We have a great laser craft project that sells and we'll show you how to make it right now. What is up? A welcome back. Do like to do it builder to make it. So do we. And we have new videos each week. We are always looking for easy laser crafts that we can sell. Last week we did those layered names with the clip art inside them. This week we're going to do something similar. We're going to do those layered letter piggy banks and we're going to show you how you can do it using only light burn or creative space. We're going to show you both. We've seen these all over Pinterest. I've seen them in TikTok. So I know they're hot sellers. So I think this is a great craft that you can make easily make and sell one. We're going to gather all of our supplies. We needed some three millimeter acrylic. This is going to be the front of our bank. We needed some quarter inch MDF. This is going to be the sides in the back and all the functional pieces of the bank. We're going to need some glue to hold everything together. We're using some starbound thick and we need some paint. We're using some foxy hues paints. And that is it. Step two, we're going to make our design. We're going to show you how to do your design without any design software. We're going to use a light burn or X tool creative space. Let's start in creative space and let's start with my piggy bank.  I'm going to need this thing to store lots of change. So we'll make it chunky five and we'll make this nine inches tall. All right. Now I can't really weld this thing. It won't let me weld one letter but what I can do to turn this into an object is go up to outline. We don't want inside. We just want zero. Okay. Now this one's an object. This one's a font. We can get rid of this one. We don't need it anymore. We'll take this one now and we'll give it an outline. I'll make my frame. I'll make my frame like just about quarter inch. I want to keep that little gap in the G. Okay. Now I got a frame. First I'm going to make a copy of this big one that I just made. So control C, control V.  So for this one we're going to bring this to front. So arrange, bring to front and we'll select them both and go combine, subtract. Now this is all one object. So now I have a frame but let's go ahead and make this personalized. So a little copy, paste and I'm going to add my name across the front here. So I'll go back up to my text tool, type out Garrett and then I just want this like a playful little font. Something that a kid would enjoy or at least be able to read. Nobody can read cursive anymore so we'll go fun font. Looks good but I think we can bring the line spacing in minus 0.3. All right. Most everything touches. Let's go point. Drag it out. All right. Looks pretty good. Let's center it. The little line horizontal and vertical. I'm going to copy my name, copy, control C, control V, put this up out of the way. That way I'll make this part 3D stand out of the frame. This frame I'm going to grab both things and we're going to go to combine, unite. Now I'll be able to place this one on here when everything's cut out. I'm probably going to cut two frames. So I only want one with a coin slot. So we'll insert a rectangle and make a coin slot in one of them and then I'll just take it out when I go to cut it again. So I'll be able to cut out the backer and then use the same piece for the plexiglass. A frame, a frame with a coin slot, the exterior frame and my name. Now let's jump over to a light burn and do something similar. This one's going to be Kim's. I don't know if she needs to collect as much change as I do. We'll start with a K and then her font is going to be Millie. Milligram, macro. So pretty chunky anyway. We'll make this one nine inches tall too. And we'll add an outline to hers. So we'll go over here to offset. Oh that's a pretty good offset. It's a little more than, a little more than quarter inch. I like that 0.375. We'll keep it. We'll keep the rounded corners. We only want outward. We'll say okay. Now I'll make a copy of this guy. But I'm going to go control D which makes a duplicate right in place. I'm just going to drag this over holding shift. Now this piece is going to be in my backer and my plexiglass and this piece will be my frame. Let's make this like a real frame piece. So we'll grab this one and then this one. And we'll go over here minus, oops, this one then this one minus front. Yeah there you go. It's all one piece now. And we're going to do the same thing where we're going to have two frames in the middle. So let's zoom out a little bit. I'll drag him over here. Copy paste. Now Kim doesn't want her name in here. She wants some kind of flowers in here. So I have some clip art that we're going to use. Here we go. I'm going to right click. Trace image. Looks great to me. Down here I have delete image after trace. So it's going to delete the PNG I just dragged in and leave me the lines. There's all my lines. We'll make this fit inside here. Give it some flower right. Make it a little bit bigger. Now I need to get rid of and trim all of these flowers that fall outside of the piggy bank. So I'm going to draw a big square around everything. I'm going to grab the K. I'm going to go control D which will duplicate it. And then I'm going to ungroup control U. I'm going to grab the square and the biggest part of the K. And we're going to go minus front. Yep. There you go. Need to put it back. Now I'm going to grab all the flowers and the box that I just made. And we'll go subtract front. Boom. There you go. We'll get rid of this guy. We don't need him. I'm going to grab the frame and the flowers. And we will go unite. There we go. Now I got some frames with the flowers. I got the frame piece over here. Let's give it a coin slot. Just draw a rectangle. Perfect. So now I have a frame with a coin slot and then I'll have the frame. I'll just remove the coin slot. I'll have the outside frame then a little decorative piece. Then I'll have the backer and I'll use the same piece to cut out the plexiglass piece. Step three. We're going to make all of our cuts. Since this project includes some transparent acrylic we have to use a CO2 laser. This will work the same on any CO2 laser. It can work on the Glowforge, the Omtech Polar, but we'll be using the X-Tool P2 to make all of our cuts. Our material is loaded. We're just going to measure the distance of the board. Oh, first let's set our material. We're using 6 millimeter MDF. Now let's measure our board. I'll just pick a spot in the middle. All right. Only the stuff on the canvas will cut. Anything touching the canvas it will think it's trying to cut and it will say it's out of bounds. So we'll grab these and move these out of the way. I'm going to grab this whole layer and I'm going to set the processing type as cut. I want 75% power and 7 millimeters per second. No tabs, one pass, process, and start. Now let's engrave our acrylic piece. I already loaded the acrylic and we'll move this piece out of the way. I'll move the G over here. I'm going to change my material from 6 millimeter MDF to 3 millimeter transparent. Let's set our focus and while that's focusing I'm going to go ahead change this guy to cut. This says 100% power, 20 millimeters per second. Let's check that against the website. So I select P2 over on the X tool website. Oh, acrylic, transparent, 6 millimeter cut. Oh, this is saying 10 millimeters per second at 100%. Let's lower that. So we'll go 10 millimeters per second, 100% power, no tabs, one pass, process, and start. Acry piece and then for me, my word, my name, I'm just going to roll it with these little foam rollers. All right, we're going to use our foxy hues paints. We're going to put our paint on our paper plates. Just roll it, right? So with these you're going to roll the backer a solid color and then really all you have to do is roll your top frame and then your name. Garen has two colors on his. Yeah, I got these two pieces. Mine's flowers. So I'm just going to paint the whole thing one color. Keep it easy. Keep it easy. I'm to assemble. We're going to bring it all together with some of this star bond thick. This is going to be an easy assembly. We're going to start with our backer and work our way out. It's going to go backer, frame piece with our coin slot, frame piece, then our acrylic. We're going to remove the protective film right before we glue it, then the top frame and then for mine, my word, or my name. Because he's got to be extra. I got to be just take it to a whole other level. Now a tip with this glue, a little goes a long way. This does not have to be waterproof. We're not going to fill these. These aren't going to be fish tanks. It's not an aquarium. Right. Here it is. So we just want to make sure that it sticks. So try and use a little bit of glue so it doesn't ooze underneath so you don't see it. Typically this glue dries with a little bit of a white haze to it. However, on our test piece, it's drying pretty clear. But you still don't want it to ooze out from underneath. It's about $15. And we think you can sell these for somewhere between $35 and $45. So I think that's a good chunk of change. Good chunk of change. Coins in at once. Did you see what I just put in mine? Oh, a dollar. Oh, honey. I don't know what you're saving for. I want in on whatever she's saving for. I hope I can get it back out. We'll be breaking the bank. Step seven, market your product. Now that you got a good product, let's get some good photos, get it on your website, and then you pin it to Pinterest to get it out on Pinterest. I'd also probably do some type of process video just assembling it and showing that you can drop coins and stuff in. And then I think showing that you can get them right back out in the video would help too. These make great gift ideas for kids and teens. Again, this would be great for a teen's room. That's why I tried to paint it these colors. I think this would be good in one of our kids' rooms. And then Garrett painted it with his own name because I'm sure he will put it in his room, his main cave. I'm saving for something. Big thanks to all of our patrons. We love you guys and that is the best way to support this channel. Join us over on Patreon where we have all of our cut files. We have a Discord channel and we even have a monthly Zoom call. And it's more than just those things. We also have a great community of people. You can get your questions answered. You can get feedback. You can get ideas. There's tons of information out on our Discord channel and our Facebook groups. With that, we are about out of time. I gotta get back to some marketing this thing. You gotta get back to cutting this thing. And we will see you next week where we'll do it building and make it again. I said a lot of things. There's a lot of thing in that one. Ooh, it's a stubby guy. It's a little harder to balance. It is it. Ooh, it's got the money in it.


