Bonjour to all. So I propose we get started. So let me introduce myself. I will have the honor to be the sessions of today, Chairman. So my name is Patrick Johnson. Actually, I don't come from academia. I come from the industry. So that would be, let's say, a different angle of approach for synthetic biology and molecular and cell biotech. I work in a software company. And we have been, of course, investing a lot in computational biology. And now we are moving forward to synthetic biology. And so I will host the two sessions this morning and this afternoon. This morning is more dedicated to plant biotech and synthetic biology in the plant arena, I'd say. And this afternoon, although we had to change a short minute the agenda with François, I would say it's more oriented toward technology, platforms, and maybe a little bit of computational approaches for synthetic arena. So what I propose, because plant is not at all my arena to kick the day, I propose just a couple of slides to provide you with a perspective from the industry, from the software industry for synthetic biology, just to give you a context. And of course, since we are in IHAS, also the math that actually the industry companies are working on towards synthetic biology. So just a couple of slides. I won't be long. I was told by François it's 15 minutes. So by 40 minutes and 59, you can throw tomatoes and we can kick to the next session with them. Is it a plant? Yeah, yeah, plant. Exactly. So actually, of course, when we talk about synthetic biology, we talk about engineering, living systems, and complex biosystems. And of course, in my company and in other fields in software arena, people are coming from, I would say, the more classical engineering field where it's, of course, a bottom-up approach, where people are designing parts, then assembling them, then testing them, simulating them, and ultimately producing them. And this is what we have been doing for the past 30 years in my company. So pure engineering work, pure systems engineering field, engineering sciences, which at first glance doesn't seem to have one dime in coming with what we want to do in synthetic biology. At first glance, I said, of course. At second glance, of course, there are a lot of questions that could be arisen in terms of modularity, standardization, emergence, emergence of phenomenon. And of course, in terms of industrial pipelines and production pipelines, a lot of industries, not only pharmaceutical, actually, but a lot of industries, CPG, agrochemical, the green, the white, biotechs, are right now actually leading the way and asking companies like mine to provide tools, industrial tools, to assist them in synthetic biology, in systems biology and in synthetic biology. And so this is what we have been doing. I would, of course, not show you things that actually you guys know more than we do. But right now, let's say the in silico approach is ramping up in the industry. Pharmaceutical is actually lagging behind when we look at energy field, for example, or even agrochemical. And from the industrial pool, the demand is not at all coming from pharmaceutical. If you look at the organizations within industries like the synergies of the world, the phases of the world, the branches of the world, of course, there are some departments for in silico approaches, and they have been for quite some time now. But if you look to exons or to energy players, for example, or even, of course, agrochemical, those guys are more advanced in actually launching programs in the field, public-private partnership, to generate tools that would be scalable and industrial. And so starting with genomics, of course, and of course, linking them with a more classical computational biology that the sector was using. So the slide that I'm showing you is what we have been developing in my company. And it's more, I would say, from the design and engineering space. But the production space has not been tackled so far in the industry at least. If you look to, again, the synergies of the world or even the energy sector, those guys are using right now in silico tools to do modeling, protein engineering, let's say, at least. But when it comes to production pipeline, bioprocesses, manufacturing, chemical manufacturing, and of course, genetic engineering and production, it's very shy to say the least. And my company, for example, who has been investing already one billion on the system's biology side, is now looking for a mature mathematical tool and technological platform to link that with production platforms for bioproduction. So we have been working in systems biology. And of course, when I come back to the Boeing example that you saw on the first slide, already design principles are starting to be modified or changed when we zoom into living systems or modified, modified systems. I have to say that systems biology today, at least in the life science sector, is almost nonexistent from an industrial standpoint. And so for the synthetic biology and bioproduction approaches, it's even worse. So all the marvelous presentation that we are discussing today, I would be, of course, and my company and all the other players in the software arena are watching that with a lot of focus because there is the pool, but there is no practices, no standardization, methodologies. And of course, when it comes to ramping up in the industrial field, it's inevitable that we have to come up with something that is more standardized. Of course, when it comes to mathematical technologies and, let's say, tools and frameworks for systems biology, of course, in my company and in other communities, we have been trying to understand the emerging field. So you see on that kind of slide different approaches not complete, of course. When it comes to trying to understand the behavioral and dynamic of complex systems, the emergence of complex systems, the multi-entities complexity. So there's a lot of mathematical, let's say, frameworks being proposed today, some of which are more coming from the computer science arena, some of which are more coming from the classical engineering computer science electrical field. It's a mess, to be honest. From an industrial standpoint, it's a mess. And it's not complete here. And pretty much what we are observing is that every time you look at one specific case in synthetic biology or systems biology, when it comes to FASH, when it comes to a specific organism that we want to tackle, you have a different formalism being proposed by the academy or a different mathematical framework. There is no overarching underlying layer, at least from our understanding. And of course, this is a demand from my sector to try to see whether there is a more generic or a more agnostic layer to be able to handle the complexity of all the different, for example, hosting platforms that could be used within the industry. So the reason why I'm showing you this is, of course, there are the experiments that are being done in synthetic biology. But the demand, at least from our customers, is also to have some sort of election of a unified framework for modeling, simulation, analysis, and production. And today, it's very fragmented. It's very fragmented. Now, if you look at other industries that have been trying to do modeling, simulation, and