samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Both initiatives are aimed at promoting the development of index bond funds in the regional markets and, at the same time, enhancing both domestic and regional bond market infrastructure. This is a very concrete initiative, involving the allocation of funds by a considerable number of central banks. These three sets of initiatives use differing approaches and a variety of tools. But they have common aims. One important aim is to identify - through individual studies, experience-sharing, and the practice of fund management - where obstacles exist and how best standards and practices can be harmonised to facilitate cross-border financial transactions within the region. A separate, but parallel  BIS Review 40/2004  3  consideration is the development of financial infrastructure. A number of studies have been carried out to explore the feasibility and desirability of establishing region-wide infrastructure, such as a regional rating agency and regional settlement and payment systems. Apart from the many technical complexities, any proposals for infrastructure on a regional dimension would require thorough discussion among different jurisdictions and rigorous assessment of business viability and impact on the market. Long planning time would therefore be expected before any conceptual proposal could be put into practice. Effective financial infrastructure across the region is a precondition for debt market development within the region. Without it, all of the other initiatives I have described would be about as useful as buying aeroplanes without having the airports in which to land them.

Prasarn Trairatvorakul: The ASEAN Economic Community’s impact on the Greater Mekong Subregion’s economies Keynote address by Dr Prasarn Trairatvorakul, Governor of the Bank of Thailand, at the Euromoney Conference “The Greater Mekong Investment Forum”, Bangkok, 12 June 2014. *  *  *  Excellencies, Honorable Speakers, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1. It is an honor for me to be back here at the Euromoney Greater Mekong Subregion Investment Forum. Let me thank the organizers for inviting me to speak at such a distinguished forum once again. This conference takes place at an important juncture as we are on the eve of the ASEAN Economic Community which will be launched at the end of next year. My remarks today will focus on how the AEC will have meaningful impacts on the GMS economies. Also, I will share with you some thoughts on how we can overcome challenges to capitalize on the region’s growth and prosperity. 2. The GMS has become one of the most vibrant regions in the world, transforming itself into a new investment frontier. The global attention on this region is reflected in the large inflows of foreign direct investment, which have increased dramatically in the past two decades. According to World Bank statistics, the FDI inflows to the CLMV countries over this period increased forty-fold to around 13 billion dollars in 2012.1 This wealth of investment opportunity has been underpinned by the smooth transition to market-based economies, the rich and diverse resources as well as the improvement of intra-regional logistics. 3.
This completes our network of 12 regional agencies across the UK - with the purpose of keeping ourselves more closely informed of regional economic developments. Previously Neil Kemsley covered Northern Ireland from our Agency in Liverpool and is here to make his farewell - and I am grateful to him for all that he did in reporting on developments here. But Nigel Falls - one of our most experienced regional Agents - is now established here in Belfast itself. He is also with us today. I very much hope that many of you will establish regular contact with him so that he can inform our Monetary Policy Committee each month of the particular problems that exist in Northern Ireland, so that we can take them into account in our monetary policy process. His reports will complement those which Roy Bailie, our Non-Executive Director here in Ireland, gives regularly to our Court of Directors. In our monetary policy role the Bank operates essentially on the demand side of the economy - aiming to keep aggregate demand in line with the supply-side capacity of the economy to meet that demand. But we can also contribute directly on the supply side, by helping to ensure that the financial system properly supports the needs of the wider economy.

