samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Chinese banks in Singapore have committed more than RMB 500 billion (USD 73.4 billion) in financing Singaporean companies involved in Belt and Road projects, including the issuance of project bonds. China Construction Bank Singapore branch issued RMB 1 billion (USD 145 million) of Belt and Road Initiative bonds in August last year. And in May this year, Bank of China Singapore branch issued Belt and Road Initiative bonds worth RMB 4 billion (USD 600 million). Expanding the role of capital markets in financing growth Second, the CCI has embarked on a demonstrative project to expand the role of our capital markets. This complements the role of banks in financing growth and development. Specifically, we should facilitate the participation of institutional investors in development projects. Why? China has many public-private partnership (PPP) projects, where the state and companies involved own and operate infrastructure assets. In Chongqing itself, RMB 800 billion worth of PPP projects are expected to be in the pipeline between 2015 and 2020. But infrastructure assets are illiquid by nature. The capital invested is locked up and not available for use in other development projects. 3/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  If we can securitise these PPP assets, we can help free up capital and diversify funding sources. We can make these securitised assets available to long term investors such as insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds, or even retail investors through a listing.

Between 2000 and 2016, China-Singapore trade has increased seven times, to more than USD 80 billion. Singapore is the largest foreign direct investor in China. Since 2010, Singapore’s direct investment into China has grown by an average 13.4% each year. Chinese financial institutions have significantly increased their presence in Singapore in recent years. Bank of China and ICBC have expanded considerably in Singapore over the past 4 years. They have set up in Singapore their regional centres– for commodities, trade financing, RMB trading, private banking, and debt capital markets. Other Chinese banks have established in Singapore their first international operations. Earlier this year, the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank opened in Singapore its first overseas branch outside of China and Hong Kong. 1/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  China Construction Bank opened its infrastructure services and private banking centres in Singapore. China Merchants Bank established in Singapore its only international private banking centre outside of China and Hong Kong. This vibrant economic connection between our two countries rests on the bedrock of a strong bilateral relationship that has grown and matured over the years. When President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong met in Hamburg in July this year on the side of the G20 meeting, they reaffirmed our close ties and discussed how China and Singapore could strengthen cross-border collaboration. In the past few months, various leaders of our two countries have met, always with the same purpose: to broaden relations, build connectivity, boost mutual prosperity.
F. Mishkin has expounded in a recent speech on “Monetary policy, risk management and financial disruptions” (Mishkin, 2008). Over the last few decades, research in macroeconomics has focused on two main types of uncertainty: -  uncertainty about the current state of the economy, commonly called data uncertainty,  -  uncertainty about the structure of the economy, which includes: 1/ uncertainty about some key parameters of the economy (e.g., the slope of the Phillips curve) which may be seen as a benign form of model uncertainty, with some parameters varying in the neighbourhood of an unknown true value; and 2/ a more radical uncertainty about the true model in a given model space (e.g. what is the true probability distribution of shocks, is it Gaussian or not, what is the magnitude of the “tail risks”?). Issues like: “What are the non-linear dynamics that financial disruption may trigger?” are here of the essence. Regarding data uncertainty, a general principle of conduct is certainty equivalence: a policy rule that is optimized under the assumption of an absence of data uncertainty is still optimal in the presence of such uncertainty. Regarding the consequences of “simple” parameter uncertainty, a key reference is the Brainard (1967) principle of caution, which suggests that the monetary policymaker should react more cautiously to shocks to variables associated with uncertain parameters in the monetary policy transmission process. However, what central banks, and in particular the US Fed, face today may be seen as a radical kind of model uncertainty.

