samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Some of the ideas that I have just mentioned will take time to materialise. Some may need a testing ground to pilot before being scaled up. On this, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area or Qianhai could function as pilot zones in the Mainland to test new crossboundary initiatives with Hong Kong. The Wealth Management Connect is a case in point. Conclusion 21. Ladies and gentlemen, what I have presented to you is a very brief summary of our thoughts on the role of Hong Kong in promoting the international use of RMB, but even that, I am sure you will agree, is already quite a menu. And we are already actively exploring some of these policy initiatives with our Mainland counterparts. But we cannot do it all on our own. While we need to create the necessary policy headroom, the market should be the one driving the process of RMB internationalisation. The active participation of market players is critical. I would therefore warmly welcome views and suggestions from Members of TMA and its subcommittees on ways to enhance the liquidity, to expand the product diversity and to build an efficient infrastructure in order that we can further develop the role of the Hong Kong markets in the process of the internationalisation of the RMB. 22. With its 76 institutional members and over 3,000 individual members, the TMA has been providing broad-based support to foster market development in Hong Kong. We believe the HKMA and the TMA’s relationship can also be a mutually beneficial one.

It is only when you have the right place to invest your money that you will have the incentive to use and hold the currency you gain from merchandise and services trade. In other words, RMB internationalisation could first be driven by the advancement of its function of store of value, which should in turn help promote greater usage of RMB as a unit of account and a means for payment and settlement for other purposes like trade. And Hong Kong is well positioned to help catalyse this process. 12. The question is “how”. We see three factors that are required to promote the use of RMB in capital market transactions in Hong Kong. These are liquidity, products and infrastructure. 13. First is liquidity, which has to be the most essential ingredient in developing markets. Without that, it would be hard for the market to conduct transactions smoothly and efficiently or to develop products. As I mentioned earlier, Hong Kong has the largest RMB deposit base among all offshore markets and the most active RMB FX market, and both have been growing steadily in the last few years, partly benefiting from the very strong growth in the turnover of the Stock and Bond Connect schemes. For example, the Stock Connect received an average daily turnover of RMB160 billion in the first eight months of this year, up 43% increase from last year. The Bond Connect received an average daily turnover of RMB26 billion during the same period, up 34% from last year.
Microfinance institutions should, therefore, strive to keep the transaction costs at a minimum and eliminate the possibility of incurring deadweight losses. The on-time delivery of microfinance loans is also a very important requirement. Most of the microfinance projects are agriculture based businesses. Hence, there is a necessity for meeting crucial expenses on-time. For instance, if a farmer has to apply fertilizer to his field, he has to do it on the due date. For him to buy fertilizer, he needs money also on the due date. This requires the microfinance institutions to release their loans on the due dates. Any undue delay would be immensely costly. A final word should also be said about the subsidization of the interest rates under microfinance credit schemes. Such subsidized credit is demanded, not by the microfinance borrowers, but by urban based social workers and politicians. The problem with subsidized credit is that it flows not into the microfinance projects but elsewhere. What microfinance borrowers need is not cheap credit. They need credit on simple terms in time at zero transaction costs. When the credit is subsidized, it not only leads to wastage, but also goes into the hands of undeserving individuals. Most probably, middle class and lower middle class people would flock to appropriate such credit which they plan to use for other types of non-productive purposes. In this context, informal money lenders would definitely provide a role model for microfinance institutions.

