samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The establishment of talent development and research institutions in Islamic finance are now increasingly wide spread in several jurisdictions with several strategic alliances across borders being entered into. The International Centre for Education in Islamic Finance (INCEIF) in Malaysia was set up by the Central Bank with programmes for practitioners and post-graduate studies to ensure the continuous supply of talent in Islamic finance. The current enrollment in INCEIF are from more than 60 countries attracting students including from the UK, Canada, France and Japan and Korea and the Middle East. Equally important to innovative development is a deeper understanding of Shariah and knowledge of Islamic finance and for a greater convergence in the theoretical understanding and practical considerations in resolving the contemporary issues faced by Islamic financial  BIS Review 141/2009  3  industry players. In this regard, a platform has been established for active engagement and intellectual dialogue among global Shariah scholars, practitioners, regulators and academicians. As the global economy becomes a more interconnected and interdependent, the process of greater convergence of financial standards and mutual recognition of products is also facilitating the international integration of Islamic finance across different jurisdictions. Concluding remarks Let me conclude my remarks. While the inherent strengths of Islamic finance have contributed to its viability and resilience, going forward the foundations for its sustainability as a competitive form of financial intermediation continues to be strengthened.

More people are becoming increasingly comfortable resuming activities in person, and this is starting to show up in robust consumer spending, job gains, and economic growth. So, now that we are on our second trip around the sun during this pandemic, many are looking to answer the most common question raised when traveling by car. And that is, “are we there yet?" With respect to the virus, I’ll leave that question to the public health experts to answer. But with respect to the economy, I will say this: while I am optimistic that the economy is now headed in the right direction, we still have a long way to go to achieve a robust and full economic recovery. In my remarks today I’ll set the scene for both the U.S. and global economies. I’ll also highlight a few of the factors I consider when evaluating the outlook for the economy. Finally, I’ll explain what that means for our monetary policy decisions. But before I continue, I need to 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 (FOMC) or others in the Federal Reserve System. Economic Outlook Let me begin by saying that despite the challenges and uncertainties we’ve faced since the pandemic took hold, the economy is now positioned to grow quickly.
This move by the HKMC to issue USD denominated bonds fits very well into the efforts by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority to promote the development of a safe and efficient financial infrastructure for Hong Kong, based on a multi-currency, multi-dimensional platform. In Hong Kong’s banking system, we have around $ trillion in HK Dollar deposits. Our banks also have the equivalent of over $ trillion in foreign currency deposits. About 70% or $ billion are US Dollar deposits. The loan-to-deposit ratio for Hong Kong Dollar deposits is 87%; the equivalent for US Dollar is only around 26%. We reckon that a significant portion of the sizable US Dollar deposits is held by retail investors and some would wish to diversify and look for investment products to increase their return. One could of course look for opportunities overseas but, as an international financial centre, Hong Kong should also try to provide more such investment products locally. In the past there have been very few local issues of US Dollar retail bonds, and the most recent one appears to have been issued as far back as in September 2003. Today’s HKMC US Dollar bond issuance would help to meet part of such investment demand. Perhaps in times to come there will be more foreign currency bond issuance in Hong Kong. This bond issuance would add to the diversity of financial intermediation channels and complement the HKMA’s effort to promote the development of a multi-currency, multi-dimensional financial system in Hong Kong.

Finally, I am pleased to see many old friends of the HKMC supporting this new issue. I would like to thank the HSBC and Bank of China (Hong Kong) for underwriting a portion of the bond issue as well as placing the notes. Taking this opportunity, I would also like to thank the other placing banks, namely, Bank of America (Asia), Bank of Communications, Bank of East Asia, Chiyu Bank, CITIC Ka Wah Bank, Dah Sing Bank, DBS Bank, Hang Seng Bank, Fubon Bank (Hong Kong), Liu Chong Hing Bank, Nanyang Commercial Bank, Shanghai Commercial Bank, Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong), Wing Hang Bank and Wing Lung Bank, for their participation in this bond issue. With their extensive branch networks, and sophisticated telephone banking and the Internet banking facility, I look forward to another successful retail bond issue by the HKMC. Thank you. BIS Review 55/2005  1
Some internal model-based banks attach a risk weight to mortgages of as little as 5%. A standardised-approach bank would need to hold at least nine times that amount in capital. These design features of Basel II were intended to provide incentives to banks to move to internal models and thereby improve their risk management. The link from use of models to improved risk management is at best tenuous. But more fundamentally, this design feature may also have potentially perverse consequences for systemic risk and competition. Under the existing approach, capital charges will tend to be highest for those small, simple banks posing least risk to the financial system as a whole. The systemic risk tax is regressive. This regressivity will tend to worsen the too-big-to-fail problem, by providing regulatory incentives for the large to become larger still. The capital surcharges recently agreed for systemically important institutions, while helpful, are unlikely to retilt this balance. Capital regulation may also have acted as a barrier to banking entry, raising the bar for new entrants. Neither outcome (higher risk and lower competition) are desirable from a societal perspective. BIS central bankers’ speeches  7  (c) Transparency and market discipline A final unintended consequence is lack of transparency. A large bank may have literally thousands of models, hundreds of thousands of outputs and several million inputs. The height of this information mountain makes scrutiny and aggregation of regulatory capital calculations near-impossible for either investors or regulators.