Hi, you guys Lindsay here. Welcome back to my channel inside the hem so spring has sprung at Quixote and they just released a whole bunch of new Patterns for spring. So I thought we would take a look at them and do a first impression video now. I cannot recall Doing a first impression video for Quixote before so I'm excited to Give it a go as usual. We're skipping children's clothes. We're skipping accessories Toys although all of this stuff looks like a lot of fun. Look at this.  Honestly if Sunny weren't almost 13 If you were a puppy, I would a thousand percent make that for him, but let's get into the clothes I'm not exactly sure how many patterns we're gonna have to review today. Quixote doesn't typically Have a huge release, but we'll go what they've got and Take it from there. So this first one is a dress obviously pullover patchwork swing dress with neck facings and sightseeing pockets and Bias armhole facing. Okay. Well, I think it's super cute Also, I just have to say since it's patchwork It reminds me of my April Fools video and the top that I made from the Stomacher fabric swatches and I just want to say thank you all so much I had an absolute blast reading all of your comments all day long and You can totally tell the people that didn't watch the video till the end like maybe they watched just like the first 30 seconds or the first minute of it and They tried to find something nice to say about it, which I thought was super super sweet so I had so much fun doing that and So I just wanted to thank you all for you know, having a little laugh with me on April Fools Anyway, this is a much better Looking patchwork garment much more intentional with the choice of fabrics That's really what's going to Make this a success or not They've obviously chose three different washes of chambray, which is a really great Easy way to make this work, you know stick with one colorway But look, they also have this other sample made with all of these different prints And I think that looks really cool to you. I think the thing with matching prints like this is to have one common Thread no pun intended kind of going through all of them and for this one it looks like circles But also the color black. So this has a black background It looks like these little doodads are black and this has a black background too So it kind of gives your eye something to focus on so that could be a lot of fun to pick out fabrics for that another really Great place to go look for fabrics or something like this would actually be the Like quilting fabric manufacturers like art gallery, for example makes a really great Are these knit or woven? These are woven so they make like different rayons here. I'll leave this up for a minute. They make different types of fabric other than quilting cotton like rayon like cotton lawn and a lot of times it's done in like one What am I trying to say like one Fabric Collection so all the fabrics were designed together. So they all go together. Does that make sense? So that could be a cool place for you to try and find some fabrics to like Art gallery cloud nine Gosh whoever does the rifle paper company, you know, all of that kind of stuff So but I think this is super cute and fun. Let's look at the line art Oh gingham would be really fun, too Or you could do like Three different size ginghams Or you could do I'm coming with all kinds of ideas now or you could do different color Sear sucker because it will all be that like thinner stripe, but you could do like different pastel colors. That would be fun. I Like this dress Okay, here's the front So all of this and then the back like mirrors it So I think that you would have a little bit of shaping through the side seams, which would be nice and Also, like it looks like they drafted kind of like a flare on the bottom, which is nice, too Now the side seam pockets. I would probably omit those. I don't love Pockets like teardrop pockets, you know, they're shaped like this just flapping around on the inside to me That is just not comfortable and after you wash it a couple times It can be a little bit bulky in here, you know, I mean, so I probably omit those I mean pockets are nice, but I Don't love them on just like teardrops not sewn into a waist seam But maybe you could like draft one like into this little Seam that could be cute. You just have one, but you know to throw your keys or a phone in for a second While you grab something Okay, here are The other pictures It does seem to be a little bit longer in the back, too, which is also really nice. I like this one Very cute and all the sizes that are offered are in one envelope extra small through extra large Are all in one So that's good if you have to grade out any Okay, next up is this cute little dress All right, Mrs. Dress it looks like they have a fitted skirt but also a Looser fitting skirt this says dresses have close fitting bodice with neck facings They are a fan of the neck facing, huh? Center back zip arm holes finished with bias tape and skirt variations skirt cut crosswise for border print fabric, so it is designed for a border print pretty Basic design here with the princess seams and the pleated skirt I think I probably have I don't know 10 different patterns But this thicker strap and the square neckline is actually a really nice detail That mine don't have I mean obviously it's not hard to alter a pattern to do this But I just want to point that out that you know that makes it a little bit a little bit unique Here's some more pictures Cute I Don't know about the facings though You know, I'd probably extend those facings into a full bodice lining. It's not super hard to do But this is super cute for those of you that have Easter plans coming up or a wedding even oh In the back has this little v. That's nice What I think there might be back darts. We'll look at the line drawings here in a second Cute oh Look at those back darts. That's beautiful Yeah, I love the neckline of this is gorgeous Gorgeous, I really love these thicker straps the squared off neckline and then the V in the back That's just like a very subtly elegant option very very very cute So cute, okay fabric wise they are suggesting your lightweight wovens And even border prints which is nice if you saw my stall maker fabric swatch video They have that one that was like Solid blue with the yellow flowers on the bottom and remember It was like only I don't know only like 30 inches Wide or whatever you know what I mean So you'd have to do the top in a solid navy and the bottom in the border print This would be a good option for that because it's broken up with the with the waist seam Designed for medium to light to medium weight woven fabrics. Yep. Got it Cute. I love that one Okay, next up is this top slash dress. Oh and pants like a little wardrobe, which y'all know I love It has like a little flared sleeve it looks like lace either overlay or inset and then a lace detail here semi-fitted pullover dress have Gathered v-neck gathered v-neck with band and facings These sentences are always structured so interestingly and purchased lace trim detail We're going to look at some line drawings semi-fitted pants have wide yoke and lapped side zipper I actually love a side zip on a pant. Oh, that's cute Very elegant Here's the dress again Okay Making me a little nervous that it seems to be so tight on her through here Which means it would definitely be tight on me All right. Here are line drawings. So as I suspected no Darting in the back. It still doesn't really say if this is stitched on top. I'm sure it is. Oh Here's the gathered neckline and then is the lace sewn onto the band. I'm guessing Yeah, and then you have this sleeve option as well. I love the tunic I think it's really cute and then you have your pants with this wide. I'm sure it's curved waistband and then a side zip Just a couple darts in the back, but I feel like it's drafted to be a little bit looser to begin with You know, like it's not super fitted through her hips So I feel like with the success that I had On my pants those coral pants that maybe These could work. I do wish that they showed the top of the pants though Like I want to know how high they come up. I want to know how fitted they are I mean, I get that it's like a whole outfit, but I still want to see the pants by themselves, right? Yeah, oh well, I think it's really cute Really cute spring outfit. They styled it really well, too. All right now. We've got a little swimsuit and cover-up That's the fun combo for one Pattern, it's like a tanky knee with a high waisted bottom Halter tank top and bottoms are line-to-edge with upper Line-to-edge with upper edge and leg openings finished with elastic Pullover cover-up C is narrowly hemmed with neck facings again with the neck facings. I Would just do bias personally little low What is that? low Leg opening, you know, it's not cut super high cute Actually a decently shaped bottom sometimes these can like come down like this and they look like a diaper And it's not cute. I what which one was it one of the indie maybe a colette or a seam work one and I was just like You know if it's not flattering on the size to model in her little itty-bitty booty Then there's no way it's gonna be flattering on my not size to booty cute though Yeah, I figured this was just a I Don't know. What is that even called not a kimono a um, oh Shoot, I know you're yelling at your computers Y'all know what I mean Kaftan bingo my brain turned on So yeah, you can see a little bit more of the detail here. They do have this seam here Don't think that it has any Wiring in it or anything like that and then a little tie Which is actually nice because that allows for a little bit more fitting So if you don't get the cups fitted perfectly, you can tie it a little bit tighter or looser It's a little bit more forgiving there And then in the back as well and then here's our cute little Booty, I like the the drafting the cut of the leg opening for sure So far so good on these quick-so patterns and look there's seven dollars. That's not bad All right kids kids kids one last one. I figured this would be a short one This is mrs. Dresses plural um Okay, scoop neck dresses have Self-fabric bands at neckline and armholes hemline variations. Okay, so I'm assuming there is also pockets And this looks like some kind of princess seam. I'm yeah moderate stretch knits only This has a high low hem, which is pretty This has like a full maxi That looks to be the same as the first one. I do appreciate the how they made up both versions That's really nice bird of style does that I really like that a lot Look, she's cold and laughing Oh Cute oh Racer back, okay, I'd like how loose-fitting this is and obviously you guys can Cut this knee length if you want Cute. Oh, it's a learn to sew to Yeah, so there's our princess seams. I think this is lovely again though with the side seam pockets You know, it's gonna be a little teardrop and they're just gonna flop around Especially with knits unless you're using like an ITY or something kind of Slinky slippery they just kind of stick to each other. You know what I mean? Here's the yardage jersey interlock match jersey cotton knits Stretch knits with 35 percent stretch across the green Which is like that's pretty much most um, like lightweight knits like Maybe sweatshirt fleece would be an example of a knit that doesn't have 35 stretch But any of these are going to have them and again, um, like those companies like art gallery and um And all of those have really gorgeous knit patterns that could make for a really beautiful spring Look and super easy to style right day to night. That's fun. I like that I like that All right.  I am Desperately waiting for the mccalls spring um, they keep teasing Have you guys have you guys been getting the ads on instagram and facebook about you know, um Our new spring patterns and every time it's the early spring and i'm like, can you please just make it say early spring? Like I keep thinking you're talking about regular spring um, but as soon as they have that i'll be sure to Do a first impression there. Yeah, I think these are the Five or so women's patterns. I actually liked them all I really did. I don't have anything like this. So that could be something I would add I'm not really into making swimwear, but if I were this would be an option And this was just cute and fun and different with the lace trim Right, I like them all I wouldn't be mad If I owned any of those Super super fun. All right. Well, I know it's a short one But thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you all very soon. Bye


