samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
More international banking activity is booked in London than anywhere else, and the UK is host to the world’s third largest insurance sector as well as its second largest asset management industry. UK markets matter for global commerce. But above all, our markets matter for our prosperity. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  Markets are a major part of the UK economy. 350,000 people are employed in financial services in London alone, and 1 million across the UK as a whole. Across the country, their enterprise contributes £ billion to our national income and £ billion to our exports. On current trends, the UK-based non-bank financial system would increase from around six times UK GDP to nearly fifteen times by 2050. Most fundamentally, our markets serve our real economy. By financing firms to hire, invest and expand, our markets help drive UK growth. By opening up cross-border trade and investment, our markets create new opportunities for UK businesses and savers. By transferring risks to those most willing and able to bear them, our markets help UK households and businesses insure against the unexpected. Much of this activity depends on fixed income, currency and commodity markets. These FICC markets establish the borrowing costs of households, companies and governments. They set the exchange rates we use when we travel or buy goods from abroad. They determine the costs of our food and raw materials. And they help our companies manage the financial risks they incur when investing, producing and trading.

To give these measures teeth, key elements of the Senior Managers Regime should be extended to all firms active in wholesale FICC markets, including dealers and asset managers. That means all senior managers would have clearly defined responsibilities and would be answerable for training, certifying and monitoring the material risk takers they supervise. The FCA should oversee compliance, redeploying resources to focus on Senior Persons. In turn, these individuals would be on the hook for promoting compliance within their organisations. Incentives will be aligned. For the best in the industry, this won’t be new. This is just how you run your business. But for others, who free ride on your reputations: the Age of Irresponsibility is over. Third, regulators should extend the coverage of market abuse regulation to include every major fixed income and currency market. And criminal sanctions should be updated, with market abuse rules similarly extended and maximum prison terms lengthened. Finally we need global standards for global markets. I welcome the FICC Markets Standards Board’s intent to be as global as possible in its membership and influence. All major Central Banks and market participants have begun working on developing a new single Global Code for FX. I would encourage IOSCO to consider complementing these efforts with a similar initiative to cover FICC markets as a whole when they meet in London next week. The FSB will engage with these processes and work to improve the alignment between remuneration and conduct risk across the globe.
The actual build-up of the Fund may span a short generation. The Fund will thereafter enter a new phase. With lower revenues from oil and gas activities, it will no longer receive capital transfers from the government. When oil and gas revenues cease to provide the government with economic rent, only the annual real return on the Fund can be used on a permanent basis. In the mid-1990s, oil prices were around USD 20 per barrel and revenues were set aside. This year the oil price must be over USD 50 per barrel to generate sufficient oil revenues to make transfers to the Fund. We must be prepared for wide variations in oil prices, and the first year without transfers of oil revenues – but rather withdrawals – may be approaching. BIS Review 44/2010  7  Increase in equity share Under the Fund’s investment strategy, more equities are purchased when equity prices fall and fewer when prices rise. Thus, the Fund purchased a large volume of equities in the period from 2001 to 2003 and during 2008 and 2009. As a result the Fund currently holds a little more than 1¾ per cent of listed European equities and roughly 1 per cent of all listed equities. The Fund’s stock holdings are spread across different countries, sectors and regions. In the early days of the Fund, the benchmark portfolio was restricted to investments in Western Europe, North America, Japan, Brazil and a limited number of countries from all over the world.

