Hawks and doves, swans and ostriches, even owls. The language on central bankers is full of mysterious animal metaphors. That's why today we're going down a bit of a different route and we'll be taking a walk through the wildlife park of central banking and finance. You're listening to the ECB podcast, bringing you insights into the world of economics and central banking. My name is Katie Ranger. The American economist, Alan Blinder, wrote in his article on central banking and democracy. Millions of Americans still think that the Federal Reserve System, which is a central bank in the USA, is a system of government-owned forests and wildlife preserves, where, presumably, bulls and bears and hawks and doves frolick together in blissful harmony. And indeed, the misunderstanding is not entirely surprising. Articles and news stories on central banking and finance are often full of animal metaphors, so much so that you might think you need to know a lot about zoology to understand economics. But what do all these metaphors mean, and why are they used so often? With me here today is Gabriel Gluckler. As an advisor in our communications department, he's done a lot of work on language and monetary policy. Gabriel, thanks for being our wildlife expert today and welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Katie. Great to be here. Gabriel, you work in central bank communications. You're used to working with language and you know that every word counts. The language in economics and central banking is often very technical and difficult to understand. And as with complex topics, metaphors help make them understandable and relatable. But why do we have all of these animal references? I think we all like a complex and often complicated world to be made a bit more simple. And lumping similar things together and sticking a label mentally on those boxes helps us. And animal metaphors do precisely that. They provide an accessible and memorable label to classify people and events. Now, the use of animal metaphors dates back to all the way to the to the ancient Greeks, but is applying animal characters to explain the limitations of human reasoning. Or to take the behavior of animals that we observe there and that let them symbolize how we see humans behave. So like things like busy as a bee, quiet as a mouse. Now, hawks are predatory birds, while doves are peaceful. Even the dove, as you know, is the symbol of peace. Indeed. Already back in 1548, the word hawk was used to mean the one who prays on others. And we don't just have it in central banking and finance. For instance, in foreign policy, we also speak about foreign policy hawks. And I think that came back in 1962 in the Cuban Missile Crisis and observers tried to explain how people inside the Kennedy Administration were reacting to that crisis.  And that's where also the hawks and doves comes in on that front. But it shows that these animal metaphors help us. And they're not exclusive to economics and central banking. But we need to understand the meaning behind them to use them usefully. Okay, so it's all about making the very complicated world a little bit simpler. All right, well, let's go for that imaginary walk through the wildlife park and take a look around. The first two animals that you come across when you enter are two birds that usually live close to each other as they share a common interest in monetary policy. Those of our listeners who are watching us and also watching what others write about us more closely may have heard the terms hawks and doves. Now, Gabriel, what do people mean when they talk about these two birds specifically? These animal metaphors are typically used to describe different positions that policymakers can take in their monetary policy decisions with the view to what they would like to achieve, which is stable prices for all. Now, hawks are said to be in favor of a monetary policy that very strictly controls inflation. They have a close eye on where they see threats to price stability. They're worried about the economy overheating and they watch out for any sign of inflation that they can see. And that's why they probably prefer higher interest rates and, for example, would be in favor of less asset purchases. An expert called this a tight monetary policy. So hawks are in favor of a tight monetary policy and also would like to see less of an activist role for monetary policy. So you might read something like this was a particularly hawkish moment. Doves on the other side are perceived to be in favor of a monetary policy that focus on stimulating the economy and supporting employment. They prefer lower interest rates. An expert called this more of a loose monetary policy. Okay, so you've got tight and loose. Correct. And they also think that monetary policy can play an activist, a more activist role in supporting the economy. And then watchers would look at this and say this was a particularly dovish statement or a particularly dovish discussion in this case. But I think it's very important to make that absolutely clear. It's easy to distinguish a hawk and a dove in nature. But the world of central banking is a lot more complex. And so it's much more difficult to have these stereotypical descriptions that are just a bit too simplistic. And that's also because these days monetary policy often means a complex package of different measures. Our tools are much more complex nowadays than they used to be obviously. So I guess, yeah, you don't have simply hawks and simply doves. Correct. If you ask central bankers themselves, are you a hawk or a dove? I don't think they'd be overly amused. I'll remember that one. That's because they see themselves as professionals. They look at the evidence and they will employ their own judgment to fulfill their mandate to serve the people and provide a stable currency. But Katie, there's one thing I think since we're talking about the aviary of central banking and kind of birds, I think that's the pigeon. The pigeon is a metaphor that is used for central bankers who take a position in between the hawks and the doves or those who would rather postpone the decision. OK, so we've got the hawk, the dove, the pigeon. They all want the same thing for the economy, right? They all want stable prices. It's just that they all have a slightly different way of taking decisions to get to that goal. Yeah, I think that's a fair point to say that. Although, I mean, to be specific on the pigeon, I think in central banking, there's no such thing as postponing a decision, not taking a decision still means that you keep your policy in place. And that's also a decision. So we're standing in the aviary. We've got all of these birds, hawks, doves, pigeons flying around our heads. But not that long ago, we also had another bird join the group, the owl. Let's have a quick listen of our first press conference with President Christine Lagarde back in December 2019. You know, I see exactly where you're trying to get me. But, you know, once and for all, I'm neither a dove nor a hawk. And my ambition is to be this owl that is often associated with a little bit of wisdom. Now, Gabriel, we've just heard that clip of President Lagarde. What was the context of this? Can you give us a bit of background? Well, as you said, Katie, it was the first press conference of then new President Christine Lagarde. And she answered that journalist's question and had been speculation where she stands on monetary policy. And so she described herself as an owl, precisely to escape that binary limitations that you have with the hawks and the doves. And the idea that she's someone who leads the governing council to profound and lively discussions, someone who listens very carefully and then helps to reach common decisions. And I think that collegial style of leadership that she's pursued since then has served us well. Because we've seen it with the very rapid and the strong response of our institution to the coronavirus crisis. Okay, so another animal that I came across recently is the black swan. Now, to me, that sounds like something that's quite a rare animal. I know I've never seen a black swan. What is it? And why is it a native in our wildlife park? Yes, the term black swan was actually originally coined by the ancient Greeks again. And they used it to describe an impossible event. And you said, you never saw black swan. And it's fair enough because swans are white. But actually, there are some black swans I saw once. No way. But it's just that they are extremely rare. Now, going to the metaphor, the black swan describes an event that is so improbable that even the possibility that it might occur is unknown. It's an unpredictable and unexpected event. It's a surprise. And very importantly, it's an event with potentially severe or even catastrophic consequences. If it happens, it's big. You don't see it coming and when it comes. Yeah, the theory was developed by a man called Nassim Nikolas Tali, who made the black swan famous in economics and finance. Some people say that the layman collapsed in the great financial crisis that followed in 2008. That was a black swan or the Brexit vote and that they all qualify as such events. Interestingly, these black swan events are often explained in hindsight as if they were actually predictable. Okay, so the black swans were new for me. It turns out they're quite dangerous animals. It reminds me of the swans in the park next to my house that seem to have taken over during lockdown. And if they're anything like those ones, then very dangerous and definitely better not to get close to them. Let's stay with the same animal family for a moment. I've also heard some central bankers and economists talking, especially recently, about green swans. What's behind that one? Well, the green swan takes up the metaphor, the idea of the black swan of a potentially extremely financially disruptive event. But one that stems from the impact of the climate crisis. Okay, so it's very specific. The impact is also severe and it's extreme. And there's also uncertainty what that impact will look concretely like. But unlike the black swan, it's difficult to argue that we didn't see this one coming. What makes it so dangerous is the failure to prepare for it. So the black and the green swans are the events, but they differ in the extent that you can prepare for them, essentially. Still on the theme of birds, there's another one that also pops up in central banking. It's a bit more benign than the swans, the ostrich. Now, from what I understand, they don't live too far from the black or especially the green swans, right? Yes. Indeed, because the swans are in a sense the events, whereas the ostrich is the kind of behavior that usually investors and how they react to events. And ostrich investors are those who tend to dislike and ignore information or bad financial use or the losses that they might incur. They simply ignore the risks and they pretend they don't exist. And they hope they simply go away. In a sense, we're all a bit like ostriches. Let's face it, and be honest. I mean, in fact, psychologists and behavioral economists have looked at that, big samples, studied this, how we often pay more attention to positive information than to negative information. I definitely do that with the weather. If it says it's going to rain, then I ignore it. Correct. So we all tend to downplay the stuff that we don't like to hear or see. And the scientists have also focused on our own desires, a very human thing, to maintain a certain self-image. We want to feel good about ourselves. That's fair enough. Fair enough, yeah. And as a result, we often bend our perceptions to reality just a tad in order to protect our ego. And so the ostrich metaphor basically takes up that kind of behavior. It comes from the very common but utterly false legend that ostriches would bury their heads in the sand to avoid