samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Ong Chong Tee: Confidence in and resilience of the life insurance industry Speech by Mr Ong Chong Tee, Deputy Managing Director (Financial Supervision) of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, at the Life Insurance Association (LIA) Annual Luncheon 2015, Singapore, 4 March 2015. *  *  *  Dr Khoo Kah Siang, President of the Life Insurance Association, Distinguished guests, Ladies and Gentlemen. 1. Thank you for inviting my colleagues and I to the Association’s 13th Annual Luncheon. 2. Modern life insurance is said to have its beginnings in London more than 300 years ago by a company called Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance, with the aim of allowing an amicable distribution of contributions to be made by deceased members to their surviving wives and children. But even during the times of Ancient Rome, it is believed that some forms of life insurance existed to help mitigate the costs of burials of deceased members and to provide for their surviving families. While clearly much has changed in the industry, the central tenet of the industry has remained – to provide financial protection to dependants and in current times, also as a means of savings and wealth management. 3. A life insurance purchase is in essence a legal promise. In exchange for payment of premiums, an insurer will honour claims and make payment as agreed under the insurance policy. Hence given the typically long term nature of the commitments, confidence in and resilience of the life insurance industry must underscore its growth and development.

All direct life and composite insurers had participated in QIS1. I would like to thank the LIA and its members for the active participation and feedback. Indeed, many of you have expressed understanding and support for many of the proposed enhancements in the RBC2 framework. 21. Let me share a couple of high level observations from the QIS1 results with you. 22. First, there is an increase in risk requirements compared to the existing RBC framework. This is to be expected, given the more comprehensive risk coverage and higher target confidence level under RBC2. RBC2 targets a 99.5% confidence level over a one-year period, which is increasingly seen as the benchmark for insurers globally. From the results that I have seen, most of our insurers are able to maintain capital adequacy ratio or CAR of well above 100% under the preliminary set of RBC2 proposals. 23. Some industry players are naturally anxious if they will still have to maintain the same high buffers of way above 100% CAR or FSR under RBC2, as they do currently for RBC. This is not our expectation, given that the risk requirements under RBC2 are designed to be more risk sensitive, comprehensive and calibrated to a higher target confidence level. 24. A second observation is the greater differentiation in CAR between firms with different risk profiles.
It is about establishing an incentive-based approach to risk management and capital adequacy, within a framework of the three mutually-supporting pillars The new comprehensive framework provides at least four transmission channels for influencing financial stability and the overall economy: first, by setting more risk-sensitive minimum regulatory capital requirements, so that regulatory capital is both adequate and closer to economic capital; second, by providing incentives to encourage improvements in banks’ internal risk management processes; third, the enhanced mechanisms to encourage the marketplace to exert external discipline on banks and the banking sector; and fourth, the necessary greater co-operation among supervisors across jurisdictions. The effects of each of these channels will be different in terms of time and in terms of final influence, some of them having the capacity to bring significant long-term positive changes to the financial markets. In my view, perhaps too much attention is placed on the minimum capital rules of Pillar 1 and not enough on the effects of the other three channels. 3. Implications of Basel II for monetary policy  Let me therefore turn to the issue of how the main elements of Basel II may affect the ability of the monetary authority to fulfil its objectives. I believe that the achievement of price stability as a desirable medium to long-term target is, by now, a non-controversial objective of primary importance whose foundations are well known. On one hand, the proposition that labels inflation largely as a pure monetary phenomenon within long time-horizons can hardly be contested either conceptually or empirically.

