Anti-racism: totem and taboo – a review article

Anti-anti-racism is seeing a renascence in the UK. Against a backdrop of punishing austerity measures, the ascent of the neoliberal project and the undermining of multiculturalism, this resurgent critique decries anti-racism as set against white communities, argues that it exists primarily to serve a liberal elite, and that it feeds into a multicultural dogma undermining western culture. Those developing this critique argue that fear of the charge of racism prevents discussion and rational policy measures to manage immigration, ‘race’ and identity. This review article examines three key books embodying aspects of these claims, as well as showing how a liberal ceding of ground to the Right on the intersections of race and class ultimately bolsters its arguments

Banking Reform

On 3 December EY hosted a SUERF conference on banking reform with Sir Howard Davies, the Chairman of RBS, and Dame Colette Bowe, the Chairman of the Banking Standards Board, as the two keynote speakers. Professor David Miles (Imperial College) gave the SUERF 2015 Annual Lecture on Capital and Banks. The conference focused on core aspects of banking reform: the amount of capital required, the design of capital requirements (complexity versus simplicity), proportionate regulation, recovery and resolution, and risk culture

The Failure of Northern Rock: A multi-dimensional Case Study

In August 2007 the United Kingdom experienced its first bank run in over 140 years. Although Northern Rock was not a particularly large bank (it was at the time ranked 7th in terms of assets) it was nevertheless a significant retail bank and a substantial mortgage lender. In fact, ten years earlier it had converted from a mutual building society whose activities were limited by regulation largely to retail deposits and mortgages. Graphic television news pictures showed very long queues outside the bank as depositors rushed to withdraw their deposits. There was always a fear that this could spark a systemic run on bank deposits. After failed attempts to secure a buyer in the private sector, the government nationalised the bank and, for the first time, in effect socialised the credit risk of the bank. It is now a fully state-owned bank..

Measuring Dynamic Changes in Lung Water Density and Volume Following Supine Body Positioning Using Free-Breathing UTE MRI

An excess of extravascular lung water (EVLW) is known as pulmonary edema, and is associated with dyspnea and poor exercise capacity, heart complications, heart failure, and can be a predictor of poor health outcomes. Recent developments in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequencing and hardware capabilities have enabled free-breathing, 3D isotropic images of the lungs. Previous studies have developed methods to overcome the inherent difficulties in lung MRI, which include low SNR, high signal variations across the image space due to B1 field inhomogeneity, artifacts caused by respiratory and cardiac motion, and a need to normalize signal units within the lung parenchyma to units of lung water content. Through these methods, lung water density (LWD) has been shown to be roughly ~25%-30% in healthy subjects, with a well-documented gradient in LWD in the chest-to-back direction (otherwise known as the “Slinky Effect”). Standard MRI protocol calls for a subject to assume a supine position, which has substantial changes to the thoracic cavity; Changes in global LWD, regional LWD, and global lung volumes over time after assuming supine positioning remain relatively unknown. This thesis has two goals: 1. Refining and improving upon a previously established Free-Breathing “Yarnball” ultrashort echo time (UTE) non-Cartesian k-space trajectory via maximizing trajectory efficiency (balancing image quality and scan time) and introducing a nnU-Net neural network approach to lung parenchyma and lung vasculature segmentation for increased accuracy in relative LWD (rLWD) calculation and 2. Performing a long-time course series (~25 minutes) of lung MRI scans using the above refined trajectory to establish the time-course changes in global rLWD, regional rLWD, global water content and global lung volumes that occur due to a physiological response triggered by a change in the direction of gravitational forces acting upon the body when supine positioning is assumed. If possible, establishment of the amount of time it takes for the noted “Slinky Effect” to form is a tertiary goal. The UTE Yarnball k-space trajectory developed by Meadus et al (2021) was optimized by adjusting the key variables of readout time, TR, voxel size, FOV, and number of averages acquired with image quality, image quantification and total imaging time being taken into consideration. It was determined that a sequence with: FOV = 350 mm, TR = 2.72 ms, TE = 100 μs, 1-degree flip angle, readout time = 1.3 ms, Voxel size = 3.5 mm in all directions, 10 averages and 2738 k-space trajectories was most optimal. At the respiratory phase of functional residual capacity (FRC), minimum lung volume with normal tidal breathing, it was found that global rLWD increased significantly (31.8±5.5% to 34.8±6.8%, p=0.001), global lung volumes decreased significantly (2390±620mL to 2130±630mL, p<0.001) and total lung water volume decreased slightly (730±125 mL to 706±126 mL, p=0.028) over a 25-minute period after supine positioning was assumed. The chest-to-back gradient (20.7±4.6% at the chest to 39.9±6.1% at the back) formed prior to first acquisition (~3:54 minutes), and was significant at all time-points. Tidal volume (lung volume change per respiratory cycle) also decreased significantly over time (474±89mL to 382±91 mL, p=0.018) despite respiratory rate remaining constant. UTE Yarnball MRI was refined to “optimally” balance image quality with total image scan time, featuring an increase in number of averages used alongside a reduction in scan time with no significant loss to image quality when compared to the preceding iteration. Global and regional rLWD and lung volumes were shown to change over long periods of time after supine positioning, a phenomenon that should be considered in future lung MRI studies. In particular, we have shown, for the first time, that the timing of data acquisition following supine positioning will significantly affect the lung water density values, and thus should be taken into consideration in clinical studies. Furthermore, any free-breathing MRI acquisitions should consider these significant shifts in lung volumes and positions over time following supine positioning (i.e. navigator type sequences would be confounded by the potential drift of lungs, heart and all organs in abdomen over time). Finally, the formation of the chest-to-back gradient was not captured, but can be inferred to occur in < 1 minute, and likely immediately with supine positioning

