samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
So earlier this year the Bank announced we would be drawing up a blueprint to replace our current real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system, now twenty years old. 48 institutions currently have settlement accounts in RTGS. All other users of the systems that settle across RTGS access settlement via one of four agent banks. 5 These users include over 1000 non-bank PSPs serving customers’ increasingly demanding standards, and many rely on major UK payment schemes, particularly Faster Payments (FPS). As they grow, some PSPs want to reduce their reliance on the systems, service levels, risk appetite and goodwill of the very banks with whom they are competing. Re-selling services ultimately provided by banks limits these firms’ growth, potential to innovate, and competitive impact. 3  These PSPs include firms granted the status of either an e-money or payment institution in the UK. 4  Examples include From Stripe to Square, from Paypal to Ripple, from Applepay to Zapp. 5  Indirect access removes the need to build costly payments infrastructure – a potentially large fixed cost for young companies. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  That is why I am announcing this evening that the Bank intends to extend direct access to RTGS beyond the current set of firms, allowing a range of non-bank PSPs to compete on a level playing field with banks. 6 By increasing the proportion of settlement in central bank money, diversifying the number of settlement firms, and driving greater innovation in risk-reducing payments technologies, expanding access should bring financial stability benefits.

It is constantly developing its skills to understand and assess the impact of relevant risks – including those linked to climate change – on the economy and the stability of the financial system. It also integrates these considerations into its balance sheet risk management in order to guarantee the value of its reserves over the long term. Here, the SNB applies ESG criteria to its asset portfolio, while respecting the requirements of monetary policy. Given the rapid  13  IMF Global Financial Stability Report (2019), October. Cf. also Krüger, P., Z. Sautner and L.T. Starks (2019), ‘The importance of climate risks for institutional investors’, Finance Working Paper No. 610/219, September. Page 11/12  pace of developments in environmental economics, the SNB is closely monitoring developments at both national and international level. Ladies and gentlemen, it is now my pleasure to invite you to a round table. This will give us a chance to broaden the debate beyond central banking and to hear what other players have to say about the impact of climate risks on the economy and the financial system. Page 12/12  Climate risks and central banks: an SNB perspective Andréa M. Maechler, Member of the Governing Board Thomas Moser, Alternate Member of the Governing Board Swiss National Bank Money Market Event Geneva, 14 November 2019  Sources: SNB, Baker, Bloom and Davis.
Before moving on to the next topic, let me close this discussion by stressing that, while central banks have been and will continue to be creative in using all available tools to achieve their mandate, we must recognize the limits of conventional monetary policy in circumstances of extreme financial distress. Conventional monetary policy alone is unlikely to be able to put back the economy on the right track and its combination with other policies certainly increases the chances of success. 4. Financial rescues and their Impact on a central bank’s balance sheet  Please allow me now to finish with another topic where Chile’s experience can contribute to the international debate: the implementation of a financial bailout and the risks it imposes on the operation of a central bank. In normal times, central banks conduct their operations maintaining only the safest assets on their balance sheets, typically government bonds or other low-risk assets. But in times of distress, acting as lender of last resort, central banks may also accept lower quality, more risky assets, as collateral for liquidity provision or in outright purchases aimed at rescuing banks, with the consequent risk to their balance sheets. This has been indeed the case in several countries during the recent financial crisis. The possibility that risk-taking by central banks may result in losses that affect their reputation and operations has recently preoccupied policymakers, especially when pondering about the possibility of a large rescue operation of troubled European banks by the ECB. The concerns are both financial and operational.

Let me summarise the three main points: •  The Eurosystem is exploring synergies between TARGET2 and T2S, with the ultimate goal of achieving a consolidated Eurosystem market infrastructure. •  We are assessing new service opportunities arising from bringing the two infrastructures closer together. In particular, we are considering enhancements to the TARGET2 services in the field of instant payments. •  The Eurosystem will increase harmonisation of its own collateralisation techniques and procedures. We will also consider the business case for a common Eurosystem collateral management system. As part of this morning’s panel, we will delve a little deeper into this vision and will discuss some of the challenges we can expect the future to bring. I would like to welcome the panel members and Marc Bayle who will moderate this session. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches
3  For a more detailed description of the model, see Adolfson, M., S. Laséen, J. Lindé and M. Villani (2007), "RAMSES - a new general equilibrium model for monetary policy analysis", Economic Review 2, pp. 33-68, Sveriges Riksbank. http://www.riksbank.com/upload/Dokument_riksbank/Kat_publicerat/Artiklar_. PV/07_2eng_ramses.pdf. 4  BIS Review 66/2009  Sweden’s data on capacity utilisation in industry and the National Institute of Economic Research’s Economic Tendency Survey. Figure 5 shows capacity utilisation in industry as reported by the companies. According to figures from Statistics Sweden, capacity utilisation in industry reached a peak of around 91 per cent in the first quarter of 2007, and has since fallen to around 78 per cent in the first quarter of 2009. According to the National Institute of Economic Research’s Economic Tendency Survey, capacity utilisation in industry during the same period has fallen from around 88 per cent to around 72 per cent. In both cases a large fall is reported. But these data concern only a small percentage of the economy and do not in general provide the same picture as, for instance, the GDP gap also shown in the Figure. Aggregate measure of resource utilisation At the Riksbank we have also produced an aggregate measure of resource utilisation. But this is not intended to replace all other measures; it will be used as a generic complement to the other measures. The aggregate measure of resource utilisation has been produced with the aid of a principal component analysis.

