samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
In the central scenario, the projection that activity will accumulate several quarters of contraction is maintained. Accordingly, the activity gap will turn negative by the beginning of 2023, flatting out until the end of the policy horizon, which is necessary for bringing inflation down towards the target. In the central scenario, GDP will grow 2.4% in 2022, then fall between –1.75% and –0.75% in 2023 and recover between 2% and 3% in 2024. This upward revision for 2022 responds to actual data, while the bulk of the downward correction for 2023 and 2024 responds to the new assumption for trend growth. The projection continues to assume that consumption and investment will post negative variation rates in 2023. This reflects a weakening of the labor market, pessimistic household and business expectations, a high real exchange rate, and tight financial conditions for all credit categories. On the fiscal side, it considers expenditure in line with the approved budget for 2023, which follows a consolidation path over the following years (table 1). The current-account deficit will narrow in the coming quarters, as the economy restores its balance between savings and investment. The drop of transportation costs from its peak will also contribute. In the central scenario, the current account will close 2022 with a deficit of 8.7% of GDP, then will decline to 4.9% in 2023, and to 4.1% in 2024. The boost that the Chilean economy will receive from abroad is downgraded from our September estimate.

Heng Swee Keat: Developments in Asia and Singapore’s insurance industry Keynote address by Mr Heng Swee Keat, Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, at the GE/FICS Award Ceremony, Singapore, 24 July 2008. *  *  *  Mrs Fang Ai Lian, Chairman, Great Eastern Life, Mr Tan Hak Leh, Managing Director, Ladies and Gentlemen, It is my pleasure to be here on this happy occasion, made all the more significant as Great Eastern Life (GE Life) celebrates its centennial this year. For a corporation to achieve success for 100 years is a significant achievement. It attests to the agility and business acumen of its leaders, as well as the commitment of several generations of staff. Today, we celebrate GE Life’s achievement as the first insurer in Singapore to acquire accreditation as a FICS assessment service provider. This reflects well on GE Life’s commitment towards staff development. Developments in Asia and Singapore’s insurance industry Despite the recent financial turmoil, the life insurance industry has held up relatively well in this region. While regional economies would not be insulated from the global economic slowdown, the medium-term outlook for the region remains good. The pace of economic growth and wealth creation in the region will drive demand for a range of insurance products. Indeed, estimates from Swiss Re show that life and general insurance premiums have been growing at a faster pace than GDP in most emerging Asian economies.
This may serve as another example in this respect. After one year of much talking about them, these subsidiaries have kept doing well. There has been no withdrawing of liquidity from Bulgaria to support the parent institutions in Greece, nor have local residents moved their deposits to other banks. The banks’ shareholders confirmed their long-term commitments to stay and even expand activities in Bulgaria to exploit the opportunities on our market. Generally, the indicators of Greek subsidiaries in Bulgaria are equal or higher than the average of the system as a whole. We as supervisors and guardians of financial stability had to spend much time to dispel all the rumours and fears. These efforts were not in vain. Continuing reforms, letting banks work Governments need to stay firm in their efforts to conduct fiscal consolidation complemented by the necessary structural reforms. Politicians must not be afraid of reforms the needs for which are well understood. Even in the short run, reform-minded politicians get social and political rewards, as long as their message is clear. That has been demonstrated recently in both emerging Europe (with the re-election of a reformist government in Latvia) and also here in Greece (during the local and regional government elections last autumn). Policymakers should not yield under populist pressures. Better financial consumer protection and prudential regulations are certainly needed. But the banking industry should not be overburdened and prevented from fulfilling its traditional functions.

