samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
During the same period, the Electronic Transactions Act and the Payment Devices Frauds Act have been passed by the Government to authorize electronic transactions and to penalize fraudulent activities relating to card operations. These laws are intended to provide an enabling regulatory framework for banks and financial institutions to use IT facilities for their operations and mitigate risks that could arise from the abuse of systems and instruments. 7. Product-centered IT development and limited customer benefits  7.1 IT developments in the Banks have positively impacted their customers, but regrettably in a limited way. For example, although the RTGS system intended to facilitate third party customer transactions, many have not been able to use the system for speedy settlements. The RTGS and SSS systems were entirely funded by the Central Bank through grants made available by the Ministry of Finance. While banks in Sri Lanka enjoy these highly subsidized clearing and settlement facilities with enormous benefits, very little effort has been made to offer part of the benefits to their customers. Until recently, some banks charged their customers more than three times the charge the Central Bank levy on banks for RTGS transactions. Moreover, customers are not even encouraged to use the system due to rigid time lines imposed on third party transactions. 7.2 In the case of retail transactions too, the benefits are not always passed on to the customers.

3/18  On the latest Banco de España macroeconomic projections released on 20 March, the current upturn is forecast to continue over the coming years. These economic projections are expected to be underpinned by the continuation of the factors that have sustained growth since the start of the recovery. These include, in particular, the gains in competitiveness achieved since the onset of the crisis, the strengthening of the financial situation of firms, households and financial institutions, and the accommodative monetary policy stance. And we should add, in the short term, the prolongation of the expansionary stance of budgetary policy. This combination of factors would enable the economy to continue growing at a pace greater than its potential rate, which would support the absorption of the high unemployment generated during the crisis. Among these factors I would like to stress the role played by competitive gains and the improved financial position of households and firms. Both have helped make the Spanish economy more resilient. Indeed, throughout the recovery, thanks to cumulative gains in competitiveness, the positive developments in our export markets were conducive to the internationalisation of Spanish companies. That in turn boosted business investment and employment and, through this latter variable, consumption. As a result, the Spanish economy has managed recurrently to post external surpluses during the upturn, which was somewhat unusual in previous recoveries.
As a consequence of our first hands-on experience with this technology, some questions which are still unanswered were raised during the process: a. How could this primary market be integrated with the secondary market? Could this same model be useful? b. There is the need for further analysis of our legal framework and identify possible gaps (the PoC scope only has a high-level legal analysis). c. When will this technology be mature enough to be considered as an alternative for critical systems? Now, I will narrow the topic of blockchain to Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC), which is the focus of our panel, and talk about the motivations, benefits and concerns. To begin with, it is important to understand that CBDCs are not new, and Central Banks have been issuing CBDCs since the first RTGS systems were around. These are the commercial banks’ reserves held in the RTGS systems. Even though this form of CBDC is not blockchain based, it is important to mention that the CBDC concept is not a novelty. Page 5 of 11  Central Bank of Chile September 2019  That being said, the central banks need to have a clear motivation to issue a CBDC. These motivations will be different and therefore the CBDCs will be different in their design, benefits and concerns. One way of categorizing CBDCs is by their access: general purpose, or retail, and wholesale.

The use of common business resources to resolve problems in supplying electricity, water and sanitation, and local roads, should be regarded as an effective option of overcoming these problems. Creating differentiated and specialized development areas will open more opportunities to them to benefit from scale economies and common solution of problems. Also, computer and telecommunication infrastructure are sectors, which can and should be addressed more efficiently by the private sector. BIS Review 158/2009  5  Business administration and transparency Though I addressed some problems even earlier in my speech, now I would like to dwell briefly upon the problem of administration and corporate transparency enhancement. Corporate administration is the linking bridge between ideas and results. It affects funds usage efficiency and differentiates profitable from non-profitable businesses. In light of this, I think that the above-mentioned issues, the extended time span of investments, their support in market researches and prudent business-plans, the orientation of businesses’ positioning in national, regional and global context, the increase in specialization and professionalization, the fostering of cooperation with the financial system, require ongoing investments in terms of your management. Finally, I think that transparency of your businesses is an aspect that deserves a greater attention. Its enhancement would help first of all the trading and financial transactions among businesses, fostering confidence and decreasing their risk. Also, the long-term and ongoing relation with the financial system is conditioned by reciprocal transparency between parties.
They work themselves up into a righteous frenzy culminating in their leader, Reg, yelling “what have they [the Romans] ever given us?” Although the question is intended to be rhetorical, after a short pause one of the rank and file gingerly points out that the local aqueduct has been useful. Several others then feel obliged to chip in with other helpful innovations from the Romans, until finally Reg has to restate his question as “Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? !”  2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  2  And what have the experts ever done for us? We have gained about 20 years of life expectancy since 1950  1  as a result of advances in water, sanitation and healthcare. Millions used to die of easily treatable illnesses like diarrhea or influenza. Polio used to paralyze 350,000 people annually as recently as 1988; today it has 2  been virtually eradicated . Average world incomes have risen over twentyfold - from $ to $ in 3  current $ - as a result of improved economic policies, particularly in developing countries. The proportion 4  of the world living in poverty fell from 44% in 1980 to 11% in 2013 .

