Speeches  Published Date: 04 May 2021  "A Tech-Enabled Financial Sector – Is Our Workforce Ready?" Remarks by Mr Ravi Menon, Managing Director, Monetary Authority of Singapore, at “Growing Timber” MAS-IBF Webinar Series on 4 May 2021 Good morning and thank you for joining us. At the “Growing Timber” webinar six months ago, I spoke about: how jobs are the central economic challenge of our times; where the job opportunities in financial services are; how we can make our tertiary students job-ready for the financial sector; and  how we can help our mid-career workers retain their jobs amid technological changes. Today, I want to focus on two topics: an update on job opportunities in financial services based on MAS’ latest employment outlook survey; and the most challenging part of our jobs and skills agenda – job specialisation, specifically in the area of technology, based on a deep dive study MAS has done. On both topics, I will be sharing for the first time some granular data and information so that we can have a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities on the jobs and skills front in the financial sector. Job Opportunities - Employment Outlook for Financial Sector Let me start with job opportunities. The financial sector added 2,200 net jobs in 2020 – a year when the economy as a whole shed 180,000 net jobs. About 2,800 net jobs went to Singaporeans; non-Singaporeans accounted for a net job loss of 600. This 100% Singaporean share of net job growth is unusual.
Welfare schemes had to be cut, schools closed and the pupils had to learn to swim in the cold fjords because the swimming pools were closed. The main argument used in favour of new and complex instruments is that they facilitate risk sharing across economic agents. But risks that are not understood can hardly be shared in any optimal way. It is also important to keep in mind that risk sharing can also be promoted through simpler and more conventional instruments. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  Our oil fund – managed by Norges Bank and with more than 500 billion dollars under management – set up a special instrument committee after the recent financial crisis. The committee must sanction every financial instrument before it can be used for investments. As a result, the number of instruments available to the Fund’s managers has been significantly reduced, in particular fixed-income and derivatives instruments, since the committee was established. One factor behind the financial crisis was a very important market distortion described by Hyman Minsky: The interaction between asset prices and credit volumes may create a spiral where both asset prices and credit rise to unsustainable levels. The use of financial innovations to create more credit with the result that it fuels such a spiral is clearly not a socially desirable use. Adair Turner of the British FSA1 has pointed out that credit and asset bubbles also represent a massive misallocation of capital in the real economy.