Speeches by Baldwin.

“Were they overly risk averse before?”

“That has changed.”

“Are you an advocate of the Bank of England bringing in a central bank digital currency?”

“Would you advocate for a particular stress test that has not been done yet or looked at?”

“Bringing to bear your expertise with quant, and your judgment from your experience to date, if we look at the stress tests run by the Bank to analyse where the potential risks might be, can you give us some commentary on whether you think it has been running the right sort of stress tests? Do you think there are stress…”

“As a potential to disintermediate a lot of the systemically important members of the financial system?”

“Do you think it poses any kind of risk to the financial system? In the past, we have been told it is not systemically important.”

“I am not sure whether I feel more or less worried than I did at the beginning of the session, but thank you.”

“Is that something we should be worried about in the context of artificial intelligence additionally being a structural problem for the UK?”

“That does not sound very reassuring. May I ask one final question on a slightly different topic? With protectionism and nationalism having been very prominent recently, to what extent does data fall into the area where we should worry about barriers being put in place for the flow of data?”

“Is your back-up plan pen and paper, as the National Cyber Security Centre recommended this week?”

“But the risk of the Bank of England, for example, being hacked and undermining our financial confidence as a country is so significant, Mr Mutton, that it must keep you up at night.”

“Thank you. Obviously, one of the risks we touched on is the cyber risk and the stress tests for industry participants. Clearly, one of the biggest worries is that bad actors get hold of some of the data, particularly now we are using so much more facial recognition and there are those databases and things like that. On…”

“Thank you. Changing subject, the Governor and the FPC recently made a statement about the valuation of AI stocks and the risk of a severe correction. Does that outweigh any of the other risks we have talked about today?”

“You have made a start and it sounds like there are more use cases to come, and more training. And at the Bank, Mr Mutton?”

“We have obviously had a really fascinating afternoon and a lot of subjects have been covered, but I am going to try to cover an eclectic bunch of things that have not been so far. The first question is, to what extent are your organisations using AI to reduce the cost of regulation, so that you are reducing your own co…”

“With other inheritance taxes, people have known about the seven-year rule, but because farmers were exempt from that, there are farmers who are now well into their 70s and 80s who have not done it. Again, that seems to be fundamentally unfair.”

“Or the future purchasers of them, yes.”

“Food security for the United Kingdom.”

“Would you all recommend that the Chancellor change the rules to reflect that? Are you all happy with those recommendations?”