samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
There are no secrets to the strategies, because the factors for success are not unique to Singapore. The challenge is in their execution and implementation. Here are five things that we have set out to do in order to excel as a financial centre in the New Economy. Enhance business environment First, we are seeking to further enhance our conducive pro-business environment. Economic and political stability, an efficient and impartial legal system, comprehensive and up-to-date market infrastructure, and fiscal discipline that allows low taxes are key preconditions, more important than special incentives for the financial sector. Singapore has established a reputation for delivering these preconditions, which we will maintain and improve upon in future. Build talent pool Second, we are building up our talent pool. In a knowledge-intensive industry like financial services, Singapore will not get anywhere without world-class talent. We are making a concerted effort to attract foreign talent who can make a contribution to Singapore, and to integrate them into our economy and society. We are also nurturing home talent to its full potential through a good education system for the young and ongoing training opportunities for those in the workforce. As Asian companies begin to use more complex strategies and products, our financial institutions need the expertise to advise on these sophisticated techniques. From time to time they will fly out experts from London or New York to service clients, but we must also build up our own indigenous capabilities.

Citizens in service, not people in power Speech given by Alex Brazier, Executive Director for Financial Stability Strategy and Risk, Bank of England Member of the Financial Policy Committee  At Allen & Overy, London Friday 17 May 2019  I am grateful to Hugh Burns, James Howat, Kiman Bassi, Jonathan Bridges, Emma Moriarty, Emily Clayton, James Hurley, Guy Debelle, Ben Broadbent, Martin Taylor, Alina Barnett, Dimitri Demekas and Paul Tucker for helpful discussions. The phrase ‘citizens in service’ is also used by Tucker in his book ‘Unelected Power’ (2018, page 546). All views, errors and omissions are my own. 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  I’d like to express my thanks to Allen & Overy for hosting this event and for bringing together such a formidable crowd to discuss these issues. More than a decade on from the financial crisis, memories can begin to fade. They must not. Because the crisis was a disaster: leaving a legacy economic cost equivalent to about £ per person.1  Like all disasters, it should be memorialised so that future generations are not destined to repeat the past. It’s sometimes argued that the crisis happened because nobody spotted that the system was heading for the rocks. I think the causes run deeper than that. They centre on a collective failure to take the long view. The financial system lived for the moment.
6  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  6  (and re-risk as rates rise) in order to maintain a stable SCR. We saw some evidence of this behaviour in 2016, primarily through a sharp increase in reinsurance of longevity risk on new annuity business. For business written before the introduction of Solvency II, insurers’ capital positions have been shielded from this volatility in the risk margin by Transitional Measures on Technical Provisions (TMTPs). The effect of these transitionals is to cushion the immediate impact of new requirements for technical provisions introduced by Solvency II – notably the risk margin. Following the large fall in sterling market interest rates in the first half of 2016, the PRA allowed many life firms to recalculate TMTPs upwards as at June 2016, to some degree offsetting the increase in the risk margin. Given its flawed design, we believe that the risk margin is too high for UK annuity writers at current low levels of interest rates. As a consequence, TMTPs are higher than they would need to be to serve their purpose with a better designed, more stable risk margin. Analysts and investors should take this into account when considering the scale of use of TMTPs by UK life firms at end-2016.

