samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
In the line of this logic, the raising of confidence would bring about its positive effects even on increasing their banking activity, which will be in compliance with their objective to be in the market with as much dignity as possible. In this discussion I will not focus on the technical aspect of cause explanation and process implementation, which I consider as exhausted by discussions made between respective technical staff, but I will focus on what we intend to reach and on the shortest and safest way to complete this process successfully. Also, I would like to clarify that the individuals will continue to participate in the primary market of securities and this market will continue to be organized by the Bank of Albania. What we intend to reach through this process is: 1. The realization of a smooth transition process, at the smallest cost possible, in terms of maintaining the participation of individuals in the primary market. 2. The reduction of the time which is needed for the realization of treasury bill primary market auction. 3. The increasing possibilities to apply into practice the principle “Delivery versus payment” for operations that will be performed in the secondary and retail Treasury bill market. Here I take into account either the facilitating of procedures or the increased safety for using these securities as collateral and for encouraging the interbank and lending market. 4.

In this framework, we would also like to inform you that the Bank of Albania is working for considering, at the shortest time possible, the possibility of increasing the participation amount of individuals, through the Bank of Albania, in the primary treasury bill market, as well as the application of a commission on new operations they will carry out with it. The new level and commission will affect only the individuals that would like to use the Bank of Albania to participate in the primary market. Thanking you again for your attention, I would like to pass on to the discussions about the steps we deem to make. At the end of this meeting, I propose we come out with a concrete plan of actions for a successful implementation of this process. 2  BIS Review 24/2005
Ladies and gentlemen, Let's now shift gears from the institutional to the systemic. With the continuously evolving ML/TF landscape, banks are expected to play a more active role in protecting the wider integrity of the financial system – and ultimately the public funds they are entrusted with. This demands greater vigilance and awareness of trends of serious crimes in the country and emerging threats impacting the system. It also calls for effective responses in the form of more robust, agile controls to address these identified trends and threat in a timely manner. From the National Risk Assessment 2020 undertaken by members of the National Coordination Committee to counter money laundering and to assess and facilitate the understanding of ML/TF risk exposures, it was found that the top five high-risks crimes that pose substantial ML/TF threats to the country are corruption, fraud, smuggling, illicit drug trafficking and organised crimes. Corruption remains a systemic issue, and is particularly insidious, since it facilitates and sometimes enables others significant crimes such as fraud, drugs, human trafficking and environmental crimes. The assessment also indicated that the banking sector is exposed to high level of ML /TF risks. With banks as the nexus between all financial and non-financial sectors, the banking platform has become an ideal channel to be abused for criminal activities including corruption.

This cooperation has also included active participation in public-private partnership initiatives, including the National Scams Response Centre. As a member of the Financial Action Taskforce or FATF, Malaysia will once again be undergoing a Mutual Evaluations Exercise in 2024 and 2025. For the uninitiated, this is an in-depth assessment of the country's measures to combat ML/TF risks and its compliance with the international standards set by the FATF. This will be the fourth time for us and the last one was done in 2014. It is my hope that the stride made in Malaysia's AML/CFT ecosystem, strong commitment of all institutions towards a highintegrity financial system, and effective cooperation between the industry and public authorities will be reflected in the eventual outcomes of the Evaluation Exercise. In particular, it is paramount for all staff of reporting institutions to maintain high professional standards, adhere to existing confidentiality requirements, and undergo adequate AML/CFT trainings. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to leave you with a line that is often quoted when speaking about integrity: "Integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching". While the quote may have been over-used, it has not dimmed its truth one bit. It is much easier to do the right thing under other watchful eyes, the safety barriers of procedures, or even the instruction of prescriptive rules. But oftentimes, the decisions that will matter most are what we choose to do when nobody, but our conscience is watching.
Well-judged adjustments in the interest rate can ensure a stable development of inflation in the long term. In addition, monetary policy can, at best, contribute to alleviating cyclical fluctuations in production and unemployment. However, the interest rate is much too blunt an instrument to be able to fine-tune the economy to any great extent. Secondly, a production target or employment target would only be purposeful if we were fairly sure how large the growth potential of the economy was and what level of employment represented some form of equilibrium. In practice, it is not possible to determine this with any great precision. Both potential growth and employment vary over time with structural changes in the economy in ways that are difficult to quantify. BIS Review 17/2007  3  Thirdly, an extra difficulty in this context is that the picture of how the economy develops changes over time as statistics are revised. This applies in particular to GDP statistics. It becomes particularly clear how difficult it would be for the Riksbank to have a target for productivity growth if one looks at how the statistics were revised at the end of 2004 and beginning of 2005. The information available at the beginning of 2005 indicated a fairly clear slowdown in production growth. Later on in 2005 the picture of a slowdown in the growth of the economy was confirmed, but it then appeared to have a more prolonged course of events.