Mortgage and real estate markets remain the biggest source of risk. I would like to make two observations in this connection. First, the imbalances on the mortgage and real estate markets persist. Both mortgage lending and prices for single-family homes and privately owned apartments have continued to rise at a moderate rate over recent months. And while prices for residential investment property have not increased any further, the risk of a price correction in this segment is particularly high. The renewed increase in vacancy rates indicates that the robust activity in rental apartment construction may have led to oversupply, exerting downward pressure on rental income and, in turn, on the prices of these properties. At the same time, initial yields on residential investment property, in other words the ratio of rental returns to transaction prices, are at historically low levels. In the event of an interest rate rise, initial yields on investment properties will also have to increase upon a change of ownership. This would place additional pressure on prices. Second, the risk appetite of domestically focused banks remains high. This is partly due to the fact that interest rate margins of these banks fell further in the first half of 2018. As long as this pressure on margins persists, incentives for domestically focused banks to increase risktaking will remain substantial.
Muhammad bin Ibrahim: Developing a safe and secure electronic payment ecosystem to promote financial inclusion Speech by Mr Muhammad bin Ibrahim, Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia (Bank Negara Malaysia), at the Regulatory Forum for the Asia Pacific Region: “Developing a Safe and Secure Electronic Payment Ecosystem to Promote Financial Inclusion”, Kuala Lumpur, 4 August 2014. *  *  *  Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to be here today to deliver the Keynote Speech for MasterCard’s Regulatory Forum for the Asia Pacific region with the theme “Developing a Safe and Secure Electronic Payment Ecosystem to Promote Financial Inclusion”. With 2.5 billion people across the world still unbanked, financial inclusion is a significant global agenda to ensure that all segments of the society, including the most vulnerable groups, have access and usage of quality and affordable financial services. This forum, which brings together regulators, international financial institutions and other payment system stakeholders, is an important platform to surface and exchange ideas on emerging trends, risks and opportunities in the use of cost-effective electronic payment system to drive financial inclusion. Over the years, Bank Negara Malaysia has taken many measures in promoting financial inclusion and in accelerating the country’s migration to electronic payments (e-payments). I will share some of my thoughts on the key areas in the payment value chain that could drive and expand the financial inclusion agenda via e-payments.

Such efforts would be effective when complemented with a consumer protection framework and product disclosure requirements that would instil user confidence and acceptance. Bank Negara Malaysia constantly collaborates with the industry to conduct roadshows, payment system forums and other outreach programs to educate the public of the benefits and security of e-payment transactions. Apart from issuing requirements on consumer protection and product disclosure, an important milestone was achieved last year where protecting the rights and interests of consumers of financial services and products has been enshrined as one of regulatory objectives that Bank Negara Malaysia shall strive for in the Financial Services Act 2013 and the Islamic Financial Services Act 2013. Conclusion Ladies and gentlemen, we are now living in an exciting time with rapid technological advances in e-payments which, if harnessed well, would serve to drive financial inclusion in a major way. To be successful in an increasingly competitive payment space, the industry should adopt a long term horizon and be prepared to sacrifice immediate term profits in order to sustain its profits and build affordable and sustainable e-payment solutions that cater to the needs of  BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  the masses, including the unbanked and the underbanked. Collective efforts to build and share infrastructure would be a step in the right direction. Policymakers on the other hand have the duty to create the enabling environment by removing price distortions, promoting competition and protecting the interest of consumers.
Conventionally, in the framework of the Capital Asset Pricing Model, ‘alpha’ would refer to excess riskadjusted return (a nice thing if you can get it!). In practice, the term seems to be deployed rather loosely, being used variously to cover allocations to assets whose returns have in the past been relatively uncorrelated with a fund’s liabilities; leveraged – that is to say, risk-enhancing – plays across almost any asset class; and giving greater freedom to fund managers. For pension funds, one motivation has probably been to diversify asset portfolios, perhaps evidenced by bigger allocations to private equity, commodities etc. Another motivation, both here and overseas, seems to be to try to close deficits partly by earning high investment returns on some proportion of their asset portfolios. Cast in that light, it appears to be part of the broader ‘search for yield’, which has been offered by some as contributing over the past couple of years to the compression in credit spreads and other market-based indicators of risk, such as the price of options on most asset classes. Two responses to this have circulated amongst market participants, both intermediaries and asset managers. One is that falls in implied risk premia truly have reflected a reduction in risk. The other is that, while that story might hold up to a point, risk has been under-priced. It is certainly plausible that structural change has caused risk to decline somewhat over the past decade or so. First, monetary policy regimes have become more credible.

