A Few White Papers
you are currently viewing::Gold in Central Bank Reserves: Strategic Considerations, Market Risks, and Practical GuidanceJuly 9, 2026-Gold has re-emerged as a prominent component of central bank reserves, largely reflecting valuation gains from higher gold prices rather than large-scale accumulation. This Note assesses gold's role from a reserve management perspective, emphasizing that while gold carries no credit risk and may support long-term balance-sheet resilience, it is highly volatile, offers only conditional hedging and diversification benefits, and is ill-suited to the liquidity tranche of reserves. The analysis recommends applying explicit market-risk haircuts when assessing gold's effective liquidity and avoiding interpretations of valuation gains as durable improvements in reserve adequacy. It also cautions that domestic gold purchase programs-especially those involving non-monetary gold-can create mandate, governance, balance-sheet, financial integrity, operational, and monetary policy risks. Central banks should treat gold as a high-risk reserve asset and anchor gold accumulation decisions in strategic asset allocation and sound policy analysis. Source: imf.org |
What Drives Crypto Mining? Evidence from Hardware Imports
July 10, 2026-Summary
Understanding financial activity beyond traditional regulatory frameworks is essential for policymakers. Yet cryptocurrency mining-which offers a direct entry point into the crypto ecosystem without relying on traditional financial intermediaries-remains highly opaque.
Aggregate Gains from AI and Their Distribution: Global Evidence from Usage Data
July 10, 2026-Summary
How large are the gains from AI, and how are they distributed across occupations? Using five waves of the Anthropic Economic Index (January 2025 to February 2026), we construct two novel measures from observed AI usage across countries over the world.
Financial Market Infrastructures Evolution in a Tokenized Economy
July 2, 2026-Summary
This paper examines how tokenization and distributed ledger technology may transform Financial Market Infrastructures (FMIs) by enabling smart contracts to perform a growing share of functions traditionally undertaken by central securities depositories, central counterparties, and trade repositories.
The Global Versus Local Identification of Macroeconomic Damages
June 30, 2026--Key takeaways:
Adrien Bilal and Diego R. Känzig's "The Macroeconomic Impact of Climate Change: Global Versus Local Temperature" (QJE, 2026) challenges the conventional approach of estimating physical climate risk-induced macroeconomic damages.
The paper argues that global temperature variation may capture a broader macroeconomic climate signal than local temperature variability alone, leading to substantially higher damage estimates than those reported in much of the established literature.
Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity in the Financial Sector
June 30, 2026-Summary
Artificial intelligence is reshaping cyber risk in the financial sector by accelerating the speed, frequency, and breadth of vulnerability discovery and potential exploitation. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in financial institutions and market infrastructures, it can strengthen cyber defense but also heighten systemic risk-particularly through shared digital infrastructure, common service providers, and machine-speed attack-defense dynamics that outpace human response.
Ireland: Selected Issues
June 29, 2026-The Irish economy has remained resilient amid trade and geopolitical tensions, but its favorable outlook faces challenges and uncertainties.
World Economic Forum-Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026
June 23, 2026--The top 10 emerging technologies of 2026 are:
1. Everything-to-grid energy
Everything-to-grid energy transforms buildings, vehicles and devices from passive electricity consumers into active grid resources, storing and returning power in real-time. New battery chemistries, smarter coordination software and updated compensation models are making this possible at scale.
Low-tech Longevity Investments Could Unlock $6 Trillion by 2040
June 23, 2026-Low-tech, low-cost strategies could prevent 400 million falls at home, 8.5 million new type 2 diabetes cases and 2.4 million dementia cases by 2040, while unlocking $5.8 trillion in healthcare savings and $645 billion in productivity gains. Yet much of that opportunity remains unrealized because governments and businesses manage health, finances and labour participation separately, a new World Economic Forum report finds.
Stack battles: the US-China artificial-intelligence rivalry is moving beyond chips alone
June 22, 2026--China is challenging US leadership in both AI hardware and software, with Europe unlikely to catch up
Despite Chinese progress, the United States remains for now ahead in the race for dominance over the so-called artificial intelligence hardware stack -the resources and equipment, especially semiconductors, needed to run AI models.
The Regenerative Blue Economy: Pathways to Prosperity
June 8, 2026-Marine ecosystems continue to degrade under pressure from warming seas, rising tides, pollution and overuse, undermining the long-term well-being of the communities and economies that depend on them. This report examines how to shift from the status quo- which perpetuates this decline -towards a regenerative blue economy.
