samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
We might view the entire three-pillar structure of Basel II as a series of built-in reality checks for management’s decision-making. In this regard, the three pillars of Basel II are intended to make sure that management assesses and controls its risks carefully and that it takes the steps necessary to allocate the appropriate capital. As you know, in the first pillar, the minimum capital requirements focus management’s attention on identifying, assessing and quantifying risk within a specified framework. This puts the onus of analysis and decision-making on the right set of shoulders: bank managers are in the best position to evaluate their risks and are ultimately responsible for responding to them. When banks consider their risks more comprehensively and work to evaluate rigorously the magnitude of losses that they may face, they are improving the quality of the information at their disposal. That, in turn, should improve their ability to arrive at sound decisions regarding the amount of capital that they may need to weather potential losses in the future. Considerable attention has been paid to some of the formulas and techniques that we have adopted in Pillar 1 to help quantify the potential for losses related to credit and operational risk exposures. We  BIS Review 66/2004  1  must remember that these formulas are not revolutionary.

•  And we need to better understand the interactions of monetary, microprudential and macroprudential policies, and how they influence price and financial stability. Henry Kissinger once asked Zhou Enlai – the late Premier of China – what he thought of the implications of the French Revolution. Zhou replied, “It is too early to tell.” We are living in interesting times. •  It has been a period of bold experimentation in both monetary and regulatory policies. •  It is too early to tell what the implications of these experiments are. •  We need much more research, experience, and the passage of time before we can draw firm conclusions on some of the issues that I have raised. •  In the meantime, let us pray for the wisdom to do the best we can. And be humble. 8  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Thank you. BIS central bankers’ speeches  9
Building block 15 calls for harmonised API data protocols and the Bank will support this objective in its development of an API layer. The Bank is also involved in the more exploratory building blocks in Focus Area E. In the light of the continued decline in cash for transactional purposes, and great technological advancement, many central banks, including the Bank of England, are considering whether introducing a CBDC would be appropriate. In March this year, the Bank published a discussion paper10 to explore the benefits, risks and practicalities of a retail CBDC in the UK. We have received valuable feedback from across the payments industry, technology providers, academics and public authorities and we look forward to setting out more information in due course. The Bank’s Financial Policy Committee also set out regulatory expectations for payment stablecoins in 2019 and 2020, which is feeding into our work on designing appropriate regulation and requirements for firms proposing these. As set out in the building blocks it is important that as these issues are debated it is also done with an eye to how they could support cross-border payments. These examples provide just a taste of the areas that the Bank of England is involved in and we will be working closely with other central banks and relevant organisations to address the building blocks as a whole.

In 2018, the Bank of Albania and the banking sector paid particular attention to financial inclusion and financial education. It is a proven fact now that improvement in financial inclusion contributes to the improvement of the welfare of the population in a harmonised way. In this regard, we have designed and implemented, among others, a series of educational projects that are adapted to various segments of the population. Financial education, tailored publications with information on bank products and services, as well as developments in the payment infrastructure and payment services are concrete steps for providing more opportunities for access to finance by all segments of the population. *** Dear representatives of the banking sector, The outlook for Albania’s development remains positive. This means that Albania offers the banking sector solid premises for business and growth. But, growth and development do not materialise out of nothing. They reflect the commitment, the hard work and the dedication of all actors. Let me now identify three challenges that we need to tackle together. First, the pace of economic growth needs to be supported by the dynamics of banking credit. We have discussed relevant reasons and factors in many forums and analyses. Today, I would like to emphasise that the economy may not grow sustainably without bank credit recovery. Your role becomes crucial in this regard. The banking sector safe-keeps the savings of Albanian citizens. It is its duty, however, to make such savings available to the growth and development of Albania.
Some focus on assets, others focus on organizational units, and yet others look at specific parts of processes. The result can be a set of assessments with potentially inconsistent coverage and disconnected recommendations. So, an appealing alternative to counter that trend and bridge siloed assessments is to integrate risk assessments. A unified approach can bring together risk and business professionals to understand and manage the risks to critical processes. The idea is to create a common picture of gaps and then design coordinated action plans that can target improvements in resilience. Let’s focus on business continuity to see how an integrated risk approach can strengthen resilience.5 Business continuity programs have traditionally been designed to restore critical physical or technology infrastructures that can be disrupted by threats like extreme weather or loss of power. So, a business continuity plan might involve arranging for a backup data center if the primary data center goes down due to a hurricane. Within an organization, different business areas may develop their own plans that are focused on their specific business needs and priorities. An integrated business continuity plan is one that is designed to protect critical organizational processes and their essential assets from the full range of relevant threats. An integrated approach begins with organizational objectives. This bridges a gap between what good looks like to an individual business and what it looks like to the organization as a whole.