Regarding monetary policy issues, the sharp rate cuts carried out by the Fed, including two 75bp cuts, contrast at first sight with the policy stance of the ECB. Why such a difference? Does this point to a lack of reactivity on the part of the ECB during downturns? This claim, though often heard, is not supported by scientific analyses of past actions. For instance, recent simulations conducted by Prof. Larry Christiano and co-authors suggest that the ECB’s actions were indeed more effective in stabilizing output in the aftermath of the 2001 crash (Christiano, Rostagno and Motto, 2007), while different shocks and different degrees of nominal rigidities in both economies accounted for apparent different reaction functions. Looking at the present situation, I think that it is possible to reconcile both views if one takes account of the nature and extent of macroeconomic uncertainty that currently affects the US economy as compared with the euro area. Economic uncertainty facing policymakers has always been a first-order problem, but it is obviously particularly acute in periods of stress. Taking into account some non-benign  2  Recent research at the Banque de France highlights moral hazard issues associated with the choice of any of these instruments by the LLR, cf. Ewerhart and Valla (2007), when the strategic behaviour of money market participants is explicitly modelled. 2  BIS Review 37/2008  dimensions of this uncertainty may be an incentive for central bankers to implement a “riskmanagement” approach to monetary policy. This is at least the view that Fed Gov.
We have to demonstrate the same spirit with which the European Union was progressively developed over the past half-century: setting objectives, agreeing deadlines and mobilising the necessary political will within Parliaments. Europe’s governments are committed to pursue fiscal consolidation. Those within the euro area have formally declared that they will take “all measures needed to meet fiscal targets this year and the years ahead in line with excessive deficit procedures” (Euro area heads of state or government declaration of 7 May 2010). Some of them have made precise additional commitments to accelerate fiscal consolidation and ensure the sustainability of their public finances. Fiscal consolidation is being put in place at the same time as we strengthen the resilience of the European banking sector. Publication of the detailed results of a harmonised panEuropean stress test is an important step in the right direction. These tests will increase transparency and enhance investors’ confidence in Europe’s banking sector. They will also contribute to restoring the important intermediation role of the interbank market in channelling funds within Europe. 3. Where next? So where do we go from here? As I have indicated, collectively as European and global policy-makers, we need to ensure economic recovery and renewed confidence, while reducing fiscal deficits and remaking the financial system into one that supports the real economy. This needs to be our clear sense of direction. 1  Keynes (1937), “How to avoid a slump”, Article in The Times, 12 January 1937.

As we move up the ladder, we increase the degree of citizen engagement in decisions that affect them. The RSA stop short of recommending the top rung, but do propose various initiatives to increase citizen involvement and collaboration. Armed with this framework, I have been thinking about how far the Bank of England has so far climbed the citizen engagement ladder. Truth be told, I suspect for the first 300 years of its life, the Bank of England scarcely had its foot on the first rung. It saw little need even to inform the wider public about the economy and policy. Trust among the public was anonymised, institutionalised and given. When tempted to step up a rung, the Bank quickly contracted an acute form of vertigo. Over the past 25 years the Bank has taken significant steps up the engagement ladder, in part in response to the public’s trust shift, in part reflecting the Bank’s wider policy responsibilities. These steps have 7  transformed how the Bank “informs” and “consults” the public on its views and policies. One simple diagnostic is the rise in the Bank’s publication count. Seventy years ago, the Bank published precisely one speech a year. Today, rarely a day passes without multiple publications. Then, the Bank uttered publically fewer than 5,000 words per year. Last year, it uttered in excess of 4 ½ million. Over the past two decades, it would not be an exaggeration to say there has been a genuine revolution in central bank communications.
In this general case, the choices of one committee will affect the choices of the others. An example of this was when the MPC, in giving it’s forward guidance on monetary policy, included a financial stability “knockout” – acknowledging explicitly that there might be circumstances when monetary policy settings had to reflect the risks to financial stability. That interaction or “spillover” is not the same as having a conflict between the objectives. Policy spillovers will be reflected in adjustments to the precise settings of policy levers at particular moments in time, but should not compromise achievement of the ultimate objectives. But to keep on course for multiple objectives certainly requires co-operation to reflect these policy interactions. One aspect of this co-ordination is a common understanding of the economy. For example, the gap between actual and potential output levels could have an important bearing on policy settings for each committee. If the three committees had different views about the size of that gap or just different economic models, then they could set inconsistent policies. That would be a conflict of judgements – not a conflict of objectives. The presence in the Bank of a single forecasting function and cross-use of its outputs, helps to avoid that particular trap. Any single central forecast would still most likely be wrong of course, but the committees will learn about changes to the outlook consistently, allowing consistent policy adjustments.

