Joe Salerno has been very precise in giving the title to this talk, the economics of fractional reserve banking. That means we will set aside for this discussion legal questions. We're not really interested as economists primarily in legal questions, you know, whether fractional reserve banking is fraudulent or under what kind of configurations legally it's, you know, permissible in the private sector and so on. These are interesting questions, but again, we want to focus on the economics and for maybe too long there's been an overemphasis perhaps in the literature on these legal questions. It's not to say that I won't bring up a few legal issues, but it won't be the focus of our discussion. Okay, with that, let's just review real quickly something that we had in a previous lecture yesterday where Dr. Engelhardt spoke about the development of money on the market. And here, following Mengder's famous presentation, we see the logic of how money arises on the market through the selection by people trading in a barter economy of a saleable good, a readily saleable good that they can use to make indirect exchange. And that this readily saleable good must be something already traded on the market. It must be some good that's being exchanged already. There must be money prices or prices I should say, exchange ratios in this commodity for it to be selected by people as the medium of exchange. Now, once the commodity is selected as the medium of exchange, whatever it happens to be, and is sort of improved by entrepreneurial innovation over time. So live cattle and raw tobacco and cocoa beans are given up for precious metal and so on. Entrepreneurs will take the next step in the market all on their own initiative to certify the money. Because without certification, the silver nuggets or the gold dust or the raw commodity that people would be using as a medium of exchange would have to be weighed in a shade each time a trade was made. So the entrepreneur can have a successful business by certifying the fineness and weight of the metal with a stamp, a certification to make coins in other words. This would be a viable business activity for which entrepreneurs would conform in their production to the standard economizing principles of production in the market that we've all heard about this morning. They would earn profit or suffer losses depending upon the cost of mining and minting equipment and labor they use and so on, and then the market value of their output, the market value of the money that they produce. So money production on the market, money proper, its production on the market, would be integrated into the regular economizing processes of profit and loss. This is how money would emerge on the market itself. Then secondly, we can talk about, we can move on now to banking. Banking could arise for other reasons. We could have institutions that historically we've called banks. For example, making money exchanges, foreign currency exchanges. So banks arose historically to do this function and to provide maybe let's say investment advice to rich clients and things like this. But eventually banks, once money comes into existence in a certified form, we have coins, then banks can engage in another entrepreneurial innovation to provide certification separately from the coin itself. They can provide certification that they're holding for redemption of the certificate holder with coins in reserve or in their vaults. Now this too is just a business proposition. This would succeed or fail based upon the profitability of offering this service. And so customers would pay a fee to have this form of certification maybe on paper like banknotes or maybe in bank accounts, electronically, in checking accounts. So we would pay fees or these customers would pay fees and those fees would have to cover the costs of producing the money certificate, warehousing the gold and providing the banknotes, printing them up or again warehousing the gold and doing the accounting of the deposits and so on. Now the customers then would get a benefit from this certification in terms of safety and convenience. As we all know it's easier to swipe debit cards or to write checks and put them in the mail than it is to lug around gold coins and so on. So there is this benefit to the customer and this benefit not only accrues to the customer who receives the bank account or the bank note but also to what in the literature we call the clientele who would be accepting the money certificate in lieu of money itself. So we always would ask the question logically would the merchant accept the money certificate, the bank note or the bank account deposit instead of money itself? And the answer is well with the bank note he gets the same convenience as the customer, right? This benefit accrues to him as well or with the bank account it accrues to him as well and so I'm sure he would favor that form of the medium of exchange to some degree at least relative to money proper. This again would just be a regular business activity that banks would perform. Their performance of this activity would conform to the regular standard profit and loss calculation. If we as customers wouldn't pay fees because we didn't find it as convenient to do this that were high enough to cover the costs of providing the money certificate then banks would not provide it. There's nothing wrong with that, right? It's just how the market would configure production as always in anything. The production is always configured to what we prefer more heavily. So again we could imagine then the market just logically thinking about this thought experiment the market would develop these two different forms of the medium of exchange, money proper, some commodity coinage and then money certificates, claims to redemption claims to money proper. Okay, now the next step is just to see what effects this has on both banks and there's financial effects on the banking system and effects on the broader economy. Now again we could imagine different legal arrangements for the issue of money certificates and some of these would not involve the kind of banking implications that I'm putting up here on the PowerPoint. We could imagine for example, we could imagine that customers form a relationship with a bank when they get a money certificate that is simply a warehousing receipt. This is how Murray Rothbard introduced this idea in his writings on money and banking that the banks would simply warehouse money for us and the money certificate, the bank note or our checking account balance is just a title of ownership to the goods that the bank is warehousing. Now if that's the legal arrangement that's made between the customer and the bank then this wouldn't apply, right? The bank would not have the money proper as an asset on its balance sheet. It would just be storing the goods. So an analogy would be, you're all familiar with those storage facilities for your personal goods that are along interstates and you're moving someplace and you can put your belongings in storage and get them out later and you pay a fee. So a bank could be like that legally, right? It could be that the customer owns the gold that's held by the bank and the bank is just warehousing the gold and the bank has paid a fee in order to keep the gold safe and to issue the bank certificate, the money certificate. But my assumption is different here. My assumption is that there's a legal arrangement. I want to do this just to make a contrast between this case and the case of fractional reserve banks. So that's the only reason to do this. So my assumption is that the banks and the customers make an agreement to transfer ownership of the money to the bank in exchange for instantly redeemable claims to that money. Okay, so, again, this is sort of weird and we don't need to go into the legal niceties of this. That's not the point. The point is to simply make the contrast between what 100% reserve banking would look like, however it's legally configured and fractional reserve banking. That's, again, the main point of this. Anyway, we can see that if the bank takes ownership of the money, so on the left-hand side, it becomes an asset. They own the gold now. But they have a liability against them in the checking account of the customer. So this is what it would look like. Now, clearly, the point of doing this is to highlight that if the bank proceeds in this way, that the issue of the money certificate does not impair the bank's liquidity. The bank is exactly as liquid as it was before it issued this money certificate. It has an instantaneous liability, the checking account. The customer can come back at any time. It's a demand deposit. The customer can come back at any time and cash out and get back the money being held. And so it has an instantaneous liability and instantaneous asset. It's holding the gold on the premises. So the time structure of its assets and liabilities are not impaired at all by the issue of the money certificate. They're perfectly matched. By the way, Mises calls this matching of the time structure of assets and liabilities. He calls this the golden rule of finance. You know, if you run a business, you need to pay attention to this issue of liquidity. They're two important financial aspects of your balance sheet, right? Liquidity, which we're talking about now, and then solvency, which we'll get to in a minute. Now, the reason why this transaction leaves the bank's solvent is because the value, the actual market value of the assets and liabilities correspond. That isn't always true, right? You could take on liabilities against asset values and your asset values could fall in value, right? And then you would be insolvent to some degree. But if you're holding money proper, then the nominal value of the money is always the same. Its nominal value can't go down. And so, and you're not issuing, this bank is 100% reserves. It's not issuing liabilities in excess of its assets. So it's perfectly solvent and liquid when it performs this function. Nothing is impaired in the finances of the bank. Now, the other thing to notice here is that the issue of money certificates does not change the money stock in society. So banks have no independent ability in a system like this to influence the overall stock of money that exists in the economy. What the bank does is they take money proper and they turn it into a reserve and they issue an equivalent amount of money certificates that then perform the function of the medium of exchange. Remember, the Austrians always pay attention in analyzing human action. We always pay attention to the purpose or intentions of the actors, right? That's a crucial thing. We always trace back the analysis to the purposes or intentions of the actors and not to mere objects, right? So when we talk about money, we're talking about the item that people use is the general medium of exchange. We're not talking about a particular object like a gold coin or a cow or a raw tobacco or something. That's a secondary issue. We're talking about the use to which the object is put, right? So if someone takes a, to give you a modern example, someone takes, you see this frequently, right? At least in movies, somebody will take a dollar bill. The first dollar they earn is an entrepreneur and they'll frame it on their, you know, and put it up on their wall. Well, that's not a medium of exchange anymore, right? I mean, that's a consumer good now. He's just admiring it.  