production, more in the classical product engineering space, this was the case 25 years ago. It was the same situation 25 years ago. If I take an example, in 1980, in the computer-edited design industry, so it's more engineering sciences, you have 600 companies existing on the field doing modeling, design, analysis, simulation, and production, the so-called CAD, CAM, CAE market, and all of which were specialized on specific use cases or specific families of products. It all has converged and being unified in today, let's say, two or three actors that are trying to unify that on the end-to-end platform. If you look at systems biology and synthetic biology today, guess what? The market today is around 400 and 500 companies. Everyone providing a specific language, or a specific framework, or a specific technological platform, for Algoa, for humans, for Homo sapiens, for different kinds, of course, of hosting organism. And we believe in my sector that there will be a convergence path. We believe that there will be when, of course, I am totally unable to say, but at least not only from the modeling perspective and the simulation perspective, but also from the productions perspective. And the reason why synthetic biology, we believe, is actually, let's say, a catalyst to that convergence. Pretty much like manufacturing was a catalyst for the engineering sector, for the CAD and the CAE, classical product design space. It is because by effectively producing, you understand better how it is done and how it could be modeled. So the message here is that the actual realization is also a catalyst. It's a key catalyst for modeling and engineering in the first place. And this is why we want to invest in that sector. So right now, at least in my company, we are trying to gather a number of tools for systems biology, synthetic biology, of course, classical computational biology and systems biology, but not only from the modeling and design perspective, but also from the processes, bioproduction, and manufacturing perspective. And this is why the synthetic sector is inevitable today. So this is what I already said. We've been monitoring a lot. You will see, at least in some of the presentation this afternoon, which are more related to computational, that there are some advances, also coming from, let's say, semantic web approaches. So the transdisciplinarity is not only coming from your field, from the biotech sector. It is also being driven a lot by not only, of course, mathematics and computer science, but also from the semantic and the web technology. And just to question marks from my side, I showed you a couple of mathematical approaches from the systems biology side. There are many from the synthetic biology side. People are providing biobricks framework in terms of grammars, in terms of component tokens, in terms of generative frameworks. I mean, again, there is a zoology of mathematical and computer science framework to do synthetic biology. Also, there is a variety, very wide, of hosting platforms and technology platforms. I don't know if some of you know the, for example, a company named Intruxon, which claims to be the number one in the US of synthetic DNA. And that company, basically, is every two or three months buying a new technological platform to have the widest hosting, let's say, portfolio of organisms, synthetic organism, to be followed very closely. And, of course, there is the social and the community approach for synthesization. And I believe that this afternoon, we'll have some hint on, for example, the, let's say, computational standardization language effort for synthetic biology with a language called Esbol, for example. So, again, my message here is pretty much like for the design side with systems biology. There is, in my mind, a too wide of a variety of offering. Synthetic biology is following the same way. And as an industry guy, of course, I'm asking and starving for unification and more standardization approaches. So that was just, let's say, not too long, I hope, an overview of the computational sector trying to not only tackle, but be part of the discussions in that field. So today's sessions, again, two blocks. This morning, we'll be focusing more on plant organism and synthetic biology. And we'll start with Ann Osborne. And this afternoon, we'll be more focusing, I guess. I'll try to find a unification, because we had some short minute change in the agenda in terms of computational tools and technological platform. And that's all from my side. So I propose to welcome Ann Osborne, who will talk about mechanism of chemical diversification and plants. Thank you.


Welcome to the knuckleheads of liberty Let's let's jump to our usual suspects of yeah, I guess the CNN and The oh gosh, what is it the Atlantic and some of those other sources? So maybe we can get an image on this so there was recently a discussion held at the University of Chicago on misinformation by by the likes of Brian Stelter of CNN and and the Applebaum I guess of the Atlantic or a few of the people and of course they even had a Obama politician in there. I can't pay his chief of staff or something Yeah, he was running the thing and of course, you know, this is about misinformation But and here's an image from it But it was funny there were a couple of students who called them out because they they were all to sell this right-wing Information.  I'm watching But the more disturbing one was Ann Applebaum because they had the question come up about the laptop and her answer To that was just shocking. She said See here. She said my problem with Hunter Biden's laptop is it was totally irrelevant? Responding to the election. Oh, how could that be irrelevant? I mean literally yeah, Hunter Biden was working in these for companies in these country Countries where he has said on interviews that he wouldn't have those positions were it not for the Biden name And then to top it off his dad was literally Had authority over foreign aid in those countries during that time here So it was just absolutely outstanding. All right, give me a sounding rather that that this is a journalist who says this I just can't even imagine a journalist with such a lack of curiosity about I didn't know what is amazing. What is even further amazing about this thing Hunter Biden flew on a force to with his father to China and about five days later or ten days later or two weeks later Suddenly he got his billion dollar multi-billion dollar contract with some some sort of financial Management thing for a novice, but he got that after flying on a force Efforts to with his father and Joe Biden at the time during the election was claiming He never discussed any business with with his son about his foreign dealings and we know that was alive You know, it was alive, but yet we have this arrogant piece of crap from the Atlantic telling us oh, it was only relevant No, it didn't matter well Yeah, she has journalism skills when it comes to a Republican in the same situation doing the exact same thing It's just that that it was a Democrat son and her son of a Democrat and the Democrat that went to China on the Air Force to and You know that that's what's important or what you know, which the party is because these people Have zero principles. They are just partisanship hacks a party hacks and they only have and no partisanship they only know loyalty to the party and Principles be damned. They are unprincipled and that is not a compliment Yeah, if it weren't for double standards, they just simply wouldn't have standards at all But what this woman's this woman's response to the student typifies the arrogance of the mainstream media because She said it was irrelevant and I guess just because the mainstream media decided it was irrelevant That means it should be censored on Twitter and on Facebook and some other places That is the arrogance of the mainstream media and that's how they see us as citizens in a supposedly free country Thank you for listening to the knuckleheads of Liberty podcast


