samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
A surplus of more than 3 % of GDP, for an economic area which still has a negative output gap of more than 2%, is clearly suboptimal. In sum, all these figures point to a significant cost of non-coordination, of at least 2% of the EA GDP at present. C.  To take the debate forward, three principled choices have to be made. These principled choices are needed: (i) to resolve the debate between coordination and reforms; (ii) to simplify rules and embrace institution-based policymaking; in order (iii) to achieve full coordination. First, we do not have to choose between coordinating economic policies and domestic reforms. This is the cornerstone of any French-German agreement: breaking the political gridlock on coordination versus reforms, and making parallel progress on both domestic reforms and European coordination. This requires overcoming distrust and putting both aspects under the same umbrella, namely a common institution. Second, institutions with a mandate are superior to rules without institutions. To bolster policy consistency and coordination, we admittedly need simpler rules. For instance, the complexity of the reforms of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) and the so-called “Fiscal Compact” is such that Finance ministers privately admit they do not know whether their country is completely abiding by the rules. But we learnt in real life that we cannot rely simply on rules. They should be supported by strong institutions with discretionary powers.

Besides the obvious economic crimes such as drug trafficking and corruption, governments also need to fight against economic and financial crimes in every other shape and form. Any type of such crimes can generate feelings of resentment about an unfair society, not just the drug trafficking cases. Stock price manipulation, insider trading, or tax evasion, which even though do not directly harm people's lives, can still make people feel slighted. This is especially so if these white-collar perpetrators are quite influential or are close friends with politicians or the administrations. In all these cases, the role model set by the government is the most important element in winning people's confidence that the government is truly and sincerely committed to fighting against economic and financial crimes. If the perpetrators are members of the government, swift and decisive actions taken against them will make society confident in the government's policy on this issue and thus encourage law enforcement officers to fearlessly do the right things. What I have been talking about so far concerns economic crimes within a country. Things get more complicated and much more difficult to combat when it comes to cross-border economic crimes. These require close cooperation of law enforcement authorities in every country. Today's United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice is a good example of the collaboration effort at the international level. To combat transnational crime, the willingness to collaborate is strong when authorities hold the same view on such crimes.
Extending the logic of domestication  Retail deposit-taking is a critical economic function and local supervisors have more levers over subsidiaries than branches. Therefore – consistent with the ICB’s logic – we have preferred for several years that international banks from outside the EEA (known as ‘third countries’) with more than £ of retail and SME FSCS-covered 6  transactional or instant access account balances put them in a subsidiary . There are not many of these: most international banks in retail focus on small expatriate or diaspora communities, or on particular niches in private banking. We expect each of these firms to have a viable and sustainable UK business model which accretes a portion of its own capital, rather than being reliant on its parent, with high standards of risk management and governance. 5  See the PRA Annual Report and Accounts; July 2017 and U.S. Department of the Treasury; A Financial System That Creates Economic Opportunities; June 2017. 6 See SS10/14: Supervising international banks: the PRA’s approach to branch supervision; September 2014. 5  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  5  EMBARGO: not for release before 19:30 on Wednesday 4 October 2017  These retail subsidiaries are not as insulated as the financial and operational separation required by the ICB. But with a much lower threshold than the £ billion of core deposits at which ring-fencing kicks in, our policy follows the same logic, proportionately applied.

