Henry Thornton Lecture 2025: Global value chains and the transmission of financial conditions to real activity

This year's Henry Thornton Lecture will be delivered by Hyun Song Shin, Economic Adviser and Head of the Monetary and Economic Department at BIS on "Global value chains and the transmission of financial conditions to real activity".

Firms enmeshed in densely connected supply chains operate with large working capital. The elastic nature of the monetary system through credit lines sustains the system, but also makes sales highly sensitive to shifts in financial conditions. This lecture maps out the mechanisms and presents evidence from firm-level data on how fluctuations in real economic activity result from changes in global financial conditions. Firms that are more tightly connected within global value chains show greater sensitivity in sales to fluctuations in financial conditions. The broad dollar index plays a key role as a barometer of greater risk taking and financial conditions.

Hyun Song Shin, Economic Adviser and Head of the Monetary and Economic Department at BIS

As the BIS Economic Adviser, Mr Shin leads the economics work at the BIS and heads its Monetary and Economic Department.

Mr Shin has a background in academia. Before coming to the BIS in May 2014, he was the Hughes-Rogers Professor of Economics at Princeton University, having previously held appointments at Oxford University and the London School of Economics. He has been an intellectual leader in the fields of banking, international finance and monetary economics, topics on which he has published widely, both in leading academic and official publications.

One area of recent focus has been in developing the BIS's work agenda on digital innovation and the financial system, laying out the implications for users, financial intermediaries and the central bank. Mr Shin was part of the BIS management team that developed the BIS Innovation Hub, and served as its Interim Head at its launch in 2019.

Mr Shin is a Korean national. In 2010, while on leave from Princeton University, he served as Senior Adviser to the Korean president, taking a leading role in formulating financial stability policy in Korea and developing the agenda for the G20 during Korea's presidency.

Henry Thornton Lecture Series

Hosted by the Centre for Banking Research, the Henry Thornton Lecture was inaugurated in 1979 in the belief that no student of money and banking should be unfamiliar with the name and work of this 19th Century economist and banker.

Renowned for a dozen different insights into the British monetary system during the Napoleonic era, Henry Thornton is best known for his one book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain (1802). Over nearly half century the focus for this lecture has been monetary theory and monetary policy.