samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
On top of the promotion of e-commerce, PromptPay together with other e-Payment initiatives, for example shared point of sales (POS) terminals, digital tax messaging, standardized QR codes, will lead to significant reduction in costs of cash management and paper processing, currently borne by banks, businesses, consumers, as well as the Bank of Thailand. In addition, the move from cash-based transactions to more electronic-based transactions can potentially reduce incidences of corruption and improve governance through greater transparency. On the regulatory front, an important development is the crafting of the Payment System Act which aims to consolidate fragmented laws and regulations governing electronic payments. The Act will set out business rules and regulatory framework for our payment systems that meet international standards. To date, the Act has been endorsed by the cabinet and expected to soon be presented to the National Legislative Assembly. Let me say a few words about FinTech. We view FinTech as an important addition to our  financial service ecosystem. FinTech would give consumers more options and save operating costs for financial institution and service providers. On a bright side, FinTech firms are agile and efficient by nature. Yet allowing certain types of them to run freely may destabilize the ecosystem. We need to promote financial innovation while ensuring that potential risks from its misuse would not contribute to systemic risks’ build-up. Equally important, there needs to be adequate consumer protection. The Bank of Thailand aims to foster a symbiosis between FinTech and our current financial ecosystem.

When it became apparent that impaired loans were in circulation but that no one really knew where they were and to what extent, confidence in the banks disappeared. The market participants stopped lending to the banks. The banks also stopped lending to each other and when it also became impossible to sell previously liquid assets or to use them as collateral for loans the liquidity crisis had definitely arrived. One lesson that we have learned from this is how quickly liquid markets can become illiquid. We also know that the participants and the authorities underestimated how seriously the markets would be affected by the crisis. But, when the price of an asset falls it is no longer possible to borrow as much money on this asset. Participants are then forced to sell the asset to acquire liquidity. If many small – or a few large – participants sell at the same time then prices fall even further. From the point of view of an individual participant it is rational to decide to lend less or to sell the asset. However, the collapse in market prices that is a consequence of these decisions affects everybody. The impact this has on the market is, in other words, a negative external effect. Selling assets at “bargain-basement” prices should normally attract buyers. But exactly the opposite happened. There was uncertainty about the actual value of some complex and untransparent assets, which explains why the buyers disappeared.
As we all know, there are many uncertainties when dealing with an assumption of political nature. And, for this year in particular, our forecast team had a hard time making fiscal assumptions. On the one hand, the government is trying to accelerate budget disbursement and push through infrastructure projects. On the other hand, the country is  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  undergoing structural reforms in many areas. Some on-going reform processes, such as those related to fighting corruption 1, cannot help but delay government spending and investment. This is dynamism of the current reform period. Some measures incur “short-term pain” but are necessary to create “long-term gains”. (Slide 2) Underlying fundamentals and medium-term outlook Ladies and gentlemen, Despite headwinds and disappointing growth last year, the underlying fundamentals that have been attracting investors to Thailand are still in place. The country’s overall economic stability remains sound against a backdrop of low unemployment, well-anchored inflation and a strong current account position. (Slide 3) Thanks to the painful lessons of the crisis back in 1997 and the adjustment thereafter, the main sectors in the economy (be it banks, corporate, households or government) have also kept their leverage in check. The banking and corporate sector had undergone a dramatic change and now possesses a fairly healthy structure. NPLs of the banking sector dropped from 43% during the crisis, to 2.3% in 2014, while debt-to-equity ratio in the corporate sector declined from 5.1 in 1997 to 1.3 in 2014.