Let me now consider the implementation of monetary policy in the course of 1999. 1  As an indicator of inflation, UNDINHX has merits as well as drawbacks, as I have pointed out on many occasions. Besides excluding imported goods, the index has a tendency to eliminate prices for domestic goods and thereby disregard inflation effects from important structural factors. But it does serve to illustrate the extent to which domestic demand pressure contributes to inflation’s path. BIS Review 28/2000  2  Monetary policy in the past year The early months of 1999 were marked by continued effects of the Asian crisis on the world economy, with weaker international demand. In order to prevent this from leading to a weaker economic trend in Sweden and thereby a lower path for inflation, the Riksbank reduced the repo rate twice, in February and March, bringing it down to 2.90%. The situation stabilised during the late spring and summer. The relatively relaxed monetary policy that had been implemented for a number of years - both in Sweden and in many other parts of the world economy - played an important part in the improvement that occurred during 1999 and contributed to more positive economic forecasts. It was then important for the Riksbank to take timely action so as not to have to implement a more pronounced monetary tightening and economic retardation to cope with rising inflationary pressure at a later stage.
We still need to re-establish multilateralism on the basis of three convictions stemming from our European experience, with its limitations:  Page 9 of 10  -  an agenda that meets people's expectations: more inclusive growth, and the protection of common public goods, starting with the climate  -  an ability to decide and act comprehensively with regard to a few wellidentified projects, rather than discussing everything, at too much length. -  a distinction between the independence of states – which may be formal – and real sovereignty on key issues. Emmanuel Macron was among the first who dared to advocate a "European sovereignty", which is still an oxymoron for many, who only dream of national sovereignty. But it is this common sovereignty that Mario Draghi promoted in a speech in Bologna last February, stressing that: “independence does not guarantee sovereignty" and that "countries need to work together to exercise sovereignty.” xxv Let me give you a testimony: this is what we have achieved with the euro. It is never easy – we have cultural differences, including economic differences. But we are proud to have created together a sovereign currency, globally respected, with popular support – 76% of citizens are attached to the euro – and a federal institution – the Eurosystem, consisting of the ECB and the 19 national central banks – which is undoubtedly the one that works the best in Europe. ** A social, environmental and multilateral model must now be Europe’s message to the world.

» Issue Brief 2019-3 – March 2019 xvii Philippe Aghion, Gilbert Cette, Elie Cohen, Changer de modèle, Odile Jacob, 2014 xviii OECD (2016), PISA 2015. xix OECD xx OECD (2016), PISA 2015: on average, the PISA 2015 sample covers 90% of the national population of 15-yearolds in Europe/EU/euro area. For the OECD, this coverage rate is an approximate measure of enrolment rates in grade 7 or higher. xxi OECD (2018, 2016) Education at a Glance. xxii OECD (2018), Equity in Education: Breaking Down Barriers to Social Mobility, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris. Performances measured in science xxiii Column in Les Echos, 20 April 2018 xxiv Hans Jonas (1991), The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of Ethics for the Technological Age xxv Mario Draghi (2019) Sovereignty in a globalised world, Speech at the University of Bologna, 22 February xxvi Simone Veil, President of the European Parliament, 1979
Domestically, monetary policy will remain expansionary, which, together with less tight financial conditions, also backs this projection. It is worth saying that these projections use as a working assumption that the policy rate will be kept at its low of 0.50% until at least the second quarter of 2010 and that its normalization will occur at a similar pace to that in December’s Economic Expectations Survey (EES), which is more gradual than the one implied by financial asset prices in the two weeks before the statistical closing of this Monetary Policy Report (figure 15). The scenario outlined here is, as usual, subject to several risks. On one hand, doubts about how robust will the global economic recovery ultimately be still persist. The latest data have been better than predicted in several economies, but financial markets continue to react with volatility in the face of unexpected events while credit losses are still being absorbed by financial intermediaries. The labor market situation is still complex in several economies, which, combined with the de-leveraging process under way, adds doubts about the capacity of consumption and investment around the world to regain strength. Another substantial risk has to do with the way in which central banks and governments will withdraw their unconventional monetary policy measures and fiscal and financial packages, and how this could affect the functioning of financial markets.

