samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The group we are most concerned with are the vulnerable customers. We are focussing on cases of mis-selling to vulnerable customers and on cases where the products were clearly inappropriate for them given their circumstances. We have required the FIs to give priority to these cases. They should not take an overly legalistic approach to mis-selling in dealing with these cases. For cases where there are sufficient indications that the product was mis-sold or that it was clearly inappropriate given the investor’s profile and circumstances, the FI should take responsibility. Several FIs have assured MAS that they will take full responsibility in such cases. We welcome this commitment and expect all FIs that have sold these products to take the same approach. They must do the right thing and ensure a quick and fair resolution for these customers. We have communicated this to their CEOs. Thank you, I will now take your questions. 2  BIS Review 126/2008

Caleb M Fundanga: Brief background to the FinScope Zambia 2005 Survey Speech by Dr Caleb M Fundanga, Governor of the Bank of Zambia, as background to the FinScope Zambia 2005 Survey, Lusaka, 8 November 2006. *  *  *  Hon. Ministers and Deputy Ministers; Secretary to the Treasury Hon. Members of Parliament; Your Excellencies and Members of the Diplomatic Corps; Representatives of Development Agencies; Chief Executives of Banks, Regulatory Authorities and Financial Institutions; Distinguished Invited Guests; and Ladies and Gentlemen. On behalf of the Financial Sector Development Plan (FSDP) Secretariat, it is my pleasure to present a brief background to the FinScope Zambia 2005 Survey. Ladies and Gentlemen - In recognition of the strategic importance of the financial sector to the country’s development and poverty reduction efforts, in 2003 Government launched a project to formulate the first Financial Sector Development Plan (FSDP) which was approved by Cabinet in 2004. This followed the joint World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) Financial Sector Assessment Programme (FSAP) report of 2002, which identified various weaknesses in the Zambian financial system including the following: •  Unstable macro-environment  •  Low financial intermediation  •  No formal structures for a financial safety net  •  Poor credit culture  •  Weaknesses in the regulation and supervision of non-bank financial institutions. Since the approval of the FSDP in 2004, a number of weaknesses have been addressed.
You have to know that when the parts come together and act upon each other, the system as a whole is resilient. One part of the system may well think it has a good plan for offloading some of its risk in a period of stress. But the impact of that on other parts of the system may turn a stress into a crisis. And, given the cost when things go badly wrong, it is not only important to ensure the financial system can manage the known, likely risks it faces – the ones you can see and the ones that you think may well materialize. The system needs to be resilient to the risks of events that are improbable but possible. And, life being what it is, it must also have resilience to risks that simply cannot be foreseen – the “unknown unknowns”. To use a familiar but imperfect metaphor, the Monetary Policy Committee is like a driver steering a car down a winding road. It can dimly see the road behind but can only forecast what the road ahead looks like. The instruments usually give unclear or contradictory readings. For all that, the MPC tries to keep the car at the highest speed that can be achieved without risking having to jam on the brakes at the next bend or having to floor the accelerator to prevent stopping.

On top of that, there were contagion effects on public and private sector holdings of sovereign debt at a time when public finances in many countries were themselves deteriorating independently. I think it is important to appreciate that the existing framework governing sovereign debt workouts in emerging market economies (EMEs) evolved in a world where official financing dominated and private financing was provided by a relatively small number of developed country banks. But private claims now outweigh official claims on the major EMEs – by a ratio of 70:30 in recent years. And these private claims are increasingly to bond investors rather than banks – direct and portfolio investment flows now dwarf bank lending as a source of finance for EMEs. Bondholders are dispersed and often anonymous, so there are potentially greater creditor co-ordination problems. To contain the potential systemic consequences of future crises, both the public and private sectors have an incentive to devise a new framework that can deal more effectively with sovereign debt workouts, and most especially with the role of PSI, when private claims, particularly bondholdings, are substantial. This is very similar in kind to the challenge of adapting the London Approach, whose original principles were most relevant where the creditor group largely consisted of a fairly small group of relatively  BIS Review 67/2001  5  homogeneous banks, to a world where creditor groups had become much more disparate and international, involving large numbers of bondholders and other financial creditors.
UOB Singapore will be conducting training for financial institutions and corporates in Chongqing on a variety of topics, including foreign exchange risk management. Conclusion Let me conclude. During these last two years, the CCI has been the springboard for many collaborations between Chongqing and Singapore. But we are only at the beginning of our journey. This forum is a good platform to generate ideas for Chinese and Singapore companies to collaborate on, whether it is to meet the demands of funding, manage risks, or share expertise and knowledge. I wish you fruitful discussions. Thank you. 1 In addition to these 32 REITs, there are another six stapled REIT-Business Trust securities listed on the  Singapore Exchange. 5/5  BIS central bankers' speeches