However, if we scale it to the country’s GDP, it was in the range between 6.1 to 6.9% over the past five years. Thus, despite the headway we have made in advancing e-payments, the persistency of cash among the public and small and medium sized businesses remains high. This opens up the economy to risks as cash is still being used by criminals to launder illegal proceeds, as we 3/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  have seen from some high-profile cases over the past year or so. Similarly, this is the preferred mode to finance terrorist activities, which will involve transacting in cash. Therefore, it is timely for us to look at ways to strengthen the controls to mitigate financial crime; namely the cash threshold reporting requirement. When we compare Malaysia with other countries, our current threshold is too high and disconnected from the size of our economy, especially relative to our purchasing power. Hence, it needs to be updated. In this regard, we would like to announce that we will be lowering the daily cash threshold report to RM25,000 effective 1 January 2019. This will bring the cash threshold report in Malaysia to be more at par with other countries. We do not anticipate any impact in terms of economic activity but an increase in effectiveness in taming the black economy that is still heavily reliant on cash transactions.
These Fintech companies, which possess some advantages over traditional banks such as state-of-the-art technology and no legacy operating infrastructures, have taken advantage of the opportunities offered by payment services regulation and exert additional competitive pressure on banks. Licensed Payment Institutions and Electronic Money Institutions, are smaller (in terms of size and complexity), and have a competitive advantage in terms of cost structure and overheads. Moreover, due to the fact that they are not licensed to hold customer deposits, in other words they are not banks, they are not burdened by red tape. However, they cannot effectively operate without the existence of traditional banks nor can their business model be sustained without banks. Bank accounts and customer deposits are a basic pillar for the functioning of the payments ecosystem. Therefore, the co-existence of these institutions and traditional banks is at the same time competitive and dependent. Competitive because PIs/EMIs have gained market share from traditional banks with respect to payment services and dependent because they rely on traditional banks in order to provide these services. In addition to the provision of payment and e-money services, a number of authorised PIs and EMIs in the EU are offering further (non-regulated) services such as peer-topeer lending, data analytics, information and communication technology related services, consultancy services, in-game payments and other payment-processing products.

Conclusion and the current situation Let me now briefly comment on our most recent interest rate decision. It may appear strange that the Riksbank chooses to raise the repo rate in a situation where inflation is very low. To understand this, it is important to remember that monetary policy must be conducted on the basis of expectations of the future, i.e. forecasts. It is therefore not the present inflation rate we intend to influence, but the expected inflation rate a couple of years ahead. Back in December we envisaged an inflation rate in line with the target towards the end of the forecast period, given a gradual rise in the repo rate during 2006. Information we have received since December indicates that developments will be slightly stronger in Sweden and abroad than we had assumed. As is often the case when making decisions, there are also arguments against raising the interest rate; productivity growth and import prices are continuing to dampen inflation, and inflation is expected to remain low for a large part of the forecast period. One thing that must be remembered when considering our decision to raise the repo rate, is that monetary policy is still expansionary even after this decision, both from a historical perspective and compared with other countries. An interest rate increase of 0.25 percentage points does not mean that monetary policy has been tightened; it is merely the first step towards less expansionary monetary  6  BIS Review 8/2006  policy.
The Bank was required by the Government to publish a quarterly Inflation Report setting out the background to the monetary policy decisions and the prognosis, and, going further, Chancellor Kenneth Clarke, subsequently decided that minutes of our policymaking meetings should be published six weeks or so after the event. This degree of transparency was a bold and far-reaching step. Before that - apart from the dozen or so people directly involved in the decision-making process - no one knew with any certainty whether the mistakes that were made were a result of intervention by the Prime Minister, bad decisions by the Chancellor, with or without advice from Treasury officials, or bad advice from the Governor and/or his colleagues at the Bank. We all kept our heads down when things went badly, only putting them above the parapet when things went well. The Bank was, it is true, able within limits to explain its thinking publicly when summoned to appear before the relevant House of Commons Select Committee, or through Governor’s speeches, and this possibility may have acted as some kind of a constraint on the Government, but such opportunities needed to be used with discretion or they could have caused a breakdown in the “continuous and constructive cooperation between the central bank  3  BIS Review 66/2000  and the Government” which Exter rightly identified as the ideal - I would say even essential relationship.

But it is positive that their establishment on the labour market looks like it is starting to go faster. As you know, there are no guarantees in the forecasting business. It has taken a decade, but it seems as though the global economy has finally recovered enough from the after-shocks of the financial crisis to start a new chapter and that central banks in our part of the world will gradually be able to raise interest rates again. For the small Swedish economy, with its reliance on foreign trade, altogether premature or rapid rate rises would jeopardise the strong economy and development of inflation. For the Riksbank, it is a question of remaining vigilant. A prerequisite for inflation to continue to develop in line with the target is that economic activity remains strong and has an impact on price developments. Monetary policy therefore needs to remain expansionary for a while. But if everything goes as expected, the time to start normalising monetary policy will come closer. The assessment we made in February was that it is probably time to slowly start raising the repo rate during the second half of this year. But such a turnaround requires considerable caution, in my opinion. I occasionally hear somebody say that it feels wrong to have a negative policy rate when the economy is going as well as it is now. But the Riksdag has assigned the Riksbank to conduct a monetary policy that contributes to suitably low inflation.
2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  employment since 1997. It is difficult to understand why firms should increase employment so significantly if their existing workforce is not fully utilised. Some of this behaviour may be explicable if employment growth were concentrated in sectors of the economy which are expanding most quickly, especially those orientated towards the export sector. But it is striking that this pattern of rising employment and weak productivity is common across most sectors of the economy (Chart 2).5 It is also possible that firms in some parts of our economy are having to work flat out just to generate the same amount of business. Estate agents, for example, trying to match buyers and sellers in a thin housing market. Or M&A teams pitching for new business. The extra effort that is required may explain why these types of companies do not report much spare capacity. But it does not help to explain why companies facing these types of pressures should want to expand greatly their workforces. It is hard to reconcile the number of new jobs created over the past year with the belief that firms are sitting on a substantial margin of spare capacity. The recent weakness in productivity may also have been exaggerated by the sheer difficulty of measuring economic activity in real time. We know that early estimates of output are often revised as more comprehensive data become available. Recent productivity may look less disappointing if subsequent estimates of output are marked up.

