samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
We expect that this will help boost the demand for fixed income securities although we do not know exactly how much such investment outflows will be approved by the Mainland authorities in the initial years. 2  BIS Review 56/2006  Given our experience and achievements in financial services and the fact that we are the only international financial centre of China, I am sure that Hong Kong is well positioned to grasp the opportunity. Apart from the initiatives and developments I just mentioned, I believe that it would be useful to highlight a few fundamental factors which make Hong Kong an ideal place for the bond market. The first is our free capital mobility. The absence of capital controls means that there are no restrictions on foreign enterprises using our capital markets to raise funds. Foreign investors can also freely invest in our markets and easily remit the proceeds back home. Secondly, our well-developed financial markets, including derivative markets, would allow issuers and investors to manage any interest rate risk or exchange rate risk effectively. Thirdly, Hong Kong has a critical mass of financial institutions which stand ready to support issuers to tap the capital markets. Hong Kong is also an asset management centre thus providing a large investor base for debt instruments. Last but not least, the absence of capital gains tax and interest withholding tax would also favour bond market development.

Bond Price Bulletin One of the factors affecting secondary market activities in the bond market is the lack of information on bond prices. To help overcome this problem, the HKMA launched the Bond Price Bulletin at the beginning of 2006. The bulletin provides investors with convenient on-line access to information on bond products and bond prices provided by eight major banks in Hong Kong. Indicative bid/offer prices of over 200 bonds of different currencies issued by both public and private sector entities are provided by the eight contributing banks. Outlook Let me now turn to talk about the outlook of our debt market. Notwithstanding the achievements we have made so far in developing our debt market, we fully appreciate that there is nothing to be complacent and there are still many challenges facing us. The HKMA has therefore embarked on a review of our debt market development with a view to identifying measures which can be adopted to help market development. On the demand side, everybody knows that the Mainland of China is enjoying a rapid economic growth and business opportunities are mushrooming. The recent announcement by the Mainland authorities of measures to liberalise portfolio investment outflows has marked the emergence of such kind of opportunity for Hong Kong. Under these new rules, each Chinese citizen is allowed, among other things, to invest in fixed income securities overseas within certain limits.
We believe that community support for our monetary and banking policies, and confidence in our financial system are strong. But we also know that confidence cannot be built on blind public faith in a remote monetary authority carrying out its esoteric policies in a quiet and mysterious way: it must be nurtured through explanation, through informed discussion, through a system that is both accountable and transparent. The safety of our banks and the stability of our currency are everybody’s business, and the Asian financial crisis has brought this fact home to the people of Hong Kong. Economic hardship has prompted more people to ask more questions about the way Hong Kong manages its monetary and banking systems. Energetic policies, such as the operation in August, have also stimulated debate some of it heated - over the rights and wrongs of what we are doing. Quite properly, the Legislative Council has been the focus of much of this debate, not just in its motion debates, but also in the many discussions organised by this panel on a variety of subjects. We have seen more interest in our work from Members during the past year than in any other year since the creation of the HKMA in 1993. I welcome this attention. It gives us the opportunity to enter into productive discussion with those who know and represent the community. It also shows that accountability is alive and well.

And if the theme of this talk is that the benefits of trade involve imports as much as they do exports, the same point applies. Put simply, a significant curtailment of trade with Europe would force the UK to shift away from producing the things it’s been relatively good at, and therefore tends to export to the EU, and towards the things it currently imports and is relatively less good at. Chart 13: UK’s revealed comparative advantage  Chart 13, which plots “revealed comparative  with the EU  advantage” in each sector – roughly speaking a rescaled version of the balance of trade with the EU – gives some idea of what these sectors are: we tend to export services, financial services in particular, and import goods, notably food and capital equipment. All else equal, the first shift (i.e. away from services exports) would tend to lower UK income, the second to raise certain costs (that is, of food and machinery). And, albeit on a smaller scale, relative to their (much 16  larger) GDP, the same would be true for the EU . Trade really is mutually beneficial and less of it costs Source: UNCTAD and ONS; Note: Gross value added was used  us all. That these truths are a couple of centuries  as output. Revealed comparative advantage is expressed as the  old, and not always widely accepted, doesn’t make  ratio of a sector’s share in UK’s exports to the EU to its share in trade with EU.
Ancient Mesopotamia did not have a circulating currency as its means of payment - coinage only appeared around 2000 years later. Instead these civilisations had a system of ledgerbased accounts of mutual debits and credits, typically denominated in terms of agricultural commodities. 7 Only the Bank of England issues banknotes in England and Wales, but seven commercial banks in Scotland and Northern Ireland can also issue banknotes, the total value of these notes in circulation is £ The seven banks must, by law, set aside assets that are worth at least the value of all of the banknotes they have in circulation. This ensures that people with genuine banknotes issued by the seven banks receive a level of protection similar to people who have genuine Bank of England banknotes. 4  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  4  The remaining 97% of the money held and used by the public takes the form not of notes and coin but of claims on the private banks in which we all store our money in payment accounts. When we use a plastic card, a cheque, a bank transfer – as we do for over 95% of the £ of transactions by value every year in the economy – we are exchanging our claims on our banks. This is sometimes called ‘private’ money as opposed to ‘public’ or state issued money. That is in my view a rather misleading description, for two reasons.