Russian army helpless against Ukrainian drones on the left bank of Nipro. The Russian army is suffering heavy losses due to artillery and drone strikes covering the Ukrainian bridgehead in Kvinke on the left bank of the Nipro river according to the UK Ministry of Defence. Ukrainian forces operating on the left bank of the Nipro river are using unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with ammunition to strike Russian forces. According to UK intelligence, FPV drones are used in conjunction with artillery to target Russian armed forces vehicles. According to a Russian military blogger, 90% of Russian military equipment in the Kvinke sector was destroyed. Russia's inability to counter the FPV UAVs is likely due to a shortage of Russian electronic warfare capability in the area, the UK Ministry of Defence says. Back in November 2023, it became known that Ukrainian forces managed to gain a foothold on the left bank of the Kursan region. They hold the bridgehead and do not allow them to be driven out despite constant attempts by the enemy to attack. In the past month, work has been underway to expand the bridgehead on the left bank. Ukrainian drones mine the roads at night and finish off enemy equipment and vehicles in the morning by dropping ammunition.


For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Argentina is witnessing massive mobilizations against the right-wing government of Mauricio Macri demanding concrete measures to combat the socio-economic crisis in the country. On August 27, thousands across Argentina took part in the 5th National March against the trigger happy. They mobilized against state violence with banners that said, enough of the trigger happy police. Not a boy or a girl less, not a bullet more. The state is responsible. The mobilizations were called by the National March against the trigger happy. The movement is comprised of the relatives of victims of reckless use of firearms. Trigger happy use of firearms is when security forces shoot at suspects of crimes, armed or not, irrespective of whether they have been judicially proved guilty of a crime or not.  In 2015, the first set of marches were held in Buenos Aires to denounce cases of trigger happy gun violence led by the relatives of Ismael Sosa, a 24-year-old boy who was found dead in the Imbalsa Río Tercero Lake in January 2015. He had left home to attend a concert in Villa Rumi Pal and never came back. This is the 5th National March to denounce state violence, which has left around 6,500 young people dead since 1983, which amounts to one person every 21 hours. The number of cases have increased during the current right-wing government of Cambimos party led by President Mauricio Macri. On August 28th, meanwhile, another demonstration took place. Under the slogan of emergency to confront hunger, more than 250,000 workers from different sectors left in political parties along with members of several social, human rights women and students organizations flooded the streets in Argentina demanding implementation of the Food Emergency Act, extension of social emergency measures and increase in the supplementary social salary and a 40% increase in the budget for lunch and snacks in schools. The protesters also demanded the cessation of suspension of labor programs, a better budget for the popular economy sector along with a bonus of 2,000 pesos for the popular economy workers. An increase in the minimum pension and retirement benefits has also been called for. The mobilization was carried out as a part of the National Struggle Day called for by various unions and organizations and with the support of different movements in the country. Macri's economic measures have led the nation to its worst recession in history. More than 50% of the Argentine population is severely affected by the economic crisis facing the country. The social and economic conditions in the country are continuously deteriorating. Due to the devaluation of the national currency, increasing unemployment, poverty, homelessness, food insecurity and inflation, the majority of the Argentine working class finds itself in a daily struggle trying to make ends meet. The setback Macri received in the primary election is a clear reflection of the people's anger towards his government and the neoliberal anti-people policies implemented by him.


Welcome back to Tennis Talk. My name's Cam Williams and it's official that the Australian Open in 2022 will need players to be fully vaccinated in order to play. And we know that this story has been going on for a while now. It's been an ongoing issue. Of course, there's a few players, including Novak Djokovic, who yet to, I guess, disclose their status of vaccination. So Craig Tyler, the Australian Open Chief, has actually come out and said this is actually going to be a requirement for all players. Let's go have a look at what he said. So this is what he said on a TV channel in Australia. There's a lot of speculations about vaccination. And just to be really clear, when the Victoria Premier announced that everyone on site will need to be vaccinated, we made that clear to the playing group. All the playing group understands it. Our patrons will have to be vaccinated. All the staff working at the Australian Open will need to be vaccinated. We would love to see Novak here. He knows that he'll have to be vaccinated to play here. This is what Djokovic had to say last week in Paris, talking about this rule that might be coming into place over the next couple of weeks. This is what Djokovic had to say. I'm going to decide on whether I go to Australia after I see an official statement from Tennis Australia. There has been no official announcement or statement. And until this is out, I won't be talking about this anymore. I don't want to be part of the stories about the assumption and what ifs. Djokovic said last week in Paris, now he's at the ATP finals and now the statement has made official by the Australian Open. Let me know down in the comments below. Do you think Novak is going to play? He's the biggest one that we're all talking about because he's the world number one defending champion. Of course, Roger Federer is not playing the Australian Open for different reasons because of injury. But he's on 20 grand slams, just like Roger, just like Rafa. He's going for history. He's been great at the Australian Open. It's his favourite slam. It's his most successful slam. Will we see him there at the Australian Open next year? So the Australian Open, you've got to be vaccinated to play. Novak Djokovic, we have no idea what his status is.


