Living with Macro-financial Linkages: Policy Perspectives and Challenges for SEACEN Countries

The deepening financial liberalisation and the tightening of financial integration globally have made it more challenging to manage macroeconomic policies in general, and to contain the spread of financial turbulence in particular. The financial sector has been shown to be inherently pro-cyclical and capable of amplifying macroeconomic volatilities, making management of monetary policy increasingly complex. In these ever changing financial landscapes, the success of monetary policy and macroeconomic policies, in general, hinges on the ability of policy makers to design policies that explicitly take into account macro-financial channels, and to interpret more cautiously the potential risk in financial system disruptions that can rapidly destabilise macroeconomic stability. The objective of this study is to take stock and examine the impact of linkages between macroeconomic development and financial market condition with a special focus on the SEACEN economies.Macro-financial linkages, Macro-prudential, Stress-testing, Cross-border supervision, Basel III

Living with Macro-financial Linkages: Policy Perspectives and Challenges for SEACEN Countries

The deepening financial liberalisation and the tightening of financial integration globally have made it more challenging to manage macroeconomic policies in general, and to contain the spread of financial turbulence in particular. The financial sector has been shown to be inherently pro-cyclical and capable of amplifying macroeconomic volatilities, making management of monetary policy increasingly complex. In these ever changing financial landscapes, the success of monetary policy and macroeconomic policies, in general, hinges on the ability of policy makers to design policies that explicitly take into account macro-financial channels, and to interpret more cautiously the potential risk in financial system disruptions that can rapidly destabilise macroeconomic stability. The objective of this study is to take stock and examine the impact of linkages between macroeconomic development and financial market condition with a special focus on the SEACEN economies.

The Role of Central Banks in Sustaining Economic Recovery and in Achieving Financial Stability

Whenever a financial crisis occurs, threatening a possible financial meltdown, central banks have to be at the forefront in combating, neutralizing the crisis and restoring financial stability and economic growth. In this regard, the present sub-prime crisis which originated from the US highlights a few key issues for SEACEN central banks. This paper reviews the policy responses to the crisis which include exit policy strategies from stimulus monetary packages. To strengthen the soundness of the financial system going forward, the paper also highlights counter-cyclical and macro-prudential regulations that central banks may want to actively look into. These include cross-border policy cooperation and coordination, particularly in the form of the college of supervisors. (This paper has also been published in the Journal of Advanced Studies in Finance, Vol.1, Issue1(1), Summer 2010, http://www.asers.eu/journals/jasf/)

Capital Flows Management During the Post-2007 Global Financial Crisis: The Experiences of SEACEN Economies

Although global financial stability in late 2010 and early 2011 has, in general, improved when compared to the 2008-2009 period of the sub-prime global financial crisis, vulnerabilities remain high. The recent World Economic Outlook of the IMF (WEO, September 2011) underlines the two speed recovery processes taking place in the world economies. In advanced economies, especially those hit hardest by the crisis, firms, government and household sectors continue to be heavily indebted and are likely to spur relatively weak demand. Although the financial markets of these economies have, in most parts, returned to profitability, the overall frail balance sheets reflect the general subdued state of the local economy. In sharp contrast, the emerging economies, including those of the SEACEN region, are posting robust growth rates until the second half of 2011, meeting new challenges associated with strong demand, rapid credit and excess liquidity. Price pressures, including potential asset price bubbles, have been the common themes of policy challenges for the SEACEN economies. Managing macro-financial risks, namely balancing growth, balance sheet soundness of the financial institutions, particularly the banking sector, and keeping a lid on inflationary pressures, have been and will likely be the primary policy challenges for these emerging markets in 2011 and 2012. This paper takes stock of recent trends and developments with regard to capital flows in the SEACEN economies. It elaborates in detail, the breakdowns and compositions of the flows. In particular, the focus of the analyses is on key flows such as the international bank lending activities to the region. The paper also summarises and analyses some of the basic push and pull factors of these flows to understand some of the domestic and external drivers of these flows. Some of the economic consequences of these capital flows and policy dilemma facing the SEACEN economies are also looked at. The paper also examines the policy responses of the central banks/monetary authorities, in particular, to mitigate the negative consequences and maximise the benefits of capital flows.

Living with Macro-financial Linkages: Policy Perspectives and Challenges for SEACEN Countries

The deepening financial liberalisation and the tightening of financial integration globally have made it more challenging to manage macroeconomic policies in general, and to contain the spread of financial turbulence in particular. The financial sector has been shown to be inherently pro-cyclical and capable of amplifying macroeconomic volatilities, making management of monetary policy increasingly complex. In these ever changing financial landscapes, the success of monetary policy and macroeconomic policies, in general, hinges on the ability of policy makers to design policies that explicitly take into account macro-financial channels, and to interpret more cautiously the potential risk in financial system disruptions that can rapidly destabilise macroeconomic stability. The objective of this study is to take stock and examine the impact of linkages between macroeconomic development and financial market condition with a special focus on the SEACEN economies

Living with Macro-financial Linkages: Policy Perspectives and Challenges for SEACEN Countries

The deepening financial liberalisation and the tightening of financial integration globally have made it more challenging to manage macroeconomic policies in general, and to contain the spread of financial turbulence in particular. The financial sector has been shown to be inherently pro-cyclical and capable of amplifying macroeconomic volatilities, making management of monetary policy increasingly complex. In these ever changing financial landscapes, the success of monetary policy and macroeconomic policies, in general, hinges on the ability of policy makers to design policies that explicitly take into account macro-financial channels, and to interpret more cautiously the potential risk in financial system disruptions that can rapidly destabilise macroeconomic stability. The objective of this study is to take stock and examine the impact of linkages between macroeconomic development and financial market condition with a special focus on the SEACEN economies

Fine-Scale Mapping of the 5q11.2 Breast Cancer Locus Reveals at Least Three Independent Risk Variants Regulating MAP3K1

Peer reviewe

Genome-wide analyses identify a role for SLC17A4 and AADAT in thyroid hormone regulation.

Thyroid dysfunction is an important public health problem, which affects 10% of the general population and increases the risk of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Many aspects of thyroid hormone regulation have only partly been elucidated, including its transport, metabolism, and genetic determinants. Here we report a large meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies for thyroid function and dysfunction, testing 8 million genetic variants in up to 72,167 individuals. One-hundred-and-nine independent genetic variants are associated with these traits. A genetic risk score, calculated to assess their combined effects on clinical end points, shows significant associations with increased risk of both overt (Graves' disease) and subclinical thyroid disease, as well as clinical complications. By functional follow-up on selected signals, we identify a novel thyroid hormone transporter (SLC17A4) and a metabolizing enzyme (AADAT). Together, these results provide new knowledge about thyroid hormone physiology and disease, opening new possibilities for therapeutic targets

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe