samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
I am particularly delighted that this seminar will address the need to “match products to user needs”. This is indeed key to the success of any service oriented industry and therefore inevitable in meeting the needs of a growing economy such as ours. Without overemphasizing this point, I would like to implore you to ensure that you develop products suitable to your clients as a good and useful product is only one that meets the needs of the market. As I have already noted, on its part the Government is committed to resolving the various constraints identified in the country’s financial system through implemention of the FSDP and related initiatives. Key among the strategies includes the development of appropriate regulations and improving the capital adequacy base for the leasing and finance companies. Adequate capitalization of commercial banks and financial institutions is important if there is to be stability in the financial sector. It is for this reason that the Bank of Zambia, effective January 2007, increased the minimum paid-up capital for commercial banks from K2 billion to K12 billion. In the same vein, the start-up capital for the deposit taking leasing institutions was increased to K1.5 billion from K250 million. I wish to urge all leasing companies to make sure that they take steps to meet the required minimum capital. Let me conclude by paying tribute to the organisers of this seminar, Sapitwa Finance.

Closing remarks for the 13th edition of the Regional Seminar on Financial Stability Florin Georgescu, First Deputy Governor of the National Bank of Romania Bucharest, September 13, 2019 Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,   We have reached the end of the 13th edition of the Regional Seminar on Financial Stability and it is my pleasure to provide some closing remarks.  After two days of interesting presentations and intense debates, I will try to summarize some of the ideas presented here.  In this year’s edition of the Financial Stability Seminar, whose topics was “Inclusion and Financial Stability”, we have discussed about: o Financial inclusion and income inequality o Correlation between macroprudential policy and financial inclusion o Access to banking financing o Climate-related risks All these were discussed in the context of financial stability.  Some of the subjects, like macroprudential policy and its effects, were discussed in-depth these days, but also in the previous editions of the seminar. And that’s how it should be. This policy represents a key element in ensuring financial stability.  Macroprudential policy, according to ESRB recommendation, has ”the ultimate objective to contribute to the safeguard of the stability of the financial system as a whole, including by strengthening the resilience of the financial system and decreasing the build-up of systemic risks, thereby ensuring a sustainable contribution of the financial sector to economic growth”.
So it is simplistic to assume that Germany becoming less competitive would automatically help others – it may indeed harm them. The solution to rebalancing is for other countries to become more competitive, not for Germany to become less so. We need to maximise competitive pressures within Europe to achieve higher efficiency, innovation and productivity growth. And thanks to the structural reforms that are taking place, this is actually what we are seeing. For example, since 2011 Portugal’s export market share has increased by 11 percentage points and Spain’s by 8 percentage points. At the same time, I see a vital need for new investment in Germany. Investment is still around 1 percentage point of GDP lower than it was in 2007, and in that year Germany already had the lowest investment ratio in the euro area. To raise investment we need structural reforms in Germany as well – for instance to liberalise the services sector – thus creating a virtuous circle of higher potential growth and better investment opportunities. And by definition, if more German savings were invested at home, the current account surplus would also fall. To conclude, I do not see the current decade in the euro area as “lost” – I think it is being used well. The decade of adjustment we are facing now is to correct the mistakes of the previous decade. But in the process, I trust we are fixing our problems at the root.

Looking forward to 2014, the key challenge is to stay on this path to create the fastest possible rebound in growth and job creation. This entails building a genuine banking union with a strong single resolution mechanism; it entails finding new ways to support structural reform implementation, for instance through so-called reform contracts; and it entails deepening our political union to ensure full legitimacy in the eyes of citizens. All this requires effort and determination to achieve – but it is well within our reach. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3
As crypto asset prices began to fall, this has led to large margin calls and automatic liquidation mechanisms – a feature of some protocols designed to protect against risk – that further amplified price falls. We have seen a range of crypto funds taken down by these effects; one of the biggest has been here in Singapore with Three Arrows Capital filing for bankruptcy last week. I could mention other examples – risks that arise from weak governance for example, or the lack of transparency and understanding of investor rights[4]. But the basic point is the same: new technology does not change old risks. The second lesson I take from the crypto winter is that regulators need to get on with the job of bringing the use of crypto technologies in finance within the regulatory perimeter. Or to put it the other way around, the lesson we should not take from this episode is that ‘crypto’ is somehow ‘over’ and we do not need to be concerned about it anymore. I should note at this point that even with the recent collapse crypto assets and crypto markets have not posed a systemic risk, though I recognise of course that this of is little comfort to those nursing substantial losses. That is not in itself a surprise; regulators, myself included[5], made clear, when crypto reached its highs last year, that it was not yet large enough or integrated enough into the rest of the financial system to be an immediate systemic risk.