Provide the public with tools to assess trustworthiness  It is hard to imagine a return to an age when large media companies controlled the flow of information, a small number of political parties dominated the political discourse and professionals of all sorts were trusted almost unquestioningly. Therefore it is even more important for citizens to be able to assess the quality of the flood of information and opinions they receive and to differentiate facts from falsehood. The online commerce world has developed many tools to inform judgments about who to trust such as ratings provided by other consumers, feedback on the reliability of other users, and data on performance measures such as timeliness of delivery. What tools might be relevant for the world of ideas? In some instances, traditional institutions have evolved to meet this need. NHS Direct and the National Institute of Heath Information for the Public websites are good responses to the phenomenon of patients coming to surgeries armed with reams of data and views from the internet. These authoritative websites provide a reliable source of information to discerning patients who would otherwise have to sift through sometimes contradictory information from multiple sources. In other instances, non-traditional sources of judging the quality of information have emerged. Fact checking websites (who appraise the veracity of claims made by public figures) are one example and have some similarities to peer review in academia which lends credibility (or not) to news and statements made by individuals.
European financial markets calmer thanks to monetary policy If you take a look at chart 1, you can follow the movements in both the euro/Swiss franc exchange rate and the average risk premium for the government bonds of five peripheral euro area countries (Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal and Ireland). The risk premium is drawn on an inverted scale, in other words, a movement downwards signifies a higher risk. This chart serves as an illustrative example for two developments. On the one hand, it shows that uncertainty in the euro area has decreased greatly over the past twelve months. At the time of the last Money Market Event in Geneva, the risk premium was almost 1,200 basis points; it is now below 400. On the other hand, the chart illustrates the fact that the upward pressure on the Swiss franc has abated. Following a long period last year when the exchange rate stuck closely to the minimum exchange rate of CHF 1.20, it moved away in January and, since May, has fluctuated within a relatively narrow range of CHF 1.22–1.26 per euro. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  Here, the situation has calmed in two respects. In order to reduce the risk of the euro area collapsing, the European Central Bank (ECB) resorted to an unconventional measure in late summer 2012, the outright monetary transactions programme. Market participants were persuaded, and since then the risk premium for peripheral economies in Europe has declined steadily. What is remarkable is how persistent this trend has been.