All right, let's take a look at this here new version. Nice. We like the end That's cool. All right, so looking at this Once you move on next version, I'd be careful not to have the blink and then the head moving down and at the same time I think it's a bit Kind of kind of simple and kind of post-aposit.  So he's he's definitely Not in control and he's trying to you kind of whoa, let's get back into this So to me anything until here is going to be less controlled like this This seems very okay, and I think this will be more of a looser Head arc in y and bit of a roll bit slower in terms of the timing You might even relax those fingers a little bit and then when he does this That movement especially pushing up the fingers curl back in so that the tension is back But even through there, I would have a little bit of side-to-side movement in the route So that he's just kind of losing like oh And that is the moment where he tenses up again and now he gets ready It still has an overall feel where I like that. There's stuff going on here It's a bit fast It feels more like a knee controller was moved versus him Leaning over and then putting pressure on this knee to then lift this knee over not there has to be like I just step but still I would go beyond just moving that controller and really if You are on your knees like this, how would your body move to? To make a shift like that. I would love to see your reference I don't know if you have any if you fill in the reference to see what your mechanics are and something like this Was even this here There's so much weight on the knees and then this knee just kind of slides over But those kneecaps are you know, he's also a massive guy, so they're gonna have a lot of weight on there So I'm not super buying this slide I was thinking more about a lean over bearing that weight and then the knee can move a little bit It's almost like these are tiny feet and then you got that little Way shift happening those moments there then on something like this That's definitely where I would start moving him over and lean on On this knee if that makes sense, right? So he's he's more like like that and maybe this knee can even come off the ground a little bit Right now it feels like there's a pivot in the root and the pelvis and it's kind of moves over and I don't see a shift over Which again gives it this overall. There's a lot of moving here, but this feels separate and cut off It's definitely better. I think this is the right direction I would just push it more in terms of the believability of weight and weight transfer And then when you have There's a lot of shake in the camera I will take the camera shake out for now so you can really look at the animation. I feel like we might want to Is it more of a tremor in the shoulder and the elbow and A bit more of a again imagine you're going up. So you're gonna raise the root a bit Lean on on that knee again It might lift that knee up a little bit so that when you go BAM This goes first shaking here Overlapped with that and then the root will come down as well and maybe even Spread out those needles that that weight brought them back. This still feels a bit too It's just an arm moving down and nothing else is really happening There's not a little bit of a like this impact tremor is gonna fan out and impact this a lot This to some degree this a bit more because it's it's lighter and looser than the massive chest there And speaking of which I be careful to not have the head in world space too much or however you animate it so that you have so much Chest movement and you can see how the rotation of the head stays the same feels it just adds to that feeling of There's movement here, but it isn't cut off IK hands. There's movement in the chest But the knees are not working. It's me still feels like separate pieces moving all the time That makes sense and then here Moves over and does this but I don't see anything here again. This is the idea of you're moving over So now this line For for that thigh, you know might be even like this and then you get that That move over and he's really leaning and maybe the arm goes even like this far pivoting off of of that side of the Over the fist. I'm just seeing a Rotation over and then this again sliding over. I don't feel like there's a way shift over Yeah, so I would definitely act out. I'm curious how you act it out and how you move And you can always have you know, you can put on like a ginormous backpack with a lot of weight So that you kind of mimic this a bit because even this here feels like the leg just kind of comes up And it rests and then the root just kind of goes up because of this movement, but I don't see really anything in the hip and in the roots Compensating or being affected by the leg going up and into a step Like I feel like there's gonna be a massive amount of intersections there But this is just the mechanics. I feel like I need a bit more work and then this Is cool, but again, it feels like that head is to separate it to me it would be a Even on this move up. You can see how that head basically looks like a 2d card going back So it would be rotating down with the drag And on this rotate up and then why maybe we'd have a roll just a bit more for an impact there And even here again, it feels like a lot of movement Separating the head at least there's some more movement there feels a bit better there and then with this I would exaggerate and add some more shake really in here that then tapers off So shake shake shake shake bit in the elbow and a little bit in that in the shoulder Maybe a little bit in the head This was too clean too smooth for me Subjectively, I don't know maybe that's super control But I think it would be really cool to feel that that vibration of those blades Goes into the rest of the body there to see here And again, I'm still concerned that we don't see too much with the eyes Just that the attitude of a bomb Like that move up in the head to me coincides right when this happens so it's almost like and Then a bigger head move up. I know it's more Intimidating like this and you want the head to be straight on but I still feel like we're We're missing a beat where the head does a really noticeable move and attitude change To me this seems so small with the eyes and what the hair the head is doing Kind of push that more Watch out for something