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Thai Buddhist Monk Relies on Karma for Lending Success

Chiang Rai Times

Phra Subin Paneeto, right, offers financial advice to borrower Dusit Satharalai. Mr. Dusit turned to Phra Subin’s network after struggling to pay off a high-interest loan from another lender

 

BAAN NA KLUEA – Buddhist monks aren’t really known for dipping into the material world of finance. Phra Subin Paneeto, though, says he felt he didn’t have much choice when he saw his neighbors near Thailand’s border with Cambodia were struggling to make ends meet.

So, in the early 1990s, he started a micro-lending operation with a few thousand baht, lending small amounts to villagers to help pay for home repairs, buy new farm machinery and pay off other, larger debts.AM-BI966_MONKFI_16U_20150512045707

Today, Phra Subin’s micro-banking network has amassed about $60 million in deposits and loans.

The idea is that its 66,000 members will each contribute sums ranging from 10 baht to 500 baht, or about 30 cents to $15, a month. Each member who wishes to borrow is bundled together with three to five guarantors, and is allowed to tap more than they put in, at an interest rate of 1% to 2% a month—or less if other villagers agree. Some borrowers pay no interest.

The guarantors, who are all members of the group, are often friends, relatives or neighbors of the borrowers. Members have an incentive to be guarantors so that others will be guarantors for them when they wish to borrow money.

Half of the venture’s earnings are paid to the members at the end of each year. The rest go to a village welfare fund.

Thais have plenty of other banking options to choose from. According to the Bank of Thailand, the country’s central bank, about 90% of Thai households have access to financial services. In rural areas, government-sponsored village credit programs have lent more than $5 billion since the idea caught on in the early 2000s, making Thailand one of the biggest players in the global micro-finance scene.

Borrowers make payments on their loans from the Sajja Sasom Sab network at a Buddhist temple

Borrowers make payments on their loans from the Sajja Sasom Sab network at a Buddhist temple

Nonetheless, demand for Phra Subin’s Buddhist-flavored lending program, called Sajja Sasom Sab, continues to gain traction.

Other temples and monasteries around predominantly Buddhist Thailand have followed his example. More than 40 of the country’s 76 provinces have witnessed monks get involved in similar micro-finance projects.

The reason for Phra Subin’s continued success?

Some borrowers, depending on how well they are perceived to follow Buddhist precepts such as telling the truth or avoiding intoxicating substances, aren’t charged interest, Phra Subin says.

“Other financial institutions, they look at your financial records, assets and collateral,” he explained in a Buddhist temple in the hub of his saving network here in Trat province. “But the community will evaluate your good deeds.”

No-interest loans cut into the lender’s profit margin, but Phra Subin says that is offset by his system’s emphasis on Buddhist principles—he calls it a karmic peer-pressure system—which makes defaults virtually nonexistent.

“If you are not honest or sincere to other group members, nobody will help you when you want to borrow the money,” Phra Subin continued. “This community will force you to practice Dharma, work hard, be honest and take responsibility. Otherwise no one will want you.”

Dharma refers to the teachings of Buddha.

Other religious groups around the world have tried to tackle poverty using micro-finance. The Roman Catholic charity Caritas Manila has helped form micro-banks in the Philippines that have expanded access to credit there; its cooperative now has 20,000 members and has a repayment rate of 96%. The Catholic church has embarked on similar projects in Indonesia, where it has set up credit unions in remote areas of the archipelago, such as Kalimantan province on the island of Borneo.

In India, Hindu charities and temples have helped rural communities secure loans from banks. Indian banking regulations prohibit banks and micro-finance institutions from taking an explicitly religious approach in their lending decisions. But some Hindu groups do help, says Shantharam Pai, financial director with Shri Kshetra Dharmasthala Rural Development Project, a charitable trust that is associated with a Hindu temple in the southern state of Karnataka. His organization acts on behalf of commercial banks, as agents, to help people, mostly women, navigate the banking system and obtain loans.

