samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
European securitisation issuance (EUR billion)  Source: European Securitisation Forum  9  See “Report of the Financial Stability Forum on Enhancing Market and Institutional Resilience”, FSF, April 2008. 8  BIS Review 68/2008  Chart 2. Funded issuance by collateral (EUR billion; by month)  Source: JP Morgan  Chart 3. European ABS spreads (relative to 3-month Euribor)  Source: JP Morgan  BIS Review 68/2008  9  Chart 4. Evolution of collateral held with the Eurosystem by asset type  Source: ECB  Chart 5. European securitised products: Publicly placed or privately retained? (EUR billion)  Source: Citi. European Secutitised Products. Strategy Analysis. Securitised Products. Europe 7 March 2008. Secondary Source: Bloomberg, International Insider, Informa GM, IFR, Citi. Note: Publicly-placed issuance includes only deals that have been publicly marketed. Private/Retained issuance includes deals that have been privately-placed or retained by the originator. The Private/Retained issuance figures include all such deals to Citi’s knowledge, but may not include such deals where there is no public information available. For some deals priced since August 2007 it has not been clear whether the deal has been fully placed. 10  BIS Review 68/2008

Having a common survey instrument would promote benchmarking of, and accountability for, progress on culture and behavior. A core element of any firm’s mission and culture must be a respect for law. Federal Reserve guidance advises that banks should strive to “[m]aintain a corporate culture that emphasizes the importance of compliance with laws and regulations and consumer protection.” 4 To maintain such a culture, senior leaders must promote effective self-policing. If audit uncovers an instance of fraud in one unit, the firm’s leadership should ask, “Where else could this behavior occur?” If the press reports fraud at a competitor in a particular business line, the same self-assessment should apply. “Could this happen to us, could we have a similar problem here?” When fraud is detected, boards and senior leaders must ensure that they are informed promptly, and that a thorough inquiry is undertaken at once. The senior leaders of financial firms, and those who report to them, must also be proactive in reporting illegal or unethical activity. Early self-reporting sends a powerful message to employees and to regulators about a firm’s respect for law. This is one important reason why those who selfreport in a timely way should be treated preferentially, compared to those that drag their feet and whose bad behaviors are only uncovered by enforcement investigations. How will a firm know if it is making real progress? Not having to plead guilty to felony charges or being assessed large fines is a good start.
Thanks mainly to Fed swaps, EU savers and investors do not have to worry about the general liquidity position of the eurozone. I almost pray that forthcoming political events in the U.S. do not alter this situation. b. The solution to this crisis involves controlled de-leveraging and the restoration of European and eurozone competitiveness in the developed world. The need for deleveraging is clear, but the restoration of competitiveness in Europe is also a must, despite the fact that the CA of the eurozone and/or the EU is roughly balanced. Otherwise, the EU will not be able to restore the real growth rates necessary to stabilize eurozone sovereigns in the context of the chief mandate of the ECB, i.e., in a non-inflationary context. I am afraid this may involve quite a few of my fellow European citizens engaging in a bit of metaphorical trench-digging. Hopefully, they will also try other types of productive activities with more value added. I am fully aware of the pain this process is causing, as my country has undergone quite a similar process recently. c.  A lot of commentators have said that Germany has benefited the most from the eurozone, or at least has benefited more than the eurozone countries that are suffering now. However, quite a significant proportion of those observers have also noted that Germany has recorded the slowest growth in wage costs and other income measures in the eurozone throughout the existence of the latter.

