samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The lower repo rate path provides a better development, while the higher provides a worse. The next paragraph mentions different measures of resource utilisation and emphasises the uncertainty of these measures. In this case, however, all measures of resource utilisation give the same answer. The lower repo rate path is better, and the higher is worse. Other forecasters than the Riksbank, such as the National Institute of Economic Research, the Ministry of Finance and the OECD, have even lower estimates of resource utilisation than the  BIS Review 22/2010  7  Riksbank, as can be seen in Figure 2. The paragraph on resource utilisation thus provides no argument against choosing the lower repo rate path. The following paragraph states that it is difficult to know how economic agents will act and how financial markets will function when interest rates are very low. However, I do not know of any information pointing to economic agents acting differently or paradoxically when interest rates are low, or why this should have such drastic consequences that it is allowed to dominate over other considerations. Interest rates have been very low in many countries for more than a year; moreover there have been much lower interest rates in several other countries than in Sweden. In Switzerland they have had policy rates of a couple of basis points.

A combination of insights, leadership, technical capacity and adequate preparation needs to be channeled into a general enthusiasm for both our regions to rise to the potential challenges and in the process become greater partners for success. In summary, the future direction of the ASEAN-EU relations will be dependent on several multidimensional facets that would include: the changing strategic landscape amidst globalisation, ASEAN's and the EU's desire to play a greater role in the global economy and international affairs, the EU's ability in managing its enlargement process, and ASEAN's commitment to forge greater regional integration. I am certain that the passage of time and closer analyses of the issues discussed at this Conference will yield more lessons that we could take to heart in making progress on expanding ASEAN-EU economic and financial links. It is my hope that in the future we can continue to have such constructive exchanges of views and experiences that will further nourish the broader learning environment. In closing, allow me to thank the speakers for enriching the Conference with their presence and their cutting-edge perspectives. I also wish to again thank the European Commission for giving Bank  1/2  Negara the opportunity to co-host this Conference. To all our participants from abroad, we hope you stay in Kuala Lumpur has been pleasant, and we wish you a safe journey home. 2/2
In the sandbox, QR Code payment services and supporting systems will be tested to ensure the accuracy of transactions, the stability and security of systems, and the provisioning of consumer protection since these are new services which require interoperability between banks and non-banks. At the moment, two banks are testing their services and six banks are applying to participate in the sandbox. The QR Code payment services will be gradually launched by service providers based on their readiness, it is expected to be available to the country wide within the 4th quarter of 2017. In this occasion, I would like to express my appreciation to all related parties for their contribution to e-Payment developments in Thailand and for the collaboration to promote standardized QR Code payment which will make e-Payment to be more accessible, convenient and cheaper. The event today is a great milestone for the cooperation of all stakeholders to build sound financial environment and infrastructure that enhance country’s competitiveness and sustainable development. Thank you.

Besides Switzerland, I will also be looking at the Czech Republic, Sweden and – a special case – Denmark (cf. chart 1). These are all small open economies with strong trade links to the euro area. With the exception of Denmark, these countries chose to continue pursuing an independent monetary policy even after the introduction of the euro. Furthermore, the central banks of all these countries have in recent years implemented unconventional monetary policy measures. I will return to this point in more detail later. Two questions stand at the centre of my speech today. First, can countries bordering a major currency area pursue an independent monetary policy – and have events since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008 affected the answer? And second, how have unconventional measures helped these countries in the implementation of an independent monetary policy? I will argue that the first question – whether countries bordering the euro area can pursue an independent monetary policy – can essentially be answered with a yes. However, for these countries, managing monetary conditions arising from interest and exchange rate levels has become significantly more difficult in recent years. Regarding the second question – how have unconventional measures helped these countries in implementing an independent monetary policy – I will argue that negative interest, foreign exchange market interventions and quantitative easing programmes – instruments each tailored to suit a country’s specific needs – have helped these central banks to regain a certain room for manoeuvre.
Yves Mersch: Three challenges for the banking sector Speech by Mr Yves Mersch, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, at the European Financial Forum dinner, 2015 Cumberland Lodge Financial Services Summit, Cumberland Lodge, Windsor, 12 November 2015. *  *  *  Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to you this evening. I have been asked to give a “central bankers’ view” on the various issues being discussed at this conference, so let me lay out upfront the perspective I will be coming from. While I am indifferent to how structural changes affect individual financial institutions, I have a strong interest in how they affect the financial sector – and in particular, in a bank-based economy like the euro area, how they affect the ability of banks to finance the real economy. We need to make sure that in an environment of structural change we still have strong and sound banks. At present, euro area banks continue to struggle with low profitability driven by both cyclical and structural factors. On the cyclical side, the low nominal growth and low interest rate environment makes traditional banking activities such as retail lending using maturity transformation less lucrative. On the structural side, banks’ return on equity remains below their cost of equity, which points to a need for further balance sheet adjustment. Nonperforming loans (NPLs) in particular remain an important obstacle for banks to provide new credit to the real economy.

