaints state that ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA honed their skills using “shadow library” websites like Bibliotik, Library Genesis and Z-Library, among others, which are illegal given that most of the material uploaded on these sites is protected by authors’ rights to the intellectual property over their works.

When asked to create a dataset, ChatGPT reportedly produced a list of titles from these illegal online libraries.

Massachusetts-based writers Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad made a similar argument in San Francisco federal court earlier this year — claiming ChatGPT mined data copied from thousands of books without permission, infringing the authors’ copyrights.

The Post has sought comment from OpenAI, Google and Microsoft.

https://nypost.com/2023/11/01/business/ai-chatbots-creating-plagiarism-stew-news-media-alliance/

Adams and other Dem mayors demand ‘urgent’ meeting with Biden on migrant crisis

 Mayor Eric Adams and several other Democratic mayors from big cities across the country are demanding that President Biden meet with them and provide additional aid to cope with the growing migrant crisis.

Hizzoner — alongside Los Angeles’ Karen Bass, Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, Houston’s Sylvester Turner and Denver’s Mike Johnston — specifically, and in bold type, requested “an urgent meeting” with Biden to “directly discuss ways we can work with your administration to avoid large numbers of additional asylum seekers being brought to our cities with little to no coordination, support or resources.”

The letter requests that the president provide additional federal funding to help offset the cost of providing housing and social services to the new arrivals, speed approvals for their work papers, increase the number of migrants eligible to work and calls for a “coordinated entry and distribution process of newcomers once they arrive.”

“We believe we have a unique opportunity to work with the White House and Congress over these next few weeks to create an immigration and asylum system that will treat our newcomers with dignity and be fair and equitable to cities and neighborhoods across the country,” the mayors concluded.

“Given the urgency of this issue, we are all willing to travel to DC next week to sit down and discuss our shared interest in finding a successful resolution.”

Late Wednesday, Adams said he was heading to Washington with the other mayors to meet with federal lawmakers and the White House, though a City Hall spokesman declined to say who he would be meeting with from the Biden administration.

The two-page missive from the mayors, dated Oct. 28, is new evidence of mounting frustrations between some of the nation’s largest — and most Democratic — cities and Biden over his slow-footed response to the waves of migrants arriving from Central and South America.

Many of the migrants plan to seek asylum and were driven northward to flee violence — including death squads sanctioned by their home countries — and dire economic circumstances.

More than 133,000 people have arrived in New York City alone since the onset of the crisis last spring, according to tallies City Hall provided reporters last week.

Adams recently flew to Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia to tour the conditions in those countries and mount an effort in the local Spanish-speaking media to discourage people from attempting to come north.

However, the trip was heavily criticized back in New York after reporters who traveled with the mayor revealed that few potential migrants had gotten the message — and that Adams failed to deliver it himself during conversations with residents at a shelter for the needy in the Ecuadorian capital of Quito.

City Hall has said that it expects the crisis will cost the Big Apple an estimated $12 billion between 2023 and 2025 and could his administration to cut spending in city-funded programs — like policing, parks, trash pickup and road repairs — by as much as 15 percent.

The mounting price tag has turned Adams, once a Biden surrogate, into one of the president’s loudest critics and resulted in a major rupture in their relationship.

The feds have provided or promised just $142 million in aid so far, compared to the $1 billion set aside by state lawmakers in Albany.

Federal officials, at one point, also promised to provide a liaison to improve cooperation between City Hall and the federal immigration authorities over the combined response to the crisis, but that position has still not been filled.

Under fire, the White House expanded the number of Venezuelan migrants eligible for work papers, provided they arrived in the United States before July 31, though City Hall has pressed for more.

However, on Thursday, the Adams administration tempered its criticism to thank Biden for reviving a clinic to help migrants apply for work papers that ran for two weeks in September — and got 1,700 people registered and in the system.

The White House, too, pointed to the clinic as evidence of improved cooperation in a statement responding to the letter from the mayors — and said the revived center would be able to handle 300 migrants a day.

“The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to supporting local jurisdictions hosting recently arrived migrants and we will continue working to deliver support in every way we can,” said White House spokesman Angelo Fernandez Hernandez.

“Starting this week, the Biden-Harris Administration, in partnership with New York City and New York State, will be scaling operations of its first-of-its-kind work authorization clinic to help thousands of migrants living in New York’s shelter system apply for work permits,” he added.

https://nypost.com/2023/11/01/metro/eric-adams-other-dem-mayors-demand-biden-meeting-on-migrant-crisis/