samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Basically the FSB considers that while crypto-assets do not pose a material risk to global financial stability at this time, given the relatively small size of this market, vigilant monitoring is (a) necessary in view of the speed of developments and data gaps. The FSB has developed a framework, in collaboration with the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures, to monitor the financial stability implications of the developments in crypto asset markets. Noting that crypto assets raise a host of other issues that I will explain shortly, the FSB also considers that further international coordination is warranted. Illicit activities risk: As many of these crypto-assets are so designed that anonymous email accounts can be used for trading and transfers without a central clearing agent, they effectively bypass the existing regime in combatting money laundering, terrorist financing and other illicit activities. The ease with which crypto-assets can be transferred across national borders has made it even more attractive to criminals in (b) laundering their proceeds and income. For the banks and other regulated financial institutions, it is proving difficult, if not impossible, for them to comply with the statutory or supervisory requirements in respect of know-your-customer (KYC) or ascertaining the source of funds. This was why the HKMA issued a circular in 2014 to banks in Hong Kong advising them to be mindful of the need to comply with all relevant KYC and anti-money laundering (AML) requirements in their dealings with crypto-assets.

Like several overseas central banks, the HKMA is studying the technical feasibility and merit of Central Bank Issued Digital Currency (CBDC). It is still early days, but it seems CBDC offers greater potential in wholesale than the retail area in terms of payment and settlement, especially in the cross-border context. However, (f) considerably more research work is needed to analyse the relative merit of CBDC over the existing electronic or digital forms of payment in which central bank funds are used, cleared and settled centrally. It is also necessary to assess the likely impact CBDC has on the monetary policy transmission mechanism. We will share with the public the findings of our research work in due course. 8. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now in an exciting era in which FinTech, including DLT, is advancing in a speed that was unthinkable 10 years ago. All of us, industry practitioners and regulators alike, must try our best to keep up with the pace or else we risk being left behind. However, in embracing new technology and innovation, we must also guard against the risk of overlooking the nature of the financial transactions and the risks that are inherent in these transactions under the pretext of technological advancement. Crypto-assets are one such example in which the use of new technology does not alter the nature or risks of the products or the transactions. 9. I hope you will find my remarks today helpful as an elucidation of the HKMA’s stance on crypto-assets and on digital payments and settlement.
Our assessment in May was that economic activity in Sweden would continue to strengthen in the period ahead owing to both relatively loose monetary and fiscal policy and an expected economic upswing abroad. GDP growth was forecast to average almost 3 per cent from 2004 to 2006. One reason that there now is cause to revise up the growth forecast is that exports once again have increased unexpectedly fast. Export growth has been robust because international demand in general has grown more rapidly than anticipated and because the relative price of Swedish exports has been unexpectedly low. As I pointed out earlier, some 20 per cent of Swedish exports go to countries outside the OECD area where economic growth has been vigorous. During the first half of this year exports of goods, measured in current prices, rose 9 per cent compared with the same period in 2003. Swedish exports have also benefited in part from the revival in the IT and telecommunications sectors. However, robust growth in exports is not unique to Sweden; average export growth in the EU has been roughly as strong during the first half of this year. Another positive signal is that a pickup in investment, which the Riksbank and other forecasters have been waiting a long time for, seems to have begun. This was a major contributory factor to our more positive outlook for the Swedish economy at the latest monetary policy meeting in August.

