samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Bond Price Bulletin One of the factors affecting secondary market activities in the bond market is the lack of information on bond prices. To help overcome this problem, the HKMA launched the Bond Price Bulletin at the beginning of 2006. The bulletin provides investors with convenient on-line access to information on bond products and bond prices provided by eight major banks in Hong Kong. Indicative bid/offer prices of over 200 bonds of different currencies issued by both public and private sector entities are provided by the eight contributing banks. Outlook Let me now turn to talk about the outlook of our debt market. Notwithstanding the achievements we have made so far in developing our debt market, we fully appreciate that there is nothing to be complacent and there are still many challenges facing us. The HKMA has therefore embarked on a review of our debt market development with a view to identifying measures which can be adopted to help market development. On the demand side, everybody knows that the Mainland of China is enjoying a rapid economic growth and business opportunities are mushrooming. The recent announcement by the Mainland authorities of measures to liberalise portfolio investment outflows has marked the emergence of such kind of opportunity for Hong Kong. Under these new rules, each Chinese citizen is allowed, among other things, to invest in fixed income securities overseas within certain limits.

With the seamless interfaces between the CMU and the Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) systems in Hong Kong for the Hong Kong dollar, US dollar and Euro, all transactions in debt instruments denominated in any of these three currencies and under the custodianship of the CMU can be settled in Hong Kong on a DvP basis in an efficient way. The recent IPO of the Bank of China Limited is probably a good example to demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of our HKD RTGS system: being a settlement system which typically handles an average turnover of $ to $ billion Hong Kong dollars a day, it saw a record high turnover of $ trillion on 1 June when the Bank of China was listed on that day. Notwithstanding such huge amount of settlement, the inter-bank payments were processed smoothly on that day. To further develop Hong Kong into a payment and settlement hub for the region, we will continue to explore opportunities for linking our RTGS systems and the CMU with similar systems in the region. For example, the HKMA has been working with Bank Negara Malaysia for the establishment of a link between the Ringgit RTGS system and the US dollar RTGS system in Hong Kong. This is aimed at reducing the settlement risk of Ringgit/US dollar foreign exchange transactions through PvP settlement in the Asian time zone. The link is expected to go live by the end of 2006. We are exploring similar linkages with other Asian central banks.
6  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  6  On a personal note, I will greatly miss your deep technical expertise, open-mindedness, wisdom, good humour and friendship. Today isn’t really goodbye but au revoir. Because, whether it is the financial system or as colleagues, we know the future will be better if we stay connected. 7  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  7

But fire services do not offer free insurance for people who smoke in bed or set fire to their own house, thereby encouraging them to take risks that endanger others. When it became clear that Northern Rock could not find funding elsewhere, it came to the tripartite authorities (FSA, Treasury and Bank) to seek financial support from the Bank of England. Rather than stabilise the situation, the actions of the authorities seemed, at least initially, to fan the flames. There are lessons for us to learn. And I will come to those in a minute. But let me return to the queues of depositors. Here is an extract from a local newspaper: “By noon on Friday, more than 40 … customers … were waiting in line at the branch … waiting upward of an hour and a half to withdraw money from their accounts.” “Anxious depositors clutching withdrawal slips filled the offices for a second straight day. … The company placed extra chairs in a waiting area and asked customers to write their names on a sign-in sheet.” This wasn’t Newcastle or London. It was Los Angeles on August 17 and 18. The bank experiencing the run was not Northern Rock but Countrywide, a US mortgage bank. It is a Tale of Two Banks – banks of similar sizes and facing similar difficulties with funding – just a few weeks apart. Like Northern Rock, Countrywide took risks and relied on short-term funding from investors. But the similarity ends there. There were two significant differences.
When we made our most recent decision on the repo rate we had received the GDP figures for the fourth quarter, which were much lower than we and other analysts had expected. As I have already mentioned, this would indicate lower resource utilisation. But when we take into account the stronger labour market development, our conclusion in our most recent Monetary Policy Update is that resource utilisation is slightly higher than it was in February. But it is still low and will remain so for a large part of the forecast period. When we cut the repo rate to its current extremely low level in July last year, the situation on the financial markets was still critical, the economic cycle was in a much gloomier phase than now and the forecasts were much more pessimistic. During the autumn the positive signs increased and the forecasts were gradually revised up after numerous downward adjustments. The Riksbank had offered loans at fixed-interest rates with a one-year maturity in July, September and October. The purpose of these loans was to bring down general interest rates in a situation where the repo rate was assessed as having come down to what was in practice its lowest possible level. The fact that new loans were not offered in December was a first sign that economic activity was beginning to stabilise and that this type of unconventional measure was no longer necessary.

