samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
My message to you is: Don’t let last month’s temporary spike in SOFR, or hope for the creation of some other replacement reference rate, become an excuse for delaying your transition away from LIBOR. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: like death and taxes, the end of LIBOR is unavoidable, and we must do all that it takes to prepare for a LIBOR-less future.9 And the existence of LIBOR is only guaranteed for another 807 days.10 Conclusion I’ve talked through a lot of important issues this afternoon, and I greatly appreciate your attention. The events I’ve described are an apt reminder of the importance of well-functioning financial markets and the vital role the Federal Reserve plays in providing liquidity. They are also a demonstration of our ability to act swiftly and effectively to execute our monetary policy implementation goals and keep the federal funds rate within in the target range. Thank you. 1 Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Statement Regarding Monetary  Policy Implementation, October 11, 2019; Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Statement Regarding Treasury Bill Purchases and Repurchase Operations, October 11, 2019. 2 Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Statement Regarding Monetary  Policy Implementation, October 11, 2019. 3 Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Statement Regarding Monetary  Policy Implementation and Balance Sheet Normalization, January 30, 2019. Further details were announced in Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Balance Sheet Normalization Principles and Plans, March 20, 2019.

As prepared for delivery  Good afternoon, everyone. When I give a closing keynote I try to bear in mind that you’ve been listening for hours to complex and technical material. I wish I could say that I’m here to offer some light relief, but, alas, no. The topic I’m going to address this afternoon is both complex and technical. It’s the recent turmoil in the repo markets and the Fed’s actions to address it. I’m going to start by laying out the Fed’s operating framework for carrying out monetary policy. This will take me into aspects of the “plumbing” of the financial system, which may seem like an esoteric topic to many, but it’s one of critical importance, so please bear with me. I will then go over the money market turmoil from a month ago that led the New York Fed to conduct open market operations to stabilize short-term interest rates. I’ll conclude by describing the path forward as laid out in the Fed announcements this past Friday.1 Before I go any further, I should give the standard Fed disclaimer that the views I express today are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Open Market Committee or others in the Federal Reserve System. Monetary Policy, Interest Rates, and Ample Reserves As a prelude, it’s worthwhile to step back and remember how this all connects to the Fed’s overarching monetary policy goals. The Federal Reserve has two goals set by Congress: maximum employment and price stability.
Furthermore, European investors have substantially diversified their bond portfolios since the introduction of the euro, prompted by the removal of the exchange rate risk. This enables them to achieve better performances for a given level of portfolio risk. 4  BIS Review 96/2001  Additionally, I would like to draw your attention to current trends in mergers or close cooperation between stock exchanges, securities settlement systems, clearing houses, and similar institutions. Had the euro not been created, would it have been thinkable that the Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam exchanges merge to create EURONEXT and recently conclude another major alliance ? Undeniably, the introduction of the euro is fostering very large-scale market restructuring throughout Europe. There are still some barriers to further integration of EU capital markets. In this regard, the Eurosystem has welcomed the objective of the European Council meeting in Lisbon in March 2000, to accelerate completion of the internal market for financial services, and to set a tight timetable so that the Financial Services Action Plan may be implemented by 2005 ; a regular review of this Plan is made by European authorities, and progress is well under way.

Coordination was also one of the questions discussed in the report by a working group at the Bank for International Settlements, where I was chair, see the Bank for International Settlements (2011). 15  See H M Treasury (2013), which points out, for instance, that "The Government intends that the frameworks for monetary policy and macro-prudential policy, operated by the MPC and FPC of the Bank of England respectively, should be coordinated” (p. 5), and “In order to foster coordination between monetary and macroprudential policy, there is overlap between the membership of the Monetary Policy Committee and the Financial Policy Committee” (p. 10). BIS central bankers’ speeches  9  be what one can call a holistic, or comprehensive, view when formulating both types of policy. If both the credit cycle and the business cycle are to be stabilised in a good way, I do not believe that they can be too far from the policy mix implied by full coordination, at least not over a long period of time. The two types of policy could then counteract or reinforce one another in ways that would be harmful to the economy. It is probably also the case that this interplay is particularly important in sensitive situations, such as preventing a credit boom going too far and ensuring that the credit cycle has a slow, soft downturn instead of a rapid, dramatic one.
If we add to the foregoing ingredients a strong increase in banking competition, both among deposit institutions and between these and other less regulated non-bank competitors, the pressure to increase the risk profile in order to maintain past profit levels simply heightens banks' incentives to take on more risk in upturns. Having commented on the problems of excessive credit growth and how a more conservative monetary policy can mitigate them, I would like to move forward to the second part of my speech, and concentrate on the resilience of the banking system and the role of supervisors. We should acknowledge that the resilience of the financial system in general, and of credit institutions in particular, plays a key role in softening cyclical downturns. Evident in this crisis has been the notable weakness with which many banks have faced the downswing. To increase their resilience, banking regulation policy can perform a pivotal function by curbing  2  BIS Review 149/2008  the countercyclical behaviour of capital, so that it protects banks and prepares them for the crisis. And to discuss this, I am bound in this second part of my speech to refer to Rojo (the Spanish for red, and “Rot” in German). Again, this is not only a type of wine but the name of the former governor of the Bank of Spain entrusted with steering and successfully ensuring the Spanish economy’s entry into the euro area.

