samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
We believe there is a need for financial advisers to possess a larger body of financial and technical knowledge, that includes a deeper awareness of latest developments in the industry and opportunities available, and to be able to apply this knowledge to a client’s advantage. Other core competencies that need to be given greater emphasis include effective communication and problem solving skills. The second priority is to identify and address the barriers that are preventing qualified parties from entering the industry, and the constraints that are limiting the ability of financial advisers to recommend the best solutions to their clients. We are close to making an announcement on revised minimum entry requirements for financial advisory business. The Bank is also currently working on measures to create a more level playing field with respect to product offerings among the insurance intermediaries. The Bank and the Securities Commission will also continue to coordinate closely in facilitating the ability of financial advisers and financial planners to provide advice on a broad range of financial solutions. In this respect, further enhancements are expected to be made to regulatory processes to improve efficiency and further ease the regulatory burden on the existing players. The third priority is to improve the alignment between the interests of consumers and financial advisers. We believe how incentives are structured have an important role in shaping the quality of advice that a consumer receives.

Strategic priorities to further develop the financial advisory industry The Bank has identified a number of strategic priorities to further develop the full potential of the financial advisory industry in delivering better outcomes to consumers and increasing the level of insurance penetration in Malaysia. I should say that we benefitted significantly from our engagements with the industry on the direction that we intend to take and the key issues that need to be addressed moving forward. Today, let me mention four key priorities. Our first priority is to ensure that financial advisers are highly competent and professional when they provide advice. We understand from our engagements with AFA that recruiting the right talent continues to be a major challenge given that financial advisory firms are competing with larger financial institutions for a limited pool of qualified individuals. The Bank will continue to work in close collaboration with AFA to increase the talent pool. This includes reviewing on a regular basis, the programmes and qualifications that meet the minimum standards for financial advisors and working with academia, training providers and accreditation bodies to broaden the qualifications recognized without compromising on quality. There is also a need to lift the competency requirements for financial advisers. The current emphasis has been largely on ensuring that financial advisers have sound product knowledge and the core competencies to understand and analyse their client’s needs.
Recently the gap between saving rates in the UK and the rest of the G7 has narrowed considerably, not as a result of higher saving in the UK but lower saving elsewhere. In large part this reflects changes in fiscal policy. There is ample empirical evidence that higher government borrowing lowers national saving. And for twenty years or more the G7, while lecturing each other and the rest of the world on the need for fiscal discipline, has continued to borrow more and more. The ratio of net public debt to GDP in the G7 has more doubled since 1980 from around 25% to around 60%. The UK is the only member of the G7 in which the ratio is lower than in 1980. The UK has a clear framework for fiscal policy. Although rules and frameworks cannot guarantee that governments will pursue sustainable fiscal policies, as the large deficits in the early 1990s illustrated, they make deviations from medium-term sustainability more transparent. But in the rest of the G7 the absence of a clear framework, as in Japan and the United States, or the lack of credibility in the stated framework, as in the failure to enforce the Stability and Growth Pact in the euro area, has made it easier to let the fiscal position slip. As a result, the G7 fiscal deficit is now close to its 25-year peak, and the average national saving ratio has halved. At home, the Government’s fiscal rules constrain the path of fiscal deficits.

Such concerns about the short run are indeed analysed carefully each month by the Monetary Policy Committee, and the results of that analysis feed into our monthly interest rate decisions. Visits like this give me the chance to listen to you and learn from you and other businesses about what is happening on the ground - not just in the retail sector but in manufacturing and services more broadly. And my visit is the tip of an iceberg because we have a permanent Agency in the North West - staffed by members of the Bank who live and work here. BIS Review 4/2005  1  But I want to step back from the immediate conjuncture and look further ahead. More relevant for our future prosperity is the question not of whether we might save too much but whether we are saving too little. The level of income that will sustain us in the future depends critically upon how much as a nation we set aside today. In other words, what is happening to the national saving rate - the proportion of the net national product that is not consumed by either the private or public sector? Since the late 1960s the national saving rate has been declining fairly steadily, from over 10% to around 5%. Although saving rates elsewhere in the G7 have also fallen, they were higher than in the UK for most of the post-war period.
1 That is in part because of its longer duration and in part because of its superior risk-sharing properties. For at least some emerging markets, their national balance sheets appear to be moving to a more robust footing. A second positive development comes from looking at countries’ degree of self-insurance, in particular their stock of foreign exchange reserves. As Chart 12 shows, these have grown dramatically since the second world war and especially since the Asian crisis, both in money terms and relative to world GDP. Reserves have risen from $ trillion in 1995 to over $ trillion by end-2013, or from around 5% of world GDP to around 15% today. Third, this has been accompanied by some augmentation of multilateral official sector facilities for helping handle external financing shocks. For example, since 1980 IMF quota resources have risen from just under $ billion to around $ billion, or from 0.7% to just less than 2% of world GDP (Chart 13). The most significant augmentation in resources came from the New Arrangements to Borrow (NAB) in 2009, which were agreed to increase temporarily the resources available to the IMF at the height of the financial crisis. 1  Bank of England research adds one nuance to this story. Dell’Erba and Reinhardt (2013) find that financial sector FDI appears to behave more like debt flows than traditional FDI flows. BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  Fourth, alongside these multilateral facilities, the past few years have seen rapid growth in regional and bilateral financing facilities (Chart 14).