1  But it has not always been the case that we do not talk much about money itself. There have been times, times when the machinery of money itself has failed or when it has changed, that there has been debate, often long and bitter, about what money is and how it should work. th  The creation of the Bank of England itself, which caused much controversy, in the late 17 century, can be seen as ingenious marriage between the King’s fiscal needs and the economy’s need for a larger and a state authorised money supply using the new technology of ‘notes’ or claims drawn on banks. 2  The same period also saw a protracted debate about the debased state of the English coinage and how to fix the value of money, a debate involving John Locke among others and leading to a painful set of statutory and technological reforms carried out by Isaac Newton no less. The development of modern economies has been punctuated by debates about the nature and technology of money. 1  Milton Friedman made use of Mill’s characterisation of money as a machine when describing ‘what monetary policy can do’ in his seminal address to the American Economic Association in 1967. 2 In 17th century England, goldsmiths would take custody of their customers’ gold and issue a paper note in receipt.
Thus far, the underlying strength of the upturn has if anything surprised on the upside, largely thanks to developments in a number of emerging economies in Asia, Latin America and eastern Europe. There is therefore reason to be slightly more optimistic than we were in the May Inflation Report with regard to short-term prospects for growth in the world economy, despite the signs of weaker developments in the United States. Coupled with the unexpectedly large price increases for oil and other commodities, this means that international price pressures are expected to be slightly higher than previously forecast, particularly this year and next year. BIS Review 59/2004  5  Economic growth in Sweden is also forecast to be robust throughout the forecast period and has been revised up in relation to the May forecast. The unexpectedly high international demand has contributed to surprisingly rapid growth in exports over the summer. The increasingly evident recovery in the IT and telecoms sector has also contributed to the favourable growth in exports. The Budget Bill contained signals of more expansionary fiscal policy in the period ahead, which can be expected to further boost demand in the economy through effects on both private and public consumption. New National Accounts data also indicate that the pickup in investment long expected by the Riksbank and other forecasters now appears to have begun. As in the May Report, gradually higher resource utilisation and rising international prices are expected to lead to a gradual increase in inflationary pressures.

It has also proved possible to combine low unemployment, compared with other European countries, with low inflation, contrary to what many experts expected. But open unemployment has only come down towards 4 per cent in a few occasional years, and stands today at 5.5 per cent. The number of employed now is lower than before the crisis, and some 1.2 million people of working age (16-64 years) are not participating in the labour force. The regime shift and employment Against this backdrop it's not surprising that a lively debate arises from time to time about unemployment and what can be done about it. What is perhaps more surprising is that some people still assert that the shift in stabilisation policy regime at the beginning of the 1990s is what has caused unemployment to be higher today than it was during the 1970s and 1980s. Sometimes the argument goes that Sweden has given up its previous objective of full employment in order instead, for some more or less obscure reason, to introduce a target for inflation. If we only were prepared to return to the high-inflation policies of the 1970s and 1980s, then everything would be better. There is much to say about this. Firstly, it is difficult in a more general sense to imagine that the markedly improved stability in economic policy that the shift in regime brought about in the long run could be something negative for employment.
I think the gradual and predictable approach the FOMC has adopted has been successful so far, but we will learn more as we proceed and as other central banks reach those milestones as well. 1 My discussion here focuses on the Federal Reserve’s actions to adjust the stance and conduct of monetary  policy in pursuit of its statutory mandate of full employment and price stability. However, the Fed’s response to the crisis also included numerous temporary programs and facilities aimed at supporting the liquidity of financial institutions and fostering improved conditions in key financial markets. 2 The Fed’s outright purchases of securities did not raise any credit risk exposure. 3 The FOMC also undertook a program to extend the maturity profile of its Treasury holdings. This Maturity  Extension Program (MEP) did not affect the portfolio’s overall size, yet still increased the portfolio’s duration risk —an important characteristic of all asset purchase programs. A common metric for communicating about the dollar value of duration risk held in the portfolio is in terms of ten-year Treasury equivalents. 4 9 / 13  BIS central bankers' speeches  4 Even before asset purchases were launched, the reserve-adding effects of the Fed’s crisis-related lending  programs highlighted shortcomings of its pre-crisis monetary policy implementation framework.