I see no tension on this issue between the interests of regulators and firms – we all want to reduce the risk of disruption. 6  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  6    Third, just in case things go badly we have been working with firms to ensure they have in place liquidity sufficient to accommodate a severe dislocation in financial markets. This is another shared endeavour – we all need to be ready for a range of outcomes. Conclusion I have aimed to describe in this speech two different modes in which we often find ourselves operating at the PRA. First, ‘battlegrounds’ where there is an inherent degree of tension between our interests and those of firms, and we play the bad cop role. This covers many of the more traditional areas of prudential regulation such as capital and we should not be discomfited by a certain amount of conflict on these as we come out of the reform phase. Second, ‘common grounds’ where we and firms collectively face a challenge and have a shared interest in tackling it. In these areas we are good cop and we should simply find the most effective and pragmatic way of dealing with problems. The Brexit risks are the most pressing current example of these shared endeavours and I hope that we, firms and EU27 colleagues will succeed in working together to mitigate them. 7  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  7
Financial union is essential in a single currency area where cross-border capital flows can lead to credit booms and other imbalances – and where the negative effects of a bust can spread rapidly to other members. One essential part of financial union is a single banking supervisor. As you know, the European Commission has recently proposed that the new supervisor should be based at the ECB. This is important to ensure consistency across the euro area and to prevent regulatory capture. Day-to-day tasks, however, would remain with national supervisors who have the competence and resources to implement them. But financial union does not have to imply the pooling of deposit guarantee schemes, an issue that I know is of concern in this country. Organising and funding deposit guarantee schemes can remain a national responsibility, with comparable effectiveness. In the longer term, all four pillars are equally important. They are the bedrock for the enormous potential of the single currency for Europe’s citizens. Completing economic and monetary union would give citizens greater security against any future crisis. It would create the foundations for sustainable growth and employment. For all citizens of the euro area, it is therefore essential that Europe’s leaders stay on course. Thank you for your attention. BIS central bankers’ speeches  5

As a general matter, however, the increase in the size of some institutions relative to some parts of our financial system necessarily magnifies the potential consequences of a mistake or an infrastructure failure in these institutions. They are sufficiently large that they have less room to maneuver in adjusting positions in response to changing risks without adversely affecting the markets as a whole. Increased concentration in some markets should reinforce the incentive the largest institutions and their counterparties have to manage risk with a greater degree of caution. Supervisors have a role here, too, providing additional reinforcement in those cases where private incentives do not seem to be generating appropriately judicious responses. A third challenge is the increased opportunity that exists today for risk and leverage to migrate to, and build up in, parts of the financial system that are not subject to direct supervision and regulation of their capital and leverage ratios. According to some estimates, assets under management at hedge funds have doubled, to $ billion, since 1998, as has the number of funds, which now stands at 6,000. We have no reliable overall measures of the degree of leverage in these institutions, though it is interesting to note that the intermediaries serving as prime brokers to hedge funds believe that overall leverage in these funds is lower than in early 1998.
In fact, this is the first crisis episode when the initial reaction of the National Bank was loosening and not tightening the MP. This time, despite the strategy of de facto fixed exchange rate, solid fundamentals and strong official reserve buffers allowed for loosening of the monetary policy and adopting regulatory flexibility. Also, our initiative for access to the ECB backstop facility, which was also supported by other central banks in the region, and the positive ECB response, allowed for wider space for accommodative policies. The symbiosis of these actions has enabled conducive financial conditions, i.e. decline of borrowing interest rates at historically low levels and uninterrupted credit flows growing at a rate of 6% annually, double than in the EU, that helped "ring –fencing" of the labor market, preserving wages and jobs. Where do we stand now, what are the major challenges ahead and is it time for complacency? A common denominator for all policy makers at the moment is the lingering uncertainty. Many scenarios are in place, from smooth and orderly recovery, through strong rebound with price pressures, ending to stalled recovery amidst new and more virulent strains. From a central bank perspective, our advantage is that there is still policy room for maneuver, although narrowed.