So objects are not the final arbiter of what the thing is. It's the intention or use that people make. Okay, so anyway, the money supplied does not change when this happens. Now, oh my. Something got cut off here on that. Well, this is, you know, we're gonna have a mystery speaker later in the week. So this is my mystery quote. Maybe I'll just ask this as a question since I had the author's name down there. I don't know where it went. Somebody hacked my PowerPoint. Okay, this is a quote from a famous economist. The bank money, bank money, speaking of these checking account balances, the bank money just offsets the amount of ordinary money, gold or currency, placed in the bank's vault. No money creation has taken place. A 100% reserve banking system has a neutral effect on money and the macroeconomy because it has no effect on the money supply. Now, contrary to what you might think, that is not an Austrian economist who said this. This came from the pen of Paul Samuelson. So I call him to witness to the veracity of this claim that the Austrians make. This is a widely understood implication of 100% reserve banking. Okay, so now, oh, there it is. Look at that. Samuelson, 19th edition of his textbook, economics. All right, so you can look that up. I didn't dream that. Okay, so here's our next, let's just run through a quick diagrammatic analysis because we're going to do the same thing again with the issue of fiduciary media in a minute just to see, just to kind of conceptualize the difference here. So let's suppose we start here at point A in the money market. This is the total stock of money, the total amount of money, plus money certificates that people are using as a medium of change at any point in time. And this is the total demand to hold money. And so the purchasing power of money, just like the price of any good, is set by the interplay of demand and supply, right? So this again is not doing anything special. We're just applying the regular marginal utility analysis that's supplying demand to money. Now, if nothing changed with respect to the demand and supply conditions in money, then the purchasing power of money would stay stable. That would just stay there at PPM sub-zero. It wouldn't change. Something must initiate a movement either in the supply or the demand side of the market, right? But the argument that we're making here is that supply, at least through production, supply never changes independently of demand. Quite the contrary. Changes in supply through production are always dependent upon changes in demand. It's only through an increase in demand that greater production is called forth because it generates greater profit, right? But if demand doesn't change, if demand stays here at TD zero, then supply is not going to shift out here to TS one. That would never happen in the market. If demand for bags of apples stayed the same in society, there'd never be an increase in production, unless, again, demand is changing for apples relative to other things, right? So demands are always based on preferences, which are relative. But if it's stable with respect to all of the things which money demand would be since it's being expressed against all of the goods, there'd be no reason to change production because this price would just be earning the normal rate of return from the production of money. So only if demand goes up, so if demand shifts out, then the value of money in the market goes up, then there's profit to producing more money. And then that would set in motion then an increase in supply through production. And so we get this movement to point B over time, and that higher PPM is justified by the increasing costs of production because of the principle of the law of returns we spoke about earlier, involved in extracting more gold and drawing resources out of more valuable opportunities to draw them into coin production and so on. Again, this analysis is no different than the dynamic process of increasing demand for any good in the market. Exactly the same argument we would use to explain that. So again, I give you this mainly for contrast, as we'll see with fractional reserve banking in a minute. Now the other thing that would develop in the banking industry on the market is financial intermediation. Now here's where we get to a point of some debate in the literature on the economics of fractional reserve banking. Here I'm taking the phrase intermediation just in the general sense of an intermediary. An intermediary is a go-between, right? So there are a lot of intermediaries or middlemen in the economy. So for example, Walmart performs the function of an intermediary or middleman. Not in credit, right, but in goods, in consumer goods. So they buy wholesale, they sell retail, they earn the price spread as their revenue between wholesale and retail, and then that revenue stream they use to pay for their costs. So they pay for their buildings and their transportation and their labor and so on and so forth. So that's how middlemen operate generally in the economy. So banks are middlemen in the credit market. That's what financial intermediation means. At least that's how we'll define it. So banks borrow funds from savers and they pay a wholesale interest rate and then they lend money to investors, the borrowers, and they earn a retail interest rate. Now, why would the savers put up with just receiving the wholesale rate? Why don't they go for the retail rate? Why don't we try to buy directly wholesale as customers? Why do we buy retail and pay the higher price? And the answer is the intermediary provides services to us that we value. The main service that Walmart provides to us is no questions asked returns. I buy something at Walmart and use it for a while. I don't like it, take it back, get a full refund. That's just some value to me as a customer, right?  But I would have to deal with the producer. If I wanted to return it, I'd pay the shipping or I'd have to hassle with somebody on the phone or something and so on. So no, it's a great convenience to do this. Some people have a preference for actually shopping in brick and mortar stores. Walmart provides that too. I don't particularly hold that preference, but apparently some people do and they just like to go to Walmart and walk around and see what's available. So there are these benefits. Now what about banks? Well, banks provide benefits to the savers. For one thing, it's a benefit of the division of labor. So if I'm going to directly lend to an investor, I have to investigate on my own all of the different possible lending opportunities that exist in the market. I would have to bear the risk directly of default by the person I lend to. But the bank will absorb that default because my contracts with the bank, I still have the problem of assessing the creditworthiness of the bank to pay me back, but at least that's just one institution that I can be more familiar with perhaps as a customer in the market than some far-flung entrepreneur that I might lend to or some, let's say, neighbor who's trying to start a business that I might be kind of talked into lending money to because, well, he's my neighbor and I want to keep up good neighborly relations or maybe he's my near-dwell brother-in-law or something like this. Okay, so there are some benefits to the saver and this generates the interest rate spread. That in and of itself generates the interest rate spread. The interest rate spread does not require a bank to leverage in order to create an interest rate spread. That's not financial intermediation. That's just risky investing strategy, a riskier investing strategy to leverage. We'll talk more about that as we go along, but what we're saying is not that the banks can't leverage, we're just saying that even if they don't leverage, there's an interest rate spread that's available to them from what we're calling financial intermediation, borrowing from savers and lending to investors. They're the middleman. Okay, now when they do this, when they intermediate credit, it again does not impair or at least not necessarily, it does not impair either the liquidity or the solvency of their operation. Now again, I'm taking an extreme example here that wouldn't look exactly like this on a bank's balance sheet, but roughly speaking they do something like this, right? They have customers who come in and they offer $5,000 in one-year CDs. The customers come in and they say, no, I don't want a five-year CD, I want a one-year CD. They have intentions to get the money back, principal plus interest and then buy something in a year. And so the bank takes those funds and they make one-year loans. They get a higher interest rate because the savers are investing their own labor effort and other resources into looking at all the dossiers of the different investable projects and trying to figure out which one to lend to. The bank is absorbing that, right? And they're better at it. They're more efficient, presumably, because they're engaged in the division of labor to do this. They're experts in it. Okay, now it doesn't have to, again, it wouldn't have to look exactly like this. There could be some reasonable variation that's done, some reasonable leveraging that's done. But again, we'll set that aside just for the point of seeing the two extremes. What would the 100% reserve banking system look like? What would the fractional reserve banking system look like? Okay, so the liquidity is still intact here. The bank is not illiquid at all in doing this. The time structure of their assets and liabilities matches exactly. When they have a $5,000 obligation to pay in one year, they'll have a $5,000 asset. The loan will be paid back and they'll have the money. No problem, right? As long as they make sound loans, then they're still solvent, right? And this is what they're in the business to do, to make sound loans, to make loans that'll be paid back. So there's nothing inherent in this operation that would impair the financial condition of the bank. Okay, now when the banks do this, what's the effect on the broader economy? Well, we would call this the absence