Chart 10: Chinese credit growth Percentage change on a year ago  45 40 35 30  Non-bank  25  Headline TSF  20  Bank  15 10  Nominal GDP  5 0  2013  2014  2015  2016  2017  2018  Sources: CEIC, Datastream from Refinitiv, The People's Bank of China and Bank calculations. A downturn in the Chinese economy would test the resilience elsewhere. China’s contribution to global growth has risen from one-fifth to one-third since the last US tightening cycle. 22  22 Reflecting the increased importance for China to the global economy, the scenario used in the FPC’s annual stress tests of the major UK banks includes a significant slowdown in the Chinese economy. 14  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  14  To give a sense of the issue, in the 21 credit booms that matched the scale of China’s since 1975, annual growth dropped by 3¼ percentage points on average in the subsequent years. Adjusting for progress thus far and China’s degree of development, this suggests growth could slow a further 1 to 1½ percentage points. Of course, deeper trade tensions would worsen the slowdown. The Bank of England estimates that a 3% drop in Chinese GDP would knock one per cent off global activity, including half a per cent off each of UK, US and euro area GDP, through trade, commodities and financial market channels.
Adjustments should be made to employment legislation where it impedes the hiring of younger and older workers in particular. For instance, Denmark, Ireland and the Netherlands – which, by the way, are all three, de jure or de facto for Denmark, in the euro area – have achieved success in reducing unemployment and stimulating job creation, despite significantly different economic conditions 8 . In 2006 the unemployment rate in these countries stood below 4.5%, while their overall employment rate was above or close to the US level, namely 72 %. To achieve such remarkable success, these countries reformed their tax and benefit systems by reducing for example tax wedges on labour income and by carrying out a stricter enforcement of job search rules and a better surveillance of eligibility. They also increased, when and where needed, the flexibility of their labour market. 5  See “The economic costs of non-Lisbon: A survey of the literature on the economic impact of Lisbon-type reforms” by Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs, European Commission Occasional papers No 16, March 2005 EC. See “Demographic change in the euro area: projections and consequences” ECB Monthly Bulletin October 2006. 6  See Blanchard, O. (2004): “The economic future of Europe”, The Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 18, pp. 3-26; and also Gordon, R. J. (2004): “Two centuries of economic growth: Europe chasing the American frontier”, CEPR Discussion Paper, No. 4415.

