samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Today, I will focus my remarks on how best practice efforts can help support the integrity and effectiveness of financial markets. I will draw upon the New York Fed’s experience with the Treasury Market Practices Group (TMPG), the Foreign Exchange Committee (FXC), and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Foreign Exchange Working Group (BIS FXWG) in developing and refining best practices for financial markets. The markets covered by these groups are those for U.S. Treasuries, agency debt, agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS), and foreign exchange (FX). Segments of these markets have historically operated under an over-the-counter (OTC) trading model and, as a result, lack a formal central trading venue like an exchange with established rules. 2 These markets are of particular interest for central banks globally, because of their important role in the implementation of monetary policy. In light of these considerations, central banks have made extensive efforts to convene market participants to develop best practices that help cultivate fair and effective markets. 3 As a participant in these markets, the Desk has a direct interest in their integrity and effectiveness. I hope my remarks will reinforce why the New York Fed and primary dealers as a group should be interested in continuing to support best practices. Your engagement in  1  The “Desk” refers to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s trading desk, which implements monetary policy on behalf of the Federal Reserve System, as directed by the Federal Open Market Committee.

It has a long history – more than three decades – of publishing documentation to facilitate FX transactions and market functioning and to articulate best practices. 9 The New York Fed is also involved in the BIS FXWG to help establish and promote adherence to an FX Global Code, a single set of guiding principles for the FX market. These groups have confronted collective action problems where an individual firm may want to raise concerns, but be unable to drive market-wide improvements. Second, when central banks partner with private-sector participants to develop best practices, it can send a powerful signal to the market. For their part, private-sector  in TMPG-covered markets and received feedback from firms active in electronic trading and an industry association of proprietary trading firms. This feedback helped refine the proposed best practice updates. 6  The OTC Derivatives Supervisors Group originated in 2005 when the New York Fed hosted a meeting of major OTC derivatives dealers and their domestic and international supervisors. The Alternative Reference Rates Committee was convened by the Federal Reserve in 2014 in a meeting with representatives of major OTC derivatives market participants, their supervisors, and central banks. 7  Outside of New York Fed-sponsored groups is the Group of Thirty (G30). The G30 was established in 1978 and is an international body composed of senior representatives in the private and public sectors and academia. It has a broad mandate and works on various issues relating to international economic and monetary affairs.
To date, CCRIS has a database of 9 million users covering approximately 53% of the adult population while the Credit Bureau Malaysia has over 28,000 registered members and generated more than 1.4 million credit reports. To empower consumers to make well-informed financial decisions, Bank Negara Malaysia has also established financial advisory centres and contact points such as the Credit Counselling and Debt Management Agency and BNMLINK. Since its inception in 2006,  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  AKPK has provided financial education to the public, benefiting more than 260,000 people nationwide. To provide financial knowledge to the young, financial education elements are now incorporated as part of the syllabus for primary schools and will be extended to secondary schools by 2017. Consumer education efforts in Malaysia are also reinforced by a holistic consumer protection framework to ensure financial institutions practise responsible financing, conduct effective product transparency and disclosure, as well as, appropriate debt collection practices. These measures have produced positive outcomes. As a result, 92% of adults (aged 15 and above) in Malaysia have access to a deposit account and basic banking services. Malaysia has also been ranked first for 6 consecutive years since 2007 for “Getting Credit” in the “Ease of Doing Business” index by the World Bank. Accelerating the migration to e-payments as a key enabler for financial inclusion The success of any financial inclusion tool or policy would depend largely on the presence of a reliable, efficient and safe payment system.