like that as you move forward so you have an elbow move down here That's going to rotate that wrist a bit more otherwise it feels too like a cut-off IK arm Same thing here. There's the elbow going out, but technically the downwards rotation is the same I see something in in why but you still have that very straight You know flat look as if it just comes up straight So imagine if it's like this that forearm either like the wrist would be out like this or you will bring that wrist down Into something like that so that flat side is here. So you have a bit of a curve there And then watch out it dies a bit at the end when you have such a big move Up and then down BAM after that rotation everything kind of dies so for your next pass We're just in future passes just think about again. I know there's tension, but it's still a big guy There's a lot of you know There's a lot of balancing he has to do so some little looseness in the in the room a little bit of swinging in the arms It's basically you want this to be loose enough while keeping a feel of tension that's kind of the What's the word the balancing act you have to achieve there All right, hope that makes sense I know here's the the sections that we talked about that might be a problem So you're gonna have to potentially really adjust this pose with the with the lean over might have to lean a lot over this way To make this work Yeah, that's kind of that. All right. Thanks. Actually hold on one more thing I know this is just the first version of it, but it could be kind of neat When this opens to have the opening of the blade be staggered Maybe or separated maybe it's like one two three or this and this and then this one just kind of make it a bit more Mechanic and maybe the end of I can't remember if you can rotate those blades down But they would be imagine that that's the the blades are like this and then they go up Into that position something a bit more transform re-mechanical could be also cute Just for a couple frames make it less clean again It just adds it a whole clean feel that I have in this pass All righty, let me know what you think and that's that's thanks All right, there's an email you can sign up you can start whenever you want you can submit whatever you want You get 16 submissions either way the like and subscribe would be awesome. All right. Thank you


The Ministry of Education in the last 12 months has advanced its plans to introduce St. Lucia's Indigenous Quaiol language in public schools throughout the island. Prime Minister Hon. Philip J. Pierre, speaking at the inaugural Dance and Drum Juvais spectacle, which formed part of official commemorative activities for St. Lucia's Emancipation Day observers on August 1st espoused his vision to have St. Lucia's history also included in the national school curriculum. The events this year are more than just a long overdue commemoration of Emancipation Day. They are the enkindling of a movement for the comprehensive education of our people in their history and cultural heritage so that this knowledge can inspire the values and aspirations and underpin the path to development. As I have said before, this means that this government will embark on initiatives to teach our St. Lucia children and African history in our schools. We will introduce the teaching of our Quaiol language in the education system and enact legislation to make Quaiol an official language of our country. General Pierre also remains committed to pursuing restorative justice. He has pledged St. Lucia's continued advocacy for and collaboration with the Karakom Reparations Committee in the ongoing regional push for reparations from the island's former colonial rulers. Our new celebrations of Emancipation Day are also the revitalization of our participation in the movement for reparations. That was denied our ancestors when they were given legal freedom from slavery in 1848, but were not granted compensation for their enslaved labor. As you should know, the plantation owners and slave masters were paid by the British government for the loss of their so-called property, the slaves. But the so-called property received nothing. St. Lucia will continue to work to ensure that this injustice is cured. So let this year's celebration be the rekindling of the hope for a better future for ourselves and for our people. From the office of the Prime Minister, Rihanna Isidou.


What's up everybody, takedown here. Welcome back to the vlogs. Today, as promised, I'm going to be sharing with you the car show I recently went to. Now, this car show was amazing. There was a lot of really nice cars, and I'm glad I get to share that with you. I think there was about 500 cars there, and it was a beautiful day, so it turned out really well. So today, I'm only going to be sharing with you the video that I took during this car show. I did take a lot of pictures as well, and I'll probably share those with you guys in future vlogs to kind of end of those vlogs. But today is just the video, so hope you guys do enjoy. Let's get right to the car show. Now though, that's a new one. Okay, so that is all the video I took at the car show. I did say I took a lot of pictures, and I'll probably share those with you in future vlogs, but the car show turned out amazing. Better than I thought. So many cars, a lot that I've never seen before in this area, so I like how every year it's bigger and bigger, and there's always new cars going to it. It's not the same stuff every single year, and it turns out amazing. So I hope you guys enjoy this vlog. I'm a car guy. That's why I wanted to do this. I knew I was going to the car show, and I think I mentioned it for a few vlogs now that this will be a vlog eventually whenever I go and get time to edit it all. And it took a while to edit because I didn't want to put people in it that I didn't know strangers. I didn't want to put family in it because I didn't really think they'd be comfortable with that. So what you got was the best that I could do, and it took a while to edit. So I hope you guys did enjoy, and I'll see you guys in the next vlog. Like I said, that one will probably be sharing at the end pictures from the car show as well, and it might be the next few vlogs that I do. We'll be sharing a lot of the pictures I took. But anyways, I'm going to leave this one here. Please take care. Peace.