In the case of social bonds, for example, the European Platform on Sustainable Finance has been working on a proposal for a social taxonomy, but this area evolves very quickly and more dimensions need to be included, such as diversity, equity and inclusion. In addition, the focus of sustainable finance is widening from climate to include nature and the environment because climate change and biodiversity loss are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. 7  Central banks are starting to analyse the consequences of the loss of biodiversity for the financial system. The Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) has set up a task force on biodiversity loss and nature-related risks. We need to research and learn more about the transmission channels from nature loss to the economy and the financial system, as we are already doing in relation to climate change.7 Thus, we have a further challenge here, and probably next year there will be a session at this conference focusing on biodiversity. In the meantime, to conclude, we can see that the issuance of green bonds is recovering in 2023. However, other bonds in the sustainable finance family are seeing less interest from investors. The challenges are several: i) the lack of common definitions, ii) the voluntary aspect of the European green bond standard, and iii) the lack of verification of sustainabilitylinked bonds. In addition, a higher degree of transparency and a global disclosure standard would contribute to the development of sustainable bond markets and a reduction in greenwashing. 7  See NGFS (2022).
At that time, it was estimated that, at maturity, the funds would amount to 1½ times GDP. They came close to that just before the financial crisis, but this was not “real”, as I will come to later. It is noteworthy that the funds do not obey simple classifications. Some of the funds have an employment guarantee and would be characterised as defined-benefit funds, where the employer bears the investment risk, but in Iceland only the government, municipalities and banks can guarantee pension funds. But the rest are not pure defined contribution funds. The investment risk is borne collectively by the members, and there is some scope for smoothing changes in benefits and for some risk-sharing among generations. This can matter when you have a once-in-a-lifetime shock to returns, as we experienced during the international financial crisis. The third pillar of the pension system entered the stage rather late here in Iceland. It was only in 1998 that legislation on tax incentives for voluntary private pension saving was adopted, but these incentives were subsequently increased. Voluntary private pensions saving then increased by leaps and bounds, reaching 10% of GDP in 2002 and 15% of GDP in 2007. This saving has proven to be an important cushion during the current crisis, as early repayment was temporarily allowed. So far, these early repayments have amounted to 2½% of GDP. This is akin to a fiscal stimulus and has supported private consumption this year and last.

I remember that the last thing I did in this respect, before I went to the Bank for International Settlements in Basel to focus on other things, was to try to sell the system to a Russian audience that was considering pension reform in their own country. 2 On what was this view based? In order to answer that, I must first remind us of the attributes of a good pension system. Of course it is obvious that it must be a mechanism for saving for retirement. But in order to be an efficient such mechanism, it must take due account of the lifetime risks facing individuals, as well as the economic and financial risks facing society as a whole. These are, for instance, risks related to life expectancy, ability to work, demographics, the productivity of labour, and the rate of return on financial assets. Furthermore, some at least would make the demand that the system have a certain degree of income equalisation built into it, and most would accept that it should at least not be regressive. Then we would want the pension system to have some degree of flexibility and to provide scope for individual choice. Finally, we want the pension system to be designed so as to promote economic performance; that is, saving, growth, and financial sector development. This is a tall order, of course, and in practice there are bound to be trade-offs between these goals.
But it leads to another and another to the point where the money is simply too good to turn away, no matter how many red flags there are. There may be less pecuniary explanations too. Regardless of the profit potential, our sensitivity to warning signs can fade from lack of practice. For every time we look the other way, it is incrementally easier to ignore the next instance. On the flip side, each time we intervene, the next intervention is easier too. Effective compliance gets better with practice. Like ethics, it needs to be a habit. And don’t think that the bad guys don’t notice a firm’s reputation—or, dare I say, its culture. Word spreads quickly. A law firm or accounting firm or auditing firm can quickly become known for being “creative” in its approach to an internal investigation or issuing a tax or audit opinion. The same goes for corporate reputations for strong and weak compliance programs, or high or low tolerances for risk. Clients may be attracted to firms with reputations aligned with their goals, for good or ill. So, my first word of advice on where to go from here is to safeguard your corporate reputations by developing good habits. Just Because It’s Legal, Doesn’t Make It Right 3/6  BIS central bankers' speeches  That’s very high-level, prudential advice—not legal advice. A second point I’d like to emphasize is to avoid cabined views of what’s permissible or impermissible. Just because something is legal, doesn’t make it right.

As I have said in other contexts, one challenge in a rules-based regime is that the pace of rulemaking is not always commensurate with the pace of rule breaking.6 Complying with minimum legal thresholds may not be sufficient in all circumstances to appropriately mitigate risk to your firm or the payment system.7 Technology has greatly expanded access to the payment system. Many of us— everyday consumers, that is—effect payments not only directly through our banks, but also through various “fintech” intermediaries. There is much good in this, but technology is not riskfree. The creative development and application of technology can create opportunities to improve the payment system. Technology also creates new opportunities to compromise that system. Take, for example, the nascent challenge presented by the development of digital currencies. The New York State Attorney General’s office estimates that more than 1,800 virtual currencies are exchanged around the world.8 Many digital currencies use distributed ledger technologies, which can help institutions achieve efficiencies in customer due diligence programs. Distributed ledgers also promote traceability, which in theory assists law enforcement. That said, the use of private exchanges for these digital currencies may facilitate anonymity, which tends to help the bad guys. My concerns, however, are less about the technological frontier, and more about well-established risks to the payment system. Recent press reports about financial crimes involving 1MDB, Danske Bank, Swedbank, and, yes, Bangladesh Bank make no mention of fancy new digital currencies.
For example, if inflation in 2011 were a 0.5 percentage point below the Fed’s inflation objective, the Fed might aim to offset this miss by an additional 0.5 percentage point rise in the price level in future years. In the current environment, such an approach would have some advantages as well as some disadvantages. When there is a large amount of slack in the economy, the Federal Reserve might not easily be able to hit an inflation objective soon. But, the central bank could plausibly promise to make up the difference later on. Indeed, the further the Fed fell behind its inflation objective in the near term, the more inflation would need to increase in order to  BIS Review 127/2010  5  push the actual path of prices up to the path consistent with price stability over the long run. To the extent this policy was more credible, it might do a better job keeping inflation expectations from falling. This might make monetary policy more stimulative and, thus, might help the FOMC achieve its objectives more quickly. However, such an approach would only work well if people understood how it would operate and formed their expectations of future inflation accordingly. And there could also be significant costs. For example, if people mistakenly concluded that the Fed was tinkering with its long-run inflation objective, this could lead to greater uncertainty about future inflation.