Instead of trying to fight the money lenders, microfinance institutions should learn good management practices adopted by them. All in all, microfinance delivery is a very subtle subject which should be handled very carefully. The best practices of microfinance lending are common to all countries. But, there may be a necessity for such countries to vary the actual implementation based on the specific country requirements. This arises from the famous dictum that one shoe will not fit all the feet. For the size and the variance of each and every foot, a different variety of a shoe has to be made. I hope that the participants of this training program have acquired this wisdom and would return to Sri Lanka armed with that wisdom. Thank you. BIS Review 48/2007  3
Charalampidis and Guillochon (2020) and Guerrieri et al (2020) also consider Covid in multi-sector models. See Cantore et al (2020) for a brief introduction to the epimacro literature. 7  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  7  that incomes have been relatively stable may not be as unrealistic as it might have been. It’s in any case useful, I think, to try to separate the direct effects of the pandemic on spending from its second-round impact, via incomes and economic risk. It’s these direct effects that these simulations  Chart 5a: Two stylised paths for the pandemic, one  attempt to represent. Chart 5(a) plots two  more persistent than the other  stylised paths for infection risk, one of which lasts a lot longer than the other (blue versus red). Our hypothetical consumer understands these dynamics and reacts accordingly in Chart 5(b). Consumption of the risky good, which at the start is assumed to account for around a quarter of the total, follows (inversely) the path of the infection. Spending on non-risky things moves in the opposite direction – there’s a degree of expenditure switching in both cases – but it’s more significant, and the initial and corresponding fall in aggregate spending less marked, in the blue case, when the virus is expected to persist for longer. Thus the response of consumer spending in aggregate is either drawn out but relatively limited (blue) or sizeable but shorter-lived (red).

This is because Solvency II caps the amount of transitional benefit a firm may derive. Bearing in mind this cap, and the benefits to be gained from a smooth transition, the take-up of transitional measures should be seen as a viable option for firms to take to assist with their capital planning, and are a feature that the UK authorities strongly supported during the development of Solvency II. They are there to be used where appropriate. As we shift to a Solvency II world, I think it is worth bearing in mind that, like a smartphone, regulation tends to get new “updates” and “apps” in response to changes in the external environment. Indeed, the path of the future is in global policy development, including the insurance capital standard (ICS) under the aegis of the International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS) which will look to develop risk-based global standards. Insurance business is fast becoming globalised and interlinked. It naturally follows that so too should regulation. Introducing global capital standards would enhance global cooperation, ensure a level playing field and limit regulatory arbitrage. For this reason, the PRA supports the development of global capital standards and the establishment of a long term vision in order to achieve a single insurance capital standard predicated on a single valuation basis which is genuinely comparable across jurisdictions. Concluding remarks Insurance sits at frontline of innovation and, as seen with climate change and digitisation, insurers can be directly exposed to changes in regulation, public policy and other shifts in society.
BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  •  At the same time, the global search for yield in a zero interest rate environment led to strong capital flows into the region, inducing increases in credit and asset prices. •  The business cycle and financial cycle began to diverge: raising interest rates to quell financial imbalances could potentially put the real economy at risk. Getting in all the cracks but not filling them A second reason why monetary policy may be ill-suited to address financial stability risks is that it is a blunt instrument. It may get into all of the cracks but some cracks may be just too big to fill. Financial vulnerabilities are often not evenly spread across the economy. They tend to be concentrated in specific sectors, such as in real estate. Monetary policy may be too blunt to address such specific risks and can cause significant collateral damage on the rest of the economy if it is calibrated to mitigate sector-specific risks. There is some empirical evidence that the cost-benefit trade-off in using monetary policy to lean against financial stability risks does not look promising. •  Kenneth Kuttner and Illhyock Shim estimate that a 100 basis point increase in the short-term interest rate would reduce real housing price growth by only 1 percentage point in the following quarter. •  Lars Svensson, drawing from the Swedish experience, finds that the cost of leaning against financial stability risks is high – with inflation too low and unemployment too high.