Companies have acted to repair balance sheets following the excesses of the late 1990s, and may conceivably have built a cushion of financial assets to support them through a period of uncertainty as they adjust to the new competitive forces associated with globalisation. But the UK corporate sector stands out as having employed its surplus in ‘cash’ to a far greater extent than its G7 peers (Chart 6). The IMF hypothesise 1 that this may have been motivated by a desire to accumulate a precautionary pot of liquid savings for managing pension fund deficits. I do not know whether or not that is so. For example, the build up of deposits has been concentrated in a few sectors: real estate, and business services, and it is not obvious that these sectors have big pension fund deficits (Chart 7). But that pensions have been a material component in firms’ cash management is not in doubt. That is apparent in the share of gross corporate savings accounted for by employers’ contributions to pension funds (Chart 8). Contributions have tripled – or in real terms doubled – since the late 1990s (Chart 9) 2 . Part of this reflects ‘special’ or ‘one-off’ contributions to reduce deficits. But, judging by selfadministered schemes 3 , regular contributions have doubled (Chart 10). What is going on here? Well, it might have something to do with your management of risk, bearing in mind avoidable and unavoidable sources of uncertainty.
You may have noticed that I didn’t mention an ARRC consultation on fallbacks for derivatives, even though ARRC’s original purpose was to address benchmark transition in derivative products. That’s because the FSB’s Official Sector Steering Group asked ISDA to do that for derivatives on all of the IBORS. So, alongside the ARRC consultations for cash products, ISDA has been conducting consultations on fallback provisions for IBORS in multiple currencies,20 and has said it will be putting out a U.S. dollar LIBOR consultation in the near future. One of the key questions being discussed is how closely aligned the cash products fallbacks and the derivatives fallbacks will be. The ARRC has also been an essential vehicle for engaging the official sector to address regulatory obstacles to LIBOR transition. For example, replacing fallback language in legacy, uncleared swaps presents a host of issues under the swap margin rules. ARRC’s regulatory working group is actively engaged with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Reserve, and other regulators to address those. On the accounting side, the Financial Accounting Standards Board has ruled that SOFR is eligible for hedge accounting treatment. While all the consulting and coordinating and kvetching has been going on, market participants have gone ahead and begun the transition to actually using SOFR. SOFR swaps are being quoted by dealers and cleared by central counterparties. CME Group and LCH are clearing SOFR-linked swaps and are moving quickly to using SOFR for discounting curves and interest on collateral. CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange have listed SOFR-linked futures.

Perhaps it would go away eventually, maybe dying of loneliness, or perhaps it would stagger on for a small range of transactions—but in any event it would cease to be a problem. While this work was underway, new regulations brought the production of LIBOR under the supervision of the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and introduced minimum requirements for benchmarks used in the EU. In 2017, Andrew Bailey, the head of the FCA, spotlighted the possibility that LIBOR itself might cease to exist altogether. 13 Bailey announced that the FCA had been exerting an increasing amount of persuasion to get panel banks to keep submitting quotes, and had gotten their commitment to continue until the end of 2021. But he warned that the FCA could not ensure that LIBOR would be published at all after that. Suddenly, instead of just the general threat that LIBOR could cease to be produced someday, there was a specific expiration date on the horizon. The challenge to the market was no longer to gradually start writing new contracts on alternative rates like SOFR instead of LIBOR, but to prepare for the risk that LIBOR could entirely cease to exist within a fairly short time frame. That was a much bigger job, because when you looked at the underlying contracts that used LIBOR, they didn’t provide very well for LIBOR simply disappearing. I blame the lawyers, and our congenital lack of imagination.
Considering the dramatic price increases on the Swedish housing market in recent years, this is a completely reasonable claim. The higher housing prices are, the greater the loan required to finance the purchase of a house or flat. Finansinspektionen’s mortgage survey shows that the debt ratio for new mortgage borrowers averages 370 per cent, which is a higher debt ratio than for existing mortgage holders. On the other hand, I do not think that the difference between new mortgage borrowers and those who have owned their homes for some time is as big as I had perhaps expected. This is because people who have owned their homes for a while have had the opportunity to reduce their debts. The fact that the difference is not bigger could indicate that the households reduce their debts at a relatively slow rate. Let me return to this a little later. The debt ratio is highest among low and middle-income earners One conclusion of the government’s inquiry “Over-indebtedness in a credit society” is that the highest debt ratios are to be found among those with the highest incomes. This is the picture you get if you look at the population as a whole, that is if you also include individuals who have an income but no debts. This means that the inquiry really shows that low-income earners do not take loans to the same extent as high-income earners. If we instead look at debts in relation to incomes only for those individuals who have debts we get a different picture.

