Welcome to the Mclowd Community Newsletter
World Bank president David Malpass said the global economy is poised to decelerate more than previously estimated, with the pile of negative-yielding debt indicating growth will be slower in the future.
Low or negative returns for years, even decades, SMH Sept 18
Introduction
SME accounting software vendor Wave Apps recently announced the release of a number of new features, including automatic transaction classification powered by machine learning.
That Wave could offer nearly 500,000 small to medium enterprises access to an army of machine learning computers for free illustrates the rate at which such technologies are being commoditised.
That the World Bank President would predict decades of low or negative yields at the same time as the Wave announcement is no coincidence.
The two forces are inextricably linked.
One is cause (deflation / demonetisation). The other consequence (low or negative returns).
What we are now witnessing is precisely the future which Mclowd has been predicting for a number of years – and for which the Community was designed since inception.
Accounting Software Update
The Mclowd Community has access to exactly the same AWS-powered machine learning algorithms as Wave.
As such it is inevitable that we will deploy those technologies in the same manner – and otherwise in the context of the upcoming launch of Open Banking.
In the interim the following have recently been deployed:
- Improved support for the creation and management of loan assets, including integration with year end reporting, SMSFAR and the Fund dashboard
- The Audit Report has now been incorporated into the Reports Pack
(Full details will be provided in the upcoming Practitioner and Trustee Updates).
In addition previous restrictions on access to unit pricing data for managed funds have now been removed. This data is now available to relevant users on Pro, via the asset maintenance screen.
During this quarter we will leverage this data to further improve year end processing (by allowing users with managed funds to accept default values for these assets, as with ASX-listed securities).
Conclusion
I can relate to the process of demonetisation which Wave is driving because I am writing this Newsletter while sitting in the Sober Mule cafe in the Victorian town of Mornington.
Just outside the cafe my electric car is being charged up.
I don’t pay for the electricity which powers my private mobility for the same reason that nearly half a million Wave users don’t pay for machine learning:
The globally-defined marginal cost of those products / services is precisely zero, so the price of those products / services has now fallen to zero.
Postcript
We have all spent the 21st century living in the macroeconomic equivalent of The Truman Show.
An elaborate set designed to mask deflationary reality – and funded by hundreds of trillions of dollars in debt.
While the credits haven’t yet started rolling, when they do the names will be familiar: Bernanke, Yellen, Carney, Draghi, Stevens, Lowe et al.
However the fact that software and energy are becoming free is a reminder that no amount of fiscal or monetary alchemy was ever going to alter our Zero Marginal Cost destination.
Because that destination was always fixed.
Regards
Ashley Porter
Managing Director
Mclowd Pty Ltd