A long upturn followed from 1992 to 2008. National income rose by an annual rate of 5.4 per cent in this period, far higher than the rate of output growth in the mainland economy. Income growth was even higher than in the post-war period in the 1950s and 1960s. BIS Review 44/2010  1  Major structural reforms Behind these favourable developments were the major structural reforms of the 1980s and 1990s that resulted in an expanded production capacity in the Norwegian economy. Capital and credit markets were liberalised. It became easier to establish and build up new businesses. The EEA and WTO agreements resulted in stronger competition and increased flows of goods and services, labour and capital. As a result of the 1992 tax reform, the welfare state could be funded with reduced impact on wealth creation. The framework conditions for the electricity market, telecom market, aviation and broadcasting were changed. Trade was liberalised. State-owned companies were listed on the stock exchange and new forms of managing public agencies were developed. Industrial policy no longer kept unprofitable enterprises afloat. Subsequently, the business sector experienced a long period of high productivity growth. Moreover, shifting forces have driven the economy. In the wake of the crisis around 1990, labour costs decreased to a low level compared with Norway’s trading partners and wage settlements were moderate. In 1995, the cost level was 10 to 12 per cent below Norway’s average for the oil age from 1970 until now.
In this context, the BIS envisages 5 different scenarios on how the fintech explosion might impact banks that range from a scenario where the incumbent banks digitize and modernize themselves to retain the customer relationship and core banking services, leveraging the technologies to change their current business models (which is not far away from the currently observed trends) to a scenario where banks have become irrelevant as customers interact directly with individual financial services providers as the need for balance sheet intermediation or for a trusted third 2/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  party is removed and banks are displaced by agile platforms and technologies. Following the example of the European Banking Association, early this year, we made a short survey of domestic banks to obtain information regarding their experience with modern-day technological solutions. The results of the survey indicate that almost two thirds of domestic banks do not have any experience with fintech companies and even surprisingly, they do not have plans to establish any relationship in the near future. The banks that have some experience with fintech companies point that it is rather a commercial partnership with existing fintech firms for launching new products or services. In addition, a few banks answered that they prefer to develop in-house fintech solutions without formal cooperation with external parties.

Moreover, the low interest rate environment, which has been particularly pronounced for some years now, is part of the fallout from the global financial and economic crisis. Driven by supply and demand, high savings and weak global investment activity put additional downward pressure on interest rates. Moreover, monetary policy measures – taken by central banks to combat the financial crisis and the low inflation level – have themselves contributed to the decline in interest rates, and continue to do so. This is also true of the measures taken by the SNB. After all, we cannot remain untouched by international developments. Interest rates in Switzerland have traditionally been lower than abroad. This is due to Switzerland’s status as a safe haven: investors are willing to accept comparatively low yield in return for more security. During the financial crisis, the decline in interest rates abroad was generally more marked than in Switzerland. The interest rate differential to other countries narrowed and the Swiss franc became even more attractive. Negative interest helps to restore the interest rate differential between Switzerland and other countries, by making investments in Swiss francs less attractive and thereby reducing the pressure on the Swiss franc exchange rate. We are aware that the costs associated with negative interest are not inconsiderable. Yet without negative interest, the Swiss franc would be even stronger, which would weigh even more heavily on the economy. The SNB is thus faced with difficult trade-offs when making its monetary policy decisions.
In this environment, some have questioned the ability of our supervisory and regulatory tools to adequately address potential financial instability risks. They argue that a broad tightening of interest rate policy might be more effective in catching incipient risks that might fall through the cracks. It is certainly true that higher interest rates would permeate the entire financial system. But this is just another way of saying that raising interest rates is a blunt tool. Higher interest rates would reduce risk-taking where it is excessive; but they also would result in a pullback in economic activity in sectors where risk-taking might already be overly restrained. That’s how a blunt tool works. If you believe that financial stability can only be achieved through higher interest rates – interest rates that would do immediate damage to meeting our dual mandate goals at a time when unemployment is still unacceptably high – then we ought to at least ask ourselves if the financial system has become too big and too complex. BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  Think about how problematic the cost-benefit calculus becomes if the only way we can achieve financial stability is to raise interest rates above the level where the forces of demand and supply in the real economy put them. The possible benefit of such a restrictive rate move would be to reduce risks that might be forming in the nooks and crannies of a highly complex financial system.

It is expected that by 2025, the number of older people in Thailand will account for 20% of the population and exceed the number of children under 15 years old. In an ageing society, banks that are able to cater to the needs of older population and tailor their products to accommodate changing demands would be successful. The next trend, urbanization, happening in many East Asian countries, brings both challenges and opportunities. According to the World Bank Research that just came out early this year, almost twelve million people in Thailand now live in urban areas; about ten million live in Bangkok alone. The number seems low for the area outside Bangkok because of the strict definition of urban areas employed by the World Bank. The same research also says that, cities outside Bangkok are growing at a much faster rate, and some cities such as Surat Thani have more than doubled its population in ten years. Urbanization results in increased purchasing power and fuels domestic demand. More infrastructure investments such as housing, electricity and transportation will be required. This is where the financial sector can contribute and benefit from the development. The trend towards regionalization poses a fourth challenge as well as an opportunity for the banking sector. With the commencement of the AEC in 2015, competition will intensify, benefiting those prepared to pursue opportunities across borders.
Winners from globalisation Speech given by Ben Broadbent, Deputy Governor Monetary Policy, Bank of England  Scottish Council for Development and Industry, Aberdeen 11 July 2017  I’d like to thank Will Abel, Alina Barnett, Gene Kindberg-Hanlon and Jeremy Martin along with other colleagues for their helpful comments and assistance. 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  Two hundred and fifty years ago, a few miles south of here, Adam Smith began working on the Wealth of Nations. It was published a decade later, in 1776. So there were (at least) two revolutions that year, one marking the birth of a country, the other the birth of modern economics. One of Smith’s main targets was the doctrine of mercantilism – the idea that international trade is a zero sum game, one you win by exporting more than your neighbour. He pointed out that, if it allows you to concentrate on things you do relatively well, and buy more cheaply the stuff that others do well, international trade can make both parties better off. A precise definition of “relatively well”, in this context, had to wait until David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy, published in 1817. What matters for trading patterns, he explained, was not just absolute advantage – whether a domestic sector was more productive than its peers in other countries – but also its productivity relative to other sectors at home (“comparative advantage”).