Overseas regulators (as host  2  See The PRA’s approach to the implementation of the systemic risk buffer: Statement of Policy; 5 December 2016. 3  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  3  EMBARGO: not for release before 19:30 on Wednesday 4 October 2017  authorities) use their own rules to set requirements for the subsidiaries in their territories. They might consider these businesses to be systemic on a local basis. They might measure financial transactions under different accounting rules, apply different prudential approaches to assessing risks, or restrict capital transfer to the UK parent. Therefore, a UK bank’s overseas subsidiary might be required to have an outsize portion of its group’s capital. Back at home, the parent might fund the subsidiary’s higher capital requirement by raising debt externally. This is known as ‘double leverage’ and firms use it because debt is generally cheaper than equity. But servicing double leverage relies on flows of dividend income which are uncertain and at the discretion of local boards and supervisors across the group. Or the parent might be incentivised to under-allocate resources to unregulated but risk-taking entities within the group. We need to be mindful of the risks this can create, and so today we are announcing a new approach, to 3  ensure that UK banking groups are at least as strong as their parts . Subject to our consultation:   We will expect firms to demonstrate to us that they can manage the cash-flow and other risks associated with double leverage.
Major banks and insurers are accelerating their digital transformation and ramping up hiring in application development, data science, and artificial intelligence. Example: OCBC Bank recently announced that it plans to hire 1,500 technology staff over the next 3 years, with the majority of those positions to be based in Singapore. Bank of America has based one of its two overseas global cyber security centres in Singapore. The bank currently has more than 800 headcounts in Singapore focusing on technology. Another example is Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, which set up its first overseas innovation centre in Singapore. Likewise, global insurers like SCOR have established innovation labs in Singapore. Local insurers have invested heavily in technology too. Singapore has made a name for itself as providing one of the world’s most conducive environments for financial innovation. We are now home to over 50 global and regional innovation labs and more than 1,400 FinTech firms. Last year, we saw record high FinTech investments of $ billion last year, up from $ billion in 2020 [2] . Leading players at the forefront of digital asset innovation have anchored their operations in Singapore. JP Morgan has partnered DBS Bank and Temasek to establish Partior, which is a multi-currency, cross-border settlement platform, leveraging blockchain technology. R3, a global distributed ledger technology provider with roots as a banking consortium, has grown its innovation hub in Singapore to become the regional headquarters for Asia.

4  See the box ”Uncertainty regarding future interest rate movements”, in Inflation Report 2006:1. 4  BIS Review 33/2006  In the second method, the uncertainty interval is instead calculated with the aid of the market’s pricing of interest rate options. The current prices of interest rate options reflect expectations of future interest rates. This method is therefore forward-looking and based on the fact that the redemption price for identical options can vary. This variation reflects the market’s assessment of the uncertainty in the future price of the asset on which the option is based. Since this variation can be observed, it is possible to construct an uncertainty interval around the implied forward rate curve. These uncertainty intervals are largely similar to the uncertainty intervals based on historical deviations (see Figure 5). To summarise, the strategy for monetary policy is being maintained with the new interest rate assumption. We normally try to attain the inflation target within a two-year period and we take the real economy into consideration. However, monetary policy cannot as before be described by the simple rule of thumb that was based on the assumption of a constant repo rate. Instead the forecasts that are based on the assumption that the repo rate will follow implied forward rates are studied and assessed. It is the whole path of inflation and the real economy that is important in monetary policy decisions.
Some things could definitely have been arranged in another way both in the late 1980s and once the crisis was over us in the early nineties. BIS Review 80/1998  -3-  But the vital conclusion is, I believe, that the roots of the profound crisis stretched a long way into the past. An economic policy realignment was essential; a credible stability oriented policy had been lacking ever since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s. It was high time to put this right. Making the new regime credible After the long period of high inflation, together with extensive economic problems and massive government deficits, the task of inspiring confidence in economic policy’s new direction proved difficult at first. Economic agents listened to the new approach with doubts and hesitation. As we know from other countries, however, creating confidence in a new regime with low inflation is a rather long process that takes time. Moreover, if the work of keeping inflation low and government finances in order is to be combined with low interest rates and stable growth, it is a task that never ends. In recent years the low-inflation regime has gained increased credibility. Besides a disciplined monetary policy for price stability, a major contribution to this has come from the consolidation of government finances. In just a few years a budget deficit at 12 per cent of GDP has been turned into today’s surplus.

