User:Joffemd/sandbox

The Public Sector Credit Framework is an open source tool for estimating the default risk of and assigning ratings to government debt. The PSCF installation package was released on May 2, 2012 at http://www.publicsectorcredit.org/pscf.html. At the same time, source code was published on GitHub at http://www.github.com/joffemd/pscf. The publishers, PF2 Securities Evaluations and Public Sector Credit Solutions, said that they released the software in response to the need for "transparent, objective and up-to-date government credit ratings."

History
The initial release of PSCF was accompanied by sample rating models for the United States and for the state of California. A preliminary model for Italy was published in July 2012. After its release, the framework received coverage in The Financial Times Alphaville blog and on Shareable.net among other web based and hard copy publications. In July 2012, the software was covered on The Lang and O'Leary Exchange, a prime time business program on CBC.

Technology
The framework combines a user interface written in Microsoft Excel with a processing engine written in GNU C. Developers have expressed an intention to support a full open source run-time environment. Excel was chosen as the initial user interface platform because of its popularity in the financial community. The PSCF user enters model parameters in Excel and then launches a control panel implemented in Excel VBA. When the user runs an analysis from within the control panel, his or her entries are converted to a C program, which is then compiled and executed. Outputs from the C program are returned to new tabs in the Excel workbook. The C program performs a multi-year budget simulation using random number generation routines from the open source Boost C++ Library.