samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Like the 14th century Silk Road, the current emergence of Islamic financial products and services has brought together financial services providers across continents to trade on this new route. The emergence of the New Silk Road reflects the increasing and evolving economic and financial relationships and interlinkages, with Islamic finance well positioned to further facilitate these linkages to offer mutually-reinforcing benefits to those who participate in it. The economic and financial linkages between Asia and the Middle East are growing through a significant expansion in trade and investment between the two regions and opportunities to leverage on the high level of savings and resources both these regions have been endowed with. Indeed, the New Silk Road opens up the prospect of exciting opportunities for greater economic progress and prosperity for us. The New Silk Road has created linkages that build on the comparative advantages between Asia and the Middle East. For example, Middle East domestic infrastructure requirements are estimated to total USD500 billion for the next 5 years, and Asian companies have demonstrated the capacity to provide the technology, expertise and human capital to meet these infrastructure demands. Indeed, the New Silk Road has facilitated the development and effective use of talent and expertise across the two  BIS Review 48/2007  1  regions. In addition, the New Silk Road has reinforced the rapidly evolving Islamic financial industry and the growing significance of Islamic financial markets and institutions.

The productivity gains to the economy can be more long lasting than the petroleum industry itself. And never forget: The real test of how a petroleum producing country has managed its fortune, will come when the boom in the petroleum industry ends. Oil and gas resources do not last forever. Emphasis should therefore be given to further development of human capital as the primary source of long-term prosperity and wealth. Thank you for your attention. 4/4  BIS central bankers' speeches
Despite the above developments, monetary policy management was significantly challenged in 2010, owing to delays in external donor disbursements and government’s expansionary fiscal policies which had to be accommodated by the Bank. The weekly foreign exchange auctions were utilised to complement monetary operations in order to sterilize liquidity, in addition to providing much needed foreign exchange to businesses. The amount allocated for private sector support through the weekly auction in 2010 was $ million, which was lower than the $ million in 2009. This reduction was necessary to cater for government’s infrastructural development needs whilst maintaining the required level of reserves to absorb endogenous and exogenous shocks. As you are aware, the Bank has been providing foreign exchange through the auction system but with our import bill increasingly higher than our export earnings, pressure on the Leone has intensified. There is therefore the need for a concerted effort in ensuring that export proceeds are repatriated into the country to ease these pressures. The Bank will therefore be embarking on a drive to ensure maximum compliance with the laid down procedures with exports and its attendant receivables from abroad. The depreciation of the Leone in 2010 was only 7.7 percent compared to almost 30 percent in 2009. It is expected that with the promotion of an interbank foreign exchange market, stability of the Leone will be enhanced in 2011. In addition to the above, I am pleased to inform you that our external reserves are comfortable and our external debt is manageable.

My colleague Arthur first presented this vision at the Hong Kong Fintech Week last November. On that occasion, we also announced a series of activities to be launched these two years in pursuit of the vision. And today’s event is one of the many activities that we have planned for this year, 2021. 5. In practical terms, how should we go about bringing our Regtech vision into reality? We do recognise that we are starting from a position in which many banking practitioners remain quite unclear about the concept of Regtech. They may be uncertain about what values Regtech might bring, or exactly how they should leverage on Regtech in order to bring about measurable benefits. Here, we see four essential actions that are needed to transform bank attitudes and practices towards Regtech. Four actions towards Regtech 2025 6. The first action is that we at the HKMA mustunderstand the Regtech landscape evolution in Hong Kong. It’s no good launching initiatives that are out of touch with what’s actually happening on the ground. We need to be able to map our progress towards Regtech 2025, and understand where our banks and other ecosystem partners are at in that journey. 7. Our White Paper on Regtech published in November last year provided a very good starting point, supplemented by the Regtech Adoption Index that we have just launched recently. These have shown that most banks here are already using at least some form of Regtech in their operations, most commonly in preventing and detecting financial crimes.
As those of you who have been in Hong Kong recently will know, this has been a very stormy summer from a meteorological point of view: we have just had the worst typhoon in sixteen years and the wettest typhoon since records began more than a hundred years ago. 1  BIS Review 103/1999  Economically, the most recent figures suggest that our wet and windy summer has brought with it a distinct turn for the better.

