samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Asia is one of the most diverse regions in the world in terms of size, stage of development, resources, economic structure, degree of openness and market orientation. In harnessing each other’s comparative advantage and leveraging on the regional complementarities, for Asia as a region, the whole has become significantly greater than the sum of its individual economies. Over the recent decade, this has generated a significant expansion in intra-regional trade, investment and financial flows. This trend is expected to intensify significantly going forward. The diversity of emerging Asia also presents immense opportunities in terms of the growing markets across the entire spectrum of products and services. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  The third key trend that is shaping the future of the region is its demographic advantages. Asia is by far the most populous region of the world, accounting for 60 per cent of the world’s population. A vast, growing and young middle class population, with increasing affluence, will be a key defining characteristic, and an underlying growth driver of Asia. By 2030, it is projected that the current 500 million Asian middle class will grow by more than six-fold, to be more than 3 billion. This will have significant implications on global consumption and trade patterns, and on urbanisation and infrastructure development. The scale is immense. The Asian Development Bank has also projected that over this decade, Asia will require an investment of over 8 trillion US dollars in infrastructure development.

But if you look at the facts, total deposits in Hong Kong’s banking system rose by almost 3% in 2019. They increased by another 7.8% in the first eight months of this year. In simple terms, the strength of the Hong Kong dollar and this expansion of the deposit base tell us that there is more money coming in than going out. 13. Our banking system continues to be robust. Hong Kong’s banks have among the highest capital adequacy and liquidity ratios in the world. And despite a difficult operating environment, our classified loan ratio is still low – around 0.8%. And that resilience provides room for our banks to continue lending and providing relief measures to customers during the COVID-19 outbreak. 14. And our capital markets are thriving. Hong Kong was the world’s leading IPO centre last year. Although global markets were tested by extreme volatility in the first quarter, our capital markets have continued to function without incident. As several large Chinese companies that had listed in the US seek secondary listings in Hong Kong this year, we should once again achieve a very high ranking in the global IPO league table. 15. None of this happened by luck or by chance. The resilience we see now is the result of sustained efforts over many years. It’s the result of building capital and liquidity buffers into the banking system; and prudently managing the reserves that support the Linked Exchange Rate System.
The Kingdom has hosted numerous domestic and international conferences and symposiums, and offered training courses on anti-money-laundering issues. The first meeting of the FATF outside Paris was held in the Institute of Banking (IOB) in 1994. In addition, there has been effective participation of the Kingdom in the membership of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and permanent participation in the FATF’s meetings. 3. The Anti-Money Laundering Unit was established at SAMA and is provided with highly qualified and trained staff. Since 1995, commercial banks have been obliged to set up similar units to cooperate with each other, with SAMA’s Unit and with the concerned security authorities. 4. In 1995, SAMA issued guidelines to all banks operating in the Kingdom on preventing and combating money-laundering operations. These guidelines are derived from the Forty Recommendations and the subsequent recommendations, in particular applying the principle of “Know Your Customer”, monitoring suspicious transactions, and informing competent security authorities (Financial Investigation Unit) of suspicious activities. These guidelines were updated once in 2003 and again in 2008. 5. For the past ten years, SAMA has collected information on the methods and techniques of money laundering, and provided banks operating in the Kingdom with such information for the purpose of building a database in this regard to be linked automatically with the goal of tracking money laundering activities. 6. SAMA’s inspection team makes periodical inspection visits to banks to insure their proper application of instructions and regulations.