Resistance is strong, particularly among those who gain most from squeezing through the loopholes. There is also an in-built professional inertia among regulators, lawyers and tax accountants with large  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  amounts of human capital invested in complexity. In removing complexities, society’s gain would be their loss. Nonetheless, in the light of the financial crisis, we may be nearing an inflection point, where the societal pendulum begins to swing in the opposite direction. There are certainly signs of the red tape tide beginning to turn in the area of financial regulation. A growing chorus of concern has emerged recently about complexities and inconsistencies in banking regulation. Earlier this year, the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors committed themselves to addressing this problem. So too has the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. This is a good start. But, at this stage, it is no more than that. One risk is that the regulatory inclination may be to tackle this problem slowly and piecemeal, to unwrap the onion one layer at a time, to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. As Axel Leijonhufvud once remarked to me in a different context, while the bathwater in this case may be worth reusing, the baby would never have come of anything. Thin-slicing reform, whether regulation or tax, condemns us to failure. Peeling the onion one layer at a time tends to end in tears.
Bahrain and Malaysia has one of the strongest relationships among the countries in the Middle East. It was further cemented with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Central Bank of Bahrain and the Central Bank of Malaysia in 2001 to jointly develop Islamic finance internationally. In fact, an 80-strong Malaysian delegation led by HRH Raja Dr. Nazrin Shah, Crown Prince of the State of Perak and Malaysia’s financial ambassador, visited Bahrain in October 2009 to forge greater financial ties with the Bahraini Islamic financial community. It is heartening to note that common grounds have been reached on the standard contracts that the Association of Islamic Banking Institutions Malaysia or AIBIM, and the International Islamic Financial Market, or IIFM, have produced. This is invariably a reflection of the growing cross border harmonisation of interpretations of concepts and agreements. Furthermore, AIBIM’s interbank Murabahah master agreement (IMMA) and the corporate Murabahah master agreement (CMMA), recently launched in Malaysia, would further unlock the potential of the Malaysian Islamic money market, which saw around $ billion worth of transactions daily last year. In the global scene, it is estimated that the global commodity murabahah market is valued at more than $ trillion, giving rise to a huge business potential. I would encourage you to focus more resources here as it is one of the key areas that we can jointly promote in our regions.

Leveraging on the experience of Bursa Malaysia in the area of exchange traded products, this platform is able to eliminate uncertainty in the transactions and could mitigate risks such as legal risk, market risk and counter-party risk. As Bursa Suq Al-Sila’ is designed to be a multi-currency platform, it can enhance liquidity and risk management capacity of the international Islamic banking community. Furthermore, it could be harnessed into a cost effective global platform to develop universally acceptable Islamic financial products for the financial and capital market. Overtime, in making it into a truly multi-commodity global exchange, the scope of the exchange-traded product offerings could be expanded to include other commodities and the level of participation should be expanded to include players from outside the financial services industry as well. The proposed collaboration between the Bahrain Financial Exchange and Bursa Malaysia is expected to strengthen cross border financial traffic between both our markets, as this platform has a vast potential to facilitate liquidity flows from one financial centre to another. It will also pave the way for optimisation of financial resources across borders as well as diversification of risks between our markets. Furthermore, this venture will also allow both our markets to explore various opportunities for further collaboration in the future, leveraging on each other’s strengths and achieve synergies for effective and efficient Islamic financial services industry. I urge the banks in Bahrain and Malaysia to work together and use Bursa Suq Al-Sila’ to enable the flows of funds that would enhance the liquidity management framework.
Hopefully, that will prevent the situation from spinning out of control and igniting a wider financial crisis in Europe. In addition to the actions of European political leaders, central banks have been actively supplying liquidity to the European banking system. The Fed set up temporary currency  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  swap lines with several foreign central banks last November. These lines allow those central banks to borrow dollars and, in turn, lend those dollars to banks in their countries. In addition, the European Central Bank has provided hundreds of billions of euros in three-year loans to European banks. These actions have defused concerns about the ability of European banks to renew credit when their debts come due. In this way, Europe has avoided what could have been a massive credit crunch as banks pulled back lending sharply. I don’t need to remind you that, in today’s interconnected world, financial turmoil in Europe would definitely hurt our economy as well. Even if the European crisis doesn’t flare up again, growth is slowing in many parts of the world. Many European countries already appear to be in recession, and there is a danger that this situation could worsen significantly as governments put in place austerity measures. Turning to Asia, growth in China has also slowed as that country has tightened monetary and credit policies to reduce inflation. Indeed, the list of countries that are still experiencing solid growth is getting shorter all the time.

