samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The intention is that it should encompass not only the best, internationally agreed, principles of payment system design but also state-of-the-art technology. Leveraging on the technology used for the existing Hong Kong dollar RTGS system, this US Dollar Clearing System will offer a range of advanced and sophisticated clearing functions. These will include linkage with the Hong Kong dollar payment system to provide real time PvP settlement for US dollar-Hong Kong dollar transactions, as well as linkages with the stock and debt securities clearing houses to provide DvP settlement. For the general public, the System will enable banks to offer US dollar cheque deposit accounts, which means that US dollar payments can be discharged through the writing of a cheque in US dollars drawn upon a bank in Hong Kong. The various features of the system will be introduced in phases. All being well, we hope to see real-time interbank payments and PvP for US dollar-Hong Kong dollar foreign exchange transactions introduced by the third quarter of this year and US dollar paper cheque clearing and a linkage with the HKMA’s Central Moneymarkets Unit completed by the end of the year. People have asked whether we propose to introduce clearing in other foreign currencies once the US dollar system is established. In principle this would be possible. In practice there needs to be a business case. The HKMA is certainly ready to respond if there appears to be market demand for similar clearing systems for other major currencies.

Mr Yam looks at the benefits a US dollar clearing system will bring to Hong Kong  Speech by Mr Joseph Yam, Chief Executive, Hong Kong Monetary Authority, at the Signing Ceremony for the US Dollar Clearing System, Hong Kong, on 9 March 2000. *  *  *  It is a pleasure to welcome you all to this afternoon’s signing ceremony. The purpose of the ceremony is for the HKMA formally to appoint HSBC as the Settlement Institution for the new US dollar clearing system that will be developed in Hong Kong over the coming months. When it is fully running - prospectively by the end of the year - this system will enable a wide range of financial transactions in US dollars to be settled here in Hong Kong, many of them on a real time basis. The project marks an important milestone in the development of Hong Kong’s financial infrastructure and it should help to consolidate Hong Kong’s position as an international financial centre. Developing Hong Kong’s financial infrastructure is, along with maintaining currency and banking stability, one of the three main policy objectives of the HKMA. Financial infrastructure, when it works efficiently, is something that is so much taken for granted that it is barely noticed. It is a far less prominent public issue than currency or banking stability. Yet, without a properly working financial infrastructure, there is little chance of currency and banking stability.
As regards Swiss bank regulations, it is primarily the risks emanating from developments in the real estate and mortgage markets which are presently the focus of public interest. However, the most decisive factor for the long-term importance of the Swiss banking centre is the alleviation of the TBTF issue. Only if this can be done, will it be possible to provide a home to international banks in Switzerland in the long term. Thus, regulatory efforts to contain the TBTF issue convincingly in Switzerland are extremely important. With the Swiss TBTF legislation, which is currently being implemented, we are making good progress in this respect. The package of legislation rests on two pillars. First, systemically important banks are subject to significantly higher capital and liquidity requirements with a progressive component. Second, arrangements must be made to ensure that systemically important banks are resolvable in a crisis, so that it is not necessary to resort to public funds. If these measures are implemented in full, incentives to take on excessive risk will be substantially reduced. This will diminish the likelihood of a crisis, as well as the costs to the taxpayer, should a crisis nevertheless occur. At the same time, the measures help to strengthen domestic competition, because they reduce the implicit subsidies to the TBTF banks. However, we have not yet achieved our objective.