of credit expansion. There's no credit expansion. So notice, in this analysis, we're able to give precise definitions to monetary inflation and credit expansion. These are very important phenomena in the real world, and we need to have precise analytical definitions. So as we saw before, monetary inflation is not every increase in the supply of money. We can have an increase in the supply of money as long as it's brought forth by an increase in demand for money that makes the production of money more profitable. That would not be monetary inflation. That would just be an increase in the supply of money that's meeting demand. And the same with credit expansion. We can have an increase in the supply of credit and a driving down of the interest rate in this system, but only if people's time preferences go down. So if people's time preferences go down, they'll save more if the supply curve for credit will shift to the right, and there'll be some diminution in the demand for credit. If time preferences go down, some people will borrow less, and on balance, the interest rate will be lower and the supply of credit traded in the market will be larger. So we can have an increase in credit in the market without having what we'll define it in a minute, what we'll call credit expansion. This is just a natural increase in credit that comes about because our preferences have changed. Just like an increase in the production of money because our preferences to hold money of increase, the corresponding increase in the production of money would not be monetary inflation. So this market system, this pure market system then would not experience monetary inflation and it would not experience credit expansion. It simply can't occur in this system. Of course, there could be entrepreneur errors and so on, right? But it's not systematic in this system. Okay, now let's turn to the issue of fiduciary media. And here we're relying on Ludwig von Mises's terminology. So this is how we define fiduciary media. Fiduciary media are money substitutes for which a bank holds only a fraction of money reserve. So we saw in the 100% reserve system, in the market system, in the pure market system, there would always be an equivalent money reserve being held by the bank corresponding to the issue of its checkable deposits or whatever form the money substitutes come in. Fiduciary media is different than in disrespect, right? So the bank is only holding a fraction of its checkable deposits as money reserve. So we get fractional reserve banking.  So anytime a bank is holding only a fraction of reserve, and again, we don't mean by mistake. Again, a bank could just mistakenly do this, right? Not make good entrepreneurial predictions, but we mean systematically it's done this. Now the question then arises as to how does this fiduciary media come into existence? And the answer is the bank simply lends it into existence. They just create it out of thin air. As Maya example indicates, they start with $1,000 money reserve or cash reserve. They start as 100% reserve, let's assume, with 1,000 in checkable deposits. How do these checkable deposits get from 1,000 to 10,000? Well, the bank just make loans to their customers of $9,000. A customer comes in and says, you know, I want to buy some new capital equipment for my business. And they check the person's credit history and they say, okay, that looks like a reasonable loan to us. And they'll just write the balance of the loan into their checking account. They're just creating the funds out of thin air. Notice they're not intermediating anything here, right? That's the point? That's the basic economic difference here. They're not intermediating created credit. They're not borrowing it from anybody. They're just creating it out of thin air and lending it to someone else. Okay, so that's the basic principle, the basic distinguishing principle of fiduciary media. Okay, now once we have fiduciary media, we can have monetary inflation. Now we can define monetary inflation in a systematic way. And let's run through the economic analysis of this and then we'll provide a kind of summary definition of monetary inflation. The thing to notice here is that the issue of fiduciary media, since it's done through credit creation out of thin air, the issue of fiduciary media cannot be regulated by profit and loss. It's always profitable for a bank to issue another loan where they create the funds out of thin air because the bank earns the interest on the loan and they don't have to pay anybody to borrow the money so they're not earning an interest rate spread anymore. They're earning the full rate of interest as revenue and it costs them very little to issue the loan. They have loan origination fees or whatever. So they have some minimal cost to issue the loan itself that corresponds to the revenue stream of the interest they get on that loan. So notice if they took the rule, if the bank took the rule, we're going to issue every loan, we're going to create every loan that we can possibly create out of thin air that generates profit for the bank. If they took that as their rule of production, then they would immediately bankrupt the bank. They would issue a billion dollars worth of credit because every additional loan that they issue is profitable for them and this would force them almost directly into bankruptcy because eventually they would have to, after the first tens of millions, they would eventually have to loan to people that they know aren't going to pay back. It's a very risky extension of the loans. They'll be creating this illiquidity in the bank that they can't manage any longer and a certain degree of insolvency. So they can't take that as the rule of deciding how much fiduciary media to issue. They have to regulate this issue of fiduciary media now not by the rule of profit and loss but by some policy. They have to say, look, we won't put our asset to equity ratios. We'll only extend them so far. We'll only leverage up to this point and then we'll stop. Just some sort of a practical rule like this that they'll impose upon themselves. And as Mises points out in 30-minute credit, this rule will depend upon circumstances. It'll depend upon the way in which the government has intervened in the banking system. The extent to which the banks can extend their fiduciary issue will just depend upon circumstances of government intervention and so on. So there's no economic law about this. It's just a practical question as to how far this can extend. And finally, let me point out another aspect of this. This is the middle bullet point. When the bank creates money out of thin air and they extend the loan to someone else, notice they do not compensate the people who bear the opportunity cost in society of the person who gets this loan and is able to buy things with the funds. When a bank intermediates credit, they persuade someone else to reduce their spending by lending them the money. And then they compensate them by paying interest. And then they lend that same money to someone else who then can use it without any sort of inconsistency in the overall demand for resources in society. They've just transferred the purchasing power from the saver to the investor and they've compensated the saver. So the saver says, I'm perfectly happy to wait and not spend my money. I'm perfectly happy to do that in compensation for the interest the bank pays me. But when the bank issues fiduciary media, they don't do that, right? They just issue fiduciary media, they make a loan to somebody. That person goes out and buys things and they displace some other buyer who the bank does not compensate. This is a difference. We get a different economic effect than the issue of fiduciary media. By the way, that effect is very similar to what happens when a government just engages in the printing of fiat paper money. It's print fiat paper money out of thin air, right? And they go and they spend it and now the government gets the resources and then some of the rest of us are displaced. We didn't consent to this. That's not how the market works. We didn't form some sort of contractual arrangement to lower our consumption in order to provide these resources to the state. So it's a similar kind of effect that fiduciary issue generates. Okay, so let's now turn to the financial effects. And these again are not really highly disputed in the literature. The issue of fiduciary media makes banks a liquid, as we mentioned. There's now a systematic mismatch of the time structure of assets and liabilities. Again, if you return in your mind to that T-account that I gave you of the bank having a thousand in money reserve and 9,000 in loans and 10,000 in checkable deposits, they now have 10,000 dollars in instant liabilities against them and yet the loan structure will be time bound, right? Their loans won't be paid back until the borrower fulfills the agreement to pay back the loan in a year or five years or ten years. So they've systematically created illiquidity on their balance sheet that now has to be sort of artificially managed. It's unavoidable, right? They can't move to a position. Once they issue fiduciary media, they can't move to a position where they're fully liquid as they would be in 100% reserve. And banks also become less solvent, at least if not insolvent, eventually they become insolvent, but they become less solvent in the following way. The banks, if they're 100% reserve, then they've intermediated their credit and they've made the loans to the best investable projects that exist in the market that they're aware of. They've made the loans to the best in the best areas that they perceive. Now, if they want to issue credit out of thin air, if they want to increase their loan portfolio by 20%, they have to extend loans to less credit worthy projects. There's no other possibility, right? They have to extend the loans to people they were unwilling to give loans to when they restricted themselves to financial intermediation. But those loans are less likely to pay back. And so it makes them less solvent, right? It becomes a problem now that they have to manage. They can't avoid this, again, that they don't have if they're just engaged in 100% reserve banking. There, they have problems of people not paying back loans, but they don't have this extra problem, right? That they must extend loans to people that are less credit worthy. Okay, so this becomes a problem. Now, in the broader economy, what happens is that financial markets become more volatile then. If banks can create credit out of thin air, then some of the borrowing that's done that wouldn't be done otherwise is spent to buy assets. The homeowners come in and they borrow more from mortgages and they bid up the prices of houses. And this sets in motion then the imputation process that Professor Salerno has spoken about a couple of times. So now lumber prices go up and cement prices go up and then timberland prices go up and so on and so forth. And investment then moves toward expanding capital capacity in the production of lumber mills and forest land and lumber jacks and chainsaws and roofing material and so on and so forth to build more houses. And we get these lines of boom in the economy. We get these lines of excessive malinvestment that proves in the long run to be excessive in these particular lines that are driven by credit creators and credit creation. And then finally I put up this other point that this process actually not only affects financial markets or asset prices throughout the economy, but it makes the banks themselves, whether or not they engage in the process of credit creation, it makes the banks themselves unstable. It makes the whole system unstable. Again, what happens is the credit creation, let's say if it goes into mortgages, it makes housing prices up. Now if I own a bank and I haven't engaged in this credit creation, I've still made loans on houses and now the asset values of those loans go up, right? The asset on my balance sheet, if I'm carrying my assets at market, the value goes up. And now I have equity. And if I'm just sitting on excessive equity, I'm liable just to start making loans, right? Because I actually have equity now. This is what homeowners did. This isn't confined to the banks. It's what homeowners did when the housing bubble occurred.   