samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
A dedicated High Court judge has also been assigned to preside over cases relating to Islamic banking and finance, complementing the mediation, arbitration and other dispute resolution mechanism already in existence for the Islamic financial system. 14. Great emphasis has also been given to enhance the Shariah framework in Malaysia. The Shariah Advisory Council in Bank Negara Malaysia is recognised as a sole authority on all Shariah matters pertaining to Islamic banking and finance. At the company level, it is a legal requirement for Islamic banking and takaful operators to establish their own Shariah Committees as part of internal governance in order to ensure compliance with the Shariah. The second focus area is that there must be efforts to have structured human talent development in the area of Islamic finance. 15. The essence of a takaful system lies in the relationship between the participants and the mudharib or wakeel, that is the person responsible for managing the takaful fund. The key success factor lies in takaful operators having high level of expertise in all relevant areas in the management of takaful business including technical, actuarial, distribution, underwriting, investment as well as strong leadership at the helm of a takaful operator. In this regard, there is a need for a structured development of human talent at all levels which include the leaders, technical personnel as well as the regulators.

These reforms have had an immediate and positive impact on the payment card landscape. The cost of payment card acceptance had started to moderate whilst the annual growth of payment card terminals had tripled from 5.4% in 2014 to 18.1% in 2015. In addition to promoting effective competition within the payment industry, it is also important to preserve the neutrality of Payment and Settlement Systems. This includes neutrality among instruments and geo-political interests. This is especially true for global and critical market infrastructure providers such as SWIFT where the offer of services to all parts of the world should be guaranteed and reliable. The emergence of other service providers to fill any void should it happen, would be most unfortunate as it could diminish efficiencies gained from access to global market infrastructures. As a participant-owned institution, adequate safeguards to maintain SWIFT’s neutrality and finality are essential to ensure it continues to serve its mandate as a trusted provider of secure financial messaging services to facilitate global connectivity. Opportunities from greater standardization and interoperability Let me now move on to the need for standardization and interoperability in Payment and Settlement Systems. Proprietary and legacy systems are costly and a source of much inefficiency as time and resources are needed to maintain different systems and facilitate interconnectivity. Hence, there is much value for the financial community to collaborate through greater standardization to facilitate interoperability and innovation to achieve greater economies of scale and network multiplier effects.
But artificial intelligence and automatic learning can also be applied to tasks such as automatic information reconciliation, fraud detection, risk mitigation and regulatory compliance. The final innovation I should like to mention in this brief review is cloud computing. In an environment in which data are configured as a strategic asset, this technique enables new 4/6  solutions to be offered with greater speed, cost efficiencies to be attained and business process adaptation to become more nimble. That said, this must all be done while maintaining an appropriate level of security, especially as far as critical areas are concerned. A little historical perspective suffices to see the improvements that new technologies can bring to users. Credit and debit cards, ATMs and on-line banking are obvious examples of past innovations that have changed our day-to-day for the better. The success of these changes, however, has been closely bound up with the appropriate treatment of risks and the vulnerabilities that inevitably accompany these processes. The move to a more digital economy is accompanied by greater cyber threats, and new measures safeguarding processes, assets and customer data must be developed. Along with paying particular attention to the management of these threats, it will also be essential to respond to the challenges stemming from the concentration of operational risk among a small number of critical service-providers, or those arising from customer protection. Financial services-providers must also meet the challenge of understanding in their full dimension the functioning and results of increasingly automated and autonomous algorithms and procedures.