Foreign participation in the Thai bond market decreased from a peak of 13 percent to the current level of around 10 percent of total outstanding public sector bond. The strong local institutional investor base was able to pick up from where foreigners left. Despite foreigners exiting the Thai bond market, total portfolio outflows last year (2014) amounted to a mere 1 percent of our international reserves. A flexible exchange rate, a relatively balanced external position and a modest external exposure, altogether acting as the first line of defence, contributed to the success. The Bank of Thailand is also equipped with comprehensive policy tools, along with ample international reserves, that can be used as a backstop to deal with disruptive capital flows and to  1  Examples of anti-corruption measures are 1) the Construction Sector Transparency Initiative (CosT) which promotes transparency in state enterprise projects and 2) Integrity Pacts which oversee purchase plans of government and state enterprise projects. Among the big projects already implemented are 1) Suvarnabhumi Airport Phase II 2) the Blue Line metro extension, and 3) Bangkok NGV bus purchase plan. 2  Total corporate debt / total corporate equity. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  safeguard financial stability. In fact, these are our multiple lines of defence available at our disposal. Ladies and gentlemen, We, should not be under the illusion, however, that good fundamentals can be taken for granted. In fact, the slowdown of economic growth in the recent years pinpoints to structural problems, holding back the economy.
Alan Krueger, Judd Cramer and David Cho, among others, have shown that the relationship during this cycle between real wages and the short-term unemployment rate – that is, those unemployed 26 weeks or less – has been in line with historical norms, whereas the huge  7  The job openings rate is the number of job openings on the last business day of the month as a percent of total employment plus job openings. 8  The hiring rate stood at 4.0 percent at its 2006 peak and fell to as low as 2.8 percent in 2009. Today, it is 3.5 percent. 9  See Dice Hiring Indicators (2014). 10  Daly and Hobijn (2014). 11  See National Association for Business Economics (2014b). 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  spike in long-term unemployment exerted minimal pressure on real wage growth. 12 Of course, the short-term unemployment rate is now close to its pre-recession level. So their model implies nominal wage growth should be returning to something close to the fundamentals implied by productivity growth and inflation. My staff’s research comes to a somewhat different conclusion. Using state-level data, they show that if you further split short-term unemployment into those unemployed one month or less and those unemployed between one and six months, only the one-to-six month rate has any predictive power for wage growth. This so-called medium-term unemployment rate is still somewhat above its pre-recession mark.

Zeti Akhtar Aziz: The transformation of Labuan as an International Business and Financial Centre Speech by Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz, Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia, at the launch of Labuan International Business and Financial Centre, Kuala Lumpur, 28 January 2008. *  *  *  Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to the launch of Labuan International Business and Financial Centre. This decade has seen the Labuan Offshore Financial Centre demonstrate its ability to adjust and reinvent itself in a rapidly changing international and regional environment. This decade has also witnessed the robustness and resilience of the Labuan Offshore Financial Centre as evidenced by its ability to continue to expand and mature even during the most challenging of periods. The global and regional market place however, continues to transform, bringing with it new opportunities and challenges. To have the flexibility to benefit from the new opportunities and to have the capacity to rise to the new emerging demands and challenges, continued reassessments need to take place to rediscover new directions, build new strengths, new comparative advantages and to define our new role in this ever changing and more competitive market place. Today we are defining a new beginning for the Labuan Offshore Financial Centre as it positions itself for a much larger role. Your presence here today to share in this auspicious occasion is indeed appreciated.
However, it is often assumed that the monetary policy pursued by the American central bank (“the Fed”) has played a decisive part. The Fed’s policy during the last twenty years differ from the policy in the preceding period in their more active and determined use of monetary policy to keep inflation low and stable. As a result, it has been possible to avoid both the overheating and the recessions that often occur when an overheated economy suddenly comes to a halt. In other words, the Fed is credited with succeeding in making recessions fewer, smaller and shorter, mainly by ensuring that the economy does not become overheated. It is important to point out that the favourable trend in the US economy during the last twenty years is not, as you might gather from following the Swedish debate, due to the American central bank “leaning back” and basically letting the economy “take care of itself”. Quite the contrary, in fact. If we were to try to draw a lesson from all this that would be relevant to the Swedish context, it would mean that in future the Riksbank should try to avoid the great fluctuations in economic activity that were caused by the devaluation policy of the 1970s and 1980s. During those years there was a long succession of cost crises and exchange rates were adjusted so many times that in the end devaluations were virtually accepted as a fact of life.

