samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
They have at their disposal a second policy lever of direct relevance for investment, namely fiscal policy. Companies will only invest in the future when there is confidence and certainty about the future, about the medium-term fiscal path, and ultimately about taxes. We need a consistent and credible application of the Stability and Growth Pact across time and across countries. Within the existing framework, governments can find space to support productive investment, and achieve a more growth-friendly composition of fiscal policies by lowering the tax burden and reducing unproductive current expenditures. In parallel, it may be useful to have a discussion on the overall fiscal stance of the euro area with the view to raising public investment where there is fiscal space to do so. In this regard, there is also a complementary role to play at European level in supporting the rebound in private investment. I therefore welcome the € billion package announced by the incoming Commission President two months ago. The role of monetary policy Let me finally say a few words on the contribution of monetary policy. We successfully fought the confidence crisis in the euro that raised interest rates to abnormal levels. We provided the euro area banking system with unprecedented funding. We have continuously lowered our policy rates. Now we have reached the lower bound. To ensure that this very accommodative monetary policy stance is transmitted to the real economy across the euro area in an equal manner, we have also deployed a number of non-standard tools.

Many countries do not seriously consider the recommendations given to them by the IMF and/or blame the Fund for its own problems. Other countries want to avoid that the consequences of their own policy actions, for the rest of the world, are discussed within the IMF or prefer to discuss them elsewhere. •  To increase the legitimacy of the IMF, there are reasons to consider the formal governance issues, (i.e. the QVR-issues). A consensus has to be built, step by step, on how to deal with this. However, to increase the efficiency of the Fund, a number of other reforms could be implemented that are as important as the QVR-issue. In these areas it is possible start moving forward at once. Thank you. BIS Review 43/2005  5
So, it is imperative that we treat terrorists, their allies, sympathizers, and associates, with the same yard stick, and not get fooled by some of the sugar coated pills in which blatant and horrendous acts of terrorism are sometimes cleverly packaged and presented. What are the other manifestation of these organized funding schemes? We, in the South Asian Region, are conscious of the unofficial banking systems that operate, like the Hawala and Hundi, which pose a serious threat to our efforts to close the avenues available to money launderers and terrorists. These underground banking services provide the ideal framework and the means for laundering of money and financing terrorism. It has just been reported that the Indian Income Tax Department early this year, busted a money-laundering racket during a routine investigation into Hawala transactions. From the information unearthed so far, they have discovered that Transworld ICT was only a front for a huge money laundering scam. In this scam, a certain Delhibased businessman, is said to have, by himself, remitted US $ 1.4 billion between January and July 2006 "as proceeds of software business" through Transworld ICT Solutions, which essentially worked as an illegal clearing house. BIS Review 48/2007  1  We are of course, mindful of the efforts of the international standardsetters and watchdogs, to deal with these situations. They work tirelessly to review and recommend the preventive measures needed to be taken in this regard.

If unchecked, it may only be a matter of time, before terror groups in other parts of the world also emulate these dastardly attacks. It is therefore, vital that all countries quickly assist Sri Lanka to eradicate this threat, as otherwise, it may only be a matter of time, before this too becomes a new tool in the armoury of terrorists. Today, combating terrorism cannot be considered the sole responsibility of single governments or of single sets of soldiers who fight at the front at the risk of their lives. We must all get involved in an international effort if we are to defeat this menace. In these efforts, financial institutions and all other corporate entities, especially, NGO’s must also actively help prevent the funding and the flow of goods and services to terrorist organizations. We must all be wise to the type of trade we are engaged in, and be mindful of the impact it can have in facilitating terrorist activity. It therefore becomes imperative that any loopholes in banking which can be identified as facilitating the financing of terrorism and strict adherence to regulations to prevent such financing, receive the immediate attention of the regulatory institutions. The aftermath of natural disasters also often provide happy hunting grounds for money launderers and terrorists. Sri Lanka’s experience post-tsunami is ample testimony to this reality. Organisations and individuals emerged from nowhere after the Tsunami, with absolutely no track record of humanitarian work, to descend on us in the guise of humanitarian relief.
Luis M Linde: The regulatory responses to the crisis Speech by Mr Luis M Linde, Governor of the Bank of Spain, at the Fundación de Estudios Financieros, Madrid, 22 May 2014. *  *  *  Good morning and many thanks to the Fundación de Estudios Financieros for your kind invitation. Let me start by recalling that just three years ago I contributed to another book of the Fundación, on the international financial crisis, as we then saw it. As Governor of the Banco de España and erstwhile collaborator of the Fundación, it is a pleasure for me to participate in this presentation. Knowing the authors’ profile, I have no doubt the book will make us reflect on how to enhance our financial culture and also on the much-needed recovery, following the crisis of confidence in the financial sector. ******* My intention today is not to talk once more about the crisis and its causes. I would rather focus on the regulatory consequences of the crisis which, as we all know, have been farreaching and which we cannot consider as complete. That crises should have regulatory consequences has been a fairly frequent occurrence in financial history.