Since then the picture has been revised again, and now the economic downturn around the end of 2004/beginning of 2005 appears much milder than was indicated by the statistics at that time. Today we have a new description of history to base our own assessments on. This type of statistical measuring problem was one of the things that made Francesco Giavazzi and Frederic Mishkin advice against having targets for production or employment in their evaluation of Swedish monetary policy. I agree with them. The best we can do is to balance monetary policy so that the economy follows what is roughly considered to be a long-term favourable path. This balance should of course be within the scope of our inflation target. The current situation and monetary policy considerations This seems like a good point to move on to talk about the Riksbank’s current views on inflation prospects. The economy has grown rapidly in recent years. Over the coming years we are expecting growth in the economy to slow down and approach a growth rate that is more sustainable in the long term. One reason is that our assessment is that international economic activity will slow down; another is that the productivity increases will slow down. Over the coming year, GDP growth nevertheless looks to be relatively high. Employment will rise and households will increase their consumption at a rapid rate. We are assuming that employment will continue to rise during the forecast period, albeit at a slower rate. This will lead to unemployment falling.
Some people here on the Continent who share this concern are inclined to argue that if a euro-participating country were to find itself in this situation - and given that it would have no macro-economic way out, for example, through exchange rate adjustment, or monetary relaxation, or fiscal stimulus beyond the limits of the Stability Pact - it would then have an overwhelming incentive to take the sort of supply-side measures which have proved so difficult to implement hitherto. I am not sure that you can necessarily rely upon that making life very much easier. But what I think this discussion points up, is the broader conclusion that if the euro is to go ahead in current conditions, as I assume that it will, then supply-side flexibility will become more crucially important that ever across the whole euro area. The Chancellor of the Exchequer announced last October that the United Kingdom would exercise its opt-out and not participate in the first wave of euro membership. That was a disappointment to some of our European partners. But it was a considerable relief to others, because UK participation from the outset would certainly have complicated the project - not least because of the substantial cyclical divergence between ourselves and the major countries on the Continent.

The nagging concern is whether this determined pursuit of macro-economic stability will be maintained - whether in fact the degree of macro-economic convergence that has been achieved is likely - in the terms of the Treaty - to be “sustainable”. A particular worry is that macro-economic stability, on its own, is not enough. It has not been enough to prevent the progressive emergence of very high, and very different, levels of unemployment in a number of the major Continental European economies. Unemployment has been for some considerable time, and it remains, much the most urgent and important economic issue confronting us in Europe. I do not suggest for a moment that the right answer would be to abandon macro-economic discipline and revert to old-fashioned demand management policies. In anything other than the very short term that would be likely to make matters worse. I share the broad consensus view that Europe’s unemployment problems originate essentially in rigidities on the supply-side of the economy. The point is that unless we are all more successful in bringing down this structural unemployment, through micro-economic policies designed to improve structural, supply-side flexibility, then some countries could find it difficult to continue to live with a common macro-economic discipline without significant tensions.
In this connection, however, it can also be pointed out that the Euro lost more than one-quarter of its value against the US dollar from the beginning of 1999 until it bottomed out, and since that time has risen once more by just over one-fifth. The Central Bank is not unconcerned about the exchange rate, but has limited means of influencing its development, as has been explained. There is only so much the Bank can do to restrain currency fluctuations. A substantial lowering of interest rates could possibly force the exchange rate down somewhat, but this would mean sacrificing other and more important objectives for precious little gain. The joint declaration issued by the government and the Central Bank in March of 2001 states that the Bank will intervene in developments on the foreign exchange market through buying and selling foreign currency if it deems this to be necessary in order to achieve its inflation target, or if it is concerned that exchange rate fluctuations could threaten financial stability. There is no cause for so doing at present. As I mentioned, the primary objective of the Central Bank’s monetary policy is to foster price stability. Price stability is recognised to be a prerequisite for long-term economic growth and thus improved welfare. The Central Bank has lightened its monetary restraint substantially in recent months. In the course of ten months, the policy rate has been cut very significantly, resulting in a real policy rate which is lower now than it has been since 1996, as I mentioned.