You now have a million dollars of equity in that house and people are running down to the bank to borrow second mortgages, right, against their equity. And then what happens eventually, right? The asset price is correct and everybody's under water. And so even the sound part of the banking system can be affected by this. It just, again, creates this possibility. Not just credit creation institutions pay the price for this. Okay, now let's just then run through the phenomena of a monetary inflation and credit expansion. So here would be the chart of monetary inflation that we get in this system. Here the demand for money has not changed at all and the production of money would be no more profitable than it was before. But the banks are simply creating money substitutes out of thin air and putting a greater stock of money into the market, right, extending credit to people and then these people are buying their houses and then that money is going to the construction companies and they're paying their workers and their workers are going and they're buying new cars and so on and so forth and prices overall in the economy begin to move up as the purchasing power of money moves down. So now we have a sort of systematic, analytical way of defining monetary inflation. It's an increase in the money supply that occurs outside the confines of economic calculation. It's just not according to economic calculation. It's just arbitrary with respect to the normal entrepreneurial process of economic calculation. And it leads to the continuous decrease in the purchasing power of money. It explains that phenomena. And then a similar thing happens with credit. So the companion activity is going on with credit creation. We have a certain demand for credit. It's not changing or we can just assume it's not changing. But the supply of credit can be continually increased regardless of what happens to demand for credit, right? Regardless of what happens to time preference, we're assuming here that nothing has happened to time preference. It's just that banks are creating credit out of thin air. Now that credit will have to push interest rates down to clear the market. Banks don't really care if the interest rates are pushed down because remember on created credit, they're earning the full rate of interest. It was better to earn 3% than nothing. And if they issue enough credit creation to push interest rates down to 2%, still better than 2% than nothing, right? So they do it. They have monetary incentive to do this. And so again, we can give a technical analytic definition to a systematic definition, one that's useful for our purposes of doing analytics to credit creation. It's an increase in supply of credit outside the confines of economic calculation. It's not based on a change in our preferences at all, but just on this ability of fractional reserve banks to issue fiduciary media. Now let me close with one last point. And then though, I'll have a one last, we'll see if it turns out to be a mystery quote or not, but I do have one last quote. I have to show you. Anyway, this is the question of, okay, so now we've just done the economics of fractional reserve banking, right? We've just done a comparative study, comparative analysis. What would happen in a market economy that had 100% reserve banking commodity money? What would happen in a market economy that had fiduciary media? We can still assume it has commodity money, but it has fiduciary media, right? So we've done that analysis. We might turn just briefly to the question of, okay, so that's an interesting sort of abstract imaginary comparison, but what would real markets generate? Would real markets generate a fractional reserve relationship? Would they generate a banking system like this? Would they generate something like 100% reserve system? And obviously, again, this depends upon legal questions. As I said before, we're not going to go into. So it's a much more complicated question that I'm alluding to in my quick answer, but what I would say in answer to this is, we mentioned this earlier. If we had, we know the logic of the development of banking is it's going to develop money certificates first. Initially, there are going to be money certificates because that's necessary to build a clientele for the use of the money certificates as a medium of exchange. And so any bank that wants to issue fiduciary media will have to be competing against banks that are issuing money certificates. Can they develop a clientele, in other words? Will merchants at large accept their fractionally backed money substitutes instead of money certificates, or will the merchants refuse and require the money certificates? That seems to be the issue. And again, since the banks cannot reward merchants in general for using fiduciary issue, they can reward their customers, they can pay their customers interest, but they can't pay a non-customer interest. It seems unlikely that fraction reserve banking would develop in a market economy. Again, we can imagine different legal configurations where it would happen, but that would be then, we'd have to do the analysis to see whether or not that was an intervention in the economy or part of the private property system. Okay, at that point I'll stop. Thank you.


This study proposes combining male frequency septal coefficients, MFCCs, and time domain features, TDS, to improve the performance of speech emotion recognition, SER. A convolutional neural network, CNN, was trained on the resulting hybrid features to achieve higher accuracy than other models. This approach outperforms existing methods on three different datasets demonstrating its effectiveness in identifying emotions from audio signals. This article was authored by Ala Saleh El Hayden, Ameema Sedani, Rashi Jahangir, and others.


From Hollywood it's time now for Johnny Duller. This is Renosa L.A. Police. Oh hi a sergeant any luck Nothing, it's top all lenely boys been in jams before he's a tough cookie, and we don't scare him a bit What's his story says he was walking through the courtyard of the apartment house when you jumped him from the bushes Flames he thought it was a stick up and fired that shot at himself defense. What was he doing there in the first place? Calling on a girlfriend only she'd given him the wrong address We can hold him over night for carrying a concealed weapon, but that's about all Johnny He'll make bail in the morning. Well fine. Let him things aren't adding up and it's got him worried He's afraid he's being double-crossed and he's fighting man about it on the loose. Maybe you'll be a help to us Maybe he can find Eddie Kailin. What are you talking about? Eddie Kailin's downtown in the morgue on a marble slab sergeant want to bet Tonight and every weekday night Bob Bailey in the transcribed adventures of the man with the action-packed expense account America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator Australia Johnny dollar From special investigator Johnny dollar location, Los Angeles to the home office Trinity Mutual Insurance Company limited Hartford, Connecticut Assignment the Kailin matter expense account continued I was following a hunch one that had started when Sargent Rhinosa said the police found the door of the Kailin apartment locked on the night Of Eddie's death locked with a key And now the hunch was stronger the way leanly had acted topo leanly the gambler from whom Eddie had won $60,000 at night things like Lila Kailin had said about her husband. They all added up But it was still only a hunch not proof and proof I had to have And at the moment the only chance I could see of getting it was to backtrack on Eddie Kailin his hangouts His contacts his missing friend Pete Stammer his movements during the hours before his car was found blazing at the bottom of a Canyon in Palos Verdes in a way what I had to do was bring him back to life Expense account item six fourteen dollars and ten cents Transportation to an incidentals at a dim little hole in the wall bar out on Santa Monica Boulevard called the cafe, Eloines It was an out of the way clip joint dedicated to the mood Caribbean Complete with palm fronds drinks and coconut shells and a lovely little hostess with a beautifully developed and well-rounded Latin accent you would like a nice table amigo. Oh, this one's fine But I would like a nice talk Sit down, honey. Let's get acquainted. Well Maybe for a few minutes My name is Pepita. Of course. What else I'm Johnny dollar That's a funny name. Oh, I'm a funny guy Will will you buy me a drink? Is that the gimmick here gimmick? Oh, what do you order a champagne cocktail? See for which I pay two bucks. It's made with ten cents worth of salt turn you get a one dollar kickback Isn't that the way it's played? Are you with it by squad? I'll forget it relax. Hey, look, I'll do better than buy you a drink What are you doing after you're through here? No, no day When I quit work here, I go straight home amigo and I live with my mother Oh, well, that's a very good arrangement cheaper that way for both of you But here's ten bucks What I want from you with some information about a customer who comes in here a lot or used to anyway Eddie Kailin, you know him you are not the police or you would not give me ten dollars just for talking Sure, I know Eddie What do you want to know about him? When did you see him last on Thursday the day before he was killed? How did he act? What did he say anything out of the ordinary? He say he loved me madly Passionately devotionally and if I do not love him too, he will kill himself Just like ordinary He was lying of course, but he always was such exciting to listen Then he buy me champagne cocktail and borrow for me the money to pay for it quite a boy He was how you say He was the most Yeah How long was he in here that night? One hour perhaps by himself. No, it is amigo with Pete Pete Steimer Have you seen Pete since then? No, I do not think nobody has seen him. What do you think's happen to him? Maybe he's too sad for Eddie dying so he is hideout someplace or by himself Well, it's a theory Did any seem worried that night? No scared Nothing special on his mind apparently. No, just like always Just like Eddie, you know. No, I never met him Then why you ask this question? Oh, just a routine business matter. What about women women? Yeah, other girlfriends of Eddie's and next to you Next to me with Eddie every girl was first. What about the nightclub here any of them come in here work here Eddie was too smart for that in each one place only one girl that way no trouble Eddie was smart. Yeah, he was the most What about girls in other places around town, do you know any of them? Oh, I do not know anybody What you've heard rumors?   