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abdullahkhalidsyesterday at 7:28 PM1 replyview on HN

On the first page, I see 9 countries which it claims have a default risk of 50% or higher in the next 5 years. Which means a probability of at least 1-0.5^9=0.998 that at least one of them will default.

That's a crazily high confidence prediction. What is their track record? What did they predict 5 years ago and how did those predictions bear out?


Replies

loegyesterday at 9:53 PM

To be clear, those countries are: Argentina, Belarus, Ghana, Pakistan, Russia, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Ukraine, and Venezuela. It would not be shocking if any of those countries defaulted. Also: your math assumes events are independent, but at least the Belarus/Russia/Ukraine events are probably not independent.

Edit: whoops, CFR only gives Russia a 9/10 score, not the full 10/10 score of 50% default probability.