Thomas C Baxter: Compliance – some thoughts about reaching the next level Remarks by Mr Thomas C Baxter, Executive Vice President and General Counsel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at the Fordham Journal of Corporate Counsel & Financial Law Symposium, Fordham Law School, New York City, 9 February 2015. *  *  *  These remarks are personal and do not necessarily represent the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, or any component of the Federal Reserve System. Introduction Let me begin by thanking Professor Sean Griffith, the director of the Corporate Law Center, and Robert Lyons, editor of the Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law, for inviting me to participate in this symposium about corporate compliance and corporate governance. Let me also thank Fordham Law School for hosting the symposium. I would also like to recognize a colleague who is with us today. He is Martin Grant, who is the New York Fed’s chief ethics and compliance officer. I have had the privilege of working with Martin for the last 25 years, and much of what I have learned about compliance I have learned from him. In the space sometimes labeled compliance, we have come a very long way in a relatively short time. In about 20 years, compliance has transformed from a nice idea to an important component of most major corporations. This is especially true in the highly regulated industries, including the industry where I have made my career, financial services.
These principles also summarise the six speeches I have given at the Academy of Science and Letters: a good institution keeps promises, makes good decisions, practices transparency as a governance principle, and learns from its own history and manages its cultural heritage. And the threads are gathered here. Today’s speech seeks to encompass all the themes in one frame. The lessons learned from Norges Bank’s first 200 years and the criteria I just cited are useful both in Norges Bank’s daily work and in making longer-term assessments. I would argue that these general principles apply to other institutions too, whether legal, cultural or educational. Decisions that are made in these institutions determine whether a country’s citizens can live a life of freedom and prosperity. The first measure is transparency. The Bank must expose itself to criticism by publishing the analyses behind its decisions. It must also be open about budgets and expenditure. The second measure is an international anchor. The Bank must be part of the international network of central banks and academic communities to compare itself with others, not only with itself. Erik Brofoss was perhaps a governor who was most concerned with issues other than central banking tasks. But it was he who laid the foundation for the “long recovery”- perhaps without realising the extent to which his pioneering efforts would bear forth. Brofoss believed that the young economists at the Bank had to go out into the world and learn.

The global economic recovery might also be delayed reaching the region, increasing the likelihood that the crisis may cause more persistent economic effects. Despite this difficult situation, remittances have proven pandemic-proof1 and have behaved countercyclically in most of the region’s countries, assuming a more important role as a source of external financing. This subject is crucial to Spain, since it is the second-ranked issuer country of remittances to Latin America. Some of the topics we will address today (such as the growing importance of digital money remittances, the role of fiscal stimulus measures in the resilience of remittances and the function of the informal economy) are key to understanding the behaviour of the flow of remittances in this crisis. Undoubtedly, today’s event will allow us to better understand these developments and – I hope – 1/2  BIS central bankers' speeches  to draw some useful conclusions on how to tackle them from the central bank standpoint. Thank you for your attention. Remittances barely fell by 1.6% in 2020, compared with their 4.8% decline during the 2008 financial crisis. 2/2  BIS central bankers' speeches
Similarly, the current unemployment rate of 9 percent is well above most estimates of the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) – the lowest rate of unemployment consistent with sustained price stability. In the pre-crisis period, the NAIRU was likely in the region of 4.5 percent to 5 percent. There are several reasons why the NAIRU may now be higher. First, extended unemployment compensation benefits create incentives for prospective workers to keep looking for better jobs rather than accept less attractive positions. Empirical work on this subject suggests that the NAIRU might currently be roughly 1 percentage point higher because of this factor. However, this effect will only persist for as long as the extended benefits are in place. Second, the rise in unemployment has been associated with an increase in the degree of mismatch between unemployed workers’ job skills and available job vacancies. Some cite the upward shift in the Beveridge curve, which illustrates the relationship between unemployment and job vacancies (Chart 22), as evidence of this effect. Third, the longer that people are unemployed, the more their skills tend to atrophy, which makes it harder for them to become employed in the future. For unemployed workers, the median duration of unemployment has climbed and a growing proportion of the unemployed has been jobless for long periods (Chart 23).

At the end of this month, it is planned to approve the restructuring plans of the banks in Group 1 (those controlled by the FROB), and those of Group 2 (the other banks which will require State aid) will foreseeably be approved before year-end. The restructuring plans envisage the transfer of assets to the asset management company, which will become operational in December, and the recapitalisation of banks which need it. Each bank will  4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  have a schedule for implementing the measures that it must adopt, and these are expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2013. Conclusions The State Budget for 2013 represents a substantial effort in terms of austerity. The intended fiscal adjustment is certainly very ambitious, given the ongoing recessionary setting for public finances next year. Central government efforts would be insufficient if not accompanied too by the adjustment to which regional and local government have committed. From the macroeconomic standpoint, some data show progress is being made in rebalancing the Spanish economy. The bulk of the correction has already been made by the current account and it is close to balance in 2012 which, foreseeably, will enable it to run a surplus in 2013. Similarly, we can see improvements in the competitiveness of the Spanish economy both with regard to labour cost indicators and productivity. We forecast that in 2014, and measured by unit labour costs, Spain will have recovered practically all of the competitiveness lost between 1998 and 2008.
At end2021 they accounted for 5% of total outstanding loans, the same percentage as prior to the pandemic. 5  Pursuant to Circular 4/2017, a loan is classified as a Stage 2 exposure when credit risk has increased significantly since initial recognition, even if no event of default has occurred. 6  Forborne loans are also typically associated with possible repayment difficulties for borrowers; indeed, more than half are classified as non-performing. 8  In any event, the developments in Stage 2 and forborne loans were encouraging in 2022 Q1: the former’s year-on-year growth was negative (-2.2%) while the latter’s slowed to 8.8%. Vulnerability is most acute among the sectors sensitive both to the effects of the pandemic and to the rising energy costs. In particular, the combined share of NPLs and Stage 2 loans in the sectors most severely affected by the pandemic stood at almost 24% at December 2021, compared with 17.7% in the moderately affected sectors and 15.5% in those least affected. These shares held stable during 2022 Q1. The credit quality of loans backed by the State through the Official Credit Institute (ICO) has deteriorated somewhat in recent quarters. At March 2022, 22.7% of ICObacked loans were classified as Stage 2 exposures (up 6.4 pp on June 2021) and 4.1% as NPLs (up 2 pp on June 2021). Further, it must be noted that a significant share of these loans continue to benefit from grace periods, which will come to an end in summer 2022.