This was demonstrated in the real estate crisis at the beginning of the 1990s and again in the most recent financial crisis. In the 1990s, the big banks were able to absorb at least part of the impact of the regional banking crisis on the economy, while during the financial crisis, the domestically focused banks, which were hardly affected, ensured that lending operations in Switzerland continued almost unimpeded. In addition, the following prerequisites must, in my view, be fulfilled, in order that the Swiss banking centre can retain its global importance and reach. The quality of the services offered by the banks, their crisis resilience and their reputations must all be considerably above average. Although, in principle, quality, crisis resilience and reputation are important for any financial centre, they are particularly crucial for Switzerland. On the one hand, our comparatively small country can only afford to host a relatively large international banking centre if this financial centre is extremely stable since, naturally, the resources available for emergency bank rescues are limited. On the other, an irreproachable reputation makes a major contribution to ensuring that the business operations of Swiss banks are not subject to constant political and legal pressure from abroad. And, again, excellence in service quality and products offered is essential if banks from a small country are to export their services successfully and secure significant market shares for themselves in international competition for customers. It is above all the banks themselves who face the challenge of fulfilling these prerequisites.
6  7  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  7  A related point is that not all reductions in uncertainty are beneficial. In particular, guaranteeing what firms themselves see as the worst case outcome (in the simple model that would mean setting q = λ = 1) is unlikely to improve matters even if it “resolves the uncertainty”. Quite the opposite: it would mean only that projects that have so far been postponed, precisely for fear of such an outcome, would then be cancelled for good. Another set of implications arises from the expected duration of the uncertainty (E[T] = 1/q). It’s helpful in this respect to re-express [2] as follows: E[T] (R – ρ) ≥ λL  [3]  Writing the result this way makes its interpretation that much more intuitive. On the right-hand side is the benefit of waiting until the event is realised, i.e. the (probability-weighted) loss the firm could thereby avoid. On the left-hand side is the cost of waiting, namely the excess return the investment would earn in the meantime. And the longer the wait (the higher the expected duration of the uncertainty E[T]) the greater the foregone income is likely to be. If the firm expects a really long delay before the news comes through (high E[T], low q) it might well decide it just has to get on with things and make the investment anyway.

Finally, we have to do our best to ensure that market discipline is exercised in a relatively benign and gradual way – graded differentiation of spreads on debt for example, rather than sudden refusal by the market to rollover debt at any price. This means we need to think hard about the frequency as well as detail of disclosures, and specifically the trade-off between the two. Too frequent disclosure might not only be too onerous but also add to the volatility of company ratings. Too long and the potential for large step changes in an institution's risk profile will increase market uncertainty and volatility. Of course, there may be times when this cannot be avoided – the sudden emergence of fraud for example – which is where crisis management by the bank concerned and by the authorities comes into play. But we should not overemphasise the relevance of these new disclosure initiatives in this particular sort of situation: publicly owned banks are after all already required to disclose any information which could significantly affect their share price. BIS Review 43/2001  3  Impact of the New Basel Accord Turning to the Basel proposals on minimum capital, their aim is to align regulatory capital much more closely with risk. This should have financial efficiency benefits, as I explained just now. To the extent that seriously undercapitalised risk taking by banks will in the future be more difficult, there are also clear financial stability benefits.
All in all, the new information shows some signs of strength in the recovery in advanced economies, but a rather more subdued development in emerging markets. ...but also in Sweden It was clear that international developments play an important role for the Swedish economy when the preliminary GDP figures for the second quarter were published. GDP fell by 0.2 per cent when calculated as an annual rate compared with the first quarter of this year. The negative growth was largely due to a fall in exports, but household consumption also fell somewhat. The outcome was slightly weaker than we and several other analysts had expected. But as the figures are preliminary, we probably should not draw any major conclusions from them. At the same time, new monthly statistics for the retail trade showed that sales were strong at the end of the second quarter. Indicators for the start of third quarter have given mixed signals. So far, the information is limited to the business tendency survey for July and the purchasing managers’ index for the same month. The economic tendency survey, which includes both households and companies, rose slightly in July and the upturn was on a broad front. Confidence in the household sector is now at its historical average. The purchasing managers’ index for the manufacturing industry was over 50 in July, for the third month in a row, which indicates growth in the manufacturing industry, but the most recent outcome showed a fall compared with the previous month.

