samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The second obstacle is the still-low appetite of banks to expand lending. This behaviour continues to reflect the effect of two factors: (i) deleveraging policies for reducing exposure in the countries of the region, including Albania, implemented by parent banks from the euro area; and, (ii) perception of credit risk at home. While banks’ balance sheets have improved and the credit risk has diminished, the policies for reducing their exposure in countries outside the EU remain conservative. Such policies reflect also EBA’s new supervisory rules on reducing the exposure of European-based banking groups in South East Europe. In the context of addressing this issue, the Bank of Albania has signed a memorandum of cooperation with the European Banking Authority College in 2015, on exchanging information and harmonising supervisory policies. Regarding non-performing loans, the Bank of Albania continues to be committed to implementing the measures set out in the national plan for reducing them. The reduction of the credit risk, in parallel with the improvement of the banks’ balance sheets and economic growth, should be accompanied by more realistic lending policies by the banking system. This is a recurring appeal I have made in my public appearances. The implementation of such policies would create the conditions for fulfilling the needs of the economy for financing, which are expected to be upward in the future. The third obstacle is the development level of financial markets and the narrow range of financial instruments.

As regards price developments, annual HICP inflation averaged 3.3% in 2008, which is much higher than in the previous two years and significantly above the ECB’s definition of price stability. However, headline inflation rates fluctuated sharply in the course of the year, peaking at 4.0% in June and July, mainly as a result of developments in international commodity prices. During the second half of 2008, annual inflation declined steadily and rapidly. In March 2009, it stood at 0.6%. By contrast, HICP inflation excluding energy and food posted a much smaller decline in 2008 and early 2009. Looking ahead, HICP inflation is likely to remain well below 2% in 2009 and may reach negative levels around mid-year. Such a phenomenon is expected to be temporary, driven mainly by base effects from past energy price developments, and would not constitute an episode of deflation, that is, a protracted  BIS Review 49/2009  1  period of decline in the price level that can adversely affect inflation expectations and aggregate demand. Looking at the policy-relevant medium-term horizon, HICP inflation is in 2010 expected to rise again but remain below 2%, reflecting mainly ongoing sluggish economic activity in the euro area and beyond. Monetary policy has been conducted in an extraordinary and rapidly changing economic and financial environment over the past year.
We adopted prudent fiscal policies, and directed monetary policy to achieve medium-term price stability. Our MNC-led growth strategy has worked well but others are pursuing the same strategy. So for the next phase of our development, we are also building a second platform based on entrepreneurship, innovation and knowledge. New areas of focus include Research and Development, biomedical sciences and the creative industry. As the competition intensifies, we break old moulds of thinking and reinvent the way we do things. For example, we overturned our longstanding policy of disallowing casinos in Singapore. To remake Singapore into a city with buzz, we are developing Integrated Resorts, with convention facilities, world-class entertainment and casinos. And Crazy Horse, the famed Paris cabaret, is performing in strait-laced Singapore. Implementation is key The third critical aspect of growth is implementation. Right policies are no guarantee of success, if the capacity to implement is missing. Good implementation is founded on three key pillars: effective leadership, sound institutions and social cohesion. First, leaders are responsible for devising and implementing pro-growth policies. They must have the unifying vision to foster economic growth, the political will to overcome resistance and implement reforms, and the ability to mobilise people and engender social consensus. Leaders must also have character, compassion, conviction, commitment and persuasive power. Above all, they must enjoy the trust of the people. The second pillar of effective implementation is sound institutions. Effective leadership must be supported by sound institutions like the legislature, judiciary, civil service, central bank and a responsible media.