Retail sales in November and December posted a slight decline compared with the corresponding period of 1995. Activity in the construction sector fell back in the fourth quarter and posted a sharp twelve-month drop. Employment levels varied little in industry, with the exception of the automobile sector, where they posted a further substantial decline. They remained stable in the market services and retail sectors, but fell sharply in the building industry. BIS Review 4/1997
These two legislation provides  BIS Review 85/2009  3  explicit and appropriate powers for our law enforcement agencies to conduct investigation, obtain relevant evidence for prosecution, share and exchange information with the relevant law enforcement agencies (both local and overseas), as well as provide mutual assistance to other jurisdictions on criminal matters. We have established a Money Laundering Prevention Task Force which comprises of the Attorney General, the CEOs of the Ministry of Revenue, the Prime Minister’s Office, the Samoa International Finance Authority, the Ministry of Police and myself as Head of the Money Laundering Prevention Authority. We have also established a Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) within the Financial Institutions Department of the Central Bank, directly responsible for coordinating and undertaking the implementation of our AML/CFT regime. Our FIU has powers under the Money Laundering Prevention Act 2007 to receive and analyse all Suspicious Transaction Reports (STRs) from all financial institutions or any person(s) suspicious of money laundering offence in Samoa. Get rich-quick operators in the region I want to talk briefly about the so called “get rich-quick schemes” that have emerged recently in the Pacific Region. Pacific Island Countries, including Samoa, recognize the critical role that domestic and overseas private investors as well as the inflow of capital, knowledge and technology have played and will continue to play in the development of the region. Genuine investors are of course welcomed.

2  BIS Review 85/2009  As a member of the APG, Samoa is required to undertake a domestic review of its NPO sector to determine the degree of vulnerability to money laundering and terrorist financing activities. I should stress that this workshop is part and parcel of such a review. Under the conditions of membership, all APG members have committed to implement the FATF Forty Recommendations and Nine Special Recommendations. Special Recommendation VIII relates to non-profit organizations. SRVIII calls on all countries to “review the adequacy of laws and regulations that relate to entities that can be abused for money laundering and financing of terrorism. Non-profit organizations are particularly vulnerable and countries should ensure that they cannot be misused: i)  by terrorist organizations posing as legitimate entities;  ii)  to exploit legitimate entities as conduits for terrorist financing, including for the purpose of escaping asset freezing measures; and  iii)  to conceal or obscure the illegal diversion of funds intended for legitimate purposes to terrorist organizations.”  What is the scale of the problem? By its very nature, money laundering occurs outside of the normal range of economic statistics. Nevertheless, as with other aspects of underground economic activity, rough estimates have been put forward to give some sense of the scale to the problem. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), for example, has stated that the aggregate size of money laundering in the world could be somewhere between two to five percent of the world’s Gross Domestic Products (GDP).
The conversations I have had with leaders in the financial sector over the past few years make it clear that this issue is increasingly recognised as being central to business strategy, not just the confines of Corporate Social Responsibility departments. We have now entered the far more difficult second phase, where we must answer the question of how to turn aspiration into action. That means collecting data, building tools and frameworks that enable changes in strategy and risk management. The publication this week of the CFRF guide and the NGFS reference scenarios is a sign we are making good progress here. The third and final phase - which I hope we are fast approaching - is using these tools to make financial and business decisions that progress us on that orderly transition to net-zero. And developing the metrics that will assure us that collectively we are doing enough. 24 25  See research from BlackRock and Morningstar Morningstar reports total assets in global sustainable funds of $ at end 2019 9  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  9  I’ve set out today how the financial sector can play its part in answering perhaps the greatest call to action in its history and the Bank’s role in supporting this. We have already taken the first steps. Now is the time to use what we have learned to make real progress on our journey. To be strategic not responsive.

Its behavior has been atypical compared to previous episodes following a recession. This fall was especially marked in the euro area, from 2.7% in 2011 to 0.8% in December 2013. Recently, developments in the euro area have started to diverge downward from some other advanced economies such as United States and Canada. The sources and reasons for such a low inflation are complex and multiple. There are many uncertainties. Temporary and global factors may be at play in the euro area with import prices going down. I also think there are more permanent and deep forces pushing inflation down both at the euro area and global level. Besides there is still an important unused capacity – commonly labeled as “slack” -in most advanced economies, as demand has not yet caught up with its pre-recession levels and firms, as a consequence, have not recovered their pricing power. Commodity price inflation has been trending down recently. This is true both for energy and food prices. Commodity prices have a global impact and react very amply to small changes in supply and demand equilibrium. They act as amplifiers and transmitters of disinflationary pressures. Powerful headwinds – and disinflationary forces- are coming from the deleveraging process especially in the euro area, due to the importance of the banking sector and the amplitude of its balance sheet adjustment. We are working very hard to repair the bank-lending channel in the euro area.
In short, the adoption of the advanced Basel II models should be seen from a perspective of realism and the pursuit of excellence. As far as the Banco de España is concerned, quality takes precedence over any consideration of timing in the adoption of the advanced approaches. As I have already mentioned, the implementation of the New Capital Accord will pose serious challenges for the institutions, which will be expected to step up the efforts they have no doubt already begun to make. The need to increase these efforts has become even more pressing since 11 May this year, when the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision approved the text of the Accord, which will be released at the end of June. Also prominent in the area of regulatory reforms, which will involve significant challenges and whose implementation is imminent, is the introduction of the International Accounting Standards (IAS). In accordance with the mandate of the European Union, these standards will affect the preparation of the annual accounts of groups with securities listed on any regulated market of the Union from 1 January 2005. The challenges associated with the introduction of the IAS not only relate to the technical adaptation that will be required to comply with them; some of these standards may affect institutions’ business strategy, since aspects such as provisions and the consolidation and amortisation of goodwill will be changed.