And as I’ve just discussed, the growing belief that the degree of spare capacity in our economy was probably less than might appear at first sight. But I also suggested that policymakers should approach their task with considerable pragmatism, and that if some of the downside risks to growth materialised, I’d reverse my vote. And that indeed is what has happened. The outlook for demand over the past few months has weakened quite materially. Consequently, at the August MPC meeting, I reversed my position and voted to maintain Bank Rate at 0.5% and the stock of asset purchases at £ billion. And as shown in the minutes published this morning, I voted the same way at this month’s MPC meeting. So what has happened to our economy over the past few months? The deterioration in the outlook largely reflects developments outside of our shores. Growth in the world economy, including in our core trading partners in Europe and the US, has slowed. Concerns about the fiscal positions of some countries, particularly within the euro area, have intensified. This in turn has fuelled worries and uncertainties about the resilience of the international banking system. And perhaps most fundamentally of all, confidence that the authorities have the ability to respond to these challenges in a decisive and timely  BIS central bankers’ speeches  7  manner has diminished. These four factors have fed on each other, leading to a pronounced downward spiral. The UK has been caught in the fallout from these external developments.
The general bankruptcy procedure is not considered credible, because it is not designed to handle systemic risk.1 The proposal envisages that a bank is to be put under public administration if it is unable, or is expected to become unable, to meet its commitments over a longer period. A bank under public administration is also to be able to obtain a government guarantee that covers all its commitments. All this is intended to enable the bank to continue operations during a transitional period without a capital contribution from the government. A guiding principle behind the proposed public administration is that, in the event of a crisis, there is no universal protection of creditors. Better risk management and decreased risk exposure are likely to result ex ante if shareholders are liable to be hit by a crisis and creditors may suffer losses. The government guarantee is accordingly proposed to apply only to commitments that are made after the guarantee has been issued. In this way, a bank’s losses are to be carried in the first place by its shareholders and after them by the creditors whose claims pre-date the decision to impose public administration. A basic principle in the management of the Swedish banking crisis was just that no compensation would be provided for shareholders if government funds were needed to cope with a bank’s problems. This was important, of course, with a view to future moral hazard problems but it was also crucial politically.

Otherwise it would hardly have been possible to obtain political support for the public funds needed. The unwillingness to adopt an equally strict approach in many Asian countries has presumably been a major factor behind the difficulties in dealing with the problems there. The central bank’s primary function in this context is to provide emergency lending for acute needs in order to avoid a systemic crisis and aid the work of the new authority. The experience from bank crises clearly demonstrates the importance of incorporating such emergency lending in the general structure for crisis management instead of treating it as a separate measure. This has to do with the great difficulty in practice of distinguishing between liquidity support and support motivated by problems with solvency. At the Riksbank we have made very concrete preparations in this field. We have, for example, produced manuals specifying who is to do what and how in various conceivable crisis situations. Before turning to monetary policy, permit me finally to underscore that I am well aware of the difficulties of various kinds, not least of an institutional and political nature, that exist at the European level when it comes to composing a clear set of rules of this type. At the same time this conference has strengthened my belief that a development towards a more integrated European banking system can be swift. The least we can do is to prepare ourselves on the national level. It will probably help us managing a crisis at the European level if one would emerge.
Banking integration In banking, the key achievement is the establishment of the ASEAN Banking Integration Framework (ABIF). •  ABIF provides a platform for Qualified ASEAN Banks to enjoy greater market access and operational flexibility. •  Banking liberalisation under the ABIF can be done on a bilateral basis and customised accordingly. •  Two ASEAN countries can agree on specific areas to be liberalised based on the Qualified ASEAN Banks’ commercial interests. ABIF will complement the broader economic integration of ASEAN. •  As ASEAN economies develop further, their corporates will expand their operations into the region. •  The banks who have been servicing these corporates in their home markets are well placed to follow their customers and support them as they regionalise. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  •  ABIF will provide them an enhanced vehicle to do so. More importantly, ABIF will be a vehicle to help grow a group of strong pan-ASEAN regional banks with the scale and the capability to compete alongside the global banks. As ASEAN becomes an economic powerhouse, so must our ASEAN banks. Looking ahead, a key priority for banking integration will be to help banking groups with operations in several ASEAN countries to share and transmit information across borders. •  For banks with pan-ASEAN operations, the segregation of data and systems in multiple countries due to data on-shoring requirements may hinder effective group risk management and raise data security concerns.