According to the timetable for the new legislation, the Riksdag’s final decision will be made sometime in the middle of November. It will be followed by the appointment of the Riksbank’s new Governing Board, which will consist of eleven Delegates. One of its major tasks  BIS Review 80/1998  -4-  will be to appoint the Riksbank’s new Executive Board. This Board will consist of six full-time members who will direct the Riksbank and decide monetary policy as of January 1999. The present situation Sweden’s monetary policy is conducted in a flexible exchange rate regime and has an explicit inflation target. We sometimes use the following simple rule of thumb to describe what governs our actions: if the overall assessment of inflation indicates that in one to two years time the rate of inflation will deviate from the 2 per cent target, then the repo rate should be adjusted accordingly. Our approach is symmetrical, which means that it is equally important to avoid undershooting the target, as it is to avoid overshooting it. The Riksbank’s appraisal of inflation up to the autumn of 2000 and the monetary policy conclusions that can be drawn from this are presented in the Inflation Report we published last week. In order to visualise the consequences for the future path of monetary policy, the report is based on the working assumption of an unchanged repo rate.
34 Constancio (2014) argues that “It seems unacceptable that macro-prudential authorities would passively watch the development of a bubble in housing prices and other asset prices, comforted by the idea that the banking sector is prepared to weather the storm and that the central bank would deal with the painful aftermath. The crisis showed that the amount of risk endogenously generated by a financial cycle spinning ‘out-of-control’ dwarfs the ‘mopping up’ ability of fiscal and monetary policy due to fiscal capacity limits and the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates. In matters of financial instability, prevention is always better than cure”. 35 The FPC recommendation on the loan-to-income (LTI) flow limit is that the PRA and the FCA should ensure that mortgage lenders do not extend more than 15% of their total number of new residential mortgages at LTI ratios at or greater than 4.5. The FPC recommendation regarding mortgage affordability is that when assessing affordability, mortgage lenders should apply an interest rate stress test that assesses whether borrowers could still afford their mortgages if, at any point over the first five years of the loan, Bank Rate were to be 3 percentage points higher than the prevailing rate at origination. For further detail, see for instance Bank of England (2014) for a documentation of the Bank of England’s 2014 housing market measures. 36 See Bank of England (2016).

I am not referring here to any desire to usurp the role of those global agencies which are household names to us, even though we may sometimes feel that their understanding of economics and business in this part of the world could be deepened and the rating process itself made more transparent. They focus mainly on rating internationally traded paper. What this region may need is better arrangements for rating domestic and regional issues. How and by whom this might be effected is for discussion. Plainly, it is essential that the investor community has confidence in the expertise and integrity of rating agencies. A more local focus by established agencies, perhaps operating via joint ventures, might ensure such confidence. If that is achieved, then the broader application of ratings may help expand the investor base, notably to embrace those institutional or individual investors who cannot themselves afford to make credit assessments of every issue but who are favourably disposed towards bond investment in principle. The other initiative in hand is to study the potential for more activity in credit enhancement. In some other centres, notably the United States, there exist insurance or guarantee corporations, typically of triple A status themselves, whose business is to sell their backing to the bond issuance of a lesser name so that the latter will be attractive in the market. There has hitherto been only limited activity of this sort in this region, although there were signs of it building up before the Asian financial crisis struck.
As a result of the reforms carried out in recent years, a high degree of institutional convergence was achieved in the banking sector. The concrete results are the full membership of the country in the European Banking Union and the indicators of our banking sector. All independent observers point out that our banking sector is profitable and well capitalised, including in the report on Bulgaria that the OECD presented yesterday. It gives clear messages that key indicators for our banking sector, such as capital adequacy and liquidity, are above the average level not only for the European Union, but also for the OECD countries. Institutional convergence is therefore not an exercise in itself. It brings significant positive results. Fiscal consolidation means restoring our more than 20-year track record of drawing up and exercising a disciplined budget, which was somewhat lost in the last two years. Fiscal consolidation is important both in the short term and in the medium and long term. In the short term, it is important because it is the main macroeconomic tool at our country's disposal to contain and reduce inflation, which, as stated, is the only criterion for joining the euro area that we do not meet. Even outside the context of the euro area, fiscal consolidation is important, with a view to avoiding the macroeconomic imbalances we witnessed only a few years ago.