danger. People say it's an urban legend. This one is a rural legend. It's a rural legend. Because ostriches, they are flightless birds. And so what they cannot do is build nests and trees where their eggs would be safe. So they'll leg their eggs in holes in the ground. And they occasionally need to check on those eggs, whether the temperature is right, whether they're still OK and so on. And to do that, they of course have to stick their head there and check this out. And so if you watch that, you've got the impression they're sticking their heads into the ground and trying to hide. That's where the myths come from. But if you think they're true, an ostrich in the face of danger that sticks the head into the ground wouldn't be around for a long time, right? I did read while I was researching for this episode that ostriches are the fastest birds on land. So even if they can't put their heads in the sand, they can run away from the problem very, very fast. All right, let's stick with investors and markets for a moment. And there are lots of animals in that part of the park. Two of the most prominent examples are bulls and bears. And they describe two types of investors. We've already looked at the ostrich. Now we look at the bulls and the bears. A bullish investor is said to be optimistic on stock prices and the development of the market. They tend to buy stock or hold on to stock for a longer time because they expect to sell them at a higher price later on. Bears, on the other hand, well, they're rather pessimistic and they expect prices to decline to go down. They sell their stocks or they opt for short-term investments so that they don't lose too much money. When looking at the overall market sentiment, journalists and traders often speak of a bull market or a bear market. And if you've ever been to Frankfurt, and I'm sure you've seen it, Gabriel, you might have seen the bull and bear statues outside the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in the city centre. So we know what the two animals represent, but where do the metaphors come from? Why do we talk specifically about the bull and the bear? Well, these metaphors are said to come from the way the animals attack their opponents. Bulls thrust their horns up and bears swept their paws downward. And real bulls can also be very aggressive and they can be hard-charging and they're very powerful. The bear, there's also this one story that it could actually be derived from the story about the bear-skinned salesmen. They were these middlemen and they used to be called bear-skinned jobbers. They sold the furs, the markets when the prices were high, when demand was high, but they sold them before even securing them and having them. The bear-skinned jobbers, they expected prices to drop and then to buy them cheaper from the actual hunters and, so to speak, make the money on the way. And later on these bear-skinned jobbers have simply become bears. Also this one dates back a long time. There's a man called Thomas Mortimer who wrote an economics book back in 1761 and it's called Every Men, His Own Broker. And that's why he first used the terms bear and bulls and bears. So they've been, so to speak, around for over 250 years. Well, some of these animal metaphors are actually a lot older than I expected them to be. Now, it's clear what a bull in a bear market is and we've seen that. Could you give us some examples of where we've seen them in history? Of course, what's very important when you speak about a bear market or a bull market, I mean, people can define them differently, but one thing is clear. It's not about short-term ups and downs, a few days or even a few weeks when things don't go in the same direction, but a longer-term period that you see a clear tendency emerging. So if I see a stock price going down for one day, I can't say, or we're in a bear market. No, you can't do that. But if you look at these big long periods, I think one example would be what we call the roaring 1990s, basically from 1990 until 2000s, until the dot-com bubble burst. Much more recently, we had the longest bull market ever, which lasted from 2009 till 2020. So that's a full 131 months. Wow. And resulted in stock markets growing by more than 400%. The longest bear market, on the other side, was in the US a while back from March 1937 until April 1942 and lasted 62 months. Great. Well, Gabriel, before we wrap up, there is something I like to ask all of our guests. If you had to recommend one must read or must watch about what we've talked about today, what would that be? What's your hot tip for our listeners? Katie, we started this episode today by talking about how words, images, and stories can help us better understand our complex world. We in communications in the central bank have a lot of complex things to convey. And we always on the surge for metaphors that everyone can relate to. And yet they get the cross on messages also with the nuances that are very important in central banking. So I've been thinking and inspired by the past weeks of footballing frenzy that we had in Europe. I would recommend taking a look at what is called the Maradona theory of interest rates. It's named after the late footballing genius from Argentina. And it was outlined in the speech in 2005 by the then Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King. And it goes like this. Back in 1986 during the World Cup, Diego Maradona was able to score a terrific goal, really one for the history books, against England by running 50 meters from inside his own half towards the English goal. On the way, he overcame five English defenders. Now how did you do that? Well, instead of moving up either left or right, as the English players were expecting him to do, he just ran in a straight line. Just went for it straight. And then scored a beautiful goal. Now, believe it or not, monetary policy works in a similar way. What matters is expectations. Markets react to what they expect the central bank will do, just like the English defenders expected Maradona to go left or right. So explaining that context of monetary policy, interest rates and how expectations come in is a super complex thing to explain to people. But all of us, those who watch it at the time, or those who've heard about it and watched the clip on YouTube, we can all imagine what happened on that football pitch and that kind of opens up a much better understanding of such a complex thing as just monetary policy expectations and markets. And that's the beauty of it. And in fact, there's our aspirations also in communications to make abstract and complex things accessible, relatable, and maybe even memorable. It certainly is our aspiration. And your Maradona story has also reminded me of a recent Instagram post on the ECB's Instagram account explaining how football is a lot like banking supervision. So it seems that the football analogy is not just suited to monetary policy, but also banking supervision too. Well, Gabriel, thank you so much. I've really enjoyed this episode. Thanks for being here. Thanks. Well, that brings us to the end of this episode. Do check out the show notes for further reading on this topic. You've been listening to the ECB podcast with Katie Ranger. If you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. We'd also love to hear from you, so do share your feedback and ideas with us via social media. Until next time, thanks for listening.


If you've watched the channel for a while now, you know that I really love watches, especially nice watches. But it wasn't like the first watch that I ever owned or watches that I've had throughout my life have always been luxury watches. Getting into and appreciating watches, developing and refining my taste in watches is something that has been a very long journey. And you're going to find out how I eventually found myself walking into the Rolex boutique on Fifth Avenue in New York City with a pocket full of cash ready to buy my first luxury watch, a Rolex Datejust. So the first watches I ever had as a kid were a Timex Ironman Triathlon. I love that watch. Don't know whatever happened to it, but I'm seriously considering searching on eBay to try and find one purely for sentimental reasons. Also as a kid, I had a neon colored swatch that had a rotating bezel. And then of course, there was the Gucci, obvious scare quotes there that I bought on Canal Street, i.e. not a real Gucci watch on a class trip to New York City when I was in high school. There was a period of time when I didn't really think about watches that much at all. I was in college, grad school, and I was just laser focused on that experience practicing my saxophone, playing gigs, and watches kind of took a backseat to all of that. But then once I got settled, had a job, and finally started thinking more about improving how I dressed, building up my wardrobe, that's when I began scratching the surface of the watch hobby. Watches in my mind were a finishing touch to an outfit and also like clothing, a way to communicate something about yourself. My first foray into watches at that time was very modest. I didn't really know anything other than that. I wanted a watch that I could wear with a lot of stuff and had a timeless, no pun intended, really look. And I also didn't really know where to look for watches, so the first one I actually got was from J.Crew and it was the Timex T2N321 Circa 2010 for J.Crew. Came on a brown leather strap and I also ordered a black strap for it from Amazon, as I recall. Very small and elegant stainless steel case, simple dial with a date window. I wore this watch all the time and if you go back to the early years of HSS on the website, you'll see this watch in pretty much every single post. So that was kind of the watch that rekindled my interest and shortly after that, I started getting the urge to have more options. The Timex was great, but I wanted something on a metal bracelet and in a gold tone. So I went to the mall and I bought a Citizen EcoDrive. And then eventually I spent a little bit more and got a Uniform Wear C40, which is a cool, minimal watch with a day date. So you're probably wondering, like, how does someone go from a $600 Uniform Wears watch to a new Rolex Datejust, which was actually my next watch after the Uniform Wears? Because I'll admit that is a huge leap to make. For me, it was a combination of two things. It was circumstance and it was also because I am who I am, the fact that watches really became a very strong interest and when I get into something, I pursue it with passion and if it becomes a goal, it's something that I try my hardest to achieve. So Rolex had become, in my mind at that particular time, the pinnacle of arrival. Now you can be cynical about their marketing and how they position themselves as the reason that that thought was in my mind and maybe that's the case and if so, good for them. But there's also a reason that Rolex is Rolex and why people sometimes say bow to the crown. Although they might not make the most beautiful movements in the world, there is no disputing that they are exceptional quality and have an amazing history. But back to circumstance, Rolex is a luxury brand and it's a luxury price point. So you've got to be in some sort of financial comfort zone to afford one. He spoke style, had been doing very well and that put me in a position to seriously consider this purchase and although it might sound cliche, but marking that kind of milestone with something like a Rolex watch really added to that sense of achievement and accomplishment that I felt. Something that I would have and something that I could always look to and remember the pride that I felt about that. Obviously, and again, because I am who I am, I didn't just run out the next day and buy a watch. I'd never spent that amount of money on anything all at once. So I dove into sort of an insane level of figuring out what