In this respect, it should further be borne in mind that the maintenance over a prolonged period of time of a strong expansion in domestic demand, driven by substantially generous monetary and financial conditions, entails pressures which, if they build up, may emerge precisely when some of the factors upholding growth begin to show signs of petering out. The foregoing comments indicate that the favourable growth prospects for the coming years cannot be taken as guaranteed over the longer term. The Banco de España has been signalling the fact that the prevailing growth pattern harbours certain risks that may emerge in the form of a deterioration in competitiveness and financial imbalances in the households and non-financial corporations sector. Although the trajectory of the Spanish economy has not yet been hampered by the emergence of these risks, any future deterioration could impair further progress in real convergence. Competitiveness can be undermined on several fronts. The first of these is the maintenance of a persistent inflation differential with the euro area. This differential is partly related to the fact the Spanish economy is ahead in the cycle, but it has also to do with the presence of elements of inertia in wage and price formation in Spain associated with structural shortcomings in certain markets for factors, goods and services. Another significant front is limited productivity growth, which is not only lower than in the United States but also than in most of the European countries.
Unemployment Per cent 9  9 8  8  Registered plus labour market programmes  7  7 6  6  5  5  LFS unemployment  4  4 3  3  2  2  Average 1990s  1  1 0  0 1990  1992  1994  1996  1998  2000  2002  Sources: Public Employment Service, Statistics Norway and Norges Bank  Unemployment has edged up recently. The current unemployment rate of 4 per cent is more or less on a par with unemployment in 1997. It is also 2 percentage points lower than the average number of unemployed and persons participating in labour market programmes in the 1990s. For manufacturing, the effect of weak profitability has not yet come into full evidence. Unemployment is therefore expected to increase somewhat in the period ahead. In spite of the high level of wage growth, inflation is low. Conditions are now conducive to a gradual narrowing of the interest rate differential between Norway and abroad. How tight monetary policy will be is essentially contingent on how fast wage growth is brought down. The inflation targets adopted by Norway and our trading partners imply that total wage growth of about 4½ per cent is consistent with little or no change in business sector competitiveness. This is based on the assumption that productivity growth in Norway is around 2 per cent, or about the same as the average for the past 20 years.

Marzunisham Omar: Statistical science for a better tomorrow Welcoming remarks by Mr Marzunisham Omar, Assistant Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia (Bank Negara Malaysia), at the International Statistical Institute Regional Statistics Conference 2014 “Statistical Science for a Better Tomorrow”, Kuala Lumpur, 17 November 2014. *  *  *  Good morning, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. I am pleased to welcome you to this inaugural ISI Regional Statistics Conference 2014 on “Statistical Science for a Better Tomorrow”. Bank Negara Malaysia is most honoured to jointly host this event, together with the International Statistical Institute and its South East Asia Regional Network, the Department of Statistics Malaysia, and the Malaysia Institute of Statistics. Today, we have more than 500 statistical researchers, practitioners, policymakers and users of statistics from around 40 countries. With such diversity of participants, I believe the conference provides an excellent platform for the participants to share insights on the application of statistical science for knowledge discovery, innovation and policy. The importance of statistics cannot be overstated. The formulation of decisions – by individuals, businesses and especially policymakers – is as good as the statistics collected and the capacity to interpret the data. While the need for accurate and reliable statistics is common across all fields of study, two other requirements for the compilation and analysis of economic and finance-related statistics can be considered to be rather unique. The first is timeliness, given the rapid pace in which economic and financial developments can change.