Based on the latest microeconomic information available,17 it is estimated that the increase in interest rates since the start of this year (of 1.6 pp for the 12-month EURIBOR,18 the main interest rate to which the stock of mortgages in Spain is linked) will lead to a rise of almost 2 pp in the proportion of households with a high net interest burden.19 This effect would be most pronounced among indebted households between the 20th and 40th percentiles of the income distribution.20  17  This exercise was conducted drawing on information from the 2017 Spanish Survey of Household Finances (EFF by its Spanish abbreviation). The latest Financial Stability Report includes the results of the exercise for various interest rate hike scenarios. It was found that the proportion of households with a high net interest burden would rise by 1.2 pp, 2.3 pp and 3.9 pp, respectively, if interest rates were raised by 100 bp, 200 bp and 300 bp. 18  The 12-month EURIBOR has risen from -0.501% at 31 December 2021 to 1.091% at 20 June 2022. 19  The net interest burden is considered to be high when the ratio of (debt service expenses - interest income from deposits) to household income is over 40%.
In any event, looking ahead, the public pension system will face additional pressures on the spending side, stemming from a significant expected increase in the population of retirement age, relative to the population of working age, owing to demographic factors.10 Reforms made in recent years have addressed these pressures; among other measures, a gradual raising of the retirement age, a sustainability factor linking initial pensions to future life expectancy developments, and a new pension adjustment mechanism that takes into account the system’s balance have been introduced. These reforms represent a considerable improvement to the system’s financial sustainability. However, in the absence of further changes to the system’s revenues, strict application of the new adjustment mechanism will give rise to systematic decreases in pensioners’ real income. Also, according to the various estimates available, eliminating the new adjustment index and returning to inflation indexed pensions, as recommended by the Toledo Pact Commission, would generate an increase in pension spending of around 3 pp of GDP over the period to 2050.11 Moreover, the date on which the sustainability factor (which adjusts the initial pension amount in accordance with life expectancy developments) will begin to be applied has been put back from 2018 to 2023 at the earliest. According to AIReF calculations, the introduction  10  My address at the meeting of the Toledo Pact Commission last September was devoted to analysing this issue.

Perhaps even more importantly, there has been a revolution in central bank attitudes towards public engagement. This revolution has, with luck, increased the public’s understanding of the economy and economic policy. But there is no question in my mind that it has also enhanced very significantly central banks’ own understanding of the economy. Having ascended some rungs of the engagement ladder, our panorama on the economy has been much enhanced. Looking back over the past five years, and looking forward to the next five, the Bank is taking further steps towards securing a foothold on the next rungs of the engagement ladder. This will increase the extent to which we “involve” and “collaborate” with a wider set of citizens, as well as “informing” and “consulting” them. From a potentially long list, let me highlight four examples of how we are going about that. 6 7  Arnstein (1969). Haldane (2017b). A number of excellent historical examples are given in Kynaston (2017). 4  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  4  (a) Layered Communications  There is a natural temptation among technocrats to communicate in a language that is only understood by fellow technocrats. This tendency has deep sociological roots, most probably dating back to our hunter-gatherer past. At that time, language was a means of bonding and binding people; it was social glue. It still is. Language can also, however, be a barrier to understanding and, as in our hunter-gather past, a source of tribal conflict.
In the EU we have about 5.3 scientists and researchers per 1000 workers, which compares to the US figure of 9 per 1000. 17 In addition, ICT investment, which is an indicator of the diffusion of innovation, represented 6% of GDP in the US over the period 2000-2004 compared to only 3% in the euro area. ICT diffusion appears to be particularly relevant in the services sector given the higher potential for employment creation in that sector combined with the evidence that there is no apparent trade-off in the medium term between labour productivity and employment growth at the level of the sector as a whole. As a result, the key issue for the larger euro area countries is how to increase their future capacity to promote the diffusion of innovation and, in particular, technological changes in the service sectors, a field in which the Nordic EU countries have performed particularly well 18 . The state of structural reforms If euro area countries would now summon up their strength and ambitiously push forward with structural reform, this will support and broaden the improvement in economic activity in the euro area. This is why the ECB has always encouraged the implementation of structural reform within the Lisbon strategy. Five years later, progress has been made in some areas - as also indicated by an increase in the euro area employment rate. Still, all in all the reforms have not been far-reaching enough 19 .