I found something on my old hard drive. An alpha minecraft build. Although the build I found was different out of all other alpha minecraft builds I have played. The version was called, Minecraft Alpha 1.0.0 underscore 66. That was a version that does not have any record on the minecraft wiki. I downloaded it, put into a vault emcee, and run the game. It was actually alpha 1.0.4. I was picking wood, and I made a crafting table. I decided to mine in my own cave, when all of a sudden, something really weird happened. I decided to go into a mountain that contained a cloud. The thought was starting to come strongly, until I saw a shadow player in the distance. Luckily I was able to make a screenshot of it. The shadow player somehow corrupted the game, and said one thing. Artificial. After that, the game crashed. I restarted it and went to my world again. Although I found a message behind me, saying the words. It's burning your home. I found burning trees, until it activated the last level of the fog. Burning trees caused by lava. Something is off here. I later found water, then another message appeared. Find the rose. I was looking for a rose, but I wasn't able to find it with this fog. After a while, I found it, got it, and I was now lost in the forest. I couldn't find the water, but some seconds later I found it. I went back to the game, and I dropped the rose to the water. But when I went into the water, the game started to glitch. The rose was floating, and the shadowy figure from before appears again. The game crashes itself again with a crash message. Unable to connect to main servers. I went back to Discord, describing my adventure. A user said about connecting to the main servers, maybe thinking that the server of the version is still running, until today. The server was shut down. I closed the window of Discord. I asked Notchan Twitter, and he replied, alpha 1.0.0 underscore 66. That doesn't exist. I never created a version like this, unless it's a mod or version that I don't remember. Even that I still no longer own or develop Minecraft, somebody snuck into my PC and programmed an unknown version. Although there are some channels with videos of unknown versions, I would never program a version as well. As I stopped and retired of making games, Microsoft is doing their best, but they did not invite me for the 10th anniversary of Minecraft. I'm Marcus Person, also known as Notch, the creator of Minecraft. So, did the alpha version <IP_ADDRESS> underscore 13 ever exist? Well, I'm not sure. If you are so curious, watch the video by retro gaming now. Now, I think that this shadowy figure only appears in the fact of the alpha 1.0.0 underscore 66 version. Because of the lack of clues, I extracted the jar file accidentally, and I found all codes in the game. I later found a mysterious code, and the label was, Do Not Activate or Access. I clicked the code, and it showed the entire programation of the anti-shadowy figures. The name of Null was actually Informanus Nieces, which is a name on the crash log for an alpha version. As soon as I closed the window, another one popped up. Another gameplay of Minecraft alpha started, this time forcibly activating the full screen mode. As I continued to explore, I stumbled across a weird structure that someone was building, however I was on a single player. As I was surviving, the fog came back, and the text started to float. That structure is a portal, this portal was where they got me. It's the portal where I came from. Dimensions never existed. Cosmos was a lie. Scientists are liars. I am stuck on a blocky world where logic doesn't make sense. You need me. You need me. You need me. Informanus Nieces started to spam. You need me. He later said in the chat, Go to the portal to give me back. I went into the portal and it crashed my PC. Everyone was partying while it was Saturday. When I woke, the principal said to me that I was sleeping. Now it was Sunday. Informanus Nieces will never interact with me, and he was never seen again. My friend, Peter, said to me in Discord that the version always showed a black screen saying, 502, bad gateway.


So we must indeed start because we are late and we have a very good panel to discuss these more structural perspectives on the unemployment problems in Europe. And we have Patrick Honohan, who is governor of the Central Bank of Ireland. We have Catherine Mann, who now is chief economist at the OECD after many other jobs, which I am not going to describe. We have Christoph Schmitt, who now is the chairman of the German Council of Economic Experts. So a very important job. And we have Jean-Pizanie Ferri, who after being in Brugel and many other places is now general commissioner of France strategy. So it is indeed a very good panel to have this discussion. I'll give the floor first to Patrick, gentlemen and Catherine, ten minutes please in your initial statements. Well, thank you Vitor for inviting me to say a few words in this session. I still don't know why you asked me to do it because it's many years since I talk about structural policies on that and I almost never speak in public about any of these matters now, which is in itself interesting. It was a good idea. Therefore, I just wanted to, reflecting already in advance, but drawing a little bit on our discussion over the last day and a half, I'm not going to lecture on structural reforms. I'm not going to discuss empirical evidence on cross-country growth. I remember doing that stuff a long time ago and financial depth, that was the thing. All you needed was financial depth, was the only thing that would be robust in regression as well. Then some people got too much financial depth, so that wasn't so good. I just thought I would just use the time to deconstruct this huge topic and why we talk about this topic at the moment in three dimensions. First of all, I ask why now? Why are we especially concerned about structural reform now? I think there are about six possible different reasons. Which way you think about it colors the emphasis and focus that you have and I think it's worth thinking about that. The second point I want to ask are there issues of language and communication that we're not thinking hard enough about in talking about these things as policy advisors, central bankers, policy advisors and so forth? Should we pay more attention to that? Then finally, and maybe just drawing on my own experience in Ireland, how should we interpret the Irish recovery from the crisis in employment and growth, which is the topic of this session, by reference to structural reform? If the experience was successful, is there some kind of silver bullet that you might want to, if it was financial depth in the old literature? Is there some silver bullet that you can draw out from Ireland? I'll suggest a silver bullet, but of course it's not a silver bullet, but it's worth thinking about. Why now? I think there are about six different reasons. First of all, there are long-term growth issues, sorts of things that Crispus Reedy was talking about in the last session. There's the question of recovery. Do we need structural reform now in order to accelerate the recovery? Are we talking about structural reforms now to guard against what people have talked about the political hysteresis of taking the wrong kinds of structural measures, steps backwards, because of the crisis, and that could damage the long-term? Is it because we've discovered problems in this crisis that need to be fixed, that we didn't really know about before? Or is it simply because people are looking for fiscal room, or they're looking for fiscal adjustment, and they're pointing to structural reforms as a technique for achieving fiscal adjustment? So long-term, never miss the opportunity of a good crisis. That's part of the story. As somebody said earlier this morning, there's a political logic to it. It may not be the best time, but it may be the only time that you can get reforms. And maybe it's even more necessary now in Europe, given the technological degree to which Europe may have fallen behind on the technological frontier, the convergence of emerging markets, and the impact of that on employment. Well, that's one big area, and I think that's what's inspiring some people to say, now, we have an agenda for structural reform, and now the politicians may do something about it. Second one is, we need to get out of this recession. We're still many, many Euro area countries, well below the peak of output or even employment. Will these structural reforms, or will some structural reforms get us out faster? And we had discussions earlier today about, yeah, some of them might, and some of them might not. And there are some job-destroying reforms, at least destroying in the short run. A lot of the discussion about whether, for example, employment protection legislation or reforms can be associated also with improvements in employment in this kind of conjunctural environment really depend on confidence arguments. And we remember all those arguments about, in the other context of fiscal adjustment, of expansionary fiscal contraction, is there a confidence factor that generates investment growth? I think Mario talked about this in his speech yesterday. The third, and I think quite a different reason for looking at structural reforms now and focusing more upon them now, is are we realizing