In EU Member States, between 2002 and November 2005, 202 cases of the restructuring of companies related to offshoring were publicly announced, which resulted in the transfer of nearly one hundred thousand jobs. Over that period, offshoring stood behind nearly six per cent of all cases of publicly announced restructurings of companies in the EU. So far, the scale of the phenomenon has not been large. However, offshoring as a strategy of increasing competitiveness is becoming more and more common and includes not only the manufacturing of products but also - increasingly - services. Table 2. Offshoring in EU member states Countries to which job transfer took place  Number of jobs liquidated in the EU between 2002 and 2003 due to transfer of jobs  Number of jobs liquidated in the EU between January and November 2005 due to transfer of jobs  China  3361  3077  India  9458  5470  Asian countries  3786  3271  Czech Republic  780  3890  Hungary  1110  772  Poland  120  2676  33151  31942  8  Source: European Restructuring Monitor , own calculations  Numerous analyses show that the process of offshoring is bound to grow and increasingly affect services 9 . For example, between 1980 and 2002 the trade in goods and services grew at 6.9%.
A new liquidity regulation is currently in the test and calibration phase. This regulation takes into account all balance-sheet and off-balance-sheet items that are of relevance in liquidity considerations, and is based – as far as possible – on internal bank liquidity management principles. It makes the big banks more resilient to disturbances in the interbank market or larger-scale withdrawals of deposits. It promotes longer-term financing as well as higher-rated securities that are capable of generating liquidity even in a stressed market environment. The new regulation is due to come into force in the second quarter of 2010. These advances and the broad consensus achieved at the international level can certainly be regarded as positive achievements. However, so far they only apply to preventative measures. As mentioned previously, these measures serve to reduce the probability of a crisis, but cannot always prevent its occurrence. Another crisis is inevitable and we must be prepared for it. 3. Resolution measures needed; “too big to fail” is biggest challenge  Consequently, we need tools that will substantially reduce the costs of a crisis. The legacy of the current crisis is a banking system with large international institutions that now enjoy a virtual state guarantee. The fact that systemically important banks enjoy such a guarantee is now openly recognised to be a problem by the banking sector, too. A guarantee of this kind contradicts the basic principle of the market economy and presents us with a situation that cannot be tolerated.

Philipp Hildebrand: Review of the international financial system Introductory remarks by Mr Philipp Hildebrand, Vice-Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, at the end-of-year media news conference, Zurich, 10 December 2009. * 1. *  *  Introduction  At the news conference in June of this year we spoke of a gradual calming in the general financial market environment, although the outlook remains uncertain. Since then we have seen a majority of banks returning to profitability. The horror stories being reported almost daily just over a year ago have now disappeared. It is very tempting just to go back to business as usual. However, we must not forget that – just over a year ago now – the international financial system was on the brink of collapse. Support packages of an unprecedented size were being put together for the banks. Exceptional monetary and fiscal measures were required to combat the dramatic plunge in the global economy – measures which have had to be kept in place to the current time. Only by a narrow margin was a complete collapse of the financial system avoided and the danger of a major depression averted. This experience has clearly shown us all that the principle of sustainability needs to be a much more dominant element in the development of the international financial system than it was previously.
The problem was that on a mark-to-market basis, some of these banks were viewed as potentially insolvent. But the mark-to-market price declines overstated the problem because a significant portion of the decline in prices did not reflect expected losses but instead was due to a huge increase in the illiquidity premium. This was due to the fact that risky assets could no longer be financed easily on a leveraged basis. As long as banks could hold onto the assets, losses would shrink once the illiquidity premium narrowed back to a more typical level. To sum up, I believe that the SCAP was an important turning point in the financial crisis. Confidence improved as banks raised capital mainly in the private markets. So what were the lessons from the CCAR? 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  I think here the lessons were mostly for the banks. There were negative consequences for banks that had inadequate capital planning capabilities or asked to make distributions that were too large relative to expected capital resources. From the CCAR, we concluded that all banks could and should be required to improve their capital planning processes, even those that received a decision of “no objection” to their proposed distributions. A detailed letter went to each firm outlining areas for improvement and we will be tracking the banks progress. CCAR is not a one-off event. It will be an ongoing process. It is designed to push banks to continue to upgrade their risk management and capital assessment processes.

