samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
  Policies will be adopted to reduce cheque usage in Sri Lanka by means of converting to digital payment mechanisms/method. The Central Bank will facilitate and promote private and government institutions to effect payments through any electronic retail payment system.   As Blockchain technology plays an important role to change the entire current financial transaction infrastructure within a digital eco system, the integration of distributed ledger systems into financial institutions and services will be facilitated in line with the regulations in the country.   With the increasing global popularity of digital currencies, the Central Bank intends to carry out a study in order to determine the effects of a digital fiat currency on the current economic landscape of the country.   The Central Bank aims to use a bottom-up approach in creating awareness from grassroot to institutional levels on the available and proposed payment modalities on a continuous basis.   In order to facilitate new developments of payment cards and mobile payments, the Central Bank intends to issue a revised Credit Card Guideline and guidelines on Minimum Compliance Standards for Mobile Applications that will be applicable to any institutions operating, facilitating and proving payment services for mobile applications. With a view to strengthening the financial intelligence environment, we will continue to coordinate with the stakeholders to develop Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) policies to implement the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recommendations more effectively.

We have also advanced in a technological leveling project and we have implemented three-year periods for strategic planning. I am also proud to have presided over the Central Bank during a period where the average annual inflation rate was 2.8%, and was most of the time within the established tolerance range and where the functioning of internal and external payments was totally normal. These are the objectives set forth by our Constitutional Organic Law. Unfortunately, the unusual increases in the prices of foods and energy pushed annual inflation above 7% toward this year’s end. This should be a transitory rise in inflation that will fade away in coming quarters, conditional to annual inflation expectations remain anchored around 3%. It is not pleasant to leave the Central Bank with such a high inflation figure. But I understand that it is a circumstantial development that is part of the job, and that the highly qualified Board and staff will take the appropriate decisions to achieve the objective to return inflation to 3% within the habitual policy horizon. We have applied an effective monetary policy that has become a powerful countercyclical tool, in light of the experience of recent years. But it would be of little use if we did not rely on the responsible fiscal policy that Chile has applied. 2  BIS Review 149/2007  During my term, I was lucky to work with two top-level finance ministers, with whom I always had very fluent communication in the subjects of common concern.
The demand for protection will grow, not just the need to insure against losses but also the demand from businesses who wish to strengthen their resilience and to recover more quickly from security breaches. 41. But the market needs development. It’s still in its infancy. We have to increase awareness of the importance of insurance in dealing with cyber risk. Again, however, the data needed for efficient underwriting of risk is weak. We need to strengthen collaboration between the industry, government and academia to build reliable databases and analytical tools to enable the efficient underwriting of cyber risk. •  We have set up the Cyber Risk Management Project in Singapore. It was launched recently, involving the Nanyang Technological University’s (NTU)’s Insurance Risk and Finance Research Centre (NTU-IRFRC), and supported by leading industry players and the Cyber Security Agency (CSA) in Singapore. Conclusion 42. It is, to conclude, a difficult and challenging environment for insurers globally. We have to live with a low interest rate environment for a long time to come, even as our societies are getting older. It’s a challenge for everyone in the retirement business, including insurers. We have to find ways to make savings for affordable for ordinary savers as they prepare for their retirement. 43. But we also have to meet new opportunities in the insurance industry.