10  BIS Review 65/2009  Table 1 World growth (*) (annual change, percent) Average Average 90-99 00-05 World World at market nominal exchange rate United States Euro zone Japan China Rest of Asia Latin America Commodity exporters Trading partners  2007  2008 (e)  2009 (f) Report Jan.09  2010 (f)  Report Report May 09 Jan.09  Report May 09  2.9  3.8  5.2  3.2  1.2  T -1.2  3.3  T  2.1  2.4 3.1 2.2 1.5 10.0 5.5 2.7 2.7 3.0  2.9 2.5 1.9 1.6 9.4 4.8 3.0 3.1 3.1  3.8 2.0 2.7 2.4 13.0 5.9 5.7 3.2 5.0  2.2 1.1 0.9 -0.6 9.0 3.0 4.2 1.0 3.0  -0.3 -1.8 -1.9 -2.4 7.5 1.2 1.2 0.2 0.4  T -2.3 T -3.0 T -3.5 T -7.2 T 6.5 T -1.9 T -2.0 T -1.7 T -1.5  2.3 2.0 1.0 1.2 8.0 3.2 2.7 1.8 2.7  T T T T T T T T T  1.4 0.5 0.4 0.9 7.5 1.4 1.5 0.9 2.0  (*) Regional growth rates weighted by share in world GDP at PPP as published by the IMF's World Economic Outlook (WEO, April 2009). (e) Estimate; (f) Projection. Source: Central Bank of Chile based on a sample of investment banks, Consensus Forecasts and International Monetary Fund.
The industry plays a key role in helping contain costs and to align the consumers and medical industry towards preventive care measures. This will reduce the burden of individuals in society, especially those less privileged. Further, the world’s population is ageing and Malaysia is not far from this. An ageing population will put pressure on growth and the social protection system. Insurance will have a role to play in ensuring the life, health and pension needs of society are met in a sustainable manner. These demands on the industry are far from trivial and will not be met without strong leadership, a longer-term view on investments in capacity, and a relentless focus on quality standards and operational efficiency. Yet, today these conditions remain hampered by what is still a fragmented industry. It is therefore timely, if not more urgent, for institutions to consider synergistic partnerships to achieve the scale and competitive edge to lift performance and break into new markets. Our economy is in need of transformational change in the insurance sector – not incremental ones. To achieve this, we believe there is room for further consolidation in the industry. Technology and innovation Let me turn to our views on innovation. This industry has no shortage of evidence of its ability to seize opportunities provided by technology to improve itself. In the United States in the 1950s, the life insurance industry was one of the first and largest commercial users of the computer during its formative years.