Thank you very much Mario, and thanks to the ECB for the opportunity to address this August group. I was very glad to see when I came down for the cocktail hour that most of you had voted to remain, not to leave, so I do appreciate that. I am not going to speak about Brexit. I was invited to do this keynote on pretty short notice, but not that short notice. So I had prepared a different subject that you can see right there. The only thing I wanted to say is that most of us in America understand that the well-being of golf courses in Scotland is not high on the list of issues raised by the by the Brexit. One thing that is raised obviously and is remained of course to what I want to talk about tonight is the importance of independent central banks, and we're seeing that in action sort of literally hour by hour since the British vote and it's by no means over. I think President Draghi's got a lot of work to do still and I'm glad to see you here. So let's see. There we go. That's a picture of Montague Norman for those of you who don't recognize him, and I want to start broaching the subject of the proper domain of central bank independence by this not quite a quotation from Norman, but from a sort of quasi-biographer of Norman. Montague Norman used to dream that the BIS, from which a number of you have just come, would one day foster a core of central bankers entirely autonomous of governments. That's my emphasis, and I want to come back to this notion of entirely autonomous of governments. Why did he say that? Because even in those days when nobody was thinking about monetary policy, the way we think about it today, the strong belief was that politicians could not be trusted to produce sound money. So sound money had a different meaning than in a fact that had a lot to do with the gold standard and a number of other things. But the notion of sound money in the hands of autonomous, but maybe not completely autonomous central banking is by no means archaic and indeed is the essence of central banking today. The point I want to make for openers is that independence, central bank independence implies monopoly power. There. I can't actually see the, oh, okay. I see a screen that I can see. Okay. There. Independence of any kind implies monopoly power. That is to say you, the central bank, or whoever's independent, have control of the lever and other people do not have control of the lever. And what I want to focus on tonight is control of the lever over what domain? What is the proper important necessary domain of central bank independence? And where maybe do we not think central banks should be independent in contradistinction to Montague Norman? So does anybody recognize that person? He's starring on Broadway these days. Alexander, these are the five classic functions of a central bank, four of which were actually known to and understood by Hamilton in the 1780s. The last was not monetary policy. A modern list of what a central bank does starts with monetary policy. The guardian or operator of the payment, I'm going to come to each of these in a second, under which I subsume the fiscal agent of the government, which central banks have always been. Either the supervisor or regulator of both or both of banks or financial institutions more broadly. The thing we're all thinking about in the last few days, the guardians of financial stability, which may imply that you're a lender of last resort. I come back to that shortly and of course monetary policy, the one that most central banking gatherings are focusing on in recent decades. Let me take these one by one, starting with the payment system. Where the central bank need not actually operate and run the central bank, run the payments mechanism, sorry, but really needs to supervise it and make sure it works as I suggest here. You can fill in your own sentence better than the cable TV. At least better than my cable TV system. We need much more reliability in the payment system than that and central banks have that responsibility. Do they have a monopoly over it? Well, no, of course. Lots of institutions are involved in the payments mechanism, ranging from banks to Bitcoin and beyond. They're even newer things than Bitcoin. I don't even know their names. So in this domain, central banks are used to having competition in providing the means of payment. It's not a new thought, but the notion, the interesting notion here that bears on central bank independence is the market share, so to speak. As the central banks market share in providing say currency shrinks, the seniorage shrinks, and that starts at some point to raise questions of central bank independence because budgetary independence is crucial part of central bank independence. Second on the list is the supervisor or regulator of either banks or financial institutions more broadly. This to me is at least the three by three by three classification. The central bank could be the supervisor, could be the regulator. Those are not the same thing as everybody in this room knows, but most people outside this room don't know. Or both. And as I said, it could be over banks or all financial institutions or maybe something in between like the so-called SIFIs, systemically important financial institutions. And we could limit the central banks either micro-prudential supervision or macro-prudential supervision or give both tasks to the central bank. So that's a lot of cells, a lot of different ways a country could organize supervision and regulation. And central banks can and most central banks do have competition in most of those cells rather than monopoly. The main point I want to make here is with that many different choices to make, there is a huge amount of room for differences across countries. This is not one size fits all. There's no reason to think it should be one size fits all. And I just put down two examples of this. I was actually going to use the UK, but I just crossed that out. The ECB as you all know was originally written out of the supervisory regulatory business by design in the treaty. But then put in, I say here by necessity, you can put in whatever verb you want. A strong feeling in Europe that the ECB better get into this business, which it's now in of course. The Federal Reserve has always been in the business of soup and reg as we call it at the Fed, but has had multiple competitors always. Most Americans that are thoughtful that know anything about this will say too many competitors. We probably have too many supervisory and regulatory agencies in the US, but there has never been anything close to a Federal Reserve monopoly over this function. The Federal Reserve has always understood that it shares the responsibility with us, which means of course that it doesn't have independence. It can't just move unilaterally. I come now to the third thing on the list with the thing that's on our minds most. As we meet here this evening, which is financial stability, a concern that dates back literally centuries. So I guess that's an old frigate going down with a lot of silver and gold or something on it. But has changed form over the centuries when we think about what is financial instability actually mean. That changed form again on Thursday night and Friday morning, a new sort of financial instability, which I didn't have in mind when I wrote this slide a few days before that. And just by the way, Montague Norman and his colleagues, the so-called Lords of Finance, didn't do a very good job on this function. So who else, if you can't rely on the central banks unilaterally to take care of this, who