Well, somebody has always made jokes with me about one of those stippers They say Eddie has had the big thing with her They think to make me mad, but there's no difference to me. I know how Eddie is. Do you know the girl's name? Very silly name which she has make up. It's Marty midnight Marty midnight. She has black hair like me But mine is natural black. Oh, yeah, sure. I figured as much. It's very beautiful Well, thanks for some pleasant conversation you are leaving now. Yeah But maybe you will come back No, I wasn't planning to One o'clock I am through working if you will come back No No We wouldn't want to worry your poor old mother would we keep a waiting up? What are you talking about? My mother is leaving Havana, Cuba Expense account item seven twenty three dollars and forty cents more transportation and some more of those incidentals This time of the brass monkey in That name would come up twice now Eddie Kalen's widow had mentioned it first So I figured I'd better have a look at it The yellow innings had been a fairly quiet place dimly lighted with a big play on that mystery of the jungle routine But the brass monkey was a pony of a different tint at the brass monkey. They let down their hair and really live The chorus line was on and at it when I arrived and strange enough the girls were all dolls Perky young lively seven of them left to right When I wanted the seven had midnight black hair I leaned against the service bar and waited for the bartender to come down out of the clouds and notice me and he finally did Sorry Buster just couldn't see you for looking at you. Oh, that's all right Who'd bother with a customer at a time like this another art lover man, man I'll tell you true there is the cream of the crop Seven shining sisters the Pleiades brother the absolute up top zenith of the entire Physiastic firm of it Well, you'll have to drink scotch or ice check. Oh, I read a lot. That's where I get all them big words Always try to better myself Get ahead man. That's the thing. Yes, so I've heard so I read all the time and I got a system to a short cut You know all them books you see around you know what they're full of well opinions very Words and you know where they get them from the dictionary so I don't mess around I go right to headquarters. The only book I read is the dictionary you want sure Read it through twice and now I'm clear up to Jay on the third time around You know what a Joss house is. Yeah, that's a Chinese temple. I think I need that drink now Oh, I'm sorry busting. Yeah Say you're pretty smart yourself. Oh, I'm a pedant Pedding that's with a P Nah, nah, I won't get to that for another three months. That's a buck even for the drink. There you go Keep the change. Well, thanks. I Hey, this is a 20 you give me. Yeah, I know See Well, Buster the answer is no I can't fix you up with one of the girls All I wanted some information like what like where is Marty midnight this evening? Oh that I wouldn't know she hasn't been around since Well, not for the last four or five nights since Eddie Cailin was murdered. Is that what you're about to say? Police insurance investigator the company I represent issued a policy on it Eddie Cailin with insurance Yeah, he took it out about two months ago. Who's the better fishery his wife? Well, I never met the gal, but I guess she's got something common. She must have took quite a beating off of Eddie Oh Man that cat could really operate so I get it You happen to know where Marty lives nah She moved a few weeks ago after she took up with Eddie. I don't even know her real name. Is the manager here I'm the manager Buster. I hired him fired him and in between just look at him. Oh, man. What a life You know a friend of Eddie's named Pete's timer sure I know he hasn't been around either disappeared that same night, huh? Yeah, yeah, that was a bad night all around There was another guy dropped out of sight to a hood named Mike Kelso when a topo lean these boys, you know topo He comes in all the time. He's a Wait a minute. You must be the cat that broke his arm Well, congratulations Felicitations and happy days. I'll have a drink myself on that real popular boy Oh the most I understand He got his start by leaning out of his baby carriage and shoving his mother under a car Was he in here that night? Well, sure. That's where Eddie met him I told Eddie to stay clear of that game Was I right and you think that's why it was killed for the $60,000 he won that much That's the type of question I never answered and that's exactly why I stay so healthy Well, you don't have to answer and that's where all the logic points Eddie met topo lean me in here that night and was invited into one of these big-time poker games And he was lucky plenty lucky and lean they got hit hard It is sad that he wouldn't stand still for it So he and his muscle man Mike Kelso went around to Eddie's apartment beat him up got the 60,000 bucks Took Eddie out of the Palace Verde's Hills ran him off the cliff and set fire to his car Any reason why it couldn't have happened like that? No, no, but there are a lot of loose ends Like what has happened to Pete Steimer and Marty Midnight scared silly hide now Mike Kelso same thing He's sweating it out waiting to see which way the wind blows Oh, there's whispers around that he double-crossed topo and ran out with the dough could be But I keep remembering that door what door to Eddie's apartment. It was left locked with a key So what's it got to do with that? The police. I'm rated again. Hey, red That water bar whiskey down a sink Jackie get back there and tell the girls to cover up Relax relax, it's not a raid that's sergeant rainosa. He's handling a Kailin case Plus there are cops a cop them out of what he's hand now shake it up red turn on that one in the second I'm at all in Definitely you doing here Johnny having a drink. What's up, Sergeant? I'm looking for a girl who's supposed to work here named Marty midnight. So am I what's your reason suspicion of murder? What's the guy was killed in their apartment about an hour ago the neighbors heard the shots And it's real crazy Johnny. It just can't be but it is We got a fast check on the fingerprints, you know the guy was sure it was Eddie Kailin It's our star to tell you about tomorrow's intriguing episode of this week's story tomorrow a stakeout a man hunted a tired Intern breaking his heart to keep life in a broken body join us. Won't you yours truly Johnny dollar? Johnny dollar starring Bob Bailey is transcribed in Hollywood Written by Les Crutchfield. It is produced and directed by Jack Johnstone Be sure to join us tomorrow night same time and station for the next exciting episode of yours truly Johnny dollar Roy Rowan speaking


I'm Kazia Otake from Nagoya University.I'm going to talk about tactile-texture rendering forElectro-static friction displays in cooperation oflow frequency friction model and high frequency texture model.An electro-static friction display controls theelectro-static adaptive force between the finger part and the panel.It is suitable for presenting fine textures.In previous data-driven models for rendering textures,mainly the high frequency texture component were used.However, since the low frequency friction component also containsthe material information, both frequency components should be considered.Our objective is to improve texture quality by combiningtwo types of models to cover a wide frequency range.One of them is a physical model for the low frequency component,and the other is a statistical model for the high frequency texture component.We measure the coefficient of friction while a finger slides on a texture.Then,the coefficient of friction was divided into low and high frequency components.For example,the left figure shows a coefficient of friction of then.The central and right one shows its low and high frequency components.The low frequency friction component is rendered by a physical model,which responds to the finger load and the velocity.The high frequency friction component is rendered by a statistical model,autoregressive model that preserves frequency characteristics of the coefficient of friction.To compare the two similar conditions,we conducted a user study.We investigated whether the combination of low and high frequency stimuliimproves the quality of texture.We compared two similar conditions.In one condition,low and high frequency components were incorporated.In another condition,only the low frequency component was presented.The experiment was a two-ontentive task.Participants selected the more realistic stimulus from the two similar conditions.Four types of materials,weather,cork,dain and wood,were presented.This shows the main proportions of participant's answersand their 95% confidence interval.BlueBush shows the proportions that the combined model was selected as more realisticand RangeBush shows the proportions of friction model only.For cork and dain,the combined model was preferred.In contrast,there was no significant difference between the twosimilar conditions for the weather and wood.So,the effect of the method depends on the types of texture.In summary,the combination of physical model for the low frequency componentand statistical model for the high frequency componentimproves the realism of virtual textures.Thank you for listening.