At bottom, of course, is the historical experience of the effects on the real economy of financial market 3  Remarks of Edward W. Kelley, Jr., Member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, at the Cyberpayments Conference ’96 (June 18, 1996). BIS Review 17/1997  -3-  disruptions and bank failures, especially when the disruptions and failures spread beyond the initial impetus.”4 A bank supervisor should have concerns other than cost, and these comprise the bad news -- the “risk” aspect of banking on the Internet. In the simplest terms, while we strive to ensure that banks remain efficient and cost-effective, we also have to ensure that banks know what they are getting into, and that they are capable of handling the risks that accompany banking on the Internet. The tension between the two is very constant and real, particularly because the technology today seems to be moving so much faster than bankers or bank supervisors can fully absorb. At the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, we are being proactive in this area. We currently conduct on-site, information systems examinations of State member banks in our district -- in addition to commercial, trust, trading, and compliance examinations -- in which we try to review and constructively criticize the examined bank’s entire MIS infrastructure. There is no separate, independent electronic or Internet bank exam as such.
Furthermore, European legislation is thus aligned with that of the United States and Switzerland, neither of which deduct these assets from their banks’ CET1. 8  (AMCESFI), which comprises the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation and the different sectoral supervisors. In tandem, new macroprudential tools have been conferred on the Banco de España. These increase our ability to act in response to possible bouts of excessive or inadequate credit growth in the future. Specifically, the reform of Circular 2/2016 currently under way develops three new tools. First, the introduction of a sectoral component to the countercyclical capital buffer, which, as its name suggests, enables this buffer to be established solely for exposures to a certain sector showing imbalances that might contribute to the build-up of systemic risk. Second, sectoral exposure concentration limits are established. Lastly, the ability to set certain limits and conditions on lending and other operations. In addition, once the crisis is over, I think it would be appropriate to reflect on the institutional financial architecture in Spain. After the 2008 global financial crisis, some countries changed their supervisory models, broadly speaking, by adopting more integrated models, with an increased role for central banks. In these integrated models, the responsibilities for preserving the financial soundness of all financial institutions irrespective of their nature (banks, insurance companies, securities firms, etc.)

From the standpoint of the banking sector, the ultimate impact of the crisis will depend both on its scale and duration and on the effectiveness of economic policies in mitigating its effects on households and firms. Along these lines and in the case of monetary policy, in December we extended our pandemic emergency purchase programme until at least March 2022 to ensure that financing conditions are favourable. More recently, the ECB has sought to counter the rise in long-term interest rates observed in recent months, in a setting in which the macroeconomic projections are similar to those in December, with a medium-term inflation forecast some distance off our objective and below that expected before the crisis. Specifically, at the ECB we have stated our intent to use the flexibility of our pandemic emergency purchase programme to increase purchase volumes in the coming months. From the vantage of the macro- and micro-supervisory authorities, we have continued to stress that the use of capital buffers by banks is appropriate in the current situation in order to recognise credit impairment and to continue providing sound credit to economic agents. Our empirical analysis shows that the use of these buffers would give rise to a positive effect on economic growth which, in turn, would ultimately translate into likewise higher solvency levels. 5  One issue worth monitoring in the coming months will, precisely, be the capacity of, or incentives for, banks to use the capital buffers available in the face of risk-materialisation scenarios.
The anchor premise of my remarks last year was an appeal for greater technological diversity in our third level resiliency and security schemes, representing an impregnable firebreak, and a platform for recovery, should the core of an infrastructure become corrupted. This work complements our traditional focus on geographic dispersion of infrastructure and human capital, but recognizes a fundamental distinction between cyber resiliency and traditional resiliency: what works for us in conventional resiliency scenarios, namely the automatic and instantaneous replication of data, works against us in cyber scenarios, reflecting risks that a pernicious malware, or a severe data corruption, or even an application failure propagates itself across primary, secondary, and tertiary operating sites, rendering a systemic infrastructure functionally inoperable. Examples of technological diversity may take many forms, from the application code to 1/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  middleware components to the operating platform, and may canvass physical, distributed, hosted, or cloud-based solutions. Reflecting their unique circumstances and assessments of the threat, financial market infrastructures will likely respond differently to the present challenge. Without prescribing any particular solution, I will merely suggest that in the event of severe disruption efforts to enhance technological diversity represent an infrastructure’s best chance to achieve the two hour recovery objective promulgated by the Committee on Payment and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) and the Board of the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO).