Pricing, underwriting and reserving in wholesale general insurance and reinsurance markets  Our primary prudential concern about current market conditions is that pressure on pricing will lead to weakening of underwriting standards, under-reserving against risks and insurers being tempted to take short 4  cuts on capital. On underwriting and reserving, Anna Sweeney’s ‘Dear CEO’ letter , published a few months ago, set out nine areas where our supervisory review work had suggested weaknesses, including:   Formulating business plans based on loss ratio (and future reserving assumptions) which appear optimistic given current market conditions and historical performance. In particular, we have seen a number of examples of insurers expecting improvements in claims experience due to portfolios changes, leading them to exclude historical years of poor performance from reserving benchmarks without good supporting evidence.   Insufficient use of technical pricing models, even for lines of business where such models are generally considered to be more developed and reliable.   Slow reaction to emerging loss development, with insurers taking false comfort from reserving benchmarks which appear to show business as still profitable despite emerging underwriting results.   Diversifying into new lines of business (for example, casualty classes) despite insufficient underwriting expertise or oversight. Aggregate analysis for a sample of London Market insurers suggests that initial estimates of reserves were inadequate for more recent years of account, with insurers needing to strengthen reserves over the past couple of years.
Among the companies in our regional network, the share expecting a sharper rise in selling prices is larger than the share expecting a slower rise in prices. TNS Gallup’s business sentiment survey gives a more neutral impression. Nevertheless, both surveys indicate expectations of a sharper rise in prices in the service sector. The other Nordic countries have also experienced falling inflation. BIS Review 18/2005  3  Inflation in the Nordic countries has declined, and is now relatively low in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway. According to the harmonised indices of consumer prices, inflation in February was around 1 per cent in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, while the rise in prices remained unchanged in Finland, as measured by 12-month changes. By comparison, price inflation in the euro area was close to 2 per cent. A common feature of the low level of inflation in the Nordic countries seems to be the trend in prices for imported consumer goods, even though developments have not been entirely the same in all the Nordic countries. The upturn is broadly based, and its effects are no less pronounced here in Rogaland. Demand is increasing in all sectors, particularly in oil-related industries and the construction sector. The market outlook for export-oriented and oil-related industries in the next six months is very bright and optimism is greater now than in the previous round of interviews. Domestically oriented manufacturing has not experienced large fluctuations in demand and output to the same extent.

It was exacerbated by classic moral hazard – the result of past government  BIS Review 69/2007  1  interventions to limit corporate and bank failures. And it was made worse by poor disclosure, which masked the scale of the increase in external liabilities and the deterioration in the level of official reserves. The scale of the buildup of foreign currency debt was fundamental to the dynamics of the crises. Once confidence weakened, and fixed exchange rate commitments became unsustainable, the economies experienced a sharp reversal in capital flows as both residents and nonresidents sought to limit their exposure to domestic institutions and assets. This broad flight from domestic assets created conditions similar to a classic bank run. The exchange rate decline magnified concern about potential losses in the corporate sector and banking system, which led to a further shift in assets out of the country, which exacerbated the exchange rate decline. These balance sheet vulnerabilities led to a vicious cycle in which the exchange rate and financial weaknesses reinforced each other. As economies slipped toward the edge of the cliff, policymakers were left with alarmingly few options to try to contain the crisis and mitigate the damage inflicted on the real economy. Given that real interest rates were already negative, relaxing monetary policy further risked accentuating the exchange rate decline, which would, in turn, have exacerbated the problems of the banking system. But with demand already in free fall, policymakers were equally reluctant to tighten policy and risk further damage to growth.
In Italy, with an overall welfare spending ratio of GDP in line with that of the rest of Europe, spending on support for the unemployed, for households, particularly those at risk of falling into poverty, is at a level less than half that of elsewhere in Europe, while spending on pensions is significantly higher. The weakness of the “social shock absorbers” is that relatively high job protection for those in employment is accompanied by weaker protection for those out of work, contrary to what happens in the Nordic models, where the so-called “flexisecurity” combines an extensive social safety net with less job protection. In some countries, even if, 40 years on, the assumptions of that model are still valid, reflections on it began some time ago. Structural factors have changed the context within which the European social model operates: the growing competition from emerging countries, the reorganisation of production processes on a global basis, the speed of innovation, the increasing fragmentation of career paths with ever looser ties to a “permanent position”, the greater instability of families, declining fertility, the prospective decrease in the workforce, an ageing population. The set of risks faced by individuals throughout their life has changed significantly. The social protection systems are therefore constantly evolving; substantial corrections have taken place in recent years in many countries, including France, the United Kingdom and Germany, the country where the reform process began a decade ago.