Central Banking and Monetary Policy: What will be the post-crisis new normal?

Central Bankers are currently facing big challenges in designing and implementing monetary policy, as well as with safeguarding financial stability, with the world economy still in the process of digesting the legacy of the crisis. The crisis has changed central banking in many ways: by shifting the focus of monetary policy from fighting too high inflation towards fighting too low inflation; by prompting new ‘experimental’ non-conventional measures, which risk to cause large, long-lasting market distortions and imbalances and which also have more far-reaching distributional consequences than ‘normal, conventional’ monetary policy; and by broadening central banks’ responsibilities particularly in the direction of safeguarding banking stability and financial stability at large. This raises several questions for the future: How long will ultra-easy monetary policies last? What are post-crisis growth trajectories, and how will the natural rate of interest rates evolve? How could an exit from ultra-easy monetary policy and a return towards higher nominal interest rates be eventually managed smoothly? Does ultra-easy monetary policy itself affect the economy in a lasting and structural way? Is the pre-crisis economic paradigm governing monetary policy still valid? If not, in what ways should it be adjusted? Are there any reasonable and practical alternatives? Against this background and given the larger post-crisis range of central banks’ responsibilities: is the current institutional set-up governing central banks and their relationship to government, Parliament and the financial system still appropriate? What adaptations might be considered? Would they bring an improvement or, on the contrary, a set-back to the unsuccessful policy approaches of the 1960s and 1970s? To discuss these issues, on 14 April 2016 the Baffi Carefin Center (Bocconi University) hosted a SUERF Conference. This introductory chapter aims to provide a framework for the various contributions in this book, and also summarizes some main ideas from later chapters for an overview

The diffusion of financial supervisory governance ideas

Who is watching the financial services industry? Since 1980, there have been multiple waves of thought about whether the ministry of finance, the central bank, a specialized regulator or some combination of these should have supervisory authority. These waves have been associated with the convergence of actual practices. How much and through what channels did internationally promoted ideas about supervisory 'best practice' influence institutional design choices? I use a new dataset of 83 countries and jurisdictions between the 1980s and 2007 to examine the diffusion of supervisory ideas. With this data, I employ Cox Proportional Hazard and Competing Risks Event History Analyses to evaluate the possible causal roles best practice policy ideas might have played. I find that banking crises and certain peer groups can encourage policy convergence on heavily promoted ideas

Refining value-at-risk estimates using a Bayesian Markov-switching GJR-GARCH copula-EVT model

In this paper, we propose a model for forecasting Value-at-Risk (VaR) using a Bayesian Markov-switching GJR-GARCH(1,1) model with skewed Student’s-t innovation, copula functions and extreme value theory. A Bayesian Markov-switching GJR-GARCH(1,1) model that identifies non-constant volatility over time and allows the GARCH parameters to vary over time following a Markov process, is combined with copula functions and EVT to formulate the Bayesian Markov-switching GJR-GARCH(1,1) copula-EVT VaR model, which is then used to forecast the level of risk on financial asset returns. We further propose a new method for threshold selection in EVT analysis, which we term the hybrid method. Empirical and back-testing results show that the proposed VaR models capture VaR reasonably well in periods of calm and in periods of crisis