samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
It means we are better able to reflect the requirements of the firms that use the services we provide and ultimately the people of the UK. And we can balance the potentially competing needs of different stakeholders on an informed basis rather than relying only on the views of longstanding contacts. A key piece of engagement took place in summer 2018 when we ran a joint consultation10 with Pay.UK and the Payments Systems Regulator on the implementation of ISO 20022. Over 70 organisations replied and their responses11 helped refine our approach, for example on Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs). Responses showed widespread support for making LEIs mandatory for transactions between financial institutions in CHAPS. Many respondents also saw the benefits of mandating LEIs for a wider range of payments but flagged the need for wider adoption of LEIs before these benefits could be fully reaped. The Bank has committed to working with key stakeholders including HM Government and the Global LEI Foundation (GLEIF), as well as providing further education about the wider economic value of the LEI. This will lay the foundations to make LEIs mandatory for a much wider set of CHAPS payments in the future. We are also seeking industry views on whether the renewed RTGS service could facilitate synchronised settlement and importantly what the demand might be. Synchronisation, or atomic settlement, is the concept that two or more transactions (payments or movements of assets) are linked in such a way as to ensure that each transaction completes if, and only if, they complete together.

An important catalyst is the renewal of RTGS, where we are making both policy and infrastructure changes to support not just a resilient payment system, but one that new players can enter and where innovation and competition can thrive. For those not familiar with RTGS, it is a critical piece of national infrastructure and the backbone of UK payments. Well in excess of £ every working day is settled through RTGS, including from CHAPS, the Bank-operated high-value payment system, and from the final settlement of the UK’s retail payment systems. The Bank has established the RTGS Renewal Programme to develop a new service which will not only enhance resilience but will also be fit for the future and promote innovation. Having defined the Programme scope, with input from the payments industry, we are now running a competitive public procurement process to appoint a Technology Delivery Partner. They will work with the Bank on the design and build of the core settlement engine. In supplementing the skills and resources we have in-house, the procurement provides the opportunity to benefit from diverse views and to draw on world-class expertise and cutting-edge experience on how we design and build RTGS for the future. In renewing RTGS, we are seeking to achieve five key outcomes, all of which will support a safe and diverse payment landscape. Despite being over 20 years old, the current RTGS service remains highly resilient. But we want to do more.
The performance of the relatively low-capitalised banking sector has been devastating during the last decade. 7. Conclusion  To conclude, leverage has been a major contributing factor in the current financial crisis. Excessive leverage has amplified the shocks to the financial system. Moreover, the now inevitable de-leveraging is imposing further stress on the system. To enhance the longerterm resilience of the financial system, effective regulation to curtail banks’ leverage is required. In an attempt to put a lower bound on banks’ leverage, I strongly support enhancing current risk-weighted capital requirements with a simple leverage ratio. A leverage ratio effectively serves as a safety valve against the weaknesses and shortcomings of risk-weighted requirements. It ensures a minimum capital buffer that protects banks against unexpected losses and underestimation of risk. As we have learned from the current crisis, the failure of risk models may quickly turn banks that seem comfortably capitalised into poorly capitalised banks. Let me emphasise again that I don’t advocate replacing the current Basel II regime with a leverage ratio. This would be unwise, as we would forgo all the advantages of the riskweighted requirements. In particular, we would lose valuable indicators of banks’ levels of risk. And, quite frankly, there is no real alternative in sight, at least not readily. In discussions with my central banking and regulatory colleagues I detect increasing interest and willingness to examine and consider the proposal of a leverage ratio as a complement to the risk-weighted capital regime under Basel II.