Barbro Wickman-Parak: The economy and the labour market Speech by Ms Barbro Wickman-Parak, Deputy Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken (SEB), Stockholm, 29 April 2010. *  *  *  Sweden’s GDP fell by almost five per cent in 2009, compared with the previous year. We need to go back as far as the 1940s to find an individual year with a correspondingly large fall in growth. The large demand shock that followed in the wake of the financial crisis had an unavoidable and drastic impact on production and employment. It has been possible to alleviate these effects, but not to prevent them, despite forceful monetary policy measures and expansionary fiscal policy. Normally, changes in employment and unemployment occur two quarters after changes in production. This time, however, it appears as though the upturn in employment has already begun and unemployment has stopped rising, which is surprisingly early given the large fall in GDP. But unemployment is still high, and we are expecting a slow recovery in employment in the coming period. During the past three months unemployment has been around 9 per cent as a share of the labour force. Today I intend to talk about developments in the labour market in Sweden. I will begin by describing how employment usually varies over the business cycle and then discuss what is different this time. I shall conclude by discussing how we Executive Board members viewed developments in the labour market at our monetary policy meeting last week.
Broken line represents OECD’s forecast  14  90  94  98  02  06  10  Source: OECD  BIS Review 56/2010  Sweden’s central government debt and gross public debt Percentage of GDP 90  90 Central government debt  80  80  Gross public debt  70  70  60  60  50  50  40  40  30  30  20  20  10  10  0  0 50  55  60  65  70  75  80  85  90  95  00  05  10  Sources: Swedish National Debt Office and OECD  General government net lending in Sweden, the euro area and the United Kingdom Per cent of GDP 10  10 Sweden Euro area United Kingdom  5  5  0  0  -5  -5  -10  -10  -15  -15 90  92  94  96  98  00  02  04  06  08  10  Note. Red broken line represents the Riksbanks’s forecast, blue and yellow broken lines represent OECD’s forecast.

The OECD estimates that potential GDP in the OECD area will decline by around 4 per cent as a result of the crisis. All in all, this means that public finances in the OECD area require a structural strengthening of around 5–6 per cent of GDP over the coming years. At the same time, several factors indicate that interest rates will rise, which will lead to increased interest expenditure and thus put even greater pressure on public finances. Monetary policy is expected to become less expansionary in the years immediately ahead, which means that short-term interest rates will rise. The large general government deficits and thus rising borrowing requirements will probably lead to higher government bond rates. In addition, there is the premium that the market participants require as compensation for the risk that the debt may become unsustainable. Meanwhile, stricter financial regulations will probably also lead to higher interest rates. In the past, there have been periods when the debts of the public sector as a percentage of GDP have been reduced as a result of high inflation. But as experiences of the harmful effects of inflation have led to more or less explicit inflation targets for central bank activities  2  2  See Reinhart and Rogoff (2009). BIS Review 56/2010  and as interest rates tend to adapt very quickly to inflation expectations, it is not probable that higher inflation will reduce public-sector debt as a percentage of GDP.
Therefore, let me stop at this point and pass the floor to the chairman of our first panel debate, Mr Jakob A. Frenkel (from Merrill Lynch International). Before I do that, though, I would like to welcome you once again and thank all of you for accepting our invitation to this event. BIS Review 17/2003  3