Muhammad bin Ibrahim: Developing a safe and secure electronic payment ecosystem to promote financial inclusion Speech by Mr Muhammad bin Ibrahim, Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia (Bank Negara Malaysia), at the Regulatory Forum for the Asia Pacific Region: “Developing a Safe and Secure Electronic Payment Ecosystem to Promote Financial Inclusion”, Kuala Lumpur, 4 August 2014. *  *  *  Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to be here today to deliver the Keynote Speech for MasterCard’s Regulatory Forum for the Asia Pacific region with the theme “Developing a Safe and Secure Electronic Payment Ecosystem to Promote Financial Inclusion”. With 2.5 billion people across the world still unbanked, financial inclusion is a significant global agenda to ensure that all segments of the society, including the most vulnerable groups, have access and usage of quality and affordable financial services. This forum, which brings together regulators, international financial institutions and other payment system stakeholders, is an important platform to surface and exchange ideas on emerging trends, risks and opportunities in the use of cost-effective electronic payment system to drive financial inclusion. Over the years, Bank Negara Malaysia has taken many measures in promoting financial inclusion and in accelerating the country’s migration to electronic payments (e-payments). I will share some of my thoughts on the key areas in the payment value chain that could drive and expand the financial inclusion agenda via e-payments.
And I’m sorry in this respect to be jumping ship at this particular point. But I’m convinced that calmer waters lie not too far ahead. And I’ve every confidence that Mervyn King - who has in effect been our Chief Navigating Officer for much of the past decade, and who will take over as skipper at the end of the month, with an outstanding MPC and Bank crew to support him - will find the way through. I certainly wish them safe passage! My Lord Mayor, if the harsh international climate made life difficult for us on the macro-economic front, the associated, sustained, fall, in global equity markets in particular, made it an unusually tough time for many financial institutions here in the City. Happily, here too, there are more recent signs of improvement. Perhaps the truly remarkable thing about that is that the financial system as a whole withstood the pressures as well as it did. But over a longer time horizon the City’s financial institutions have responded remarkably well to sustained market pressure for change, and we have been outstandingly successful in fulfilling the City’s vital economic, and social, function of promoting growth and employment both in this country and across the globe. One can think of lots of reasons for that success - I pick out two in particular. First, we have managed over time to maintain a reasonable balance between creative market dynamics on the one hand and official intervention and regulation on the other.

A year ago there were grounds for hoping that the external storms were beginning to abate, but those hopes were deferred - by the after-effects of corporate governance and accounting failures in the US and by uncertainty associated with the war in Iraq. There nevertheless remain reasonable grounds for  BIS Review 29/2003  1  thinking that the external environment will now gradually improve as we move through the second half of this year into next, and that this will help to offset the gradual moderation we are beginning to see in the growth of consumer spending. That would open the way to continued relatively steady and better balanced growth - at or above trend, with inflation remaining close to target. But there are certainly short-term risks on either side, and given those risks - including the risk of slow growth in the Eurozone, particularly in Germany - I agree with your assessment that the economic case for euro-entry has not yet been made. More generally on that subject, I very much welcome the Treasury’s exhausting - I mean exhaustive - broader assessment of the longer-term pros and cons which I hope, when people have had time to digest it properly, will result in a better balanced - less polarised - debate on the economics of the euro question. I confess that I had hoped that we would by now be further along the narrow channel I have described on past occasions between the Charybdis of external weakness and Scylla of unsustainable consumer demand.
In other professions, such as medicine, prescriptive rules have generated a wood-from-trees problem. They have also caused defensive, backside-covering behaviour. Both may have increased risk in the system. What is true of doctors is almost certainly true of bank supervisors. In the pre-crisis period, being required to monitor many small, rule-based risks may have caused supervisors to overlook potentially life-threatening ones. This ticked-box approach failed to save the banks, just as in medicine it fails to save lives. Supervision suffered the same fate as the autistic savant – penny-wise but pound-foolish. Breaking free of that psychological state calls for a fresh approach, one which is less rules-focussed, more judgement-based. That alternative approach to financial supervision is beginning to be recognised. For example, this approach will underpin the Bank of England’s new supervisory model when it assumes prudential regulatory responsibilities next year (Bank of England and FSA (2011)). Accompanying this will be a streamlined approach to regulatory reporting in the UK. In line with US reporting from the 1860s, more regulatory data will be available “on call”. In future, the limits of Excel will hopefully no longer be tested. This will reduce the complexity quotient, making easier the wood-and-trees task for supervisors. It will also hopefully streamline compliance costs for both regulator and regulated. This approach does not come without risks. As when catching a frisbee or a criminal, catching crises relies on a lengthy sample of past experience. Good supervision means developing well-honed rules of thumb.