Of course, the automation of activities through a smart contract raises many questions about how firms and regulators ensure appropriate risk management and resilience. In the UK, the authorities are to establish a regulatory ‘sandbox’ to allow firms to investigate technical feasibility in this area and the regulators to assess related risks and risk management. It is of course impossible to say how successful and how disruptive these technologies will ultimately prove to be in finance. History has many examples of technologies that promised much but failed to deliver. Given the pace of change and the disruption we have seen in other sectors of the economy it would, as I said be very unwise for financial regulators to ignore these developments. But it would also be unwise for innovators and the authorities alike to forget that to be successful and sustainable, technologically driven innovation needs regulation. A succession of cryptowinters will not, in the end, help the deployment and adoption of these technologies and the reaping of the benefits that they may offer. History also has examples of technologies that have been put aside/ shunned because of dramatic early failures. While the causes of the Hindenberg Zeppelin disaster are still debated, it is very probable that the general development of the use of hydrogen in transport was put aside for decades as a result. Innovators, alongside regulators and other public authorities, have an interest in the development of appropriate regulation and the management of risk.
Monetary policy strategy in 2007 and beyond  Monetary policy is the mechanism that is used by central banks all over the world to direct an economy along a non-inflationary, growth path. Such policy would ideally be supported by a series of other policies and strategies as well. The policy framework adopted by the Central Bank of Sri Lanka is a monetary targeting framework with reserve money as the operational target and broad money (M2b) as the intermediate target 1 . Such targets are carefully computed and set after taking into consideration, the potential growth and after assessing the liquidity needs of the economy to move along the projected growth path while keeping inflationary pressures in check. The veracity and accuracy of the values derived from the computation of the demand for money and the value of the money multiplier 2 are important prerequisites for effective monetary targeting. In that context, it is important to note that in Sri Lanka, there is a stable relationship between the operational target, i.e., reserve money, and the intermediate target, i.e., broad money, with the money multiplier consistently remaining around 5 during the recent past. The long-term relationship of monetary aggregates and inflation also indicates that money would be a useful leading indicator for inflation. Hence, we believe that monetary targeting could continue to be an effective framework for Sri Lanka in the short to medium term. In 2001, Sri Lanka moved to a “Floating exchange rate” regime thereby allowing market forces to largely determine the exchange rate.

We have sought to push in the direction of market forces, rather than against them. Asset management One good illustration of how we have sought to promote and develop our financial centre is our efforts to develop Singapore into an asset management hub. We assessed very early on was that there was good potential for growing the asset management industry in Singapore. A rising affluent class across Asia would have assets needing to be managed. Most of the savings in Asian countries are still in the form of bank deposits. There is considerable scope for diverting some of these funds for professional management. There was also an opportunity for managing the Asian mandates of global portfolio investors, an area where no clear leader had emerged. We believe that global funds and institutions would find Singapore a good location from which to manage their Asian portfolios. Although for now the region is not a hot destination for inbound investments, this will change as the region picks up again. We therefore carried out a comprehensive strategy to strengthen our fund management industry. We streamlined licensing requirements for fund mangers, and provided more room for indigenous fund managers to grow. We introduced tax incentives, especially for fund managers managing substantial amounts of discretionary funds out of Singapore. We leveraged on our domestic savings, both government and private, to attract fund managers here.
The team’s analysis shows lower lending growth for low headroom firms on average, though statistical significance across specifications is mixed. They analyse possible effects on mortgage lending, credit card lending and non-government guaranteed corporate lending separately.20 They find statistically significant evidence that low surplus banks constrained nonguaranteed corporate lending and credit card lending more than their peers during Covid-19, though the latter is based on a small number of observations. The effects on credit card and non-guaranteed corporate lending strike me as an important result. Table 2 shows the full results. Chart 4: Evolution of effective surpluses  Notes: The graph plots the growth of effective CET1 capital surpluses, calculated from public requirements. The series are indexed to 100 in 2019 Q4. The sample is divided into different quartiles based on banks’ 2019 average effective surpluses. There are 40 “low surplus” banks (i.e. those in the bottom quartile), and 79 “high surplus” banks, (i.e. those in the second and third quartiles). Banks in the top quartile are excluded for comparability purposes. In the rest of the analysis, the “pre-pandemic” period is defined as that from 2019 Q1 to 2019 Q4, and the “post-pandemic” period is from 2020 Q1 till 2020 Q4. 19 This was based on a difference-in-differences econometric strategy. With more detailed data available to them for our domestic banks, the calculation of headroom was based on granular information on surpluses to the full range of regulatory requirements – their effective surplus. They took banks at their highest level of consolidation.