This thinking lay behind the Committee’s decision to issue a statement after its July meeting that the recent upward movement at the near end of the yield curve was “unwarranted”. More generally, the explicit guidance provided in August should also serve to emphasise that UK monetary policy decisions are taken with reference to the domestic outlook and will only be influenced by developments elsewhere in so far as they affect that outlook. There is mixed evidence thus far on whether guidance has helped to de-couple movements in UK short-term rates from those overseas. The prime exhibit against this having happened is the high degree of correlation between UK and US interest rates at the time of the FOMC’s unexpected decision at its meeting on 17/18 September not to begin to taper its asset purchases. As far as market participants were concerned, this was surely primarily news about the FOMC’s policy reaction function, not about the US economic outlook. So it ought also to have had little impact on UK interest rates. As Chart 7 shows, however, the movement in UK one-year interest rates two years ahead was almost as large as for the corresponding US series. That, together with the high co-movement prior to the September FOMC meeting when US interest rates rose, suggests that market participants may have not yet grasped the extent to which decisions over the level of Bank Rate will be driven by the domestic outlook. There is, however, other evidence which suggests that some de-coupling may have taken place.
François Villeroy de Galhau: Secular stagnation and growth measurement Speech by Mr François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Bank of France, at the Secular stagnation and growth measurement conference, organized by the Bank of France, Paris, 16 January 2017. * * * Accompanying slides Ladies and Gentlemen [slide 1], I am very pleased to welcome you all to Paris, for this conference on “secular stagnation and growth measurement”. We should always be cautious when using expressions as categorical as “secular stagnation”, and which describe the long term: Alvin Hansen, who coined it in 1938 with his famous “full recovery or stagnation”, lived long enough – until 1975 – to see thirty years of almost full recovery, instead of stagnation. Nevertheless, this risk, popularized again recently by Larry Summers, is a matter of concern for central bankers. Why? Because a persistent slowdown in trend output growth could make the economy more vulnerable to shocks that push the natural interest rate below the effective lower bound. Whether secular or lasting for many years, very slow growth and inflation also challenge the efficacy of conventional monetary policy tools. They can affect the sustainability of public and private debt. And beyond central banking concerns, they can also alter the functioning of our social models. Let me just clarify that I will not speak about monetary policy today, as we are in our “silent period” before the Governing Council meeting.

Allow me to say simply that some of the more recent comments about a “come back of inflation", which would allegedly put the Governing Council under strain, seem greatly exaggerated. So, where do we stand? The slowdown in per capita growth in advanced economies can actually be traced back to the 1970s [slide 2]. It worsened in several stages, the latest starting in the mid2000s, after the ICT revolution and before the Great Recession. The issue is that this prolonged slowdown raises questions about future potential growth, largely due to uncertainty about productivity trends. To assess the risks, I would like to elaborate on the three hypotheses that form the basis for today’s conference [slide 3]: first, are we simply underestimating growth? Second, is the slowdown a demand phenomenon? Third, is it a persistent phenomenon due to a slowdown in the pace of innovation? 1. Are we underestimating growth? New technologies usually lead to a mismeasurement of output. National accounts indeed have a hard time taking into account improvements in product quality and product entry or exit. As a result, they tend to overestimate inflation and underestimate output. For instance, there is currently an issue with IT hardware, as output of these products is inadequately recognised, even in the US. But the growing share of digital computing technologies in economic activity raises new specific challenges, both on a conceptual and practical level [slide 4]. Let me take the example of travel services.
A small number of these participants quickly separated themselves from the pack and consistently maintained their exceptional performance. Tetlock dubbed these individuals "superforecasters" and subsequently focused his team on aggregating the forecasts of these standout performers—a strategy that draws from the "wisdom of the crowd." As you well know, this strategy relies on some degree of independence in the information, approaches, and insights producing the forecasts. We often think of independence in a very statistical sense, but Superforecasting conveys a useful framing of independence as how one assembles diverse teams and how team dynamics can be established to maintain this diversity. 4 This approach won the IARPA tournament by a substantial margin with the use of one subtle but important tweak. Tetlock extremized the aggregated prediction probabilities—so, for example, a probability of 70 percent became 85 percent. 1/6  BIS central bankers' speeches  So what can we learn from these non-technical superforecasters who outperformed the intelligence community? Tetlock lists a number of characteristics that generate individual diversity and maintain that diversity in a team dynamic. My quick summary of these lessons is to be humble, always question, listen to alternative views, and—very comfortingly for Bayesians like me—always express your forecast as a distribution rather than a point forecast, and crucially update that forecast when new information arrives. Further, constantly assess why forecasts worked and didn't work.