9  The average consumer was defined was a 41-year old man with upper secondary school education and an annual income of SEK 350,000-400,000 and who lives in a two-person household. 4  BIS Review 68/2008  they charge the retail trade. 10 In the long term this would benefit us consumers in the form of lower goods and services prices. Perhaps the retail trade could also discuss charging a fee of those of us who insist on using the most expensive credit cards – that is where the hidden cost of the payment is highest. Charges on ATM withdrawals have been a hot political topic in Sweden. Should we have to pay to take out our own money from our own accounts? But isn't it time to defuse the question of ATM charges? It costs money to manage cash. And isn’t it better that we can see the costs than that we pay a hidden price in some other way at the bank or the supermarket? 10  According to an earlier study made by the Riksbank, the loss made by an average major bank in 2002 in connection with cash management was approximately equal to the profit it made on the card market. There is evidently some subsidising between the card and cash markets. See Guibourg and Segendorf (2007). BIS Review 68/2008  5
So far, there is no indication that the US has problems in financing its deficit. If creditors begin to fear a fall in prices and withdraw from the market, substantial corrections may nevertheless be triggered. This may lead to higher interest rates and perhaps also a fall in US equity markets that spills over to other countries’ financial markets. In that case, the dollar will also depreciate. The household debt burden in the US may be another source of instability if households abruptly reduce both housing demand and consumption. Strong demand in the US has sustained growth in the world economy. We assume that growth will slow somewhat in the US in the period ahead. A more pronounced downturn cannot be ruled out, however. An abrupt and pronounced downturn might fairly rapidly lead to declining growth in the entire OECD area. The US is not the only source of trade imbalances. They also reflect very low growth in continental Europe and largely export-based growth in Asian countries. Therefore, countries other than the US must also contribute in order to prevent a decline in world economic growth. With limited domestic growth capacity and high unemployment, many industrial countries are poorly equipped to cope with a weaker dollar and lower demand from the US. The challenges are perhaps  3/7  particularly demanding in some large European countries, whereas it appears that the Japanese economy is becoming more self-driven.

Given that the recent financial turmoil has highlighted the importance of strong liquidity risk management, an important recent development to assist in the liquidity management of Islamic financial institutions is the establishment of the International Islamic Liquidity Management Corporation (IILM). The IILM has begun its operations in Kuala Lumpur from early February this year, following its official launch in October 2010. The IILM is tasked to issue short-term multi-currency liquidity instruments that would facilitate the cross-border liquidity management between financial centres, and by doing so, would enhance financial inter-linkages. The first issuance of liquidity instruments is expected to take place later during the year and is very much anticipated as it would contribute to more efficient management of financial flows across borders, thereby leading towards more efficient internationalisation of Islamic finance. The Islamic finance industry is at a stage of growth in terms of products and services, which requires innovation to remain as the driving force behind the progress of the industry. In the pursuit of innovation, it is paramount that the Islamic banking and takaful industry achieve full Shariah compliance in the development and application of their products and services. A robust Shariah governance framework is therefore an important foundation for the Islamic financial institutions to ensure that its objectives and operations are in accordance with Shariah principles. In Malaysia, there have been recent enhancements to the Shariah governance that aim to further strengthen the existing Shariah governance process, decision making, accountability and independence of Shariah advisories.
The price boom has continued in spite of the generally weak economic activity of the last two years. This is a new experience which differs from previous business cycles, when prices have tended to recede during periods of economic decline. Similar developments have occurred in other countries, for example in the US, England and Holland. The situation could appear worrying, particularly given that the rise in housing prices has been accompanied by an increase in household indebtedness. The upsurge in prices has raised questions about the healthiness of this trend. Are the price rises in the Swedish housing market the result of a bubble? Are the higher levels of household indebtedness sustainable? The Riksbank's view is that the current price developments in the housing market do not reflect any speculative expectations of future price rises which would warrant the term “bubble”. Nor is household indebtedness a bigger problem than usual for this stage of the business cycle. I will explain this in a moment. The other segment is the market for commercial property. Here, it is primarily prices for office premises which have displayed a different trend to that seen in the housing market. Commercial property prices have adjusted to the economic slowdown. In Sweden, both prices and rents have fallen since 2000 at the same time as vacancy rates have risen. I myself do not believe that these price declines are a concern from an economic perspective, as was very much the case with the property crisis at the beginning of the 1990s.

