Mohamed A. El_Erian writes:  The central bank of Russia appears to be losing control of its currency market.  Here are the seven things to know about what’s going on in Russia now.

The women’s media center recently gave out their 2014 awards. Included was Ursula M. Burns, chairman and chief executive officer of Xerox Corporation.  She was presented with the Carol Jenkins Visible and Powerful Media Award.

Burns is an interesting woman executive.  “As I’ve progressed in my career, I’ve come to appreciate — and really value — the other attributes that define a company’s success beyond the P&L: great leadership, long-term financial strength, ethical business practices, evolving business strategies, sound governance, powerful brands, values-based decision-making.”

She talks about creating jobs and not thinking about how they can be eliminated.  \At a mst powerful women summit, she noted:  “As long as I’ve been alive discussing this, and even before, this concept of having it all — that’s not the point,” she said. Pick the places where you want to be great, focus your energies there, and then go do it, she added. Understand “you’re not going to be great at everything, and then relax.”

What is her deepest regret.  She wishes she had had more children.  (She has two).

Wolfgang Schuble writes;  We are witnessing profound changes in the way that the world economy works. As a result of the growing pace and intensity of globalization and digitization, more and more economic processes have an international dimension. As a consequence, an increasing number of businesses are adapting their structures to domestic and foreign legal systems and taxation laws.

Thanks to technical advances in the digital economy, companies can serve markets without having to be physically present in them. At the same time, sources of income have become more mobile: There is an increasing focus on intangible assets and mobile investment income that can easily be “optimized” from a tax point of view and transferred abroad.

Tax legislation has not kept pace with these developments. Most of the tax-allocation principles that apply today date back to a time when doing business internationally primarily meant transporting goods across a border to a neighboring country.  Rules that were devised in the 1920s and 1930s are no longer suitable. They need to be adapted to the economic reality of digital services.

In the absence of workable rules, states are losing revenue that they urgently need in order to fulfill their responsibilities. At the same time, the issue of fair taxation is becoming more and more pressing, because the number of taxpayers who make an adequate contribution to financing public goods and services is decreasing.

The resulting tensions between national fiscal sovereignty and the borderless scope of today’s business activities can be resolved only through international dialogue and uniform global standards. Within the European Union, permitting groups of states to forge ahead with joint solutions to issues that can be addressed only multilaterally has worked well in the past. If such measures prove successful, other states follow.

This approach can also serve as a global governance model for resolving international problems. In today’s world, even large states cannot establish and enforce international frameworks on their own. Groups of countries still can. This has been demonstrated in the context of financial-market regulation; it is starting to become clear with regard to the regulatory framework for the digital economy; and it is now being confirmed in the area of taxation.

The Seventh Meeting of the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes took place in Berlin this week, bringing together representatives from 122 countries and jurisdictions, as well as the EU. A joint agreement on the automatic exchange of information on financial accounts was signed on Wednesday.

The joint agreement was originally an initiative by Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Spain. Roughly 50 early-adopter countries and territories decided to take part, while other countries have indicated their willingness to join.

The agreement is based on the Common Reporting Standard, which was developed by the OECD. Under the CRS, tax authorities receive information from banks and other financial service providers and automatically share it with tax authorities in other countries. In the future, virtually all of the information connected to a bank account will be reported to the tax authorities of the account holder’s country, including the account holder’s name, balance, interest and dividend income, and capital gains.

Various measures are in place to ensure that banks can identify the beneficial owner and notify the relevant tax authorities accordingly. The CRS thus expands the scope of global, cross-border cooperation among national tax authorities. In this way, we can establish a regulatory framework for the age of globalization.

The automatic exchange of information is a pragmatic and effective response to the perceived lack of global governance regarding international tax issues. By making taxation fairer, governments will have a positive impact on people’s acceptance of their tax regimes.

This great success in the fight against international tax evasion would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Now it is important to continue the efforts of the OECD and the G-20 in the area of corporate taxation. We need to make sure that creative tax planning in the form of profit-shifting and artificial profit reduction is no longer a lucrative business model.

A “beggar-thy-neighbor” taxation policy, by which one country pursues tax policies at the expense of others, is just as dangerous as beggar-thy-neighbor monetary policies based on competitive currency devaluation. It leads to misallocations – and will ultimately reduce prosperity around the world.

That is why we need to agree on uniform international standards in order to achieve fair international tax competition.

Kenneth Rogoff writes:  Why do the comments of major economies’ central bankers command outsize attention nowadays? It is not as if they change interest rates all of the time. Nor have they developed new, more robust models for analyzing the economy. On the contrary, major central banks’ growth and inflation forecasts in the years since the financial crisis have consistently overestimated both growth and inflation – and by wide margins.

There are many good reasons for the attention lavished on monetary policymakers, including the rise of central-bank independence, public acceptance of the need to appoint highly competent technocrats to oversee the money supply, and the deepening of financial markets. And many central bankers have been rightly lauded for their role in preventing a global meltdown during the financial crisis.

Even so, given the numerous uncertainties surrounding macroeconomic forecasts and the effects of policy instruments (not least quantitative easing), many academics find it puzzling that central bankers’ speeches and statements generate so much fanfare. Moreover, central bankers bear a share of the blame for the crisis in the first place, mainly owing to lax regulatory policy.

Many central bankers portray former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (who served from August 1987 until January 2006) as the culprit, saying that he projected an image of central-bank omnipotence that is not warranted in theory or practice. But this critique is overblown: Greenspan is long gone, but the focus on central-bank pronouncements is greater than ever.

What, then, is going on? I would argue that, in addition to all of the factors listed above, three further considerations should be noted. For starters, the public perception that central bankers are omniscient makes them an attractive whipping boy for politicians. Moreover, the digital revolution in media has elevated the role of business news, one of the few profit centers for print and broadcast journalism in many countries. Central bankers’ pronouncements are of interest to businesspeople – especially in the financial sector – and businesspeople are of interest to advertisers.

Finally, and perhaps least appreciated, is the fact that central-bank policy pronouncements are almost unique in having clear and predictable effects on financial markets, at least in the very short run.

Some economic indicators, such as unemployment or inflation data, are indeed immediately important for central banks, because they may directly concern their mandates, and therefore have rather predictable effects. But much information is simply noise. This makes policy opinions that come straight from the horse’s mouth almost uniquely valuable.

In short, there are many good reasons why central bankers receive so much media focus, including their relative independence and generally solid performance. But there are also other reasons having to do with politicians’ need for scapegoats, the media’s struggle to reinvent itself in the Internet age, and central-bank pronouncements’ predictable short-term effects on financial markets. These other factors have combined to create a bubble around central-bank pronouncements and decisions that grossly exaggerates their economic significance.

Is this a bubble that central bankers should worry about? The answer is clearly yes. The news bubble is of particular concern, because it reinforces the idea that central bankers somehow care disproportionately about financial markets, which is generally not the case.

Most central bankers really are targeting growth, inflation, and financial stability, if not necessarily in that order. The political bubble is an inevitable product of central-bank independence, and preventing monetary policy from becoming a target for elected officials requires constant effort. The predictability bubble is perhaps the trickiest to navigate, though my instinct is that less would be more. Exaggerated importance is one kind of bubble that central bankers should always be eager to burst.