During the four euro area business cycle expansions since 1970, there have been 50 soft patches – defined as a two-quarter growth slowdown – and only 4 recessions.4 In fact, the euro area faced an analogous situation in 2016, when the economy also went through a soft patch triggered by a contraction in world trade. At that time, the strength of the domestic economy was able to shield the recovery from external uncertainties. The key question is whether, with monetary policy continuing to support the expansion, domestic 1/6  BIS central bankers' speeches  demand will remain as resilient today. The demand component typically affected most by a weaker global environment is investment. ECB internal analysis shows that the more exposed euro area listed firms are to foreign markets, the more sensitive they are to uncertainty when making their investment decisions. And there are some signs that external demand may be affecting investment via manufacturing value chains within the euro area. In particular, both extra and intra-euro area trade slowed steeply last year, whereas in 2016 intraeuro area trade was robust to the external slowdown. Such a recoupling of intra- and extra-euro area trade growth in a downward direction has not occurred since the start of the global financial crisis. Intra-euro area exports of intermediate and capital goods were hit particularly hard, with capital goods exports registering their strongest contraction since the sovereign debt crisis. A further rise in global uncertainty could therefore lead to a deceleration in trade and investment.
Thank you for your attention. 6  BIS Review 133/2008

In this field, I believe that an important step forward is represented by the recent MoU on financial stability arrangement signed by the EU central banks, supervisors and ministries of finance in June 2008. Finally, referring more to the supervisory domain but still linked to the central bank interest, the turmoil has evidenced the need for strengthening the macro-prudential dimension of regulation and supervision. This means the regulatory and supervisory requirements should be able to ensure adequate capital and liquidity buffers throughout the economic cycle. In this regard, the actual impact of the new capital adequacy regime under of Basel II will have to be monitored very closely. BIS Review 106/2008  1
One of the key challenges for monetary researchers is, accordingly, to discover more about what determines inflation expectations. Meanwhile, whatever is incorporated into forecasting models, policymakers cannot sensibly just take it for granted that expectations are anchored, so that inflation will painlessly come back into line with the target whenever it is driven away by temporary cost shocks. What that means right now is that arresting the upside risk to inflation cannot rely entirely on real-economy interactions. So what diagnostics have we got on nominal trends, right now? On the whole, they are not signalling an imminent resurgence in inflationary psychology. Nominal demand growth has slowed quite sharply (Chart 5). Adjusting for various misleading technicals, 14 broad money has decelerated sharply (Chart 6). The rate of growth of so-called Divisia money, a measure of transactions balances, has similarly fallen sharply. And in the labour market, nominal earnings growth has recently been below 3.5%, although the annual wage round lies ahead. Sterling’s exchange rate has fallen, however. That might be consistent with the foreign exchange markets expecting a nominal shock in the future. But there are other possible explanations, notably that a risk premium may have become incorporated to compensate for uncertainty in the outlook. Had there been a shift in the market’s inflation expectations, the obvious place for that to show up would be in the yields on nominal government bonds.

Unit-linked policies accounted for more than a quarter of gross inflows in September 2019, but only 7% of net inflows. This discussion is relevant for new subscriptions; for top-up payments into existing policies, the terms of the contract must of course continue to apply. With regard to new policies and new ad hoc inflows, these should not lead to the returns paid to existing policyholders being overly diluted. The duty of advice applies here: it has to be tailored to the individual client and to their particular situation, but it is rarely good advice to invest 100% in euro funds or 100% in unit-linked policies. So I am asking you to use your innovative capacity and promote offerings that, alongside eurocroissance and retirement savings, could make up a category of investments where the risk is contained, somewhere between euro products and unit-linked policies. At the ACPR, we are fully prepared to facilitate these initiatives, by supporting any demands for regulatory adjustments that might prove necessary, and without ruling out a recalibration of the tax rules applicable to different products. But more broadly, over the medium-term, it is life insurers’ business model that needs to be redesigned. We need to think about this together, and get ready to use all the levers that can help in this transformation. II. Our ambition for the Solvency II review  I would like to turn now to your second major concern: Solvency II.
Minouche Shafik: Making markets fair and effective Speech by Ms Minouche Shafik, Deputy Governor for Markets and Banking of the Bank of England, at the London School of Economics, London, 27 October 2014. *  *  *  Accompanying figures can be found at the end of the speech. Making markets fair and effective It is a real pleasure to be giving my first speech as Deputy Governor of the Bank of England at the London School of Economics (LSE). It resonates on so many fronts. The LSE has produced many members of the Monetary Policy Committee, Deputy Governors and indeed Governors of the Bank of England as well as vast numbers of its staff over the years. I was taught macroeconomics at the LSE by Charlie Bean, one of my predecessors at the Bank as well as by my host this evening, Nick Stern, when I did the MSc in economics. And the topic of my speech tonight resonates with the origins of the LSE as an institution that always sought to bring the best of academic thinking to the pressing problems of the day. As you will no doubt realise by the frequency of misconduct stories in the papers, Fixed Income, Currency and Commodity (or FICC) markets are certainly dealing with pressing problems.