Andrew G Haldane: Managing global finance as a system Text of the Maxwell Fry Annual Global Finance Lecture, given by Mr Andrew G Haldane, Executive Director and Chief Economist of the Bank of England, at Birmingham University, Birmingham, 29 October 2014. *  *  *  Accompanying charts can be found at the end of the speech. The views are not necessarily those of the Bank of England or the Monetary Policy Committee. I would like to thank Ambrogio Cesa-Bianchi, Edd Denbee, Jeremy Franklin, Carsten Jung, Matt Roberts-Sklar, Stephanie Quiet and Benedict Roth for assistance in preparing the text. I would also like to thank to Rob Elder, Jeremy Harrison, Kristin Forbes, James Smith and Stacy Williams (HSBC FX Quantitative Strategy Team) for insights and comments. It is a great honour to be giving this year’s Maxwell Fry Global Finance Lecture. Max was a tremendous colleague, both during his time here at Birmingham University and as Director of the Centre for Central Banking Studies at the Bank of England. Max also had a rare gift. Through his exceptionally rich academic and public policy career, he was able to integrate the insights from disciplines which all too rarely communicated – monetary theory and central bank practice, advanced and emerging market experience, financial markets dynamics and mainstream macro-economics. The global financial crisis could not have provided a clearer demonstration of the benefits of combining these insights.
While to some extent procyclicality is inherent in the financial system because risk is by its own nature cyclical, it is important to ensure that the regulatory framework does not amplify these fluctuations. Instead, the public sector should play an active role in mitigating procyclical behaviour as far as possible by enhancing the forward-looking nature of the regulatory framework. Concrete areas for attention that have been identified include certain elements of the fair value accounting rules and the implementation of the new capital requirements for banks and insurance companies. In the future, public authorities will need to be continuously aware of the importance of applying sufficiently long-term horizons for financial rules and prudential practices. Third, it will be necessary to pay closer attention to the growing importance and complexity of liquidity risk in the more market-based financial system. In this context it will be essential to ensure that prudent liquidity risk management of financial institutions provides an effective line of defence, also to pre-empt the moral hazard risk associated with a possible undue reliance of market participants on central bank actions. The experience gained from the financial market correction has indicated that the liquidity risk management of a number of financial institutions was not commensurate with their increasing exposure to liquidity risk from both the assets and liabilities side.

And parallel migration by both the Bank and the NPSO will encourage widespread adoption of ISO 20022, a precondition for unlocking these benefits. We encourage stakeholders to take this opportunity to feed into the process and help shape the future of payments in the UK. So, what has been achieved? The consolidation and transition of Bacs and the Faster Payments Service (FPS) to the NPSO has been st  delivered. On the 1 of May of this year, the NPSO formally took over responsibility for the operation of these 1  See: The Bank of England’s supervision of financial market infrastructures – Annual Report 2018. Which manages the paper processing system for cheques and the recently launched Image Clearing System. 3 See: public statement on the commencement of the Bank’s direct delivery of CHAPS. 4 See: ISO 20022 consultation paper: a global standard to modernise UK payments. 2  3  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  3  two systemically important payment systems and was brought within the supervisory remit of the Bank. It has been operational for almost two months now, and, with the Cheque and Credit Clearing Company to be integrated shortly, another key milestone on this journey will soon be achieved. Between these retail payment systems, the NPSO will be responsible for the processing of £ trillion payments each year, almost two and half times the UK’s GDP. I think we would all agree that its continued resilience and smooth functioning is a matter of primary concern.
Supervisors must ensure that banks improve their operational resilience by strengthening their ability to respond to and recover from cyber-attacks. At a minimum, mitigating cyber threats would require effective collaboration between regulators and the industry, adequate contingency and Central Bank of Kuwait - Public ‫ عام‬- ‫بنك الكويت المركزي‬  -4-  recovery plans by banks and sound security practices by all participants of financial market infrastructure. In Kuwait, we are in the process of putting in place an advanced platform for effective information sharing about cyber threats that can later be used at the regional level. Supervisors in this regard can leverage CPMI-IOSCO guidance that calls for ‘resilience by design’, encouraging to incorporate sound security features in the system right from its earliest stage of conceptualization. This approach will help address the potential cyber compromises that could stem from banks’ dependence on legacy technologies. To help strengthen cyber resilience of financial institutions, Financial Stability Board (FSB) is currently working on ‘identifying practices to help financial institutions recover from and respond to cyber incidents’. Next year, they are planning to release a toolkit of effective practices that banking industry can use in improving operational resilience against cyber threats. Coping with climate change The second emerging issue warranting our close attention is climate change. According to UN estimates, around 60 million people were affected by extreme weather events in 2018 alone. And within this year, we have witnessed the damaging impact of wildfire in California, hurricane in Bahamas, cyclone in Bangladesh and typhoon in Japan.