The Swiss Federal Banking Commission (SFBC) – as the authority with responsibility for this area – is currently in the process of spelling out in detail what measures will be needed in the area of capital adequacy requirements. Careful planning will be particularly important with respect to implementation of the new measures. First of all, the current crisis has to be seen through. The appropriate measures then need to be introduced progressively over a number of years. In this project, the SFBC can count on the full support of the SNB, in the interests of securing a long-term strengthening of the Swiss financial system. 2  BIS Review 80/2008
According to the principle of risk-spreading, it would still be better to support research and development activities on quite a broad basis. •  The economic analyses by the central bank consistently emphasise that in order to obtain financial capital required for development, Estonia must remain attractive in the eyes of foreign investors also in the future. However, in order to boost the country's competitiveness it would be a good idea to adopt a more carefully planned system of investments into human capital and set up a framework for financing innovation. •  There are many possibilities to do that. Firstly, large companies could train their own staff. This would require strong public secondary education, diploma studies, and postgraduate studies, and not necessarily public vocational education. (There are examples of such an approach primarily in the IT and telecommunications areas.) •  The second possibility is state-commissioned education. Since investments into human capital promote innovation and bring about other positive effects, state investments into the area are justified as the private sector invests less than is socially optimal. Estonia is quite progressive in that field - we spend 6-7% of the GDP on education, which is more than in other transition countries and similar to the respective levels in Finland and Sweden. •  Even though state-controlled development of human capital requires increased spendings from the national budget, it is relevant that some of the expenditure will be later recovered through additional receipts since rising productivity and employment boost tax revenues.

But this task can only be performed in cooperation with the Government and other constitutional institutions. Today we can acknowledge that regardless of the fact that both the central bank and other state institutions employ Estonians who are known as great individualists, our cooperation in the field of economic policy has been smooth and yielded results. •  Five years ago I also spoke about the essential developments and necessary reforms facing Estonia. Today, many structural reforms under discussion at the time have been successfully launched, including the pension system reform, which has given a completely new dimension to the saving patterns of the Estonians. As regards the changes that the financial system was facing, my anniversary speech mentioned the plans to set up a universal financial supervisory body, which has also successfully materialised. Today we have a banking sector that is very up-to-date and successful on the international banking scene as well. •  According to the World Economic Forum, Estonia is the most competitive country today among the new European Union member states with its competitiveness index of 4.64 points. With this score Estonia is also ahead of four ‘old’ member states (Spain - 4.47, Italy - 4.38, Portugal - 4.25, and Greece - 4.00), while narrowly falling behind Ireland (4.69). Our open market economy, development of the information society and the financial sector  BIS Review 26/2004  1  as well as the quality of our business environment have been considered Estonia's strongest areas.
It is a fact that today, most central banks are granted significant independence. This holds also for the SNB, which, by law, is functionally, institutionally and financially independent, as well as with regard to personnel issues, from the Federal Council, the Federal Assembly and any other body. 4 There are compelling reasons for this delegation of monetary policy power to an independent central bank: It is a fact both in theory and practice that an independent central bank better fulfils its mandate, namely, ensuring price stability and thereby contributing to sustained economic developments, than a central bank that is under the influence of political interest groups. However, a further important fact in this regard is that the SNB’s independence is far from unlimited. First, our independence is not an end in itself. It applies only to the pursuit of a clearly specified mandate. This mandate is defined in the political realm. It is stipulated in article 99 of the Federal Constitution and set out in detail in the National Bank Act. 5 Second, independence goes hand in hand with accountability. With the privilege and duty of conducting an independent monetary policy comes a particular responsibility. As bearer of this responsibility, the SNB is accountable to the Federal Council, the Federal Assembly and the public for the decisions it takes, the means it chooses and the results it achieves. The precise scope of this accountability is also clearly defined in the National Bank Act. 6 Yet having a sound legal framework in place is clearly not enough.

At the same time, central banks and financial regulators became increasingly vocal in stressing the overwhelming importance of a stable financial system, and took a more active role in strengthening their regulatory frameworks, both nationally and globally. Inevitably, these substantial, unprecedented shifts in the design and operation of a key field in economic policy have raised fundamental questions and cast doubt on deeply entrenched beliefs. Based on practical experience of making monetary policy in the last few years, I will try today to dispel four Swiss monetary policy “fictions” by contrasting them with established facts about Swiss monetary policy. These facts are not necessarily new, but rather took a back seat in more benign times; it took the crisis to amply demonstrate their considerable relevance. Fiction I: Negative interest rates can’t happen First, I would like to address the belief that, because of the so-called “zero lower bound”, nominal interest rates cannot become negative. This belief has clearly been proved a fiction by current developments, with the SNB lowering its policy target rate into negative territory. 1 Unsurprisingly, the measure has sparked intense debate in the public domain. This is partially due to fears that the costs incurred by banks holding sight deposits with the SNB will, at some point, be passed on to their clients. But there is a more fundamental issue here. At first glance, negative rates violate the intuition that savings must be remunerated. However, this intuition is misleading.
Similarly, those extending loans will find it more difficult to assess the real value of collateral security and the borrower’s wealth. This situation must be corrected sooner or later, and when bubbles burst the risk of debt crises and financial instability is high. We have seen examples of this in Norway and in other countries. If we allow imbalances to develop in the domestic economy, this may trigger major capital movements with wide fluctuations in the exchange rate and long-term rates. Distributional effects of monetary policy The distributional effects of changes in nominal interest rates figured prominently in discussions concerning interest rate policy in the 1970s. There is probably a basis for saying that the consideration of distributional effects was an important reason behind the low interest rate policy. However, as developments were to prove, this was not the right approach. The low interest rate policy contributed to increased disparity. People are affected in different ways by a change in interest rates. Households with considerable debt will, ceteris paribus, be adversely affected by an increase in interest rates because they must use a higher proportion of their income to service the debt. However, the increase in interest expenditure in  BIS Review 92/2000  8  relation to household income is about the same for all income groups. This is because households with high income generally have a higher level of debt.