Here it is essential that practitioners such as risk experts, auditors, consultants and the supervisors themselves should strive to learn of and transpose all these regulations to their daily duties. I believe it is time to reflect on our subject today in something of a critical frame of mind. I have some concerns over the scope of the new regulatory arrangements. By way of example, the transposition of Basel III to the European Union has required almost 700 articles, many of which not only involve notable technical complexity, but also entail the promulgation of extensive technical standards and additional supervisory guidelines for better implementation. Just as banking industry practitioners face the challenge of implementing and applying this regulatory agenda, the challenge to regulators and supervisors is to reflect on how to square effective regulations with a framework that should ideally be simpler and more transparent, since the effectiveness of the new regulations will also hinge on this. Thank you. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches
The cooperation programme will be implemented with the support of experts from 11 central banks in the EU, with the ECB being the overall coordinator. Only two years ago, the Bank of Albania successfully concluded a twinning project with two of them: Banca d’Italia and Banque de France. During the six-months of the project implementation period, central banks of the Eurosystem will provide expertise through training, conferences, seminars, study visits and support to strengthen administrative capacities, and regular technical missions. This form of cooperation will aim at fostering the existing relations and building a broader network of cooperation between the Bank of Albania, central banks of the region and the Eurosystem. The Project is funded by the European Commission, in the framework of support policies for the central banks of the Western Balkans, to promote macroeconomic and financial stability in the region. This form of technical assistance has been particularly successful in the past, creating strong institutional ties between the central banks of the Eurosystem and those of our region. The twinning is based on a detailed plan of action for achieving a series of concrete and measurable objectives. This means that upon conclusion of the project, having benefited from the technical assistance, the Bank of Albania will be able to discharge its institutional duties and responsibilities in the relevant fields more effectively and more efficiently. I believe the main factor of success for such technical cooperation programmes is closely related to having clear goals and objectives, set jointly with our European partners.

In my view, regional cooperation can and should serve as a forerunner to European integration. Lastly, my special thanks and highest appreciation for Mr. Mersch for the fruitful cooperation between our institutions during his mandate as the Governor of the central bank of Luxembourg, and now as an Executive Board member of the European Central Bank and, above all, as a friend of ours. Thank you for your attention! BIS central bankers’ speeches  3
I believe that we can learn a lot about the impact of monetary policy on the economy by studying how monetary policy interacts with the distribution of income and wealth. Today I have focused primarily on the question of what distributional effects the expansionary monetary policy conducted by the Riksbank and other central banks  10 I have discussed the factors behind this downturn, what it means for households and companies and the  consequences for monetary policy in an earlier speech, see Ohlsson (2016). 11 [14]  may have had. The debate has so far mainly focused on the effect of rising asset prices. I have tried to nuance this picture and pointed out the importance of actually looking at the total effect of monetary policy on the economy, as well as using the correct point of comparison. My point can be summarised roughly as: without the expansionary monetary policy, growth and employment would have been lower and unemployment would have been higher. This would hardly have benefitted any group in society, and especially not those with the lowest incomes. Assessments of the distributional effects of the expansionary monetary policy should be regarded in the light of this. It is also important to note that no group would have benefitted from a decline in confidence in the inflation target. The whole idea behind the inflation target was that stable prices create good conditions for economic growth and high employment, as it was formulated in the Riksbank's press release in 1993.