So one of the secrets to making this new supervisory approach a success will be the accumulated experience of supervisory staff. That means having staff with a nose for a crisis (like a hedgehog) as well as ears and eyes (like a fox). Therein lies a dilemma. Galbraith observed that: “There can be few fields of human endeavour in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.” 23 A full crisis cycle might last 20–30 years. A systemic crisis might only occur once or twice a century. Among  22  A number of authors have proposed basing contractual triggers in banks’ debt instruments on market-based measures of capital adequacy (Calomiris and Herring (2011), Flannery (2010)). 23  Galbraith (2008). 16  BIS central bankers’ speeches  risk managers, typical levels of experience are significantly less than a full crisis cycle. The same is true among bank supervisors. Historically, financial supervision has been long foxes and short hedgehogs. Ever-expanding numbers of regulators will not solve this problem – if anything, that may cause average levels of experience to fall, not rise. Nor will ever-expanding amounts of regulatory reporting – if anything, that breeds more complexity, not less. A strong case can be made for a reversal of the historical trajectory in which “more is more”. This strategy has comprehensively, and repeatedly, failed the crisis test. This calls for a different supervisory direction of travel.
The new PvP link will eliminate this principal risk by enabling the Thai Baht delivered in Thailand and the US dollar delivered in Hong Kong to be done at the same time in a coordinated manner within the Asian time zone. The linkage of the two RTGS systems will enhance integration of the financial markets in Thailand and Hong Kong, and provide a win-win solution that will bring significant benefits to the banks on both sides. For the banks in Thailand, the USD RTGS system in Hong Kong, with its low cost and operating hours that are fully synchronized with its Thai counterpart, will provide a highly flexible and cost-effective solution for them to manage the settlement risk of their US dollar FX transactions. There are more than 90 participating banks in the USD RTGS system in Hong Kong, of which 18 have significant presence in Thailand. This extensive network will provide ample USD liquidity and easily accessible correspondent banking service to the Thai banks for the PvP service. For banks in Hong Kong, the link will provide them with new correspondent banking opportunities of serving Thai banks in settling their US dollar FX transactions in Hong Kong. Over time, this new relationship will also create opportunities for commercial cooperation on other fronts.

The other Nordic countries – Denmark, Finland and Sweden – are comparable in size and structures, but are mainly non-oil economies. 3 Three indicators may be relevant in this context. First, there is no evidence that our productivity growth has been eroded. In fact, Norway has generally managed to sustain high productivity growth compared with most other advanced countries. Second, there is no evidence that labour force participation has been impaired. In fact, labour force participation is now high, after having lagged behind our neighbouring countries up to the mid-1980s. A third indicator is welfare spending. Here, there is evidence that developments have been less favourable. Norway has seen a sharp increase in sickness absence and a steadily higher share of the working-age population is on disability benefit or rehabilitation schemes. Over the past decade, Norway has underperformed on this score compared with the other  1  The expression ”Dutch disease” originates from the Netherlands, where the government rapidly spent large revenues from extraction of gas in the 1960s. 2  The economic literature includes many studies that look at the relationship between income from natural resources and economic growth, see for example Jeffrey D. Sachs and Andrew M. Warner, “The curse of Natural Resources”, European Economic Review 45 (2001) and Thorvaldur Gylfason, “Natural Resources and Economic Growth: From Dependence to Diversification”, Discussion paper No. 4804, CEPR. 3  Denmark has also been producing oil and gas since the early 1970s, but on a smaller scale than Norway.
Average difference between forecasts and Sources: Consensus Economics Inc. and the Riksban outcome of forecasts made during 2005 and 2006  Actual and trend labour productivity 6  6 Outcome and forecast Trend  5 4  4  3  3  2  2  1  1  0  0  -1  -1 -2  -2 81  83  85  87  Annual percentage change, seasonally adjusted data  6  5  89  91  93  95  97  99  01  03  05  07  09  Sources: Statistics Sweden and the Riksbank  BIS Review 17/2007  Revised GDP 115  115 Outcome February 2007 Outcome and forecast M arch 2005 Outcome and forecast June 2005  113  113  111  111  109  109  107  107  105  105  103  103  101  101  99  99  97  97  95  95 03  04  05  Index Q1 2003 = 100  06  Sources: Statistics Sweden and the Riksbank  GDP Annual percentage change 6  6  5  5  4  4  3  3  2  2  1  1  0 mar-02  mar-03  mar-04  mar-05  mar-06  mar-07  mar-08  mar-09  0 mar-10  Sources: Statistics Sweden and the Riksbank Note. Broken lines represent the Riksbank’s forecast.