In a setting as august as this one – on the eve of the 600th anniversary of this great academy – and speaking on the day marking the 129th anniversary of the birth of John Maynard Keynes and the 289th anniversary of the baptism of Adam Smith in nearby Kirkcaldy – I should disclose up front that I am the least formally trained among the mostly academic economists who sit at the table where we make monetary policy at the Federal Reserve, the 19-person forum known as the Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC. I have an MBA, not a PhD. I am an autodidact when it comes to monetary theory. On the other hand, I am the only participant in our policy deliberations who has been both a banker and a professional money manager – the only one who has been a market operator. What the credentialing gods denied me, the practitioner angels kindly granted me: another skill set that provides a complementary perspective to those of my more learned colleagues. I shall speak today, as I always do, only from my perspective; nothing I say represents the thinking or proclivities of other members of the FOMC. And most of what I will say will confront theory with my interpretation of the rude reality of the marketplace. A quick primer on the Federal Reserve’s structure For those of you who do not know well our central bank’s structure, a quick primer. The Federal Reserve is the third central bank in American history.
In the alternatives space alone, the average allocation by insurance companies, as a percentage of their assets under management, has in fact already increased from 10% to 15% between 2011 and 20135. 4  “Asian Insurers: Adapting Investment Strategies to a Changing World”, BlackRock in conjunction with the Economist Intelligence Unit, Sep 2013. 5  Preqin’s 2013 Global Alternatives Report. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  15. A recent Goldman Sachs Insurance Asset Management survey reports that nearly half of Asian insurers are looking to raise their allocation to higher yielding assets. Like expected returns, risks – market, credit, liquidity, and legal to name a few – from investing in these newer asset classes will also be higher. There is no free lunch. Insurers’ risk profiles will be distributed across a wider and more complex spectrum of asset classes. This will call for more sophisticated and robust management of individual investment risks, as well as the correlation between the range of investment risks within a more diversified and complex portfolio. 16. The risk management deficiencies highlighted by the global financial crisis and recent tail events, have raised the bar in all areas of risk management. As a result, risk management has now been elevated from a mere control function under the responsibility of the Chief Risk Officer, to a strategic role that comes under the direct oversight of the insurer’s Board and senior management. 17.