By applying Buddhist precepts to its lending policies, Phra Subin’s microfinance operation in Thailand goes considerably further than its counterparts. Its supporters say that applying the concept of karma, that an individual’s actions inevitably affect them later in life, appears to reinforce the peer-pressure model that is at the root of most micro-finance programs, helping to keep the operation’s borrowers from defaulting.

The operation’s managers say there are no current defaults and the lender is in contact with all borrowers who are late on their payments. In Thailand’s commercial sector, loan defaults were about 2.16% of outstanding loans, or 278.2 billion baht in 2014.

Moreover, the more a borrower repays, the lower the interest rate will be the next month, unlike at commercial banks, which calculate interest rates at set levels.

Traditional bankers generally applaud such a system. “These forms of lending and savings promotion are typically observed in low-income communities in rural areas,” says Piyasak Ukritnukun, managing director of CFG Services Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Bank of Ayudhya.

He said larger commercial banks tend to shy away from similar lending structures “due to the relatively small loan sizes and lower interest rates coupled with high operating costs.”

There are other potential drawbacks to the less-formal village micro-finance system: Much of the Sajja Sasom Sab network’s success is bound up in the efforts of its charismatic founder, Phra Subin. Economists such as Luxmon Attapich at the Asian Development Bank say it is sometimes a problem for lenders to rely so heavily on the leadership of one person. “What if they are not around anymore?” she asked.

She and other economists say that some informal microfinance programs, while initially successful, ultimately falter because their leaders die or move away.

Still, Phra Subin’s network has been a boon to the many Thais who still don’t use the formal banking network. According to an Asian Development Bank report, more than 1.7 million Thais borrow from informal lenders, including some 335,000 who borrow from loan sharks or other unlicensed lenders.

Dusit Satharalai, for instance, borrowed some 300,000 baht with an 8% annual interest rate from an agricultural cooperative in 1992 to start a durian plantation.

The venture was slow to bear fruit, however. Twenty years later, Mr. Dusit found himself struggling to make payments and prevent his land being seized. Adding to his problems, the co-op increased his interest rate to 13% because of late payments, he said.

He borrowed money from his sister, but when she had to pay for her children’s school fees, Mr. Dusit was running out of options.

At his brother’s suggestion, Mr. Dusit turned to the Sajja Sasom Sab group in 2013, securing a 400,000 baht loan from the fund with an interest rate of 0.5% per month. After two years, he has already paid half of it back and plans to clear his debt to zero by the end of this year, including the co-op loan. Business has picked up at Mr. Dusit’s plantation, which has helped with his payments, but the lower-interest loan from the Sajja Sasom Sab has also eased his struggles.

Mr. Dusit’s niece, Panisa Satharalai, whose father borrowed 1 million baht from the fund to rebuild the family home, says she has doubled her income since then by offering home-stay accommodation and starting a catering business.

“This is a happy debt,” said Ms. Panisa. “This loan gave me a job and makes me want to get up early every morning to work hard, and it shows how united our community is. I won’t need to worry that I could not pay it back and risk losing my house and land.”

By Wilawan Watcharasakwet

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Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding, But Still Accounting 48% Search Revenue

Google

Google is so closely associated with its key product that its name is a verb that signifies “search.” However, Google’s dominance in that sector is dwindling.

According to eMarketer, Google will lose control of the US search industry for the first time in decades next year.

Google will remain the dominant search player, accounting for 48% of American search advertising revenue. And, remarkably, Google is still increasing its sales in the field, despite being the dominating player in search since the early days of the George W. Bush administration. However, Amazon is growing at a quicker rate.

google

Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding

Amazon will hold over a quarter of US search ad dollars next year, rising to 27% by 2026, while Google will fall even more, according to eMarketer.

The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the forecast.

Lest you think you’ll have to switch to Bing or Yahoo, this isn’t the end of Google or anything really near.

Google is the fourth-most valued public firm in the world. Its market worth is $2.1 trillion, trailing just Apple, Microsoft, and the AI chip darling Nvidia. It also maintains its dominance in other industries, such as display advertisements, where it dominates alongside Facebook’s parent firm Meta, and video ads on YouTube.