In exercising its authority, following its published approaches, the PRA also makes judgements around a broad set of firm-specific factors that the FPC would not be involved in: risks not captured in the formal capital definitions, senior appointments, approving specific transactions, risk and governance controls etc. In short the FPC makes decisions to ensure financial stability in the system as a whole and the PRA acts to support the safety and soundness of individual firms. But the PRA approach to supervision also involves other considerations. I have already mentioned that we must not operate a “zero failure” regime. That was in the context of not taking extreme decisions in over-zealous pursuit of our objectives. But if investors and other market participants believe that supervisory effectiveness leads to a situation in which a firm cannot fail, then they will likely take inappropriate exposures to those firms and the market will become distorted. In particular if a firm is likely to be bailed out by the public sector then that reduction in risk means that firms will have to pay less for their liabilities – giving them an implicit subsidy. That has been discussed at length in a number of Bank publications, but a key point for today is the Bank’s continuing commitment to end the “Too Big to Fail” problem and, specifically, to seek to establish realistic recovery and resolution plans for the firms it authorises. That consideration also affects supervisory decisions on legal entity structures, transactions, senior persons and so on.
Furthermore, our forward guidance could be made more outcome-based by linking the path of policy rates to realized inflation rather than with judgements and forecasts on the expected future path of inflation. Concerning our fourth instrument on liquidity provision, let me stress the efficiency of TLTROs. This instrument is a specific feature of euro area monetary policy and I believe we should keep it in place in some form for more time. The embedded incentive scheme on pricing makes it attractive for banks to extend credit to firms and households. Through TLTROIII, the ECB has provided around 2.1 trillion euros in loans to banks at negative rates. According to Eurosystem estimates, TLTROIII liquidity is expected to boost loan volumes to real economy to the tune of 3pp cumulatively by 2022v. The April Euro Area Bank Lending Survey indicates that around 45% of banks have reported and expect an increase in bank lending to firms due to TLTRO’s. Page 9 sur 9  Implementing a rule-based tiering multiplier, as I proposed earlier, could make it easier for us to get rid of some possibly excessive subsidies in the present design of TLTRO, and also limit the room for carry trades. But such a “refocused TLTRO” would remain crucial to provide the real economy with sufficient credit, and banks a significant additional source of funding relief. ** Let me conclude: we central bankers and policy makers must always deal with uncertainty, but still more since March 2020 and the pandemic.

Mojmír Hampl: Financial strangulation? Article by Mr Mojmír Hampl, Vice Governor of the Czech National Bank and a member of the EU's Economic and Financial Committee, published in The Wall Street Journal, Prague, 2 December 2008. *  *  *  Don't rush to change all the fire regulations while the actual fire is still raging. The reaction to the financial crisis should not be worse than the crisis itself. This is the mantra I've been repeating to myself – while shaking my head in disbelief at many ideas surfacing in the European and global debate on the "postcrisis" shape of the financial universe. The list of proposals that have appeared on the table so far is long and ranges from attempts to ban short-selling and regulate credit default swap markets to toughening up supervision of credit rating agencies, hedge funds or the whole sphere of structured financing. Capping executive pay – the easiest target for anyone searching for cheap political capital – is of course included. So are state efforts to micromanage banks, such as French attempts to set numerical targets for lending by recapitalized banks. For many people, these measures are the tolerable or even necessary by-products of fixing the crisis. At the top of the list, then, looms a concept of a brand-new, omnipotent, global (or at least European) super-regulator that would undoubtedly do everything better next time.
I recommend giving it a read: the report itself is a treasure trove of data, and the results do you credit. The average solvency capital requirement (SCR) coverage ratio on the French market climbed from 222% in 2016 to 238% in 2017. What’s more, in the first quarter of 2018, the French insurance market overtook Germany and the United Kingdom to become Europe’s number-one market, with over EUR 35 billion in direct premiums written in non-life insurance and over EUR 2.100 trillion in technical provisions. It also leads in investment capacity: commanding total assets of EUR 2.7 trillion in September 2018, France’s insurance sector is far and away the largest institutional investor in Europe, accounting for over one-third of the total assets of euro area insurers. In comparison, France makes up 21% of euro area GDP. Insurers, then, are a crucial asset for France, and their critical role in financing the economy can and indeed must grow further. Corporate equity is vital to innovation and hence to a vibrant economy, but in mid-2018 equity was equivalent to just 77% of GDP in the euro area and 76% in France, compared with 124% in the United States. II. Tapping into regulatory opportunities. I would like to start this section off by noting that France’s introduction of a flat tax on capital income on 1 January has not had the slightest detrimental effect on life insurance, despite fears on this score within your industry.