India’s ascent to a formidable global ICT power has been mainly driven by economic reforms, establishment of a free market democracy, perseverance of some unbeatable private entrepreneurs and above all, continuous human capital development in engineering and electronic fields. 10 The last development came from the high educational standards maintained by a web of reputed state owned Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and permission given to private sector to set up higher learning institutes. This is definitely an eye opener for Sri Lanka. Even in the midst of growing evidence from India and elsewhere that privately owned institutes of higher learning could make a significant contribution to the globalization of education and training, Sri Lanka still keeps education as a closelyguarded relic in the public sector. As a result, its capacity to meet the demand for higher education is woefully low with one place being offered to satisfy about 16 aspirants. This has led aspiring youth to seek higher education in other countries at a high personal investment cost. Since every investment should yield commensurate returns, it also has compelled them to seek employment elsewhere. Whatever the intention, the closely protected public university education system has become a waste of scarce public resources, since only a fraction of the total registered students is reported to be in 11 attendance in classes. Hence, to gain reputation as a global centre of learning, it is necessary that the Sri Lanka’s university education system should undergo a complete overhaul and reform.
As Chart 11 shows, we have seen two major spikes in CPI inflation within the last two years. And it is possible that another one is in prospect when higher VAT comes into effect early next year, particularly if this is accompanied by a continuation of the recent surge in energy and commodity prices. These repeated episodes risk eroding confidence that UK policymakers remain committed to low and stable inflation, with a knock-on effect on inflation expectations in financial markets, among the business community and the public which could be self-fulfilling. In the depth of the recession in the first half of last year, we could be fairly relaxed about upward pressures on inflation. At that time, the MPC was worried about the opposite trend – a lurch into deflation with prices and wages on a downward spiral. But these deflationary fears have not been realised. Instead, inflation has run above the target and wage freezes introduced to help businesses weather the storm of the recession are coming to an end. The current period of above-target inflation risks being prolonged by monetary policy which is too lax – creating a climate in which higher inflation is not just the product of one-off shocks but becomes more deeply ingrained. 12  BIS Review 134/2010  The economy is now recovering at home and abroad. The world economy is growing above its pre-crisis trend, and domestic spending in money terms is also following the same pattern, as Chart 12 shows.

5  The latest evidence suggests that the strong momentum of growth in Asia and other emerging markets is being maintained. In Asia, there are many indications that domestic demand has been a powerful driver of its recovery and that growth in this region is becoming more autonomous and less dependent on export demand from the western economies. In the US and Europe, the indicators are more mixed. Within the European Union, Germany grew very strongly in the first half of this year, recording the biggest rise in GDP since unification in the second quarter and more recently the lowest rate of unemployment since 1992. German unemployment has been falling since the mid-2000s, with the exception of the recession period, which points to an improvement in the structural performance of its economy, which should help to sustain consumer spending and investment. Some of Germany’s neighbouring economies – including the Benelux countries – are also sharing in this pattern of healthy growth. A strong performance from these “core” European economies should help to offset the dampening effect of financial and fiscal problems in countries on the European periphery, including Ireland. 5  In the decade to 2007, annual GDP growth averaged 3.1% in the United States and 2.3% in the European Union. BIS Review 134/2010  5  Currently, the United States appears to be in a “soft patch” where growth is disappointing. But the most recent indicators – including the widely followed Purchasing Managers’ Indices (PMIs) – still point to continued growth.
BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  which maintains the size of the portfolio and adjusts the asset type and maturity composition of its holdings. 8 Large-scale asset purchases as a policy tool and their execution Of course, as this audience knows well, the Federal Reserve was not the first major central bank to use alternative tools for monetary policy implementation at the zero lower bound. The quantitative easing policy (QEP) that the Bank of Japan (BoJ) initiated to combat deflation in 2001, after operating for some time under a policy of zero interest rates, provided a valuable precedent when central bankers elsewhere faced similar challenges later that decade. However, the balance sheet expansion under the BoJ’s original quantitative easing differed significantly from the asset purchase programs undertaken by advanced economy central banks over recent years, including the BoJ’s current quantitative and qualitative monetary easing (QQE). The earlier QEP was a liability-driven program in which the BoJ changed its operating objective from an overnight interest rate to quantitative targets for the level of current account balances outstanding at the BoJ (the counterpart to reserve balances held by depository institutions at the Fed). To achieve its new target, the BoJ provided ample liquidity through a range of operations. Although the BoJ increased its outright purchases of long-term government bonds as part of this initiative, a large share of the easing was accomplished through temporary open market operations or purchases of short-term securities.