A central authority and a national repository can significantly improve the ability to better distribute, monitor and manage the supply-demand imbalances. Developing a thriving rental market should also be on the agenda to temper the nation’s fixation on home ownership. Another issue that banks should be concerned with is the sizable surplus in commercial property. In contrast to affordable housing, the office and retail markets are in oversupply. In 2016, the vacancy rate for prime office space in the Klang Valley stood at 21.8%, outstripping the regional average of 6.2%1. Monthly rentals of prime office space in Kuala Lumpur are the lowest among regional cities. Over the next few years, the significant incoming supply of large projects is likely to aggravate supply conditions in this segment. Signs of oversupply are also emerging in the retail segment in major urban centres in Malaysia. This can be traced to the abundance of shopping malls. You may be surprised to learn that there are as many as twenty shopping malls just along the 40km stretch of the LDP highway. It is equally astonishing that the prime retail space per capita in cities like Johor, Penang and Kuala Lumpur is actually higher than regional megacities such as Shanghai and Beijing, and also higher income cities such as Singapore and Hong Kong. A significant increase in vacancy rates, and the ensuing price corrections, are risks that the Bank has highlighted as far back as 2013.
This calls for us to review our strategy and to consider how our monetary policy can best deliver on our mandate. Indeed, a question that is common to the entire community of central banks today is how to best define the medium-term objective of monetary policy, so as to ensure that expectations are firmly anchored. This could be particularly beneficial in conditions – like today’s – in which the policy space to buffer the economy from adverse developments is more limited than it was prior to the crisis. And, we are all trying to gain a better understanding of how the longer-term trends I mentioned might affect variables we monitor regularly and seek, to some extent, to control. This being said, it is premature to venture here into debates about the precise scope, direction and timeline of our review, as the matter has not yet been discussed thoroughly by the Governing Council. What I can confirm, however, is that the strategy review will be guided by two principles: thorough analysis and an open mind. This will require time for reflection and for wide consultation. The Parliament, and this Committee in particular, have traditionally offered a unique forum for dialogue, which has been enriched by the expert reports prepared ahead of the hearings.4 The ECB greatly benefitted from these debates 16 years ago when it undertook its last strategy review. This time around, we will be seeking a dialogue which is even more intense and productive than in the past.

This publication aims to enhance the knowledge and information about remittances in the Albanian market, and to convey messages in the context of needs for intervention and the potential of remittances for various actors in the economy. For all the issues addressed above, especially related with the commitment of various stakeholders in the modernisation of payment systems in Albania, I invite you to actively participate and contribute to this conference. Concluding, I would like to wish you fruitful conference proceedings and thank you for your participation and attention. 2/2  BIS central bankers' speeches
Third, a currency union requires a common fiscal backstop for its central bank. Central banks must be able to act as Lender of Last Resort, both to financial institutions that are solvent but experiencing an unwarranted loss of confidence and to provide bridging finance to institutions that are being recapitalised using new resolution regimes. Under the current governance arrangements in the UK, these operations require an indemnity from, and the approval of, the Chancellor, because they would put substantial public funds at risk. The existing banking union between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom has proved durable and efficient. Its foundations include a single prudential supervisor maintaining consistent standards of resilience, a single deposit guarantee scheme backed by the central government, and a common central bank, able to act as Lender of Last Resort across the union, and also backed by the central government. These arrangements help ensure that Scotland can sustain a banking system whose collective balance sheet is substantially larger than its GDP. The euro area has shown the dangers of not having such arrangements, as well as the difficulties of the necessary pooling of sovereignty to build them. An independent Scotland would need to consider carefully how to develop arrangements with the continuing United Kingdom that are both consistent with its sovereignty and sufficient to maintain financial stability. 20  That in turn contributed to the divergence in output growth between core and periphery (chart 8).

Such is our aim in Hong Kong. But this does not mean throwing money into each and every idea which comes along - there’s no point in constructing highways if no-one wants to drive down them. There must be a reasonable business case. On the other hand, no venture no gain. The opening up of a footpath may lead to the emergence of heavy traffic. Thus we have been selective in the initiatives which we support and, although not every project may have been an unqualified success, examples such as our HKD RTGS system which we pioneered in the mid-90s; the CMU which provides such an excellent settlement and custody service for debt securities and which is being linked up with a growing number of overseas counterparties; and the relatively recent USD clearing system; all of these present a strong track record. We are here today to mark another milestone in this infrastructural development - in the field of clearing and payments. Our USD clearing system, introduced in 2000, has demonstrated that a niche exists for services of this type in this part of the world. USD RTGS turnover has grown to about 3,000 transactions a day with a value of some $ billion; and over 1,000 USD cheques are being processed daily. Enquiries and discussions with banks suggested to us that there was also a business case for a roughly parallel service in euro.
In particular, some of the job losses in the non-tradable sector are the outcome of the necessary rebalancing towards tradables and away from previously unsustainable domestic demand growth. However, the rise in unemployment in a number of countries has been aggravated by delays in structural reforms and, as I said, by a lack of downward flexibility in prices and wages after 2008. Job losses were largest among low-skilled, temporary workers in Spain and in the non-manufacturing sectors.7 As employment fell, unemployment – particularly of the young – jumped, especially in Greece and Spain, where more than a quarter of the total labour force is currently without a job. There was also a sharp increase in unemployment in the Baltic states – it rose from 5% in 2007 to 18% in 2010 on average in Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. However, since 2010 in all three countries unemployment has fallen relatively quickly. By the end of 2012 it had improved by about 10 percentage points.8 In the most stressed euro area countries, there are no signs of a reversal yet. This is the result of the inherited very rigid product and labour markets, which have started to change and need to continue to do so vigorously to prevent further job losses. Again, this is not only a matter of efficiency, but also a matter of equity. Europe cannot afford a lost generation. 5  See ECB Monthly Bulletin Box (2012), Rebalancing of competitiveness within the euro area and its implications for inflation, June 2012, pages 64–66.