Ravi Menon: ASEAN financial integration – where are we, where next? Keynote address by Mr Ravi Menon, Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, at the ASEAN Banking Council Meeting, Singapore, 12 June 2015. *  *  *  Dr In Channy, Chairman, ASEAN Bankers Association Mr Samuel Tsien, Chairman, Association of Banks in Singapore Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. ASEAN banks have performed well over the last two decades since the Asian Financial Crisis. Asia’s economies and financial systems, including those in ASEAN, generally held up well during the Global Financial Crisis. The near term economic outlook for ASEAN will be shaped by two themes: the ongoing recovery in the G3 economies and the slowdown in the Chinese economy. Barring shocks, overall growth in ASEAN should remain firm this year, at about 5%, not spectacular but very respectable considering the state of the global economy. Macroeconomic conditions are therefore supportive of banks in ASEAN. There are, however, downside risks they need to watch. •  The divergence in monetary policy settings among the G3 economies could pose risks to financial stability that could also potentially hurt growth. •  The anticipated normalisation of interest rates in the US against continuing quantitative easing in the Eurozone and Japan is already causing sharp movements in exchange rates and bond yields. The scenario of a “double whammy” posed by a rise in US interest rates and a strong US Dollar could expose vulnerabilities among some ASEAN borrowers.
To be more precise, this higher capital requirement will be applied on those which have less than 20% of their share capital or voting rights with third parties and that have wholesale funding of more than 20%. These institutions are not the globally active ones, but they are the locally oriented ones that have created the highest risk for financial stability in Spain during recent times. While our largest banks have been more a support factor than a problem, and part of our savings banks sector is sound and profitable, we have faced serious challenges regarding a number of the local savings banks. Our experience in this crisis illustrates that we should be careful not to establish over-simplistic solutions to be applied generally. Instead, we should concentrate on solving the problems where they really originated. This is precisely the goal of the measures we have adopted in Spain during the last two years. We are currently dealing with a deep restructuring process that will end up by transforming those savings banks into larger commercial banks that, in the future, could also become global banks or a part of a global foreign bank. In conclusion, we should not demonise global banks for being global. They can play an important role in the international economy. Provided they are safe and soundly managed, they can facilitate the internationalization of non-financial firms, and they can bring greater competition, efficiency and stability to the markets in which they operate.

If the loops don’t communicate, we fall short of the network opportunities that checks, debit and credit cards, and ATM cards offer. The tremendous potential in mobile lies in the eventual speed and quality of the end-to-end experience and in the security of any information on the device or in transit, tough challenges simultaneously to engineer. And beyond mobile payments, achieving the speed and general availability of faster payments seen or planned for in the United Kingdom, Australia and other countries requires tremendous coordination across the payments industry. So, how does the Federal Reserve fit into this period of extraordinary change and challenge? BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  The Federal Reserve has long championed access, including nationwide connection, coordination, as well as the security, efficiency and resiliency of the nation’s principal payments mechanisms. In light of the tremendous increase in payments innovation, last fall the Federal Reserve Banks launched a new strategic plan for Federal Reserve Financial Services. We’re asking how our services may need to change to facilitate the direction of the payments market and how we could enable existing and future innovation by the payments industry. The Federal Reserve Banks are actively engaged in adjusting our planning, our product development and our resources to address innovation in the marketplace. To do that, however, we need to build consensus within the industry around a broad direction, around the benefits of access and connectivity across the nation, and about understanding and managing the risks of new technologies and new business models that emerge.