6 See Donald Kohn and Brian Sack, Monetary Policy during the Financial Crisis, preliminary discussion draft  presented at the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at Brookings and Yale School of Management Program on Financial Stability event, Responding to the Global Financial Crisis: What We Did and Why We Did It, Washington, D.C., September 11–12, 2018. 7 Possible sources to which this lament has been attributed are catalogued here, although its actual provenance  is not known. 8 As part of our analysis of what went wrong in our forecasting before the Great Recession, researchers at the  Federal Reserve and European Central Bank jointly looked at various methods of more directly including highfrequency fluctuations in our forecasting models. The results from this research are reported in Luci Alessi, Eric Ghysels, Luca Onorante, Richard Peach, and Simon Potter, Central Bank Macroeconomic Forecasting during the Global Financial Crisis: The European Central Bank and Federal Reserve Bank of New York Experiences, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports, number 680, July 2014. 9 See survey questions and results to the Survey of Primary Dealers and Survey of Markets Participants, Federal  Reserve Bank of New York. 10 Of course, the NBER didn’t actually declare the start of the recession until late November 2008, nearly a year  after it officially began. 11 Estrella and Mishkin’s original paper, updates, related research, and current recession probabilities implied by  the term spread are available on the New York Fed’s Research website.
4  3 [20]  that the central bank determines how its tools are used to attain the goals that have been set. There are also other ways of making the central bank independent of the political system. Personal independence concerns how the bank’s management is appointed. If the board members have long terms of office, are not politicians and cannot be dismissed for political reasons, then there is considerable personal independence. Financial independence means that the bank can take measures without relying on financial support from the Government. One can say that the new act in 1999 gave the Riksbank a large measure of independence according to all of the four varieties above (see Figures 1 and 2). 9 The Riksbank decided itself, through its Governing Council, on the introduction of the inflation target in 1993, and in 1999 price stability was introduced into the act as objective for the Riksbank. Goal independence was thus strong, as the Riksbank can itself determine how the target will be attained in operational terms. One sign of this was that we much later, in 2017, decided ourselves to change the target variable from the CPI to the CPIF. We were also given a mandate to decide independently on how the monetary policy instruments would be used to attain our inflation target and in this way we gained a high level of instrument independence.

Narrow or broad mandate for central banks? Political influence  Political independence Narrow target definition, few tools  Broad target definition, many tools  17 [20]  Figure 7. Yield spread between different types of bond and government bonds in Sweden Percentage points 2,5  2,5  Municipal bond, 5 year Corporate bond, 5 year Covered bond, 5 year  2,0  2,0  1,5  1,5  1,0  1,0  0,5  0,5  0,0 Jan-19  Jul-19  Jan-20  Jul-20  0,0  Jan-21  Note. Percentage points. Yields on covered bonds, corporate bonds and government bonds are zero coupon rates calculated using the Nelson-Siegel method. Corporate bonds refer to companies with a high credit rating. Municipal bonds are issued by Kommuninvest i Sverige AB. Broken line marks 11 March 2020, same day the WHO declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic. Sources: Bloomberg, Macrobond, Refinitiv and the Riksbank. Figure 8. Borrowing among non-financial corporates Percentage of GDP, quarterly data 80  80  60  60  40  40  20  20  0  0  95  00  05  10  Lending from MFI  15  20  Issued securities  Note. Includes securities borrowing in both Swedish kronor and foreign currency. Sources: Statistics Sweden and the Riksbank  18 [20]  Figure 9.
Should disturbances occur in a creditor country, their banks may tend to rein in their reaches to preserve liquidity thus worsen the affect on the borrower country. Another reason may be that lenders outside Asia tend to look at Asia as a block, not differentiating one country from another much. Therefore, in order to lessen the risk of crisis and contagion, we have to find ways for the Asian countries to prevent crisis or deal better with imbalances. This means dealing better with capital flows, or rather the sudden reversal of capital flows. Now comes the third question: Which initiative can be most effective in dealing with capital flows? The Asian governments have cooperated in certain schemes. The Chiang Mai Initiative whereby Asian countries sign swap agreements with each other to provide temporary financing to each other in emergencies. Even though the combined amounts exceed $ billion, it is still small compared to the volume of foreign exchange trade in the world. We also have a system of mutual surveillance, but Asian culture sometimes does not go for direct confrontation to such particular issues. The best safeguard, in my opinion, is therefore to have stronger structures in Asian countries to deal with financial shocks. This is why I attach much hope in the Asian Bond Markets Initiative being proposed. BIS Review 28/2003  1  This leads me to the fourth question: What is the Asian Bond Markets Initiative? What does it involve? The Asian Bond Markets Initiative can be viewed at 2 levels.