4  ECB (2015), Financial Stability Review, May 2015. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  3. The regulatory challenge As I said, however, CMU is for the longer-term. For the medium-term, SME financing in the euro area will still mainly come from banks. So we need to make sure that there are no unnecessary obstacles to that process. And this brings me to the third challenge facing banks – the regulatory challenge. The regulatory agenda since the crisis has no doubt been essential. Banks had too little capital, too much short-term funding, too high leverage, and created too great a cost for society when they failed. The reforms that have been introduced so far have increased resilience and, in extremis, made banks less costly to resolve. And there is no reason why this should, in principle, diminish the ability of banks to serve the real economy – research suggests, for example, that higher bank capital has no negative impact on lending. 5 But as new regulation accumulates, we know that it can also come with costs as well. In the economics jargon, policymakers always have to be watchful that, in attempting to internalise externalities, they do not inadvertently create new externalities. The possible risks can be summarised under the headings of complexity, clarity and consistency. As regulations have built up since 2009, they have tended to introduce more complexity, and with that comes an inevitable cost in terms of compliance.
The dotted line below, in Chart 6, seeks to get the point across. It’s the outcome of a simulation in which the monetary authority periodically publishes a plan for future interest rates. People believe the plan but the monetary authority only gets to change it intermittently. In the meantime, and no matter what crops up in the economy, it’s obliged to follow the most recently published path. The idea is to convey the flavour of what happens when the central bank is (or feels) obliged routinely to “pre-announce” a path for interest rates but can only update that path now and then. Remember that this is a model in which forward interest rates have a powerful impact on current demand and economic activity. So living with the “wrong” forward rate – one that fails to respond to incoming news – can be pretty costly. In reality the economy is almost certainly less sensitive to expected future interest rates than assumed here, and the dotted line wouldn’t be so far above the others. But qualitatively, at least, it gets the problem across. Sought for its own sake, greater stability and predictability of interest rates can come at the cost of less stability in demand and inflation (i.e. the central bank’s ultimate objectives). Chart 6.

3  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  3  Throughout our work on AI/ML we want to enable safe innovation. We are open to use of this technology, but with proper scrutiny to the practical details. This is how we balance the competing demands of our primary objectives, which include ensuring financial stability and ensuring safety and soundness of firms, and our secondary objectives such as promoting competition. Open to new firms entering  My second theme is the importance we at the Bank of England attach to being open to new firms entering markets. In addition to supporting new ideas and approaches, fintech is creating a more open, competitive and diverse financial ecosystem. At the Bank of England, we see more businesses working on identifying and solving global financial challenges as a welcome development. It is clear that on several dimensions today’s financial system offers an imperfect service, including the cost and efficiency of domestic and cross-border payments and access for the disadvantaged or excluded. We want to improve the service consumers and businesses receive, without compromising our regulatory perimeter or undermining the ‘same risk -same regulation’ principle that underpins our approach. At the heart of our vision for these improvements is putting consumers at the centre and empowering them to take full benefit from their data. I will discuss this in more detail at tomorrow’s panel session on SME financing.
This can be seen in corporate bond markets, where credit spreads can be decomposed into a component measuring firms’ expected probability of default and an “excess” bond premium. The latter has been shown to be a powerful proxy of the risk-bearing capacity of leveraged financial intermediaries. [27] The evidence shows that changes in the excess bond premium can explain virtually all of the conditional response of credit spreads to a change in monetary policy. [28] The reason is that monetary policy tightening typically reduces intermediaries’ risk-bearing capacity, thereby raising the compensation they require for warehousing risk, over and beyond changes in the quality of borrowers’ balance sheet. [29] This is precisely what we have seen in the euro area. In the first half of 2022, the increase in the excess bond premium accounted for 80% of the total increase in corporate bond spreads (Slide 15). By October, it still accounted for around two-thirds of the rise in credit spreads. Portfolio rebalancing channel in reverse The partial reversal of the portfolio rebalancing channel of asset purchases is likely to have amplified this transmission mechanism compared to previous tightening cycles. Indeed, over the course of last year we observed significant portfolio shifts, resulting in large volumes of securities being sold in the secondary market in a short period of time. Non-bank financial institutions, for example, have offloaded a notable part of their holdings of lower-rated corporate and sovereign bonds that they had acquired during the period of asset purchases (Slide 16, lefthand side).