Dear guests, The fact that the leaders of this Fund offered to present their financial services in the Republic of Macedonia, the Central Bank certainly encouraged and supported this initiative, shows that these important partners consider the Republic of Macedonia a friendly environment for launching various mutually beneficial business initiatives and projects. Yet, we do not forget though, that some of these institutions had no doubts whatsoever about the Republic of Macedonia even in the most difficult periods for us after gaining the independence, since when nobody else was coming, they were here. We certainly appreciate that. Regardless of all above, we still have many reasons that urge us to notice and convince others why is it good to invest in the Republic of Macedonia and to develop partnership with our economic agents and, of course, to inform on the activities that all of us in our country perform, directed towards increasing the attractiveness of the Republic of Macedonia as investment destination. Hence, we definitely need such financial offers. The economic growth could be accelerated by more investments, competitive offer of financial instruments and products, which are likely to eventually bring about lower costs for borrowing capital. The potential investors should be aware that the Macedonian financial sector is booming, but that the room for investments is yet to be opened. The gross national savings is low, not more than 12-17% of GDP, over the recent several years.
During previous periods of accelerating growth and firming business confidence, the MPC had always tightened policy significantly. Indeed, on the basis of this past behaviour in the great moderation, the MPC would have raised interest rates by 2 to 3 percentage points between August 2013 and the end of 2014 (Charts 3 and 4).6  See Carney M (2018), ‘Guidance, Contingencies and Brexit’. For anyone who might suggest the MPC should have followed that reaction function, note that, even on unchanged policy, CPI inflation by the summer of 2016 was running at only about ½% and core CPI inflation around 1¼%. 6  7  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  7  Chart 3: Close correlation between output and monetary policy pre-crisis 3 month moving average, balance 65  3 month moving average, bps 50 Combined CIPS output survey (LHS) 25  60 55  0  50  -25  45  -50  40  -75 Average MPC vote, including QE (RHS)  35 30 1998  -100 -125  2000  2002  2004  2006  2008  2010  2012  2014  2016  2018  Sources: IHS Markit, ONS and Bank calculations. Notes: Combined CIPS output survey is a weighted average of the Markit/CIPS PMIs for services, manufacturing and construction.

13  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  13  Chart 9: Pass through of ECB rate cuts to lending and deposit rates facilitated by TLTRO TLTRO I  TLTRO II  Per cent 5 4 3 2 1 0 -1  2010  2011  2012  2013  Household deposits EONIA ECB main refinancing rate  2014  2015  2016  2017  2018  2019  Loans ECB lending rate ECB deposit facility rate  Source: ECB. To sum up on liquidity and lending facilities, reforms over the crisis leave behind a much more comprehensive backstop to dysfunction in funding markets. Liquidity is available more freely, against a wider range of collateral and in all major currencies. Moreover, through careful calibration targeted lending schemes can lower the effective lower bound on interest rates, unlocking more stimulus. ----------------------------------------------------To return to where I started, the past ten years have spurred tremendous advances in the conduct of monetary policy. In this as in so many other respects, Europe has a rich past. And in part because of that past, it now has the possibility of a bright future. For a perspective on the challenges faced by central banks today I will hand over to Stan Fischer. 14  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  14
They result from errors or omissions in the data which inevitably occur given the many different data sources for such statistics. Capital transfers should also be taken into account, but they have been excluded here for the sake of simplicity. Page 4/13  surplus increased significantly until the onset of the financial crisis. During the crisis, the current account balance fluctuated sharply. In recent years, the surplus has stabilised at 8–11% of GDP, and in 2016, as I said earlier, it stood at some 10%. Since Switzerland consistently generates a current account surplus, one would expect the net international investment position to rise over time. However, chart 2 shows quite clearly that this is not the case. The chart depicts Switzerland’s net international investment position during the period 2000–2016, again relative to GDP. We can see large fluctuations from year to year that cannot be explained by developments in the current account surplus. If these fluctuations are factored out, it becomes clear that the net international investment position has not increased significantly over the observation period. The high fluctuations illustrate how important the other influencing variables already mentioned are in the development of the net international investment position. I will go into this in more detail later. Let me just add something here: Although the net international investment position has not increased, Switzerland’s gross claims and liabilities abroad have continued to rise, particularly since the 1990s.