But if the economics literature is right about the greater impact of new technology on the distribution of income, at least in the US, how many would say we should tax computer investment? The distribution of the benefits: I want to end this section with something else the early economists would recognise – that, whatever it has done to widen the distribution of income, free trade with labour-rich countries can have significantly progressive effects on prices. In their early writings on international trade the classical economists reserved particular hostility for the Corn Laws. Introduced after the Napoleonic Wars, in the midst of an economic downturn, these measures imposed heavy restrictions and tariffs on agricultural imports. The result was a much higher price of food, benefiting agricultural landowners  14  and penalising the less well-off, for whom food was the major part of  their consumption. Their eventual repeal in 1846, a landmark in Britain’s move towards (and support for) free trade in the second half of the century, owed much to the intellectual arguments of the classical economists. But it also came about because of what those restrictions meant for the poor. 11  See for example Acemoglu (1998) and Behar (2013). There are some obvious historical exceptions to this support. In 1779, there was a spate of “anti-machinery” riots. In one of them, Richard Arkwright’s new mill in Birkacre, in Lancashire, was destroyed. Thirty years later the “Luddites”, formed mainly of textile workers, also sought to destroy labour-replacing weaving machinery.
As the recent experience has shown, financial shocks can feed on themselves when they induce large swings in interest and exchange rates that undermine the fundamentals and further reduce confidence. At the same time, Hong Kong possesses a highly flexible economic structure that has proven capable of adapting quickly to new circumstances. This flexibility owes much to the inherent entrepreneurial instincts of the people and to a tradition of economic management that has  BIS Review 53/1999  4  emphasised the role of market forces, self-reliance and individual initiative. Our exchange rate system has, I believe, supported this flexibility by establishing a clear anchor on which to base decision-making. It is evident to Hong Kong residents that the ultimate responsibility for adjusting to new challenges lies with themselves. Armed with this knowledge, people have continued to behave in a pragmatic and realistic manner in response to changing circumstances, even as rising incomes have brought unprecedented prosperity. Affluence has not bred complacency. The response to the Asian crisis bears this out. Coming at the same time as the bursting of short-lived bubble in property markets, the crisis led to a plunge in property prices of some 40-50%, from the peaks in mid-1997 to the troughs twelve months later. Yet this striking decline has been accommodated without major incident. Mortgage delinquencies have edged up, but they remain below the typical levels in industrial countries, and the banks remain highly capitalised and profitable. Equally important, property prices have dropped quickly to levels consistent with underlying supply and demand.

