Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam is the chair of the G20 Eminent Persons Group (EPG) on Global Financial Governance.

The 16-member panel was set up in 2017. It comprises heavyweights with deep knowledge of finance and governance from all over the world.

They have collectively put together and released a document -- available here in PDF -- at the Annual Meetings of the IMF and World Bank in Bali this second week of October 2018.

It offers ideas for making the global financial system work for all in an age where cooperation and ties between powerful countries have frayed and not enough is being done to ensure development for all internationally in the years ahead.

A little more about Tharman

DPM Tharman, who is also Coordinating Minister for Economic and Social Policies and chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, began his five-year term as chairman of the Group of Thirty (G-30) consultative group on Jan. 1, 2017.

The 61-year-old was the first Asian to chair the G-30.

The Washington-based private group is made up of leading economists and policymakers from across the world, and seeks to deepen understanding of international economic and financial issues.

Tharman quoted Elvis Presley

Making the rounds on social media in Singapore is a quote by Tharman, where he liberally quoted Elvis Presley when he wrapped up the Group of 30 International Banking Seminar on Oct. 14.

The admonishment by Tharman for more action and less talk is the summing up sentiment in the 100-page report by the 16-member panel that has called for more urgency in getting things done -- hence, A Little Less Conversation.

One of the quotes in the EPG report reads: "The ambition is in the doing."

It was printed no less than three times in total.

Next 10 years important

At a Oct. 12 discussion on the group's recommendations at the annual membership meeting of the Institute of International Finance, a global finance industry association -- a few days before the entire event ended -- Tharman said the next 10 years will pose an immense challenge for the world.

This is so as more people are poised to reach working age in the developing world than in any past decade.

"Because we've succeeded in lifting large parts of humanity out of poverty, because China has succeeded, we now have a more multi-polar world," he said in Bali.

You can watch Tharman's views at a panel discussion in Bali here:

Views from report

His spoken views were a reiteration of the EPG report that said Africa alone will add 334 million job seekers by 2030, and Africa is where nine in 10 of the world’s poor people will be.

The group report stressed: "To bend the arc of history, we must succeed in Africa, where the poverty, demographic and environmental challenges are the largest -- and so too the opportunities to contribute to world growth and the global commons."

Bold and urgent reforms in development policies and financing are needed now to achieve growth, job opportunities and sustainability that the world needs in the coming decade.

It also said: "The current pace of reforms will not get us there."

Tharman restated as well the EPG report proposal.

He said: "We're not prepared in terms of job creation. We're not prepared in terms of financing. And this requires a new form of public-private partnership."

"There's tremendous untapped potential, but we've got to take it. And if we fail, the consequences are not merely going to be economic consequences."

Current account deficits worked

Tharman also noted that current account deficits are necessary for developing economies, even though they are maligned these days.

Using Singapore as an example, Tharman said our country ran a deficit till the mid-1980s, well above 5 percent of GDP.

"How can we make it possible for a country to run current account deficits, where it is fundamentally required, at that stage of growth to invest ahead and to create growth while savings are being built up?" he said.

"How can it be reliably financed and how can the international monetary and financial system be one where capital flows downhill once again and is invested in the right areas?"

"That's what motivates a lot of our report: Strengthening development finance and long-term finance, but also strengthening the resilience of the financial system."

Tharman on Bloomberg

Tharman's views on the causes of a weakening global financial system was hashed out in a separate Bloomberg interview on the side on the same day:

Tharman explained about the lost of resilience in the whole system at one point:

But the fundamental issue here, is not about individual policy weaknesses, which are there in every country. But about the fact that the system as a whole has lost its resilience.

There is too much short term capital flows dictating the future of countries. And countries have to respond by tightening policy, far more than it is warranted by domestic circumstance just to defend their currencies. What suffers is growth. It's not like the global finance crisis, where you had a major financial crisis that hit everyone at the same time and we all took a big knock. It was a recession, alright?

This time round, growth is being eroded by stealth. One country at a time, one episode at a time, one liquidity squeeze at a time. But if you accumulate it, it is a net reduction in growth for those countries, but also for the world economy. And we are lucky today because the US economy is healthy, but the cycle will turn, and we find that we won't have many other engines. We all need to be concerned about this.

Eminent Persons Group report summary

The 100-page EPG report makes three basic points on development finance -- a summary of which can be read here:

- The world needs a better system to achieve development impact through promoting economic stability and sustainable growth, and it needs it now.

- This requires global development finance institutions to work together as a system, rather than as separate entities.

- A new governance structure should provide coherence across key institutions to ensure that the system works well across all its component parts.

This is so as the diagnosis now is that “the present international monetary and financial system lacks the coherence, joint capacity, and effectiveness" to support the goals of international development, and there is a lack of urgency.

Moreover, the problem lies with the inability to start now as "shareholders could be described as being in a state of active inertia -- willing to talk about reform but without being willing to provide the political leadership needed to drive change".

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