This concern was at the forefront of UK and international prudential regulators’ minds and motivated the various interventions they made at the time to make clear that regulatory buffers could and should be used.6 So today and in the spirit of John Dewey, I want to reflect on the lessons from the Covid stress so far for the prudential framework for banks and in particular for the regulatory buffers within it. What we worried about during the early Covid stress With hindsight, this banking system resilience is evident. But during the stress of March and April 2020, we were concerned that it was, to use the words of the Chair of Financial Stability Board, Randal Quarles, “a close run thing”.7 One concern was a potential decline in capital ratios at the time. There were two effects in play. First, banks were increasing provisions as their expectations about the state of economy and credit quality declined. This affected capital resources. Second, capital requirements were increasing. This was because risk weights in some parts of the capital framework are sensitive to current market conditions, which had worsened; and total assets were increasing, as firms drew down pre-existing credit facilities. Third, liquidity requirements and resources were sensitive to market conditions too. Mechanisms designed to capture potential liquidity needs related to derivatives activity produced estimates that were too low going into the shock and then increased rapidly after the shock had crystallised.
Tharman Shanmugaratnam: Promoting innovation in finance in Singapore Speech by Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, at the Launch of the Singapore FinTech Festival, at the Asia Society, New York City, 12 April 2016. *  *  *  I’d like to thank the Asia Society for hosting us this evening, for the launch of the Singapore FinTech Festival. The Festival will take place over 5 days in November this year in Singapore, bringing together technology players, financial institutions, FinTech players and regulators. We are launching the festival in New York City, and that is not as surprising as it may first seem. It says something about how we view innovation in finance. It is an inherently open system. Innovation is about ideas and enterprise flowing between cities, and connections between players everywhere. We can’t predict how those connections will unfold, but we know that there’s no neat geography that will define financial innovation. It’s also why we shouldn’t focus too much on the rankings of different financial centres at this stage of the game. You know what they say about the rankings of colleges and universities. If you rank very well, the rank is extremely important. And if you are not ranked well, they are unimportant, irrelevant, and they don’t get to the heart of what you are really trying to do. Well, we are nicely on both sides of that.

Such as the infrastructure for centralised addressing for real time mobile payments. And the efficient and secure storage of data in the cloud. And critically – no one has done this very well in in an organized way, having open APIs, whether private or public APIs in each of our established players. Open APIs can spur innovation in banking and finance. There will be tensions as we go forward with FinTech, tensions inherent in a new wave of innovation, that we must accept and manage. First, the tension between new players and established players, or the tension between disruption of existing players and collaboration with them. Many FinTech players see themselves as disrupters. But there’s also a fair bit of collaboration that’s taking place. Established financial institutions have been partnering or acquiring new, smaller players with new technologies. Acquiring them either as a defensive mechanism or as a way of bringing disruptive technologies within their own organisation with the hope of strengthening what they offer customers. It’s hard to say how this will play out in the years to come – hard to say whether the disrupters will indeed disrupt the existing financial business in a significant way. I think it’s too early to say. In China, we have some major FinTech players, they are no longer new now, those like Alibaba and Tencent. They have become established names. Elsewhere it hasn’t made too much of a difference yet. It is early days.
We can all agree that such a fragmentation would  Page 3 sur 7 generate instability, notably creating the risk of runs from one currency to another. iii Competitive currency devaluations between the two world wars created such instability, when the dollar and the pound were competing for leadership. Fragmentation might also lead to the development of separated payment systems with limited interoperability. And it could harm the GFSN (as reserves could be less convertible) with, consequently, a misallocation of capital. Another current concern is China’s reluctance to join the international community cooperative debt treatment process, the Common Framework. Finally, we all hope that the sanctions and other measures taken in an emergency situation will be withdrawn after a peaceful settlement of the geopolitical situation. In addition to this public – or geopolitical – fragmentation, there is a risk of “private” fragmentation through the disorderly development of crypto-assets, among which the somewhat misnamed “stablecoins”. As demonstrated by the turmoil on financial markets in recent weeks, they are possibly very unstable. We have long stressed the risks of such speculative investments. But it’s not enough: this must be taken as a powerful wake-up-call for a global regulation, which is urgently needed. MiCA on the European side paves the right way. Crypto assets could disrupt the International Financial System if they are not regulated, overseen and interoperable in a consistent and appropriate manner across jurisdictions.

