Regaining Financial Stability: Taming Financial Markets Is a Must - A Focus on NMSs

The need for a radical overhaul of the regulation and supervision of financial markets has been acknowledged in all advanced economies. And yet, there still is a line ofreasoning which argues that the main source of the current financial crisis is the cheap money of the past, which would have caused large global imbalances as well.But another, that I share, is that something wrong has been occurring with overall financial intermediation in recent decades. This is like saying that structure has been no less important in derailing economies than misconceived policies and unavoidable cyclical dynamics. By structure we mean the configuration of rules and practices in the realm of regulation and supervision, on one hand; and the evolution and practices of financial institutions, including securitization and the growth of the so-called shadow banking sector (which has escaped regulations), on the other hand. Structure has, arguably, influenced policies in view of the relative neglect of systemic risks and the almost blind belief, by some, in the self-regulatory virtues and clairvoyance of financial markets. For a long time financial stability was relegated, de facto, to a second tier policy priority – especially in advanced economies. The current crisis has brought this concern back, with vengeance, and relates it to structure. The “great moderation” reveals itself as a “great misperception” period, which compels a rethinking of regulations and practices, of monetary policy itself (of inflation targeting, too), of the linkages between various domains of economic policy. Nothing seems to be certain any longer, in an increasingly stochastic world. Just think about the huge difference between how Spain and Ireland were judged before and after the eruption of this crisis – with a sharp deterioration of public finances and drastic economic downturn. The economies of EU new member states (NMSs) in Central and Eastern Europe have been most hardly hit by this financial crisis, a fact that has intrigued observers. Because these economies’ exposure to toxic products was quite minimal and their budget behaviors, with some exceptions, were not profligate. And yet, apart from Poland, their economic downturn was, on average, the most significant among emerging economies. What this paper argues is that this dynamics can be explained by considering implications of deep financial integration. The latter can bring benefits and rapid growth, which did take place in the Region until 2008, but it can also harm unless proper institutions and policies operate. Moreover, the impact of the current crisis on NMSs illustrates the role of Structure, of the rules of the game in the EU (complete capital account liberalization), the nature of regulation and supervision, and, not least, massive cross border operations. The case of NMSs is all the more significant since these economies imported capital on a big scale as a means to foster growth – while in Asia and Latin America, the episodes of crisis of the past two decades induced countries to attach a high premium on the accumulation of foreign exchange reserves and the reduction of current account deficits. NMSs look like they have tried to defy the lessons of previous crises by betting on the virtues of deep financial integration. This paper looks at their case and probes into future possible developments. This discussion is couched in a broader context, of the need to reform structure (rules and arrangements), in the EU, too. A key argument is made: in order to regain financial stability, at the international level, a return to the initial logic of the Bretton Woods arrangements is needed. The financial policy trilemma (the impossible trinity)3 would ask for releasing monetary policy and trade flows from the vicissitudes posed by unconstrained financial flows. The currency war underway and rising protectionism are additional indications that new international arrangements are badly needed if an open global system is to be preserved. Finally, the paper puts forward a range of issues which need further scrutiny in order to make policy more effective.

Project knowledge into project practice: generational issues in the knowledge management process

This paper considers Learning and Knowledge Transfer within the project domain. Knowledge can be a tenuous and elusive concept, and is challenging to transfer within organizations and projects. This challenge is compounded when we consider generational differences in the project and the workplace. This paper looks at learning, and the transfer of that generated knowledge. A number of tools and frameworks have been considered, together with accumulated extant literature. These issues have been deliberated through the lens of different generational types, focusing on the issues and differences in knowledge engagement and absorption between Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Generation Y/Millennials. Generation Z/Centennials have also been included where appropriate. This is a significant issue in modern project and organizational structures. Some recommendations are offered to assist in effective knowledge transfer across generational types.Accepted manuscrip

Scalable Audience Reach Estimation in Real-time Online Advertising

Online advertising has been introduced as one of the most efficient methods of advertising throughout the recent years. Yet, advertisers are concerned about the efficiency of their online advertising campaigns and consequently, would like to restrict their ad impressions to certain websites and/or certain groups of audience. These restrictions, known as targeting criteria, limit the reachability for better performance. This trade-off between reachability and performance illustrates a need for a forecasting system that can quickly predict/estimate (with good accuracy) this trade-off. Designing such a system is challenging due to (a) the huge amount of data to process, and, (b) the need for fast and accurate estimates. In this paper, we propose a distributed fault tolerant system that can generate such estimates fast with good accuracy. The main idea is to keep a small representative sample in memory across multiple machines and formulate the forecasting problem as queries against the sample. The key challenge is to find the best strata across the past data, perform multivariate stratified sampling while ensuring fuzzy fall-back to cover the small minorities. Our results show a significant improvement over the uniform and simple stratified sampling strategies which are currently widely used in the industry

Taming Data Caches for Predictable Execution on GPU-based SoCs

Heterogeneous SoCs (HeSoCs) typically share a single DRAM between the CPU and GPU, making workloads susceptible to memory interference, and predictable execution troublesome. State-of-the art predictable execution models (PREM) for HeSoCs prefetch data to the GPU scratchpad memory (SPM), for computations to be insensitive to CPU-generated DRAM traffic. However, the amount of work that the small SPM sizes allow is typically insufficient to absorb CPU/GPU synchronization costs. On-chip caches are larger, and would solve this issue, but have been argued too unpredictable due to self-evictions. We show how self-eviction can be minimized in GPU caches via clever managing of prefetches, thus lowering the performance cost, while retaining timing predictability

Double Whammy - How ICT Projects are Fooled by Randomness and Screwed by Political Intent

The cost-benefit analysis formulates the holy trinity of objectives of project management - cost, schedule, and benefits. As our previous research has shown, ICT projects deviate from their initial cost estimate by more than 10% in 8 out of 10 cases. Academic research has argued that Optimism Bias and Black Swan Blindness cause forecasts to fall short of actual costs. Firstly, optimism bias has been linked to effects of deception and delusion, which is caused by taking the inside-view and ignoring distributional information when making decisions. Secondly, we argued before that Black Swan Blindness makes decision-makers ignore outlying events even if decisions and judgements are based on the outside view. Using a sample of 1,471 ICT projects with a total value of USD 241 billion - we answer the question: Can we show the different effects of Normal Performance, Delusion, and Deception? We calculated the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of (actual-forecast)/forecast. Our results show that the CDF changes at two tipping points - the first one transforms an exponential function into a Gaussian bell curve. The second tipping point transforms the bell curve into a power law distribution with the power of 2. We argue that these results show that project performance up to the first tipping point is politically motivated and project performance above the second tipping point indicates that project managers and decision-makers are fooled by random outliers, because they are blind to thick tails. We then show that Black Swan ICT projects are a significant source of uncertainty to an organisation and that management needs to be aware of