All these sessions are recorded and we'll put them up on the website in due course. And so it gives me great pleasure to welcome Dr. Sally Pearman to this final session of the day. Sally is the relatively newly appointed Chief Executive of the International Confederation of Youth Wives. She has held a number of positions over the past 30 years in New Zealand as Midwife Educator and Regulator and a host of other experiences as well, which we have summarised on the website. But I don't want to waste time saying all of that, so I would like to introduce, I would like to offer Sally the mic and off you go, thank you very much Dr. Sally Pearman. Thank you Linda. Cure everybody, it's wonderful to be here, to have this opportunity to close the conference. I can't believe really what an amazing opportunity this is for Midwives all around the world to be in an education session together at the same time and I just think the work that the team have done in putting this together and have been doing for years is really fantastic. So congratulations and thank you for inviting me to take part in it. I want to say too that we're nearly in the Netherlands anyway, it's 11 o'clock at night and so International Day of the Midwife is almost over for us. But we've been in the office today and it's been incredible really because it's been full of messages and videos and contacts from Midwives all around the world constantly all day sending photos and telling us what they've been doing and sending messages to each other and I think it's really quite exciting and amazing and I can see that Suicce is online and I wanted to just acknowledge her as our communications manager because she's done a phenomenal job getting ready for IDM and also today almost couldn't quite manage all of the Twitter that was running so hot so well done to Suicce but well done to everybody and I think what it is is a sign of how much Midwives really enjoy being Midwives and having this opportunity just to share the joy and the fun of it with each other even if only for a day but it's been fantastic so well done everybody and it's great now to be able to close the session. I want to talk a little bit about, oh hang on I have to remember how to change the slides, yeah there we go. I want to talk about who we are and I mean it seems like a bit of a silly question but I think really the answer is not that simple. We have an international definition that's been set by Midwives globally through the International Confederation of Midwives. We all work with women and of course with women is what Midwife means at least in Anglo-Saxon meaning and we all share an amazing opportunity, we have that joy, we all share that joy of being with women in that amazing wonderful transformative life event that is birth. We are in that privileged position of being with women as they become mothers, being with men as they become fathers, we are with families, new families, families getting bigger, we hold new life in our hands and that we share as Midwives that's what brings us together but our lives as Midwives, as practicing Midwives is very different and depending where we live we'll have a big impact on how we practice and how what it's like for us as a Midwife. There are huge variations across the world as I know you know, you know variations in regulation and education and titles and how Midwives are recruited, how women even access education to even become a Midwife, deployment of Midwives, how our services are supported or not within our health systems and you know all of these have a really big impact on the way that Midwives practice. There's been a couple of reports and you can see the photos of the covers here, the SOMI reports that I'm sure you're aware of, State of the World Midwifery reports that the 2014 report identified that Midwives you know who are educated, it basically shows all of the differences and variations in many countries around the world but what it concluded is that Midwives who are educated and regulated to international standards can provide 87% of the essential care that's needed for women in their newborns and that if governments invested in Midwifery education and supported Midwives to deliver community-based primary maternity services, there could be a 16-fold return on that investment in terms of the lives that those Midwives could save, the unnecessary interventions that they could reduce. And we also know that Midwives have different experiences and this report, the Midwives voices, Midwives realities that came out last year that captured feedback from two and a half thousand Midwives around the world and it shows that while we know and we know this that Midwives are deeply committed to caring for mothers and their babies and their families, but most often they are constrained by external factors. And some of the themes that were identified in this report show that Midwives experience lack of respect at work and in their communities, sometimes they are not safe at work, physically not safe, sexually harassed at work, that when they are needing to live in provided accommodation often it's totally inadequate, they are not well paid, they don't get pensions necessarily and many Midwives, all Midwives have difficulty juggling and I'm sure we all understand this, the competing roles of being a paid employee, managing the home and being a mother. There is also a lack of understanding by others about what Midwifery is. People just don't understand what Midwives do and what Midwifery actually means. There is an increasing medicalisation that's happening for all of us in our environment and a devaluing of the Midwifery profession, inadequate Midwifery education and inadequate or non-existent regulation. And that's everywhere, it's not just in low income, middle income countries, it's everywhere. Excuse me, this is a slide from the diagram from the report, but it's talking about the barriers that Midwives face, but underpinning all of these of course is gender inequality and I heard a little bit from the previous speaker. This is a really significant issue for us as Midwives. Childbirth is women's work, it's seen as women's work and therefore Midwives have low social status because of doing that work. And as women ourselves, we also face then a double penalty in terms of the gender impact. Childbirth and Midwifery are human rights issues and in 2011 the ICM adopted a Bill of Rights for women and Midwives that called on governments globally to recognise and support accessible and effective Midwifery care as a basic human right for all women, babies and Midwives. Women have a right to have care from Midwives, Midwives have a right to have appropriate education, regulation and a practice environment in which they are respected and supported to practice autonomously and within the Midwifery scope of practice. This report tells the world what Midwives all know that these basic human rights are still being denied to women and to Midwives. And it's ironic because we know also that Midwives are the solution to so many of the world's problems. We've got these new sustainable development goals now, 17. We could say that Midwifery is only concerned with number three, that we achieve good health and well-being, but you can find Midwifery in all of them. Midwives are the solution and the World Health Organisation has identified that that Midwives are a crucial resource to achieving the United Nations sustainable development goals. There's lots of evidence out there now that care by Midwives is safe, that Midwife-led care produces better outcomes than care led by other health professionals, that Midwife-led care reduces unnecessary intervention, that women are more satisfied with care from Midwives, that Midwives influence the uptake of public health measures, that Midwife-led services reduce health service costs, and that Midwives save lives. So there's much to be gained for countries that establish Midwifery-led primary maternity services integrated within their wider health system. There's much to be gained by developing a Midwifery workforce, making sure that a country has got access to well-educated, qualified and regulated Midwives and that women can access those Midwifery services. So I want to turn now to talking a little bit about partnership. The theme of today, International Day of the Midwife, and I think again as Midwives we share this understanding about partnership because we do have this unique opportunity to work with women in a one-to-one and a very intimate relationship sometimes. But no matter what kind of environment we're working in, we are all with a woman, with women, during childbirth, during the childbirth continuum, and especially for those that can have that over time, but even for Midwives who are working in environments where they don't get to know the woman before they meet her perhaps in the maternity facility, we can still build a partnership relationship with each woman that we care for. And each of those relationships is going to be different because of the two partners, but there's going to be some common principles, equity, that we respect each other. We learn to trust each other, that the relationship is reciprocal, negotiation that we talk through together decides what to do. That women have informed choices, she knows what her options are, she understands them, and is able to give consent. That there is a shared responsibility and a mutual empowerment that comes from partnership relationships. Time, as I said before, is an important element, but every interaction with a woman can include elements of respect, information sharing, choice, power for her, etc. And these kinds of relationships are fulfilling for both parties, and they start to have a flow-on effect to the wider family, to the community. So when women have confidence and strength and feel really empowered through their experiences and relationship with their midwife, they start to stand up and to ask questions. And that starts to have an impact on their sisters and their mothers and their aunts and cousins and their friends. And it can actually start to flow out through the whole community. And midwives have partnerships in lots of ways. Of course the midwife-women partnership is central for those of us who are practicing with women. We also have partnerships with each other. Midwives working together to provide care in a partnership and a partnership. Midwives working with women who also have their midwife-free students working with them. And the midwife educators that they are working with because nobody, it's never just one person who educates a student midwife. It takes all of us. Midwives together performing the midwifery associations. And of course midwife associations in partnership with women's groups which can provide a very strong political voice. Through the ICM, there's a partnership of midwifery associations with the ICM. And the ICM also has partnerships with its global partners. WHO, UNFPA, JAPAGO, UNICEF, Safer Children, etc. And it's by working together in a partnership that we can advocate for change with our partners. We can support each other. We can network. We can share resources. We can build strengths. We can take the same message. We can advocate together to bring about changes. The ICM is essentially that's its job. And you can see here that the vision of the ICM is a world where every child-bearing woman has access to a midwife's care for herself and her newborn. We work with midwife associations