ravi menon : future of finance jobs opening remarks by mr ravi menon, managing director of the monetary authority of singapore, and chairman of the institute of banking and finance, at the launch of the study on future of finance jobs, singapore, 23 april 2019. * * * mrs josephine teo, minister for manpower, members of the ibf council, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to ibf. ibf will be turning 45 this year. it is hard to imagine the financial sector today without the ibf. not all countries have the equivalent of an ibf. fewer still have as strong a collaboration as we do here in ibf – among financial institutions and between financial institutions and the regulator. and all for a common cause that has been consistent for the last 45 years – to equip the professionals in our financial sector to do their jobs better, and to make the singapore financial centre more competitive ibf began life in much simpler times. its primary aim in the 1970s through the 1990s was to provide training for the financial sector professionals. in the 2000s, ibf shifted its focus to setting competency standards and facilitating skills development for the industry. looking to the future, the jobs and skills landscape in the financial industry is a lot more complex and uncertain. technology is transforming finance – the way financial services are produced, distributed, and consumed. this means that jobs in financial services will also be transformed. we need to take a more sophisticated, integrated, and purposeful approach to prepare our workforce for the future of jobs. this is why mas and ibf commissioned ernst & young to study the impact of data analytics and automation – the two most immediate technologies – on jobs in the financial sector. the study takes a three to five year time horizon. it reviewed 121 distinct job roles in the financial industry, examining how data analytics and automation are likely to change the individual tasks in these 121 job roles. it identified the additional skills that would be necessary to perform these new tasks. the study took nine months to complete and the findings have been validated extensively with more than 80 industry participants. many of you here contributed to this study. you will be hearing from ernst & young later on the study findings, and minister teo will speak more on this, including how the industry, the labour movement, and government are coming together to put into action the key strategies emerging from the study. i want to make three key points that i think are worth keeping in mind : 1 / 3 bis central bankers'speeches

for job creation. this explanation has emphasized a favorable relative return on u. s. investment, coupled with increased foreign willingness to hold dollar assets, as causal factors driving the united states ’ growing current account deficit and low national saving rate. but causation may in part also have run from structural influences that contributed to reduced u. s. saving. that is, a fiscal policy shift toward greater deficits and innovations in financial markets and other structural changes that facilitated household spending worked to lower national saving relative to domestic investment. the resultant upward pressure on rates of return here relative to those abroad have helped to draw in capital and increase the current account deficit. for a model - based examination of this question, see “ u. s. current account deficit : causes and consequences, ” remarks by vice chairman roger w. ferguson, jr. to the economics club of the university of north carolina at chapel hill, chapel hill, north carolina ( april 20, 2005 ). unwinding the imbalances what can we say about the likely path by which these spending imbalances will resolve themselves and about the effects those resolutions will have on the broader economy? almost a year ago, the federal reserve started a process of removing the unusual degree of policy accommodation, which was outliving its usefulness as the economic expansion gathered strength and the possibility of declines in inflation receded. we have not yet finished this task : the federal funds rate appears to be below the level that we would expect to be consistent with the maintenance of stable inflation and full employment over the medium run, and, if growth is sustained and inflation remains contained, we are likely to raise rates further at a measured pace. by increasing the return to saving and by damping the upward momentum in housing prices, rising interest rates should induce an increase in the personal savings rate, and thereby lessen one of the significant spending imbalances we have noted. forecasting the path of the overall spending - production imbalance is more difficult. to a great extent, continuation of the current account deficit depends on the willingness of investors to provide financing. one factor that will influence their willingness is the rate at which u. s. dollar assets are increasing in global portfolios relative to other assets. we can speculate that unless a persistently large current account deficit in the united states is accompanied by further and continuous shifts in the world ’ s willingness to increase holdings of dollar - denominated assets in their total portfolios, investors will ultimately require higher ex