Chiarotti, Mathur, and Rajan (forthcoming), ‘Assessing Basel III: Impact of automatic distribution restrictions on regulatory capital and bank lending’, Bank of England Staff Working Paper. The authors apply a difference-in-difference approach to aggregate bank balance sheet data and granular loan-level data on syndicated lending to corporates. The latter allows the authors to control for important unobservable features in the aggregate data such as changes in credit demand and in borrowers’ risk. 12. To ensure that banks which have different concerns about MDAs nevertheless have similar probabilities of triggering the restrictions, the analysis considers also the banks’ capital surpluses to regulatory buffers. 13. During the Covid-19 pandemic, several jurisdictions including ECB/SSM Fed and BoE recommended banks to restrict or suspend dividends and share buybacks, but not AT1 coupons (see Svoronos and Vrbaski (2020) (2021)  and BCBC  ). 14. During the pandemic AT1 coupons were excluded from the scope of the blanket distributions restrictions that many jurisdictions imposed, so unlike for dividends banks’ ability to pay AT1 coupons was still linked to automatic distribution restrictions thresholds. 15. A somewhat extreme version of broad-based capital conservation – reflecting the unusual and extreme level of economic and market uncertainty at the time - was implemented during Covid-19 when PRA recommended the major UK deposit takers to cancel dividend payments, share buybacks and cash bonuses. 16.
In addition, there has been an important shift from the traditional high net worth clients investing in individual hedge funds to funds being invested in hedge funds via diversified pools and formal fund of funds structures. These pooled assets, coupled with liberalizing regulatory developments have opened up hedge funds to a more diverse universe of investors, including a wide range of institutional and retail investors. Currently, the total size of funds invested in hedge funds via pooled structures is estimated to be approximately USD 300 billion or nearly a third of the underlying hedge fund industry. Remarkably, annual growth rate estimates of the pooled funds suggest that their expansion has proceeded at a more rapid pace than the underlying hedge fund industry. This implies that a significant portion of new assets flowing into hedge funds does so via collective asset management pools. In a competitive environment, the Swiss financial sector has succeeded in leveraging its position as one of the world’s leading asset manager to secure an dominant position amongst collective asset management pool operators in the hedge fund industry. Though many of the early formal funds of funds were registered under Luxembourg, Cayman Island or Bermuda law, Swiss financial firms today manage a significant part of the world’s alternative asset management pools.

Particularly in the area of wealth management which comprises over half of the total added value of the banks, Switzerland is clearly one of the world’s leading provider of services. The value of total assets managed in customer accounts in domestic banks as of the end of the year 2003 amounts to CHF 3’300 billion, of which nearly 60% is held by foreigners. According to various estimates, this corresponds to approximately one third of the world’s total private wealth managed abroad. Much has been said and written about the various strengths of the Swiss financial center which account for the dominant global position in wealth management. Political, economic and monetary stability, know-how, traditional high quality of services provided, guaranteed protection of privacy and strict conditions ensuring the prevention of abuse are all key ingredients to Switzerland’s past and future success. In the current global market place, some of these strengths represent structural competitive advantages. The Swiss authorities and the Swiss financial sector representatives rightly  1  Charles P Kindleberger (1974): “The Formation of Financial Centers: a Study in Comparative Economic History”, Princeton Studies in International Finance, No 36, Princeton: Princeton University, November. BIS Review 34/2004  1  make great efforts to defend these structural competitive advantages as much as other sovereign countries defend theirs. Nonetheless, in a fierce global competitive environment, defense is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for sustained success.
Nonetheless, it is difficult to argue with the basic direction of these forecasts. The fundamental dynamic behind the recent rise of SWFs will not disappear over night. As I mentioned, estimated excess reserves are very large. 12 In all likelihood, at least some of these excess reserves will be transferred to SWFs in coming years. Moreover, even if global imbalances were to unwind quickly, for instance in association with a sharp and protracted recession in the United States, the power of compound return will continue to be a substantial source of growth for SWFs that already exist. Fourth, SWFs have so far been initiated predominantly in the Middle East and in Asia. Slide 8 shows that these two regions account for 77 percent of the assets of the largest SWFs. Nonetheless, we should not lose sight of the fact that 16 percent of the assets of the 14 largest SWFs are held in developed countries. 13 Fifth, SWFs will increasingly attempt to diversify their holdings. They will do so gradually, given the prevailing size and liquidity constraints. Like central banks, SWFs have traditionally been investors in highly rated fixed income assets. Going forward, SWFs will increasingly look for investments in equity markets, both public and private ones. Several of these investments have recently produced headlines in the global financial press. Slide 9 depicts some of them. 3.

