Ravi Menon: opportunities  Global  outlook,  Asian  promise,  alternative  Speech by Mr Ravi Menon, Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, at the DBS Institutional Investor Symposium 2017, Singapore, 22 June 2017. * * * Mr Piyush Gupta, CEO, DBS Bank Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. I am happy to join you today, and I thank DBS Bank for the invitation. The American author John Maxwell once said, “The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.” As investors, you too seek to adjust the sails, to avoid being knocked over by market turbulence and to find new harbours of opportunity. So, what are the winds facing us like? Let me offer some thoughts in three areas: First, the global economy and financial markets – where are we today, what are the risks? Second, Asia’s medium-term prospects and the promise it offers to investors. Third, opportunities in alternative assets as investors look to unlock new sources of value. Global economy and financial markets The global outlook seems rather straightforward at this point. Growth is on a positive momentum and is increasingly broad-based, across both advanced and emerging economies. Global trade has picked up, manufacturing has recovered, and commodity prices have bottomed. Most measures of confidence are looking up. But the factors that underpin sustained growth – capital investment and productivity – remain weak in most parts of the world.
Its aims were shaped by an extreme tail event (the Great Depression) and were explicitly minimax (to avoid a repetition). It sought to achieve this by acting directly on the structure of the financial system, quarantining commercial bank and brokering activities through red-line regulation. In other words, Glass-Steagall satisfied all three robustness criteria. And so it proved, lasting well over half a century without a significant systemic event in the US. The contrast with Basel II is striking. This was anything but simple, comprising many thousands of pages and taking 15 years to deliver. It was calibrated largely to data drawn from the Great Moderation, a period characterised by an absence of tail events – more minimin than minimax. Basel II was underpinned by a complex menu of capital risk weights. This was fine-line, not red-line, regulation. In short, Basel II satisfied few of the robustness criteria. And so it proved, overwhelmed by the recent crisis scarcely after it had been introduced. (c)  Incentives  Tail risk within some systems is determined by God – in economist-speak, it is exogenous. Natural disasters, like earthquakes and floods, are examples of such tail risk. Although exogenous, even these events have been shown to occur more frequently than a normal distribution would imply. 24 God’s distribution has fat tails. Tail risk within financial systems is not determined by God but by man; it is not exogenous but endogenous. This has important implications for regulatory control. Finance theory tells us that risk brings return.