In an economy with a developed banking system such as ours, financing for the internationalisation of the Spanish economy is largely conditional on developments at the international level. The best policy for promoting the financing of the international expansion of our companies is to ensure the financial stability and soundness of the Spanish financial and banking system. 6  BIS central bankers’ speeches
Since 1986, Review Teams have carried out focused visits to banks to evaluate the level of risk in an institution as well as the risk management systems in place to identify, monitor, and control these risks. And in 1995 we introduced a Traded Markets Team to focus on banks’ pre-processing models which can be recognised under the CAD (Capital Adequacy Directive) as well as sophisticated risk modelling techniques used by the banks to manage treasury activities. These teams spend on average about three days on banks’ premises, which may seem short, but the visits are highly focused, reflecting a great deal of work carried out in advance, not just between team members and the line supervisors of the bank in question but also by the bank itself in providing detailed answers to a series of questions. At the same time, the Bank has recognised the need to be more systematic in its approach to risk assessment and has announced its intention to introduce a more formal approach based on a common approach, known as the RATE model, to identify - using a series of qualitative and quantitative measures - the risks faced by the bank. RATE is an acronym for the three stages of the process: Risk Assessment, Tools of supervision and Evaluation. BIS Review 21/1997  -9-  In the future, by performing periodic risk assessments, we aim to gain a better understanding of the quality of management, the characteristics of the business and the risks the banks face.

First and foremost, euro area countries should regain their ability to save money for a rainy day by adhering to their fiscal commitments in the new framework of the Fiscal Compact. They have already agreed to limited mutual insurance through the EFSF/ESM. A centralised fiscal capacity could be considered too, provided it is not the basis for permanent transfers but is used to promote market integration and better resilience to economic shocks. For instance, a euro area unemployment insurance scheme could be set up, which would support much-needed cross-country labour mobility. Indeed, an integrated economic policy framework is needed to boost economic integration and ensure that unsustainable policies do not jeopardise the stability of EMU. The framework should provide for a better enforcement of commitments to structural reforms, i.e. measures to increase a country’s competitiveness and its capacity to adjust to economic shocks. Structural reforms make EMU more robust. In addition, an integrated financial market framework is required in order to break the bank-sovereign nexus that threatens financial integration. This is another important element to make market-based risk sharing work effectively. While many euro area banks have benefited from the single currency, and significantly expanded their European business activities, they are still supervised at national level. Financial fragmentation, as I described above, has led to the perception that banks’ liabilities, even though they are nominally the same, are in fact different from one euro area country to another. This is not acceptable: the currency union has thus to be complemented by a banking union.
This certainly underlies the growing popularity of inflation targeting and the forward guidance that comes with it. But even this may be challenging in a changing environment, where the business cycle overlaps with structural changes, and more so in areas, like financial stability, where policy targets may be hard to design and explain. From credibility to trust So, a broader approach to credibility-building may be needed. To this end, it may be useful to acknowledge that credibility is an attribute of a certain individual or institution: that of being believed or trusted. So surely, credibility does not depend exclusively on your own actions but on how far others trust you. Trust, in turn, is defined as a person’s belief or expectation that another person or institution will act in favor of one’s well-being (OECD, 2017). So we could think of credibility as an institutional asset that depends on the factors that influence trust from stakeholders and the public. Credibility in a central bank refers to public’s belief that future actions of monetary policy that are optimal today will be carried out even if they no longer seem optimal in the future. This is related to public trust, but the two concepts are not quite the same. One can imagine the public having trust in the central bank and at the same time the latter adopting a discretionary monetary policy strategy to retain full flexibility regardless of past promises.

This is well reflected in the 2018-2022 corporate strategy under course. This was based on an unprecedented consultation of stakeholders and participatory internal process. It defined as a vision for the Bank to be a trustworthy technical institution, known for its high standards in achieving its institutional objectives. On this basis, we have launched a number of initiatives aimed at fostering public trust in terms by improving its reliability, adaptability, integrity, accessibility and fairness. To improve its reliability, the Central Bank of Chile has taken a thoughtful process of revision of its framework of monetary policy and forward guidance. Great emphasis has also been given to strengthening the technical toolkit to identify and communicate sources of financial risk. With a focus on adaptability, we have introduced special chapters, analytical boxes and companion studies to our flagship reports. We have also launched a technological observatory with the goal of identifying new sources of risk, and the creation of the Corporate Risk Area within the Bank. For integrity, we have broadened the framework and coverage of declaration of interests among executives and staff in sensitive functions, and have strengthened our external auditing committee. Some initiatives to improve the Bank’s accessibility include regular presentations of Bank reports throughout the country, the development of market intelligence mechanisms and the upgrading of communications by creating an Institutional Affairs Division. To foster fairness we are also deepening our analysis of the economic and financial behavior of households and raising our contribution to financial literacy and education to the highest world standards.