Details are important, but looking at details you sometimes miss the overall picture. This, at least, is one conclusion we drew in Sweden from the experiences of the 1990s. The third pillar of oversight is the supervision of the financial infrastructure. This is a relatively new task derived from the complicated technical and legal systems that handle all financial transactions today. The infrastructure is of particular importance to the central bank, since we would most probably have to provide emergency liquidity assistance if anything went wrong. The infrastructure is dominated by the systems for clearing and settlement of payments. In Sweden, like in many other countries, we manage the large-value payment system in-house at the central bank. But the infrastructure also includes the stock exchange, the derivatives exchange, the central securities depositary (CSD) and connected trading systems. Well-designed systems reduce the risk of contagion from the financial markets or between institutions. They also reduce the risk of the infrastructure itself causing problems through, for instance, operational disturbances. 2  BIS Review 58/2003  The Financial Stability Report In Sweden, the main tool for addressing the oversight of systemic stability is the report on Financial Stability. The Report, in Sweden as well as in other countries, basically aims to provide a picture of the banks’ ability to stand up to any disruptions.
In 2017 alone, Bank Negara Malaysia has processed applications from 43 new non-bank players, an increase of 91% compared to the past two years. This is in line with global developments where the size of the global payments industry has increased to account for 34 percent of overall banking revenues in 2016 and is projected to become a $ trillion dollar industry by 2020. This is a significant turning point. In essence, the traditional 1/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  payment channels are increasingly being replaced by nimble, innovative and lower cost alternatives. We must embrace the next wave of technological and e-payment transformation. As a nation, we need to rise and seize this exciting opportunity, take a proactive rather than a reactive role, and benefit from the enormous opportunities brought about by technology to improve our payment system’s security, efficiency, productivity. We need to bereft ourselves of the inertia to move forward with the times. There are a few strategies we ought to adopt, to reduce further the wastage arising from the cost of maintaining two parallel systems by accelerating the displacement of cheques, harness the pervasiveness of mobile payments to ensure reach, and focus on solving the last mile obstacles to enhance migration to e-payments. The enormous cost of maintaining two parallel systems Cheque is a very costly payment instrument to process compared to electronic fund transfer.

It will benefit Malaysia through greater efficiency and productivity, thereby enhancing our country’s competitiveness. We have no choice but to improve the way we conduct our financial affairs. The banking system has allocated huge amount of resources. From 2009 to 2017, the industry has invested RM893 million to enhance the e-payment infrastructure. Moving forward, the industry will invest a further RM346 million to expand the POS terminal network and RM40 million to develop the Real-time Retail Payments Platform to spur the usage of mobile payments. By the end of 2020, it is envisaged that individuals and businesses will be able to make and receive payments seamlessly via online banking, payment cards and mobile payments. There 3/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  are no reasons whatsoever for us not to migrate from a costly and inefficient payment mechanism to a cheaper, safer and more efficient payment mode. To reflect the higher cheque processing cost, hasten the migration away from cheques, and incentivise individuals and businesses to migrate to a lower cost of doing business, beginning 2 January 2021, the cheque fee will be increased from 50 sen to RM1.00 and gradually thereafter, to reflect the actual cost of cheque processing. However, users of financial services will continue to be given a choice of using cheques, if they prefer to use an expensive and inefficient option rather than a cheaper one. To support businesses and individuals, over the next three years a few initiatives will be implemented.