Howard Davies, the first chairman of the United Kingdom’s Financial Services Authority (1997-2003), is Chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland. He was Director of the London School of Economics (2003-11) and served as Deputy Governor of the Bank of England and Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry.
European governments have seemingly concluded that hosting large, risky, and volatile financial firms and markets is not worth it, while the US administration still regards the financial sector as a comparative advantage for New York. Which side has made the wiser choice?
LONDON – US President Donald Trump made his intentions on financial regulation clear from the very start of his administration. He issued an executive order requiring that, for every new regulation imposed, at least two should be targeted for repeal. No such deregulatory zeal is evident in Europe.
The Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, signed by Trump in May 2018, has, in practice, emphasized the second part of its title over the third. According to a set of regulatory principles issued by the administration, regulators must consider the competitiveness of US firms and advance American interests in international financial forums. The Treasury was instructed to produce four reports, covering banks, capital markets, asset management and insurance, and non-banks and fintech, to show how the principles could be realized through a variety of deregulatory initiatives. All four reports have now been issued. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning in the US State Department (2009-2011), is President and CEO of the think tank New America, Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, and the author of Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family.
Fadi Chehadé, a former president and CEO of ICANN (2012-2016), is a member of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation and an advisory board member of the World Economic Forum’s Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Because the Internet is a network of networks, its governing structures should be, too. The world needs a digital co-governance order that engages public, civic, and private leaders on the basis of three principles of participation.
WASHINGTON, DC – Governments built the current systems and institutions of international cooperation to address nineteenth- and twentieth-century problems. But in today’s complex and fast-paced digital world, these structures cannot operate at “Internet speed.”
Recognizing this, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres last year assembled a high-level panel – co-chaired by Melinda Gates and Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma – to propose ways to strengthen digital governance and cooperation. (Fadi Chehadé, a co-author of this article, is also a member.) It is hoped that the panel’s final report, expected in June, will represent a significant step forward in managing the potential and risks of digital technologies. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
To understand the future of Silicon Valley, cross the Atlantic
“The birthday of a new world is at hand.” Ever since Thomas Paine penned those words in 1776, America has seen itself as the land of the new—and Europe as a continent stuck in the past.Nowhere is that truer than in the tech industry. America is home to 15 of the world’s 20 most valuable tech firms; Europe has one. Silicon Valley is where the brainiest ideas meet the smartest money. America is also where the debate rages loudly over how to tame the tech giants, so that they act in the public interest. Tech tycoons face roastings by Congress for their firms’ privacy lapses. Elizabeth Warren, a senator who is running for president in 2020, wants Facebook to be broken up.
Yet if you want to understand where the world’s most powerful industry is heading, look not to Washington and California, but to Brussels and Berlin.In an inversion of the rule of thumb, while America dithers the European Union is acting. This week Google was fined $1.7bn for strangling competition in the advertising market. Europe could soon pass new digital copyright laws. Spotify has complained to the eu about Apple’s alleged antitrust abuses. And, as our briefing explains, the eu is pioneering a distinct tech doctrine that aims to give individuals control over their own information and the profits from it, and to prise open tech firms to competition. If the doctrine works, it could benefit millions of users, boost the economy and constrain tech giants that have gathered immense power without a commensurate sense of responsibility. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Jim O’Neill, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management and a former UK Treasury Minister, is Chairman of Chatham House.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, economic orthodoxies have been collapsing left and right. Under conditions of low unemployment, elusive inflation, weak productivity growth, and high profitability, economists in advanced economies may need to go back to the drawing board.
LONDON – Though economics aspires to the rigor of the natural sciences, at the end of the day it is still a social science. At no point in the past 40 years has this been more evident than it is now.
For decades, conventional macroeconomic analysis has rested on the edifice of the Phillips curve, which asserts a clear tradeoff between unemployment and inflation: when the unemployment rate falls below a certain point, inflation must rise. But this assumption has not been borne out in the decade since the 2008 financial crisis. In both the United Kingdom and the United States, for example, the unemployment rate is historically low, yet inflation remains weak.
Or consider monetary policy. Even after years of quantitative easing (QE) and ultra-low interest rates, central bankers in the advanced economies – particularly the eurozone – have continued to undershoot their inflation targets. Economists have also had to question long-held assumptions about downward nominal wage rigidity, an artifact of the 1960-70s, when organized labor was much stronger. Clearly, the idea that employees will always resist cutting wages (or workers’ hours) no longer applies. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Democratic presidential hopeful puts spotlight on antitrust in tech industry ahead of 2020 campaign
Sen. Elizabeth Warren called for ‘big, structural changes to the tech sector to promote more competition.’
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat running for president, on Friday called for the breakup of Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc., taking an aggressive populist stance against some of the nation’s most powerful companies.
“Today’s big tech companies have too much power—too much power over our economy, our society and our democracy,” Ms. Warren said in an online post. “They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation.”
