samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Post-September 11, Middle Eastern countries have started to look East to lessen their reliance on the West for management, science and technology, education, governance systems and developmental models. They are also increasingly aware of the dynamism of a rising Asia. Singapore began to take a focused interest on the Middle East three years ago. My overall impression is that the Middle East is at a tipping point. The region faces major political and security challenges like the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, situation in Iraq and Iranian nuclear issue. These are deeply complex and inter-connected issues, made even more complicated by a long history of distrust and religious conflict. We in Asia wish the Middle East well. We hope that the Middle Eastern countries can find ways to either resolve the issues or at least manage them in such a way as to avoid the region from tipping over. Despite the challenges, there are many positive developments to balance the negative challenges in the Middle East. Breathtaking physical transformation and impressive development are taking place  BIS Review 21/2007  1  there. High oil prices and sound policies underpin this strong economic performance. Within the region, the Gulf states are taking the lead to modernise and diversify their economies in as quick a time as possible. If these positive forces tip the region in the direction of peace, cooperation and development, the Middle East will, together with Asia, transform the world in this century. Asia's growth story is already well-known. China and India will be the lead players.

Converting our quantitative and qualitative challenges into unprecedented opportunities 2/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  Our objective is to enhance the role of the financial system, not only to manage climate change– related risks, but also to “mobilise capital for green and low-carbon investments.”14 But  financing the transition to a low-carbon economy is both a quantitative and qualitative challenge. [slide 5] The quantitative challenge is linked to the massive investment required in three areas: first, infrastructure and technical solutions, especially in transport, energy production and consumption and agriculture; second, intangible goods, including continuous training and research; and third, the adaptation and improvement of existing structures, notably the thermal rehabilitation of buildings. The needs are so considerable that public financing alone will never be sufficient: as an illustration, the estimated global needs could reach USD 90 trillion over the next 15 years for new green infrastructure alone.15 Fortunately, the private sector is already showing a growing interest in green finance. I could cite many examples, including the sharp rise in the global green bond market, +78% in 2017,16 or the success of the issuance of France’s first green sovereign bond in January 2017 with EUR 7 billion allocated and total demand of more than EUR 23 billion, and supplemented yesterday. All this looks very promising… but it is still insufficient. The systematic oversubscription of green bonds at issuance is actually a sign that there is a lack of green financial products.
Our assessment is that GDP during the final quarter of last year fell by almost 4 per cent on an annual rate, compared with the previous quarter. But we are also assuming that economic policy and various measures will slow down the fall in Sweden. The weak krona will also provide some assistance. And brighter prospects are in sight! We are expecting GDP to show a turnaround at the end of 2009, although growth will then be fairly modest over the coming two years. But as growth abroad increases it will also stimulate the Swedish economy. We are therefore assuming that growth will be around 4 per cent at the end of our forecast period. However, the forecasts are of course very uncertain in this situation. And there are uncertainty factors that can push developments in different directions. One of the prerequisites for our forecasts is that the measures taken to improve the functioning of the financial markets will have an effect. But in a crisis that is as closely linked to lack of confidence as this one, the recovery could come very quickly once the distrust is dispelled. We assume that our forecast is fairly cautious. Compared with other recessions, the recovery predicted for Sweden is fairly slow, although quicker than that following the financial crisis of the 1990s. Large fluctuations in CPI inflation and the interest rate We are expecting fairly large fluctuations in CPI inflation in the coming period.