the cost of shocks and therefore the need to build resilience through structural reforms? And I think Tito Bueri's paper was very much along those lines, recognizing the contrasting degree to which different European countries have responded to the crisis. And we may get, have some lessons in Ireland from that. I already mentioned then the fourth one, guarding against damaging anti-reform measures. I think it was well brought out by several speakers, and I think Sajid San Paul talked about the political hysteresis, the problem of potentially, how you deal with this whole issue of counter-cyclical unemployment benefit trends. And then the fifth one, is it because we're trying to fix structural problems discovered in the crisis? Not sure that that makes that much sense when you think about the contrasting structural problems in different countries. I mean, the sluggish growth of Italy sort of discovered because of the high debt environment and how that looked like causing destabilization. The fiscal excesses in Greece, the private credit bubble in Ireland, quite different types of problems. But you do hear to some extent in the narrative around structural reforms, look how we got into this crisis. We've got to make structural reforms to get out of it. Not sure it's as coherent as the other ones. And finally, maybe people are adopting and talking about structural reforms because they see it as a double dividend for fiscal correction. We need to adjust the fiscal positions, obviously, at what pace can be discussed. And it's not that the structural reforms are, that it's fiscal adjustment masquerading as structural reforms, but a double dividend. You get your fiscal adjustment and you get a growth benefit in the long run. But I think if we don't think carefully about, when we're talking about structural reforms, about which of these motivations, I think we may choose the wrong packages and we may also not ring true to our audiences as policy advisors. And so that brings me to the question of language. You know, I think we all know in central banking communication is really, really important. And we use a lot of tautological language and vague language when we talk about structural reforms. I mean, reform is good. It's a tautology in itself. And I actually suspect that the language that we tend to use and how we use it can be unnecessarily provocative or counterproductive. It can be, at the same time, euphemistic, so we use nice word like reform, ambiguous, don't be too precise because you might trigger a reaction, and sometimes patronizing. And occasionally, as Paula Grover suggested yesterday, intrusive on politics. So for example, when we talk about labor market flexibility, are we sure we're not just talking about low wages? Well, in this room, we're not. But sometimes, people are talking about labor market flexibility and they're just meaning low wages. Are they seen as meaning low wages? So I think precision in language and elaboration of what exactly we mean. Fiscal reforms. Well, is that a synonym for size of government? Because it will be seen as a synonym for size of government by people who think government should be big. On the other hand, we talk about protections, dismantling protections. Well, protections for whom? Very often, always, protections are selective. They protect some people at the expense of other people. And reforms that are inequality reducing are one thing. But reforms, failure to do reforms that could be inequality reducing. For the sake of maintaining some kind of protection, may actually be inequality increasing. So reform has distribution effects and it's complex. And we should be careful about being precise about how we talk about it. Now finally, in my last minute and 20 seconds. Is Ireland then, the recovery is strong recovery. Certainly, it's an employment dimension. Last two years, employment has grown by 2%, almost just under 2% per annum. Is Ireland a poster boy story for structural reforms? For this employment, there's productivity. And as we mentioned earlier, productivity and employment can be enemies in the short term and friends in the long term, as the way I put it. But I think this came, was discussed this morning in the lump of labor discussion. And has productivity been fantastic in Ireland? I should remind you that there are great traps of interpretation in the national accounts of a super open economy, one of the most globalized economies in the world. Agriculture productivity measurements very, very tend to mislead when you're looking at GDP, trends in unit labor costs. So the recovery actually in Ireland has not been a super productivity story even though it looks like it. And the competitiveness gains have been appreciable, but they're nothing like what you would measure the headline numbers. So you've got to be very careful about interpreting the Irish story as a super productivity and a super competitiveness story. That was the story in the 1990s, even though in the 1990s it was exaggerated as well. The recovery of these elements have been sufficient, but they've not been the big drivers. So what are the big drivers? Well, I think you saw on the slide that John Fernald put up, Ireland almost the best of the countries in terms of having got to a structural reforms, OECD measure by 19, whenever it was, 85, 90, some early date, not made much difference since. So I think it's true to say that Ireland has done a lot of the things that we all in the room want countries to do, and it had done them in advance and it was able therefore to respond to the emerging situation in a way that was quicker and achieved better results. But let's think behind that, and that's my last point, is behind that, why did Ireland achieve those things? Well, partly because it had a massive crisis in the 1980s and there was a wake-up call and policy changes were introduced taking advantage of that crisis, but why were they introduced and why did it not sink further into the mire in the 1980s? And I think we should look behind into a kind of Northean institutions because they are what are driving the adoption of reforms, the ownership of reforms. And why does Ireland manage to adopt reforms or did it manage to adopt reforms 20, 25 years ago? And I think it's the globalization, the way in which Irish people, not just policy leaders, Irish people are aware of the business world, they have family members in many countries around the world, migration is big, trade, foreign ownership of firms, they know how business works and even if they don't like in some ways how business works, they know what's needed to get the benefit from how business works. If I had time, I would show you the chart of unemployment in Ireland. Unemployment has just gone below 10% in Ireland now, which is a fantastic achievement. If you plot Irish unemployment against Euro-Ary unemployment, of course loosely they both went up in the crisis and they're coming down, but you don't get very close correlation. But if you plot it against UK unemployment, there it is, that's it. It's just part of the UK labour market in terms of unemployment and that's part of the globalization story as well. It's insurance, it's diversification. And so it drives a lot of things and that's my silver bullet but it's, of course, not a complete silver bullet. I did run over in the end, sorry. Now everyone knows why I invited you. You could have had another element of early measures which is the fact that from 1965 to 85, Ireland was the country of the WECD that increased the most expenditure in education, which of course was quite early on with spectacular results. Which added three quarters of a percentage point to GDP growth in the period 85 to 2000. Right, but this is a very important lesson too. Very good. Now we have Catherine, please. Oh, that education thing was great. It's a great opportunity, it's a great place, it's a terrific group of people and I've really been having a lot of fun. So this is an enormous topic that we've been asked to talk about here so you have to choose a lens that you're going to look through and so actually I'm going to look through the lens of public debt burdens and partly that's because of, as a number of people have said, that public debt burdens are an important driver of crisis, whether it be through market discipline or it be through Brussels discipline and so thinking about the public debt burden and what to do about that and how to get out of that straight jacket is an important question. I'm going to look at how one might do that with different kinds of structural policies and you notice that I try not to use the word reform for exactly the reason that Patrick has said. The word structural reform has become toxic in the political vocabulary. Changing it to structural policies at least makes it sound neutral like fiscal policy, monetary policy, it could be good, it could be bad. Structural policy is the same way and it's very clear that structural policies in the context of active demand management which is our way of saying fiscal policy can be used along with monetary policy is part of the package that I'm going to discuss and then finally I am going to address the issue of structural policy and inequality which came up in the couple of previous presentations because there are structural policies that exacerbate inequality and there are also ones that can be used to ameliorate it. So not that you need to know anything about public debt ratios but over here on the right-hand panel it's our pictures of what's happened with gross government debt by the Maastricht definition for the Euro Area 15 countries. This is the constraint that is being put on a number of countries in terms of what kinds of policies they can implement and how to move forward. Whether or not we agree with all of the complexity and strictures of the commission rules that's for another discussion but this is what it is. Now if we look at the decomposition of where the public debt dynamics come from which is the right-hand panel, part of the problem with the public debt explosion as a percent of GDP as you see in the left is the consequences of the denominator. I mean a little bit on the numerator of course too but a lot of it has to do with the denominator and inability of the countries to grow and grow their way out of the debt burden. If we look at some work that's been done by a colleague of mine at Brandeis where I was before I went to the OECD most recently, George Hall and Tom Sargent look at the debt dynamics for the United States and find that almost all of the periods of time starting from the Civil War up to the present how did the US grow out of very large debt burdens it was through growth, through total factor productivity and growth not through fiscal consolidation and not through taxation, either actual or by inflation. So growth is the key here. So what's the problem with growth? Well we could look at a lot of different dimensions of growth. I wanna focus on the