the perfect Rolex was going to be for me. And that started with going to the boutique and actually trying a few models on. Robin was living in New York at the time. So we were kind of back and forth every other weekend. So on one of the trips up there, I went to the Rolex boutique on Fifth Avenue and also hit up Torno. The experience of actually putting these watches on my wrist for the first time was kind of transformative. I'd only been used to relatively inexpensive watches and there is a very different feel on the wrist when it comes to a modern Rolex. It has a solidness and heft that for me was just really unexpected and made a very big impression on me. It just felt like this is a high quality watch. Two questions I bet you have right now are how and why did I settle on a Datejust? And why did I choose to purchase brand new instead of pre-owned? Although I briefly considered a Submariner, I settled on the Datejust for a few reasons. I wanted something that was classic. I wanted something that was versatile. And I wanted something that leaned more toward the dressy side of things because that tends to be more of my default mode of dressing. So once I'd settled on the Datejust though, there was still a big decision I had to make between an Oyster bracelet or a Jubilee bracelet. Oyster would be more casual and Jubilee would be a little more dressy. And once again, I leaned more dressy because it matched my style and seemed a little more special to me. And then size 36 millimeter verse 41, I chose 36 because it was more classic and fit my wrist a lot better. Now new verse pre-owned. I wanted to buy new simply because I wanted the watch to be completely mine. I didn't want to have a story before me. I wanted to write its history myself. So as I tell it here in all of two minutes, it makes it sound like it was a pretty simple process that I went through and that it didn't take long at all to arrive at my final decision. But in reality, I agonized over this for a good nine months.  I better make sure that I've done all my research and that I am 100% confident that this is indeed the watch that I want to buy. I spent a lot of time reading articles. I spent a lot of time on the forums. I spent a lot of time on the Rolex website playing with different configurations. Once I arrived at my decision, however, I went to the bank, made the trip to New York for the weekend. And before we left the apartment, and this sounds like completely ridiculous, but Robin had a colleague at the time who ran this Instagram account called cash cats, which was like photos of cats laying around in piles of money. So we actually took a picture of her cat Ringo for cash cats.  So the transaction in the boutique was kind of the most boring part of the whole affair. And the only thing that kind of sucked about it was that instead of leaving with the watch on my wrist, I actually had it mailed to me in Maryland so it came like a few days later. So that's the story. Now let's take a closer look at this watch and all of its details with some good old fashioned watch porn. So here it is, my Rolex Datejust reference 116234. It is a 36 millimeter case in oyster steel in white gold. It's got a screw down case back, which you can't see through and a screw down crown jubilee bracelet giving it a dressier look. Also contributing to that dressier feel, it has a fluted bezel, which looks amazing as it catches the light. I mentioned that I wanted something extremely classic. So I went with a silver dial and stick pin hour markers, hour minute and running seconds hands. It does hack, which if you are really anal about setting the time accurately is an awesome feature. It is an automatic movement. Of course, the real signature feature is the Cyclops, which magnifies the date window. This watch looks great on the wrist and I feel like 36 millimeters is a perfect fit for my six and a half inch wrist. It's incredibly comfortable to wear. It still is one of my favorite watches, gets a lot of wrist time and it will always have a very special meaning to me. As I went through the process of buying this watch, I learned a lot and if you find yourself in a similar position as I was really wanting a Rolex to be your first luxury watch purchase. I put together a video linked right over there that goes even deeper and gives you some really important questions that you should be asking yourself to see if this is the right choice for you.


Good, pretty good. All right, my name's Dane Fichter. I'm a software developer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. I'm working on OpenStack for about two years now, mostly upstream Nova stuff, a little bit of playing around with Barbecan, some security features. But today I'm here to talk to you about something that's pretty different than all that. I'm gonna be talking to you about this, I would call it a sort of newer thing in OpenStack. It's called a Tempest plugin. Just for my own education so we can perhaps move through the beginning of this presentation a little quicker. How many people know what Tempest is? Okay, so everybody. How many people know what a Tempest plugin is? Okay, decent amount. All right, cool. Okay, so what we're gonna do today is we're gonna walk through a little bit of background. I'm going to tell you how to basically get a Tempest plugin started from scratch. We're gonna talk about the anatomy of sort of what's going on inside the Tempest plugin. I'm gonna impart some of my amazing wisdom to you and then we're gonna run through a really quick demo to show how sort of the testing workflow works once you have a Tempest plugin. So what is Tempest? Many of you raised your hand so I assume you already know what it is, but basically Tempest is a project that exercises a cloud like an end user and allows you to replace manual tests with this automated testing framework. What can Tempest test? So Tempest can exercise the APIs directly interacting with them through a REST client or it can do something a little bit more complicated called a scenario test, which is where it uses multiple interactions with services to test something a little bit more complicated than just whether the API works the way it should. So a good example of this is what we have here, which is a boot from volume scenario test. Basically what's going on is Tempest would act as an end user would if they're trying to boot a volume and that's a good way for you to make sure that the code path that you would follow to boot from a volume is still functional. So what's a Tempest plugin? Tempest plugin is a little helper project for Tempest essentially. If you have a project that's sort of outside of the big tent and I use Barbican as an example here because I implemented the Barbican Tempest plugin, what you would do is you would implement one of these plugins to work alongside Tempest to test the functionality that's supported by your service. And this is in response to the Tempest project essentially narrowing its scope to the core services. Why would you create one? I think we touched on this a little bit and for many of you in the room, this is pretty obvious but essentially it's a good way for you to make sure your API still works. It's a good way for you to make sure that your features still work. It's a good way to make sure that no one merges code that would break either of those things. You make a plugin because your project isn't a core project and you can't merge your scenarios or your API testing directly into Tempest. In my case, I made the Barbican Tempest plugin because the Nova PTL told me to. So the first step that you have to do is to create a new project. As of Pyke, the official guidance from the QA community is that you should maintain your Tempest plugin as a separate project, not as a part of your existing service that you're testing.  So your basic Jenkins jobs, your basic Pepe jobs, that sort of thing, and then the Tempest cookie cutter provides sort of the basic structure of how the plugin should look. The next step that you wanna do is you wanna add an entry point to your setup config file. So this basically is how Tempest discovers your Tempest plugin. As Tempest is sort of spinning up, it iterates through Python paths until it can find plugins and then it sort of reads from the plugins all the necessary testing. Okay, so now we're gonna get down into the guts of what's going on inside these Tempest plugins. And I'm using the Barbican Tempest plugin as a case study so sort of think about that and triangulate that to your own use case if you see some differences to how you might wanna do things. But essentially the first thing we're gonna talk about is these service clients. So the Barbican API has several resources. It has resources to keep track of consumers, secrets, secret metadata, quotas, containers, and orders and mirroring each of those resources we implement a service client in our Tempest plugin. And the functionality of this service client is essentially to use rest requests to talk to each of those API resources. And the functionality of these is very simple. They essentially format payloads as JSON, dump them into a rest request, send them along to the right method of the right API resource, very little error checking. They're basically just a pass-through. So here's an example of a method that you might find in a service client. Let's say you're talking to the secret client, you wanna create a secret. So in the secret client class, you have a create secret method that as I said just passes along the payload essentially. So once you have the service clients implemented, you need to test them. So the next thing you wanna do is implement your API tests. And as you can see, just as we had sort of a mirroring of service clients to API resources, we have the same sort of thing going on with the API tests. You basically want one test suite corresponding to each resource of your services API. And here's just another diagram to give you an idea of how these things inherit from Tempest. You're basically pulling in Tempest's test case interface to set up your API tests. The base, excuse me, the base API test is not required by any means, but we'll see later, actually in the next slide, we'll see how it helps you with sort of the setup and cleanup of resources and makes the labor of writing API tests much easier. So here's an example of why you would want a base API test. You use the base API test essentially as a way to track resources that you're creating in the course of testing your API. And that means that during your API tests, you don't really have to be as cognizant about cleaning up. It sort of can clean up for you. So in using the example of the create secret method, let's say you have a secret API test that's testing this create secret method, the sort of the direct effect of calling this create secret method is that some blob of data is now stored in the key manager, right? So your secret API test is testing this method. It calls the create secret method and if you just exited the test or failed the test at that point, you would still be stuck with this blob stored in the Barbican key manager. And obviously for CI that's running all the time, you don't necessarily want that. So what you do is you overload the Barbican base API so that you overload the create secret method in the base class here to keep track of the actual secret itself. And then when the base case goes through sort of it's life cycle set up and tear down, during the tear down part, you can explicitly delete that secret, clean up after yourself basically. And here's a little code example to show you how you would do that. This little convention of using a creates function decorator is everywhere in Tempest and so I leveraged it for Tempest plugin. But it's essentially what I just said, you have a resource list, you can tag things to make sure that, you can tag methods to make