With effect from 2010, CPI inflation will also rise, according to our forecast. Once again interest rate changes have had a powerful impact, but they are now pushing in the opposite direction. In 2010 we are expecting to raise the repo rate again. Mortgage rates will then cease falling and begin to rise instead. At the same time, energy prices will begin to rise slightly. The repo rate will then be raised fairly rapidly, from a level of around 1 per cent to around 3 per cent at the end of the forecast period. The fact that I am now talking about the forecast for the CPIF should not be interpreted to mean that we have changed the monetary policy target. Our target is still that CPI inflation shall be 2 per cent. But we are also constantly studying a number of other measures of inflation. In this situation with exceptionally large changes in the repo rate –first down to just below one per cent and then rapid increases at the end of the forecast period – it is very important to openly and clearly illustrate the direct consequences this can have on the CPI. However, in the longer term, beyond the horizon for our forecast, the repo rate is assumed to be stable and then the rate of increase in the CPI and the CPIF will coincide.
The credit risk capability, both at the point of origination in terms of know-yourcustomer (KYC) and customer due diligence and for ongoing monitoring, must be enhanced to cater for the rapid growth of this new line of business. Naturally the HKMA has accorded high priority in our ongoing supervision of banks to ensure that the underwriting standards are upheld all the time. I am pleased to report that the non-performing loan (NPL) ratio, which is a key indicator to assess the credit quality of the Mainland-related lending, has remained at a healthy level of around 0.7%, which is just slightly above the overall NPL ratio of 0.56% for all bank loans. Wealth Management 11. Given the rapid growth and accumulation of wealth in Hong Kong and the Mainland, there is a strong demand for wealth management services. The asset-under-management of private banking in Hong Kong now amounts to roughly $ trillion. Again, risk management is the key to the sustainable development of the private banking industry. There are two key aspects of risk management in the private wealth business. First, the banks must conduct proper KYC processes, especially on the source of funds and ongoing monitoring of suspicious fund flows for anti-money laundering / counter-terrorist financing purposes. Second, the private banks must understand the risk appetite/tolerance level of their clients on the one hand and conduct proper product due diligence before marketing them to clients.

Lars Heikensten: Stability and Growth Pact needs reinforcement Speech by Mr Lars Heikensten, Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at a conference organised by the European Commission, Brussels, 15 December 2004. *  *  *  Thank you, Mr Chairman. I very much appreciate this opportunity to comment on the work of the Commission. Perhaps the invitation is particularly pleasing for me as, unlike the other members on the panel, I do not come from a country that has introduced the euro. I should also immediately say that I very much enjoyed reading the background report and the communication on the Stability and Growth Pact produced by the Commission. Let me begin by characterizing the experiences from the Monetary Union so far. There is no doubt that the regulations on fiscal policy laid down in Maastricht had clearly positive effects up until the euro was launched. They are still having the same impact on those countries that remain outside the single currency and have the ambition of joining in the future. Far-reaching measures were taken, and are also being taken today, to enable entry into the Monetary Union. Noting the progress, some people have even claimed that earlier less well-functioning national economic-political cultures have been replaced by a more stability-oriented common European culture. But since the start of Monetary Union, this momentum has been lost. Several countries have returned to their old behaviour even though there are good examples of the contrary.
•  Another factor that may slow merger activity is that the strategic trend among the vast majority of bank holding companies in the United States has been toward specialization focusing on core businesses or a core customer base, which in turn determines the type of products and services offered. In past years, some criticism has been leveled at the industry for announcing mega-deals in what was perceived to be a response to peer pressure, rather than compelling economic reasons. I’d like to think that the disappointing post-acquisition results of some of these unions have taught the industry to think more strategically, and to weigh more carefully all the pros and cons of pursuing such transactions. Deciding what combination of traditional and new activities will best create long-term economic value for your customers and shareholders will be a leading challenge as you contemplate the future of your organizations. Challenges for supervisors The continuing evolution of the financial services industry and a newly modernized legal framework also pose significant challenges to supervisors. What are the objectives of supervision in the twentyfirst century? How can those objectives be best pursued? Let me say first of all that there is no easy, single answer to these questions. The modern financial marketplace is too dynamic, too complex.

Without question, the Accord  5  BIS Review 32/2000  was a milestone achievement - for the first time, supervisors in G-10 countries were able to use a common yardstick for assessing banks’ capital adequacy. But the Accord has a number of serious shortcomings. It does not adequately differentiate among degrees of credit risk and, as a result, banks have had incentives to take on higher risk exposures within broad risk categories. Banks have also tended to engage in transactions that lower regulatory capital requirements without reducing economic risk. For example, through asset securitization a bank may physically transfer assets off its balance sheet, but still retain some or even all of the associated risk. In addition, it has proved difficult to incorporate into the Accord’s simple risk-weighting scheme the innovations of the last decade in the way banks manage and mitigate risk. As credit risk management techniques advanced, and as the importance of managing operational risk has been increasingly recognized, the long run relevance and efficacy of the Basel Accord has been eroded. In June of last year, the Basel Committee released a Consultative Paper laying out its vision for a new, more refined capital adequacy framework - one that more accurately distinguishes degrees of credit risk, and that is appropriate for banks of varying levels of sophistication.
Having lived with a monetary policy framework for a long time, it is easy to start taking the benefits of it for granted and to focus on the drawbacks. The debate in recent years suggests that this is what has begun to happen, at least in some quarters. The debate has had slightly different angles. One line of reasoning criticises the policy conducted by the Riksbank, although it is not always clear, to me at least, the extent to which this criticism is directed at the policy as such – i.e. that we have taken the wrong action given the target we have – or at the target definition itself. The monetary policy mandate given to the Riksbank by the Riksdag is in short to keep inflation over time close enough to 2 per cent so that long-term inflation expectations in the economy are anchored at that level. More or less all central banks in western countries with a floating exchange rate have the same main task and the same target level, for example Norges Bank, the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve. Broad support for the inflation target Before continuing, allow me to digress a little on the subject of the Riksbank’s mandate. Those who follow the current debate can certainly gain the impression that the Riksbank has unilaterally adopted a monetary policy target that it thinks is appropriate – 2 per cent inflation – but that is quite controversial in the rest of society.