In the first case, we have good tools with which to respond. As the economy moved closer to full employment, we could raise short-term interest rates and subsequently sell assets from our portfolio. By doing this, we would tighten financial conditions, slow the economy and ensure it remained on a path consistent with our dual mandate objectives. The losses to society from this scenario should not be very large, provided we act in a manner that keeps medium-term inflation expectations in check. But the losses to society may be very high in the second case. That is because – as Japan has discovered over the past two decades – once in a liquidity trap it is not easy to return to full employment and price stability. Pinned at the lower bound, we don’t have as good a set of tools as we would ordinarily have to push the economy back toward our dual mandate objectives. As a result of this asymmetry, we should give somewhat more weight to avoiding the liquidity trap outcome. Embedded within the traditional Taylor Rule formulations is the implicit return path back to full employment and price stability that the FOMC achieved in the past when faced with shocks that pushed economic activity below its potential level.14  14  Obviously, there is a cost to those who are unemployed longer than necessary with no offsetting gain in terms of greater price stability. But there also is another potential long-run cost.
When it comes to the question of which payment instruments should become the credit transfer and direct debit schemes used for euro payments in the EU, for me it is obvious that the answer is the SCT and SDD. This is, in fact, the position of the Eurosystem, which was clearly communicated in the seventh SEPA  1  The survey involved 42 European banks in nine countries. See the press release (in German) available at: http://www.bearingpoint.de/PMI_SEPA_081110.pdf  BIS Review 159/2010  1  progress report. Of course, it is one thing to set a goal, but it is far harder to achieve it. However, I am confident that the European Commission will make this possible through a legislative proposal. Despite the debate surrounding the end date in the past few weeks, we should not forget that we all share the same goal: we all want to make SEPA a reality. Of course, SEPA will only be a success story if it goes beyond credit transfers and direct debits. This brings me to my next New Year’s resolution: New Year’s resolution number two: let’s establish the requirements for a competitive cards market Any cards market should meet a number of requirements in order to facilitate competition and efficiency. The principle of separating card scheme management from processing entities is one of the core elements of SEPA that aims to guarantee open access. The SEPA credit transfer and direct debit schemes are built on this principle; it should be applied in the cards market too.

And this was an important reason why the Riksbank began to publish its forecasts and other material on which decisions were based early on in the new inflation-targeting regime. Building up confidence in the price stability target as quickly as we actually did would probably have been very difficult if we had not been as open as we were with regard to our work and our decisions. Secondly, openness and clarity are nowadays an important part of monetary policy in itself. According to economic theory, there is a correlation between interest rates with different times to maturity. And expectations of short-term interest rates, which the central bank governs, are important to the longterm interest rates. By influencing expectations of short-term interest rates, a central bank can therefore also indirectly affect interest rates with longer maturities. Greater influence over interestsetting for all maturities – the yield curve – means that the impact of monetary policy is more effective. This is often called conducting monetary policy by “management-of-expectations”. And the best way to do this is to provide good information. A third reason for working to achieve greater openness and clarity “outwards” is that it can help us to work more efficiently within the Riksbank’s walls. And this is an argument I do not think should be underestimated. Openness quite simply increases the incentives for us to do a good job as it makes it easier for others to evaluate how well monetary policy functions. 3  Sveriges Riksbank Act (1983:1385), Chapter 3, Article 3.
In particular, although high uncertainty surrounds this area, new technologies clearly pose the most significant challenge (and opportunity) for banks in the medium and long term. These technologies may rapidly alter the competition framework, increasing competition in some segments and changing both the demand for banking services and the way in which they are provided. This means that banks will have to respond by anticipating and adjusting to the new environment, even though this may entail higher costs in the short term. The current degree of penetration of new technologies is comparatively low in Spain, as shown in Chart 20. This, together with Spain’s extensive bank branch network, leads one to believe that there is considerable room for growth in digital banking and for efficiency gains, providing a growth opportunity for Spanish banking institutions. Growing financial disintermediation is yet another challenge for the banking sector. Its intensity will depend on short-term and structural factors relating to monetary policy developments, the emergence of new competitors, progress in the capital markets union and long-term saving trends. Challenges facing the euro area Lastly, let me now turn to the challenges facing the euro area, since the outlook for the Spanish economy also relies to a crucial extent on these challenges being adequately met. In this respect, despite the improvements made in the European architecture in recent years, more progress is needed to enhance euro area stability, requiring further steps to reduce risks and also to share them between the Member States.

