The historical recourse in this situation is to go enter the debtor nation without asking and take ownership of what you need. For instance if you are trying to collect war debts after World War I, you could go in and assume ownership of factories the Ruhr Valley. The debtor nation would completely understand, because debts are debts, after all.

Reminds me in the aftermath of the research scandal that interviewers were asking every analyst if they had any commercial relationship with the company under discussion and one SG analyst said “your viewers should assume on any topic that if we aren’t already doing business we are working round the clock to remedy that situation”.

Personally, I would rather go on the facts and arguments presented rather than their “biases”.

The important distinction is we *know* Felix gets paid by Reuters, so the reader can choose to account for whatever bias we feel might be present because of that.

Being paid is not the crime. Failing to disclose it so that readers can’t use this information to inform their perception of the piece is.

Is there any actual issue you have with the article Mr Scott published? You get paid by Reuters, does that mean you won’t offend media companies and financial institutions who are the largest clients of Reuters? I suspect in alot of these “conflict” cases the academic has been picked because he believes what he is writing anyway.

Were you paid by Hal Scott? It’s not Felix’s job to do MORE work; rather, it’s Hal’s job to reveal his sources of funding. Alternatively, Hal Scott has zero academic credibility.

Of course, Argentina’s entire effort falls apart if they don’t have “intellectually neutral” backers of their position, so Hal’s paper isn’t exactly unexpected.

Why don’t you call him and ask him?