It was also Rojo who, in the final stage of his mandate as governor of the Bank of Spain, designed and put into practice the prudential regulatory mechanism of dynamic provisioning. This has contributed to reinforcing the stability of the Spanish banking system and today commands wide recognition; but, when initially launched, it aroused understandable rejection by Spanish banks and was met with indifference on the part of the international community of banking regulators and supervisors. Let me give you the background to this prudential and countercyclical regulatory mechanism. The origins of Spanish dynamic provisioning must be sought in credit developments in the late 1990s. Having emerged from the 1993 recession, the worst for 40 years in Spain, the economy, and much more intensely so bank lending, began to expand at an increasingly brisk pace. The Bank of Spain was led to introduce dynamic provisioning, which came into force in mid2000, by a combination of factors. These included most notably: the mix of strong credit growth, with the dangers this entailed for the stability of the financial system; heightened competition, which acted to exacerbate these risks given that credit institutions applied increasingly lower risk premia to maintain their market share; the deterioration in the level of loan loss provisions and their extremely high correlation with current default rates; and, finally, the Bank of Spain’s past supervisory experience.
For example, putting some temporary restrictions on cross-border movement of capital could give some but not complete independence of monetary policy. But how do we reconcile independence and co-operation? In my view, we can and should act to enhance co-operation between public authorities, based on at least two elements: Ruling out any currency war, as we clearly stated at the meeting of the International Monetary and Financial Committee in Bali last month. I quote the unanimous communiqué: “[We] will not target our exchange rates for competitive purposes”. Trade multilateralism is at risk, but financial and monetary multilateralism still stands fast. Second, as the G20 Eminent Persons Group (EPG), led by Tharman Shanmugaratnam, rightly stressed in its recent report, we need to put in place a reliable Global Financial Safety Net (GFSN) before the next crisis and co-ordinate its different layers. This should include an “IMF standing liquidity facility”. The GFSN is the best insurance we can get against the risks created by economic divergence and it comes at a limited cost. I know that Governor Kuroda is very committed to this issue too. ** Let me conclude by quoting a Japanese proverb: “A frog in a well knows nothing of the great ocean” [“I no naka no kaeru taikai-o shirazu”]. In these uncertain times, the temptation is to look inwards, but that would be exactly the wrong thing to do.

According to Banque de France model estimates, the negative impact on GDP of higher import tariffs is 2 to 3 times larger when we account for these indirect channels. And this increase in uncertainty can produce front-loaded negative effects, even before the effective implementation of protectionist measures. That said, protectionism is first and foremost a negative supply-shock with stagflationary effects. As such, the adverse effects of protectionism cannot and should not be accommodated by monetary policy. In spite of protectionist threats, the global economy continues to expand strongly, at 3.7% this year. In our latest IMF meetings, we have often used the nice French word “plateau” to describe global growth. But this “plateau” is not even: the strong acceleration in the United States, even if it is temporary and fragile, is offset by a moderation elsewhere. In short, the challenge is that we 2/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  are moving from synchronised growth to economic divergence. Consequently, countries might be suffering from the ongoing rise in US interest rates. I do think however that the euro area – like Japan – can determine its own monetary course. The “transatlantic gap”, be it on long-term or on policy rates, is the widest since 2009. But if I turn to emerging countries, they seem to be arranged along a continuum, with some exhibiting total independence at one end to those with exchange rates pegged to the US dollar at the other.
Short-term demand management through monetary policy too often led instead to accelerating inflation, and increasing external deficits, which had eventually to be brought under control through recession – an absolute recipe for short-termism in both financial and business behaviour. Equally, excessive public expenditure – which had ultimately to be financed through higher taxation – imposed burdens on the private sector which weakened its capacity to generate employment and income and wealth. So the emphasis now, more or less everywhere, is on effective price stability as the immediate objective of macro-economic policy – not simply as an end in itself but as a measure of the balance between aggregate demand and underlying supply in the economy as a whole. In effect the aim of monetary policy in particular is to moderate, rather than aggravate, the economic cycle, and so to provide the basis for sustainable growth at around the underlying rate of growth of productive, supplyside, potential. And the emphasis now – again more or less everywhere – in relation to fiscal policy is to limit public sector borrowing, and the outstanding level of public sector debt, to levels that can be sustained into the medium and longer term without the need for increasing tax burdens or the imposition of rising real interest rates on the private sector.