But we must be alert to the development of new forms of shadow banking, meaning substantial maturity transformation and leverage outside the banking system. The balance of activities may also shift between banks. The post-crisis reforms include additional capital buffers for globally-systemically important banks (G-SIBs), and, as the Governor has said, the FSB is on track to present a proposal for an international standard on total loss-absorbing capacity for these banks, to the Brisbane G20 summit this month. 2 These changes are intended to move G-SIBs further away from distress and to make orderly resolution possible if, nonetheless, they do fail. But it is possible that tougher regulation of G-SIBs might also encourage them to become less systemically-important over time, perhaps with some shift of activity to smaller banks. At this stage, it is too early to tell. And, in the other direction, there are some signs that higher regulatory requirements might be leading to greater concentration of activity amongst the largest firms in certain markets: for example long-term derivatives. That might be consistent with micro-economic theory, which suggests that, in oligopolistic markets with high fixed costs, an increase in marginal costs due to higher regulatory capital requirements may tend to lead to a higher concentration of activity amongst the biggest players (Chart 1). Authorities will need to monitor these trends closely. Within the scope of their business models, individual banks are also likely to change their mix of activities in response to changing regulatory requirements.
In addition to providing a measure of individual forecast uncertainty, these density forecasts yield richer information about how expectations vary across people and over time than do single-value forecasts, or “point predictions.” The SCE is the outcome of a five-year collaborative research project involving economists, psychologists, and survey design experts. During this period, we conducted a large number of experimental surveys to assess the information elicited with existing survey questions and to develop new questions, including those for measuring forecast uncertainty. This preliminary work and the probabilistic format of the new survey questions represent an important innovation that builds on academic work over the past 20 years by economist Charles Manski, as well as some early pioneering survey work conducted by the Bank of Italy. Creating the CCP and SCE has yielded some important lessons. First, data innovation requires an ability to think outside the box, and it benefits from the collaboration of people with diverse skills and backgrounds – academic economists, but also representatives of other academic disciplines and individuals with business and public policy experience. Skills in identifying valuable but underutilized data, the creation of data linkages, the development of appropriate sampling procedures, and survey methodology and questionnaire design experience are all particularly valuable. In this respect, our experiences mirror those at the many new interdisciplinary data and social research centers and numerous “Big Data” university centers being created across the country.

And both loan-level data and aggregates like the Flow of Funds miss an important dimension of borrower behavior that became very important during the crisis and recovery – the relationship between different kinds of credit use by individual borrowers or households. The creation of the Consumer Credit Panel is an example of the use of pre-existing commercial data in an innovative way that had not previously been pursued. The panel is based on credit report data collected by Equifax (one of the three credit bureaus in the United States) and it contains information on all outstanding loans – including mortgages, auto and student loans, and credit card debt – at the individual consumer level. While credit records are primarily used by lenders to evaluate a potential borrower’s creditworthiness and ability to repay, they can also provide a comprehensive picture of outstanding balances and delinquencies and how they interact. Of course, all the data are completely anonymous – the dataset has been stripped of all personally identifiable information. The CCP was created by our research group using an innovative sampling procedure, based on the randomness of the last four digits of social security numbers. The resulting panel allows one to track individuals over time and across different locations within the nation, starting in the quarter in which they establish their credit report when taking out their first loan.
Also, once a firm has run into trouble, in part because it is in trouble and/or markets are dysfunctional, the marketable value of its assets are often found to be substantially less than valued in accounts – so losses are usually greater than originally expected, once a stress has occurred. Prior to the financial crisis, firms appeared to hold substantial capital to meet their then regulatory requirements, but in many cases this was illusory – the rules on what could count as capital had been weakened over time and much of it was not properly or easily lossabsorbing in the event. So the quality of capital is also of interest. There is also a challenge of what the minimum level of acceptable capital is, and how to meet it, post-stress. Suppose X is the appropriate level of capital pre-stress, then substantial losses will always leave a firm  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  with significantly less than X. And raising extra capital in the market in those circumstances is not always feasible, nor can a balance sheet be quickly run down to reduce capital requirements. So how can a firm meet the ongoing requirements for the normal level of capital after a stress event? The answer is usually to start with a buffer above the minimum acceptable and/or to have some way of creating extra capital in a crisis.

