When one hears 2-6%, it is just the floor.
1. Perfect roads. Little visible construction despite high traffic: no corruption.
2. Awful roads. Almost no visible construction - medium corruption.
3. Continuous years-long construction. Roads always semi -closed, semi-permanent "work zone". When one construction ends, another immediately starts - extremely high corruption
Zany stuff.
Did you miss the entire Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool disaster?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/11/climate/reflecting-pool-c...
Or alternately, why should anyone believe that was a one-off event and not the new normal for recent no-bid contracts being awarded by an obviously corrupt administration?
the leaders of Germany, France, and Spain meet to discuss infrastructure...says the German chancelor: see this autobahn? 10% in my pocket...comes the French president and says: this autoroute? 20%...ha!, the Spanish prime minister says, you don't see no autopista here do you?
You send aid to a drought-stricken farmer to some sub-saharan region with ample cheap data but no (stable) banks, how...are they supposed to store the money?
So they fund wages among other things?
Currency as a tool is inextricable from currency as a representation of interconnected states and state coercive power about what can be done with it. The maximum-autonomy other end of the spectrum leads to feudalism—not equivalent to feudalism but actual feudalism.
Low-currency-autonomy systems like we have can also produce bad outcomes. But sprinting for the other end of the spectrum guarantees them.
Stablecoins are what are supposed to be stable sources of value, but Zeke Faux's book Number Go Up points out how opaque and unaccountable the companies managing these currencies are. From his reporting, their "tractor app" appears to be not so much farmers in sub-saharan Africa receiving aid payments but criminals looking for anonymous ways to transfer lots of money.
> We estimate an implied leakage ...
So the estimation became almost a fact in the title? What's the equivalent of clickbait in papers?
The rest of that sentence:
> ... of 2 to 6 cents per aid dollar, which amounts to roughly 1.7 to 4.4 billion dollars of aid diversion across the tranche arrivals we study.
This isn't a clickbait in the paper, but by the submitter.
Original post: While you're being rude and it would be worth cutting the first half of your comment, that's a good point that "2-6%" is still clearly an estimation.
https://theleahfiles.substack.com/p/the-currency-killer-part...
Did you know Tether (cryptocurrency company) is in the top 20 USD treasury holders, more than most countries?
And Lutnick is the manager of those funds, or his sons are (silly mistake!) because he divested completely.
If you can imagine a valid world in which a measure is an indicator of a property and also imagine a valid world in which the same measure is an indicator of its inverse, all you have done is proven that the measure cannot be used to determine the truth of the property.
eg say a foreign rich gvt wants to stoke up civil unrest via NGO / civic organizations - they bring in foreign cash (pallets loads) - then that money goes into the black market destabilizing exchange rages, some of it into crypto as being said, some to bad actors.
such is life.
Crypto is really handy and useful for actual money management. It's heavily used in Ukraine in the army and shadows the official monetary system.
For example it's close to impossible to use fiat funds to purchase X for the combat units: you'll need a separate department of lawyers just to manage that one procurement documentation. In a war you'd rather not do that.
Crypto? No problem. Payment sent, X received.
Lots of cases like that.