to strengthen the midwife's association so that we can advance the profession globally and promote autonomous midwives as the most appropriate caregivers for child-bearing women. Head birth normal and enhance the reproductive health of women and the health babies and their families. The ICM is a non-government organization accredited with the World Health Organization. It has 131 member associations over 113 countries across the four regions of the world and represents over 400,000 midwives. So it can be a powerful voice for midwives globally. I think that the ICM has got a really important role in holding the space for midwives. And really continuing to emphasize and make it really clear that there is only midwives practice midwifery. We have a definition, as I said earlier, about who a midwife is and those midwives practice midwifery. Nobody else practices midwifery. There's no such thing as another health professional having midwifery skills. They have their own skills. They might work in maternal and child health and many do, of course. But we all share some underpinning knowledge, but only midwives practice midwifery. The ICM is the global voice for midwives. It's up to us to always talk about midwifery, to always raise attention around what midwives can do and work to support midwives wherever they are. We know that they do have access to education and regulation and practice environments that enable them to practice the way that they are educated to do. We work with midwives associations, our members in the regions, really working closely with them, trying to strengthen them so that they can take that role and do that advocacy and hold that space for midwives in their own areas. The ICM, through its council and its governance structure, sets global midwifery standards that midwives around the world have supported. Those standards for education, regulation, and the essential competencies then become a global benchmark, which is really important for contexts where we're trying to establish midwifery education, for example, to have a set standard that can be measured against is really important. The ICM develops and provides resources to strengthen midwifery and midwife association. It contributes to midwifery knowledge and professionalism. It also delivers projects with funding from many donors and there are a number of different projects that are happening around the world that the ICM is involved in with partners. The ICM provides technical advice and support at a global level and, as I said, works with global partners, governments, UN agencies, etc. Tries to influence as much as we can the global strategies and policies that impact women and babies and maternal and child healthcare and midwifery and advocates for midwives and midwifery. Some of the I've just put a couple of pictures here of some of the advocacy strategies that are happening at the moment that are important and relevant to midwife and some messages around partnership. We all know that the best partnership for a pregnant woman is with a qualified midwife and that if we have high quality midwifery care for women and newborns then we save lives, we contribute to healthy families and more productive communities. I've already talked about the fact that midwives contribute to achieving the sustainable development goals and we know that midwives are key health influences because we trust it, because we're with women, because we're part of a community. We're much, much more than a pair of hands during childbirth. So midwives, mothers and families, raise your voices to advocate for midwifery and maternity services. Our collective political power can generate change. The services must meet the needs of women and midwives around the world and that's the message that we have from this international day and midwife. We are partners for life. Collectively we have power and we need to use it together. So here we are, midwives, changing the world one day one family at a time and we know that that's true. That's really all I wanted to say to you to close the day. I want to remind you of course of the next big event in our calendar the Congress which is coming up incredibly quickly only a month away now and I'm really hoping that many of you are going to make it to Toronto. We're expecting over 3,000 midwives which is going to be fantastic. But just a little reminder in case you're still thinking about it. And that's it from me. I'm really happy to take any questions or any discussion. So can I ask if anyone has any questions? I have one actually. Sally if you don't mind me start the ball rolling. You mentioned that midwives should not be considered pairs of hands and this nicely links with the question I was devising anyway. We've had a couple of presentations today from midwives working in countries where they are only used as pair of hands where the medics consider them to only be capable of doing basic chores and not to have any autonomous ability to make decisions about the progress of the care of a woman. Do you see the ICM being able to do anything to help these midwives where they're struggling to maintain normality or return to normality and physiological growth? I think you know, under the ICM of that so what can we do? We can join together form an association if there isn't one in those countries. But if we've got a midwives association then we should be members of it. And then what the ICM can do, at least from the head supporters perspective, is try to help to support those medical free associations to actually build their capability and capacity to be able to advocate for midwives in their countries and to start to work out how are we going to address this? How do we take the messages to the decision makers around our health system that this is a complete and absolute waste of resource. That we're not using the skills and education of a health professional that's there that we have and we're using other health professionals like concentrations inappropriately actually by the sound of it. I know these are not easy to change because this is the way that many, many maternity services have developed across the world and midwives are not at the forefront, they're not able to practice autonomously as they should be. And that's our struggle. That's what we have to keep working with. I've got to say that I still think, and we from New Zealand we know this to be true, that if we midwives associations can partner up with women in their communities, build relationships with women's groups and build relationships with women and make a collective voice. Take that collective voice to challenge what's actually happening. If women start to say this is not okay, this is not the kind of maternity service that I want, midwives are saying this is not okay, you know, that's how we can get the message heard. But it's not easy, I don't deny it and it's certainly not a quick change. That's what we want to do is to make that change. I totally agree with you there. And interestingly enough as I asked that question Bucky also asked us a related question, how can the ITM help midwives in developing countries, especially in Nigeria to have a voice? Midwives in developing countries, especially in Nigeria to have a voice, yes. It's the same answer. You have a free association in Nigeria. Join it if you're not already. Work in terms of the association, how can you as an association get a voice? What is it that you need to do? How do you develop your capacity and capability? How can we help you in the ICM? Is there another association nearby? Are there others within the ICM that can provide support within your region to help you build capacity, to help you build confidence? And really it is about taking that step. And it's also about working with women and bringing women along with you to get that voice heard. Sally Joy Kemp from the UK RCM has also continued that vein really. What do you think is the role of National Midwifery Associations in better resource countries in supporting global midwifery? Thanks Joy. I think there are several things. One of them I guess is to keep being a member of the ICM because that's incredibly important. It's really important to the ICM in terms of what it can do that it has got a lot of midwife members. And that's how we can actually be resourced enough to do anything effectively. And I think that the better resource countries have got a lot to offer. They can contribute resources. They can offer support. I mean there's been twinning programs in the past. There's still in quite a number of places there are midwife associations in well resource countries working with midwife associations in less resource countries and actually helping them to build their capacity. And the ICM can facilitate that and help that to happen. But I think also in well resource countries you often have access to forums that other places don't have access to. And so it's up to us in the well resource parts of the world to also continue to take the message. Even if we're in a country where midwifery is autonomous, where midwives are respected and so on we have to continually raise it up and talk about the fact that this is not the case everywhere. That women around the world have a right to care for a midwife. And that it's just plain ridiculous of governments not to recognise the untapped resource that they have. So we can all talk and we can all raise our voices in support of countries where there are a lot more issues than effects on their own. Cynthia has made a comment that she thinks one way midwives can develop a voice is to do more research and publication. Well I think that's true. I mean I think we've seen in the last few years a huge increase in midwifery research. And I think it's fantastic that we're starting to actually get evidence about what midwives can do and how midwifery care can make a difference. And I think it's definitely one way. It's absolutely essential. It's totally important. The thing that depresses me though is how easily dismissed often midwifery research is. So even when we have brilliant evidence from incredibly well done research we often face a situation where those who don't actually want to pair the method or don't want to take on board findings are able to dismiss it and quite often and very distressingly around in many contexts the media buy into this in quite a big way. So I think it's yes research is important and yes publishing is important but we also have to fight the gender battle year again to even get the findings out publicly sometime. And your colleague from the ICM is pointing out that there's a Congress app so that you can keep up to date with ICM Congress News. That's very good. I seem to remember there was one in Prague. I think I'm sure I downloaded that one. Someone has also made the comment that we should be starting with the students. Yes of course we should be. Well we should be starting with everybody but it's very, very important in our midwifery education programs. Teaching students the values and you know the important philosophical views in midwifery. I mean our students need to understand what it is to be a midwife. They need to understand the importance of working in partnership with women. They need to understand the gender issues that they face. We need to be talking to them about that. I think it's really important that our education programs as much as they can find ways for our students to have continuity experiences where they get to actually see