While ex ante expectations of a fast convergence  1  I wish to thank Beatrice Pierluigi for her contributions to this speech. I remain solely responsible for the opinions contained herein. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  across euro area countries might initially have been reasonable, given the favourable environment created by the monetary union, the degree of sustainable convergence ex post turned out to be very limited. In many countries, excessive private/public consumption and residential investment spending, partly resulting from excessive debt accumulation, led to persistently higher HICP and unit labour costs with respect to the euro area average. At the same time, the supply side was not able to catch up with demand, due to the fact that investment spending was not channelled towards activities able to generate high future returns and due to important structural rigidities in the labour and product markets, which policy-makers largely neglected to tackle in the years before 2009. This process was aggravated by weak fiscal institutions and prudential supervision. All this contributed to the accumulation of large imbalances and vulnerabilities. In this environment, the EU framework for economic governance proved to be unable to enforce an early implementation of critical reforms or to prevent imbalances. Let me make the point with a few figures. The charts that I will show today focus on the three programme countries as well as Spain. Of course, the adjustment process is in fact taking place in a larger number of countries, some of which joined the euro area after 2007.
This does not mean that the Riksbank’s tasks would disappear, however, as claimed time and again by one of my predecessors Lars Wohlin. The majority of the Riksbank’s tasks would remain relatively unaffected by our participation. As I just mentioned, this applies to our work on financial stability, which would essentially remain a national responsibility for the foreseeable future. The Riksbank’s operational tasks such as monetary policy transactions, the management of the Riksbank’s assets, the collection of statistics, the management of banknotes and coins and various administrative tasks would also remain. I also object to the claim that the Riksbank would become a branch office of the ECB. In actual fact, the national central banks of the Eurosystem own the ECB. If Sweden were to join the Eurosystem, we would become a member of the board and be able to influence how the system as a whole develops in the future. That is hardly an opportunity available to local offices of other organisations. In addition, the Eurosystem is a decentralised system, in which the vast majority of tasks are carried out by the  BIS Review 29/2003  7  national central banks. Many tasks are also performed at national level completely outside the framework of the Eurosystem. The main change if Sweden were to participate in monetary union would be that decisions on the interest rate level in Sweden would be taken by the ECB Governing Council instead of by the Executive Board of the Riksbank.

Lars Heikensten: The Riksbank and the euro Speech by Mr Lars Heikensten, Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at the Society of International Treasurers Convention, Stockholm, 17 June 2003. *  *  *  Let me begin by thanking you for the invitation to come here and speak on the subject of EMU. Approximately three months remain until 14 September when the Swedish people will vote on whether to participate in monetary union. In the event of a “yes” vote, Sweden will enter monetary union in 2006 and introduce the euro as its currency. The right of determination over our interest rate level will then be transferred to the European Central Bank (the ECB). On the other hand, a “no” vote would generally imply “business as usual” for the Riksbank. Today, I will be speaking about some of the implications for the Riksbank and our operations in the event of a “yes” vote in the referendum. I will begin by speaking about the preparatory phase, that is, from 14 September until 1 January 2006, during which time preparations will be conducted in the Swedish economy for a changeover to the euro, and the krona will join the exchange rate mechanism, ERM2. Subsequently, I will talk on the issue of monetary policy as it will be conducted by the ECB and point to differences as well as similarities with how it is conducted today. Thereafter, I will touch upon the effects of a changeover on our work with financial stability.