The inflation target has had considerable benefits... Apart from this criticism, there is also a line of reasoning that states more clearly that the target definition should be different. It is above all this part of the debate that I will concentrate on in my discussion going forward. I would like to go deeper into two specific areas: wage formation and the exchange rate. It was failures in these two areas in particular that caused, or rather forced, Sweden to  9 It is, for example, worth noting that the terms of reference for the recently presented Riksbank inquiry made it  clear that the baseline should be that “the objective of price stability shall remain central” (Swedish Ministry of Finance, 2016, p. 1). 8 [17]  switch over to the monetary policy regime we have today with a floating exchange rate and inflation target. To provide some background to my continued discussion, allow me to describe the situation prior to inflation targeting. Since the early 1970s, Sweden had been stuck in what could be called a devaluation cycle. Pegging the exchange rate, at least in theory, is the same as setting a target for domestic inflation. The idea is that the domestic rate cannot exceed (or fall below) inflation in the countries to which the domestic currency is pegged, at least not for any longer periods of time. But in order to make the commitment of maintaining a fixed exchange rate credible, it must be supported by other policies.
First, and most importantly, unlike in the US, allowing inflation to overshoot our price stability definition for the sole purpose of bringing more people back into employment would not be consistent with our primary mandate. The “divine coincidence” applies only insofar as employment developments are consistent with our definition of price stability. Beyond that there is no room for trade-offs. Second, there are doubts as to the likely efficacy of such a policy. We have seen some evidence in the United States that the participation rate can become partially endogenous to demand, as discouraged workers return to job-seeking in a strengthening labour market. But we have seen no such evidence in the euro area. Our participation rate has continued to increase over time. So the question in the euro area is much more whether, or not, long-term unemployment is likely to be amenable to continued policy accommodation. The evidence raises at least doubts. For example, although many claim that monetary policy was too accommodative during the boom years of 2005 and 2006 – as also evidenced by policy rates often being lower than what standard Taylor rules would have predicted – the share of long-term unemployed in the euro area has remained fairly constant over this period. So, even if the desired effects of accommodative policy lead to more investment and employment, it remains questionable whether employers will respond by taking on chronically unemployed or whether they would instead rely on “insiders” whose pay has been stagnant or, alternatively, on fresh university graduates.