sure that the whatever resulting resource is created by calling that method is stored and then later you can clean it up. And the nice byproduct of this is that your API tests are very simple. You don't have to really worry about cleanup as much. It's just a matter of creating that unique ID for the test and then just calling the method of the base class. So that's API testing, pretty straightforward. We're gonna get on to something a little more complicated now, the scenario tests. And I think this is sort of what most people the capability that people are more interested in with the Tempest plugin. This allows you to make sure that your features sort of stay intact. So someone merges a patch to Nova and breaks one of your features. If you have a gate running that's running your Tempest plugin scenario tests that's testing out these actual features in a live cloud that failure will be exposed and it'll prevent that code from merging. So here's an example of a test that you might want to do with the Barbican Tempest plugin, a volume encryption test. The steps of how a user would do it you can see on the side there basically you would want to store the certificate, you would want to sign an image, store the image in glance, you'd have Nova boot the signed image and then you would create an encrypted volume in Cinder and use Nova to attach the volume to the instance. Manually if you were going to test periodically test OpenStack, this would be kind of an annoying thing to have to do and I know that because I've done it many, many times. The upshot of the Tempest plugin is that this becomes an automated process and you no longer have to manually do it. So quite similar to the way the API sort of class inheritance works, it makes things a lot easier if you have a base scenario test that you inherit things from, can help with setup and tear down, it can also help with just reducing code duplication if there's things that many of your scenario tests are going to do. So here's an example base scenario test, this isn't exactly perfectly accurate Python or whatever but it just gives you a sort of notional idea of how you would want to have a common method in this base test that many of the scenario tests would use. And then here's an example scenario test. Again, because a lot of the heavy lifting is sort of done behind the scenes by the Tempest framework itself and by your clients that you've already implemented and your base tests, these scenario tests tend to be pretty short and sweet and readable, which is good. Okay, so some general tips and tricks, excuse me, tips and tricks to sort of make this thing, this whole process a little less laborious is to implement your plugin in the order I've described here. So the service clients are really the basic, easiest part, the API tests test these clients. So a good way to make sure that everything is working properly with your service clients is as you're implementing a service client, implement the parallel API tests at the same time and continue to test and implement service clients alongside each other so that you know that your API tests and your service clients work as you expect them to. The service clients working as you expect them to is very important for the scenario tests and you don't want a situation where your service client has some small error and you're trying to figure out a complicated scenario test at the same time. Following along with your project's API docs is a great way to just give you ideas for how to implement the API tests. Generally, with any sort of, any of these open-sex services, if you look at the API documentation, there's pretty specific examples of how each API method is used and I found that those can, you can just basically crib straight from those and make API tests very quickly. A sort of a key important thing that's becoming a little bit more important as Tempest gets refactored is that you wanna make sure that you stick to what Tempest advertises as it's stable interfaces. You don't wanna be pulling some obscure thing down from Tempest and then a week from now Tempest obliterates it or changes it or the Tempest community decides to do something else with it. Maintaining a test environment and testing as you go is key that's pretty common sense and I always use DevStack precautions which means I don't run any of this stuff directly on a machine that I can't get rid of easily. I think the key to working with DevStack in maintaining your sanity is deleting it often and restarting a VM. Okay, so now we're gonna walk through a little demo of how this sort of testing workflow works. The first thing you would need to do once you've set up DevStack is to configure it. So we're going to enable the Barbican plugin and we're going to set the auth options so that the stacking process is a little easier. After we've done that, we're gonna run our stack command and those of you who work with DevStack often can tell that this clip is sped up a significant amount. Okay, and they're serving our default users, admin demo and the password is what we configured in the local conf. So I've always found that Tempest is way easier to use in a virtual environment so we're gonna go ahead and set that up now. Those of you who are familiar with virtual environments this should look very, very standard but essentially all we're doing is creating the virtual environment and going ahead and activating it. The next step is installing Tempest in our virtual environment. I always like to install this from source just because if I wanna tinker with something in Tempest itself and see how it works, the installing it from source makes that process a lot easier. So you need to do this Tempest init phase. This creates this cloud one directory which is basically Tempest's abstraction of the DevStack instance that you have running on this machine. And the next thing you need to do is configure this cloud abstraction, this cloud representation so that Tempest actually knows where this cloud is running. So I'll actually run through this clip again because it's pretty quick. But basically, so we're editing Tempest Conf and basically what we're doing, the majority of what we're doing here is we are pointing Tempest to our Keystone install. And so this is how Tempest knows where to set up users and then from there knows how to talk to Nova, Glantz, et cetera. So once we have Tempest up, we need to incorporate our plugin with Tempest. And the fortunate part about the fact that Tempest finds plugins via Python paths is that this process of setting up the plugin is actually extremely easy now. It's as simple as cloning the source and just running pip install. And Tempest will run your plugins test now. This step is pretty optional, but I always just do it as sort of a sanity check. If you list tests and grep for the name of your project, you can make sure that Tempest actually knows that your tests are there and will run them. So now I'm gonna walk through sort of a cheesy example of how you could maybe find a bug in an existing project with the Tempest plugin. So what's going to happen here is I've basically put a bad line of code in the code path that follows from booting an instance in Nova. So what's going to happen is I'm gonna try and run my Barbican Tempest plugin scenarios. Over the course of running these scenarios, what's going to happen is Nova's going to try and boot an instance. It's gonna fail, we're gonna correct it, and then we're gonna show that the Tempest scenarios succeed. So first you use this Tempest run command and you can just pass it the name of your plugin and it'll run the test for you. And as you can see from our output here, we've got a stack trace. Specifically there, we're getting a no valid host error, which if you guys have used Nova before you know that, that means that something went wrong, but it's not necessarily specific to a particular part of the code. So the next step is to fix this error. So we'll use our trusty rejoin stack script, which will bring up all the services which support OpenStack.  We're gonna get rid of it, restart our Nova CPU service and rerun our tests. And as we can see this time, our tests were successful. So that's basically the benefit of using a Tempest plugin. If there's some issue down some obscure path, some obscure code path that isn't necessarily tested by other things in Nova, you can run this Tempest plugin, and it'll exercise all your features for you and make sure that they still work. So here's some links that might be useful to you. Some of these are just things that I've referenced in this presentation, but the, in particular the ether pads have very specific procedures on them, which are really useful for setting up the plugin, running through the tests, all that good stuff. Okay, that's it for me. Any questions? If you guys could go to the microphone, that would be great. How do you not run the plugin? Like say you've installed it, you don't wanna run that plugin, you wanna run some other plugin. Okay, the test or run command basically works. I don't know if you've ever used like TOX tests. You can specify what you want to run. So if you wanted to run some other plugin, you can change the tester command to run the other plugin. So by default though, if you just run tester, it's gonna run every plugin, right? You have to form a regex to not to exclude your stuff. Yes, that's correct. Thanks. Anybody else? Okay, oh. Earlier you tried to debug, you saw the NOVA arrow saying nobody hopes. How do you know that the problem was in the glance? I knew it was in glance because I put a bad line of code there. I mean generally there's a stack trace that pops up. That's what I wonder if there's a debug flag that you can put in so that it output the more detailed stack trace. So that I know that when you get to the image, then you fail. Is that option? Let's go back to this clip. Yeah, I believe the stack trace has, I believe what happens when it fails does, does include information about where the failure is from, but I could be wrong. Yeah, so one of the drawbacks of this framework, I guess, is that the. It's always found in that case sign image upload, so I guess you can kind of figure out it's in glance. Yeah, so the. It wasn't though it was in compute, right? Yeah, so the error itself was in the compute service, but what you see from Tempest's perspective is which command failed, which is not always, I guess, necessarily the most helpful thing, but the Tempest framework doesn't have access to the code that's running in the cloud, so unless NOVA is reporting that error in a verbose way, you're not going to see what inner machination of NOVA broke and caused the Tempest test to fail. Yes, yeah, so what I would suggest is if you were trying to debug this, I would suggest that you look at the Tempest output, you'll see exactly which test broke, then you can go to the Tempest logs, you can see the sequence of REST commands, which led to the failure, and then from there, if you're running the gate in a job, excuse me, the job in a gate, or you have access to the compute logs, you can look at the compute logs themselves and see where the exact failure originated from. Thank you.  Correct, yeah, I mean, obviously a unit test is going to fail in a nicer way in terms of the console output, but yeah, you can clearly just step back through logs if you need to. So all those helpful links at the end, I didn't get a chance to copy them all down, where is this presentation available? Oh, sure, the presentation will be, I think there's, after the summit's done, there's like a slide share thing, so I can put the slides up there, or if you just stop by when I'm done with this, I can just email them directly to you. Let me show you the references again. Okay, all right, no worries then, we'll talk after this. Yeah, same, anybody else? Okay, great, thanks for your attention, guys.