investment component of growth as being a particular source or constraint on the growth in the economies and you can see in the left-hand panel how much growth in fixed investment non-residential fix so it's kind of business cap X kind of stuff, how much that has deteriorated for a range of countries including OECD countries that are outside of the Euro area. So weak business investment is obviously part of the story. It is explained by subdued demand. So we have a low level equilibrium where we've got low investment because demand is low and therefore jobs are not being created and therefore wages are not rising and that's a low level equilibrium. What we wanna do is get to the upper level equilibrium the high level equilibrium where we have higher investment because there's higher aggregate demand because there's investment, growth, jobs, wages, consumption and that demand, higher demand ratifies the investment that has been undertaken. So we really wanna get to that higher level equilibrium and how are we going to do it. Well we have a number of, we have a research, it'll be coming out as part of the economic outlook in June where we really decompose the investment problem into a number of different factors. Policy uncertainty is one of them and we know what it is in Euro area and we know what it is in the United States and in other countries as well. There's also restrictive financing conditions matter but not as much as you might think. Product market regulations are a key constraint on investment based on the work that we've done here and that the third, the last item there is that public investment which we've already seen is a important reason for why there has been overall sluggish investment. The public investment is one of the first things to be cut even though from a multiplier standpoint it has some of the highest multipliers. In keeping with the, what did countries choose to consolidate when they had to consolidate their fiscal positions they tended to choose things that had the highest multipliers which was not the thing to do instead of choosing things that they could have cut but didn't. So if we look at what the implication of the low investment is for potential growth because ultimately potential growth is what's gonna repay the debt obligations that were undertaken previously. That's gotta be through ultimately in a sustained fashion through potential growth. Let's look at the decomposition of the source of potential output per capita decomposing it into, which is the line over time as you can see. Decomposing this into where is the decline in potential output coming from. A lot of it is coming from capital per worker that's the blue. Also a lot of it is coming from failure or reduction in TFP. At least in compared to the 2000s. So wanting to look at both of those things separately. Now on the Yonker plan, this is one strategy to focus on to support a redirect of the public investment problem in Europe. Now the Yonker plan is not about the money actually because it's not a lot of money. The Yonker plan is something about regulatory harmonization and regulatory reduction. And the research that we have on regulatory harmonization and it's not down to the lowest level and it's not complete harmonization in regulations but regulatory harmonization, particularly in the network industries, telecoms transport energy, could increase FDI across Euro area borders by about 20%. So that's private sector response to the public sector initiative, not through the money catalytic effect but through the regulatory harmonization effect. The second reason why the plan offers some benefit is in the confidence building in the animal spirits aspect, in the sense that it creates a common vocabulary. There's not a lot of vocabulary that, just to be honest, that the Germans and the French agree upon. But this is one that says supply for those who believe that the constraints in the Euro area are on the supply side and demand for those who believe that the constraints are on the demand side. So it's a common vocabulary. In addition, since the Yonker plan is a, put the money into a pot and then it gets distributed out, it has the potential to target better investments as opposed to national priorities. These investments have cross-border prioritization at least in principle. Now, as I say, it's not a lot of money when we come down to it. So these other factors have to be important and from what we see based on these policy uncertainty variables in our investment equations and the role of collective action in our investment equations, these potentially have more bang for the buck than you might think. Now I'd like to turn to the second problem facing the Euro area in coming to grips with the debt to GDP burden from the denominator's perspective. So we wanna get potential output growth up. We talked about investment. The other approach is to, or other part of the story is to increase TFP. So what do we know about TFP? Well, we know that TFP in aggregate has deteriorated. Looking at very detailed, firm level data, the research that I'm citing here decomposes TFP growth into frontier TFP. Now these are firms in countries all around the world, actually not just in the Euro area. So the frontier firms in manufacturing or services, as you can see, the frontier firms are innovating at a very rapid and in the case of services, for example, an increasing pace. Yeah, there was a little downturn in the Great Recession, but they're back on track. What is not back on track is the diffusion of those frontier innovations to everybody else, which is demonstrated by the center line in red. Now the gap has opened up in manufacturing, principally opened up in manufacturing after the crisis, but in services that gap has, from the start of the data series onward has just continued to rise. So that points us in a direction of looking for constraints in what firms face in terms of what might be their challenges in the diffusion to everybody else. So I'm gonna talk about two different things in my negative one minute. Structural factors are one of the reasons why we do not have diffusion. So you have a bunch of different structural factors on the bottom, and you have a candlestick for individual countries. So at the top of the candlestick, it's how much like Canada gets from globalization in terms of being able to grab a hold of the frontier innovations. And then you've got Austria down at the bottom, not getting much benefit from globalization at all, in fact, hardly at all. And then in terms of participation in global value chains, much tighter, but there's still a differentiation. A key element of being able to diffuse, we've already heard this, is the ability to reallocate resources. That's what diffusion is all about. John Furnold talked about it, a number of other people have talked about it. Who is able to reallocate the most? Well, Belgium, according to this, it's a reallocation, there's a number of different things inside this pot. And here's Italy, not reallocating much at all. Now individual countries fit in different places along the candlestick, and the regression coefficient from a difference in difference is that center red dot. Knowledge-based capital, we already heard that also again in the extent to which knowledge-based capital, which is broader than IT, matters. And management, you can see there, again, how do you reorient business processes and workplace practices? It has to do with management. And so some countries have much better managerial capacity to get that diffusion from the frontier, and other ones don't. Now, there were skill mismatches and the sort of characteristics in the labor market that was considered in a number of different presentations. And basically, improving skill matching is a factor to improve labor productivity. So skill mismatches are measured on the horizontal, on the vertical axis, and then the yellow dot is how much labor productivity could be gained from reducing skill mismatches. This is using the PIAC data, which is the adult skills, the PISA is the education of the younger people. So what is it about the business environment that improves or causes deterioration in skill matching probabilities? And you can see along the bottom, product market regulation, employment, cost of doing business, transactions. This is just a subset of the menu of things that we look at in order to evaluate how much a country might improve its skill matching probabilities versus to have not an improvement in skill matching probabilities. So that's just a little thing. And then the inequality, which is my last point. These are, each one of these bars is how much a structural reform affects a different levels of income distribution, average, median, lower, and poor from different kinds of reforms, as you see along the horizontal axis. And most of these structural reforms improve household disposable income, even though wages might get more differentiated because more employment opportunities are created, you end up with an improvement. Now you notice limiting unemployment insurance for at the long-term end, those are the bars that are negative. Those are the bars where the low, lower middle class and the poor are differentially hurt by those kinds of reforms. So we'll leave it at that. Thank you. Thank you, Catherine. Interesting. Now I give the floor to Christoph, please. Thank you. Let's see if your take on German, French vocabulary is justified or not. Please, Christoph. Well, you could say now for something completely different. Yeah. Very good. In a sense, thank you very much for the invitation. Yeah, no, no, of course. Let me start by coming back to President Draghi's introductory speech yesterday. He clarified that monetary policy might be able to lead an economy back to its growth path, but structural reforms would be needed to raise that potential. He also made clear that expansionary monetary policy serves to make reforms less costly and therefore rather support reform efforts, so far so good. And there are no excuses, he clarified for the individual governments in Europe not to undertake sensible reforms. But one question immediately emerges, which is, do voters in these countries know that their current situation is much better due to this policy than it would have been otherwise? You don't have to go far to find an illustrative example for the relevance of that question, because if you talk to many Germans in evening sessions, when you talk to the general public, you often get the question, aren't we under the pressure, they think people voice the concern that it's the ACP's policy that is at fault for their savings being destroyed, not the crisis, they don't understand the causality. Similar or variant of that question is, do voters understand that current times of ensuing recovery are indeed the best times to pursue, to conduct, to implement structural reforms? After all, you need to be convinced that after reform you are better off than before and