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At the Bank of England, the risks posed by climate change are currently most directly relevant to our micro prudential responsibilities for the safety and soundness of the banking and insurance sectors. Assessing how well general insurers and reinsurers are identifying, measuring and mitigating weather-related risks, has long been part of supervising insurers. We published a stocktake of insurers’ progress in adapting to climate change in late 2015, and are working to update and deepen our assessment with a second stocktake in 2018. More recently, we have extended our focus to the financial risks faced by the UK banking system, and will publish the full results of the survey I referred to a moment ago in coming months. The aim for both pieces of work is to consider whether insurers and banks have adequate governance arrangements to develop strategies for identifying and mitigating climate risk across their entire businesses, both their liabilities and assets, and over sufficiently long time horizons. We aim to highlight examples of good practice and to articulate our supervisory expectations later this year. We are also considering our approach to assessing risks across the system as a whole. The Bank has routinely included weather-related shocks in the scenarios for its biennial general insurance stress test, including three North American hurricanes in 2017. This meant we had a good sense of the likely resilience of the market and individual firms when Harvey, Irma and Maria 8  hit – both in terms of exposures and mitigating actions.

First, in time for the Argentine G20 Summit, drawing on the work of the Big Four accounting firms, the Task Force will report on implementation experience, focusing on examples of good practice to foster wider adoption. Second, the Task Force is launching a Resource Hub to provide technical support, data, and collaborative partnerships – all aimed at helping companies implement the recommendations in as effective and efficient a manner as possible. As preparers, financials and investors 'learn by doing’, a virtuous cycle will be created where more and better information creates the imperatives for others to adopt the TCFD and for everyone to up their game on the quality of information they provide. This iterative process is a reason why there is likely cause for the Task Force to continue beyond the Argentine Summit in late 2018 and into the Japanese presidency. In particular, it will be important to get feedback from investors on which disclosures are truly decision useful so that this process is as efficient and effective as possible. Third, insurers and banks. Insurers have long been on the front line of the physical risks posed by climate change such as extreme weather events. Since the 1980s, the number of registered weather-related loss events has tripled. Inflationadjusted insurance losses have increased from an annual average of around $ in the  5  See ISS, (2018), United States Proxy Voting Guidelines, Benchmark Policy Recommendations, and Glass Lewis, (2018), Guidelines: An Overview of the Glass Lewis Approach to Proxy Advice.
Strategic decisions need to be made on establishing relevant competent authorities tasked with the responsibility of resolving banks and investment firms, on setting up resolution funds, and on the drawing up by the supervised entities of adequate plans for recovery or controlled restoration of their viability by restructuring. In connection with the new EU capital framework CRD4, in 2014 the BNB began to implement the new reporting framework for supervisory purposes (the so-called FINREP and COREP), consisting of over 100 separate reporting forms. The additional supervisory reporting will meet the accumulated information needs of the Banking Supervision Department and will tackle the most sensitive sources of risk in banks’ portfolios. In 2015 it is expected that the EU-wide banking supervision rules will become more and more common in banking practices. Numerous technical standards, developed by the European Banking Authority (EBA) and adopted by the European Commission, are going to be put in place. In supervising the subsidiaries of euro area banks, the BNB is going to cooperate actively with the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) which started in November 2014. Last but not least is the BNB’s intention to initiate an asset quality review of the entire banking system, which will cover all banks operating in Bulgaria. This will also be a key requirement if the government should decide, at some point, to start talks with the ECB for joining the SSM.

Ivan Iskrov: Review of 2014 as a starting point of reflection on the challenges ahead in Bulgaria Speech by Mr Ivan Iskrov, Governor of the Bulgarian National Bank, before the Association of Banks in Bulgaria on the occasion of the Banker’s Day, Sofia, 4 December 2014. *  *  *  Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m happy that we are together again on our professional holiday – on the celebration of the Banker’s Day, Saint Nicholas Day. Keeping the tradition, this year again, with the BNB Governing Council members we are marking the occasion with you – the management representatives of the banks in Bulgaria. Please accept our presence here as an expression of acknowledgement of your work and professional attitude in running your entrusted institutions. Also, today we would like to underscore our appreciation of the efforts and contribution of many of you here for safekeeping the financial stability in our country. The banks deserve congratulations for the positive results the sector has achieved amid a very unfavourable market, media and political backdrop in 2014. At the same time, let us use the recapitulation of this year as a starting point of reflection about the challenges that may lie ahead. The passing year has proved one of the toughest for the banking system in Bulgaria since the time of the big crisis in 1996–1997. The reasons for this have been several and I would conditionally divide them into two groups.
And central bank facilities such as the Bank of England’s Term Funding Scheme have offered a cost effective source of funding to support additional lending to the real economy, providing insurance against adverse conditions in bank funding markets. These changes have led many banks to choose simply not to borrow in unsecured markets as the costs increase. Overall, this leaves Libor rates capturing (at best) only a tiny fraction of overall funding costs even in benign market conditions. As transactions become scarce during periods of stress, this reduces yet further. For example, during March and April Libor rates were impacted by liquidity mismatches in money market activity. Money Market Funds, that are important investors in unsecured bank funding markets, experienced large outflows, the so called ‘dash for cash’. This meant Libor linked borrowers were immediately exposed to a sharp increase in rates driven by these more esoteric liquidity factors in addition to any perceived changes in bank credit risk. When the banks that provide the data on which the Libor rates are based can’t reference actual transactions that they have undertaken, they are asked to provide Libor’s administrator with a submission based on transactions in other markets, where they are able. More commonly though, those data aren’t available either, so they have to rely on ‘expert judgement’ which is an estimate of the rates that the firm would expect to pay in those wholesale unsecured funding markets.

