When a financial system becomes impaired, there can be dire consequences for economic activity and the ability of central banks to achieve their macroeconomic objectives. Hélène’s work highlights an important global dimension to financial cycles, showing that gross capital flows, asset prices and credit often move in a synchronized way across countries as perceptions of risk change. As we now know all too well, the global financial crisis dramatically underscored the fact that instability in the U.S. financial system and those of other advanced economies imposed extraordinarily high costs on the entire global economy. Making the global financial system more resilient and less procyclical has been a key focus of policymakers since the financial crisis, and most countries have made substantial progress on this front. This is evident in stronger capital and liquidity buffers for banks, lower reliance on wholesale short-term funding, reforms of over-the-counter derivatives markets, and the development of resolution and recovery regimes for banks and key financial market infrastructures, among other efforts. Nonetheless, we must continue to work on these issues. In particular, the U.S. financial system—the epicenter of the crisis—has been considerably strengthened. Here, I would highlight additional reforms such as the Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) regime, which imposes annual capital stress tests on systemically important banks; tri-party repo reform; and money market mutual fund reform. Policymakers globally have also made good progress on strengthening supervisory oversight, and are making headway—albeit more slowly—in developing effective macroprudential frameworks and toolkits. But, more work remains to be done in several areas.

The next step is to look at skills upgrading, job placements, and career pathways in an integrated manner. The Institute of Banking & Finance, together with the industry, used the results of the study to develop a Skills Framework for Financial Services. Many financial institutions are using this framework to help plan career pathways, transitions in job roles, and training programmes. The third step is the most challenging: workforce transformation to support business transformation. Simply hiring those with the skills to fill emerging job roles and firing those who have become less relevant, will not work. We must invest in the existing workforce – building deep technical skills, broad lateral skills, and digital skills of the future. That’s what strategic human resource development means. Building a resilient workforce in the maritime industry will not be the same as in the financial industry – but there could be some potential take-aways. The maritime industry can consider doing similar granular analysis, to identify changing tasks and new skills in evolving job roles, map out skills gaps across the industry, and plan appropriate interventions. Maritime Singapore is off to a good start: the Skills Framework for Sea Transport, launched in 2017 and updated recently, identified skills in automation, engineering, data analytics, cyber security, and green shipping as growing in importance. The technology trends identified in the Skills Framework are bearing out.