The Rt Hon Sir Edward George GBE: The progress of the euro  Speech by The Rt Hon Sir Edward George GBE, Governor of the Bank of England, at the Cercle de L’Union Interalliée in Paris on 24 October 2000. *  *  *  Thank you, Mr Chairman. I am grateful to the French Section of the Franco-British Council for giving me this opportunity to address this distinguished audience here in Paris, and I am delighted to share this public platform with my dear colleague, Jean-Claude Trichet. You have invited us to speak about the progress of the euro. I am very happy to do so from my British perspective - at least for the time being - as a keenly interested observer. My perspective you might expect would be very different from that of Jean-Claude, who was, and is, one of the principal architects of and a major driving force behind the process of European monetary union - one of the true founding fathers. In fact you will find that our analysis and assessment of the euro’s progress so far is very similar. I hope that will not come as too great a disappointment to you! We would certainly, I think, agree that the preparations for and introduction of the euro at the beginning of last year were a technical triumph. The euro-payments infrastructure is generally working well and has underpinned the integration of the euro money market which is an essential precondition for the effective implementation of Eurozone monetary policy.
Chart 4  5  In this context, some of the discussion has centred on the extent to which low inflation is a problem if it is paired with robust GDP growth and full capacity utilisation, particularly if these are a result of positive supply shocks. In that case, perhaps the problem lies in how the inflation target is presented and understood. This will call for more flexibility and a longer horizon for the target, which was one of the proposals explored in the Central Bank’s 2010 report on monetary policy in post-capital controls Iceland.1  Monetary policy milestones I mentioned earlier the success we have had with monetary policy – success that was visible a year ago and is even more obvious now. This past September, the Central Bank of Iceland issued a Special Publication entitled Monetary policy based on inflation targeting: experience since 2001 and postcrisis changes.2 In addition to discussing the topics in the title, the report maps out this success with monetary policy. Chart 5 shows what that entails: inflation expectations are at target, unexpected changes in inflation that strongly affected short- and long-term inflation expectations in the past no longer do so, and movements in the exchange rate of the króna function much more as shock absorbers and less as sources of shocks than they used to.

In short, monetary policy with a flexible exchange rate is much more successful now than it had been before 2012, when the Bank published its report entitled Iceland’s currency and exchange rate policy options.3 Chart 5  1  Special Publication no. 4, Monetary Policy in Iceland after capital controls. Report from the Central Bank of Iceland to the Minister of Economic Affairs, December 2010: https://www.sedlabanki.is/library/Skraarsafn/Serrit/Peningastefnan_eftir_hoft.pdf 2 Special Publication no. 11. Monetary policy based on inflation targeting: experience since 2001 and post-crisis changes, September 2017: https://www.sedlabanki.is/library/Skraarsafn/Serrit/Serrit_nr_%2011.pdf 3 Special Publication no. 7. Iceland’s currency and exchange rate policy options, September 2012: https://www.sedlabanki.is/library/Skraarsafn/EMUskýrsla/Valkostir%20Íslands%20í%20gjaldmiðils-%20og%20gengismálum.pdf  6  Capital flow management tool There have been proposals in the media recently to the effect that the special reserve requirement on foreign capital inflows for investment in the bond market and in high-yielding deposits be immediately reduced or even eliminated. In a Box in the newly published Monetary Bulletin, the Bank discusses this special reserve requirement. It does not agree with these proposals. The special reserve requirement has functioned as intended, and monetary policy transmission along the interest rate channel has improved, as can be seen at the right in Chart 6. Without it, monetary policy transmission would have been shifted in greater measure to the exchange rate channel, leading to a stronger appreciation and increased exchange rate volatility, which would not have been terribly popular under current conditions. Although the goal is to lift the special reserve requirement, conditions do not warrant it as yet.
In a situation where the Riksbank's monetary policy scope is not unlimited, it is important that the question of how an economic downturn shall be counteracted is on the economic policy agenda. There are currently large reserves in fiscal policy, but using them is not unproblematic. If low real interest rates persist, it may in the longer run become necessary to modify the monetary policy framework with the 2 per cent inflation target that  35 It is fairly common, especially among emerging market economies, to lower the inflation target as confidence in the inflation-targeting regime increases. However, there are few examples of countries that have raised their inflation target (see, for instance, Apel, Armelius and Claussen, 2017). 17 [24]  most central banks currently apply. Of the various proposals circulating in international debate, I am currently leaning towards a raised inflation target being the best option. At the same time as this would alleviate the problem that the repo rate cannot always be cut as much as needed, it is also relatively undramatic and straightforward. But this does not mean that it is something I feel we should do soon. A fairly major problem is that it is difficult to make this kind of change independently of other countries. But it is always good to be well-prepared in advance and it is therefore worth starting to think about possible modifications already today.