References Bernanke, Benjamin S. 2006, "Global Economic Integration: What's New and What's Not? ", Speech held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City's Thirtieth Annual Economic Symposium, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, August. Coeuré, Benoit, 2007, "Faut-il Avoir Peur Des Fonds Souverains? ", forthcoming, Les Cahiers, Le Cercle des économistes. Cox, Christopher, 2007, "The Role of Governments in Markets". Speech at Harvard on 24th October 2007 (http://www.sec.gov/news/speech/2007/spch102407cc.htm). Genberg, H., McCauley, R., Park, Y. and Persaud, A. 2005, Official Reserves and Currency Management in Asia: Myth, Reality and the Future. London, Centre for Economic Policy Research. Gourinchas, Pierre-Olivier and Olivier Jeanne, 2007, Capital Flows to Developing Countries: The Allocation Puzzle, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 6561. Hildebrand, Philipp M., 2007, Hedge Funds and Prime Broker Dealers: Steps towards a best practice proposal, in: Banque de France, Financial Stability Review – Special issue on Hedge Funds,” No. 10, April. International Monetary Fund, 2007, Global Financial Stability Report. Washington D.C. September. Johnson, Simon, 2007, "The Rise of Sovereign Wealth Funds, Finance and Development, September 2007, Volume 44, Number 3, International Monetary Fund. Jones, Matthew T. and Maurice Obstfeld, 2000, "Saving, Investment, and Gold: A Reassessment of Historical Current Account Data", in Calvo, Guillermo A., Rudiger Dornbusch, and Maurice Obstfeld, eds., Money, Capital Mobility, and Trade: Essays in Honor of Robert A. Mundell, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. 8  BIS Review 150/2007  Lowery, Clay, 2007, "Remarks by Acting Under Secretary for International Affairs Clay Lowery on Sovereign Wealth Funds and the International Financial System", June 21st, San Francisco.
Firms may, therefore, have been reviewing their preferences between risk-taking in their core business and risk-taking via pension provision, and for a while may have been unusually uncertain about how equity markets value those different sources of uncertainty. If so, that may conceivably offer part of the explanation for the measured recovery in UK business investment having been weak, relative to the economy’s total output, compared with past cycles (Charts 11 and 12). Some have suggested that the need to close deficits may have been a factor, via the call on cash flows. The possibility I am airing is that another factor may be the size of a scheme’s discounted liabilities and the prospective volatility of the associated fund’s net value relative to the sponsor’s underlying business and capitalisation. I do not want to push that too far. There have, of course, been other possible explanations for weak fixed-capital expenditure. These include competition from China, India and elsewhere; the rise in oil and commodity prices; and the uncertainty about how both will play out, and thus about prospective demand for UK output. All of this might have been thought to make the external environment unusually risky and so to warrant deferral of investment decisions. Another possible explanation is, simply, that the level of investment has been under-recorded, and that the data will be revised up, as they have been frequently in the past (Chart 13).

Just as governments collaborate on economic integration to advance prosperity, the time has come for them to do so with digital integration to seize new economic opportunities. This requires establishing foundational digital infrastructures and connecting them, to create truly global digital public goods. Upon these platforms, enterprises can build innovative digital services and solutions to seamlessly serve global markets, helping to empower and uplift millions of people. 3/3  BIS central bankers' speeches
Your input has been valuable in designing the strategies and approach to advance VBI as a key thrust in propelling the Islamic finance industry further forward. Today, I would like to share some of my thoughts on the concept of value-based intermediation. I will begin by giving an account of the achievements of our industry within the past decades. I will then touch on the role of VBI as a catalyst for growth with positive impact and the call for Islamic finance to lead the way in realising the visions and objectives of VBI. Islamic finance in Malaysia has evolved and grown by leaps and bounds over the last 30 years. Today, we have a well-developed and regulated Islamic finance industry. There are diverse industry players, both local and foreign. Prior to 2000, there were only two Islamic banks and two takaful operators in the country with total market share and takaful penetration rate of less than 5%. Islamic banking assets have now grown to capture more than a quarter of the total banking system while the takaful sector has increased its penetration rate to 14.6% of the population. This is indeed very good progress. In the sukuk segment, Malaysia is also the market leader with market share of more than 50% in sukuk outstanding since year 2000. On the Bank’s part, the Islamic Financial Services Act 2013 was introduced to modernise our regulatory and legal framework in adapting to changing needs of the industry.

For VBI to work, the desired collaboration has to bring in not just our market players, but also other non-financial stakeholders, to pool critical skills and infrastructure that reside beyond our terrain. By expanding our network, we will be better able to deliver far greater values that otherwise could not be achieved if we were to depend on limited capabilities within the financial industry alone. With stronger collaboration, I believe there will be much more that each individual can learn from one another. In this context, the Community of Practitioners comprising committed Islamic banks, will be instrumental in pioneering advancements in VBI. The Community of Practitioners will serve as the nucleus for other collaborative efforts. Networks to be formed will comprise a diverse group, from ventures and corporates to knowledge and advocacy institutions. Through the exchange of knowledge and experiences, as well as coordinated actions to address implementation issues, the Community of Practitioners can help accelerate the execution and amplify the benefits of VBI. I would also like to thank the panel members that will take part in the Panel Discussion today, which also includes representatives from the Community of Practitioners. We can certainly gain greater insights from the panel members who will elaborate further on the VBI approach and provide interesting perspectives on its implementation. In conclusion, while the Malaysian Islamic financial sector has made great strides since its inception over 30 years ago, the next growth frontier in Islamic finance is in realising its potential to create greater socio-economic impact.