Okay, very good morning Thursday 5th of March It's gonna have a talk through then sort of the main reasons why Wall Street printed the Dow Jones the stat I saw this morning was the 6th second biggest rally in the Dow in history And actually the past seven sessions have seen the kind of wildest price swings that we've had in the last seven sessions Since the inception of the S&P 500 in 1982 So a couple of stats for you So, you know if you are new to markets Quite an unprecedented time to have to have been involved and certainly a fantastic learning situation perhaps a difficult one though to To expect upon yourself Real performance, and I think that's quite a key thing. I think anyone who has been training over the last few weeks You know, obviously the benefit of experience is quite a telling thing But if that's not the case for you then you know, don't be too hard on yourself I mean the type of volatility that we've seen as I said Has never been seen before in the entirety of the existence of the S&P 500 So, you know if you're finding it quite tricky It's unsurprising if it's all kind of brand new and fresh to you So things will revert back to normality at some point, but Certainly the severity of yesterday's rally I think Caught me certainly a little bit by surprise I mean we're talking to a couple of the guys about this kind of range of consolidation The S&P was in but then as you probably saw there was a big headline development overnight where basically the US have come out and pledged Three times more than what Trump was asking for and proposed spending for the economy In order to counteract specifically coronavirus and that helping just fire things up in combination with The kind of big switch we've seen in the democratic nomination with Joe Biden now the firm favorite The IMF have come out and they're pledging also Monetary funds to those being hit by the virus and this of course comes in the context of the Bank of Canada The RBA the Fed have all been cutting and markets now are 100% priced for a Bank of England rate cut or sorry an ECB rate cut and also his price for a Bank of England rate cut so You know, this is the The kind of nature of what I guess markets were We're looking for from a more positive response was you know the disappointment and the sell-off from the Fed that we saw two days ago You know, it's quite different now because now you're getting a real coordinated and larger fiscal response And other central banks are starting to follow suit now as what we've seen from the RBA and the BOC and what markets are Anticipating as I said for those other major Western central banks. So This thing stand at the moment though. I think probably yesterday Might like what we've seen in other occasions But on the flip side, you know when the market does sell off a great deal the period thereafter you see a little bit of a bounce of normal just short-term Profit-taking on those speculative shorts. It's kind of the opposite this time round So these US index futures have just come off a little Or be it still higher than where we were this time yesterday Gold's pretty quiet. T-notes are pretty quiet overall, but both are down So it would be reflective of that general risk appetite from the Wall Street close So gold's down about five bucks T-notes down about eight But it's been pretty sideways price action in the overnight session and the currency market the dollar is pretty flat I mean in terms of the euro-dollar pair and cable Sam obviously in a moment will talk about that more technically But yesterday obviously a good test and bounce off that quite key level down in the futures and around the one 11 handle that was being the previous high that we had right at the beginning of this month and also the test that we saw at the beginning of the week and Rejection of that fail to break and it bounced back up quite meaningfully and we're back to just test yesterday evening or I guess afternoon US price action low that we had Cable a little bit about performance comes despite You know still a lot of kind of negative press I guess you're getting at the moment in respect to The upcoming UK budget that's coming out. That's obviously got to be pivoted more now to counteract in the potential implications that any type of Quarantine in areas of the UK to contain the virus outbreak if that does materialize the impact that might have in the economy And so on so banks like Goldman Sachs for example are now expecting I read a 50 basis point rate cut coming up in the next meeting which is on the 26th of March But irrespective of that I guess great deal of it is priced in to some respect at the moment. So a little bit of a break higher for the time being you can see there a relatively nice Nice footing that you've got technically I'd say for cable from some of the previous price action that we can see over The last kind of two weeks. You got that low here late Feb retest again and again Third time of asking really on a more come more firm test I mean a big sell-off on the break of that and now that key level has now turned support You can see it it reacted to that level really nicely in the age of Pacific level It's used it as a bit of a springboard to move back higher again So perhaps in a strong level of support for the time being But let's get into some of the headlines I'll leave the charts more for Sam to have a look at and this was that headline that really was the predominant factor that drove Markets higher yesterday And that was that the House of Representatives were approved an eight billion dollar spending package intended on combating The coronavirus including funds for protective equipment testing surveillance and so on To put that into some context obviously market moves against expectations last week Trump was asking for basically one-third of that amount and he's got three times more so great stuff for him in that respect that all politicians are kind of gathering round with a coordinated effort to Counteract what is I'm still anticipating a multi thousand type level of cases in America over the coming week or so And I think that's you know, this is why I think Trump has done a pretty good job Remember he held that press conference about a week ago When there wasn't really much in the way of cases at all and you might have thought well Is he gonna spook people but I think by just putting this coronavirus seed in people's head early and Allowing then him to come out get this job done on Capitol Hill for the spending programs You know as long as you can control the human both for markets and consumer their psyche Then you can counteract then this whole big sell-off and fear trade that we had last week And you know, this is what Trump is good at I think in in this respect So is it enough and you know do we continue to recover? I don't know yesterday was such a big move Just like we had last week, you know down days, you know one thing that's very common in markets Markets generally move much more violently going down than they do going up So after a thousand plus points second biggest rally ever in the now I wouldn't be my my statistics would show that you're probably not gonna get Another size of all day like that again but plan for For the different scenarios as we normally say so here Democrats also counted five hundred million dollars in Medicare funds So the actual total amount that they've passed in Washington is eight point three billion The other thing of course of which was getting attention was the in the briefing this time yesterday was Joe Biden Obviously taking a real significant boost and I did he performs particularly well But Michael Bloomberg pulling out of the race is now throwing his support against Biden It's kind of the the stop Bernie Sanders job by the more center Democrats the prospect of a Biden Trump showdown. I mean if you actually think about those two candidates It's the elimination of Sanders is which is very important A Biden Trump showdown whoever wins even though we're still firmly on the side that Trump will become the victor in the end There's a clear positive for markets And probably a small plus for the economy as well if you think about Biden in himself Has proposed tax rises, but they're relatively modest He's got a light touch on regulation Probably a softer line on tariffs on the global protectionist front that Trump's been doing and also He's probably gonna have to go slightly left in order to capture some of that vote As well to appease as he then fends off any attempt from Sanders going forward in the next couple of weeks. So all in all You know whoever wins. It's kind of a net positive in a sense and I guess that explains as well Partial of why we we rallied yesterday and then the other thing that's probably gone a little bit unnoticed was the IMF The IMF have actually unveiled a 50 billion dollar package of emergency financing Specifically for country stricken by coronavirus So so again, it's just another Fiscal and this is what's so key to support markets when they were in free fall like last week You cannot you cannot expect just the Fed to prop up the entire global market That's unrealistic and hence the reason why it sold off on that day of the emergency cut But now we're starting to see more evidence come through of real commitment to counteract it and hence The reason why we had a day like yesterday As I said the ECB Bloomberg running the headlines talking about some of I guess yesterday's price movement snapping a bit of a four-day winning streak But markets now very much price for the ECB to deliver on the fact that they're going to cut the deposit rate further once again And here is a crib sheet. I did actually tweak this last night. It's probably quite a useful way of just Consolidating quite a lot of information into a nice easy digestible graphic And it's looking at the major central banks So the key things are one of the dates so you can see still quite a lot to come for March And you've got the ECB on the 12th. You got the Bank of England on the 26th You got the PBOC in China on the 20th the SMB in Switzerland on the 19th as well as Norway and so on So it's still quite a lot to come As far as the ECB are concerned, this is from ING the Dutch Bank They're saying the ECB opted against a coordinated move with the Fed Suggesting policymakers will wait and see until next week's meeting and then try to steer markets with words rather than action However, don't rule out some measures if conditions deteriorate now That's what ING are saying so ING going for a little bit more of a neutral wait and see approach to just see how these numbers develop And that was to come a common thinking which caught a little bit of people by surprise when the Fed took such preemptive action Just given how low the numbers are In actuality in the US at the moment, but markets are very much priced on the side of easing in terms of the Bank of England What ING are saying and they're meeting and towards the end of the month Arguably less sensitive to market moves from the Fed and has signalled it will take a little more time to judge the impact But ultimately ING anticipating a 25 basis point rate cut coupled perhaps with some credit easing is likely at the March meeting Possibly before which is quite quite interesting a statement to make as well But I'll leave you with that graphic. It's on my my Twitter handle here if you want to have a look you can do in more detail With the Fed obviously there is still a Fed meeting Happening this month and it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out That's not for another just under two weeks on the 18th And this is looking at market implied probability in the short end So at the moment markets are priced 73.5% that the Fed are going to cut another 25 and there's a 26 and a half percent that they're going to cut another 50 so so markets are still definitely expecting Much more to come but you know definitely on that last if they went 50 again They repeat what they did earlier this week I mean that pretty much exhausts there and that avenue of interest rates going forward So they'd be banking on the fact that That's enough and over the coming weeks you get the peak and then decline of the virus and subsequent impact And that they by doing now Gets ahead to promote then the