Last week, the FOMC directed the Desk to reduce purchases of Treasury securities to $ billion per month and purchases of agency MBS to $ billion per month starting in October. The Committee also indicated that it will end the current purchase program at its next meeting if incoming information broadly supports its expectation of ongoing improvement in labor market conditions and inflation moving back toward its longer-run objective. It also directed the Desk to maintain its agency MBS and Treasury security reinvestment policies – activities it separately announced it expects to continue after it begins to increase its target range for the federal funds rate. Should this course come to pass, the domestic securities portfolio will peak at a par value of about $ trillion – more than a five-fold increase since the start of the financial crisis in August 2007. The composition of the portfolio will also remain more complex. Formerly composed entirely of Treasury securities, the domestic portfolio is now only 60 percent Treasury securities, with the remainder held in agency MBS (and a small amount of agency debt securities). As I noted earlier, the weighted average maturity of the Treasury portfolio has lengthened substantially, while the MEP essentially eliminated the portfolio’s holdings of any Treasury securities maturing prior to February 2016. Meanwhile, it’s hard to predict the exact pace at which the SOMA portfolio’s agency MBS holdings will pay down over time given the prepayment uncertainty associated with those securities.
I expect that there will be further public supervisory guidance on these and other key elements of the IRB approach this year. BIS Review 5/2003  3  Operational risk is another area where the Basel Committee is developing a new regulatory capital approach that seeks to provide incentives for banks to improve their management of risk - - one that is designed to build on banks’ rapidly developing internal assessment techniques, and to accommodate industry innovation over time. Now that the industry is developing a more refined sense of operational risk - the risk of losses caused by failures in processes - the New Accord will “unbundle” this risk and allow banks to differentiate between, and manage separately, their exposures to credit, market, and operational risks. As with market and credit risk, supervisors will use a number of qualitative and quantitative criteria to ensure the integrity of the approaches that banks develop internally - but with the criteria structured to be flexible enough to allow for a wide range of qualifying approaches. By allowing banks to test and experiment with a variety of operational risk methodologies and measures, we think that the New Basel Accord’s approach to operational risk will be a true catalyst for innovation. Timing for the New Accord As you may know, the revision of the international regulatory capital framework has represented a monumental commitment on the part of both banks and supervisors worldwide and has been, so far, nearly four years in the making.

This group is responsible for promoting the consistency and quality of implementation of the New Accord and facilitating the exchange of information among national supervisors about bank and supervisory practices. Through the AIG, senior line supervisors - that is, the people who actually assess banks’ risk profiles - are seeking ways for examiners to validate and supervise internal risk assessment processes in a more consistent fashion across jurisdictions. Implications of Basel II on the supervisory approach We’ve also continued to think about how we should adjust our method of supervision to incorporate the tenets of the new framework, which brings me to the third and final area that I would like to address today. Naturally, allowing banks to rely on internal models in determining their capital requirements has led, and will continue to lead, to changes in our supervisory process. Fortunately, we have the benefit of some experience already at our side. In 1996, under the “market risk amendment” to the original Basel Accord, qualifying banks with large market risk positions were first permitted to incorporate internal estimates of the associated risk in their regulatory capital requirements. When determining whether a bank may rely on its market risk model for capital purposes, our examiners have had to evaluate the technical underpinnings of the model, as well as the risk management and control processes surrounding its implementation and use.