As a result of this, Turkish banks have started to provide interactive banking services to decrease their costs and increase efficiency of banking transactions. They are also part of the Electronic Fund Transfer system for their internal banking transactions and of S.W.I.F.T. for external transactions. Parallel to the process of liberalizing the economy, Turkish banks have made significant progress in investments and in organizations abroad. They opened branches abroad and took important steps to increase their shares in international markets by acquiring financial participations and partnerships. As of June 2000, Turkish banking sector, including branches abroad, operates with the total asset size of USD 140.4 billion, more than 8,000 branches and almost 170,000 personnel. The Turkish banking sector is also open to international competition. At present 25 foreign banks, including development and investment banks, constitute 31% of the total number of banks in the sector. The share of foreign banks has also increased during the past few years. While their share was 5.8% and 5.6% as the end of 1997 and 1998 respectively, it increased to 6.7% as of June 2000, representing the total asset size of USD 9.4 billion. The majority of this share belongs to foreign commercial banks. As of July 2000, Turkish banks have: •  83 financial subsidiaries in 24 different countries;  •  41 branches in 10 different countries; and  •  62 foreign representative offices in 10 countries.
Imagine if the banks publish their ‘rewards points’ suite of APIs, a single aggregator app could be developed that allows us to enquire and redeem points directly with merchants and service providers. The Playbook also provides guidance for the standardisation of APIs. The industry has come up with standards for information security, data exchange, and governance mechanisms. Having common standards will help promote greater data sharing and interoperability. The API Playbook is an important milestone in our FinTech journey. Some of our FIs are announcing their API initiatives over the course of this week. So watch this space. Not to be outdone, MAS published last week 12 APIs for its most heavily used data sets. We will progressively expand the list. Conclusion Let me conclude by saying a few words about the larger picture behind what we are trying to do 8/9  BIS central bankers' speeches  in FinTech. We talk a lot about technology but it is really about fostering a culture of innovation. In an industry facing the headwinds of lower economic growth and heavier regulatory burdens, innovation must be the way to refresh and re-energise the business model. And innovation is not always about high-tech. It is about seeking newer and better ways to do things, about a spirit of enterprise. It is about hope in the future. The financial industry needs that. And let us not forget the purpose of innovation.

7/9  BIS central bankers' speeches  An Open API Architecture And saving the best for the end: creating an API economy. APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, are likely to be one of the most important building blocks for innovation in the future economy. APIs are basically a set of protocols that define how one system or application interacts with another, usually from the perspective of information exchange. They allow systems to interact with one another without the need for human intervention. Publishing these APIs allows FIs to collaborate with external users to: – seamlessly merge multiple data sets from different sources into an integrated rich data set; and – deliver more functional and customised solutions faster and cheaper. MAS aims to establish Singapore as a centre of excellence for APIs on financial services. We are actively pushing FIs to develop and adopt APIs, and to offer as many of them as possible to the broader community. APIs are the essential ‘plumbing’ – the pipes – that enable the connections and collaborations that foster innovation. The financial industry has come together, in partnership with MAS and the Association of Banks in Singapore, to develop guidance on APIs. I am pleased to announce that we will publish today what we call the “Finance-as-a-Service API Playbook”. The API Playbook provides guidance on common and useful APIs that FIs could make available. For instance: Many of us struggle today to track and use our rewards points on our credit cards issued by various banks before they expire.
Secondly, SMEs with good track records will not only enjoy a wider acceptance from banks, they will also be able to access financing on more favourable terms, and obtain faster decisions on their financing applications. This is because the Bureau acts as a one-stop center for banks to obtain consolidated information on SMEs, which is currently scattered, and will take longer for banks to obtain and verify individually. We have already seen how this can work in the case of consumer financing, where real-time and comprehensive information on consumers’ credit exposures and history that is available from CCRIS has  2  BIS Review 67/2008  significantly shortened loan-processing times. With greater availability of information on SMEs, the processing time for SME loans can be similarly shortened. Thirdly, the Bureau includes and takes into account both positive and negative information on SMEs. Certain third party information that financial institutions use in the evaluation of credit applications only provides negative information on the business conducts. Examples are information on bankruptcy and legal suits, which are sometimes not updated and may result in a biased assessment of creditworthiness. By collecting and disseminating both positive and negative information, the SME Credit Bureau will benefit SME loan applicants by providing a more balanced view of SMEs’ credit standings. In an objective rating process, credit bureaus typically accord greater weight to the more recent credit information or behavior. Negative records in the past can thus be mitigated by more current and consistent good track records.