Latin America: Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru; Emerging Europe: Bulgary, Czeck Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine; Emerging Asia: India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam; Commodity exporters: Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Source: Central Bank of Chile based on CEIC Data. 16  BIS Review 9/2010
The share of GDP in quarantined areas has moved from 11% to 52% in the same period. Page 1 of 3  Central Bank of Chile June 2020  11. This has intensified the impact on economic activity. GDP growth remained in positive ground in the first quarter, but economic activity declined 3.5% in March and 14.1% in April. Figures are likely to be worse for May and June in line with the broadening of lockdowns. Central Bank estimates from last week set the contraction of GDP between -5.5% and -7.5% in 2020, with the range broadened to take into account uncertainty around the persistence of constraints. 12. Assuming that constraints will begin to roll back in the third quarter, we estimate GDP to grow between 4.75% to 6.25% in 2021, and 3%-4% in 2022. 13. While the drop in GDP in 2020 will be the deepest in 35 years, prospects remain better than in other Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries. This owes to five factors: a. Structural factors are more favorable than in other EMEs. Chile has a deeper domestic financial market, where institutional investors play a major role; remittances have never been a source of foreign revenue, and the composition of foreign trade means that the terms of trade are improving rather than worsening. Even the informal sector, while bigger than in advanced economies (AE), at 30% of the labor force is smaller than it is in other LAC countries. b.

The exchange rate remains operative as a shock absorber due to the low FX exposure of households, government, financial institutions and the non-financial corporate sector. c. Foreign liabilities are appropriately matched by sound and liquid foreign assets. The latter include not only Central Bank reserves, but also sovereign wealth funds and foreign assets of domestic institutional investors. This has been recently enhanced by access to a USD 24 bn FCL from the IMF, membership of the Fed’s Temporary Foreign and International Monetary Authorities (FIMA) Repo Facility and a swap facility with the People’s Bank of China. d. Policy space is broader, thanks to sound management of fiscal, monetary and financial policy over many years. e. Institutions are stronger, including high credibility of the Central Bank and a stronger social safety net. 14. These favorable factors outweigh some shortcomings, most notably the effect of social unrest in the last quarter of 2019. In fact, in the last three months markets have fully reversed the relative erosion of Chilean asset prices at the end of last year. 15. So, how has the Central Bank used policy space? What challenges have emerged and how are these being resolved? a. The Central Bank has been largely proactive since November 2019. Over the last eight months we have cut the policy rate by 125 bp to its effective zero lower bound at 0.5% and have implemented a dozen measures to provide liquidity to markets and to foster lending to firms most affected by the lockdown. b.
Mr. Tosovsky gives the Czech Republic’s perspective of transition in Central and Eastern Europe Text of eighth Gerhard de Kock Memorial Lecture given by the Governor of the Czech National Bank, Mr. Josef Tosovsky, to an audience at the South African Reserve Bank in Pretoria on 17/2/97. It is a great honour and pleasure for me to be invited to give the eighth Gerhard de Kock Memorial Lecture, especially as this is probably (if I am not mistaken) the first time that a governor from the reforming countries of Central and Eastern Europe has been afforded this privilege. The region of Central and Eastern Europe has undergone a profound re-shaping. More than 100 million people of Central and Eastern Europe got involved in a far-reaching process of political, economic and social change. Because of its unprecedented character and size the impact of this multidimensional transformation has been in continent-wide Europe. Indeed, the political and economic map of the whole of Europe is nowadays rather different from what it used to be throughout the postwar period till the 1990s. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to share with you some experience we have acquired. At the beginning of my lecture I cannot avoid briefly mentioning options for economic and political reforms as opened up for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s as well as the starting position of the former Czechoslovakia on the eve of the “velvet revolution” which in November 1989 enabled us to start a process of radical economic reforms.