It may not be so much a question of purely economic aspects, but rather what is feasible according to social conventions and possible to create understanding for. During the period we have had a negative repo rate, individuals have not faced negative interest rates and thus not needed to pay for having money in the bank. 6 I assume here that –0.5 per cent, that is, the lowest level to which the Riksbank has ever cut the repo rate, is a  lower bound for how much the rate can be cut. This assumption can of course be discussed, and I shall return to this shortly. 4 [24]  But if the repo rate becomes sufficiently negative, this may happen. On a theoretical level, one can argue that the policy would then be more powerful and have a greater effect on the economy – that the so-called monetary policy transmission mechanism would function better. But this also risks leading to various types of problem. As I see it, the biggest problem is not the economic arguments usually raised, such as the general public wanting to empty their bank accounts and hold cash instead. Holding savings in cash is, when it comes down to it, troublesome and costly and given that most people in Sweden are getting used to living without cash it would not be a natural thing to do. The threshold would probably be relatively high here. The main problem, as I see it, is another one.
Traditionally, in exchange for being allowed to profit from taking risks inherent in providing liquidity, or monetary and credit services to the economy, banks have been subject to: prudential regulation; given access to liquidity insurance at the central bank; and required to finance industrywide insurance schemes. Those have been the key elements of the social contract for banking. This series of speeches explored in more detail how those components of the social contract need to be redesigned. 2  BIS Review 134/2009  On regulation, as Adair Turner has said, it is clear that firms need to hold more capital; and, as the Governor emphasised earlier this week, that that capital needs to be proper, lossabsorbing capital. It is equally clear that banks need to hold a portfolio of high-quality liquidity; that there should be no compromise about what counts as such liquidity; and that any banks thinking a decent treasury policy involves holding the bonds of other banks are way off-beam. That much has pretty well been agreed by international policymakers. The numbers remain to be set. Just as important is the necessity of reviving supervision. By that, I do not mean checking compliance with rules after the fact, punishing breaches; punishing offenders does not bring back to life a bank or the customer businesses that have collapsed with it. I mean forwardlooking judgments about the prudence of a firm’s management and the resilience of its business.

The Swedish Telecommunications Administration’s monopoly began to break up as early as the 1980s, but the real turning point came in 1993, when the Administration was privatised as Telia. The market was opened up and exposed to competition; new challengers could gradually take over more than a quarter of the total market and a significantly greater part of the mobile telephony and Internet telephony segment. At the same time, technical developments were very rapid. Fiberoptics enabled lower costs for long distance calls and increased the speed of transfer of large amounts of data, which benefited the development of the Internet. Together, increased competition and rapid technological developments led to a fall in prices with regard to both telephony and Internet connection. The lower prices for users have probably contributed to the widespread use of the Internet in Sweden. The new technology was perhaps available in all essentials to all developed countries, but the views on deregulation varied. Only eight of the 25 member countries, today 30, of the OECD allowed competition in the telecommunications market, while the remaining countries retained a monopoly. There is also a clear connection between use of the Internet and competition. Competition is allowed in the telecommunications markets of six of the nine countries with the highest Internet usage. These countries have also experiences an increase in access to the Internet six times as fast as countries that have a monopoly market.