else? Well, I think it's inevitable frankly that in a crisis situation, the Treasury or the finance ministry, whatever your country calls it, is going to be needed. And I can't imagine that Mark Carney and George Osborne aren't talking to each other many times per day. And we wouldn't want it any other way, even those of us who are big believers in central bank independence. And finally, if a crisis is serious enough, it's probably going to need some kind of a fiscal remedy. We finally got on the road to fixing the financial crisis in the United States when the TARP passed Congress and the Congress of the United States allocated up to $700 billion to this task. And that was not a sui generis event. That's what you expect to happen in a crisis. Eventually, if it's a serious one, if it's a minor one, the central banks can fix it. If it's a serious one, there's going to have to be a fiscal component of the remedy, and that component will probably be an important component. And so as it says on the last line, that means there's no monopoly. It's not like the central bank is the monopoly provider of financial stability services. There is no real potential for monopoly there, and with non-monopoly goes some dependence rather than independence. I come to the fourth, which follows logically from the third. This is going to be one of the few audiences on earth, this and Jackson Hole, that actually recognizes this guy. Vitor knows immediately who it is. This is Walter Badgett, who prescribes what central banks are supposed to do in a financial to avert or mitigate a financial crisis. Here we have what I call a natural monopoly. Only one institution can print money, and if you're going to be the lender of last resort, you almost certainly have to have the ability to print money. And that's the central bank. In fact, that's almost a tautology. We call that institution that can print money the central bank. So it does have a monopoly on that. It is an independent actor on that, and this function must be handled with great care. For a number of microeconomic reasons, which I just subsumed under the title moral hazard. You can be careful about who you're dishing money out to. And a macroeconomic reason, which is inflation. You dish out too much of this. You're going to get inflation in the end. I want to call your attention a bit of a paradox, which I hardly ever hear anybody mention. And that's this. A lender of last resort loan, unless it's very small, if it's a big one, to an important institution, is going to be a political event. You can't expect the politicians to keep quiet about it. You can't expect the body politic to ignore it as some sort of a technical fix. And yet we give this function to a bunch of non-political technocrats that we call central bankers. We should just understand that this is a very tough position to put a central bank in. Here's a highly political thing we're putting you in charge of it, you who have not been elected by anybody. But as somebody has said, that's what they pay them the big bucks for. It goes with the territory of running a central bank, but it's a tough one. I come finally to the last with the one that most conferences of central banks focus on, monetary policy. Before the crisis, and by the way I mean the 2008 crisis, not the 2016 crisis, central banks were moving toward a consensus. And that consensus was the way that you do monetary policy is you control an overnight interest rate in order to achieve an inflation. And of course that's exactly what the ECB had been doing, what the Bank of England had been doing and a number of other central banks. Not quite what the Federal Reserve has been doing, I'll mention that. I'll come back to that in a second. But the main point is that since the crisis, since the 2008-09 crisis, monetary policy has become much broader. Both as to the instruments, so it's not any longer only about the overnight interest rate, it's about QE, quantitative easing, it's about forward guidance, and there's a dot, dot, dot there because there's other stuff in there, those are the two big ones. And in addition to that, the goals have been broadened. Financial stability, which has been a tacit goal of central banks forever, and that's why I appeared on that initial slide, has become an explicit responsibility of central banks in many countries, including in a kind of left-handed way the United States. The U.S. Congress did not change the Federal Reserve Act but did thrust responsibilities upon the Federal Reserve. A curious thing to me, and I said I would come back to the Federal Reserve, is that despite, I think it's a consensus view, that the Federal Reserve weathered the storm of 2008-09 pretty well. And the U.S. economy has done, you know, graded on a curve defined by other countries pretty well since the bottom of the recession. The notion of a dual mandate, that there's an employment responsibility for the central bank, has not spread around the world. It still distinguishes, at least in verbiage, I don't really think in action, but at least in verbiage distinguishes the Federal Reserve from most other central banks, and those of you who know me know that I've long thought and still think that's a good thing. Now, on monetary policy, I want to remind everybody of something, of course you know, this is central bank kindergarten. The main argument for giving central banks independence, CBI, central bank independence, there are others, but the main one is that if you give this responsibility to the politicians, they have very short time horizons and a consequence of that is they will inflate too much. This goes back to monarchs clipping the currency. This is a very old consideration and is really central to the argument for making the central bank independent. And I believe that, but I want to pay, call your attention to two buts. I think there are two buts that are, at least in central banking circles, often ignored. The first but is what if inflation is too low rather than too high? Remember what I said a moment ago, that one reason we don't want to put this in the hands of politicians is they'll make inflation too high. What if the problem is that inflation is too low? This is a pretty new problem, but by now a pretty widespread problem. This is not just one country, it's not just Japan anymore. And I think it's a fair to say at the risk of sounding critical of some central bankers, central banks, that success in pushing inflation up, our inflation rate is too long, we got to get it up, is kind of minimal so far. Not that they're not trying, but the success is much less say than the success of central banks moving inflation down after the great inflation in the 70s and beginning of the 80s. So you know this, but here's a picture of where we are in the United States. This is the CPI, 12 month moving average, going all the way back to 1948 and you see we are here. If you've got really good eyesight or you're close to the screen, you can see the feds got that pushing up a little. But you got to be pretty close to the screen or have good eyesight to see that. And the feds target as everybody here knows, oh by the way maybe you don't. For this number, the feds official target is not for the CPI, for this number CPI it's 2.3, 2.4. That's the translation of the feds target. Fed hasn't been there in a long time. But of course it's not only the fed, here's the ECB. This is the Euro area hiccup. Consumer prices. Harmonized index of consumer prices. I get that right? Harmonized index of consumer prices. The ECB website for some reason starts at 95, so this just