“My administration will make big, structural changes to the tech sector to promote more competition—including breaking up Amazon, Facebook, and Google,” Ms. Warren said.
Some bank executives are open to new rules, hoping for softer pay limits now than if a Democrat becomes president in 2020
The Fed and five other regulators would be involved in any new regulation on banker pay.
WASHINGTON—Long-dormant efforts to restrict Wall Street pay are back on the agenda as regulators turn to unfinished business left over from the 2010 financial overhaul.
Banking regulators are discussing reviving a proposal that would require big banks to defer some compensation for executives and to take back more of their bonuses if losses pile up at a firm, according to people familiar with the matter.
The talks are in early stages and involve top officials from at least three bank regulators: the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Federal Reserve, the people said. Some bank executives are open to having the agencies write a new version of the rules, betting the limits would be milder during the Trump administration than if a Democrat takes the White House in 2020. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Date: 02-03-2019
Source: The New York Times By Cade Metz
Building ethical artificial intelligence is an enormously complex task. It gets even harder when stakeholders realize that ethics are in the eye of the beholder.
Building ethical artificial intelligence is an enormously complex task. It gets even harder when stakeholders realize that ethics are in the eye of the beholder.
HALF MOON BAY, Calif. — When a news article revealed that Clarifai was working with the Pentagon and some employees questioned the ethics of building artificial intelligence that analyzed video captured by drones, the company said the project would save the lives of civilians and soldiers.
“Clarifai’s mission is to accelerate the progress of humanity with continually improving A.I.,” read a blog post from Matt Zeiler, the company’s founder and chief executive, and a prominent A.I. researcher. Later, in a news media interview, Mr. Zeiler announced a new management position that would ensure all company projects were ethically sound. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Howard Davies, the first chairman of the United Kingdom’s Financial Services Authority (1997-2003), is Chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland. He was Director of the London School of Economics (2003-11) and served as Deputy Governor of the Bank of England and Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry.
A new report by the Financial Stability Board argues that the Big Tech could “affect the degree of concentration and contestability in financial services, with both potential benefits and risks for financial stability.” Managing the risks will require much more than vigilance by banking supervisors.
LONDON – As its Valentine’s Day present to the world, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) in Basel published a report on financial technology, or fintech, and market structure in financial services. The subtitle was more insightful, and revealed the authors’ intentions: “market developments and potential financial stability implications.”
The country’s populist leaders alarm European bankers
The bank of italy has long been seen as one of a handful of efficient and incorruptible institutions that curb Italy’s anarchic tendencies. But on February 9th this august establishment came under fire from the two deputy prime ministers who call the shots in the populist government that is nominally led by Giuseppe Conte, the prime minister. Matteo Salvini, who leads the hard-right Northern League, said he wanted to “reboot” the senior management at both the central bank and the stockmarket regulator, Consob. Luigi Di Maio of the Five Star Movement (m5s) demanded “discontinuity”. Both alleged the Bank had failed to protect investors and deposit-holders.Two days earlier, the cabinet had refused to approve a further six-year term for Luigi Federico Signorini, the deputy director-general primarily responsible for banking supervision.
The attack sent ripples of apprehension through the euro zone amid media stories that the populist coalition wanted to get its hands on the Bank’s gold reserves, the third-largest of any country, to fund its expansionary fiscal policies. The president of the Eurogroup of finance ministers, Mario Centeno, and the eu commissioner for economic affairs, Pierre Moscovici, both pointedly stressed the need to preserve the independence of central banks in the single currency area.
On an optimistic interpretation, the threats were perhaps not meant to be taken too seriously. The coalition leaders’ remarks were addressed to a very specific audience: an assembly of stakeholders who lost money when two banks in the Veneto region were liquidated in 2017. The government has promised partially to reimburse them. But eu rules on state aid could yet prevent that. Inveighing against the central bank enabled the party leaders to win plaudits from an unhappy audience. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Bertrand Badré, a former managing director of the World Bank, is CEO and Founder of Blue like an Orange Sustainable Capital, and Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on International Governance, Public-Private Cooperation, and Sustainable Development. He is the author of Can Finance Save the World?
Laurence Daziano is a professor of economics at Sciences Po Paris.
Despite progress since the 2008 financial crisis, reforms of the financial sector have been fragmented rather than fundamental. In particular, the system still lacks the effective holistic regulations needed to encourage the optimal global allocation of capital.
PARIS – In December 2018, US stocks recorded their biggest monthly decline since the subprime mortgage crisis. The sharp fall reflected current concerns about slower economic growth, higher interest rates, Brexit, a possible US-China trade war, and rising geopolitical uncertainty. But the recent equity-market volatility has been made worse by a global financial system that remains largely unreformed more than a decade after the 2008 crisis.
LONDON – US President Donald Trump made his intentions on financial regulation clear from the very start of his administration. He issued an executive order requiring that, for every new regulation imposed, at least two should be targeted for repeal. No such deregulatory zeal is evident in Europe.