The economic performance of the euro area since the mid-1990s Since 1996, the annual growth rate for the euro area has averaged 2.1% per year compared to 3.3% in the US. What are the fundamental causes of this unsatisfactory low trend growth in the euro area? The answers can be found by looking at the factors that determine potential or long-term economic growth, namely 1 : •  The degree of labour utilisation,  •  Productivity growth,  •  And the demographic trends. - Over the period 1996-2006, the euro area witnessed a slight improvement in the utilisation of labour, which increased on average by 0.4% per year (compared with 0.1% in the US) when defined as the total annual hours worked divided by the total population. Labour utilisation reflects the extent to which the potential labour resources in an economy are actually utilised and therefore have a direct influence on output growth. This improvement in labour utilisation mainly reflects the significant rise in the euro area overall employment rate from 58% in 1996 to 64.4% in 2006, accompanied by a decline in the aggregate unemployment rate from 10.7% to 7.9%. Although this is a very encouraging fact, which shows that the positive employment effect we witnessed over the last ten years has significantly helped us to partly counteract the growth differential to the US, one has to remain aware of the inferior starting position of euro area countries.
John C Williams: Healthy workforce, healthy economy Remarks (via videoconference) by Mr John C Williams, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at Combating Food Insecurity: What’s Working – and What’s Scalable?, 30 November 2021. * * * As prepared for delivery Good morning, and welcome. We are pleased that so many of you have joined us today for this important discussion about food insecurity. It is not lost on me that we are holding this event just five days after Thanksgiving, a holiday that is largely centered around food—the turkey, the stuffing, the mashed potatoes, the pumpkin pie. For some of us, the big concern coming out of the weekend was whether we had eaten too much. But for far too many, the much bigger concern is that they and their families did not—and still do not—have enough to eat. That’s what brings us here today. Our mission at the New York Fed is to make the economy stronger and the financial system more stable for all. But we can’t have a healthy economy without a healthy workforce. And that is why health—along with household financial well-being and climate change—is a focal point for our Community Development team. Before I continue, I must give the standard Fed disclaimer that the views I express are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Open Market Committee or anyone else in the Federal Reserve System. Food insecurity has long been a systemic problem.

Findings on Important Business Services identification On IBS, our current view is that firms have generally made positive progress against our expectations for identifying these services. This is good to see and reflects well on the sector as a whole. We also know that firms have taken a wide variety of approaches to the granularity with which they have identified their IBS. To illustrate this I will use a couple of examples of different approaches we have seen. These represent only a small subset of the IBS that firms’ submitted but I think illustrate the point. So, taking payment services as one example, we saw that some firms have identified all types of payments as a single business service, whilst others have split out different types of payment (for example payments made via individual systems including BACS, CHAPS and Faster Payments). Others have gone in a different direction, for example differentiating services for credit card payments versus debit card transactions. We have seen similar themes in other areas, such as services to do with lending. Here some firms have taken a granular approach – for example listing services such as “obtaining a loan” and separating different types of loan – while other firms have kept their IBS at a higher level or gone in different directions by identifying different types of products and/or the split between preand post-trade execution.
Moreover, the pace of internationalisation of the euro area economy has been further spurred by the euro. Allow me to give just one example: the level of accumulated foreign direct investment abroad by French residents since 1999 amounted to EUR 380 billion (i.e. four times its pre-1999 level). Indeed, capital flows between the Euro area and the rest of the world mirror a high degree of attractiveness: over the years 1999-2001, the Euro area has registered total inward direct investments worth 719.8 billion Euros. At this point, one may wonder which conditions are required to ensure the success of the euro and EMU in the medium term. I believe that we have to tackle three main challenges: structural reforms, financial stability and the accession to the EU of new Member States. ***  BIS Review 11/2003  5  Challenges ahead Structural reforms The first challenge is, beyond dispute, to implement structural reforms in the euro area’s economies. Structural reforms were crystallised at the European level in what is called the Lisbon strategy. The first objective of this strategy is to substantially raise our potential output growth. The second is to make our economies more competitive. Implementing the reforms: the Lisbon strategy The European Council meeting held in Luxembourg in December 1997 explicitly mentioned structural policies among the items selected to achieve enhanced co-ordination. The Lisbon European Council, held in March 2000, further enhanced the medium-term strategy to introduce structural reforms in the Union.

Moving forward, we all have a role to play to ensure that boards of financial institutions in Malaysia continue to be served by high-calibre directors who will guide our institutions on a path of sustainable growth in the service of the economy. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3
It is envisaged that more than 90% of the Spanish banking system, measured by volume of assets, will be supervised by the SSM. 6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Prior to the ECB effectively taking over supervisory responsibilities, a bank asset review and valuation is planned which will give rise to the requirement of a level of capital to be met by all banks subject to the review and, where necessary, to the setting up of additional coverage. It is worth noting that our banks are starting from a very reasonable level, both from the perspective of the accounting classification of their assets, and from that of asset coverage and provisioning, the result of the review conducted last year under the stress tests and of the above-mentioned recapitalisation processes. Recently, banks’ review of refinanced loans has also concluded, a process which contributes to shoring up their position ahead of the forthcoming evaluation of the quality of their assets. Likewise, and once more with a view to reinforcing the solvency of our banking system, the Banco de España has recommended that banks moderate the distribution of dividends during 2013 and that, in any event, the cash dividends paid out should not exceed 25% of attributable consolidated profit. Naturally, all banks are following this recommendation. The solvency position of Spanish banks has clearly improved in 2013. Average core capital in our banking system will stand at around 10.5% as at December 2013, more than 1 pp up on the same figure a year earlier.