But in a situation where we are going to have much longer lives, it is critical that we have the ability to earn a living and to save money over more years, so as to provide security and assurance through our retirement years. 22. It’s true everywhere in the world. Some countries have already recognised it through legislation. Denmark is a good example, of having linked their retirement age and pension age to life expectancy. Sweden intends to follow. Several other countries are considering the same thing. 23. But it is not just about pushing back the retirement age or pension age. It is critical that we make it attractive for older citizens to work. That means not just providing jobs but rearranging the work place so that it becomes part of the culture to have older persons, experienced persons, in the team, in the work place. The culture of the work place has to change and the culture of the consumers has to change in a whole range of industries so as to accept and celebrate the presence of older persons at work. 24. So that’s one important reform over the next 10 to 15 years – enabling older persons to work for longer, it may be full time or part time, but make it attractive to work. 25. The second important reform concerns the financial industry. We have to reduce the costs that ordinary savers face in saving for the retirement. 26.
François Villeroy de Galhau: Economic Union, Financing Union, Banking Union Speech by Mr François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Bank of France, at the Annual General Meeting of the Foreign Bankers’ Association, Amsterdam, 16 November 2017. * * * Ladies and Gentlemen, It is a pleasure to be in Amsterdam today and to give the keynote speech at your Annual General Meeting. I wish to warmly thank my friend Governor Klaas Knot and FBA Chairman Leonique van Houwelingen for their kind invitation. For a central banker, Amsterdam is a highly significant place, especially because the Bank of Amsterdam, in Dutch the “Amsterdamsche Wisselbank”, which was established as early as 1609, can be considered a precursor to central banks, before its role was taken over by the Nederlandsche Bank, which is also a venerable ainstitution since it was created by King William I in 1814. Furthermore, for a long time, Amsterdam has been an economic and financial capital and a major city at the heart of Europe. If I add your tradition of freedom and tolerance, your country is a paragon of many of the European virtues that we cherish. This afternoon, I would like to share with you some reflections as a central banker on a highly topical issue: the future of Europe. Your new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Halbe Zijlstra, gave a speech on this very theme last week and rightly called for “a Europe that is relevant to its people [and] which is again synonymous with prosperity and growth”.

In this respect, there is still a need to better coordinate the roles of the different European authorities – SSM and ECB, SRM, Commission, and EBA – in order to 3/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  have a clearer “pilot in the plane” in crisis management. At a later stage, we should even consider establishing a single banking authority for our single Banking Union, acting to bolster the robustness of the European banking sector. The second challenge is to support cross-border bank consolidations in the euro area. You, the “foreign” bankers in the Netherlands, are probably especially sensitive to that. The head of the SSM too, Danièle Nouy, insisted on this point last week. We still lag far behind the American market in this respect: the market share in the United States of the top five banks is more than 40% whereas the market share in the euro area of the top five banks is less than 20%. Sound and safe cross-border consolidations would make banks better able to diversify their risks across the euro area, and channel savings more effectively towards investments across borders; this would foster the Financing Union I talked about. From a supervisory point of view, it involves supporting an approach on a consolidated basis by granting more waivers on liquidity and capital so as to allow more flexible capital allocation and limit ring-fencing. Swift execution of cross-border transactions is also essential: the implementation of a fast-track process by the SSM would address this issue.
One way of doing that is by looking at the immediate movements in asset prices around announcements of purchases. As market participants are forward-looking, one might expect the bulk of the movement associated with QE to happen when the purchases are announced rather than when they take place. And indeed that approach seems to work reasonably well for identifying the impact of QE1 on the yields on gilts, and those on close substitutes such as corporate bonds. Analysis by Bank staff2 suggests that long-term gilt yields were around one percentage point lower than they would otherwise have been; that corresponds to a rise in long-term gilt prices of around 20%. Investment-grade corporate bond yields3 fell by about the same amount, while high-yield corporate bonds fell by somewhat more. This approach is less suited to analysing the impact of QE2. The deterioration in the economic situation, speeches by MPC members, and the minutes of the September policy meeting all encouraged market participants to expect a re-commencement of the purchase programme. As a result, the effects were already largely incorporated into the general level of bond prices prior to the MPC’s actual announcement of the new programme in October, so it becomes difficult to disentangle the effect of QE. Ahead of that announcement, however, UK sovereign bond yields did fall relative to those in Germany and the United States, consistent with an effect from QE. Moreover, in February we did make an unexpected announcement of a change in the maturity structure of our purchases.

But the more a scheme is underfunded (overfunded) to begin with, the more it will find its deficit (surplus) increased. This is entirely intuitive. By reducing yields, QE increases the cost of purchasing a given future stream of income. So if a fund starts off relatively “asset poor”, the sponsors will now find it more costly to acquire the assets necessary to match its future obligations. A corollary of this is that the cost of provisioning against additional pension entitlements being accumulated by currently serving staff unambiguously rises. That does mean that the effective cost of employing labour, when their pension costs are also included, also rises.8 This is certainly an unwanted side effect of QE. But it needs to be balanced against the higher activity and business profits resulting from QE, as well as the fact that wage growth has recently been exceptionally weak, which work in the opposite direction. Given that pension funds have for the most part seen deficits widen in recent years, whether it be as a result of the crisis and recession or the result of QE, how should sponsors and trustees respond? It makes little sense to rush to close a deficit that is likely to prove temporary. But if a deficit is likely to persist, then corrective action is required, initially to prevent it continuing to expand and ultimately to close it, though that adjustment could, quite reasonably, be spread out over time. This is all recognised by the Pensions Regulator.
So apart from the initiatives I touched upon, we also welcome your inputs on what more should be done to better capture the opportunities in the structured credit space riding on the conducive macro trends I mentioned earlier. 25. Once again, I thank IMN for having me here today. I wish you all a very successful Summit. 1 1Simmons Simmons, “Synthetic securitisation: opening the Basel toolbox in Asia-Pacific”, 13 August 2020 3/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  4/4  BIS central bankers' speeches