real interest rate lowing effect into the economy, which is kind of a laggard effect I guess the problem is is that what if the virus picks up more? Aggressively than what we've seen like in Italy for example That could be a real problem then for the Fed given the limited ammunition. They've got on the interest rate side The final thing I wanted to mention was this you've got the OPEC meeting in Vienna so yesterday basically Saudi and Russia the two main people to monitor as we go through today and tomorrow in this meeting They are far apart according to reports on Bloomberg This was at the kind of prelude to today's meeting the OPEC plus. It's called the JMMC the joint Ministerial monitoring committee this typically is more of a meeting just to see if they're adhering to that their compliance of their quotas so The biggest point here is that there still seems to be a big disagreement and without Russia being on board and Russia being obviously the second largest oil producing country in the world behind the United States of which is a country the US which is producing oil at the moment at Record high levels really putting the pressure on people like Saudi obviously who are really under Pressure to diversify their economy. So these sub 50 oil prices are hurting them at the moment Talk of the town is that basically Saudis want a reduction as big as 1.5 million Whereas Russia basically don't want to cut at all So, you know, this is what we're looking out for at the moment and I do think actually this could be quite a meaningful moment then for crude oil because I Think the risk the risk for me is to the downside And that is they don't get a deal done and Russia doesn't agree and therefore I think oil is quite Subceptible to some downside price action if that happens then I don't think it's unrealistic to see oil come back through Well, definitely this near-term area or a zone of support and a breakthrough down there opens up the prospects of 45 again And you've seen how oil tends to move in these types of situations I wouldn't discount either by the end of the week. You might get down to these levels at 43 34 You saw, you know, not that fly be is a big issue for the global economy But fly be one of the biggest national carriers in the airline space in the UK has basically gone into administration last night and that's a That's a sign of the times really and that's why you heard yesterday's briefing Goldman Sachs looking on the demand side for You know big implications that this virus is going to have on tourism and relatable industries in that sense and fuel Consumptions a big component of oil demand and you know if if Russia don't agree to act And the problem you've had is now that numbers like one and a half million have been thrown out there on the table trade as a hungry for a deep cuts and Not delivering a deep cut is going to be negative for price And so that's why I think on the balance. There's risks to potentially a deep move on the downside of a multi-dollar nature If they were to deliver a cut of 1.5 million That obviously would be bullish and if there's some upside levels here to monitor But I would say the likelihood of a deep cut like that I think is minimal the consensus on Wall Street is from economists that the cut if they do one would be around 750 but this is the problem when these all ministers start opening their mouths Essentially is that now markets I think would be disappointed with a 750 cut now. You've mentioned 1.5. That's bad Tactical management in my opinion from the Saudis if you were to apply a central banking kind of forward guidance communicate Strategy and so yeah keep an eye on all is all I'm saying One thing to be aware of OPEC has taken Unprecedented steps this specific meeting of blocking journalists from entering its headquarters and also have scrapped a final press conference For those of you who've never seen it before It's an absolute media scrum at the OPEC event Why because these all ministers love saying stuff and basically what that means then is that this is the oil Chart I was looking at here and these these deeper moves to keep an eye on at 45 and below But what it means then if journalists are not present perhaps The ability to see leaks and rumours is diminished somewhat But I would probably still remain pretty alert and vigilant for comments because usually It's unlikely you need to wait till Friday afternoon's press conference for definitive confirmation of what's going to happen So so keep an eye out for from ensuing volatility to come over the next 48 hours All right quickly look at the calendar and then we'll wrap things up with Sam What have we got for this morning? Well from a data point of view Nothing really you've got a couple of UK numbers, but quite frankly, they're not really market moving And so we'll move to the US afternoon where things will start to heat up a little bit weekly jobless claims factory orders in the US Jobless claims not interested in and don't anticipate that to move markets factory orders normally I would be but you know like we've seen yesterday. I think a little bit of context perhaps Is quite key One thing that probably was another supportive factor for yesterday's aggressive rally outside of This spending package to counter the virus the IMF pledge the Biden bump is you have that ISM non manufacturing Which was pretty spectacular yesterday in the US as well So factory orders, let's see It is a January reading so it's quite backward-looking and obviously the markets are quite forward focused at the moment So I don't think it's going to be too meaningful with that being said Speakers though, there's quite a few to monitor I guess the key ones will be Bank of England's chief economist Haldane You know what is the current insight the Bank of England? He's talking off topic So I wouldn't be expecting too much, but just given the context probably worth monitoring if you're looking at the pound just in case The chief brexit negotiator Michelle Barnier speaks in the first round of EU trade talks at 3 p.m. I Would definitely not be expecting movement out of the pound on that What you can expect from Michelle Barnier today is he's going to say this and in the UK going to respond and say that and Exactly where we are at the moment. There's going to be absolutely zero movement from their origination of their Statement of their red lines at this point is way too early in the negotiating round first round talks Nothing happens. That's just the usual practice. So, yeah, maybe interesting to hear He'll talk about you know what Europe one and how far apart they are and to put the pressure back on Britain and that doesn't really That's not really meaningful in respect to anything out of the blues So I wouldn't be expecting too much from that Bank of England outgoing governor Mark Carney speaks later on this afternoon They've got Bank of Canada's governor Polo's and then Kaplan later for any fixed income traders He'd have quite a lot of Spanish French supply coming to market as well Throughout the morning. All right, gonna leave it at that Let's hear what sounds gonna say And I'll see you later on. Thanks very much Thanks, and I've just seen a tweet China's CSI 300 index is that closing at its levels not seen in two years at the highest which is Incredible the Dow Jones. Yes, they what a day. I mean the range in this thing is is insane God knows what's gonna happen in the coming in the coming days. It's a really, you know I think mark your levels up Identify where you could see a reaction and have the patients then when we get there just to have a little wait and see I was with the guys and The other office we were talking about the Bank of Canada decision I mean sort of say if they do 50, you know stocks could get a little bit of a bounce a little bit When they continue to push on and on and on I guess the you know If you are bearish, you know the fact that we didn't get above yesterday's high and had a little rejection could be You know in a way A bit of a small win just by the big push I think we're actually coming to levels now, which are quite interesting in US equities You can see here. I've had us mark up 30 74 Probably 30 74 and a quarter that and the pivot You can see we had a bit of resistance initially in early trade there yesterday before Breaking through coming back to test it around six. So you'd expect some sort of reaction here So, you know these lines in the sand if you like these are the points where you know, I just be looking for some sort of reaction before They're making a decision on these markets because we you know the range from Tuesday Afternoon to Tuesday evening low and then Monday then Wednesday's Early Asian session trade loads of the hiatus incredible Good V shape recovery, which of course has been an in topic this year, but yeah, keep an eye on that pivot I think that's a pretty key level That is to break through then you know these moves can can gather pace relatively quickly It would be also keeping an eye on what the dex is doing just to see if we can get a you know Follow-through from European trade and it's a similar kind of level here in the Dax You can see we had some nice price action initially around three o'clock around 430 just hitting This resistance point we then broke through came back to test it and we're just on there now with the pivot So if I'm looking for an opportunity in US equities at any point today Potentially to continue lower these levels would have to go For you know there to be that continuation Let's bring over the down and just say that this level here is just a bit above its pivot So just be you know aware of that those highs that we initially had yesterday before that that push through but yeah strong moves in In US equities here. You've got that again failed test of what would have been Tuesday's high So you can V shape recovery is there, but we're just coming down to a bit of support now and down on the futures Anyway, down 285 which two months ago would have been a big move now. It's Incredible moving on to oil obviously now could start to see things pick up a bit We're just actually pushing and drifting lower down to under 47 and there's gonna be a bit of support around here So it's worth just keeping an eye on around the s1 You've got the lows from yesterday just a bit above there as well And and what has been quite a good guide for the stocks in recent times is what oil has done I know it's you know, got there Absolutely still will be days where they do their own thing But to keep an eye here if oil does continue to push lower and I'd must stress There's a fair bit of support around this s1 and that might also help the case for stocks to go lower But having a look here oil s1 this bit of a trend line that we're coming into play on a couple of smaller Term levels in and around that pivot. We were in a bit of a range before that Level broke through and then of course r1 looks like a pretty key point where you can see that the sellers really did defend that area Around 48 dollars. I was still waiting yesterday Patiently for 49 if it was to come to then make a decision about you know, do I see this market pushing higher and for me until it does I think it's gonna be relatively contained. But yeah, keep an eye on that trend line and that s1 Have a quick look over at gold, which did as I'm saying just drop lower In early trade. We have just rebounded a touch relatively small range to begin that day Again, it's markup your key points of interest where you could expect to see a reaction And these would be those points. I know the S fine little trend line breaks could happen from from then until From now until we get down to these points, of course I'm really just looking at the lows that we had from yesterday quite good support around there almost a double bottom Okay, so 1633 point eight I'm interested if it comes to make some sort of decision below there, you know the s1 You know that was to break that could be the target for example 1645 and a half good strong resistance really from Three o'clock to you know after 6 p.m. And then above there We just couldn't quite confirm a break at all from 1648 up towards 1650 so very important resistant zone and not the goal is just doing a bit of a range at the moment You can see not much