By moving the banking industry collectively back to Figure 1 from Figure 2, the “bad state of the world” becomes less likely. In the SCAP, we had to make a number of important decisions. These included:   The appropriate capital target. We focused on the Tier I common ratio because we believed that this was the most credible form of capital. This put much greater emphasis on common equity than previously.   The severity of the stress test. We assumed a stress scenario with an unemployment rate 1.5 percentage points higher than the baseline scenario, and further home price declines of about 29 percent compared with 18 percent in the base case. We were aiming for a stress test scenario that had about a 5 percent to 10 percent probability of being realized.   The capital target at the end of 2010 and the stress test severity were both important in terms of the credibility of the SCAP. Going in, we were worried that with our capital goal, the BHCs’ needs might turn out to be higher than the available  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  resources from the private sector and the U.S. Treasury. We decided not to compromise the credibility of the stress test to save on needed capital resources.
Lars Heikensten: The economic situation and monetary policy Speech by Mr Lars Heikensten, Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at the Swedish embassy, London, 20 September 2004. *  *  *  Thank you for the invitation to the Swedish embassy and for the opportunity to speak about the economic situation and Swedish monetary policy. It is important for the Riksbank to come to London occasionally to meet the participants in the financial markets that regularly follow the Swedish economy and our work. My intention today is to give a broad picture of my views concerning the inflation outlook in the years ahead. The starting point will be the most recent Inflation Report in May and the assessments in the press releases that the Riksbank has published thereafter. I will also discuss particularly some issues that have recently been touched upon in the monetary policy debate: oil price developments and household indebtedness as well as developments in residential property prices. Following my introduction I look forward to a lively discussion. International developments The Riksbank’s assessment in the latest Inflation Report in May was that international economic activity would continue to strengthen this year and during the coming two years. During the summer we concluded that there was reason to be somewhat more optimistic about economic growth this year. The high oil price was indeed judged to stifle growth somewhat, but not to such an extent that would derail the upswing. Developments have differed somewhat between various regions.

An unexpectedly steep increase in global demand for oil, not least from the rapidly growing Chinese economy, seems to have been a significant driving force behind the rise in the oil price in 2004. This has led to a marked decrease in the idle capacity in the oil sector. Other relevant factors include unease over the situation in the Middle East and the various circumstances surrounding the Russian company Yukos. The rapid, short-term changes that have characterised the price formation in the oil market also point to a not insignificant element of speculation. Exactly what weight should be attributed to different factors from time to time is difficult to establish. But it is clear that the overall price rise in 2004 has been demand-driven to a larger degree compared with other occasions when the oil price has risen sharply. The increases in the oil price in 1973-74, 1979-80 and 1990 were as we know essentially a result of reductions in the oil supply. The demand for oil will of course play an important part for price developments in the period ahead as well. A key aspect is that more and more countries that previously were economically undeveloped will take the step towards more energy-intensive production. Even if new innovations can be put to use in a couple of years, the fast growth in many developing countries points to a relatively high oil price in the period ahead, too.
12 Member States have decided to impose a positive rate on the countercyclical buffer.7 The ESRB has likewise taken action. In 2016, it issued warnings to eight countries, drawing attention to medium-term vulnerabilities in the residential real estate sectors. In six of these countries, the ESRB judges that the vulnerabilities have not been sufficiently addressed and on Monday published recommendations setting out remedial action to be taken.8 Five further countries were issued with warnings.9  Areas for further progress in macroprudential policy Yet the overall framework for macroprudential policy in Europe remains incomplete. We need progress in three key areas to counter systemic risk more effectively: better analytical tools, new instruments that counter the development of risk outside the banking sector and a clearer framework to govern policy actions. The past decade has seen a sustained improvement in the tools available to assess risks to financial stability. Better data and better modelling techniques have revealed important insights. Developing the analytical toolkit to adequately monitor interconnectedness and contagion requires granular datasets, and the ability to map and link data across entities and markets. The sub-prime crisis in the US banking sector spread to European banks through their direct exposures, but it also spread to insurers through the use of credit default swaps.10 Only a holistic view of the system will allow potential contagion channels to be identified and modelled. And that requires investing in new technologies for data analytics and enhancing the capacity for authorities to link and share data and technical knowledge.

The second area of improvement for the macroprudential framework in Europe involves keeping pace with developments in the financial system. That requires broadening the range of macroprudential instruments beyond those currently available, which focus almost exclusively on the banking sector. For the insurance sector, the contours of such instruments are taking shape. They include solvency instruments such as symmetric capital requirements for cyclical risks; liquidity instruments for insurers with a vulnerable liquidity profile; and instruments to target bank-like activities to ensure macroprudential policy is consistent across sectors.11 The third area for improvement in macroprudential policy involves establishing a clearer conceptual framework to govern policy discussions and interventions. Such a framework would facilitate communication with market participants and the general public, as well as help mitigate any risk of inaction bias. 2/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  For monetary policy the framework is well known and the reaction function of central banks is normally well understood by markets. By contrast, the framework that governs macroprudential policy interventions is much less developed, due in no small part to our limited experience of using these tools. The objective of financial stability is broader than the objective of price stability, so is less easily defined by a single numerical measure. Developing the policy framework is challenging and will take time.