Such fundamental changes in investor risk assessment influence not just the prices of the affected bonds. They also impact on other investment categories and, therefore, as I will explain later, on the financial markets in general. Allow me to begin by addressing the most serious developments. The European sovereign debt crisis is far from over. In comparison to last year, it has again worsened. Thus the credit risk premia of euro countries with large debt burdens continued to rise; compared to the previous year’s average value, the risk premia have approximately doubled. That the debt problem in the euro area has worsened is apparent not just on the bond markets. On the foreign exchange market, the CHF/EUR exchange rate, in particular, reacted strongly, attaining new all-time high levels. Since, at the same time, the US dollar was still tending lower, the CHF/USD exchange rate also climbed to extreme levels. The weak dollar has to do with doubts about the robustness of the US economy in the wake of diminishing fiscal and monetary policy stimuli, as well as worries about US public debt. Since the Swiss franc also recorded historical exchange rates against other currencies, its value, on a real and trade-weighted basis, is now well above its long-term level. Investor appetite for bonds considered to be secure helped to push down capital market yields on US, German and Swiss ten-year government bonds to the level last recorded in December 2010 of around 3% (US and Germany) and 1.7% (Switzerland).
In the domestic context, the economy continues to face relatively low consumption and private investments and an absent stimulus by the public sector resulting from the orientation of the fiscal policy towards maintaining long-term stability of the public debt. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  On the other hand, the banking and financial system remains sound and liquid and capital indicators are at relatively satisfactory levels. The activity of the banking sector continues to be strongly supported by the increase of publics’ deposits. Banks have reinforced their capital position to boost resilience against risks arising from banking operations. As at the end of June 2012, the capital adequacy ratio stood at 15.6%. Credit developments, however, remain a problem that is subject to the performance of economic activity and expectations for the future. Slowdown of economic activity and decline of demand for investments and consumption by businesses and households are determinants of private sector credit and credit quality performance. On their side, banks have evidently increased their prudence as regards lending. Periodic stress tests show that the banking sector is resilient and can withstand any adverse events to economic performance. However, we are aware that the banking industry is facing difficult challenges. Besides recovery of economic activity and confidence for the future, improvement of credit quality requires also the completion of legal issues to enable and facilitate collateral execution.

This double-dip recession has pushed us off the growth path we were on just five years back and halted the process of real convergence. GDP per capita in Spain currently stands at 90% of the euro area average, after having exceeded 95% in 2007. Or, if you prefer, production per capita, after rising notably in the pre-crisis years, today scarcely exceeds the levels of a decade ago. Fortunately, the latest data support expectations of a gradual recovery of the Spanish economy, which might have already begun in the third quarter of this year according to data published by the Banco de España last week. However, the task ahead of returning to sustainable growth to place us back on track to regaining forgone prosperity remains formidable. This includes progressing further with the major reforms already undertaken in various areas, including the financial sector. In this latter field, nevertheless, the significant measures to be adopted in our country are closely linked to the regulatory reforms designed at European and international level. In fact, the crisis has underlined noticeable deficiencies in the regulatory framework of banking. I imagine that during today's seminar you will have analysed them in detail.
Acting in the opposite direction, it appears that consumer-facing companies may have squeezed their margins by more than had been anticipated during 2009/10. The various changes to VAT during this period have also complicated the task of forecasting inflation. However, relative to the February 2009 forecast considered here, changes in VAT did not contribute significantly to the surprising strength of inflation in 2009/10, since the effects of the temporary reduction in VAT in December 2008 were included in that forecast, and the main impact of the more recent increase in VAT did not come through until the first quarter of this year. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  thinking that the degree of pass through may be relatively limited, but by the start of 2010 that judgement was shown to have been wrong and we have incorporated close to full-pass through in forecasts since then. By contrast, the unexpected strength of inflation through much of 2010 largely stems from the surge in commodity prices. Could inflation remain high? To summarise: there’s no great puzzle as to why inflation has been above target for much of the past few years. Our economy has been subject to a series of large shocks – to oil and other commodity prices, to VAT, and to the sterling exchange rate – which have raised inflation. The scale of these shocks can more than account for the overshoot of inflation relative to target.

Today, despite the effort to develop foreign currency (FC) issuances and other businesses out of Malaysia, we have not yet reached a critical mass. To date, FC issuances constitute only 4% of the total outstanding sukuk in Malaysia (March 2023: RM1.3 trillion), with USD being the main currency1. In terms of international players, these past few years have seen more consolidation rather than expansion or growth. Notwithstanding these, the FC or international business should represent a continuous opportunity for market players to develop further, in particular with the continued growth of our own international trade and investment and the foreign exchange liberalisations we have undertaken. Moving forward, while the opportunities of FC business remain available, the MIFC agenda will also give due consideration to strengthening the domestic ringgit market. Inclusion of MGII into international indices such as Markit iBoxx ALBI, Bloomberg Global Aggregate and JPMorgan GBI-EM have already led to improved visibility of Islamic instruments and increased foreign participation. Increased foreign participation in the local market via government issuances and multinational corporations' (MNCs) investment in the Halal industry is also envisaged to increase ringgit market appeal among the investors. Growth of takaful and re-takaful also continues to be a development focus. In the financial sector, Malaysia's takaful industry has continued to grow at a faster rate than conventional insurance. It recorded a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.6% in the first nine months of 2022 and outperformed conventional insurance's CAGR of 10.8%2.