This is critical to ensure the benefits of regional integration are experienced by all in the region. Conclusion While the future for ASEAN looks promising, ASEAN businesses, including SMEs, need to consider and explore an ASEAN strategy and to view ASEAN as an increasingly integrated market. Having such regional or international perspectives may prove to be a game changer for SMEs, paving a path towards sustained growth, increased job creation, and higher innovation capacity. A crucial element in the ASEAN economic agenda is the development of the SME sector which will contribute to stronger and more equitable growth in the region. The next frontier for SMEs is to emerge as regional players that are not constrained by the domestic consumer base. SMEs possess the potential to participate in global production networks by riding on ASEAN’s intrinsic strengths and prospects, multiple SME-focused policy initiatives as well as the continued wave of regional financial integration. This will allow for the transition for SMEs to benefit immensely from the ongoing regional economic and financial integration and thus contribute towards a balanced and sustainable growth of our region. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches
Inflation expectation indicators also remain low over all horizons, far from the ECB’s 2% benchmark. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  However, it must be emphasised that monetary policy’s ability to address the challenges posed by a situation such as that we face today is not without limits. Laying the foundations for a sound and long-lasting recovery in activity, investment and employment requires an approach in concert with other economic policies, especially fiscal policy, along with institutional reform, labour and product market reforms and strengthened European governance. Thus, according to their individual circumstances, euro area countries should use the room for manoeuvre provided for in the Stability and Growth Pact to bolster aggregate demand and growth in activity. Admittedly, in many cases, the precarious state of public finances leaves little room for stimulus measures, such as tax cuts or higher public spending, especially because the countries with most spare capacity are also those with the highest levels of public debt. However, fiscal policy’s contribution to growth is not only determined by revenue and expenditure levels, but also by their composition. In that respect, there is some scope (broader in some countries than in others) for a shift in the tax structure towards taxes that are less distortionary and more favourable to growth. A further objective is to make public expenditure more efficient and direct it to those components that are more favourable to growth.

In the more medium term, the combination of negative demographics, low productivity growth and high levels of public and private debt constrains the euro area’s ability to regain precrisis growth rates, creating a breeding ground for disillusionment with and distrust of the European project. It is, therefore, essential that governments revive the reform momentum, to optimise the working of production factors and product markets, improve the business environment and complete the euro area governance framework. Important labour market reforms have been undertaken in recent years, especially in the countries hardest hit by the crisis. Empirical evidence shows the positive impact that those reforms have had on growth and employment. But preventing high unemployment rates from becoming entrenched and long-term unemployment from growing remain a priority. Where least progress is perceived is perhaps in reform of the product and service markets. Recent experience shows that it is important to implement the reform agenda in the right order, since early reforms, tending to enhance competition, may be vital to ensure that labour market reforms have the desired positive effects. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  In various euro area countries, product market reforms should aim to improve the business environment, remove administrative barriers and increase competition. Revamped insolvency proceedings would help to improve management of the loan write-offs that currently place such a heavy burden on banks’ balance sheets. Insolvency proceedings, if well designed, can be an efficient way to reallocate resources to sectors and firms that offer higher growth potential.
•  Another welcomed development of the banking system belongs to the customer service, which through electronic terminals, has been naturally associated with the increased number of electronic cards in circulation. Presently, banks provide debit and credit cards, in cooperation with the international companies of Visa and MasterCard, Diners Club. Nine banks provide the ATM service and the number of the latter ones at end of December 2005 was 205, while in August of this year it has reached to 266. In the meantime, the number of the points of sale has reached to 1073, of debit cards to about 70,176 and of credit cards to 4,245. •  Undoubtedly, the further expansion and strengthening of the banking system is an important aspect. The geographic extension of covering the territory with banking business, the increased competition, the introduction of many new products and the new recent developments constitute an additional argument for the vital role played by the banking system. The map of covering the country with banking business was further expanded, including new regions uncovered previously. Thirty new branches and agencies were opened during 2004, while in 2005 their number became 48, making the total number of branches at end of 2005 reach 127 and that of agencies reach 113. 4  BIS Review 115/2006  •  The positive developments in the banking sector and the increased number of subsidiaries and agencies have brought about a considerable increase in the number of employees.

Hence, after putting into operation the real time gross settlement system and the automated electronic clearing house system, the establishment of a loans register is presently aimed at. After the completion of the automated electronic clearing house system, another possibility is created not only for the banking system but also for the business of services of a periodic nature, so as to enhance its economic efficiency. •  The Bank of Albania deems that a banking system helps the economic growth if it is sound financially, since the developing economies, such as our economy, are generally characterised by a fragile stability. Therefore the Bank of Albania has taken a number of measures, aimed at enhancing its supervisory abilities, with the purpose to have a strong, sound and efficient banking system. Regardless of the positive developments, still much has to be done. The degree of financial intermediation continues to be relatively low. Some economy sectors, such as agriculture, continue to be slightly credited or not credited at all. The banking credit contribution to productive investments is still low, and moreover, given the high weight of lending to support the trade activity, the conclusion drawn is that the majority of loans go for financing the imports. Also, the degree of using the banking system is not in the required parameters, and moreover, the degree of using cash is still high. During the current year, it has been worked for improving the existing Law “On Banks in the Republic of Albania”.