A problem, of course, was the persistent weakness of the Euro in foreign exchange markets, despite strong "fundamentals" in terms of conventional analysis. This was largely the result of an outflow of capital, much of it drawn into the US by the magnetic attraction of prospective corporate earnings growth – and apparently continuing despite the US slowdown. The euro's weakness gave rise to widespread – but in my view unjustified – criticism of the ECB. The task of a central bank operating an independent monetary policy is necessarily a limited task, not least because it effectively has only one instrument – its control over short-term interest rates. Its role – as I said earlier – is essentially, to use that instrument to influence aggregate demand in the economy, with the aim of keeping demand broadly in line with the supply-side capacity of the economy. The measure of its success is consistently low inflation. Against that criterion the ECB has been relatively successful. The Euro area economy has grown, above trend, with core inflation nevertheless remaining within the tolerance range of 0-2%, even though on the headline measure, influenced by rising oil prices and the weaker exchange rate, inflation has for the time being moved above the top of that range. The ECB would have put that internal stability of the Euro area as a whole at risk if it had attempted at the same time to use monetary policy to target the euro's exchange rate.
2) In recent months, as a prior step to the SSM taking over supervisory competences, an assessment has been made of significant institutions, the aim of which is to enhance transparency in respect of their position and to reinforce their solvency. The outcome of this exercise will help the SSM to assume its functions with accurate knowledge of the actual situation of the banks it will directly supervise. The exercise is now close to completion and its results will be made known before the end of this month. It comprises two phases: an asset quality review and a stress test, on which the Banco de España has been working intensely for several months in cooperation with the ECB. The first phase, namely the assessment of the quality of the assets associated with credit and market risk, consisted of verifying the accuracy of the figures and of reviewing asset and collateral values, along with the related provisions (with the collaboration of audit firms). On the basis of the results obtained, exposures have been classified as standard or nonperforming, based on the level of risk, with the ECB imposing painstaking quality control of the results of the review. A stress test is an analysis of credit institutions‘ capacity to absorb losses, evaluating their resilience in different scenarios. The exercise indicates how much capital might be needed were risks to materialise, and it helps highlight areas where supervisory action might be necessary.

The slower catching up of the region is not a new phenomenon as it came on the surface right after the global financial crisis. Most of the post transition real convergence (around 60%) occurred in the 5-year period preceding the GFC, against the backdrop of the remarkably growth-conducive global context, rising globalisation and trade integration, as well as favourable terms of financing. Afterwards the convergence slowed down, and it took twelve years since 2008 up to the pandemic to achieve the pace pertinent for the five years pre GFC period. Now, with the global environment becoming highly uncertain, risk of deglobalisation and supply chains defragmentation becoming more certain, and tightening of the global financial conditions already in place, faster real convergence seems even more complex issue. In this vein, there are estimates that crisis has adversely affected growth potential of the CESEE region with average decline of 0.7 pp in 2020. 3/4  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  What are the main structural hurdles that prevent lifting of the growth potential and resilience? Growth accounting framework reveals that in the last decade the slowdown was mostly through the total factor productivity, while the growth in the region became more reliant on capital accumulation. Given the wide capital stock gaps compared to the more advanced countries, the accumulation of capital is warranted, and preferable way to grow. Yet, the fact that the other sources of growth seem to be muted, gives ground for concerns.
This commitment has been made, for example, in public statements from Governor Andrew Bailey here here and here and Sarah John, the Bank’s Chief Cashier, here  , from myself  . 5. The NPA is a multi-year project which will allow for real-time payments, be able to handle increasing payment volumes. It will include the rules and standards that make up various payment types, allowing the market to create new products and services as well as allowing for the development of new overlay services. 6. Open Banking’s joint regulatory oversight committee consists of the FCA, PSR, CMA and HM Treasury. 7. See for example early stage use-cases of DLT for supply chain finance reported in UCL’s Centre for Blockchain Technologies report ‘DLT in the Supply Chain  ’. 8. As set out in Money creation in the modern economy | Bank of England the majority of money in the modern economy is created by commercial banks making loans. 9. The umbrella term ‘stablecoin’ has been used to describe a range of instruments with quite different characteristics. In particular, they may be backed by a range of financial assets, commodities or unbacked cryptoassets (which in some cases are supported by algorithmic protocols). The robustness of those backing assets and the wider safeguards for guaranteeing stability of value vary significantly across the products labelled as stablecoins. 10. See for example the Libra White Paper and related Diem technical papers 11. As set out in the Regulatory Initiatives Grid  . . 12.