It could possibly be claimed that the stricter budgetary discipline  BIS Review 18/2002  1  is a rather last-minute conversion, as countries with large deficits are often forced to borrow on the international markets and there submit to the requirements made, in only to keep down the loan costs. Large, growing budget deficits also reduce the possibilities for parties other than the central government to assess the future and increase their costs. Borrowers are forced to pay high and varying risk premiums to borrow on the bond markets, as financial investors want to be paid for the uncertainty regarding the inflation rate or exchange rate. In addition, there is always a risk that if the debt becomes too large the central government will be forced to implement large savings that will in themselves lead to increased unemployment and poor profitability for domestically oriented companies. Large international efforts have been made and are being made to create new regulations and standards that will reduce the risk of financial instability in a deregulated environment. The Basel Committee's new capital adequacy rules are an example of this. Financial supervisory authorities in most countries have been strengthened considerably, although the complexity of the markets always threatens to increase more rapidly than the competence to supervise them. Quantitative deregulation of the financial markets is largely complete and the adaptations have been made. Increased experience of acting in a deregulated environment should in itself have reduced the risk of financial crises.
2  See ECB (2009), Financial Stability Review, Special Feature B for a discussion on the concept of systemic risk. 3  For an overview, see Bisias, D., M. Flood, A. W. Lo and S. Valavanis (2012), “A Survey of Systemic Risk Analytics”, Office of Financial Research Working Paper No. 0001, January. 4  Hollo, D., M. Kremer and M. Lo Duca (2012) “A Composite Indicator of Systemic Stress in the financial system”, ECB Working Paper No. 1426, March. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  short-term interest rate) in a MS-VAR, to illustrate the dynamic interaction of systemic financial instability and the macroeconomy in the euro area. 5 CATFIN, a VAR and Expected Shortfall measure at system-wide level calculated with non-normal distributions with fat tails, showing the predictive capacity of financial volatility regarding real economic downturns was proposed by Allen et al. 6 Similarly, Giglio et al. examine 19 measures of systemic risk for the US and 10 measures for the UK and the EU from the perspective of how well they forecast macroeconomic downturns. 7 They also build dimension-reduced risk indexes using principal components and partial quantile regression to demonstrate the robust performance of some indexes in anticipating future macroeconomic downturns. These efforts in developing composite indexes are complementary to the on-going research on the concept of a financial cycle as a sort of a generalisation of the old concept of credit cycle, distinct from the concept of the economic or business cycle. The ECB paper presented this morning by Hiebert et al.

See also Ampudia, M., H. van Vlokhoven and D. Żochowski, (2016), “Financial fragility of euro area households”, Journal of Financial Stability, forthcoming; see also: ECB Working Paper Series No. 1737. 17  For details, see the Household Finance and Consumption Network webpage, https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/economic-research/research-networks/html/researcher_hfcn.en.html. 6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  remarks. Since March this year, the ECB started publishing a Macroprudential Bulletin 18 that will inform about the analytical work being done, the policy decisions adopted and assessed, as well as analysis of relevant regulatory developments. This will further contribute to enhance transparency in our assessments. We look forward to maintaining a lively dialogue with the community of people in official institutions, in the financial sector and in academia who are interested in the new important field of macroprudential policy. Thank you for your attention. This is the full text of a speech delivered in abridged form at the ECB on 26 April. 18  ECB Macroprudential Bulletin, (2016), Issue 1: http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/ecbmpbu201603.en.pdf?f584ec27e20fd378bdca2d6f68d5d7b9. BIS central bankers’ speeches  7
A lighter touch does not mean a laxer approach, and maintaining high standards of integrity, transparency and enforcement is more important than ever. Foster competition Fourth, we are opening up to, rather than sheltering from, global competition and the winds of change. To develop as a financial centre, we must attract global players to locate here and carry out more activities in Singapore. We have therefore been levelling the playing field for local and foreign competitors, and opening up hitherto closed parts of the financial industry, including domestic banking, insurance, and securities trading. We are completely open in the insurance industry and will be so in the securities industry as well from next year. We have, however, proceeded more cautiously in banking, where we consider it crucial for systemic stability to have strong Singaporean banks retain a significant market share. Here our approach is to liberalise in a phased manner so as to inject more competition and spur the stronger Singapore banks to upgrade and compete, and not to put off liberalisation while waiting for smaller players to become strong and confident enough. We introduced the first banking liberalisation measures two years ago. We are now finalising a second banking liberalisation package, which we will announce at the end of this month. Promote key markets and activities Finally, we are actively promoting the development of specific markets and activities, which have stronger growth potential. An example is the wealth management industry. Another example is the debt markets, which until recently were underdeveloped all across Asia.

There is a saying: “The face you have at age 20 is the face Nature gives you; but the face you have after 50 is the face you earned” MAS’ face today, on our 50th anniversary, is perhaps marked with the scars of crises fought and overcome and hopefully also a few lines of wisdom gathered over the years. It is also – we like to think – a radiant face, as we look ahead with hope and confidence, to push the boundaries of innovation, to make finance more inclusive, more sustainable, and more purposeful, while ensuring it remains safe. Thank you and have a good evening. 3/3  BIS central bankers' speeches