, i am not entirely convinced that interlinking arrangements will necessarily deliver on those goals. let me explain with some context. faster and cheaper cross - border payments not all frictions that slow payments down are bad. certain frictions are purposely built into the global payment system for compliance and risk - management reasons. slowing down the speed at which payments are cleared and settled helps banks prevent money laundering and counter the financing of terrorism, detect fraud, and recover fraudulent 1 / 4 bis - central bankers'speeches or misdirected cross - border payments. granted, the practice today of sending payments through an often complex chain of correspondent banks contributes to slower payments that could benefit from efficiency enhancements. however, there is no silver bullet that increases speed and efficiency without tradeoffs. unless new solutions are found, interlinking fast payment systems might increase the risk - management burden for banks that participate in them. that is, legal, compliance, and operational considerations are critical to the discussion of the promise and challenges of interlinking. governance, oversight, and settlement arrangements also need to be thought through, along with considerations for data privacy. in addition, can we assume that all parties to a cross - border transaction want faster payments? the fundamental friction in any transaction is that the seller of an object - a can of soup, an hour of labor, or a good manufactured for export - wants to receive their money as fast as possible. however, the buyer of the object, or the buyer's intermediary, typically has an incentive to wait as long as they can to pay for something they have purchased. under this logic, senders need to be properly incentivized to speed up cross - border payments. the one exception may be person - to - person remittances, where workers from other countries want to send money home, and recipients want access, as fast as possible. but remittances are only a small percentage of the value of cross - border payments, so we'd need to weigh the benefits against the costs of a potential public - sector intervention to shift incentives. so, i am still left with the larger question of whether we should be incentivizing faster cross - border payments. suppose we do want to incentivize senders by lowering costs of faster payments - whose responsibility is it to do that? should it be left to private - sector competition to drive down costs as is typically the case with other products? or is there something unique

number enrolled in school, and those who may lack the necessary skills or face other barriers to taking jobs. the rise in the average workweek since early 1996 suggests employers are having increasingly greater difficulty fitting the millions who want a job into available job slots. if the pace of job creation continues, the pressures on wages and other costs of hiring increasing numbers of such individuals could escalate more rapidly. to be sure, there remain an additional 34 million in the working - age population ( age 16 - 64 ) who say they do not want a job. presumably, some of these early retirees, students, or homemakers might be attracted to the job market if it became sufficiently rewarding. however, making it attractive enough could also involve upward pressures in real wages that would trigger renewed price pressures, undermining the expansion. thus, there would seem to be emerging constraints on potential labor input. even before we reach the ultimate limit of sustainable labor supply growth, the economy ’ s ability to expand employment at the recent rate should rapidly diminish. the availability of unemployed labor could no longer add to growth, irrespective of the degree of slack in physical facilities at that time. simply adding new facilities will not increase production unless output per worker improves. such improvements are possible if worker skills increase, but such gains come slowly through improved education and on - the - job training. they are also possible as capital substitutes for labor, but are limited by the state of technology. more significant advances require technological breakthroughs. at the cutting edge of technology, where america finds itself, major improvements cannot be produced on demand. new ideas that matter are hard won. the economic outlook as i noted, the recent performance of the labor markets suggests that the economy was on an unsustainable track. unless aggregate demand increases more slowly than it has in recent years - - more in line with trends in the supply of labor and productivity - - imbalances will emerge. we do not know, however, at what point pressures would develop - - or indeed whether the economy is already close to that point. fortunately, the very rapid growth of demand over the winter has eased recently. to an extent this easing seems to reflect some falloff in growth of demand for consumer durables and for inventories to a pace more in line with moderate expansion in income. but some of the recent slower growth could simply be a product of abnormal weather patterns, which contributed to a first - quarter surge in output and weakened the