4  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  4  considerably more changes that reduced rather than increased capital requirements. We do put a lot of weight on accountability of senior executives (re-enforced through our new Senior Insurance Managers Regime), risk and actuarial functions and good governance within firms. But without strong supervisory oversight of models, firms might relax assumptions, follow their competitors in adopting more aggressive approaches and interpret new data in a favourable light. Model complexity gives ample opportunities to do this. The reality is that firms have strong incentives to reduce capital requirements in order to report higher coverage ratios, increase return on regulatory capital and ultimately pay higher dividends. That is why we have put in place a framework to monitor the possibility that firms’ model estimates of capital will drift lower over time. I am aware that our model change process can sometimes leave a firm in the anomalous position of needing to change a model – for example, following a sudden change in circumstances such as a loss event or acquisition – but without having approval for the change. Firms can help in this by giving us timely and well presented information. Where we can change things in the PRA to speed the process, then we will do so. For example, our recent consultation on market turning events highlighted the importance of timely decision making in those types of circumstances. 7  Capital requirements are only one side of the equation.
The yield on Icelandic Treasury debt is now a bit lower than in the euro area countries that are facing severe sovereign debt crises, and real yields are considerably lower. It is not a given that this would be so without the capital controls. If the controls were lifted today, interest rates would probably rise sharply, even though a large proportion of the investors that own these bonds are relatively at ease within the capital controls regime. Without the controls, the authorities would have to take further action in order to achieve the objectives set for the coming year. It is therefore of pivotal importance to lengthen the maturity profile of Treasury financing before the controls are lifted. Marked progress has already been made in this area. The average duration of domestic Treasury bonds has increased from 3 to 7 years. Last spring, domestic pension funds and other investors purchased a sizeable supply of indexed longterm Treasury bonds by participating in the first auctions under the liberalisation strategy, which were dedicated solely to investment in long Treasury bonds. The aim was to lengthen the maturity profile of Treasury financing and thereby reduce risk. Although there has been a hiatus in the auctions and the pension funds lost interest in them after foreign stock markets fell this past summer, non-residents are growing interested in this investment option, which will continue to be available alongside the Investment Programme.

This is extremely important, although no one knows exactly how large a share of these assets are volatile. It is clear that a small group of non-residents are ready to sell their assets at the current offshore exchange rate. This spring’s auctions did not tempt owners of short-term Treasury bonds. Many will turn out to be long-term investors in the sense that they will not unwind their positions at an auction price approaching the official exchange rate, but will continue to reinvest as long as the interest rate differential exceeds the assessed risk. The auctions will reveal whether this is the case. Because it is unrealistic to expect more than a limited portion of the offshore krónur to be released through auctions, the Investment Programme does not stop there. When the incentive to participate in the investments diminishes – for example, because investors consider the auction exchange rate not favourable enough to justify a five-year commitment, or because the investment projects are not sufficiently large in scope – an exit tax will be levied on short-term capital movements. This step will not be taken, however, unless the offshore exchange rate moves close to the onshore rate, which would be a clear indication of enhanced stability of these assets. A number of critics have found fault with this sequence of events and suggested that the exit tax be levied immediately. In their opinion, this would generate significant income for the Treasury and facilitate the full removal of the capital controls much sooner than is currently projected.
Nonetheless, we believe that this treatment helps to align regulatory capital more closely with the underlying risks. Procyclicality Another general concern expressed is that the New Accord’s increased sensitivity to risk will reinforce behavioral patterns in banking organizations that may increase the cost of credit precisely at times when its supply is falling, namely during downturns in the business cycle. While we are working to address this concern about procyclicality, it is not a reason to shy away from creating better risk management tools. Here, supervisors must articulate the need for banks to assess risks on the horizon. If banks fail to develop and manage to reasonable expectations about how their risk profiles may change over time, they may take on excess exposures today that they cannot administer responsibly tomorrow. At the same time, we should remember that the New Accord sets out the minimum amount of capital necessary to comply with banking regulations. All supervisors expect their banks to operate at levels above the regulatory minima, and nearly all banks manage to their economic capital needs, not to their regulatory capital requirements. So although deteriorating credit quality might drive up the minimum capital requirement, a bank should already be operating above that level, which should dampen the effects of a sudden downturn in business conditions and asset quality. Along those lines, the Committee recently agreed that banks adopting the "internal ratings based" approach to credit risk will be required under Pillar 2 to conduct meaningfully conservative credit risk stress testing.