Different firms can assess risk by different methods and models, using different data sets or applying different judgements: assessments undertaken by the BCBS1 have shown firms can generate quite different RWA calculations for an identical hypothetical portfolio. And firms may choose to optimise both their choice of assets and the weights attached to them to minimise capital requirements. It has been shown that differences in capital ratios calculated on an RWA basis have historically had little or no correlation with whether firms were able to survive a 1  4  Basel Committee on Banking Supervision July, 2013. “RCAP – Analysis of risk-weighted assets for credit risk in the banking book”. BIS central bankers’ speeches  stress2. A leverage ratio offers an alternative approach, which is not risk sensitive but simply calculates total capital in relation to total assets. The degree of leverage has historically been a much better indicator of likely firm failure (although we can’t be sure that correlation will survive if firms start to manage to a constraint!). As alternatives, the RWA and leverage approaches would generate different incentives for firms to be capital efficient. Under RWAs the incentive can be to expand the balance sheet with assets that carry low risk weights. Under a leverage ratio, the incentive can be to limit balance sheet size but choose riskier assets. Ideally, the two measures would work in tandem to ensure sufficient capital to support both balance sheet size and risk taking.
In the medium term, the Bank of Albania will focus its efforts on a number of initiatives, notably on further legal developments and infrastructure improvements. An important step in the medium term is the drafting of the bill “On the payment account". The bill will transpose the European Union Directive “On the Payments Account” and promote transparency by creating a public register to present all commissions applied by institutions, which can be easily compared. At the same time, during this period, the Bank of Albania will engage in a number of infrastructure developments that support financial inclusion, reduce the costs of using these instruments and is estimated to have an impact on the remittance market, mainly from the point of view of remittance receivers and their use. Here we can mention the creation of a national platform for processing payments in real time (instant payment and processing of card payments). The platform creates conditions for the development of innovative and low-cost services and also aims at market segments that create ample volumes by targeting state institution payments as well as daily payments that Albanian citizens make. Last but not least, I would like to thank the Government of Albania for the importance it places on this matter and its continuous support. In particular, I would like to thank the ministries such as the Ministry of Diaspora and the Ministry of Finance and Economy for their support and fruitful cooperation.

To ensure smooth operation of the New Turkish Lira money markets and to contain the potential volatility in short term interest rates, the Monetary Policy Committee, judging that inflation will display a more rapid fall than envisaged before, has lowered the borrowing rates by 50 basis points and the lending rate by 100 basis points on November 19, 2008. This allowed the margin between the lending and borrowing rates to be reduced by a further 50 basis points. BIS Review 153/2008  1  We are also aware of the significance of foreign exchange liquidity in the banking system and progressively put into effect necessary measures in order to get through this period with minimal damage. To that end, we have resumed our role to act as an intermediary in the FX deposit market as of 9 October 2008, and later doubled the transaction limits to 10.8 billion USD. During times of confidence breakdowns among the participants of the financial markets, central banks can serve as a blind broker to intermediate in the foreign currency lending market. In this FX deposit market, banks can post their bids for foreign exchange without disclosing their identities. It also acts as a market of last resort as the banks can borrow directly from the Central Bank.
(2017) ‘The Bank of England’s FinTech Accelerator: what have we done and what have we learned?’, Remarks given at a meeting for FinTech contacts of the Bank of England’s Agency for the South East and East Anglia at the offices of Mills & Reeve, Cambridge, available at: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2017/the-boes-fintech-accelerator-what-have-we-done-and-whathave-we-learned HM Treasury (2009), ‘Pre-Budget Report: Securing the Recovery: Growth and Opportunity’, Cm 7747, December 2009, available at:  https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/238510/7747.pdf  OECD (2017), Economic Surveys: United Kingdom, October 2017, available at: http://www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/United-Kingdom-2017-OECD-economic-survey-overview.pdf Ramsden, D. (2017) ‘Monetary policy from end to end: define, decide, deliver’, Speech given at King’s College London, available at: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2017/dave-ramsden-speech-atkings-college-london Tenreyro, S. (2018) ‘The fall in productivity growth: causes and implications’, Speech given at Queen Mary University of London, available at: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2018/silvana-tenreyro-2018peston-lecture  8  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  8

The part that has been much in focus has been the monetary policy regime – in Sweden and the UK, inflation targeting with a specific target for inflation and regular and transparent inflation forecasts has worked well. But inflation targets, or for that matter Denmark’s euro peg, would never have been as successful had fiscal policy not been reformed in parallel, with clear rules and budgetary ceilings in Sweden and Denmark which put the problems squarely in the sight of the public. Considering the UK fiscal deterioration the last couple of years, one might draw the conclusion that the so called golden rule, i.e. only borrowing for public investment, is not a clear enough rule, but that expenditure ceilings and targets for the fiscal balance are more effective. In fact those euro area countries that have some sort of national transparent targets and evaluation of fiscal policy have managed to retain some order in their public finances; Finland being a prominent example. The power of targets and transparency is that the public, with the help of comments from analysts in the media, can evaluate clearly how the government is doing in relation to a long-term norm. Is fiscal policy in line with the target, or is it deviating from target? The idea of being on or off target is quite easy to grasp, and if the process is transparent, experts and the public alike will learn to trust the figures. In this area most countries still have a lot to do.