really happened yesterday for for gold It was supported at the top a bit at the bottom and resisted at the top quite nicely So keep a key eye on those range levels, which have dictated play so far Moving over to a couple of the currencies Euro Not many people can quite understand why we were so high is this now the opportunity to get short If you want to be late to the party with a bit more confirmation a break of yesterday's lows You know, there's no harm in and sort of wait for that to really go for there to be a continuation to the downside You can see strong support yesterday also Tuesday and was resistant on Monday You got the s1 there as well. So if that is to go fantastic Or if you're already in this trade, I think you've got quite a nice ceiling You know here where at 111 50 along with the pivot the higher the day the high of yesterday afternoon Which is also the morning support from yesterday as well is is a good enough Area where as long as we stay below there, you'd be happy to be short Of course, if you're intraday trading this targeting down towards I would say 111 17 and then the lows down at 111 05 that would be how I'm looking at that above the pivot I think we can start to you know push towards these key levels here 111 74 And I'll just keep an eye on what was the high that we had on the second. So what would that be? Monday Yeah Monday, and also yesterday's high around that R1. So like gold is doing now relatively Relatively speaking pretty range bound up at these tops. I know these moves are obviously a lot bigger than what has previously happened for euro But those would be the key levels that I'll be focusing on down at yesterday's lows 111 05 And then 111 50 in between there You might have a bit of support literally where we're trading now as we found some buyers late last night But at the moment those would be the key areas having a look over at the pound or Is this another one where you should have could have would have got in that low We talked about on Monday, which was the the high of the length of October since then It's it's up nearly 200 pips, which is a great move really extending through here And I know you know a couple people I'm seeing on Twitter I like the look now of a few pound longs against other other pairs and you can see here just extending through Early trade resistance however coming up. So do be patient. Don't go chasing This market just yet. You can see there's quite a lot of lows in the mix here and then highs once we have broken through So all around one twenty nine ten that are one just be a bit patient You know perhaps waiting for either price to break through before getting in or a little pullback down to one twenty nine Key level as well if you are medium term or even intraday long in your book profit You've got a bit of a flaw here one twenty eight fifty strong area of resistance between break through get a clean break And you know that's going to be you're happy to stay long as as long as price remains above that but yeah the pound strong Today across the board Yen you can just see here just fighting back a bit So just keep an eye the decks which is trying to now if you see my middle left chart Just trying to break through that pivot if that was to continue you're gonna get probably the yen Just having another go at trying to break through its high and T notes as well Which is just you know not doing too much in the morning You know and always a bit risky trading in early trade But you can see here a bit of a range that we're in if stocks were to continue lower I'll see that getting a break of that and similar for the the bund above its pivot You can see there's a bit of a area of resistance and we're in therefore a bit of a range from those lows from yesterday as well But early trade at the moment You know not to to say we're gonna have a day like we had yesterday in terms of you know The point moves in the Dow Jones and NASDAQ SNP But I'll be surprised if we continue to smash higher in similar fashion So a little pullback in European trade wouldn't be the most unusual thing Any questions usual guys, please do let us know will be run the throughout the chat Throughout the day. So yeah, I hope you all have a good one and you know markets are interesting at the moment Doesn't mean you need to be in a trade all the time So be patient wait for those levels and wait wait for that confirmation before looking to get in


So what qualities do you possess that should make you a good solution? Sir, being a graduate from engineering equality is a problem solving approach. An analytical and logical thinking along with other qualities like honesty and integrity and objective approach in decision making will make you a good solution for that. Are you working Mr Kumar? No sir. No? Are you working with software? Yes. Right. Is this your first attempt? Yes. First attempt? Yes. Good. You did a good job. Yes sir. After 2016? Yes sir. Why did you decide to leave it? Sir, it was planned actually I want to, I want to be a part of civil services. I got motivated from one of my school seniors who qualified in the UPSC and we got highest. But because of financial situation I had to take up the job and I had to continue for so long. So it was planned that I had to, ultimate goal was to go for the civil services. So to the board decision and giving up the job and preparing for this? Yes. And this is your first attempt? Yes. And you qualified in the first attempt itself? Yes. Very good. Very well done. Okay. Here comes Suthantpur district. Yes sir. Which is always in the news for political reason? Yes. Why it's so? Sir, because Suthantpur represents the constitution of Rao Gandhi as well as Varun Gandhi who is MP from there. And Varun Gandhi has also done research regarding Manrega and it has found, it has revealed some finding what Manrega has contributed to the society as a whole. Can you tell me what are the findings and what is your assessment of Manrega? Sir, finding with respect to Manrega, I would like to divide it into three aspects. The social impact of Manrega and the economic impact of Manrega and what are the governance impact of Manrega? As far as social impact is concerned, it has empowered the government and also it has provided, it has reduced the described employment in the area of agriculture. Secondly, in the term of Manrega to poverty, it has reduced the stock, economic stock of the people and provide such basis to some of the people. As far as governance impact is concerned, yes, it has boosted the government's power and it has brought a certain nature of the people because they can demand their right and it was a demand-based approach. So it has, in fact, tried to empower the grassroots democracy by demanding for the job and all those things. Good. So these are the three very strong parts. Are there any big points also? There are cases of ghost, many series with respect to Manrega. A lot of payment is there and different payment is there. So these are the weaknesses of the Manrega where sometimes people demand for their job but their demand is not in 15 days, which is mandated under the Manrega Act. Anything regarding the output? Yes, as far as output is concerned, the quality of the assets created is also not very good as per the social audit findings also. So for the idea of asset being made under Manrega is also sometimes not part of the standards. Since you are so thorough in Manrega, you know about 2-3 years ago it was discussed that Manrega is not giving too much emphasis on convergence, which is, of course, linked to the output. That's why... Yes, sir. So what can they keep it to date by that? Sir, I'm not very much aware of convergence but... You know, basically what they are saying is that in villages you are expecting schools, hospitals, you know, courts, but you don't link that with Manrega, you link all of them and then you can accept it also. Yes, sir. I need to support agriculture also because in the... Like pots can be used for the water harvesting system and the water can be used during the time of drought and so on. So it will support agriculture infrastructure in the village also. You know, you have been reading a lot about the Kumbh Mela arrangements in Halapa. Yes, sir. You also must have heard something about it. Yes, sir. So what is your take on that? Sir, in my humble opinion, this time Kumbh Mela was organized very well and in fact, my family members have also visited here. They have taken various things into account like cleanliness was one of the most important things, managing the things in a very proper manner, like devising the exit gate and entry gate and proper management of the waste was there. But do you think all these practices can be replicated in other places? Yes, sir, definitely. Because these... What are the practices that you can... Do you think you can replicate in such a time? Like effective waste management with respect to the home area that has been there. Second thing, you apply technology to disseminate the information best possible manner so that people don't face any kind of problem with respect to the arrangements. The third is that the proper administration management with respect to the crowd management and all those things, traffic management were getting good at that places. So that could be replicated in the Suntankur. So all these things is related to sanitation, traffic, crowd management, all these things can be replicated. Yes, sir. Even though the Suntankur municipality doesn't have so many people to work and so much money to work, even then you think it can be replicated. Yes, sir. Fun current is an issue. But if the idea is... Fun current is also a significant problem. But we have a proper plan. Then we can implement it in the phase wise manner. You can do it in the phase. Yes, sir. They have priorities. Like sanitation will be the first priority. Because it has a multiplier effect. You know, right in Suntankur has been the prime minister. Yes, sir. Long, long, long time. Yes, sir. But looking at the development... Yes, sir. One that they don't look like prime minister. Why do you think that's happened? What is the reason? Sir, there are few reasons behind that. The first thing is that the factured mandate that in fact all UP has, like people basically focus on prime model like caste, class and religion. The second is that lack of political reason. Because often it has represented the prime minister, so regional issues get sidelined and then regional issues get priority. So this is also one issue. So you are... Yes, sir. Yes, sir. The third issue is that because of poverty and electricity people are not very much assertive with respect to their demands of development. And they are not looking like that. They are more attached with that particular constituency with respect to their caste and caste. So that is the reason. From UP, there is a lot of menace of this free cattle. Yes. And they say that a lot of cattle are also dying because they are not being looked after in the Gorshalas. Yes. I just read that 200 cattle died in murder and in Rajasthan five cattle died every day. So what can be done to take care of this problem? Can you think of any suggestions? Yes, sir. In fact, in the recent budget by the U.S. government 1,600 crore has been set aside for the cattle, and they are constructing the centres for the cows. So this is one thing. Second thing is that can be done that the issue with respect to mistake at us like centres can be built in the gram panchayat. So the centres are being built in the gram panchayat. What about the fodder? There is no money for the fodder. So just building a shelter is not enough? Yes, sir. In fact, that's why the UP government has updated 1,600 cows so that the fodder management can be done. And it can be capitalised also like cow products like we can capitalise in the area of organic manure and all those things. What can be all those things? Like organic manure can be used with respect to the centres right here. And we can promote organic farming. So that is going to benefit the lotters. Along with like urine of the cows is important with respect to it can act as a pesticide also. So these things can be taken into account. Okay. Now the loan waivers given to farmers do you think that was a good scheme? All states