It is a pleasure to be here in Basel, to attend this fine conference at the BIS, and to see so many old friends. It is also a pleasure to have the opportunity of commenting on this paper by Richard Cooper. If you know Dick, you know that he is a stickler for definitions. Ask him to comment on a paper on the renminbi’s undervaluation, and he will question the author’s definition of “undervaluation. ” Ask him to comment on a paper on current account sustainability, and he will question the meaning of the term “sustainability. ” So it is only right that I should question what the author means by “central bank cooperation. ” In fact, Professor Cooper doesn’t provide a definition; rather, he provides a series of examples: information sharing, standards for information gathering, coordinated policy adjustments by central banks. Although illustrations are helpful, an explicit definition would still have helped to focus thought. But what I miss even more is an attempt to prioritize these forms of cooperation. Are some more productive or important than others? Are there some that we should be particularly concerned to promote? The paper is organized as a series of vignettes in central bank cooperation, but

Over the past 80 years, biotechnology has advanced agriculture, health care, and economic development by harnessing biological processes from the organism inward, i.e., from the organ system to the molecular scale. Today's global challenges, including biodiversity loss, climate change, and pollution, demand a complementary technological expansion inspired by processes operating from the organism outward, i.e., at the levels of populations, communities, ecosystems, and the biosphere. Here, we present the components of this technological expansion through ecosystem technology, or ecotech. We propose a framework for ecotech to integrate elements of ecology, engineering, and earth science and to function as a practical and conceptual convergence accelerator. Ecotech will advance critical environmental solutions by uniting independently evolving technologies, generating diverse fields of inquiry (e.g., ecomimicry, ecosystem materials science, ecosystem sensing and signaling), and inspiring innovation. To harness this innovation to improve nature restoration, carbon storage, water quality, ecosystem energy, and infrastructure resistance to disasters, ecotech is guided by cross-cutting actions to ensure scalability, equity, and accountability. When integrated into strategies across nongovernmental organizations, business, and governments, ecotech offers a pathway to advance climate adaptation, biodiversity recovery, and economic diversification and growth. By uniting ecology, engineering, and earth sciences at scale, ecotech transforms technology into a tool to confront humanity's most urgent existential needs and secure a livable future.

The positive association between the service sector share of output and per capita income is one of the best-known regularities in all of growth and development economics. Yet there is less than complete agreement on the nature of that association. Here we identify two waves of service sector growth, a first wave in countries with relatively low levels of per capita GDP and a second wave in countries with higher per capita incomes. The first wave appears to be made up primarily of traditional services, the second wave of modern (financial, communication, computer, technical, legal, advertising and business) services that are receptive to the application of information technologies and increasingly tradable across borders. In addition, there is evidence of the second wave occurring at lower income levels after 1990. But this change in the second wave is not equally evident in all economies: it is most apparent in democracies, in countries that are open to trade, and in those that are relatively close to the major global financial centers. This points to both political and economic conditions that can help countries capitalize on the opportunities afforded by an increasingly globalized post-industrial economy.

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Tal como turioes necessitam de agua para crescer, a economia precisa de liquidez para tornar-se robusta, defende Barry Eichengreen.

Leveraging long contexts is crucial for advanced AI systems, but attention computation poses a scalability challenge. While scaled dot-product attention (SDPA) exhibits token sparsity, i.e. only a few pivotal tokens significantly contribute to output, exploiting this sparsity remains challenging. Existing methods either suffer from quality degradation or require substantial additional resources. We show that identifying pivotal tokens is a Maximum Inner Product Search (MIPS) problem. However, existing MIPS solutions are not well-suited for SDPA, as they are not GPU-friendly and often underperform due to the separated query and key distributions. This paper introduces HashAttention, framing pivotal token identification as a recommendation problem. Given a query, HashAttention encodes keys and queries in Hamming space, capturing the required semantic similarity, using learned mapping functions. HashAttention efficiently identifies pivotal tokens for a given query using bitwise operations and computes attention using only these tokens, improving the overall attention efficiency. Trained on generic data, HashAttention reduces tokens used by up to $16\times$ with minimal quality loss, requiring only 32 bits of auxiliary memory per token. Sparsity can be further improved to $32\times$ through task-specific fine-tuning. On A100 GPU, at $32\times$ sparsity, incorporating HashAttention reduces attention latency by up to $4.3\times$ in GPT-FAST and $2.54\times$ in FlashDecode, and achieves up to $3.12\times$ higher throughput for GPT-FAST.

We use data on the extent to which residents of one country hold the bonds of issuers resident in another as a measure of financial integration or interrelatedness, asking how Asia compares with Europe and Latin America and with the base case in which the purchaser and issuer of the bonds reside in different regions. Not surprisingly, we find that Europe is head and shoulders above other regions in terms of financial integration. More interesting is that Asia already seems to have made some progress on this front compared to Latin America and other parts of the world. The contrast with Latin America is largely explained by stronger creditor and investor rights, more expeditious and less costly contract enforcement, and greater transparency that lead to larger and better developed financial systems in Asia, something that is conducive to foreign participation in local markets and to intra-regional cross holdings of Asian bonds generally. Further results based on a limited sample suggest that one factor holding back investment in foreign bonds in East Asia may be limited geographical diversification by mutual funds, in turn reflecting a dearth of appropriate assets. Asian Bond Fund 2, by creating a passively managed portfolio of local currency bonds potentially attractive to mutual fund managers and investors, may help to relax this constraint.

The thesis of this paper is that there is no historical precedent for Europe's monetary (EMU). While it is possible to point to similar historical experiences, the most obvious of which were in the 19th century, occurred in Europe, and had union as part of their names, EMU differs from these earlier monetary unions. The closer one looks the more uncomfortable one becomes with the effort to draw parallels on the basis of historical experience. It is argued that efforts to draw parallels between EMU and monetary unions past are more likely to mislead than to offer useful insights. Where history is useful is not in drawing parallels but in pinpointing differences. It is useful for highlighting what is distinctive about EMU.

This paper analyzes the impact of the global financial crisis on emerging markets. It argues that the crisis will have enduring implications for policy toward the development and liberalization of financial markets. In particular, emerging markets will rely (even) less on external finance and adopt a less permissive approach to foreign bank presence. In contrast, the crisis will have a much more limited impact on other aspects of globalization. More controversially, the paper argues that the crisis is unlikely to have a major impact on the structure of the international monetary system.