Eddie Yue: Opening keynote - "Scaling up sustainable finance in Asia" conference Opening keynote by Mr Eddie Yue, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, at the ASIFMA "Scaling up Sustainable Finance in Asia" conference, Hong Kong, 17 March 2023. *** Alice, Diana, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, Good Morning, Let me start by thanking ASIFMA for inviting me to this Sustainable Finance Conference. It is my great pleasure to share with you Hong Kong's vision and the concrete steps being taken to strengthen our leading role in green and sustainable finance. As we come into Spring after a colder-than-usual winter, this is a good time to talk about the advances that happen when the right ecosystem is combined with the right opportunities. In the financial world, green and sustainable finance brings extraordinary opportunities. And if we are looking for the best ecosystem for these opportunities to flourish, Hong Kong is the place. The climate challenge to Asia is huge, and urgent. Meeting this challenge will require substantial investment – some $ trillion over the next three decades based on market estimates. China alone will require more than 100 trillion yuan. The multi-trillion-dollar funding need can hardly be met by the public sector alone, and climate finance plays a crucial role here. It helps the public sector raise funding from the market to finance climate projects and initiatives. It also mobilises private capital to directly fund climate actions.
Mr George outlines monetary and exchange rate policies for sustainable growth Speech by the Governor of the Bank of England, Mr E A J George, at The Central Bank Policies Conference, Macau, 17 May 1999. Mr Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen, let me begin by saying that it is a real pleasure to be here with you today in Macau and to participate with such distinguished central bank colleagues in your conference. One of the very agreeable things about coming to the other side of the world to participate in an event like this is that it enables me to step back from the daily hubbub of my office, the financial markets in the City of London, and the media, and reflect in a broader way on what it is we are all actually trying to do. It is in fact much more agreeable than working! In a broad sense, of course, our ultimate objective as central bankers is clear, and it is reflected in your conference title when you talk about “leading the way to sustainable growth”. I would add high rates of employment and rising living standards to that objective. Very often in the past, certainly in my own country, but not just in my own country, that fundamental objective was seen to be largely a matter of demand management – of pumping up demand by expansionary fiscal and monetary policies – with too little regard to the structural, supply-side, capacity of our economies to meet that demand.

There is not much that overall fiscal policy, still less monetary policy, can do directly to affect the supply-side capacity of the economy: they operate essentially on the demand side. And our recurrent experience showed that excessive demand growth spilled over into inflation and a worsening balance of payments which ultimately had to be corrected – the infamous boom and bust cycle. This macro-economic instability damaged the supply side of the economy, with a worse outcome over time in terms of our ultimate policy objective. It is now very widely understood that “stability is a necessary condition for sustainable growth” and that, of course, has become the universal central banker’s mantra. But the question is stability of what? You obviously cannot sensibly aim to stabilise everything. The aim has to be sustainable growth of the economy as a whole. But that cannot mean stable growth for every sector of the economy or for every business enterprise. Consumer demands change over time and so, too, do technologies and production techniques. Open market competition to identify such changes, and to exploit them to meet social needs more efficiently, is a vital driver of improvement on the supply side of the economy. At the micro-economic level, that means that particular sectors and individual businesses will continually rise and fall; and that is why established producers everywhere often see new competition, perhaps especially international competition, as an unwelcome threat.
Over the following months, they also injected liquidity into markets that were on the verge of drying up, and acted as lenders of last resort by providing liquidity to distressed financial institutions. 3 The importance of providing liquidity and acting as lenders of last resort is the main lesson which central banks took away from the experience of the Great Depression, and it has been seen as their main role in times of financial distress ever since. 4 Thus, as regards central banks’ reaction in the early days of the crisis, what we saw was not them doing too much – it was them doing their job. For most, certainly for the SNB, they were doing what their mandates required them to do. Collectively, they helped stabilise economies and financial markets that were in danger of collapsing. Many challenges remain, to be sure, but avoiding a rerun of the 1930s does constitute a success. Supporting the weak recovery: unconventional monetary policy Once central banks had lowered nominal short-term interest rates all the way to zero, they hit a natural limit at which conventional monetary policy becomes powerless. Their decisive reaction, together with fiscal policy measures by governments, had succeeded in stopping the free-fall, but economies were still weak, unemployment rates high, and recoveries feeble. More action was clearly required. Conventional economic wisdom asserts that at the zero lower bound fiscal policy is the most effective lever on which to act. Unfortunately, most governments perceived themselves unable to do more for a variety of reasons.

So, the answer to the question whether central banks have too prominent a role in the new regulatory framework is once again “no”. Given our recent experience, it would be negligent not to address systemic risk directly in order to prevent system-wide crises in the future, and  9  Crockett (2000). BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  because addressing these risks involves a set of tools and competences that naturally belong to the domain of central banks, their prominent role in this task is a direct consequence. It is also important to bear in mind that the expanded efforts to prevent future crises will, if they succeed, reduce the need for extensive crisis management in the future. Conclusion History is a great teacher. And central banks must learn from its critical episodes. The recent crisis is such an episode and is thus an exceptional learning opportunity. Central banks were active in managing the crisis with both conventional and unconventional tools. Their efforts played a major role in preventing the collapse of the financial system in the early days of the crisis, and have contributed to mitigating the economic damage of the aftermath. These actions were only possible because central banks, including the SNB, were able to act flexibly in exceptional circumstances – a flexibility which the gold initiative would severely constrain.