came straight from the ECB's website a few days ago. And the ECB's target as everybody here knows is 2 and it sort of looks below 2 for a while. And so I just give you here the two most prominent central banks in the world, but they're not unique in having inflation too low for quite a long time. So that's the first point that maybe central banks are better at bringing inflation down than they are at pushing inflation. Second point is, and I'll explain what I mean by this in a second. There's a strong, and I've written about this before. Some of you may have read some of what I wrote. What if the central banks listen too closely to the markets in the sense that you listen to your mother or should anyway, as opposed to listen to the radio? It's curious. I used to think it's curious that in the English language we use the same verb for these two meanings. What I've learned teaching central banking at Princeton for many, many years where more than 50% of the students are foreign, way more than 50%, and for many, many languages. This is true in many languages that the verb to listen has these dual meanings. They're really quite different. You need to listen to the markets as a source of information. If you don't do that, you're being foolish. You don't need to listen to the markets as a source of direction and orders. Here's what you should be doing to make us happy. That's not the job of the central bank. Ironically, so this is where it ties back to what I said before, about short-time horizons. If central banks listen to the markets in the listen to your mother sense, they will tacitly and automatically inherit the short-time horizons of the markets. And if you think politicians have short-time horizons, you should talk to traders on trading dust. I mean, they think the politicians' time horizons are like two infinities. That's to the next election. That could be two years or something, not a half an hour. So there is a danger there. And that's an important but to the monetary policy independence notion that you can listen in the wrong way and too much to financial markets. Now, let me raise another question very briefly. Is it possible to make your central bank too independent? Well, in principle, absolutely yes. We don't want central banks to be autonomous of governments. That's why I put that Montague-Norman phrase up at the beginning. I don't think they want this at the BIS either, although that was Norman's vision. It is an irony which seems very appropriate in this gathering. If you can remember back in 1999, quite a few observers thought that the ECB's design might make it too independent. It was called, and I think correctly, the most independent central bank in the world because the law, the ECB law, is in a treaty and a treaty is virtually impossible. To change. And the ECB has, it wasn't originally, I guess it was originally 11 governments, now 19 governments quote above it, which basically means functionally there's no government that is sitting on top of the ECB. And that stands in contrast, sharp contrast to the Federal Reserve. I don't know how many of you know this, probably most of you in an audience like this. The Federal Reserve is established by an ordinary law of Congress which Congress could repeal tomorrow. It's not in the Constitution. There's no special protections. And by the way, Janet Yellen doesn't have any doubt about which government is watching what it does. I'd like to finish up with some survey, oh sorry, I shouldn't have left that out. So we don't hear much of this about the ECB these days. I don't think Mario is going to sleep at night worrying about he's too independent. In the United States, as I think a lot of you know, there's a significant backlash against the Federal Reserve for showing how much unchecked and unbalanced power it has. The United States has this strange form of government that's built on checks and balances. And if you ask who's checking or balancing the Federal Reserve, it's sort of hmm, I don't know, probably nobody except in drastic things. As I said, Congress could do drastic things to the Fed and there are some members of Congress that are thinking about that now, but they're far from a majority. All right, sorry, I left that out. What I want to finish with is a couple of questions, survey questions about what the crisis, and again I mean the 2008-09 crisis has done to the picture of central bank independence. These numbers, which I'm going to show you in a moment, come from a survey that I did along with Michael Ehrman, who's now at the Bank of Canada, but coming back to the ECB. Jacob Dahan and David Janssen. Forgive my trying pronounce Dutch names. I do the best I can, but it's not very good. I'd like to, by the way, a number of you are actually survey participants, at least we ask you. And I'd like to thank you all personally. Excuse me a chance to thank a bunch. I don't know who you are because I wasn't looking at that. But those of you who responded to this questionnaire, both central bankers and academics, we had separate but very similar questionnaires for the two. So I would like to thank you all for giving us data. Here's what the data looked like. Pretty interesting on the question of whether central banks gained or lost independence during the crisis. The green is the central bankers. The red is the academic. Same question basically, but not the same answers. You can see that the central bankers are highly concentrated on neither gained nor lost. It didn't change. And if you look at the two tails, the gains tail is much bigger than the lost tail. Look what the academic said. Almost nobody believed in gained, but neither and lost independence were sort of in a flat tie among the academics. I've surveyed groups like this before and I can tell you differences like this are not common. By the way, I guess I should have said we polled academics who had some expertise in macroeconomics and finance and monetary economics. That sort of thing. This was not a bunch of labor economists or I don't know, I shouldn't pick on labor economists. They're actually some of the best. I mean, if macroeconomics was as good as labor economics, I'd be a happy man. So that's a pretty interesting discrepancy. Here's the second question we asked about this. How much is central bank independence under threat now or in the near term future in your countries? And again, very different perspectives. Whoops, sorry that didn't all come. I lost something there. The red is again the academics. The green is the head of central bank. If you look at what the central bankers said, there's a huge plurality, a majority, a strong majority saying none. They don't see any threat to their independence and most of the rest say it's too early to judge. We have very, very few central bankers, 20% saying either a little or moderate threat to their independence. Look what the academics living in the same countries, presumably seeing some of the same thing, thought. A large, the plurality, the near majority saying a little threat and a very substantial minority saying a moderate or a lot. Those are two choices I combined to make this slide. And interestingly, maybe the most interesting thing for an academic like me is the very last thing. How many academics thought it was too early to judge? No. We're judging. They didn't see it that way at all. So I think this juncture of views is pretty surprising and pretty interesting. By the way, those are central bankers and academics. You can tell which is which. And my last word is let's hope the central bankers have it right. Thank you.