The financial crisis has demonstrated the need for a set of macroprudential policy tools that can be used to mitigate systemic risk. Focusing on the UK, our paper reviews the performance of the Basel III credit-to-GDP gap that, alongside judgement, is to be used as a reference guide in setting the countercyclical capital buffer. We find that this measure worked well in providing an advance signal of past UK episodes of banking system distress. But this does not guarantee future signalling success. We therefore evaluate some conceptual shortcomings of the credit gap and suggest complementary indicators. viewed as complementary: we discuss a subset of the indicators in Bank of England (2013) in more detail with a focus on indicators for which we have long time series available. We take the credit-to-GDP gap as a starting point, arguing that the gap as defined by the BCBS worked well in providing an advance signal of past UK crises. This is despite us using a real-time measure (see Edge and Meisenzahl (2011) for a contrasting discussion of this issue).But, as noted in Bank of England (2013), no single indicator can ever provide a perfect guide to systemic risks or the appropriate policy responses, given the complexity of financial interlinkages, the tendency for the financial system to evolve over time and time lags before risks become apparent. Policymakers will also need to monitor a wide and time-varying set of indicators, depending on the emerging risks. In this paper, we therefore discuss additional indicators that might complement the credit-to-GDP gap, both in the context of having been useful in past crises in the UK and elsewhere and in helping to address some of the credit-to-GDP gap's conceptual shortcomings. In particular, we argue that the sources and quality of credit are important, suggesting the need not only for an aggregate capital tool such as the countercyclical capital buffer but also sectoral tools such as sectoral capital requirements. Finally, we discuss indicators that might help determine when to release the capital buffers.In discussing other indicators, we take guidance from the literature on the basis of cross-country analyses (e.g. Kaminsky and Reinhart (1999); Drehmann et al. (2010); Drehmann et al. (2011); Borio and Lowe (2002, 2004) and Barrell et al. (2010)). Cross-country studies have the obvious advantage of relying on more observations that gives more rigour to understanding the indicators that have tended to signal banking crises in the past. However, they also have drawbacks. For example, there may be little gained by including countries with different institutional arrangements and financial structures in the same panel analysis. Moreover, data definitions may not be homogeneous across countries and time series employed in panel approaches tend to be limited. By taking the lessons from the cross-country literature but focusing on the UK only for our own analysis, we have the advantage of being less limited by data availability, can focus more closely on individual series and...

ASC-G4 is an algorithm for the calculation of the advanced structural characteristics of G-quadruplexes (G4). It allows the unambiguous determination of the intramolecular G4 topology, based on the oriented strand numbering. It also resolves the ambiguity in the determination of the guanine glycosidic configuration. With this algorithm, we showed that the use of the C3’ or C5’ atoms to calculate the groove width in G4 is more appropriate than the P atoms and that the groove width does not always reflect the space available within the groove. For the latter, the minimum groove width is more appropriate. The application of ASC-G4 to 207 G4 structures guided the choices made for the calculations. A website based on ASC-G4 (http://tiny.cc/ASC-G4) was created, where the user uploads his G4 structure and gets its topology, the types of its loops and their lengths, the presence of snapbacks and bulges, the distribution of guanines in the tetrads and strands, the glycosidic configuration of these guanines, their rise, the groove widths, the minimum groove widths, the tilt and twist angles, the backbone dihedral angles, etc. It also provides a large number of atom-atom and atom-plane distances that are relevant to evaluating the quality of the structure.