Mr Carse: The importance of corporate governance in banks  Speech by Mr David Carse, Deputy Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, at The Year 2000 Millennium Dinner of The Association of International Accountants - Hong Kong Branch, Hong Kong Bankers Club, Hong Kong, on 17 March 2000. *  *  *  Ladies and gentlemen, I am very pleased to be here this evening to speak to the Association on the subject of corporate governance in banks. I have chosen this as my theme both because it is highly topical for reasons that I will explain later and because it should be of particular interest to this audience. The Association plays an important role in the training and promotion of the accounting profession; and accountants are a vital component in corporate governance not simply in their specific role as auditors but also as a source of highly trained directors and managers. I will begin by giving you a brief situation report on the banking sector because this is relevant to the governance issue. Clearly, the situation is looking a lot better than it has done for the last two years. As the 1999 results released so far have shown, the performance of individual banks is by no means uniform. Some have done a lot better than others, depending on such factors as the mix of their business and where they are in the provisioning cycle.
The current inflation rate does not therefore provide sufficient information to determine the level at which interest rates should be set now. Our analyses indicate that a substantial share of the effects of an interest rate change will occur within two years. Two years is thus a reasonable time horizon for achieving the inflation target of 2½ per cent. Using this time horizon, we avoid substantial variations in output and employment. A shorter horizon than two years would result in wider swings in production. Credit developments and developments in equity and property prices influence inflation. With an inflation targeting regime, we take these variables into account to a certain extent when setting interest rates. Equities and dwellings account for a substantial share of household wealth. Higher equity and house prices increase the value of this wealth. The increase in wealth can relatively rapidly result in rising consumption. Several studies indicate that an increase in the value of housing wealth is more likely to lead to higher consumption than a corresponding increase in the value of equity wealth. Higher prices for commercial buildings may be passed on in the form of higher prices for goods and services. Developments in asset prices can thus affect inflation more directly. In Norway, a high proportion of households own their own dwelling. Even when we include securities funds and some insurance claims, Norwegian households’ housing wealth is far higher than their equity wealth.

Some observers have therefore posed the following question: has the functioning of the economy changed so that higher demand does not necessarily translate into higher inflation, but instead results in growing financial imbalances? If so, a conflict may arise between achieving the inflation target in the short term and financial stability. There are several reasons why financial bubbles can develop in periods of low inflation. First, a highly credible monetary policy results in low inflation expectations. Explicit or implicit long-term price and wage contracts will become more common. It will take longer for higher demand to translate into higher inflation. Cyclical changes will have less impact on inflation. Moreover, periods of higher productivity growth may lay the basis for high corporate earnings, heightened optimism and reduced risk awareness. At the same time, with strong productivity growth, inflation remains low. Banks that record low losses and solid results can increase lending without eroding their capital adequacy level. Debt-financed investments may lead to a faster rise in house and property prices. A third factor is that strong international competition may contribute to curbing inflation during a period of strong economic expansion. China, because of its access to an abundance of cheap labour and its substantial production capacity, has contributed to a fall in prices for many manufactured goods. In Norway, we have not experienced situations where there has been a conflict between the objectives of financial stability and price stability.
The post-trade system is a collection of systems, infrastructures, and workflows that differ across firms, with low levels of interoperability. Many firms operate on legacy post-trade systems and technologies that require a lot of maintenance and upkeep, but are critical for the firm in its daily operations. The current system contains inefficiencies and complexities, with many firms running on systems which were developed in-house by firms during the 80s and the 90s. Many firms have run on the same systems over this time, patching and upgrading, whilst the environment we are operating in has developed, becoming bigger and more complex. There are obvious cost benefits in simplifying. But if you look at the kinds of innovation the sector has seen since it built the systems on which it runs, it is clear that there are also opportunities to take advantage of the benefits of new technologies and functions. As you would imagine, the Bank is not immune from the needs of change and development, and we have been investing in our own plumbing.

The work will stocktake current and emerging post-trade technology solutions, identify key pinch points and barriers to adoption across markets and products, and look at the cost and benefits of different solutions to address these barriers. Conclusion  The post-trade system is a key component of a bigger effective, efficient, and resilient financial system; one much reformed since the financial crisis of eleven years ago. A key feature of the financial system is it is one of multiple interdependencies, and it is this interdependent nature which is why I chose to focus on resilience and innovation today On the face of it, these two concepts are quite different – one referring to the ability to return to a previous state, the other referring to making change. But in practise they are irrevocably linked. An environment that prioritises resilience and innovation is one that ensures post-trade continues to thrive and adapt to technology, finance, and wider changes in the economy, whilst avoiding costly fragmentation. The Bank is playing its part here, with strategic goals on the one hand focussing on the need to innovate and drive change (Fintech; RTGS), but on the other on maintaining resilience (operational resilience; RTGS) – demonstrates that well. That’s why we’re focussing on providing a platform, via the right hard and soft infrastructure, for innovation to flourish. And why we will never slacken our focus on the criticality of resilience. 7  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  7
Given that net zero is both an imperative of climate physics and a commitment by 120 countries; companies, banks, insurers, pension funds and investors will increasingly be expected to develop and disclose their transition plans. For companies that could mean:   Commitment to a net zero target (for scope 1, 2 and ideally scope 3 emissions) by a specific date;    Assessment and disclosure of how the transition to a net zero business model will impact strategy;    Short term milestones to track progress; and    Details of governance, including whether executive compensation is tied to success and how risks are managed at the board level. In turn, there are several possible ways for the providers of capital to assess the level of preparedness for the transition. To support the assessment of who is on the right side of history and therefore presents the most promising investment opportunities in the transition, providers of capital could measure and disclose: 1. The percentage of assets that comply with TCFD disclosure; 2. The percentage of assets that are Net Zero-aligned (“Paris aligned”);  14 See e.g. Giuzio, M. et al. (2019), Climate change and financial stability in the Financial Stability Review of the European Central Bank, May 2019;  and Piera de Silva, L. A. (2019) Research on climate-related risks and financial stability: An "epistemological break"?, speech at at the Conference of the Central Banks and Supervisors Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), Paris, 17 April 2019.