Prasarn Trairatvorakul: Thai economy – tapping the untapped opportunity Speech by Dr Prasarn Trairatvorakul, Governor of the Bank of Thailand, at the inauguration of the RMB Clearing Bank in Thailand and 5th year celebration of the ICBC (Thai), Bangkok, 22 April 2015. *  *  *  1. Your Excellency Ambassador Ning Fukui, Chairman Jiang, Chairman Hu, Dr. Zhigang Li, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the invitation to give a few remarks on the occasion of the inauguration of ICBC (Thai) as the official Renminbi clearing bank here in Thailand. 2. This development of the RMB Clearing Bank in Thailand and certainly also to celebrate the 5th Anniversary of ICBC (Thai) is in fact the result of the long and continued ties between China and Thailand. It has marked another important step in further development of our financial ties following the signing of the Renminbi – Thai Baht Bilateral Swap Agreement and the Memorandum of Understanding with the People’s Bank of China on the establishment of the Renminbi Clearing Arrangements in December 2014. 3. Today, I was invited to talk about Thai economy. So I am pleased to have the opportunity to share with you some of my observations on the current state of the Thai economy. Let me humbly start from some of the challenges we are facing, the economy is currently reeling from both internal and external headwinds. Internally, the stagnant technology and labour readiness has so far taken a toll on Thailand’s economic expansion.
Some insight can be provided by assessing whether, even in a simple environment, a complex predictive rule outperforms a simple one. To assess that,  BIS central bankers’ speeches  11  consider a wider range of potential predictors of bank failure than just capital. A natural starting point would be the well-known CAMEL (capital, asset quality, management, earnings and liquidity) indicators of bank strength. These are a commonly-used performance metric, including by bank supervisors. 16 Table 6 presents the results of a logit regression of US bank failure using the CAMEL indicators as predictors. All five CAMEL measures are correctly signed, although not all are statistically significant. The in-sample fit suggests an important explanatory role for the CAMEL measures. When fitting bank failure from the past, many indicators dominate the few. But how would this model have performed out-of-sample in situations where information was partial? As one way of exploring that question, consider estimating the model using a subset of the sample of banks and using that sub-set to predict bank failure for the remainder of the sample. This can be done for a sequence of random samples of varying sizes. 17 The size of these samples proxies the degree of information imperfection – the smaller the sample, the greater the model uncertainty. These random bank samples of varying sizes are used to re-estimate a set of models of bank failure.

Measures of risk-weighted capital are statistically insignificant, while the leverage ratio is significant at the 1% level. Contrary to the risk-sensitivity doctrine, less appears to have offered more. These results are robust to the inclusion of a broader set of macro factors, such as GDP growth and credit (Table 3). Using different methods and samples, other studies support the predictive superiority, or at least equivalence, of leverage over capital ratios (IMF (2009), Demirguc-Kunt et al (2010), Estrella et al (2000)). A second source of regulatory complexity is the definition of capital. Table 4 considers the predictive performance of a selection of measures of capital for a sub-set of banks. Two key conclusions emerge. First, simpler measures of accounting capital based on equity capital (core Tier 1) outperform broader, more complex, measures. Second, simple market-based measures of banks’ equity dominate accounting measures in their crisis-predictive performance. Simple, once again, beats complex. Put another way, consider a straight horse-race between the most complex measure of banks’ capital position (the Basel Tier 1 ratio) and the simplest (the market value of equity relative to unweighted assets). The explanatory power of the simple measure is about 10 times greater than the complex measure. However well they perform in theory or in sample, complex capital rules do not appear to have performed well in practice and out-of-sample. That is a sobering message for the architects of the Tower of Basel. (5)  Predicting bank failure – simple or complex?
However, performing these activities makes banks vulnerable, in particular receiving short-term deposits and transferring them into long-term loans. At worst, banks may fail and destabilize the whole financial sector and even the whole economy. To avoid such calamities from happening, society is willing, under certain specified circumstances, to rescue banks from failure by providing exceptional lending from the central bank or solidity enhancements from the government. Depositors may be protected by a deposit insurance scheme. But the willingness of the authorities to assist the banks and their customers must be matched by regulation and monitoring to ensure that the bank owners and others do not use, or I might say “abuse”, the possibility of public support to further their own purposes. Hence, there must be some regulation and supervision to make sure that banks behave in ways which are consistent with the overarching goals of society, such as financial stability and consumer protection. Regulation must also provide the necessary incentives for banks to act prudently and in fair competition with other banks and other financial institutions. An adequate level of domestic regulation is also necessary if you want your banks to do business internationally or if you allow foreign banks to do business in India. You should welcome foreign institutions but you should not open your markets to unregulated and unsupervised institutions. Ideally, regulation should be limited to what is really necessary to obtain these overarching goals. In practice, authorities have a tendency to over-regulate since they are risk averse.