12 / 13  BIS central bankers' speeches  Following each meeting, the FOMC announced a monthly pace at which it would buy Treasury securities and agency MBS, and provided guidance that it would continue its purchases until the “outlook for the labor market had improved substantially in a context of price stability.” The Committee also advised that it was prepared to increase or reduce the pace of its purchases to maintain appropriate policy accommodation as the outlook for the labor market or inflation changed. 38 The FOMC adopted such guidance throughout its third asset purchase program. Similarly, on October 12, 2017,  ECB President Draghi pledged to maintain interest rates at their current, low level “well past” the end of the ECB’s bond-buying program. 39 Governor Brainard recently suggested that in a low neutral rate environment, delaying balance sheet  normalization is a means to provide “makeup support” for the economy while enabling the policy rate to escape the lower bound earlier than otherwise. See Lael Brainard, “Rethinking Monetary Policy in a New Normal,” remarks for the panel on monetary policy at the Peterson Institute for International Economics conference, Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy, Washington, D.C., October 12, 2017. 40 This sequencing also allowed the FOMC to meaningfully assess the efficacy of its tools to control short-term  interest rates with a large balance sheet, and thereby judge how patient it could afford to be in reducing the balance sheet to its longer-run level.
Our position has not changed. In any case, we call for  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  the full implementation of the decisions taken by the Heads of State and Government on 21 July. Then providing funding to Greece remains the only option. How many years will Europe have to support Athens? Greece must pursue an adjustment which must be very strong and credible under the permanent surveillance of the IMF and of the European institutions. A key element, in my opinion, is the technical assistance of Europe, now being organised in Athens by Mr Reichenbach. Can the European safety net protect the euro area from a conflagration? We welcome the decisions of the Heads of State and Government of 21 July through which the flexibility of the safety net was enhanced. It is now their responsibility to make the safety net operational as soon as possible. Do you believe that the ECB will then be able, as planned, to cease its controversial buying up of government bonds? In the future, the EFSF will be able to intervene in the secondary market. The stability of the European financial system will in the future be guaranteed by the governments via the EFSF. How large should the capacity of the EFSF be? The governments must first implement all the decisions of the EU summit of 21 July and provide appropriate leveraging of the fund. Should the EFSF be granted a banking licence in order to be able to obtain money directly from the ECB?

The second element is for supervisors to conduct independent reviews of a bank’s capital adequacy relative to its risk profile, while the third is to help improve the ability of market forces to exert discipline on management behavior. These last two elements, which I will address in more detail in a moment, have been adopted by the Basel Committee as key parts of our proposal to revise the international standards on capital regulation. Risk-focused supervision In terms of the "risk-focused" approach to supervision, many of my colleagues would agree that what makes bank supervision so challenging is the need to keep pace with such a dynamic, fast-moving, and diverse industry. Consequently, supervision must be adaptive. The banking industry is intensely competitive and firms must constantly identify new markets, new products, and new ways to do business. Innovative products and technologies can quickly alter a bank’s exposure to risk. Continuous innovation in the industry and increasingly rapid changes in risk profiles demand that supervisors, too, keep up with the latest developments and work to anticipate them to ensure that our regulatory framework remains relevant and timely. Likewise, supervision needs to be flexible. We all know that the banking sector encompasses organizations that vary greatly in scope, size, and risk appetite, so it’s obvious that regulations that are useful for small, community mortgage banks will not apply equally well to massive, multinational trading banks, and vice versa.
Hence, as an important step, the approval of the Cabinet of Ministers was obtained in principle to introduce comprehensive amendments to the MLA, particularly in the areas of strengthening Central Bank independence and facilitating the adoption of FIT as the monetary policy framework, in addition to other amendments to improve governance of the Central Bank, strengthen financial sector oversight and also to boost fiscal-monetary coordination. Accordingly, the Central Bank, 14  assisted by legal experts from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is in the final stages of drafting the revisions to the MLA, which will address long standing concerns, such as the focus on non-core and quasi-fiscal activities, monetary financing as well as limits to Central Bank autonomy by way of clearly demarcating the powers and functions related to monetary policy. In addition, the remit of price stability will be elevated to the status of the prime objective of the Central Bank. The revised legislation will also facilitate institutional arrangements for setting inflation targets and improvements to monetary operations, as well as macroprudential tools. These legislative amendments would not only improve the overall focus of the mandate but would also boost the credibility of the Central Bank through an enhanced governance framework and autonomy as well as greater accountability and transparency of the Central Bank. We expect to submit the amended MLA to the Cabinet of Ministers and the Parliament for approval this year.