Such operations have reinforced the perverse link between banks and sovereign debtors and may be considered a violation of the prohibition of financing public debt with central bank money, laid down in Article 123 of the Treaty. And, the opposite – but conceptually equivalent – criticism that these operations did not provide the economy with finance. As regards the first point, it is again pertinent to refer to strategy: in the medium to long term, the inflation dynamic reflects developments in broader monetary aggregates. Conditions that encourage the creation of inflation or speculative bubbles are generated by strong and sustained growth in money and credit, not necessarily as a result of an increase in liquidity granted by the central bank to the banking sector. This liquidity constitutes a precautionary supply for sight liabilities that the banks have towards households, non-financial corporations and other banks. The sight liabilities, i.e. deposits, and not the supply of liquidity, demonstrate a high statistical correlation to the price dynamics of goods and assets. Today, monetary developments do not allow for the identification of risks of inflation or pressure on asset prices in the medium term. As regards the second point, the main criticism related principally to the expansion of collateral accepted by the national central banks of the Eurosystem as a guarantee in return for liquidity extended to credit institutions. In particular, doubts were raised regarding credit claims that became eligible with the decisions taken in December 2011.
Artists usually do visuals better than words, but some of those present today have effectively combined both to capture our natural treasures. Bank Negara Malaysia has a long history of encouraging local artists. For almost as long as the Bank has existed — 58 years — we have been building up an art collection. This asset is both an incentive to artists and a mirror to the nation’s development. We can trace our society’s evolution through the collection. We are honoured to have among us in the audience today, those who have worked and committed their lives to the preservation of our environment and wildlife, so that future generations can continue to experience the richness of life, and not only in a natural history museum. This exhibition hopes to inspire more of us to take up this important cause. No matter in small or big ways, we all can – and must – do our part. Dato’ Dino has brought home today the urgency of the environmental challenges that we face – not in the distant future, but today. Just this morning, the news carried reports of Earth reaching its highest temperature on record in 2016. This is the third successive year that temperatures have exceeded past record levels. We have long passed the point where global warming is a problem for tomorrow. Bank Negara Malaysia welcomes the opportunity to work with organisations like the WWF to increase the impact of financial institutions in advancing environmental goals through sustainable finance initiatives.

An area of focus has been in green finance, with over RM2.5 billion in financing extended from the financial sector to companies that promote clean and efficient energy from sustainable sources. There are many ways in which we can better protect our environment. Art provides a sober reminder of this, as depicted in one painting from the Bank’s collection which captures the KL Banjir of 1971, by Mohd Hoessein Enas, showing the iconic Merdeka Square under several feet of water, just a stone’s throw away from the location of the Bank’s headquarters which had moved only shortly before the event. Another exhibit at the BNM Museum and Art Gallery depicts the two major Asian tsunamis of the past 13 years. This piece of installation art by Malaysian artist Oi Nuen Sprunt was displayed here in 2014, bringing home the message of nature’s power and unpredictability, but also the healing power of human compassion and kindness. Today, we bring you a more hopeful exhibition, with works that remind us of what exists just beyond our doorsteps, to be preserved and nurtured. The artists featured here today have all created their imagery direct from the source, which says a great deal about their passion and commitment to their craft. Few of us would take the time or trouble to observe nature at such an intimate level. These works allow us to do so in some measure. I am deeply encouraged by our own Bank staff who have also submitted works for the exhibition.