Such events might mean that the bank would have to suffer a loss although it thought it had protected itself. The conclusion is that the authorities must force the banks to assess whether the risk buyers have adequate financial and organisational capabilities and whether the legal arrangements are robust. As in many other countries, there is a strong tendency in the Swedish financial sector to move from “bricks and mortar”, such as having many branch offices, to providing their services through the Internet and telephone. About half of all payments of companies and physical persons in Sweden are made through the Internet and by phone. This has made it possible to increase bank efficiency in  6  BIS Review 111/2006  terms of staff numbers and branches. Each Swedish bank branch now services an average of 4,700 persons in the population compared to, for instance, only 1,900 being serviced by the German banks’ branches in Germany. Of course, each country is free to choose its own service level and may prefer a higher level, although it brings higher costs. Modern regulation In my view, Sweden abolished its old-fashioned regulations for good reasons. Using the banks for directed lending and for other non-commercial purposes may seem handy for the government, but entails large risks and costs.
Because the Basle Committee’ s jurisdiction is limited to matters of banking supervision and regulation, its primary emphasis has been on ensuring that the major banks prudently manage their risk exposures to HLIs. The best way to achieve this is through the adoption of sound practices by the industry, perhaps supplemented by incentives created through capital requirements. While it is primarily the responsibility of each banking organization to manage its risks, sound practice standards give banks and supervisors a tool to measure industry progress. If banks themselves do not follow sound practices, then supervisors must step in and take the necessary action. The Committee’ s report revealed a number of deficiencies. In particular, the Committee observed an imbalance among the key elements of the credit risk management process, with too strong a reliance upon collateral. This undue emphasis, in turn, caused many banks to neglect other critical elements of effective credit risk management, including in-depth credit analyses of counterparties, effective exposure measurement and management techniques, and the use of stress testing. Credit Approval Process For a bank to make sound lending decisions, it needs to obtain sufficient information about the borrower. Supervisors routinely stress the need for banks to have an effective credit approval process consisting of formal policies and procedures, accompanied by documentation of actual credit decisions. When dealing with an HLI, a bank also must obtain comprehensive and timely financial information about that HLI’ s risk profile and credit quality, and it must engage in an ongoing credit analysis of that HLI.

Basle Report Findings As you know, I chair the Basle Committee on Banking Supervision, comprised of bank supervisors from the G-10 countries who coordinate supervisory policy for internationally active banks. While the Committee does not have formal legal enforcement powers, its conclusions and recommendations are widely implemented, both in G-10 countries and many others. In late January, the Committee issued a report dealing with the relationship between 1  BIS Review 27/1999  banks and highly-leveraged institutions, or “HLIs”. The Committee’ s report provides a framework for addressing the broader issues raised by the LTCM episode, the policy responses of supervisors, and some key risk management challenges for the banking industry going forward. In the United States, the Federal Reserve System, the New York State Banking Department, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency have conducted target reviews of a number of large-bank dealings with hedge funds. These reviews contributed to the Committee’ s work, to the Federal Reserve System’ s issuance on February 1 of new guidance to financial examiners and banks, and to similar guidance from the Comptroller of the Currency issued in January. These new standards emphasize the need for improvements in the credit risk management process at banks. The new standards will likely be complemented by a study of the implications of the LTCM episode by the President’ s Working Group on Financial Markets.