Emerging contours of financial regulation: challenges and dynamics.

The current ongoing financial crisis is attributed to a variety of factors such as the developments in the subprime mortgage sector, excessive leverage, lax financial regulation and supervision, and global macroeconomic imbalances. At a fundamental level, however, the crisis also reflects the effects of long periods of excessively loose monetary policy in the major advanced economies during the early part of this decade. The theory and belief of efficient and rational markets have been severely discredited by the current crisis. There is, therefore, a growing agreement for much strengthened, and perhaps, intrusive regulation and supervision in the financial sector. Hitherto unregulated institutions, markets and instruments will now have to be brought under the regulatory framework. A more developed macroprudential approach will be important. Once the current financial crisis is beyond us, minimum regulatory capital requirements would need to be signifi cantly above existing Basel rules, with emphasis on Tier I capital, and supported by a maximum gross leverage ratio. Liquidity regulation and supervision must be recognised as of equal importance to capital regulation, reinforced by an effective global liquidity framework for managing liquidity in large, cross-border fi nancial institutions. The issue of remuneration in the fi nancial sector would require reforms on an industry-wide basis so that improved risk management and compensation practices by some systemically important firms are not undermined by the unsound practices of others. Whereas the suggested reform principles are being increasingly well accepted, many challenges will arise on their modes of implementation, and their practicality. For instance, once normalcy returns, the fi nancial industry will do its utmost to resist the requirements for higher capital at that time. From the point of view of emerging market economies (EMEs), the volatility in capital flows – mainly the outcome of extant monetary policy regimes in developed countries – has led to severe problems in both macro management and financial regulation. This will remain a challenge since there is little international discussion on this issue. Finally, as the global economy starts recovery, a calibrated exit from the prevalent unprecedented accommodative monetary policy will have to be ensured to avoid the recurrence of the financial crisis being experienced now.

High-pressure micro-discharges in etching and deposition applications

High-pressure micro-discharges are promising sources of light, ions, and radicals and offer some advantages in materials processing applications as compared to other more conventional discharges. We review here results from etching experiments using stencil masks where the discharge is formed only in the pattern cutout. The mask consists of a thin metal-dielectric structure and is pressed against a Si wafer, which becomes part of the electric circuit. Pattern transfer takes place, albeit the profile shape appears to be limited by the expansion of the plasma into the etched hole at long etch times. We also review experiments on using micro-discharges as sources of radicals for materials deposition applications. In the latter case, the micro-discharges form in metal capillary tubes permitting incorporation of gas flow and a short reaction zone that can be controlled to favour production of specific radicals. We demonstrate these concepts by using CH4/H2 chemistry for diamond deposition on a heated Mo substrate. Good quality micro- and nano-diamond crystals could be produced

A frictional Cosserat model for the flow of granular materials through a vertical channel

A rigid-plastic Cosserat model has been used to study dense, fully developed flow of granular materials through a vertical channel. Frictional models based on the classical continuum do not predict the occurrence of shear layers, at variance with experimental observations. This feature has been attributed to the absence of a material length scale in their constitutive equations. The present model incorporates such a material length scale by treating the granular material as a Cosserat continuum. Thus localised couple stresses exist and the stress tensor is asymmetric. The velocity profiles predicted by the model are in close agreement with available experimental data. The predicted dependence of the shear layer thickness on the width of the channel is in reasonable agreement with data. In the limit of the ratio of the particle diameter to the half-width of the channel being small, the model predicts that the shear layer thickness scaled by the particle diameter grows.Comment: 17 pages, 12 PostScript figures, uses AmsLaTeX, psfrag and natbib. Accepted for publication in Acta Mechanic