Without any asymmetries of information, banks would not be necessary, since households could invest their savings directly or through mutual funds. Therefore, by definition we cannot have banking with full transparency. 14 Fortunately, banks are not totally opaque either. Some risks can be assessed more or less readily. A US Treasury bill is clearly less risky than an unsecured loan to an obscure software company. Therefore, capital requirements can at least partially be based on the relative riskiness of various types of assets, even in our non-ideal world. “Basel I”, the first Basel Accord of 1988, introduced “risk buckets” for this purpose. For instance, loans received a risk weight of 100%, government bonds a risk weight of 0%. “Basel II” – the revision of the  10  Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales (1995): “What Do We Know about Capital Structure? Some Evidence from International Data”, Journal of Finance. 11  Tier 1 capital to total assets. Source: The Banker, July 2007. 12  See, e.g., Jean-Charles Rochet (1992): ”Capital Requirements and the Behavior of Commercial Banks”, European Economic Review. 13  See, e.g., the classic article by Douglas Diamond (1984): ”Financial Intermediation and Delegated Monitoring”, Review of Economic Studies. 14  See Charles Goodhart (1988): The Evolution of Central Banks, p. 63. BIS Review 158/2008  3  first Basel Accord – which is currently being implemented, tries to go beyond what were perceived to be rather crude risk buckets. Under Basel II, risks are differentiated in more detail.
The risks to pay from structural factors are probably larger, though operate with a longer lag. Take unionisation. Its downward trend historically has suppressed pay growth. If this trajectory were to continue, the fraction of the workforce unionised would fall by a further 16% percentage points by 2030. According to our estimates, that could suppress wage growth by over ¼ percentage point each year. The same is true of trends in automation. To date, UK levels of automation have lagged international competitors. Were the UK to catch up, this could have significant implications for wage growth. If the UK in 14  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  14  a decade was to reach levels of robot use in, say, Germany, then this could lower wage growth by around a percentage point each year. If the dawn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution resulted in robots and automation becoming much cheaper, easier and more ubiquitous, the impact on pay could be larger still. Finally on company concentration, as with automation there has so far been only a modest rise in the degree of monopsony power among UK companies compared to the US. If the rise of superstar firms were to reach US proportions, however, the impact on pay could be larger, if not necessarily large. If the UK reached US levels of monopsony power over a decade, this could reduce pay growth by around 5 basis points per year.

The larger this unemployment gap, the weaker the upward pressures on pay growth, as A W Phillips had first postulated 60 years ago. In econometric wage equations, the unemployment gap is a (statistically and economically) significant determinant of pay (Table 1). A 1 percentage point unemployment gap drags on wage growth by around 0.8 percentage points. That means the 2 percentage point narrowing in the UK unemployment gap since 2012 would be expected to have raised wage growth by 1.6 percentage points, a significant tailwind. The NAIRU itself is unobservable. It is also moveable, depending on structural features of the labour market. This means the NAIRU needs to be estimated and these estimates are apt to shift over time. Over recent years, the Bank has revised down its estimate of the NAIRU in the UK, by just under a percentage point, to around 4 ¼%. These downwards surprises to the NAIRU (upwards revisions to the unemployment gap) help account for the persistent overshoot in the Bank’s wage forecasts. There are a variety of alternative, complementary measures of slack in the jobs market. For example, the number of hours a person works, relative to their desired hours, is also relevant to gauging the degree of spare capacity in the labour market. A number of research papers, theoretical and empirical, have found that such “under-employment” may also have a significant bearing on the setting of pay.
Two observations might be made about the case the Bank was making. First, there is a conviction that the long-term health of the real economy is affected by the monetary regime. In the jargon, money neutrality but not “superneutrality” which, put broadly, holds that monetary regimes are irrelevant to the long-run performance of the real economy. 12 The way I think about this is that low and stable inflation can bring two (related) benefits to the real economy. Relative price signals will be clearer, aiding the efficient allocation of resources. And greater macroeconomic stability will reduce risk, reflected in lower risk premia and so in a lower effective cost of capital for firms and households, as well as possibly in longer investment horizons. Second, some of the arguments might have seemed to shade into a “moral” case for price stability, which has recently been excoriated by Willem Buiter 13 on the grounds that it has typically come packaged with central bankers presenting themselves as akin to spiritual leaders who are above needing to explain their actions to the public. Well, I don’t think we had much truck with central banking as religion, and from the early 1990s the Bank could reasonably claim to have been in the vanguard of transparency. But there did run through our corridors a sense of outrage that homes, livelihoods and businesses could be destroyed by quite unnecessary lurches from boom to bust; and that the economy’s progress was being arrested by the lack of sustained and credible nominal stability.