But banks will need to be careful that this process is handled with tact and sensitivity. Otherwise, they may be open to accusations from sections of the community that they are neglecting their social responsibility by curtailing or increasing the cost of basic banking services to the economically disadvantaged. This was certainly the accusation made against the Australian banks after deregulation there. A further aspect is that the possibility of higher and more extensive charges for banking services will make it all the more important for the banks to deliver sufficient information to their customers about these charges. Let me clarify at this point the HKMA’s attitude to ethical matters and particularly the issue of “fairness” to customers. Our main responsibility under the Banking Ordinance is to promote the general stability and effective working of the banking system. In common with banking regulators in other countries, we interpret this to mean that our principal concern should be to determine that individual banks are financially sound and prudently managed. The aim is to reduce the risk of bank failure that would result in depositors losing money and threaten the stability of the banking system as a whole. We concentrate therefore on checking that the banks have adequate capital and liquidity and effective management and internal controls. However, this is not all that we do.
Singapore is the gateway to Asia’s bond market 1/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  7 . Singapore is well-positioned to serve Asia’s growing financing needs. We are a developed pan-Asian asset management centre with more than 600 asset managers and over SGD 2.7 trillion of assets under management, of which 20% is invested in fixed income strategies such as Asian or Emerging market debt. These include global fund managers such as Schroders, PIMCO, BlackRock as well as our local fund managers such as Fullerton and UOB Asset Management. Let me share a few highlights of our bond market: a. Issuances volumes grew at a compound annual growth rate of around 9% over the last five years to reach SGD 186 billion (USD 129 billion) in 2016. b. 60% of corporate bonds issued in Singapore are in foreign currencies including G-3 and Asian currencies, which encompass the RMB. c. 70% of issuers are repeat issuers, returning to tap Singapore’s bond market, after the favourable experience with their maiden issue. Let me zoom in on three pillars of strength:  I. International capital for Asian companies Singapore offers an excellent ecosystem for Asian companies to raise international capital. Asian corporates, including Chinese and Indian companies, looking to regionalise and 8.  globalise are increasingly looking to international bond markets to raise capital and to diversify funding sources. a. Over 50 international and regional banks locate their debt capital markets teams here in Singapore.

They have a lot of stories and messages to tell, waiting for us to look up close and decipher their meanings and symbolism. Therefore, I urge all of you to take your time to marvel at the wonders of banknotes on exhibit today. I hope this exhibition will open our eyes to view banknotes from a different perspective, to have a greater understanding why banknotes have always exuded a strong sense of pride, prestige and sovereignty of the issuing country. Thank you. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches
I have mentioned four prudent principles, plus another four more forward-looking ones. Some may emphasise the former, while others may prefer to move faster. My own view is that there is some urgency in moving forward significantly. Building the European framework So let us now focus on the concrete steps that move in this direction. I would like to separate these into two categories: those that relate to the regulatory framework and those that pertain to the supervisory framework. The regulatory framework Let me begin with some reflections on the regulatory framework. Going back to the principles I highlighted earlier, I believe we should build upon the regulatory framework that already exists in the EU. Any improvement to the EU framework for financial supervision should first seek to fully exploit the potential of the existing framework. In this respect, the concepts and responsibilities of home and host supervisors and the framework for consolidated supervision are well-embedded in the existing banking directives, and it makes a lot of sense for them to form the basis of the future approaches. Indeed, the directive to implement Basel II in the EU – the so-called capital requirements directive – contains key provisions which will reinforce the role of the consolidated supervisor in relation to applications to use the advanced approaches of the new capital framework.