These interventions have largely succeeded in avoiding deflation and a cumulative fall in GDP during the most acute phases of the crisis. It remains true, however, that, contrary to past episodes which followed deep recessions, the current recovery appears sluggish, uncertain and fragile. The global growth environment remains affected by significant uncertainties. Today, I would like to reflect upon these developments and focus on the challenges facing central banks in the post-crisis environment. 1. Let me start with a few stylised facts The first, and most visible, is the spectacular expansion in central banks’ balance sheets. In all advanced economies, their size has been multiplied, over four years, by a factor of two to five. This is an unprecedented development. Beyond advanced countries, central banks in emerging economies have also, to a lesser extent, expanded their balance sheets, mainly, but not only, as a result of foreign exchange interventions. A second, and related, feature is the diversification of central banks’ interventions. Prior to the crisis, central banks would conduct monetary policy by determining the policy rate, and, in some countries, by imposing compulsory reserve requirements on banks. The crisis has led to the development and proliferation of so called “non-conventional measures”, with two objectives. First, to remedy financial market disruptions; and second, to provide further monetary accommodation once policy rates have been brought down to very low levels and hit the so-called “zero lower bound”.
From Construction to Maintenance: Patrolling the ring-fence Speech given by James Proudman, Executive Director, UK Deposit Takers Supervision  Cass Business School, London 26 November 2018  I am grateful to Simon Debbage for preparing these remarks and to Michael Ainley, Sadia Arif, Charlotte Bull, David Eacott, Jeremy Leake, Duncan Mackinnon, Ben Martin, Alex Michie, Simon Morley, Rhys Phillips, Josh Sadler and Philip Sellar for their helpful contributions. 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  Introduction It is a great pleasure to be here again at the Cass Business School, and I am very grateful to the Associate Dean for inviting me. In fact, Andrew and I have quite a lot in common. We share a birthday, for a start, and a home county (Hampshire). For a while, we also used to share an office, back in the far off days before the financial crisis, when – as young(ish) economists – we used to debate the relevance of the ‘corporate veil’ for determining macroeconomic outcomes. Nowadays, we don’t discuss the corporate veil so much as the banking ring-fence, and that is the focus of my speech tonight. A decade on from the financial crisis, one of the largest ever reforms to the structure of the UK banking industry is coming into force. By 1 January 2019, the largest UK banking groups must have implemented the ‘ring-fencing’ – or separation – of their UK retail business from their international and investment banking operations.

And by the end of this year, we will have assessed and approved more than 50 applications for senior management positions within these groups, and considered the suitability of their proposed prudential sub-groups, containing hundreds of entities between them. Ring-fencing also resulted in the Bank helping ring-fenced banks undertake around 20 on-boarding operations to payment systems settling across the books of the Bank, and admitting six banks to the Sterling Monetary Framework. Most of the banks have also needed to undertake a complex legal process – called a ring-fencing transfer scheme – to transfer assets and liabilities between legal entities in their group.4 Each transfer required Court approval. Independent ‘skilled persons’ were required to review the banks’ plans, the PRA and FCA were called to provide their opinions, and objections from the public were invited before the judges could make their decisions. In each case, the Courts were able to approve the transfers going ahead. These transfers took place between April and August this year. Over £ billion of assets were moved between legal entities over a series of implementation weekends. Operational changes, in particular involving IT systems, can be complex, and the impacts when things go wrong can be wide-ranging and difficult to remedy. But in each case the ring-fencing transfer took place smoothly. A knock-on impact of these transfers was that the sort codes of over 1.3 million retail and corporate account holders needed to be changed.
Alberto G Musalem: International spillovers and policies Remarks by Mr Alberto G Musalem, Executive Vice President of the Integrated Policy Analysis Group of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at the People’s Bank of ChinaFederal Reserve Bank of New York Joint Symposium, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China, 15 Mach 2016. *  *  *  Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to speak here in Hangzhou about the important theme of international spillovers. By exchanging perspectives and experiences we can forge relationships and a shared understanding that can lead to better economic outcomes. I will focus mostly on the interaction of international spillovers with policy frameworks within and across countries. I will do this from the vantage point of a domestic economy experiencing foreign spillovers. I will then briefly turn to considerations from a U.S. perspective. As always, my remarks reflect my own views and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), or the Federal Reserve System.1 International spillovers encompass a broad topic with respect to their sources and channels. Before narrowly focusing on monetary sources and associated channels, it seems appropriate to first take a broader view of the various sources. Foreign spillovers can emanate from monetary, fiscal, regulatory, currency or trade policies. Spillovers can also arise from endogenous productivity changes, from financial stability developments, and from a global financial cycle.2 The Mundell-Fleming logic remains relevant for thinking about policy options of open economies.

It provides lessons on channels of transmission, basic tradeoffs across objectives, and the effectiveness of policy responses.3 The channels of macroeconomic and financial transmission among open and interdependent economies occur through the current account of the balance of payments, the capital account, or both. From the vantage point of the domestic economy, there are three main channels of transmission: the exchange rate; the external demand; and the interest rate or risk-premia channel. The last can be more broadly defined as the financial conditions channel. The intensity of transmission of spillovers will depend on the monetary policy, currency policy and the real and financial openness of the economy being affected by external developments. Other relevant characteristics include the flexibility of labor and product markets; the depth, safety and soundness of the financial system; and the economy’s position as an international creditor or debtor. The Mundell-Fleming framework suggests that a country with a high degree of capital mobility and a flexible currency will be in a favorable position to use monetary policy to attain its internal growth and inflation objectives. When foreign interest rates increase and financial conditions tighten, changes in relative prices brought about by currency fluctuations can help to absorb the external shocks. The positive expenditure switching effect from currency depreciation improves the trade balance and supports demand.