As you may have guessed though, the main reason for central bank transparency is not to make your weekends more relaxing. Central bankers today pursue a policy of broad information because we believe that transparency helps us fulfil our mandate. We are convinced that monetary policy is most effective and least disruptive if it is predictable: no news on monetary policy is good news. In the following, I would like to discuss why, today, central bankers think transparency is crucial for a successful monetary policy and how the Swiss National Bank attempts to achieve transparency in practice. I shall then debate the limitations of what transparency Finally, I would like to reflect upon how transparency in monetary policy may affect the relationship between you, the journalists, and us, the central bankers. 1. The case for transparency  At the Swiss National Bank we see three main reasons to be transparent about our monetary policy. The first reason is that we count on transparency to enhance the effectiveness of our monetary policy. In the public eye, central banks may be viewed as almighty. The plain reality is, however, that our open market operations only have a direct influence on current short-term interest rates. Economic activity and thus future price developments are, however, determined primarily by the shape of the yield curve, i.e. by the expectation of future monetary actions. Transparency about how we judge future inflationary pressures enables us to guide expectations about future short-term interest rates and thus also long-term interest rates.
Internationally, we have catalysed a series of actions at the Financial Stability Board (FSB) that will be presented to the G20 Leaders’ Summit in July. Allow me to review the main elements before concentrating on how codes of conduct and the Senior Managers Regime (SMR) can lift standards and improve culture. Let me be clear at the outset that the Bank of England holds itself to the highest standards. In that spirit, I will extend my remarks to review some lessons the Bank can learn from the events surrounding Charlotte Hogg’s resignation, and the steps we are taking in response. The UK Action Plan to improve conduct  Our action plan for the financial system begins with stronger deterrents. In the UK, important steps have 5  been taken to strengthen laws and regulations, though some gaps remain, most notably in the FX market. But authorities cannot and should not try to legislate for every circumstance, watch every transaction, or anticipate every market innovation. So while fines and sanctions have roles in deterring misconduct, they will not, on their own, bring about the cultural change we need. We must move from an excessive reliance on punitive, ex post fines of firms to greater emphasis on more compelling ex ante incentives for individuals, and ultimately a more solid grounding in improved firm culture. This includes reducing opportunities for bad behaviour, for example, by overhauling the regulation of key benchmarks in FICC markets. More fundamentally, it requires compensation rules that align better risk and reward.

Remarks at the Banking Standards Board Panel “Worthy of trust? Law, ethics and culture in banking” Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England  Bank of England Conference Centre 21 March 2017  1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  It is a pleasure to host this Banking Standards Board event “Worthy of trust? Law, ethics and culture in banking” and to join this distinguished panel. Over the past decade, banking has suffered twin crises of solvency and legitimacy. The first is being addressed by comprehensive reforms. As a consequence, large banks are now stronger, more liquid, and more focused. 1  This immense progress has been overshadowed by a crisis of legitimacy. A series of scandals ranging from mis-selling to manipulation have undermined trust in banking, the financial system, and, to some degree, markets themselves. 2  Multiple factors contributed to a tide of ethical drift. Market standards were poorly understood, often ignored and lacked teeth. Too many participants neither felt responsible for the system nor recognised the full impact of their actions. Bad behaviour went unchecked, proliferated and eventually became the norm. The economic consequences have been enormous. Global banks’ misconduct costs have now reached over $ billion – capital that could otherwise have supported up to $ trillion of lending to households and businesses. 3  But there is a bigger cost. An industry the scale and importance of finance needs social capital as well as economic capital.