The credit for this goes mainly to the Ministry of Finance. We, as a Central Bank, try to contribute to this process in the best possible way. The formal launch is a matter of decision by the government. I see no reason why this should not happen within the current month. Preconditions The third topic that I will touch on is: What are the conditions for the tasks I talked about to be successfully completed and thus to successfully complete the entire process of joining the euro area? The short answer to these conditions is contained, in my opinion, in one word: "consolidation" with three important dimensions – political, institutional and fiscal. 3/5  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  Political consolidation means a functioning parliament and a regular government with clearly defined and consistently implemented priorities, and joining the euro area must definitely be one of these priorities. Institutional consolidation means ambitious reforms to address the still serious institutional deficits in the country and achieve the much-needed institutional convergence. Perhaps biased, but I will give an example with the BNB. In 2014-2015, the Central Bank, and the banking sector as a whole, were the subject of sharp political attacks and heated political discussions. Among other things, one of the main reasons was precisely the institutional deficits in the banking sector. It was about both the state of banking supervision and the lack of an institutional framework for solving problems in the banking sector.
This is what we have done since mid-2013, when the 6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Board announced that in great probability a monetary easing was coming, which immediately translated into a reduction in long-term interest rates. Later on, in October 2013, we began the monetary expansion process that involved a reduction of 200 basis points off the monetary policy rate in one year. In these months we have acted with conviction, allowing an easing of financial conditions and a peso depreciation that we believe important for the economy’s cyclical adjustment. Thus, during 2014 our economy was the one that lowered its policy rate the most among a group of emerging countries, with the obvious result that our currency has also depreciated the most (table 3). This has not been cost-free. The depreciation of our peso has certainly been the biggest source of the high inflation rate of this year, but it is a cost that any healthy economy like ours can assume in these circumstances, provided that the situation is transitory, as we believe it is. This sets us apart from other emerging economies, which because of vulnerabilities accumulated in the past, now have difficulties to take more resolute action in this matter. Today our economy is ready to resume a higher growth path. This assertion is based on the fast and significant adjustment it made during the year, as reflected in the current account, interest rates and the real exchange rate.

Similarly, rating agencies should also be regulated, given the key role they play in correcting information asymmetries on financial markets. Lastly, public authorities should pay greater attention to those financial institutions that are central to the supply of market liquidity and financing. An important starting point is to acknowledge that financial system participants have very different functions, pursue different strategies and operate according to different economic models. This diversity is crucial to the smooth functioning of markets. A one-size-fits-all  BIS Review 161/2008  1  regulatory framework applied to all participants would certainly give rise to herd behaviour and, consequently, reinforce the endogeneity of certain risks. A gradation could reasonably be applied to the regulations and requirements imposed on financial system participants. Three levels, ranging from oversight to regulation, naturally come to mind. The first level would take the form of a mandatory registration and the commitment to comply with a code of good practices. The second – more restrictive – level would include disclosure obligations with regard to activities and accounts, in addition to the mandatory registration and the compliance with good practices. Hedge funds and, more generally, institutions pursuing strategies essentially based on leverage or risk-taking could have to meet such requirements. Finally, the last level would involve more restrictive regulations with regard to activities and risk-taking, as well as closer oversight. In many respects, this gradation system is not only relevant with regard to prudential requirements. It should also apply to accounting rules for example.
Together, we can pave the way for a transformed banking industry. Thank you. 4/4  BIS central bankers' speeches

In March of this year, Bank Negara Malaysia established a Reuters page for the RMB/MYR exchange rate for trade-related settlements, with 11 banking institutions offering the facility to Malaysian companies. A cost-effective arrangement is now being finalised to provide the option for exporters and importers to settle bilateral trade obligations in local currency by the middle of this year. This will complement the existing facilities that are already being provided by commercial banks in the settlement of trade in RMB. Bank Negara Malaysia has also signed a memorandum of understanding with the China Banking Regulatory Commission in 2009 to further strengthen the framework for cooperation and collaboration between both authorities, and to promote regional financial integration. This MOU provides the platform for both regulatory agencies to share information, to ensure the enforcement of prudential rules and regulations and to undertake pre-emptive actions  BIS Review 58/2010  1  towards ensuring the sound development of financial institutions operating in both the respective jurisdictions. This MOU also provides an established mechanism to enhance cooperation in areas that will be mutually beneficial for the development of the financial sector in both countries. With respect to the performance of the Malaysian financial sector, it has demonstrated its resilience throughout the recent global financial crisis. Financial intermediation has remained intact with the banking institutions in a strong position to support the economy. This has been reinforced by fiscal and monetary measures to ensure adequate access to financing by all segments of the private sector.