The OMFIF Podcast

The economic impact of financial sanctions against Russia

The West has rolled out tough financial sanctions against Moscow with unprecedented speed, magnitude and multilateral co-operation. This move will not stop Russian tanks, but it will squarely impoverish President Vladimir Putin’s regime.

Danny Glaser, global head of jurisdictional services at K2 Integrity and former assistant secretary at the US Treasury overseeing sanctions, and Christopher Smart, chief global strategist and head of the Barings Institute, as well as former US Treasury/National Security Council special assistant to the president, join OMFIF's US Chair Mark Sobel. They discuss the efficacy, historical context and the economic consequences of the sanctions across the globe. 

Exploring the link between gold and central bank digital currencies

What impact will the emergence of central bank digital currencies and cryptoassets have on the gold market? John Reade, chief market strategist at the World Gold Council, and Bob Wardrop, director and co-founder of the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, join David Marsh, OMFIF chairman, to explore this question. They expand on topics emerging from the recent OMFIF and World Gold Council paper ‘Central bank digital currencies and gold’, including those surrounding geopolitics, inflation, trust and the role of gold in a future dominated by CBDCs and cryptoassets.

The revival of inflation and the threat to central bank independence

Charles Goodhart, emeritus professor of economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, talks to David Marsh, chairman of OMFIF, about his theses on the effects of demography and immigration, the revival of inflation and the threat to central bank independence. He sees this latter danger as particularly virulent from right-wing governments, including from the possibility of a re-elected Donald Trump (or indeed from a return of any Republican administration in the US).  Goodhart is a veteran central bank watcher who was a founder member of the Bank of England monetary policy committee in 1997-2000. He has warned for years that central banks may be unable to tighten interest rates sufficiently to ward off inflation because this would further exacerbate the budgetary problems of debt-ridden governments. In his prescient book from 2020, co-authored with Manoj Pradhan, The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival, the two authors explain the societal and economic changes wrought an ageing society.  They believe that the fall in the workforce will inevitably shift bargaining power to lower-paid workers and trade unions. Political resistance, they forecast, will prevent immigration from being large enough to reinflate the supply of labour and diminish inflationary pressures.

The future of cross-border payments: achieving instant and frictionless payments

Following the publication of ‘The future of payments 2021’ report, Saskia Devolder, strategic programme director, SWIFT, joins John Orchard, chief executive officer of OMFIF, to discuss the financial community’s collective cross-border payments initiatives aimed at overcoming challenges to instant and frictionless payments. They also discuss predictions of what the payments space will look like in five years and the role of CBDCs in the future of payments.

Driving biodiversity and conservation finance: In-conversation with WWF

Thomas Vellacot, CEO, WWF Switzerland, joins Emma McGarthy, head of OMFIF’s Sustainable Policy Institute, to discuss the role WWF is playing in biodiversity and conservation finance. They discuss how governments and private industries are developing financing solutions to protect and sustainably manage natural resources. They explore solutions to biodiversity financing and risk considerations, as well as the latest developments in carbon pricing and mechanisms for driving the transition to net zero and increasing ecological conservation.

View the panel discussed in this podcast here.

Digital exchanges and the future of financial assets

The digital assets landscape is growing rapidly in both scale and variety. As the first regulated digital securities exchange, Six Digital Exchange is at the heart of this developing market. Michele Curtoni, Head of Strategy at SDX, joins Lewis McLellan, editor of OMFIF’s DMI, to discuss the benefits that a new digital architecture for financial securities is starting to bring. Curtoni goes into detail on the benefits of distributed ledger technology in improving the settlement of different asset classes and the disruption that it enables. He also discusses how to solve what he calls the ‘cold start problem’ — the problem of how to simultaneously introduce digital assets, liquidity, and a dedicated digital market infrastructure.

A macroeconomic overview and the Bank of England’s monetary policy

With the impact of Covid-19 on international monetary and financial conditions, as well as higher energy and goods prices, Catherine Mann, external member of the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England, discusses the latest economic projections for the UK. She offers her thinking on effects on inflation and the direction of monetary policy. 

To view the slides mentioned in this podcast, please visit our website here: https://www.omfif.org/videos/a-macroeconomic-overview-and-the-bank-of-englands-monetary-policy/

 

Ahead of the ECB: Inflation, central bank reserves management and risks

Max Castelli and Athanasios Orphanides discuss inflation expectations in the euro area and how these impact monetary policy thinking and market behaviour. Talking to Ellie Groves, Castelli, head of strategy, global sovereign markets at UBS Asset Management, and Orphanides, who is professor of the practice of global economics and management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, as well as former governor of the Central Bank of Cyprus and member of the European Central Bank governing council, contextualise inflation forecasts from the ECB and UBS. They explore what is in store for central bank reserves managers as they navigate investing in riskier assets and the biggest risks facing the financial community in 2022.

Reflections on the Fed and risks to financial stability

Randal Quarles, former member of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System, joins Mark Sobel, US chair, OMFIF, for a broad discussion on the outlook of the Federal Reserve. Their discussion will take in everything from the economic outlook, financial stability to Randal’s reflections on his time at the Fed and as Chair of the Financial Stability Board. 

Technical issues around the introduction CBDCs and their policy implications

As economies around the world look for ways to foster greater financial inclusion, conversations have increased around upgrading the global payments system, both wholesale and retail. Koji Fusa, chief executive officer at GVE, joins John Orchard, chief executive officer of OMFIF, to discuss the tension between privacy and oversight if physical cash is phased out, characteristics of a two-tier (opted for by the People’s Bank of China and most other central banks considering CBDCs) and three-tier system. A closer look at the impact on tokens and contracts used to settle transactions if a new payments system is created involving using blockchain or distributed ledger technology is also explored. 

View the graph mentioned in the podcast here.