The same may undoubtedly be said about the Central Bank. After all, useful and supportive as these institutions may be, they neither can nor should play a leading role. That role can only be performed by the financial companies themselves. Because they rely so heavily on open access to credit markets, it is crucial for them to enjoy the confidence of their creditors. In this respect like many others, credibility is a fragile thing and a very high price can be paid for losing it. Turbulence in global markets is sure to continue. Naturally people try to read the signs and foresee the most important parameters, in order to adapt to them in good time or respond sensibly. Important as it is to keep a close watch on developments and changes in global markets, what matters most of all is to be strong and well-positioned enough to withstand the most unexpected shocks. Global liquidity has been exceptionally abundant in recent years, and has been widely tapped on good terms. The benefits of resourcefulness and bold, quick action can be realised to the full in such circumstances. It is impossible to rule out that such a climate will persist for a long while, but this is by no means certain. And when a change does take place, it may be caused by unexpected circumstances and strike quickly. It is then that caution and prudence prove most effective.
It could thus become increasingly difficult for us to defend our own interests. Enlargement is therefore very likely to influence our relationship with the EU. Let me now move to one of the key features of our economy: our financial sector, which currently also faces some major challenges. 4. Switzerland as a European financial centre  Since the beginning of the last century the Swiss financial sector has been a mainstay of our economy. It accounts for just under 6% of total employment, but currently generates over 10% of the country’s GDP. Relatively speaking, therefore, it is more than twice as big as the German or French financial sectors, for example. Switzerland’s globally active big banks and insurance groups are also major international competitors in most market segments. The two big banks are among the world’s ten largest banks. In terms of value added by the financial sector, Switzerland occupies fourth place behind New York, London and Paris, but is ahead of Frankfurt. Switzerland plays a leading role in banking, above all, in asset management. Almost four trillion francs worth of assets are managed in Switzerland. This accounts for around one-third of the world’s portfolios of cross-border investments. Over the last 10 years, our financial institutions have also greatly expanded their activities abroad on a global basis. In 2000 the value of their foreign investments amounted to some 54 billion Swiss francs, which is equivalent to around 14% of total Swiss investments abroad. Switzerland is also a magnet for foreign banks.

In a boom phase such a policy will tend to have a restrictive effect and in a cyclical downturn it will tend to have an expansionary impact. ·  The second element is an inflation forecast. We publish a quarterly forecast of medium-term inflation. Not only does our forecast provide extremely valuable information on the future effect of monetary policy; it also plays a key role in explaining the central bank action to the public. ·  The third element is the publication of a target range for the three-month interest rate. The target range sets the parameters for day-to-day implementation of monetary policy. Our experience with the new approach is positive. We have been able to enhance the transparency of monetary policy and to simplify lines of communication with the market. How do we take account of the fact that Switzerland is now fully surrounded by the euro zone? Indeed, the introduction of the single European currency at the start of 1999 has profoundly changed the environment for our monetary policy. But the fears that were expressed when the euro was introduced four years ago failed to materialise. In particular, the Swiss franc is no more volatile against the euro than it had previously been against the D-mark. Immediately following the introduction of the euro it remained remarkably stable for more than a year. This was due in part to the fact that the economies of Switzerland and the euro area were strongly converging and that both central banks were pursuing a similar monetary policy.