Putting the aforementioned laws into practice will change Thailand’s business and financial landscape regardless of which political party steps into power after the next election. They will contribute to better governance and equality, higher productivity, and long-term sustainability of the country. However, I should point out that, as for all reform initiatives, effectiveness in execution will be the bottom line of their success. Ladies and gentlemen, As for the Bank of Thailand, we also play an important role in upgrading Thailand’s financial infrastructure and regulatory reform within our responsibility. In the pursuit of the digital economy, the government aims to involve all stakeholders to transform Thailand to a lesscash society under the National e-Payment master plan. In conjunction with the Ministry of Finance and the Thai Bankers’ Association, we have recently launched the PromptPay system, which is an electronic faster payment system. It helps facilitate payment transactions and save costs for businesses and consumers. This morning I also witnessed the signing of an agreement with two banks; consortium to roll out EDC machines to 560,000 shops and government agencies all over the country to promote the use of debit cards on a nation-wide basis. 5  The Bank of Thailand also aims to promote competition, innovation, and digital financial services among financial service providers (including FinTech). This move will benefit financial institutions, businesses as well as Thai citizens. In addition, we will encourage niche players to help narrow gaps in access to financial services.
Indeed, despite the context of an increasingly uncertain global economy, Chile has continued to show significant growth rates, has reduced unemployment and has advanced in repairing the damages caused by the earthquake and tsunami that hit us last February 27th (27-F). At the same time, after a prolonged period of very low and even below-zero figures, inflation has returned to the defined tolerance range and is headed, according to our own projections and private expectations, toward levels consistent with the 3% target range (figure 1). That the stimulative monetary policy applied during all of 2009 bore fruit is without question. The extraordinarily expansionary conditions implemented more than a year ago by way of a historical reduction in the monetary policy interest rate, together with special liquidity facilities and the communication that the monetary policy rate (MPR) would be kept at its minimum level throughout the second quarter of this year, limited the persistence of the negative effects of the crisis on the capacity of households, firms, and financial institutions to repay their debts and generate income. Furthermore, these measures helped set the grounds for the vigorous economic upturn we are seeing now. The expansionary monetary stance of early this year permitted, also, to keep at bay the financial effects of the earthquake and provide a lending environment that would foster reconstruction.

Toward the second quarter of this year, as confidence returned, with reliable information that output and demand were picking up, together with prospects of inflation returning to the target range, the Board began a gradual process of normalization of the stance of monetary policy. Overall, at its current level the MPR is still expansionary, and will continue to provide momentum to the economy (figure 2). Since the last Report that we presented last June, incoming information point at the real sector consolidating its renewed strength. Output and demand growth have exceeded expectations, narrowing the output gap. In that context, as we have said before, the question is not to continue or not to continue raising the MPR, but how fast to do it. As we know, delaying this process can end up calling for drastic adjustments, higher interest rates and  BIS Review 126/2010  1  increased pressures from the exchange rate, all of which is detrimental to employment and economic activity. As detailed in this Report, convergence of inflation to the target in the baseline scenario is determined by stronger output and stronger domestic expenditure, but combined with reduced pressures from abroad. In addition, in the short term we have seen some prices increases, such as transport fares, cigarettes and the stamp tax. As for earlier projections, these latter factors will contribute to somewhat less CPI inflation over the coming months.