But we cannot know for certain the extent and the speed at which payment stablecoins might be adopted and we may well need limits, at least initially, to ensure we avoid disruptive change that could threaten financial stability. Another important question will be whether the requirement to be redeemable in fiat money, on demand and at par and the backing asset model will be sufficient to ensure uniformity of sterling stablecoins with each other and with other forms of sterling money. This will depend to some extent on whether there are frictions in the redemption and interchange process. It has been suggested that ensuring the uniformity (or ‘singleness’ of money) requires that all transactions between different monies settle ultimately in central bank money across the books of the central bank. While it is not clear to me that this should be the case, it is clearly an issue that should be considered carefully in the design of the regulatory regime. Finally, on stablecoins, it is important to emphasise that powers in the Bill and the Bank’s regime will be for stablecoins used for payments. A digital representation of an asset with a generally stable value could be used for other purposes. It could offer a return as an investment product akin to a money market fund. Or it could be part of the credit creation process, with the loans issued in the form of stablecoins.
In that background, it is vital that the country is not pushed into “foreign-grown” solutions of international agencies and others, who unfortunately, sometimes appear to be influenced by certain human rights crusaders, who have been well- known terror activists in the past. It is also worthy to recall that, in its commitment to the principle of restorative justice following the conflict, the Sri Lankan government has already granted amnesty to more than 11,000  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  former Tamil Tiger terrorists, some of whom have even committed grave crimes. In such circumstances, if the government were to open new investigations as proposed by some, it could turn the clock back and cause great anxiety to those offenders who have been forgiven, and may even lead to some of them reverting back to violence. At the same time, some of the proposed “foreign” interventions that seem to be narrowly focused on the conduct of the Sri Lankan armed forces only, could also be construed as unfair and/or selective treatment towards the Sri Lankan armed forces who defeated terrorism, and could lead to a consequent de-stabilization of the country. Practical wisdom would therefore suggest that reconciliation between communities must be allowed to follow a “home-grown” path in keeping with the time and space as set out by those who suffered the agony of terror, and those who are today responsible for maintaining the peace in the country.

Caleb M Fundanga: Bank of Zambia Risk Management Framework Opening remarks by Dr Caleb M Fundanga, Governor of the Bank of Zambia, at the Risk Management Framework Sensitisation Workshop for Board of Directors, Chisamba, 24-26 November 2006. *  *  *  • Chairperson • Directors • Ladies and Gentlemen I wish to welcome you all to the first in the series of the Risk Management Framework Sensitisation Workshops organised by the Risk Management Department. As the Directors are, no doubt aware, the Board approved the establishment of a Risk Management function at the Bank of Zambia in February 2006. Following this approval, the Risk Management department was created to, among other duties, coordinate Bank-wide risk management activities, for which Heads of Departments remain primarily responsible. In this regard, my vision is to move the Bank to a position where risk management becomes our way of doing things. This workshop, therefore, is one critical step towards achieving this vision. Directors would agree with me that Risk Management has always been part and parcel of the financial sector, and as financial industry authorities, central banks are no exception to this. The increasing pace of globalisation, largely, on account of advancements in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), has provided an added impetus for institutions to strengthen their governance structures, including implementing enterprise-wide risk management strategies. It is for this reason, therefore, that the Bank, like other world-class central banks, decided to position itself, in this fast-changing financial landscape, by incorporating risk management in its operations.