too are a source of regulatory fear and foreboding. with financial data captured in a homogenous fashion across financial firms, the stage would be set for mapping much more comprehensively the contours of the financial world – an atlas of financial complexity to mirror hausmann ’ s atlas of economic complexity. technologically, there is no reason why tracking the financial web should be any more complex than tracking global supply chains or the web. monitoring global flows of funds, as they ebb and flow, should be possible in close to real time. to get a sense of the possible, consider the case of meteorology. it operates within a huge, interconnected global network, with cross - border information pooling. the logistics are eye - watering. forecasting the weather involves massively large - scale data sampling of over 100 million observations per day, across hundreds of thousands of locations scattered across the globe, measured along multiple dimensions. the result is a very high - dimension information grid, similar in some respects to the web. the information embedded in this high - dimension web is then aggregated, filtered and used to forecast weather patterns in close to real time. these weather predictions can be telescoped to any level of geographic granularity, from the smallest town to the largest continent. and the forecasts are made for timelines ranging from minutes to decades ahead. g20 ( 2008 ). bis central bankers ’ speeches there is no reason why, with the right data infrastructure captured in a common language, technology could not be used to map and simulate the risk contours of the global financial system. international regulatory authorities would play the role of the meteorologists. risk warnings, like weather warnings, would form part of the regulatory toolkit. so too would stress - tests of the impact of extreme financial events on the functioning of the global financial web. 41 ( d ) lowering barriers to entry paul volcker famously commented that the only useful piece of technological innovation in banking over the past 30 years had been the atm. what is certainly true is that some markets for banking products appear to lack contestability. that has meant large incumbents have often dominated the banking landscape, in much the same way as was true until recently in music and publishing. in banking, this lack of contestability is one root cause of the too - big - to - fail problem. consistent with that, birth and death rates in banking are lower than among non - financial companies. they are lower even than in other

all others, that led me to change my own story about growth. broadberry and wallis do two things. first, they construct some new estimates of growth going back to 1300. rather than relying on period averages, they use higher - frequency measures of growth. this changes the growth picture significantly. period averages conceal large, long - lasting swings in growth over time ( chart 4 ). their revised measures suggest growth did not flat - line prior to 1750, even though it averaged zero. rather, growth oscillated wildly. second, given the scale and duration of these oscillations, they decompose their growth data into “ expanding ” and “ contracting ” periods. chart 5 plots these for the uk over the past 700 years. a broadly similar pattern of expanding and contracting periods can be found in spain, france, italy, portugal, and the netherlands over roughly the same period. this decomposition changes the growth story radically. even prior to the industrial revolution, economies experienced notable periods of strongly positive growth. between 1300 and 1700, gdp expanded slightly more than half the time. over these expanding periods, growth averaged 5. 3 % per year. the reason average growth was far - lower over this earlier period – indeed, solow ( 1956 ), mincer ( 1984 ), romer ( 1990 ), iyer, kitson and toh ( 2005 ), north ( 1990 ). haldane ( 2015a ). broadberry and wallis ( 2017 ). all speeches are available online at www. bankofengland. co. uk / speeches little more than zero – was because expanding periods were almost exactly offset by contracting periods. they accounted for slightly less than half the period, during which growth averaged minus 5. 4 % per year. so what has changed in the period since the industrial revolution? growth during expansion periods is relatively little changed. since 1750, it has averaged 3. 2 % per year. that is in fact a bit less than growth during expansion periods prior to the industrial revolution. this strongly implies it is not the greater incidence of ideas - fuelled booms after 1750 that accounts for the growth inflexion. the explanation lies instead in the dramatic fall in both the probability and cost of gdp contractions. recessions have occurred only 30 % of the time since 1700 and only 17 % of the time since 1900. during these periods, growth has averaged minus 2. 2 % per year since 1700 and minus 3. 4 % per year