I am happy to report that this experience has been a successful one, particularly from the point of view of monetary autonomy. Indeed, the Basic Law has, since 1 July 1997, provided Hong Kong with far greater autonomy in its monetary and financial affairs, and this autonomy has been confirmed in practice by the clear confidence that the Central Government has placed in our ability to manage things on our own. I make this point, not because Macau needs any reassurance from Hong Kong, but because it is a striking illustration of how some of the deepest forebodings about future events can often be the product of the most dismal misjudgements. Two years ago, gloomy scenarios were being painted - not about an Asian financial crisis - but about the impending demise of Hong Kong’s monetary autonomy under Chinese rule: about the breaking of the link between the Hong Kong dollar and the U.S. dollar, the absorption of Hong Kong’s substantial foreign reserves by the Mainland, and so on. Of course, nothing of the kind has happened, and there may well be lessons here to apply to some of the more lurid scenarios that are being drawn up for the first of January 2000. Our topic this morning, however, is not the Year 2000 problem, but the perennial question of how to devise sustainable and realistic monetary and exchange rate policies in an uncertain global financial environment.
Supervisors in countries that have gotten a head start on the issue can thereby provide the benefit of their experience to those who are starting later. Those supervisors getting a late start have a need for tools of this type. The Joint Year 2000 Council will also be working with the members of our External Consultative Committee, particularly the Global 2000 Coordinating Group, to build on this effort and develop a Y2K self-assessment tool that could be used broadly by the financial industry in countries around the world. We also intend to develop additional papers on a variety of Y2K topics that might be of interest to the global financial supervisory community. At this point, I am sure that members of the Committee have questions regarding the state of Y2K preparations in various parts of the world. I think that it is fair to say that most believe a spectrum exists, with the United States at one end of the spectrum, and emerging market and undeveloped countries at the other end. There are likely exceptions of course; some developed  BIS Review 56/1998  -7-  countries are probably less far along than they should be. Some emerging market countries, on the other hand, appear to be quite advanced in their preparations. Overall, however, there is still not nearly enough concrete, comparable information on the preparations of individual institutions to be able to make any confident statements about the state of global preparations in any detail.

How the U.S. outlook evolves in the future is fundamentally tied to the fortunes of the economies around the world. As I look ahead, I’m keeping a keen eye on all the data, both domestic and global, and the implications for our economy. With an uncertain outlook, vigilance and flexibility are essential for achieving our dual mandate goals of maximum employment and price stability. Persistently low inflation, heightened uncertainty, and global cross-currents make this a particularly challenging time for monetary policy, and my laser focus is on doing the best we can to support a strong economy and achieve our 2 percent inflation goal. Thank you. 1 Jerome H. Powell, Challenges for Monetary Policy, speech delivered at the “Challenges for Monetary Policy”  symposium, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, August 23, 2019. 2 See the FOMC’s Statement on Longer-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strategy, as amended effective January  29, 2019. 3 International Monetary Fund. 2019. World Economic Outlook Update: Still Sluggish Global Growth. Washington,  D.C., July. 3/3  BIS central bankers' speeches
This is an important challenge, not just for sake of healthcare, but for the sake of retirement security. We need to move towards a fair, progressive and sustainable healthcare financing systems. If we don’t, then our ability to afford decent retirement for all our citizens, in a whole range of countries, is going to be severely compromised. Emerging opportunities for insurance 29. Let me move now to some of the emerging opportunities in the insurance industry. It is a difficult environment in many respects – I’ve spoken about low interest rates, here to stay for the long term. It’s also a crowded market in traditional insurable risks. You know that better than me. Too much capital is chasing after the same risks in traditional insurance lines (property and casualty for instance), and that doesn’t help returns. 30. But there are still many viable options for growth, and here in emerging Asia especially, there are major new underwriting opportunities. •  The insurance market in emerging Asia is projected to grow by 9% per year over the next 10 years, which is substantially above the global growth of the insurance industry. •  By 2020, Asia is expected to account for 40% of the insurance business. 31. There are three major opportunities that I will highlight briefly, besides traditional underwriting opportunities. Infrastructure financing 32. First, infrastructure financing. It is a huge opportunity in Asia.

Tharman Shanmugaratnam: Challenges and opportunities for the insurance industry Address by Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, at the International Insurance Society Global Insurance Forum, Singapore, 13 June 2016. *  *  *  Mr Michael Morrissey, President & CEO, International Insurance Society Distinguished delegates 1. Let me first say how pleased we at the MAS are that you have chosen to hold your meeting in Singapore. We are especially humbled by your decision to host the meeting in Singapore in rotation with New York and London, henceforth, so that we meet in Asia, in Singapore, once every three years. 2. It’s a challenging time for the insurance industry, and more broadly, for everyone involved in the business of providing assurance in retirement. But it’s also a time of opportunity, especially in Asia, where the opportunities for insurance are multiplying. I’ll talk a little about the challenges the industry faces before highlighting some opportunities. Ensuring retirement security 3. The challenges come about for reasons that go well beyond the cyclical forces. We are faced with structural trends around the world, that are making the business of insurance and pension funds and everyone concerned with retirement security more difficult. 4. The principle challenge lies in the combination of meeting the needs of societies getting older and living for longer and an environment of low interest rates. 5.