3  One explanation of this is that a household’s propensity to consume is affected by how highly indebted the household is. Studies have found that a highly-indebted household reduces its consumption more in a crisis than a lowly-indebted household. See, for example, Andersen, A.L., Duus, C. and Jensen, T.L. (2014), “Household debt and consumption during the financial crisis: Evidence from Danish micro data”, Working Paper, Danmarks Nationalbank and Mian, A. Rao, K. and Sufi, A. (2013), “Household Balance Sheets, Consumption, and the Economic Slump”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 128(4), pp. 1687–1726. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  total level of indebtedness. 4 I would also like to point out the difficulties that many individuals experience when bad times coincide with high private debts. An additional factor is that mortgage lending forms an important part of the Swedish banks’ assets, which means that the financial system is sensitive to risks linked with indebtedness. The banks fund as much as three-quarters of their lending for housing purposes on the market for covered bonds and access to funding on this market is based on Swedish and foreign investors being highly confident in the safety of the the underlying assets. If confidence wanes, funding costs may increase and access to funding may decline. This would disrupt the functioning of the financial system and thus have a direct negative effect on financial stability.
Therefore, we predict the upward trend in the current account deficit to persist in the short run also taking into account the low base effect from last year. Yet, we also envisage that the dampening effects of our recent policy measures on loans and imports will materialize as of the second quarter of the year. 8  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Distinguished Guests, 26. Domestic credit volume, which surged in 2010, accelerated further in the final quarter of the year. As the effects of the crisis waned, the number of sectors utilizing loans increased rapidly and maturities were extended. An analysis of the rise in real sector loans by sub-categories reveals that this rise was supported by the rally in both consumer and business loans. Meanwhile, loan utilization by small and medium-sized enterprises, which were those hit most severely by the crisis, increased as well. 27. I would like to underline that the vigorous loan utilization was underpinned by measures taken by the CBRT in the aftermath of the crisis with a view to maintain the functionality of the credit markets, as well as by the consequent rapid recovery in economic activity and the favorable economic outlook. Furthermore, ample global liquidity owing to the monetary easing implemented by major central banks and the favorable economic outlook providing low and foreseeable interest rates were also instrumental in stimulating loan utilization.

Crucially, Malta enjoyed the gains from a range of structural reforms that increased labour force participation, 7  raised efficiency in key economic sectors and led to the diversification of activity into new niche areas, particularly in services. Monetary policy on its own cannot deliver the full range of desirable economic outcomes. When it is accompanied by complementary and consistent fiscal policy actions, as well as by well-designed structural reforms, then monetary policy can deliver on its primary objective of price stability, while maintaining economic activity and employment close to their potential levels. 8
There is no mechanical link between any piece of data and inflation – despite the impression often created by newspaper headlines. Policy cannot be set by a simple scorecard. There is no substitute for asking the question “why?” One of the achievements of Alan Greenspan during his time as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board was his recognition that when output growth picked up in the United States in the late 1990s it reflected an increase in supply capacity as productivity growth rose in the wake of the application of IT to business processes generally. This “supply shock” meant that output could expand faster without generating inflation. “Spotting the shock” is a perpetual challenge for us. The shocks we have identified are the reasons we raised Bank Rate four times over the past year. We spotted them by asking three questions, all beginning with “why”. So let me give you those questions and our answers. The first question is why total output has grown steadily at an annualised rate of around 3% for 18 months – the longest run of stable output growth since 1997 and much stronger than most commentators anticipated, even though interest rates and the sterling exchange rate have risen. And why are business surveys even more upbeat? Notwithstanding a slowdown in the United States, the world economy, especially the euro area, our largest export market, has been surprisingly buoyant. World GDP growth over the past three years has averaged over 5% a year, the strongest such period since the late 1960s.

In my view, the task could be easier achieved if the focus of EWE is narrowed down to the really important systemic issues i.e, the issues that have high-global impact but are beyond the capabilities of market and individual economies to monitor and make assessment. For example, instead of trying to spot vulnerabilities in all the possible key risk, in all markets, and in all economies, EWE should narrow its focus instead on the systemically-important issues, especially the known-unknowns. This include the robustness of the key global financial markets and infrastructure, risk relating to the systemically-important large economies and the operations of the internationally-important financial institutions. Such focus will make the whole EWE process more valuable and complements well with the surveillance that are done elsewhere at the country or regional level. With regards to the nature of future crises, a few realities have emerged from the current global financial turmoil. First, it is clear from recent experience that nobody is above crisis. Crisis can happen in any economy regardless of whether it is large or small, developed or emerging, with or without a sophisticated financial system, and regardless of whether the country adopts a fixed or flexible exchange rate system. And once happens, the impact is large because of the  BIS Review 19/2010  1  globalized nature of markets that drives the spillover or contagion. For emerging markets, this means the risk of future crises are wide-ranging and can be both externally and internally induced.