people tend to do before-after comparisons. The lesson is quite clear. Policymakers do not only have to get the counterfactual right themselves, they also have to convince their voters that they managed to get it right. And this is obviously quite in contrast to the usual before-after considerations that you see in general discussions. And I would put forth the thesis that, or the question, who if not the national governments of the Euro area member states, the individual governments could have the knowledge, the mandate and the credibility to advocate and to conduct structural reforms. I'm quite unconvinced that the general approach, the top-down approach that has been advocated this morning several times, especially in the nice paper by Tito, that that's the right strategy. I'm quite confident that there are good arguments for objecting to this suggestion. Now, I have two sets of remarks, deepening that a little bit. One going to the identification of the right strategy, the identification problem, and one to the governance, the governance issue. Now, let me start with the identification problem. The question is, of course, what are the right set of reforms for any particular member state? And more specifically, one needs to ask who is identifying this right set of reforms and how will they be identified? The introductory remarks yesterday, I come back to that, were giving us two messages, one of which I find very constructive and one of which I think should be qualified. The one that I found very constructive was to define structural reforms in very general terms as basically all sets of reforms lifting the potential growth path and thereby by offering this very general definition wisely avoiding to indicate that the right set of reforms might be the same everywhere. But what was suggested yesterday in these remarks and what was echoed today, a more detailed fashion in Tito's paper was the suggestion that the German way, especially to extend short-time work arrangements during the downturn to use lifetime work accounts and overtime accounts and so forth to cushion the shock, our devices, using devices to reduce hours while retaining the jobs, that might be the preferred strategy for countries hit by a macroeconomic shock. But I would rather qualify that because this strategy of emphasizing adjustment at the internal margin worked for Germany in 2009. It worked well for Germany, but it worked for Germany because the retained jobs became productive again after the shocks subsided. German companies in the automotive, the machinery, the chemical industry are those strongly competing on the world markets today as they were before the crisis. We had just simply as the economy, we had just simply a dose of good luck that the institutional arrangements which emphasize obviously internal flexibility and the nature of the shock that hit us were so highly compatible. I don't think that other member states would be well advised if they had to pursue only this strategy or the same strategy with the same emphasis on retaining jobs. Let's say in the construction industry in Spain, that obviously wouldn't have made that much sense. And to be frank, I don't think that Germany is so well prepared to a future shock if this shock were to challenge its portfolio, its persistent decline in interest in German cars might not be so easily cushioned. And actually, but that's not the topic today, the German government in the moment does a lot of making this basis for cushioning persistent shocks less viable even. The lesson here is clear, it's prudent and I think that's one of the big points of Tito's paper that I would support. It's prudent to be prepared for different kinds of shocks, potential shocks, installing elements of internal and external flexibility at the same time. But quite obviously it's not a matter of maximizing flexibility, having the lowest wage as possible or anything of the sort. It's a matter of balance. It's a matter of balancing continuity and flexibility. I'm quite convinced that German workers have high investments in human capital specific to their firms, specific to their sectors, also because employment protection is strong in Germany. It's always a matter of balance between flexibility and continuity and that again has to be found at the national level best. It can be found best at the national level. What can we learn from the German experience though? I think we can learn a lot about the process and about things that we have discussed and we're discussed this morning. First of all, you have to understand, I think that it's an answer. It has been an answer to structural deficits that Germany and the German labor market has been characterized by throughout the 80s and 90s. So it only came about through pressure. There wasn't a wise German decision made in front of the before the crisis hit and then it worked out. No, it was coming under pressure. So it might well be that in a model world you might be able to find the best, the optimal policy. But I think that Gilles, for example, was really clear in his remarks that the political economy of this is quite different. Other people in the room also echoed on this. Secondly, reforms were only amplifying what was going underway anyway. The social partners with their wage restraint were the more vital part of all these developments. So it might well be that in a theoretical, in abstract thinking you might be able to say, well, let's change the bargaining structure but you need the social partners to feel the pressure to change in order to get something like that implemented. Now, third point, labor market reforms and that reflects on the point made by Catherine this morning, labor market reforms are only part of a more encompassing package of reforms to the tax system, to the pension system and so on. So the best labor market policy might not always be a reform on the labor market or to labor market institutions. I think understanding these aspects also helps qualify the apparently confusing cross-country evidence. Now, Germany was on a way down the German unemployment rate, the structural unemployment rate because of all the things that were altered in the German economic structure was on the way down during the time the crisis hit. It was not a consequence. It should not be mistaken as a consequence of particularly well-taken crisis management. You have always these two things, structural and cyclical and to disentangle them is quite difficult, obviously. So it's profoundly important generating any suggestion for reform. It's profoundly important to really disentangle or distinguish between correlation and causation. Why is identification of the right set of institutions so tricky? Just to reiterate maybe. First, we have very highly institutions and we learn a lot from the papers written by Tito about it. Institutions are highly complex web of arrangements which come about as the outcome of historic developments and reflect social preferences. A web of arrangements so complex that it has certainly a higher number of facets than we have numbers of observation. If you really go into the details that the detailed structure makes the difference. The second conclusion from that is identification doesn't only need theoretical and empirical theoretical thoughts, theoretical knowledge and empirical skills but also an intimate knowledge of the idiosyncratic characteristics of the specific labor market. I give you a brief example, not understanding that Germany has had for a long time an implicit minimum wage set by the arrangements for income supplementation in order to provide poverty relief might lead you to the suggestion as an ill informed outsider that Germany should now introduce a statutory minimum wage to boost disposable incomes. But this would be bad advice because it would just ignore that the situation is more complex and that you would rather destroy employment and destroy demand by introducing that. Then third point and last point on identification. Some of the countries we are looking at in the pictures that we have seen are going to a post-Tratokhoyloven situation. Now most of you won't know what I mean with that. I think that we saw yesterday, Olivier used nonparametric regression to show us that the growth rates were more, less deeply sloped often after the recession hit. Ottmar Ising was reminding us of the writings of Hayek. I'm being more simple-minded, I think of the world of sports and you probably all remember that in the early 80s, late 70s, early 80s, world records were set at a tremendous pace. And nobody epitomizes that more than Jamila Kartokhoyloven, the Czech athlete who still holds the 800 meter world record. So if you were actually asking yourself, are the figures from that time, are they telling us really very sensibly in a very sensible fashion something about the way that good nutrition, exercise, and devotion to your sport is leading you to the borderline of human capacity to achieve? You would probably not go to these figures. The same thing with several of the unemployment figures you look at, basically it goes back to the point that Marco Bouty made and the discussion of Gilles, you would rather not see that as a reflection of the genuine state of the economy, for example in Greece, to provide sustainable jobs. Rather you would see the increase in unemployment as a correction towards the state that was genuinely present. So this identification assumption makes a big difference because if you say before the crisis everything was in order and now we have high unemployment rates, of course you come to the conclusion that it's all a matter of demand and you don't need to, you should not conduct structural reforms at the time being. Three points about governance and then I'm through. First of all about the architecture. We are a union of sovereign states according to the setup of the European, the EU area. We have already many people talking about a demographic, not demographic, democratic deficit in the EU and at that time with this high skepticism about the legitimacy of top-down procedures to introduce something like the European Commission governing, steering labor market reform seems not convincing to me. Secondly, you indicated that there are papers, Tito, that there are papers showing that one might construct, one might be able to construct common unemployment insurers and things like that in a way that is working not to generate persistent transfers. But we have a good proverb in German saying, no legislative procedure leaves the parliament the same way it goes into the parliament. That means you can construct it in a very nice fashion but if it's fragile to the setting of the parameters you don't know what you get. So I think it's a very, very tricky affair and who in the end decides what a reform is? You say, well, you will get benefits because you engage into reform. Who decides what is sufficient to be eligible for support and actually why should some countries pay other