To put those “other” firms in context, each is worth more than Delta Air Lines’ total market value. So, yeah, Google is not going anywhere.

Nonetheless, Google faces numerous dangers to its operations, particularly from antitrust regulators.

On Monday, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Google must open up its Google Play Store to competitors, dealing a significant blow to the firm in its long-running battle with Fortnite creator Epic Games. Google announced that it would appeal the verdict.

In August, a federal judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on search. That verdict could lead to the dissolution of the company’s search operation. Another antitrust lawsuit filed last month accuses Google of abusing its dominance in the online advertising business.

Meanwhile, European regulators have compelled Google to follow tough new standards, which have resulted in multiple $1 billion-plus fines.

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Pixa Bay

Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding

On top of that, the marketplace is becoming more difficult on its own.

TikTok, the fastest-growing social network, is expanding into the search market. And Amazon has accomplished something few other digital titans have done to date: it has established a habit.

When you want to buy anything, you usually go to Amazon, not Google. Amazon then buys adverts to push companies’ products to the top of your search results, increasing sales and earning Amazon a greater portion of the revenue. According to eMarketer, it is expected to generate $27.8 billion in search revenue in the United States next year, trailing only Google’s $62.9 billion total.

And then there’s AI, the technology that (supposedly) will change everything.

Why search in stilted language for “kendall jenner why bad bunny breakup” or “police moving violation driver rights no stop sign” when you can just ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT, “What’s going on with Kendall Jenner and Bad Bunny?” in “I need help fighting a moving violation involving a stop sign that wasn’t visible.” Google is working on exactly this technology with its Gemini product, but its success is far from guaranteed, especially with Apple collaborating with OpenAI and other businesses rapidly joining the market.

A Google spokeswoman referred to a blog post from last week in which the company unveiled ads in its AI overviews (the AI-generated text that appears at the top of search results). It’s Google’s way of expressing its ability to profit on a changing marketplace while retaining its business, even as its consumers steadily transition to ask-and-answer AI and away from search.

google

Google has long used a single catchphrase to defend itself against opponents who claim it is a monopoly abusing its power: competition is only a click away. Until recently, that seemed comically obtuse. Really? We are going to switch to Bing? Or Duck Duck Go? Give me a break.

But today, it feels more like reality.

Google is in no danger of disappearing. However, every highly dominating company faces some type of reckoning over time. GE, a Dow mainstay for more than a century, was broken up last year and is now a shell of its previous dominance. Sears declared bankruptcy in 2022 and is virtually out of business. US Steel, long the foundation of American manufacturing, is attempting to sell itself to a Japanese corporation.

Could we remember Google in the same way that we remember Yahoo or Ask Jeeves in decades? These next few years could be significant.

SOURCE | CNN

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2024 | Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case

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Washington — Trump Media,  The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will not hear an appeal from social media platform X about a search warrant acquired by prosecutors in the election meddling case against former President Donald Trump.

The justices did not explain their rationale, and there were no recorded dissents.

The firm, which was known as Twitter before being purchased by billionaire Elon Musk, claims a nondisclosure order that prevented it from informing Trump about the warrant obtained by special counsel Jack Smith’s team violated its First Amendment rights.

The business also claims Trump should have had an opportunity to exercise executive privilege. If not reined in, the government may employ similar tactics to intercept additional privileged communications, their lawyers contended.

trump

Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case

Two neutral electronic privacy groups also joined in, urging the high court to hear the case on First Amendment grounds.

Prosecutors, however, claim that the corporation never shown that Trump utilized the account for official purposes, therefore executive privilege is not a problem. A lower court also determined that informing Trump could have compromised the current probe.

trump

Trump utilized his Twitter account in the weeks preceding up to his supporters’ attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to spread false assertions about the election, which prosecutors claim were intended to create doubt in the democratic process.

The indictment describes how Trump used his Twitter account to encourage his followers to travel to Washington on Jan. 6, pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification, and falsely claiming that the Capitol crowd, which battered police officers and destroyed glass, was peaceful.

musk trump

Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case

That case is now moving forward following the Supreme Court’s verdict in July, which granted Trump full immunity from criminal prosecution as a former president.