It is essential that the industry keeps considering the issues and expressing its ideas, but I am afraid that unrealistic expectations can only lead us to an agonised debate which could polarise views and even hinder the progress that we need to make now in the crucial and urgent work of implementing Basel II, and international accounting standards. As I mentioned earlier, these were the more prudent principles that I wanted to mention. But, as the 19th century English writer Charles Caleb Colton said, “there is nothing more imprudent than excessive prudence”. Therefore, let me add a further four principles that go more in a more progressive direction. Firstly, I think that the EU needs to be ambitious, and set an example. I am convinced, and have said in many of my recent interventions, that the EU can and should go further, deeper and faster than the wider international community in finding greater consistency, convergence and efficiency in banking supervision. We should especially take advantage of the opportunities presented by Basel II and the fact that we already have a body of single market legislation and a long history of supervisory cooperation on which to build. And if we can demonstrate that progress is possible among 25 countries that are still rather diverse, others will have more confidence to push ahead also. Secondly, we should recognise the legitimate concerns of the industry. More efficient supervision is a necessary - although not sufficient - condition for a more integrated market.
Caleb M Fundanga: Improving school infrastructure in Zambia Remarks by Mr Caleb M Fundanga, Governor of the Bank of Zambia, at the Handover Ceremony of computers to Mumbwa High School, Mumbwa, 4 February 2010. *  *  *  The Board Chairperson, Mr Gracious Hamatala Board Members Present The PTA Chairperson, Mr Mwila Kabange The Headmaster, Mr Kizito Kalonga Distinguished Teachers Students Members of the Press Ladies and Gentlemen It is an honour and privilege for me to be with you today as the Bank of Zambia makes this humble donation of 5 computers to Mumbwa High School. I am also glad because in some small way we are making a contribution towards ensuring a brighter future for the students. Chairpersons, I am informed about the numerous challenges and difficulties, the school continues to face in its quest to produce high quality education to students. For instance, I am aware that there is a critical low level of books compared to the population of students in the school. Further, having been established 40 years ago, the School’s infrastructure urgently needs to be rehabilitated. The refurbishment of infrastructure is not an easy task but in the able leadership of the Board Chairperson, I have no doubt that a solution will be found in good time. As we grapple with the ways and means of improving the school infrastructure, let me reiterate that the school need to maintain and protect the little infrastructure available.

Zeti Akhtar Aziz: Islamic finance – the new regulatory challenge Introductory remarks by Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz, Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia, at the book launch of “Islamic finance – the new regulatory challenge, 2nd edition”, Kuala Lumpur, 22 July 2013. *  *  *  It is my pleasure to be here this afternoon to witness the launch of the second edition of “Islamic Finance: The New Regulatory Challenge”. As the Islamic financial industry transitions into a new era of growth and development in this post-crisis world, the evolving regulatory reforms that are taking place to strengthen the resilience of the financial industry has presented wide ranging challenges in the implementation of the reforms and in also ensuring a more inclusive and stainable growth. The various dimensions of these regulatory challenges and its impact on Islamic finance are captured in the publication that is being launching today. It is indeed a more challenging time for financial regulators and policymakers worldwide. Priorities for strengthening financial stability and growth are now focused on achieving global financial systems that serve the needs of the real economy. Driven by concerns to ensure that banking institutions are more robust against mutil-faceted and more complex dimensions of risks going into the future, regulatory efforts are being directed at significantly strengthening the capital and liquidity structures of banks, and ensuring that there is better alignment between risk-taking behaviours and long-term viability as well as ethical conduct.