But the SMR is not an end in itself – the accountability it delivers should contribute to safety and soundness. Firms should therefore expect us to make more use of the SMR to deliver supervisory priorities. There is no magic to this: we will simply ask, when we set out those priorities, which senior manager is on the hook to deliver them, and what will happen if they do not? We want to know who is on the hook if things go badly wrong, and have recently asked firms to spell this out in developing areas such a crypto-assets, operational resilience and algo-trading. And enforcement cases have shown that we can, and will, take action against Senior Managers if our red lines are crossed. However, we are not an enforcement-led regulator: in my opinion, the real prudential value of the regime lies in creating opportunities for preventative or remedial action through supervision. Which brings me to my third example: pay. This has been another area of massive reform. No pay system is perfect, but I remain convinced that the 100% cash, paid out up-front bonus systems which existed for risk-takers in some of our largest firms before the crisis were an important part of what broke the financial system. The new system of deferral, malus and clawback is much safer. So we are not planning to come up with some new approach at this stage – seven year deferral is long enough, and has a pleasingly biblical ring to it.
It is worth spending a moment on this point because it has an important parallel in the issues concerning money market funds. Banks are primarily funded by deposits, where the contract is understood to be to return the full value of the deposit plus whatever the interest rate is – usually “on demand” and without delay. Banks are held to high standards by regulators – including through liquidity and capital requirements, and regular stress tests – to ensure that they are well placed to be able to honour depositors’ demands. Central bank liquidity operations, resolution arrangements and deposit insurance further reinforce confidence in this promise to return the deposit. Thanks to the post financial crisis reforms, bank deposits are therefore cash or moneylike in most states of the world. At the other end of this spectrum are investment funds of many sorts. Most are not meant to be cash-like, in the sense that the promise is to return the fruits of the investment strategy, which may be more or less than the amount invested. Cash-like certainty of value is not part of the contract. If only it was that simple. There are at least two problems which are evident in how this system operates – or possibly two variants of the same problem. First, there are instruments which at least in some of their existing forms are neither one thing nor the other – neither properly cashlike nor properly investment-like. Second, there are instruments which are meant to be investment-like but which become regarded as cash-like.

The existing size of the sterling T-bill and gilt repo markets may, however, limit the extent to which this solution would be achievable in sufficient scale to meet the needs of sterling investors, at least in the near term. And this would of course also have significant implications for the funding of banks. Second, at the other extreme, the liquidity mismatch could be removed by making funds nondaily dealing – i.e. not cash on demand. This would require a term notice period. Such a fund would be somewhat like a term deposit with no break clause. This would fundamentally change the potential uses for which MMFs could be held, and so would also have repercussions for the demand for other instruments, such as bank deposits, the implications of which would require further consideration. Third, there may be a middle option whereby a combination of measures are used to reduce the risks to a sufficiently low level. We have a menu of options to choose from. For instance, a limit could be introduced on the percentage of assets a money market fund could hold in nongovernment instruments, to reduce the holding of less liquid assets. This could be combined with making sure funds are structured as variable net asset value, albeit with this asset mix the variability of the value in the fund should be lessened. And we would need to ensure the absence of regulatory cliff-edges, so that funds could be more confident to release their cash buffers in times of stress to meet withdrawals.
Ladies and Gentlemen, in recognition of the need to provide a conducive regulatory environment which promotes sustainability, accountability, transparency and growth of the building society industry in Zambia, the Building Societies Act was amended in October 2005 to harmonise it with the Banking and Financial Services Act pending the modernization of the Building Societies Act under the Financial Sector Development Plan law reform programme. Ladies and Gentlemen, Bank of Zambia is concerned about the levels of lending interest rates charged by most financial institutions in Zambia, building societies included. With the achievement of relative macroeconomic stability in the recent years as evidenced by a significant reduction in the inflation rate to 11.1 percent as at June 2007, it is the expectation of the Bank of Zambia that all prudent lending institutions would make downward adjustments to their lending interest rates to make financial services accessible and affordable. It is also important to note that high lending interest rates can lead to high levels of delinquency. Ladies and Gentlemen, it is in this light that we anticipate that credit referencing services will help in reducing credit risk through the provision of widely accessible information on the loan repayment profile of borrowers. This should also provide another incentive for lowering of interest rates. Ladies and Gentlemen, in conclusion I wish to state that the Bank of Zambia is committed to broadening and deepening the financial sector through effective implementation of the Financial Sector Development Plan.

