- Guest post: Libya after Gaddafi
FT Beyondbrics, October 21, 2011
Thierry APOTEKER focuses on Libya after Gaddafi’s views and consequences on the oil production situation and outlook in a paper published in the FT Beyondbrics, the FT’s emerging markets hub.
The complete fall of the Libyan regime and the end of Colonel Gaddafi’s 42-year rule is opening a new chapter for the country. Its small population (5.5m people), large oil resources (exports of oil and gas reached $44bn in 2010) and the dire need for substantial reconstruction spending hold great appeal for international companies. But the challenges facing the governing National Transition Council and the risk of new rounds of instability and violence are substantial. How to define the right path forward?
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- Participation to the 8th International Conference on the "Chinese Economy"
CERDI-IDREC and the University of Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, October 20-21, 2011
The CERDI-IDREC organises every two years an international conference on the Chinese economy. The conference attracts participants worldwide to address major economic issues and challenges that China and the world are currently facing. The theme of this eighth conference is “New Challenges for China’s Economy”.
Sandrine Lunven, quantitative economist at TAC, is undertaken a PhD with Dr Eric Girardin, a well-known French specialist on China’s economy, at the GREQAM research center (Aix-Marseille). As part of their research, Sandrine presented at this conference an analysis on the mechanisms and the efficiency of monetary policy transmission across the yield curve in China during the recent financial crisis. Their paper should be finalized and published in few months.
- Solution to Euro Zone Debt Crisis
CNBC, October 18, 2011
Thierry Apoteker, CEO, Founder and Chief Economist at T-A-C Financial, discusses ways to resolve the European debt crisis.
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- Perils of marking to market sovereign risk
The Banking Conversation, October 17, 2011
Conversation with Thierry Apoteker, CEO, TAC Financial, on
- Can Europe pull back from the Greek abyss, and what needs to be done to do so. (part 1 of 3)
- Why Europe can't print money like the US, and the other options it has - the historical foundation of currency union - why the Greece debt crisis in entirely manageable. (part 2 of 3)
- Seeing the “glass half full” on the US economic problems - why the current crisis is foremost a crisis of confidence — how all this impacts emerging Asia. (part 3 of 3)
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- Self Organizing Maps, Pattern Recognition and Financial Crises
FFM, May 2011
Neural networks, and particularly feedforward or multilayer perceptrons, become more and more popular in data mining and notably in the fields of finance and risk analysis. However, if these supervised neural networks are very powerful for the approximation of multivariable functions, unsupervised clustering techniques are probably more useful when analyzing high dimensional data and when no information is available on output or groups ‘a priori’.
Self organizing maps (SOM) are a particular class of unsupervised neural networks that enable to identify non-linear patterns and clusters on large datasets through the visualisation of groups on maps.
Despite existing classification of country crises, the large number of financial crises in emerging markets since the 80s has left many observers, both from academia and financial institutions, puzzled by an apparent lack of homogenous causal relations between economic variables and the bursting of large financial shocks. Moreover, heterogeneous and complex interactions between economic and financial variables blur any clear identification of risky economic patterns that could lead to large shocks on domestic financial systems.
The SOM methodology presented in this paper combines macroeconomic and financial variables in a non-linear and non-parametric way that is able to capture the combinatorial aspect of such causal relations. Moreover, it provides a flexible and visual display tool (implemented in Java/Processing), allowing for the identification of similarities between crises. In this research, we conduct different pattern recognition analyses using SOM on various samples of countries since the 80s, and different sets of financial crises (currency shocks, banking crises, sovereign crises...). The SOM toolbox implemented here illustrate the potential of such methods for the identification of granularities or typologies of crises as well as non-linearities in their causes or symptoms.
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- European Central Banking System (ECBS). An increase in the balance sheet because of the crisis, a fairly modest rise.
Banker's Comment, October 2011
This month, Jean-Pierre Patat looks at the European Central Banking System.
Quite deliberately we talk here of the ECBS and not of the ECB, since almost all operations are carried out by national central banks; commercial banks having no account at the ECB.
Between the start of 2007 and today, ECBS assets went from 1,337 billion to 2,071 billion euros. Of the 734 billion increase, 230 billion result from growth in gold reserves and currency (almost wholly from rises in the value of gold holdings). Classic refinancing operations increased moderately, from 473 billion to 573 billion euros, with the ECBS having above all replaced short term operations by long term refinancing. It is of course the purchasing of sovereign bonds, so controversial, which increased most: from 173 billion to 534 billion. We might note, though, that the holding of such bonds were already 173 billion before the crisis.
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- mdgTrack.org
Monitoring the Millennium Development Goals
TAC is proud to announce the availability of mdgTrack.org, a new website designed to track progress on the Millennium Development Goals over more than 140 locations worldwide.
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- Celebrating 20 years of TAC
20 years of independant research for corporates, financial institutions and multilateral organizations
20 years since the creation of TAC in January 1991! When looking back at these 20 years, there is a mixed feeling of nostalgia when remembering the defining moments of the company’s development and of alarm when looking at the scope and depth of the world changes and the parallel challenge for understanding and analyzing unfolding events... And one conviction left: such changes are not about to subside: they are the initial signs of a completely different economic and political architecture worldwide and the need to read properly such changes will remain as acute as ever.
- European Commission Framework Contract Lot1
January 2011
We are very pleased to announce that TAC is a member of a consortium selected among the assignees of lot 1 (Studies and Technical assistance in all sectors) of the new EC Framework Contracts (EuropeAid/129783/C/SER/multi). This Framework Contract will cover short-term technical assistance requirements in the fields of investment, trade, development policies and macro issues for the next three years. To apply please send your CVs to pesca@tac-financial.com.
- Project Management
2010 achievements
Over the past 2 years, TAC has substantially developped its activities in the field of project management, organizing, monitoring and managing research studies and consulting assignments for multilateral organizations. We have had a very successful outcome in 2010 - our first full year of operation in this business - thanks to our commitments to providing highly skilled experts on very short notice and with tight constraints on one side, and to our permanent support to experts in the field and high quality relationship with them on the other side. We managed consulting assignments in regions and countries where complex political and economic background required strong expertise to adapt easily to problems and to different work environments.
The quality of our project management skills were highlighted by the selection of one of our projects as a "Best Practice" by the EC facility TradeCom, and the presentation of our know-how at a TradeCom's Best Practices Workshop held in Brussels on October 12, 2010.
2010 Technical assistance projects:
- TradeCom Facility (5 projects)
- FWC EC lot 5 (3 projects)
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