have been giving loan waivers in the last few years. What are your views on it? When I am in my humble opinion I think loan waivers are not good for farmers in the long run because in the long run they require structural reforms in the agriculture which is going to benefit the farmers. But does a farmer, as poor farmers, validate that loan from an institution? Yes, and there is a second point where only 26 per cent credit is given to the farmers from the farmer's sector. And the poor and marginalized farmers are taking loans from the moneylenders. And they are not getting benefited out of that. In fact, the large farmers are getting benefited and they are using that for other problems. So there was this green revolution. And now we are talking about an evergreen revolution. Can you tell me something about this second green revolution? As far as evergreen revolution is concerned we are in first green revolution we focus on the weak and padded. Whereas in evergreen revolution we are focusing on magical crops. What are the crops that we are targeting? We are targeting like... Pulse seeds? Pulse seeds are also sugarcane. And in fact the... How can you grow sugarcane in the context? Pulse seeds and corn seeds. Right? They are diversifying into fortified seeds. Yes. So what else? Which are the areas? In evergreen revolution we are talking about the northeast and the eastern part of India which does not benefit from such green revolution. There is also a blue revolution which is being talked about. Can you tell me something about it? Blue revolution talks about production of facilities in the inland waterway, in the inland as well as in the oceans also. So to increase the size of production so that it can benefit the farmers as well as the fishermen as well. Mr. Lugay, Mr. Alapam. You have worked in the software industry for about three years, right? What is the contribution of the software sector to India? What are its main contributions? The main contribution of the software in the area of the services sector that is the software services that we are providing to the rest of the country, the United States, the UK and the direct contribution of the... So the major source of follow-ups is there, right? Yes. Right? Software exports? Yes. But at the same time there are certain problems especially with this sector. So the problems related to... We are only focusing in the area of the services program providing services. Second is because of automation there are lots of jobs that will be happening. The third is there is literally being done on the software product side which is the contribution of which is very least as compared to... Lots of uncertainties. Yes, uncertainties with respect to the... How much of foreign exchange we are getting at present in India? FDF? Why... We are a pioneer in the software sector. Hardware... I think FDF is hardly... Yes. So why the picture is so distorted in the hardware sector? There are a few reasons, man. The first most important reason is that early opening of the software sector before liberalization so that it can prepare for the... It can prepare for the... Drawing companies in the market. Second... I just want to talk about... The huge investment. Where are we going to start to hire a huge investor? I think that's a satisfactory explanation. Okay. I'll come to another sector of banking sector. Yes. What are the problems faced by the banks today? Particularly the public sector banks. Sir, the major problem faced by the public sector bank is that they are not profiting assets and the Senate... Not profiting assets. Yes, not profiting assets. The Senate is that because of that they are not able to meet the credits so that it also... What is the extent of the NPA at present? We have some data. Okay. Why NPA has gone up to such a large level? It's about 11 to 12 percent. Yes. So why it has reached that level? And which are the sectors where NPA is the most important? The sectors like large infrastructure projects like OBEF and... Okay. So another project with respect to huge infrastructure in the industry like Bridget. The reason why it is NPA has mounted because of regulation issues with respect to the army and we won't have a demand without any corrective support. Due diligence was not followed? Yes sir, due diligence was not followed. Certain steps have been taken by the government and by OBEF to address this problem. Yes. Just briefly mention what are these steps? Sir, in the counter-active action that has been taken by the army and it's already seen that the support has been brought by the government of India so that the army is released from these rules to the last question. Reporate. What is meant by reporate? Reporate is the right techniques the army gets next to the bank based on the government support. Recently, reporate was brought down? Yes. What was the logic behind it? The logic behind it brought it down. Reporate was in say some other control and we need to plug in the credit but that is not happening so that was the reason. Reporate was brought down. Priority sector lending, what is the meaning of that? And what are these priority sectors? Priority sector lending means that banks while doing credit to the sector they need to set aside some part of the credit. How much? What percentage? Sir, one of them is 42 percent. My priority sector lending area is like agriculture, education and more and small and medium sector enterprises. Thank you. Name some strengths of UP that you feel it has some strong points. Sir, strength of UP with respect to huge demographic dividends that it has. That's nothing. The second is that it has a cultural. The first one is wrong. It's common to everything and it is not necessarily a dividend. It's turning into a burden, more of a burden. Yes. We need to capitalize on that. That's what we do. It is all a visual thinking. You say where it is actually strong. Second is that it has huge culture and more material. So it can catalyze in the... Not right. Tourism potential is huge. It's important. Now with that, it has also had a potential with respect to that small and medium sector enterprises. In fact, said UP government has launched one district... You are talking about potential. You are not talking about potential. It has no achievements. No achievements. Then why don't you mention those? In fact, UP is the second-largest producer of leather in the Indian. Then you say those. Who is number one? Number one is Tamil Nadu. Yes. And UP has also second-largest production of the sewer came in the country which is contributing to it. You are right. I think it's number one. Yes. In recent times, it is trying to... It is already number one. Sugar production. Yes. After Maharashtra. Maharashtra is far behind now. What else? Other thing is that... It's number one in milk production. Yes, milk production is... It has third-largest GDP in other states. Which are the number two? The exact reason I don't know but Maharashtra is Tamil Nadu. Maharashtra is Tamil Nadu. Alright. Now, names of weaknesses which you would be ashamed of. Sir, the weaknesses in respect to the social sector indicator that it is. Like... Where does it stand among states in human life? Sir, it is thirty-six. A lot of thirty-six. It is really dismal. This is one weakness. What else? Second weakness is respect to the... Like we are not able to capitalize on the demographic we have... Another weakness is respect to the... Second weakness is low economic growth. Yes. Very low economic growth. Just 6.4% in respect to all the... all the fertile lands it has gotten. Yes. Low economic growth. These are the two. Yes. Then third is, it is right with Tamil Nadu problems. Yes. Tamil issues, caste issues, some of the bad things. Yes. Alright. Computer science is the same. What is IOT? Sir, IOT stands for the Internet of Things. It is a... network of connected devices like home appliances, mobile phone and cars. What medium connects them? Sir, Internet basically is used to connect. In fact, Internet can also be... Internet is a... Internet is the medium. Connecting them. Yes. Yes. So, what are the practical issues? There is one other important component, the priority. Just in there it is not... Without sensors, what... Yes, sensors and actuators is a basic component. But they try to communicate with the machines as well as the... What are the practical applications? Sir, as far as practical applications concerned, it can be used... in multiple areas. It can be used to control the home environment and it can be used to... ease the life of the people. Automatic sensors can be used in the home as well as mobile. What are the much bigger uses then? Home comforts. So much bigger uses... Industry... Industry is... Artificial intelligence. Yes. Artificial intelligence. Now, what are the practical uses of artificial intelligence? Sir, as far as practical uses concerned, it can be used in the machine learning process. It can be used in the natural language processing and it can be used in the robotic system. That is in the process. Practical uses. Sir, what are the practical uses? Sir, practical uses... In fact, it can be used in the automatic cars like... self driver... driverless cars can be used. It can be used. It can be used in the field of medicine. Medicine has... It is being tried in America that manual cumbersome jobs... The machines are taking over those jobs. Yes, with the help of... With the help of artificial intelligence. Like making appointments. Better use of time. Better use of time. What is robotics? Sir, robotics is basically use of machine with the help of algorithm which can perform those jobs which are considered... Mineral and which are considered difficult for the human being. Repetitive job. Which eliminates human labor. Yes, sir. Now, what is drone? Sir, drone is a device which... Unmanned area vehicle. Unmanned area vehicle device. Correct? Yes. What are its practical uses? Sir, it can be used in many areas like it can be used in the... It can be used in the agriculture. It can be used for transporting organs not... Transporting, yes. It has legalized it? Yes, sir. India has legalized it. And it has come up with some rules of what are the areas where unmanned area vehicle cannot be. Yes, correct. It has legalized December 2018. One policy was initiated. Now, public administration is your subject. Yes. Good governance concept as initiated by the World Bank. Are you aware of it? Yes. Are you aware of it? Yes, sir. Yes. The catalytic government and consumer-oriented government is passing transparent rule of law. So, these are many things. Transparency. Rule of law. Who gave this concept of rule of law? Sir, dies in this concept of rule of law. Who gave the concept of separation of powers? Montest. Oh, yes. Montest. Does it exist in India? Yes, sir. There is a separation of power in India but there is not a water type separation of power. Not a water. Very good. May improve unitary features of our party. Sir, unitary features like we have similar students. We have integrated duty setting. Then, important ones. Emergency powers. They will give over a second. In the three lists Union gets a much bigger land share. Yes. These are the two most important. Now, we close the interview and I am giving you a feedback. By and large, I am giving you a summary of the interview. By and large, you have handled the interview nicely and you have been able to handle more subjects nicely. We feel this is how your interview would run, actual interview. Right? So, you are from UP. So, on UP, you must prepare well. Yes, sir. Its strong points, its may points, what is being done to to eradicate regional disparities, etc., etc. Number two is public administration. Do you have any questions? In public administration, there are important judgments of Supreme Court. Like the basic structure concept or due process of law there are commitments in politics of Supreme Court.  Sunil. Then we come to computer science. I have asked you a few questions think of all the more questions like On the 5G, and Constitucion principles are done you are told that, lastly, current affairs. This is not a correct practice. This is not a correct practice. This is not a correct practice. This is not a correct practice. This is not a correct practice. This is not a correct practice.