Bank of Zambia will endeavour to contribute towards the creation a stable macro-economic environment. BIS Review 84/2007  1  I would therefore like in this particular instance, to call upon the housing finance industry to play its role effectively so that Zambian people can have access to affordable housing finance. Thank you and God bless you. 2  BIS Review 84/2007
Anti cash campaign Recent developments have impacted cash reduction in the economy. On the other hand, we have carried out an intensive public activity, of clarifying and promoting nature where meetings of another  BIS Review 39/2005  3  nature were held too, in which we, all of us as a banking system, have been concretely engaged. Allow me to remind you the meetings we have organized with business and utility services business and also that on the primary market of Treasury bills. Using this opportunity I would like to bring again to your kind attention the problems raised even beforehand. I hope that now, on the eve of finalising the Automated Electronic Clearing House project, each bank separately and the Association itself are seriously thinking to raise the profit level from this facility that Bank of Albania offers in this moment. I would appreciate if from the Association will have some comments or potential reactions on the system preparations and the possible assistance and co-operation of Bank of Albania in this direction. After the completion of this project, I deem that we must think more seriously about the numerical and qualitative addition of electronic payments. For this purpose I would envisage to start thinking from now about future projects in the payment infrastructure. I personally will insist that even in this direction all of us as a banking system look forward to the European Union directives, in order that each future step is oriented toward the country integration in the European Union.

After the licensing of Popular Bank, with Albanian capital, the number of banks increased from 15 to 16, and a preliminary license is granted to Union Bank (Albanian capital), which is expected to raise the number of banks to 17 over 2005. The system assets have further increased by 14 percent while there was an increase of banking products and an expansion of their network. During this year there will be sold the public shares of both the Italian Albanian Bank and United Bank of Albania, which will lead to an increase of effectiveness and banking competition, paving the way to the processes of selling, merging and acquisitions towards a new consolidation of the banking system. The lending activity increased by 38 percent where one can distinguish, inter alia, the significant growth of medium-term and long-term loans compared to short-term loans. The map of coverage of the country with the banking system has further expanded, including new areas ever covered before. At the end of 2004, the total number of branches reached 88, or 11 branches more that the end of the previous year, while the number of agencies recorded for the first time a full three-digit number, 100 and the number of the employed people increased by 26 percent. The high increase of the number of branches relative to that of agencies shows that banks are not interested only in providing the service of collecting deposits but also in providing other products like crediting to the economy.
The risks for success inherent in a bold pre-emptive strike are bigger. The famous notion of “acting ahead of the curve” presupposes having solid confidence in one’s own forecasts. Notably the fact that the Federal Reserve has lost this confidence in the late 1990s and that it has refrained from taking big, bold steps, has apparently turned out to be the right strategy. In an environment of increased uncertainty, a tendency to take small, careful steps makes sense. It is hardly possible to chart the ideal course that way, but there is a good chance that deviations remain limited and can be corrected within a reasonable time frame. In Switzerland - perhaps with a time lag - we are also affected by such uncertainties. This is the case even though the factor of a declining natural rate of unemployment cannot play a central role in this country. Economists in Switzerland would certainly be well-advised to critically analyse the  3  A useful overview can be found in Davies 2000. BIS Review 35/2000  6  hypotheses and phenomena propagated as “new economy” - not with preconceived ideas, but with an open mind. 5. How relevant are asset prices? A topic which is related to the “new economy” is the phenomenon of extreme price fluctuations of individual assets. Even previously, the bitter lessons learned on the heels of the recession in Japan had stimulated a discussion of whether and how asset prices are important for monetary policy.

Regulatory changes, adjustments in the structure of banks, and innovations in the fields of investment opportunities and payments undoubtedly play a major role. Moreover, with receding inflation rates the relative disruptive effect of such instabilities has increased. Certainly, it cannot be excluded that at some point in the future we will again see a phase of greater stability in the demand for money, but in the current environment such a change is not evident. The policy concept implemented by the Swiss National Bank three months ago is made up of the following three elements: an explicit definition - in terms of a figure - of price stability; publication of a three-year inflation forecast; and an operational implementation target in the form of a target range consisting of 100 basis points for the three-month Swiss franc/Libor rate. I need not enter into this in detail before this audience. The decisive test must be in the time path of the ultimate target variable - the price level - which we will achieve on this basis. As regards the concept as such, I should merely like to make two remarks pertaining to misunderstandings. First, the interest rate target defined as a target range is not a substitute for the money supply target of the concept formerly implemented by us. It is neither more nor less than an operational implementation aid with a much shorter time reach relative to the formerly used money supply target.