So, it looks like going back to 2017, there's only been one week in which returns were negative , which was late March 2020: https://ycharts.com/indicators/3_month_t_bill . And that was (clearly) a very unusual moment so I'm not worried per se about rates truly going below zero. I am more worried about rates going to zero, in which case, yeah, we'd have to figure out some other low-risk investment opportunities for the model to keep working. This is on my research agenda -- get a good sense of the ROI of, say, short-term bonds from all the OECD countries, rank them by yield and perceived risk, and then rank things that fall near that on the risk/reward scale but that still definitely qualify as conventionally safe. I'm afraid I haven't gotten to it yet, this week I've been focused on writing something up about why we are donating to GiveDirectly and not some other great charity (e.g. GiveWell's top ranked charities, which as of this week no longer include GiveDirectly; GD's response is interesting https://www.givedirectly.org/giving-directly-still-means-giving-well/).
gotcha, thanks. This goes back to the thing we've learned in the past few month that our potential donors and our potential users have, we think, pretty different attitudes towards risk. This is speculative, but I think that a stablecoin approach is likely to generate more usage but less fervor, and I think that tradeoff makes sense.
So, it looks like going back to 2017, there's only been one week in which returns were negative , which was late March 2020: https://ycharts.com/indicators/3_month_t_bill . And that was (clearly) a very unusual moment so I'm not worried per se about rates truly going below zero. I am more worried about rates going to zero, in which case, yeah, we'd have to figure out some other low-risk investment opportunities for the model to keep working. This is on my research agenda -- get a good sense of the ROI of, say, short-term bonds from all the OECD countries, rank them by yield and perceived risk, and then rank things that fall near that on the risk/reward scale but that still definitely qualify as conventionally safe. I'm afraid I haven't gotten to it yet, this week I've been focused on writing something up about why we are donating to GiveDirectly and not some other great charity (e.g. GiveWell's top ranked charities, which as of this week no longer include GiveDirectly; GD's response is interesting https://www.givedirectly.org/giving-directly-still-means-giving-well/).
Hope that helps!
gotcha, thanks. This goes back to the thing we've learned in the past few month that our potential donors and our potential users have, we think, pretty different attitudes towards risk. This is speculative, but I think that a stablecoin approach is likely to generate more usage but less fervor, and I think that tradeoff makes sense.
So glad you asked!
We're still working out all the regulatory/legal details of deploying a stablecoin, so GLO isn't out yet.
But in the meantime, we're asking folks to take the GLO pledge, and when the coin is out, to purchase some on a monthly recurring basis.
We (and you!) can then take concrete evidence to potential partners as evidence that there is GLO out there waiting to be spent.
Any other thoughts on ways we can speed this up?