5  See OECD (2005) and (2006) “Going for Growth” and OECD (2005) “Economic Surveys: Euro Area”. 6  See Economic Policy Committee of the EU (2005), “Responding to the challenges of globalization”, Brussels. 2  BIS Review 44/2006  Without aiming to be exhaustive, I should like to highlight some of the key priorities for reform in four main areas, namely getting people into work, increasing competition, unlocking business potential and supporting an innovative environment. First of all, well-functioning labour markets are extremely important in fostering high economic growth. The divergent pattern displayed by growth and labour utilisation in the US and in Europe has prompted some economists to suggest the existence of a ‘European model’ and a ‘US model’, related to the trade-off between labour use and productivity. 7 One view is that the lower levels of GDP per capita in Europe reflect European preferences for more leisure. However, we should bear in mind that lower participation rates are not necessarily solely associated with personal preferences, but are also triggered by the legal and regulatory environment, tax systems and social institutions. Benefit systems that are too generous discourage job search, early retirement schemes encourage early withdrawal from the labour market - employment rates for older workers aged 55-64 stood at just 40.2% in the euro area in 2005 and, according to the OECD, at around 60% in the US - and marginal tax rates that are too high discourage labour market entry and have a downward effect on average hours worked.
If fiscal policy is no longer able to act, there is a danger that politicians, economic agents and the public will expect monetary policy to come up with a solution for every problem. In Switzerland, where good rules and a strong culture of stability exist, there is currently no tension. But even if our country is in a relatively good position, this is no reason to rest upon our laurels. Stability-oriented fiscal and monetary policies must be constantly maintained, to ensure that they are sufficiently robust when the next challenge presents itself. One of the greatest challenges for fiscal policy is demographic changes, which will place a heavy burden on public finances in the future. Calculations show clearly that, if policy is not changed, age-related costs will rise sharply. It will not be possible to solve these problems using only fiscal rules such as the debt brake. Profound structural reforms to social security arrangements are needed. Central banks, too, face major challenges. In the last few years, central banks across the world have broken new ground. They have cut interest rates practically to zero, supplied the financial system with generous amounts of liquidity and introduced unconventional monetary policy measures. These measures carry a number of risks, of which inflation is the most frequently cited. Allow me to conclude my presentation with a few words on that subject. 16  Cf. Jordan (2012b). BIS central bankers’ speeches  7  There is no sign of inflation for the short or medium term.

In the fiscal policy domain, the elements of a good rule are: It is clear and easy to understand; it is binding, i.e. has a basis in law – ideally at the constitutional level; and it is equipped with a specific sanctioning mechanism. Finally, it must make provision for exceptions, and these should be clearly defined. In the monetary policy domain, too, there are certain requirements regarding what makes a good rule. First, it must set out how the central bank should use its policy tools to achieve the goal of price stability. It defines criteria according to which monetary policy measures are taken. For many central banks, inflation forecasts play an important role. On the one hand, they serve as the main indicator for the interest rate decision. On the other, they are an important communication tool. A good rule creates a certain degree of transparency vis-à-vis the public, and makes monetary policy more predictable. It provides an anchor for inflation expectations and helps to improve the credibility of monetary policy. Second, we need a culture of stability which is well anchored in the minds of both politicians and the general public – part of the national mentality (cf. chart 6). Economic literature has repeatedly demonstrated that certain political structures and a culture of stability are mutually reinforcing. 7 For fiscal policy, these structures can be, for example, fiscal federalism (tax competition), the subsidiarity principle, direct democracy structures and political continuity (e.g. the concordance principle).