With the advance of the euro area economy’s position in the cycle, according to the ECB’s latest estimates, there will be a progressive pick-up in inflation levels to close to 2% in the coming years. Indeed, at its meeting on 14 June, the ECB’s Council reached the conclusion that the progress to date towards a sustained adjustment of inflation has been substantial, which gave rise to a gradual reduction in net asset purchases, duly confirmed by subsequent successive meetings of the Governing Council. The anchoring of long-term inflation expectations, the sound underlying firmness of the euro area economy and the maintenance of a high degree of monetary accommodation offer reasons to believe that the sustained convergence of inflation on the Governing Council’s objective will continue in the coming months, and that it will be maintained even after the finalisation of the net purchase programme, in line with the – very gradual – normalisation of monetary policy announced by the ECB’s Council. Fiscal policy should resume the fiscal consolidation process, given that both the public debt/GDP ratio and the structural deficit are holding at levels some distance off the limits set in the Stability and Growth Pact (see Chart 12). In recent years notable headway has been made in correcting some of the imbalances in the Spanish economy, such as the restructuring of the financial system, private-sector deleveraging, the recovery in competitiveness and the attainment of persistent currentaccount surpluses, and the adjustment of the real estate sector.
Currently, Malaysia’s exports to India has amounted close to USD9 billion in 2011, equivalent to 4.1 percent of Malaysia’s total exports, while the outstanding direct investments from India is now close to half a billion USD. The financial sector has an important role to be a catalyst to facilitate growth in such trade and investment activities between India and Malaysia. The establishment of our relationship has already begun with the issuance of a full commercial banking license to an Indian bank to operate here in Malaysia in 2010. A licence has also been granted to an Indian fund manager. Rise of islamic finance in the new global economy Another development in several emerging economies in Asia and the Middle East is the rapid growth of Islamic finance. An important development in this decade has been the growing significance of the international dimension of Islamic finance and its increased role in mobilising and channeling funds to productive investment activities across borders. Expanding steadily at a double digit pace of growth, total Islamic financial assets currently is estimated to be more than $ trillion. With more than 600 Islamic financial institutions now operating in more than 75 countries, countries from Asia, Middle East and Africa are increasingly participating in cross-border financial markets. In financing trade and investment activities, Islamic finance has influenced a new global pattern of trade and financial flows. Islamic finance serves as an important channel for more efficient allocation of funds across borders and diversification of risks.

This report comes at an opportune time as there have been growing concerns that terrorist groups are using the pandemic outbreak to advance their propaganda and fundraising efforts. Although the risk seems muted at the moment due to strengthened border enforcement, online activities and financial transactions related to terrorism could easily go under the radar of authorities. This bolsters the continuous need to better understand and profile key players involved in the furtherance of terrorism financing activities. I believe that the typology report and also discussion during this Workshop will help us to close gaps and reduce our blind spots. As we progress, financial crimes will continue to evolve and take on more complex forms. As such, we should remind ourselves to not let our guards down. The fight against terrorism is a shared battle and it must always be our collective priority. This can only be successfully conquered through the sharing of information between members. Conclusion As we face unprecedented times, we are bound to encounter unknown challenges. Thus, there is a need for all of us to stay prepared, agile and responsive in facing those threats. Collaboration amongst us, through sharing of information and experience, will further strengthen our collective readiness to address the ML/TF risks. I note that a diverse mix of participants including from the private sectors have registered for the Workshop which will no doubt enrich the discourse this week.