According to SWIFT data, almost 40% of transactions are denominated in euro. It truly is the second most important currency in the world after the dollar. The European Commission has recently taken steps to further strengthen the role of the euro, which are most welcome. iv Among other things, the Commission has launched the Capital Markets Recovery Package that introduced targeted amendments needed to develop euro-denominated derivatives for energy and raw materials. 1. Supplying euro denominated safe assets and enhancing Capital Markets Union An international currency is only as strong as the safe assets it can offer. The euro sovereign debt market is still fragmented and only a few Member States are issuing global assets in a sufficient quantity. In this regard, there have been interesting recent developments in Europe. In June 2021, Europe launched Next Generation EU (NGEU) which will raise over 800 billion euros through a joint issue of European bonds. More broadly, the deepening of European Capital Markets Union should, at end, be instrumental. v It would help both for the allocation of capital within the euro area and for the stability and balance of the International Financial System. Such an initiative is important as we face new policy challenges. The transition to a greener economy will require immense financing, and the digital transformation will also require both public and private investments. This all calls for investments in global public goods to be increasingly managed at the EU level. Two open questions remain.
There was also very broad agreement with the extent of the recalibration, which was based on technical work carried out by the staff of the whole Eurosystem in our committees. The analysis we did before the inception of our asset purchases, and the evidence accumulated since, give us confidence that the additional measures announced yesterday provide material upward pressure on price dynamics to reach our objective as initially intended. Arguably, the only difference between our current situation and a more traditional situation is that our monetary policy stance is not determined primarily on the basis of just one tool – interest rates – but on the basis of an array of tools, which include also the pace of asset purchases, and forward guidance on both interest rates and asset purchases. But similar to the times when we steered policy primarily through interest rates, we are continuously monitoring economic and financing conditions, on which our policy action is always conditional. If these developments change in directions that make it necessary to respond again, we are of course ready at any time to adjust this array of tools to secure the return of inflation to our objective without undue delay. There is no particular limit to how we can deploy any of our tools. And in this context it is important to recall that we operate under a clear framework of monetary dominance – we are ultimately driven by our mandate of maintaining price stability.

But falls in oil and commodity prices can have a more lasting impact on inflation – and hence become relevant for monetary policy – if they feed into core inflation. That can happen under two circumstances. The first is if price falls are symptomatic of weakening global demand, rather than a boost to global supply. Then, lower oil prices might be accompanied by declining net exports, which could in turn cause firms to cut back on investment and drag down core inflation. This blunts the growth-bolstering effect of lower commodity prices. Imported inflation might also be depressed as foreign producers cut prices in reaction to weakening global growth. The second circumstance is if there is a succession of supply shocks that keep inflation low for a long period and cause firms and households to revise down their inflation expectations. In that situation, low oil and commodity prices can have “second round effects” as lower expectations feed into wage bargaining and price setting, thereby affecting core inflation. Then, the effect of supply shocks becomes more similar to demand shocks. In both cases, central banks end up facing a situation not of a benign supply shock, but rather of an adverse demand shock that, if left unaddressed, could derail price stability over the medium-term. That would call for a more forceful monetary policy response. Importantly, there were signs in the past that such circumstances were present in the euro area.