One of the first means of paying tribute to him that occurred to us was to publish a book with a broad selection of these texts. On reading it you will see how many of the subjects he tackled over the course of his term of office, from 1992 to 2000, remain fully valid in today’s economic debate. Along with the publication of this book we decided to hold this Conference as a tribute, structuring it around a discussion of the pivotal areas of Ángel Rojo’s economic thought. We are joined by a select group of speakers whose common denominator, in addition to their professional standing, is to have shared concerns and experiences with him at different times in his life and in his various fields of academic, institutional, domestic and international activity. The Conference comprises four sessions that turn on subjects which largely reflect the main areas in which he developed his body of academic work and his best economic policy contributions. The first session addresses monetary and fiscal policy; the second, the challenges of European integration; and the third and fourth, the Spanish economy and the role Ángel Rojo played in the design of Spain’s economic policy. Ángel Rojo’s main achievement as Governor was his contribution to Spain joining the euro as a founding member.
It was during that time that we came to recognize that the relationship among monetary aggregates, inflation, and output in Thailand did not have sufficient stability and predictability to make monetary aggregates a good nominal anchor of our monetary policy. Inflation targeting then appeared as a natural choice for our new monetary policy regime. From that day onward, price stability has become the Bank of Thailand’s overriding policy objective. The core inflation rate was, as it is now, to be kept within a 0-3.5 percent range. When Thailand adopted an inflation target some six years ago, the policy regime was a relatively uncharted territory for emerging market economies. Although the history of inflation targeting dates back to 1990 with the adoption of an inflation target by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, prior to 1998, inflation targeting was pursued mostly by developed economies. The first substantial crosscountry study of inflation targeting, published by Ben Bernanke, Thomas Laubach, Frederick Mishkin and Adam Posen, who is here today, in 1999, was mainly about inflation targeting experiences of developed economies, with the exception of Israel. The situation looked vastly different from today where emerging market inflation targeters outnumber developed market ones. Ladies and gentlemen, Six years may be too short to claim definite success for inflation targeting in Thailand. Nevertheless, inflation targeting as a monetary policy framework has served us well over the period. When we first adopted an inflation target, our economy was still very much affected by the 1997 crisis.

Let me give a recent example. One major lesson from the great financial crisis was the need to be far better at identifying the many entities and organisations operating within the financial system. When the crisis hit, the lack of any uniform international method of identifying the huge number of legal entities scattered across the world added to the crippling uncertainty over who owed what to whom. We all remember that uncertainty causing panic on the financial markets. So was born the Legal Entity Identifier, or LEI – a 20-character alphanumeric code that uniquely identifies a legally distinct entity. It allows data relating to a single bank, insurer or whoever, to be combined. Over one and a half million entities in over 200 countries have now registered for an LEI. And it has had a wide range of benefits. It has supported the portability of data between organisations. It has aided the fight against money laundering. And it has been helpful in our data collections: for example, when we ask firms to submit counterparty exposure data to us, it provides a clear way for us to compile data about each entity. So the LEI is a growing success. But it also demonstrates that the adoption of standards is a long journey, with a continued need for public sector involvement. The G20 endorsed the LEI system as a global standard back in 2012. It has come a long way since then, but it still has further to go, and we will continue to support it.
In conditions of reduced import prices, the inflation continues to slow down, so that the average as well as the annual inflation rate for February equaled 1.2 and 0.7 percent, respectively. Inflationary developments within the first two months of this year show that inflationary path for this period is under the projected one. Such deviations, to a large extent may be explained with the fast decline of oil prices on world markets and with even faster deceleration of food prices. In conditions of risks for a possible bigger then expected deceleration of domestic demand, as well as due to higher reduction of  2  BIS Review 60/2009  import prices, risks about the projected inflation are towards realizing lower then projected level of inflation. Figure 1 Inflation (in %)  3)  In the external sector during 2008 the highest ever current account deficit of 12.7 percent of GDP was realized, which is a significatn increase (by 5.5 percentage points) compared to the previous year, and to a large extent it is explained by the trade deficit worsening and reduced net inflows from private transfers. Yet, such a gap, during the most of the year has not created strong pressures towards NBRM foreign exchange market interventions, having in mind that in a significant part it was financed by direct investments, as well as through foreign assets of domestic banks.

In this regard, the fiscal policy adjustments are important, also to obtain external financing to support the balance of payments. The NBRM, with the decision made today, for interest rate increase on the CB bills, is making an additional step towards reducing the external imbalance, and for achieving the interim and final objective of the monetary policy, remaining prepared to futher undertake additional measures, if necessary. V.  In the end, one more information. Today, the Council of the National Bank of the Republic of Macedonia held its 3rd session this year. Among other issues, on this session, the Council has adopted the 2008 Annual Report of the National Bank of the Republic of Macedonia; the 2008 Annual Report on Managing Foreign Reserves; the 2008 Internal Audit Report. All these documents shall be available on our web site in the following days. BIS Review 60/2009  5
One often sees forecasts as mean forecasts. This means in principle that the risk that the economy will develop less well is as great as the chance that it will develop better. A mean forecast for GDP growth abroad, for instance, balances everything that could give rise to lower growth against everything that could give rise to higher growth. Another way of expressing the same thing is that the forecast is a form of middle way of all the different roads the economy could take in the coming period. This way of working with forecasts means that one acts as though one has succeeded in quantifying the possibilities and effects of all of the different potential courses of events. A year or so ago there were frequent discussions of the risk of a split or disintegration of the euro system – what was the probability that this would happen and what effects would it have for Sweden? Today there may be reason to ask these questions with regard to an escalation of the Ukraine conflict or to a substantial fall in housing prices in Sweden. If one considers these difficulties in quantifying various possible sequences of events and probabilities that they will occur, it may not be as simple a matter to make decisions on monetary policy and make forecasts for future interest rates as it is sometimes made out to be.

