The fatal flaw in macropru: it ignores political risk

Political risk is a major cause of systemic financial risk. This column argues that both the integrity and the legitimacy of macroprudential policy, or ‘macropru’, depends on political risk being included with other risk factors. Yet it is usually excluded from macropru, and that could be a fatal flaw

Brexit and systemic risk

Brexit is likely to cause considerable disruption for financial markets. Some worry that it may also increase systemic risk. This column revisits the debate and argues that an increase in systemic risk is unlikely. While legal ‘plumbing’ and institutional and regulatory equivalence are of concern, systemic risk is more likely to fall due to increased financial fragmentation and caution by market participants in the face of uncertainty

Lessons from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank shows that banks still pose risks. Are they systemic? Jón Danielsson, Robert Macrae, and Nikola Tchouparov write that while it is unlikely that the failure of SVB will lead to a crisis, it shows us that the financial system is much more fragile than the public had been led to believe

Artificial intelligence and systemic risk

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing how the financial system is operated, taking over core functions for both cost savings and operational efficiency reasons. AI will assist both risk managers and the financial authorities. However, it can destabilize the financial system, creating new tail risks and amplifying existing ones due to procyclicality, unknown-unknowns, the need for trust, and optimization against the system

Linking Music Metadata.

PhDThe internet has facilitated music metadata production and distribution on an unprecedented scale. A contributing factor of this data deluge is a change in the authorship of this data from the expert few to the untrained crowd. The resulting unordered flood of imperfect annotations provides challenges and opportunities in identifying accurate metadata and linking it to the music audio in order to provide a richer listening experience. We advocate novel adaptations of Dynamic Programming for music metadata synchronisation, ranking and comparison. This thesis introduces Windowed Time Warping, Greedy, Constrained On-Line Time Warping for synchronisation and the Concurrence Factor for automatically ranking metadata. We begin by examining the availability of various music metadata on the web. We then review Dynamic Programming methods for aligning and comparing two source sequences whilst presenting novel, specialised adaptations for efficient, realtime synchronisation of music and metadata that make improvements in speed and accuracy over existing algorithms. The Concurrence Factor, which measures the degree in which an annotation of a song agrees with its peers, is proposed in order to utilise the wisdom of the crowds to establish a ranking system. This attribute uses a combination of the standard Dynamic Programming methods Levenshtein Edit Distance, Dynamic Time Warping, and Longest Common Subsequence to compare annotations. We present a synchronisation application for applying the aforementioned methods as well as a tablature-parsing application for mining and analysing guitar tablatures from the web. We evaluate the Concurrence Factor as a ranking system on a largescale collection of guitar tablatures and lyrics to show a correlation with accuracy that is superior to existing methods currently used in internet search engines, which are based on popularity and human ratingsEngineering and Physical Sciences Research Council; Travel grant from the Royal Engineering Society

Why macropru can end up being procyclical

Discretionary macroprudential policies aim to be countercyclical by adjusting risk-taking across the financial cycle. This column argues that the opposite effect may happen in certain cases. Depending on how regulators measure risk and how they react, the eventual outcome may well be procyclical, with serious unintended consequences

1-Adamantylmethyl 2-amino­benzoate

The asymmetric unit of the title compound, C18H23NO2, consists of two crystallographically independent mol­ecules bearing an adamantane cage consisting of three fused cyclo­hexane rings in almost ideal chair conformations, with C—C—C angles in the range 108.47 (16)–110.59 (15)°. Both aryl rings are essentially planar, the maximum deviation from the best plane being 0.0125 (19) Å. One conformer forms chains parallel to the b axis via N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds, whereas the second exhibits only an intra­molecular N—H⋯O hydrogen bond. The crystal structure is stabilized by further weak N—H⋯O and N—H⋯N inter­actions