The warrant arrived at Twitter amid quick changes implemented by Musk, who bought the company in 2022 and has since cut off most of its workforce, including those dedicated to combating disinformation and hate speech.

He also welcomed back a vast list of previously banned users, including Trump, and endorsed him for the 2024 presidential election.

SOURCE | AP

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The Supreme Court Turns Down Biden’s Government Appeal in a Texas Emergency Abortion Matter.

Supreme Court

(VOR News) – A ruling that prohibits emergency abortions that contravene the Supreme Court law in the state of Texas, which has one of the most stringent abortion restrictions in the country, has been upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. The United States Supreme Court upheld this decision.

The justices did not provide any specifics regarding the underlying reasons for their decision to uphold an order from a lower court that declared hospitals cannot be legally obligated to administer abortions if doing so would violate the law in the state of Texas.

Institutions are not required to perform abortions, as stipulated in the decree. The common populace did not investigate any opposing viewpoints. The decision was made just weeks before a presidential election that brought abortion to the forefront of the political agenda.

This decision follows the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended abortion nationwide.

In response to a request from the administration of Vice President Joe Biden to overturn the lower court’s decision, the justices expressed their disapproval.

The government contends that hospitals are obligated to perform abortions in compliance with federal legislation when the health or life of an expectant patient is in an exceedingly precarious condition.

This is the case in regions where the procedure is prohibited. The difficulty hospitals in Texas and other states are experiencing in determining whether or not routine care could be in violation of stringent state laws that prohibit abortion has resulted in an increase in the number of complaints concerning pregnant women who are experiencing medical distress being turned away from emergency rooms.

The administration cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in a case that bore a striking resemblance to the one that was presented to it in Idaho at the beginning of the year. The justices took a limited decision in that case to allow the continuation of emergency abortions without interruption while a lawsuit was still being heard.

In contrast, Texas has been a vocal proponent of the injunction’s continued enforcement. Texas has argued that its circumstances are distinct from those of Idaho, as the state does have an exemption for situations that pose a significant hazard to the health of an expectant patient.

According to the state, the discrepancy is the result of this exemption. The state of Idaho had a provision that safeguarded a woman’s life when the issue was first broached; however, it did not include protection for her health.

Certified medical practitioners are not obligated to wait until a woman’s life is in imminent peril before they are legally permitted to perform an abortion, as determined by the state supreme court.

The state of Texas highlighted this to the Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, medical professionals have criticized the Texas statute as being perilously ambiguous, and a medical board has declined to provide a list of all the disorders that are eligible for an exception. Furthermore, the statute has been criticized for its hazardous ambiguity.

For an extended period, termination of pregnancies has been a standard procedure in medical treatment for individuals who have been experiencing significant issues. It is implemented in this manner to prevent catastrophic outcomes, such as sepsis, organ failure, and other severe scenarios.

Nevertheless, medical professionals and hospitals in Texas and other states with strict abortion laws have noted that it is uncertain whether or not these terminations could be in violation of abortion prohibitions that include the possibility of a prison sentence. This is the case in regions where abortion prohibitions are exceedingly restrictive.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which resulted in restrictions on the rights of women to have abortions in several Republican-ruled states, the Texas case was revisited in 2022.

As per the orders that were disclosed by the administration of Vice President Joe Biden, hospitals are still required to provide abortions in cases that are classified as dire emergency.

As stipulated in a piece of health care legislation, the majority of hospitals are obligated to provide medical assistance to patients who are experiencing medical distress. This is in accordance with the law.

The state of Texas maintained that hospitals should not be obligated to provide abortions throughout the litigation, as doing so would violate the state’s constitutional prohibition on abortions. In its January judgment, the 5th United States Circuit Court of Appeals concurred with the state and acknowledged that the administration had exceeded its authority.

SOURCE: AP

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Could Last-Minute Surprises Derail Kamala Harris’ Campaign? “Nostradamus” Explains the US Poll.

Scientists Awarded MicroRNA The Nobel Prize in Medicine.

US Inflation will Comfort a Fed Focused on Labor Markets.

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