Risk management and stable financial structures

Conventional development economics has focused mainly on generating economic growth by mobilizing savings and allocating them wisely among investment opportunities. Savings (external and domestic) were to be mobilized through tax incentives, income, and interest rate policies. Their allocation often involved direct government intervention in the investment process. After the disastrous results of the 1980s, the new wisdom is to let the private sector generate growth, while the government provides the regulatory and supervisory framework for competitive markets, ensures the existence of level playing fields, and removes obvious cases of moral hazard. But the private sector working under an inappropriate financial structure may do no better than the government in making right investment choices for long-term growth. So governments (which in a financial crisis are responsible for all national debts) should have an effective national risk management strategy, with an understanding of the national balance sheet, and the necessity of a stable financial structure for steady long-term economic growth. The authors argue that it is not only how much investment is mobilized and allocated but also how investments are financed that matters for an economy's long-term growth. Finance and development are inextricably linked with risk management (both at the sectoral and national levels). Development is a function not just of promoting the right industries and allocating capital for the high-return investments (asset management) but also of choosing the right financial structure (liability management) - and of the related risks arising from the liability mix chosen. The authors argue that one of the ingredients of the East Asian success is prudent risk management by these governments. They present five rules for national risk management, concluding, among other things, to: (a) establish fiscal discipline and price stability as the anchor of overall financial stability; (b) encourage asset diversification through industrialization and export orientation, financed by foreign direct investment; (c) avoid sectoral imbalances, such as excessive domestic or external borrowing, including the development of instruments and institutions to absorb shocks; (d) establish strong institutional capacity to assess and contain systemic risks; and (e) when the above conditions are not adequately met, retain some policy measures to handle the risk.Environmental Economics&Policies,Financial Intermediation,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Theory&Research

Pastoral Care to the Grievers in Crisis

The COVID-19 is still causing many deaths globally. Thus authorities have implemented strict public measures designed to reduce and limit the interactions between people. Such measures have impacted the pastoral ministry in many ways. There has never been such a great crisis for the pastoral ministry, especially the pastoral cares to the grievers. The grief in the bereaved has challenged the pastoral care in parish in numerous ways with regard to how to deal with them. In this circumstance, the pastoral care to the grievers comes to the surface with a totally different paradigm. Pastoral care to the grievers is best when rendered by and within a particular religious tradition such as religious rituals, faith ideology and cultural patterns. Therefore the local parish and staff have to try all means possible to connect with the grievers, while exercising discretion and creativity to minimize physical contact during the pandemic times. Now is the high time for the pastoral care service to the grievers to stand up for it. Now is the opportunity for the pastoral ministry to the grievers to provide a compassionate leadership

Parts of the Sum

Parts of the Sum is an installation of ceramic, wood, and drawn components which examines the symbiosis of individual and cultural identity: a recursive relationship which engenders unceasing diversity. The installation uses patterns and rule-based compositions as vehicles to address the development of complexity from compounded simplicity as it relates to personality. An immersive meta-network that emulates the complexity underlying identity, Parts of the Sum ultimately relies on the active participation and inclusion of the viewer for completion

Method of lines transpose: High order L-stable O(N) schemes for parabolic equations using successive convolution

We present a new solver for nonlinear parabolic problems that is L-stable and achieves high order accuracy in space and time. The solver is built by first constructing a single-dimensional heat equation solver that uses fast O(N) convolution. This fundamental solver has arbitrary order of accuracy in space, and is based on the use of the Green's function to invert a modified Helmholtz equation. Higher orders of accuracy in time are then constructed through a novel technique known as successive convolution (or resolvent expansions). These resolvent expansions facilitate our proofs of stability and convergence, and permit us to construct schemes that have provable stiff decay. The multi-dimensional solver is built by repeated application of dimensionally split independent fundamental solvers. Finally, we solve nonlinear parabolic problems by using the integrating factor method, where we apply the basic scheme to invert linear terms (that look like a heat equation), and make use of Hermite-Birkhoff interpolants to integrate the remaining nonlinear terms. Our solver is applied to several linear and nonlinear equations including heat, Allen-Cahn, and the Fitzhugh-Nagumo system of equations in one and two dimensions

Numerical Simulations of Driven Relativistic MHD Turbulence

A wide variety of astrophysical phenomena involve the flow of turbulent magnetized gas with relativistic velocity or energy density. Examples include gamma-ray bursts, active galactic nuclei, pulsars, magnetars, micro-quasars, merging neutron stars, X-ray binaries, some supernovae, and the early universe. In order to elucidate the basic properties of the relativistic magnetohydrodynamical (RMHD) turbulence present in these systems, we present results from numerical simulations of fully developed driven turbulence in a relativistically warm, weakly magnetized and mildly compressible ideal fluid. We have evolved the RMHD equations for many dynamical times on a uniform grid with 1024^3 zones using a high order Godunov code. We observe the growth of magnetic energy from a seed field through saturation at about 1% of the total fluid energy. We compute the power spectrum of velocity and density-weighted velocity and conclude that the inertial scaling is consistent with a slope of -5/3. We compute the longitudinal and transverse velocity structure functions of order p up to 11, and discuss their possible deviation from the expected scaling for non-relativistic media. We also compute the scale-dependent distortion of coherent velocity structures with respect to the local magnetic field, finding a weaker scale dependence than is expected for incompressible non-relativistic flows with a strong mean field.Comment: Accepted to Ap

Method of Lines Transpose: Energy Gradient Flows Using Direct Operator Inversion for Phase-Field Models

In this work, we develop an $\mathcal{O}(N)$ implicit real space method in 1D and 2D for the Cahn--Hilliard (CH) and vector Cahn--Hilliard (VCH) equations, based on the method of lines transpose (MOL$^{T}$) formulation. This formulation results in a semidiscrete time stepping algorithm, which we prove is gradient stable in the $H^{-1}$ norm. The spatial discretization follows from dimensional splitting and an $\mathcal{O}(N)$ matrix-free solver, which applies fast convolution to the modified Helmholtz equation. We propose a novel factorization technique, in which fourth-order spatial derivatives are incorporated into the solver. The splitting error is included in the nonlinear fixed point iteration, resulting in a high-order, logically Cartesian (line-by-line) update. Our method is fast but not restricted to periodic boundaries like the fast Fourier transform (FFT). The basic solver is implemented using the backward Euler formulation, and we extend this to both backward difference formula (BDF) stencils, singly diagonal implicit Runge--Kutta (SDIRK), and spectral deferred correction (SDC) frameworks to achieve high orders of temporal accuracy. We demonstrate with numerical results that the CH and VCH equations maintain gradient stability in one and two spatial dimensions. We also explore time-adaptivity, so that meta-stable states and ripening events can be simulated both quickly and efficiently