countries, some countries, taxpayers pay other countries for doing something that benefits them. Last remark, quite a general, let's step back for a second from the crisis discussion and ask ourselves about the setup of Europe. How should we be able, do we want to be able to benefit from our diversity? We benefit from it because the competition of different approaches shows us in the time and the course of time what's working and what's not working. And new challenges will come about. Harmonized imperfect policies are still imperfect and it's always a difficult thing to find out what works and what doesn't and having a very harmonized approach might not help in the long run. Thank you. Thank you very much, Krista, for reminding us in detail that the national, the insecurities matter very much and that the, not necessarily the German experience can be extrapolated to other situations. So it's indeed a, I think, wise message. So, Jean, please. Thank you, Vitor. I'm very pleased to be on this panel, not least because during the coffee break, everybody was asking me why we're not reforming faster in France. So it's a relief to have the opportunity to talk about reforms in general, not specifically about Michael. What I would like to do is read to go back to the core of the discussion we're having, which is on the one hand we're saying there are reasons to think about reforms in taking into account the framework of the euro area in general. So about coordination, if you wish. And on the other hand, everybody agreed that there are deep national dimension there. And so the question is whether there is a way out of this sort of conundrum. We have a lot of new procedures and these procedures have been analyzed. They've been put in place in response to crisis, the macroeconomic imbalances procedure with a country-specific recommendation and then we have the flexibility within the pact and we have further proposals for reform contracts and we have obviously the exhortation by the ECB and all that in terms of whether it delivers, whether the system delivers, I think we can be skeptical for all the reasons that have been given. And so some would say, okay, let's go back to the, and that was very much what Christopher was saying, let's go back to the national responsibility, let's forget about the common framework and let's consider that reform is interestingly national. So the first thing perhaps is to discuss again whether there is a case for a common approach. And long ago, about 10 years ago, there was a paper by Charles Vipros and Guido Tabellini about coordinating structural reforms. And basically the conclusion was the case for reform coordination, structural policy coordination is very weak. Essentially they were saying these reforms benefit the countries that undertake reform and they spill overs if any are positive and they are pecuniary. So there is not a strong case for international coordination. I think this is basically true, but not in a monetary union. I mean, basically they were discussing the Lisbon agenda. They were not discussing a situation in monetary union. And I think Mario Draghi put very clear yesterday what are the reasons specific to the monetary union, why there is a case for having a Uriah-Yah wide approach to these reforms. And this has to do with the functioning, which he calls the resilience of monetary union, which has to do with the internal imbalances, which has to do with the transmission mechanism of monetary policy, which has to do with all what keep the Uriah-Yah together. And this has to do with the collective benefits from reforms that would enhance the gross potential. And this is particularly relevant in the current context, where there is a recovery and there is a question about the pace and the potential for further growth. So the normal times case for coordinating reform, which is that if you do some reform and you create some potential, then without the support of monetary policies, the short-term benefits are going to be weaker. So there is a collective action problem. This remains true, but there is more to it. There is a situation in which we're in where there are limits to what you can do with macro policy instruments, so you want in a way structural reforms to supplement. And what has to do with the risk of hysteresis that we discussed yesterday. So case is stronger. And I agree with the observation that reforms are generally conducted in bad times, so you may just wait for the next crisis and hope that it will trigger a new wave of reform. But that's not the problem of today. Today we're in a recovery phase. So the incentive for reform coming from the fact that governments are shoulders against the wall is going to diminish. So the question of the day is whether we can actually trigger more reforms in good times. Now, the problem so that in the one hand, we want some more centralization, on the other hand, some more decentralization and what the way out. I would suggest that what has to do with the coherence between national policy and participation in the monetary union could be decentralized to institutions at national level that would really be the voice for it. We have the example of the fiscal councils. The fiscal council, they were introduced by the treaty, the TSCG, having observed that there are limitations to what can be done top down. And it's early to say, but my impression is that the fiscal council at national level they're making a difference. So basically they are a network of institutions with a similar mandate. But very much part of the national discussion that are actually informing policymakers, informing parliament, informing public opinion about what are realistic forecasts, about what are realistic budget forecasts, in some cases what is a sustainability perspective, in some cases what the cost of new measures that are being introduced. And this is changing the domestic conversation about fiscal policy and sustainability. And this similar approach has been proposed actually by André and Guntram-Volff or by Agnes and Xavier Hago, but competitiveness council. So to use exactly the same approach and to have at national level bodies that would actually be entrusted with the responsibility of assessing in relative terms. And I would add on the basis obviously of common methodologies because the question of internal consistency of the assessment of the competitive position is extremely important. Though that they would be able to make this assessment and to make recommendations, being much more granular in the recommendation they can make, being much more able to also push for ideas in the national conversation without having this sort of top down, not very detailed or if detailed, not very appropriate approach that Tito has criticized with the reform approach that has been introduced. Now, would it be sufficient or is there a case for more? I think there is a case for more and I would like to go back to the other idea that the positive conditionality that was proposed in the paper by Tito and Juan. There is a question of the incentive to reform. And this question of the incentive to reform comes from the externality that have exist in the context of monetary union. So this has been taken on board with the flexibility within the pact, saying if you do reform, you may have some more leeway in your fiscal adjustment. But that only works for neither for countries which are in a sound fiscal situation because they don't need it, nor for countries which are in a bad fiscal situation because they don't qualify, they have to be basically below 3%. So it's a relatively narrow approach. Then there was a approach proposed by or attributed to Chancellor Merkel, the contract saying if you reforms, you're going to be, you're going to put forward a program for reform and we can discuss on this basis, but never said exactly what you would discuss. But this started from I think a good observation, which is that it's better to start from what governments can propose, what government can consider appropriate and feasible in a particular context rather than from the sort of top-down approach of advice from the commission. The problem was that it very quickly looked like in sort of Troika program light. And for this reason I think it cannot fly. So the positive conditionality approach in a way would be a sort of response, essentially that would consist in and I think there are two ideas in your paper. One is to create a sort of EU scheme and to say this is a scheme supported by the EU or the URIR, there is so many attached and you can qualify. Now if you don't want to qualify for it, there are conditions, there are local conditions. Conditions that depend that are attached to the purpose of the program. So you're not asking to reform, I don't know, taxation is if it's something linked to labor market protection. So it has to be very closely linked to the purpose of the program you're putting forward. And the program has to correspond to a common goal, so on which there is a rationale for the EU or the URIR to push for it. Now you can choose to qualify or not. If you do qualify you have to fulfill a certain number of conditions and this is absolutely something that it's impossible to reject because if you have a program that will favor, I don't know, youth employment, then you don't want countries to apply while at the same time keeping policies that run against the very purpose of the program. So this is difficult to dispute. So I think the scheme of this sort could be used in several fields. Labor market, you could think of fields where is a common interest in pushing for it. Also for universities for example, or for various fields. Now there's another idea in your paper which is to go to the citizens as you said. So essentially it's the suggestion that you would be creating a sort of 20th regime at URIR level. So you have the national regime and you would create a different regime for labor contracts or for whatever with specific rules, with specific payments, et cetera. And I'm not entirely sure, and I think we do need to discuss much further what would be the effect of creating a 20th regime. Because it may help reform domestically or it may have a sort of opposite effect. But I'm sure the first idea of introducing a program with U-support has potential. I'm sure also that to break the taboo that the U doesn't speak to citizens, it speaks to entities, but never to citizens also has a potential. And I think this is a good reminder that we do have a very large, in absolute terms, a very large budget in the EU. And that we're using this budget for purposes that have nothing to do with the stated goals of our currently stated goals, our priorities. So we could use this budget to push, to support initiatives that would foster employment, that would foster potential output goals in an incentive way. And I think the potential for that is significant in view of the monetary. So I would say we should just do it. Thank you.