The SNB will closely monitor the effectiveness of the revised self-regulation. In  1  Federal Council (2019): Bericht des Bundesrates zu den systemrelevanten Banken. www.admin.ch/opc/de/federal-gazette/2019/5385.pdf  Page 2/4  Berne, 12 December 2019 Fritz Zurbrügg  News conference  parallel, it will continue to regularly reassess the need for an adjustment of the countercyclical capital buffer. Climate change and financial stability  Let me now turn to climate change, a subject already addressed by my colleague Thomas Jordan. Climate change can pose longer-term risks to financial stability. There are primarily two ways in which climate risks can affect the financial system. One is through the increase in the frequency and severity of natural disasters with all their consequences, and the other is through changes to climate policy and to the corresponding regulations. It is the responsibility of individual financial system participants to fully understand climate risks relevant to them and to correctly assess the potential consequences from a business perspective – just as with other risks. For its part, the SNB is focusing on how climate risks could impact on the stability of the Swiss banking system as a whole, as well as on systemically important financial market infrastructures. Currently, the SNB considers the likelihood of risks linked to climate change threatening the stability of the banking system as a whole to be low. In the case of financial market infrastructures, climate risks are minimised, for example, by stipulating that technical facilities be distributed over different locations.
In this scenario, the FOMC could misjudge the presence and magnitude of economic impediments and misread the recent progress we have made as evidence of sounder economic trends. If we were to presume prematurely that the U.S. economy has returned to a more business-as-usual position and reduce monetary accommodation too soon, we could find ourselves in the very uncomfortable position of falling back into the ZLB environment. Such an outcome could be a serious setback to the timely attainment of our dual mandate policy objectives. This risk consideration means that the decision to lift the funds rate from zero should be made only when we have a great deal of confidence that growth has enough momentum to reach full employment and that inflation will return to a sustainable 2 percent rate. We should also proceed cautiously and keep the path of rate increases relatively shallow for some time after we begin to raise rates. This approach will allow us time to assess how the economy is performing under less accommodative financial conditions and reduce the odds of overaggressive rate hikes choking off progress toward our policy goals. History Shows That Premature Exit Is a Risk  15  See National Association for Business Economics (2014a). 16  See, for example, Kocherlakota (2013). 6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Great depression Past experience with the ZLB also counsels patience. History has not looked kindly on attempts to prematurely remove monetary accommodation from economies that are in or near a liquidity trap.

Charles L Evans: Is it time to return to business-as-usual monetary policy? A case for patience Speech by Mr Charles L Evans, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, at the 56th National Association for Business Economics (NABE) Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, 29 September 2014. *  *  *  Thank you. I would like to thank the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) for inviting me to speak this morning. The organizers of this annual meeting were farsighted in arranging the conference around the theme of long-term strategies. As the many excellent speakers make clear, there is much to ponder as we contemplate the future of monetary policy. And I welcome the opportunity to talk to you today about my views on the appropriate strategy for determining the timing and pace of our eventual policy normalization. Before I begin, let me note that the views I express are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) or within the Federal Reserve System. Introduction and summary As you know, for almost six years, economic conditions have led the FOMC to keep its primary policy tool, the federal funds rate, at its effective zero lower bound (ZLB). When will it be time to finally lift the funds rate from the ZLB? Of course, the answer to that question depends on our progress toward our mandated goals of maximum sustainable employment and price stability.