Further, several measures are in the pipeline, including the issuing of regular Monetary Policy Reports, which will be developed into Inflation Reports in the future and expanding the public awareness outreach programme, which will be implemented during next two years as set out in the road map for FIT. As another important step, we re-commenced publishing an advance release calendar for regular monetary policy announcements last year. Continuing this practice, we wish to present the advance release calendar for monetary policy announcements for the year 2019 as set out below. 21  Monetary Policy Announcements in 2019 Announcement No. Date of Announcement  1  22 February, Friday  2  10 April, Wednesday  3  31 May, Friday  4  12 July, Friday  5  23 August, Friday  6  11 October, Friday  7  15 November, Friday  8  27 December, Friday  Currently, although the global economy is somewhat less robust than it was in the first half of 2018, the pace of global growth remains strong pointing to further normalisation of monetary policy in major economies. This has necessitated most emerging market economies to adjust their monetary policy in view of addressing economic imbalances associated with capital flows, currency depreciation, trade wars, etc. Taking such trends into consideration and responding to domestic economic developments, we will continue to remain vigilant in formulating our monetary policy to ensure sustained economic and price stability in Sri Lanka. 22  3.
This became a major problem when there was a run on the dollar-denominated bank liabilities of non-US international banks post-Lehman.3 Second, the Icelandic banking system expanded very rapidly prior to the crisis, growing in just five years from a combined balance sheet of less than 2 times GDP (at the end of 2003) to almost 10 times GDP (in mid-2008). Most of this expansion was cross-border, and a significant part of it was really off-border, having very little to do with Iceland, as both financing and investment took place abroad. This was facilitated by two factors: first, Iceland’s membership in the European Economic Area (EU + Iceland, Lichtenstein, and Norway), which gave banks headquartered anywhere in the region the right to operate throughout the region, and second, the prevailing global conditions of abundant, cheap credit. Just before their failure, the Icelandic banks had foreign currency balance sheets amounting to almost 7.5 times Iceland’s GDP, with a significant maturity mismatch between assets and liabilities. In comparison, the Central Bank of Iceland’s foreign reserves amounted to 21% of GDP.4 These and other examples I could mention were accidents waiting to happen. And happen they did in the autumn of 2008, when, during the panic that gripped markets after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, there was a full-scale run on cross-border banks’ foreign currency liabilities.

“The Fault Lines in Cross-Border Banking: Lessons from the Icelandic Case”. SUERF Studies 05/2010, European Money and Finance Forum (2010). Baldursson and Portes give a recent assessment of the rise and fall of the Icelandic banks: Friðrik M Baldursson and Richard Portes (2013), “Gambling for resurrection in Iceland: the rise and fall of the banks”, CEPR Discussion Paper 9664, September. 5  Fleming and Klagge describe the Federal Reserve’s foreign exchange swap lines: Michael J. Fleming, and Nicholas J. Klagges. “The Federal Reserve’s Foreign Exchange Swap Lines. Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Current Issues in Economics and Finance”, 16, 4 (2010). Allen and Moessner analyse the important role of the US Dollar surplus in the policy response to the crisis and compare it to the policy response during the Great Depression: William A Allen and Richard Moessner (2010), “Options for meeting the demand for international liquidity during financial crises”, BIS Quarterly Review, September 2010, http://www.bis.org/. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  of the safety net and the associated moral hazard-mitigating mechanism in cross-border banking applied across the board to regulation, supervision, LOLR, deposit insurance, and crisis management and resolution. The adjustment that needs to take place after the crisis in order to make cross-border banking safer is clear in principle: the market action and the public framework in the form of the safety net and other arrangements has to be better aligned.