We introduced a novel metric for hypergraphs that takes into account both the distance between pairs of nodes and the distance between groups of nodes. This metric can be used to calculate the efficiency, closeness and between the centralities of nodes in a hypergraph. When applied to real-world data, this metric revealed differences between the values of these centralities obtained from the original hypergraph and those obtained from its clique projection. These differences were more pronounced when the hyperedges had larger sizes and fewer connections between them. This article was authored by Ekaterina Vasilieva, Miguel Romance, Ivan Samalanco and others.


Hi everybody, I am Dr. Yogesh Prinsingh, Consultant Department of Rheumatology, and I am the Department here. Coronavirus or COVID-19 as we recall, is a global pandemic and it is affecting all nations across the world. It's one of the most challenging or testing times the world has faced in the recent years. It is believed to be one of the most challenging crisis which has affected the world since World War II. So in this situation, rheumatological patients have a lot of questions in their mind. I am immunosuppressed, I am immunosuppressed, I am at an increased risk of infections. The drugs or medications which we use in rheumatological conditions and in the doses what we use are not really immunosuppressive. They do calm the immune system slightly down because in the autoimmune conditions or rheumatological conditions the immune system is slightly hyperactive. So all these medicines really slightly calm the immune system down and they do not really suppress the immune system to a large extent. And whatever data is available worldwide from this COVID infection, it has not shown that rheumatological patients or patients with rheumatological conditions are at increased risk of this condition. So it doesn't seem to affect them more than the normal population. The other question that a lot of people have in their mind is what precautions should one take to prevent this? So there are no special precautions what rheumatological patients have to take. These are normal precautions which every individual has to take right from hand hygiene, covering their mouth while sneezing or coughing, use of a mask whenever it is appropriate and try to maintain appropriate physical distancing or social distancing as it is called. So there are no special precautions, normal precautions have to be followed. The other question which people have in their mind is should I continue my medicines? It's very important that all patients with rheumatological conditions continue their medications as it has been prescribed to them because stopping the medications may make the disease worse and treatment of which may be slightly problematic during this period of time. These are very challenging and testing times and keeping in mind the convenience of patients trying to reduce their exposure to this virus. We do offer online consult or remote consult opportunities which is mainly for patients who have already seen us and mainly for follow-up consultations. So these facilities are available here keeping in mind the convenience of patients and trying to reduce the exposure of patients. At Manipa Hospital we are taking adequate precautions so that patients who come here are not exposed to COVID-19 or coronavirus. These are challenging times. The world has overcome a lot of challenges in the past. The world will overcome or we shall overcome this challenge also that is COVID-19.


Hi, folks. Basil Trapp is sitting here for Tom O'Brien, my pleasure to be here. Dow is up 387, making up more than the loss on Friday, and that's really important because it is hugging the nine-period exponential moving average. I'll talk about that in a moment. It's at $33,864, about to tell you the truth. Friday's close after the Fed speak on Wednesday, after all the CPI, PPI, and all those numbers come out. We want to see on Friday a close in perhaps the 34,100 areas. Is that too much to ask? Rather than $33,400 or lower. So let's get to this. We'll look at the S&P. The S&P at this particular point is also up nicely. The S&P is trading. Let me just click on that right there. The S&P is trading at 3973, up 38, also very good. Not the pattern itself. It needs a little more to be matching the Dow. I did not put it down error even though it's a peak. Actually, let me just show this real quickly for those of you who are new to my work. I try to identify the lowest low bar as soon as it starts to make a higher peak or peaks. I alphabetize them sequentially, A through G, ABCD, FG. If it gets upgraded from a buy signal to a buy mode, it means it should go to at least a D. You'll see how many D's there are. At least a D can go D, E, or even F. But in the meantime, back at the range. D's where other things can happen. We're only looking at three patterns in terms of the direction. Straight up, straight down. Cup formation, where it goes from one point down to the back again. Could be a V or a cup. And an arch formation, where it could go from one point up in an inverse V or an arch. Come back down. How it tests the low is important. This is red. It looks like a lowercase h, because if it goes to a peak A and a B and then fails, takes out this left side low. It could go quite a bit lower. And on the right side, the green, reverse Y means if it takes out that left side high, it can go quite a bit higher. And one other thing that I'll just show you right now, I usually talk about it and often show it. This is going to be really important for the month of December. The long, narrow rectangle, or the large rectangle. Let's go to each one of these things and I'll show you exactly what I'm looking at. Yes, I will look at Amazon in a moment. Let's just get to this. So the S&P has made this peak D. Remember the objective in the Chaff Wave is to get you to at least a D. But also, I talk about the 200 period exponential moving average. How important is that? Well, you want to know how important it is? Have a look at this. This is the E-mini one-minute chart. Whoops, I lost the letter there, but put it over there. Where does it need to go to? To at least a D. What has just gone to a D in the one-minute chart? It's gone to a D in the five-minute chart. It's in a leg D in the ten-minute chart. These are the techniques that I'll be working on. We'll be trading these. We'll be studying them. We'll be looking at a couple of other instruments that we'll use for trading on this coming Thursday. So don't forget you got your Tiger dollars today. End of the end of the Tiger dollar rewards. Can you believe 20 to 40% gain you get on your buying of these dollars? Because if you buy it, you can get up to 20% or 40% discount. Isn't that great? Oh, we've got a call. Do you say, hell, let's see, we have, we have. Oh, do we have a caller? No, I didn't have a caller. All right, we'll go right back to one. Hello. Yes, we do. Who am I speaking with? Sam from Philly. Hi, how are you? Good. How are you doing, Devin? I'm doing very well. And you'd like to look at it. You say, Oh, how do you what? What are the symbols? It's a little lady. You as in unit. Oh, you. Okay, that is Lufax Holdings. Yes, sir. Okay, good. So this is the way I look at this is the most immediate things. I look at it and I see a W formation. These U or W formations that I was just talking about a moment ago, it looks like that reverse Y in this particular instance has gone from the low of $1.30 on the 24th of October. It went to the requisite peak A, peak B, and then it kind of stored instead of going to see what happened was it went A, B. I'm just notating from the low bar each successively high peak, and then it fell and it broke to a lower low. That negates this peak C becomes a C minus. And that C minus says you've got to restart and it was uppercase because on the way up in the uppercase. So it restarts and now it goes peak A, peak B, brand new, I have to put it in. So the stochastics at 81%. So I can put in an up arrow. It says it should go to at least a D. This is an A right here that first that's a peak right there. This is a peak right here. And it's testing it. So today's highs $2.19. $2.19 the last high was $2.35. So it's got a little bit of a way. Are you along this from any position that you can tell me? Yeah, I only at $163. Okay, so I see because we're looking at a $2 stock folks. This is not for everybody. But obviously in this particular instance, Sam is done his homework. Have you ever traded this before? Yes, sir. And it will be actually a good dividend that has a good earning per share. And the PE is low. The only thing is different is a Chinese company. Alright, the fact that it's a Chinese company is an issue. But look at survive so far and it's bounced. It's almost doubled from the low that was just made at $1.26 on the 25th. So in that regard, I'm going to say, there's always a risk when you're playing very, very low, very low price, even low price single digit stocks, because they can go broke, you know that. So what you're doing now is you you're looking at it and you're treating it somewhat like an option in the sense that you're saying to yourself, well, it's held in the ones for a while. Even if it pulls back, it should give me an opportunity, hopefully to get out if it doesn't work. So this is what I like to do. And I'll be teaching this in my course on Thursday. And I'm what I'm doing is I'm showing you bar symmetry. I go to a particular bar, and then I measure the number of bars on the left and measure the bars on the right. And if it isn't the exact low, I choose a particular bar to do this. Can you hold on and I'll give you the results of what I'm looking at. Yeah, we've got salmon fully does a 393 recipes of 38. This is Basil Chapman. This is the Tom O'Brien show. I'll be right back.