From a practical perspective, for the BNB this means reorganising the management, administrative, IT, and budget processes in these two areas, as well as an increase in the number of employees involved in these activities. So far the banking supervision and bank resolution activities have been funded by the BNB’s monetary income. From 2021 the BNB will move on to the principle of the ECB and SRB to fund the relevant activities by collecting fees from credit institutions. 4/4  BIS central bankers' speeches
In sum, we are still far from completing the steps envisaged in the first phase of the Five Presidents’ roadmap. Achieving and maintaining responsible fiscal policies at national and euro area level still  3  seems beyond our grasp and while certain elements of the Banking Union are now in place, more needs to be done. Overall, the timetable is ambitious. We must also be realistic and admit that further integration is running against headwinds of popular discontent with integration and liberalisation. We need, therefore to be more open about what we are doing, to fully engage all our citizens and to build a case for a stronger EMU that can enjoy broad popular consensus rather than being imposed from above. 4

This has largely contributed to the emergence of an environment favorable to price stability and low unit production costs, strengthening the competitiveness of our European economy. Finally, all countries have experienced significant fiscal consolidation in the 1990s Enhanced European performances are also evidenced by the significant fiscal consolidation pursued in Europe in the 1990s. The general government deficit for the euro area fell by 3.5 percentage points between 1993 and 1997 and was brought back below the 3% threshold. Since then, deficits have continued to fall. The most recent data point to a public deficit of 1.2% of GDP for the euro area in 1999, down from 2.0% in 1998. Four countries of the euro area have managed to achieve a fiscal surplus since 1999. The fact that European member states have made significant efforts in order to improve their public finances does not mean that the process of fiscal consolidation is over. In fact, some member states, including France, still have some way to go to meet the Stability and Growth Pact goal of budget positions which are close to balance or in surplus. In addition, there is a need to further reduce government debt levels, which remained above 70% of GDP for the euro area.
4  See Tucker, P M W, ‘Money and credit: banking and the macroeconomy’, speech at the Monetary Policy and the Markets Conference, 13 December 2007, Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin Q1 2008, pp 96-106. 4  BIS Review 96/2008  Other bits of central banking Finally, and briefly, I would observe that Blinder’s work on decision-taking processes and structures has so far focused entirely on the setting of interest rates. We have been living through a decade or more in which, at many although not all central banks, other decisions affected the financial landscape and risks to stability. Again drawing on his experience as the Vice Chairman of the Fed Board and again comparing and contrasting different approaches, I think we would all benefit enormously if Alan Blinder took his scholarly apparatus and spirit of enquiry into other corners of central banking and how they fit together. BIS Review 96/2008  5

It reminds us, if need be, that crisis management is always a difficult and potentially long lasting task. Time is a key dimension for fixing the economic and financial systems, which in turn creates the conditions for self sustained recoveries. In a couple of weeks, Greece has been at the epicenter of the phenomenon when doubts about the ability of its government to honor billions of debts maturing in 2010 became widespread. The lack of market confidence translated into spectacular increases in government bond yields. While this extreme situation was largely limited to one Member State, the magnitude of these price movements and signs of contagion to other sovereigns led market participants to fully reassess global sovereign risks. In this global reassessment process even less vulnerable countries were broadly and suddenly impacted with spreads widening very rapidly and reaching sometimes unprecedented levels. The issue at stake is certainly not to refute weaknesses of certain fiscal positions. In fact I, and many ECB Governing Council members alike have regularly called on policy makers to pay due attention to debt dynamics. What was very peculiar was the intensity of contagion between member states and between segments of the financial markets. Some observers have voiced concerns that specific mechanisms were at play, highlighting the potential destabilizing role of speculation and called for decisive policy actions to curb its consequences. I will come back to this issue later on. Looking at the roots of these countries weaknesses, the financial crisis has played a pivotal role.