However, when the country faces a nationwide economic crisis, a lot of companies would tend to suffer losses at the same time. And they cannot all together tap additional equity in such an environment. This pushed them into defaults. A lot of what seemed, before the crisis, to be long-term foreign borrowings, therefore, suddenly became callable almost overnight. The second problem is that of currency mismatch. Unlike the major countries, the emerging markets in Asia cannot borrow from the international market in our own currencies. In the case of Thailand, when our currency was floated in 1997, it depreciated more than 65 per cent before backing up to the 40’s. Many companies that had US dollar debts were forced to convert to Thai baht along the way, suffering massive exchange losses as a result. It was an important factor, among others, causing the NPL ratio to go so high, peaking at 45 per cent. In future, if the local bond market could be developed, and made attractive to foreign investors, there could be the option of foreign investors taking the foreign exchange risk instead of the borrowers. Liquidity risks will also be less. If foreign investors want out, they can sell the bonds. Prices will fall. But the borrowers who already had the money would not be affected by the sale in the secondary market. The third risk was that of an interbank market breakdown. At the height of the crisis, foreign banks just stopped lending to local banks.
At the same time, productivity in Sweden has not increased as quickly as in other countries. The development of unit labour costs reflects the difference between wage increases and growth in productivity. Unit labour costs, measured in the respective currencies, are shown in the column on the far right of the table. Sweden is here on the same level as Germany, but higher than the euro area as a whole and also higher than the OECD aggregate. Inflation towards the target – in an orderly manner Let me round off. One main purpose of my speech is to show how important the inflation target has been as a benchmark for price-setting and wage formation in Sweden. It is an important task for the Riksbank to create confidence in the inflation target. This is why we are worried over the current low inflation rate. The Riksbank wishes to safeguard the inflation target. We can do this by formulating monetary policy so that the current low inflation rate rises towards the target. During the spring we have therefore cut the policy rate further on two occasions and moreover decided to buy government bonds. We are prepared to do more than this if it proves necessary. At the same time, it is important that the journey back towards the inflation target is a smooth one and does not pose any threat to production and employment. We are now on the verge of very extensive wage bargaining rounds.

If we look at the period from 1993 up to the end of 2014, the average rate of inflation was 1.5 per cent. The figure also shows that the variations from year to year have declined since the inflation target was introduced. A related question here is how high inflation has been since the Industrial Agreement was drawn up in 1997. The answer is that the average annual rate of inflation has been 1.2 per cent since then. Figure 2 shows the average value for annual inflation over six three-year periods since 1997. These three-year periods roughly follow the agreement periods. 2 Actual inflation has been close to the target for three of the agreement periods. During the other three periods, inflation has been much lower. After two periods of being close to the inflation target, average price levels have not increased during the most recent agreement period. How have wages developed since the inflation target was introduced? During the period 1970–1992, when there was neither an inflation target nor an Industrial Agreement, nominal wages in the whole of the Swedish economy increased by on average 8.9 per cent a year. This is shown in Figure 3. But as inflation was so high, the increase in real purchasing power was very limited. Real wages actually increased by an average of only 0.7 per cent a year. During the period 1997 to 2014, nominal wages in the Swedish economy as a whole have increased by an average of 3.3 per cent per year (see Figure 3).
The UK houses some of the world’s largest CCPs. For example, LCH in London clears swaps in 18 currencies for firms in 55 jurisdictions, handling over 90% of cleared interest rate swaps globally and 98% of all cleared swaps in euros. All currencies, products and counterparties benefit from the resulting economies of scale and scope. Fragmentation of such global markets by jurisdiction or currency would reduce the benefits of central clearing. EU27 firms account for only a quarter of global activity in cleared euro interest rate swaps, and about 14% of total interest rate swaps in all currencies cleared by LCH. Any development which prevented EU27 firms from continuing to clear trades in the UK would split liquidity between a less liquid onshore market for EU firms and a more liquid offshore market for everyone else. 11  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  11  The potential for higher costs is not theoretical. In Japan, for example, where the clearing of yendenominated swaps by certain Japanese firms must take place onshore, the difference in price between the onshore and offshore markets has generally been in the range of 1-3 basis points. Such seemingly small price differences translate into significant costs for users given the scale of activity in these markets. Industry estimates suggest that a single basis point increase in the cost resulting from splitting clearing of interest rate swaps could cost EU firms € per year across all of their business.

International Capital Flows in the Post-crisis World, September 2019 CENTRAL BANK OF CHILE  Non-bank lenders  Household debt issued by NBLs has increased as a share of total consumer debt  15  Retailers CCAFs NBLs  13  Real annual growth of loans  Nonbank credit (*)  (real annual change, percent)  (percent of bank consumer loans)  Car dealerships S&Ls  F&Ls Bank  60  Retailers  Car dealerships  F&Ls  CCAFs  S&Ls  50  11 9  40  7 5  30  3 20  1 -1  10  -3 -5  0 13  14  15  16  17  18  13  14  15  16  17  18  (*) Based on individual financial statements, including for bank consumer credit, which is used as the denominator. Source: Central Bank of Chile based on data from the SBIF, CMF and Suseso. The steady growth of the nonbank portfolio is a potential source of vulnerability, given that most of these lenders are outside the consolidated debt perimeter. In terms of arrears in the nonbank consumer portfolio, retailers recorded a slight improvement relative to end-2018, to 3.8%. In contrast, for the CCAFs, delinquency has increased steadily since 2013—when they began to use accounting criteria more similar to the banks—and it is currently more than double the rates for the rest of the nonbank consumer lenders.