what happens to a woman and her family over time. To write through pregnancy, the labour, the birth, the postnatal period. Because that is a unique experience that can change how you feel about what it is that you do. I totally agree. I just think education is so important. We have to equip our students with the skills, the knowledge, the ability to be midwives and help them get the confidence that they can practice. And I think we also have to help prepare them for the reality of the world they're going to step into. They will see it as students of course. But starting to actually do work with the students around how are you going to respond in a situation where you're treated badly by another medical practitioner or in a situation where something goes wrong. How will you challenge? How can you challenge what you see around you in a way that's not confronting but able to actually have an impact. Which is depressing to say that we should also prepare them for the reality because what we really want them to understand and feel is the joy of being a midwife. It's a hard world out there for many many midwives and we should be preparing them but at the same time we should be giving them confidence that they're joining an incredibly wonderful profession. So yeah, totally agree with you. You can't go past education. It's so important. I was just about to ask you, I know if you wish to actually speak the question but I see you put it in the chat box. So one of our participants's questions is how does the ITM support midwifery research? Well the ITM has a standing committee, a research standing committee as it also has for education and regulation. And the research standing committee is active, gets involved with research projects that's been involved with the Lancet series for example, the research there. Sometimes members of the standing committee are representing the ICM in various forums where they are bringing their understanding of research, their knowledge of research. For example I know there's going to be a meeting concurrent with the Congress around helping plan a research agenda for midwifery globally. So the ICM is really trying to support whatever is going on in terms of the search and through its standing committee mainly. It also, the standing committee is also undertaking some small pieces of research. Of course the ICM doesn't have, you know, we don't have a lot of money or anything to run big research projects that we always participate and have participated in them. We participated in the Sony report development, we participated in the midwifery voices, midwifery realities and so on. And that's a role that we can play to enhance research. And of course through the Congress. I mean the Congress is all about sharing knowledge, developing knowledge, supporting midwifery research. We've got four days of fantastic presentations coming up in a month and brought together by the ICM and again regionally. So it happens every three years at the Congress but every other year there's a regional conference of the ICM which is doing the same thing to a smaller extent. So it's all important and it's all about supporting research. You probably shouldn't be surprised by my next question and that is will any of the sessions at the ICM Congress be being streamed so that those who are not at the Congress can follow some of it? I believe that they will be Linda. I think the plenaries definitely are but I don't think that the concurrence can be. No that's a little bit more different. I look forward to that because many of us can't get to the Congress for one reason or another. I thought I wouldn't say that. Susanna it's too expensive unless someone's paying for you. It would be useful to get the information out to the rest of the world so streaming it would be a great way of doing this. We look forward to that. There's more that the ICM can start to do in that direction in the future I hope. There's always that kind of pay off thing isn't there? If you stream it or lots of it people might not come to the Congress and you need people to come to the Congress for their money in order to put on a Congress and stream it. There's a pay off there isn't there? There is but there's so much more that happens at a Congress anyway isn't there which we know those of us that have had the privilege of going. To be in an environment for four days or a week with 3,000 plus midwives, or 4,000 I think actually I might be even underestimating it. It's incredible because it's just such a unique opportunity to be with midwives from all around the world. The scientific program is really important and there's so much to learn and it's brilliant to see so many midwives actually standing up and presenting their work. It's fantastic. But then there's all the networking and the connections and the socialising and there's the talking midwifery that goes on that's kind of another whole experience that just adds to it. If we can take some of that out and stream it and share some of that through the app and through the ICM website and through our Twitter feed then that's what we're going to be doing and Sweche and others are going to be working very hard the whole time to actually take the message out and take it outside of the Congress so that midwives everywhere can actually access some of it. Yes but I do agree it's a wonderful experience especially seeing everybody in their national costumes etc. I've been to three I think of them, yes three and it's a wonderful thing but as someone has said here she can't afford it on her salary. Yes the BIDM is a great opportunity to have that virtual feeling. There was a comment made higher up which I think we should be kind of closing in a minute but someone made the comment that actually the world-resourced countries can learn from the poorly resourced countries in some ways for example breastfeeding which we're not very good at and they are very good at. I completely agree and in fact you know it was interesting we had a lovely conversation today at Morning Tea ourselves in the office and two of our colleagues were sharing who come from countries in Africa and sharing the fact that at a birth and when a mother has a baby there's incredible kind of continual support from her family and from the community and it's everybody's baby and everybody's involved and I was reflecting on that and thinking that in many parts of higher resourced countries we've kind of lost that. We're a little bit more isolated in our houses and we don't necessarily have extended families that are involved with us in that same way or involved with our children and I think that's a sad and I completely agree there's a lot to learn I mean absolutely there is. There's no way that you could say that the developed world or the high resourced world has got it right. Absolutely and Joyce made a final comment here. She's really excited as we have our twinning partners from Uganda, Nepal and Cambodia coming together with the RCM and Zoralto to discuss the long term impact of twinning and reciprocal learning. That's brilliant, fantastic it can be great to see. I wish I hadn't retired before twinning kind of really got cracking. I would have loved to have got involved in such things. Okay, oh yes she says please come to our symposium. I'll try. And Lola from the Wilds of Shetland I know has made the point that the loss of community of birth has caused so many problems. Yeah, because we've lost faith in ourselves haven't we? Yes, faith in our ability as midwives or as women to give birth and that impacts all of us. That's our role to try and build that confidence back up again to help women to trust themselves. Okay, if anybody else have any questions I'm just delaying things a little bit Sally I'm sorry I know it's really late where you are. Deb is preparing our final slideshow and it's slow so we're just waiting to see whether or not she's going to have it ready for us to say cheerio. Hi Lorraine. Linda. Hi I have a question actually who's coming here. So they're asking if the ICM conference in Toronto is going to be on live by internet. Is there any way that it's going to be live through internet? I asked that question just now actually but I'll let Sally reply again. It's my understanding that the plenary session will be live streamed. So not the whole congress unfortunately and there's so many sessions I think it would be pretty it'll be a pretty big tour order but maybe in the future somebody will fund us to do that it'll be brilliant but at the moment I think it'll be the plenaries in the each day, the daily plenary sessions which will be live streamed. And then as I said before there's a lot of work going on in terms of the social media activity to try to get out as much as possible with the experience and the experience of having little interviews with people, stories every day and getting that information out beyond Toronto, beyond the congress venue around the world to provide so that you can feel experience some of it in one way. Fabulous. Okay thank you very much indeed then Sally. That was about a very interesting presentation to finish off our conference. We don't think we're going to have our slideshow ready for tonight so we're going to put it on Facebook and Twitter once it's completed so we're not going to worry about that and we're not going to keep you up any longer. So thank you very very much for coming and honouring us with your presence today and maybe we'll see you again next year or maybe somebody else from the ICL will come next year. It would be wonderful. It wouldn't Dave and thank you London very much for your support and once again thank you to your whole team for doing it. Thanks. I think we've worked brilliantly and you know really really well done and thanks everybody for attending. It's great to see so many people here. Hello special hello to New Zealanders that I've spotted and thank you that's been a pleasure. Thank you very much. Okay so there we have come to the end of the IDM 17 but before we go finally I think we should have a few words of thanks. My colleagues and I have been working on this for seven months now and near enough we start in September with a due date of May which is not quite nine months but it's pretty well there. So I want to thank my fellow committee members for giving up evening weekends and sunny days. We've had a sunny week and I spent much of it at the computer and in Scotland sunny weeks are not very common and we meet virtually quite often at antisocial hours to organise this conference so my very warm thanks to everybody on the committee. I want to also say thank you to our facilitators for their support of our speakers. The facilitators do a one to one sterling job at helping those speakers get their IT sorted and to understand the whole process of an online conference and many of our speakers have presented this time for the first time in an online environment. I would also like to thank the speakers themselves for their presentations. We've had a wide range of subjects and we've had more than a dozen countries represented on the IDN17 and we would like to hear from many more countries next year. I'd like to thank our participants. Many of whom have attended a huge number of sessions and they waited patiently while we dealt with a small number of technical challenges and finally I want to thank our sponsors who are mentioned at the beginning and I've forgotten to go through the rest of the slides here so someone is doing that for me.