samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
This would reduce the number of “false positive” rates on transactions and reduce the costs of checks. This is one example of how a common approach to using payment data globally, harmonising our implementation of payment message standards and tackling potential barriers to sharing payment data across jurisdictions could reap significant benefits. The G20 roadmap for cross-border payments highlights key actions for jurisdictions, system operators and the wider financial system and payments industry to undertake and I would encourage all of us who are involved to redouble our efforts[9] . Through that collective effort we will make payments, quicker, smoother and cheaper for all. The benefits of richer, more structured data, including payments data, will only be fully realised if data users are able to access and extract value from the ever increasing pool of data they now have access to. The financial sector has been at the forefront of using artificial intelligence techniques such as machine learning to extract value from the explosion of timely data they now have access to, as the Bank’s surveys have found. [10] It’s obvious why as adoptions of technologies like machine learning have the potential to make financial services and markets more efficient, accessible and tailored to consumer needs[11]. I don’t have time to do anything like justice to this subject today but before I leave it let me just return to the example of fraud detection and anti-money laundering. Here machine learning is particularly useful for card authorisations that flow through the payments chain, very much in realtime.

Page 1  Message received and understood − speech by Dave Ramsden Given remotely at a conference by the Lietuvos bankas and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) on the “Future of Central Banking”  Page 2  Published on 29 September 2022  Speech Introduction Thank you very much for the invitation to join this panel today and I am very sorry I can’t be with you in Vilnius. Real-time market developments kept me here in London, but I’m grateful to the organisers from the Central Bank of Lithuania and from the BIS for allowing me to contribute virtually to the Bank’s 100th birthday conference. I really welcome the focus of this panel on data since having access to fast, accurate, appropriately structured data is critical in equipping central banks with the knowledge they need to function in order to meet their objectives. The Bank of England’s mission to deliver monetary and financial stability is a broad and deep one. We need a similarly broad pool of data of varying depths to fulfil our mission. In 15 minutes I cannot hope to do justice to the variety of data we need to get a clear picture of the economy, the financial system as a whole and the firms we regulate in order to frame action. Last year the Bank and PRA published our data strategy, joint with the FSA, setting out how we will transform our collection and use of data to fulfil our responsibilities as a supervisor and regulator[1].
The doctor suggested that she should marry a CPA. “Will that make me live longer?” the lady asks hopefully. “No,” the doctor replies. “But it will seem longer”. Well, I promise to keep my remarks short, although since this is an accounting workshop, you will forgive me if they might seem long. As you know, IFRS 17 was finalised and issued in 2017. Today, the 17th of May, also marks 17 years since the International Accounting Standards Board took on the job to develop a globally accepted accounting standard for insurance contracts. What a remarkable coincidence indeed! The final IFRS 17 standards represent a historic milestone – for the first time, insurers in over 120 countries, with assets worth at least USD13 trillion, will be reporting financial statements based on a common set of standards when IFRS 17 comes into effect in January 2021. Almost two decades ago, standard setters embarked on a Herculean mission to develop a globally accepted accounting standard for the measurement of insurance contracts which did not exist before. In the time that it took to finalise IFRS 17, we have witnessed significant developments in the accounting world, including the transformation of the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) into today’s IASB, the formation of the Monitoring Board to enhance public accountability of the IFRS Foundation, and sweeping reforms to key accounting standards to address the deficiencies which were believed to have amplified the 2008 global financial crisis.

The development of IFRS 17 itself saw the issuance of IFRS 4 as an interim standard, one discussion paper and two exposure drafts. Its finalisation was achieved after more than 900 meetings, 600 comment letters and 4 rounds of fieldwork and testing! I am told it is among the longest in duration, largest in scale and most complex project ever undertaken by an international standard setter – making it a tremendous feat and a testament to the intellectual capacity and perseverance exemplified by the IASB. 1/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  Even then, this 17 year journey remains incomplete as the final stretch begins with the passing of the baton from the standard setter to those involved in preparations for implementation – that is the industry. As the clock counts down to the global implementation date in January 2021, the most important implications of IFRS 17 lie ahead of us. 1. First, it will have an important impact in strengthening market discipline. 2. Second, it will improve alignment between business units and financial management and reporting. This in turn will provide more robust foundations for the growth and development of the insurance sector in this region. 3. And third, it will raise important issues around governance to ensure the integrity of financial reporting by insurers and other market participants.
15 The debate about the plans to split up some very large European banks demonstrates the difficulty of measures aimed at size. At the same time, the debate illustrates that such measures are not impossible. The extent to which we are required to travel down this difficult path will depend a great deal on how much genuine progress we are able to make on the reforms I have tried to outline this evening. Competitiveness All the measures to improve financial regulation which I have discussed tonight raise the delicate issue of banks’ competitiveness. Of course, it is not the intention of any regulator to hurt banks. However, somebody has to bear the costs of preserving financial stability. Up to now, through the implicit and now explicit government guarantees, taxpayers were bearing a considerable part of these costs. By strengthening regulation, these costs are to be shifted to the banks. In economic terms, the new regulatory framework endeavours to internalise the externalities caused by banks. 13  See, for instance, Group of Thirty, Financial Reform: A Framework for Financial Stability, p. 59: “To guard against excessive concentration in national banking systems, with implications for effective official oversight, management control, and effective competition, nationwide limits on deposit concentration should be considered at a level appropriate to individual countries”. 14  Cf. for example, Y. Altunbas et al., “Efficiency in European banking”, European Economic Review 45, 2001, pp. 1931-1955. 15  Cf.

Equally, the most prominent banks should invest their efforts, not in resisting fundamental change, but in genuinely supporting the work to bring it about, in the interests of a more longterm and less volatile global banking and, ultimately, economic growth model. If we fail to reform fundamentally the financial system and the position of the largest systemically relevant firms in that system, we will undermine one of the most basic mechanisms of any market economy, namely that of punishing failure. What is more, we will – to quote Mervyn King – bequeath to future generations a serious risk of enduring another crisis even worse than the one we have just experienced. 16 My biggest concern is that a future crisis on a larger scale could create such an immense regulatory and protectionist  16  Speech by Mervyn King to Scottish business organisations, Edinburgh, 20 October 2009. BIS Review 145/2009  7  backlash, that the very market-based system, on which so much of our current welfare is based, will be threatened. In that sense, it is in the long-term interest of banks themselves to support the far-reaching efforts to make the financial system more resilient. If our reform efforts falter, we risk having to look back one day at the vast and unprecedented stabilisation efforts undertaken by so many governments and central banks and conclude that they were short-sighted.
Low for long makes demand management of the economy more difficult in downturns, reducing the space for monetary policy easing with conventional tools. This is because, for a given inflation target and with the reduction in long-run real rates, policy rates are closer to their effective lower bound. Changes in the structure of the financial system as a result of low for long may also weaken the transmission mechanism. Monetary policy, to be clear, is not powerless at the effective lower bound. As post crisis experience has demonstrated, ‘unconventional’ monetary policy tools can and have provided stimulus when interest rates are at or near the effective lower bound. These are now very much a part of central bank toolkits.24  22 For example, the share of corporate debt owed by UK companies with a ratio of net debt to EBITDA  greater than four was 35% in 2018, compared to 28% in 2007. 23 See Bank of England (2019), Chart F.6. 24 See, for example, a recent BIS paper that conducts a cross-country analysis of unconventional monetary policy tools. Potter, Smets et al (2019).

And had Jane been living in the euro area today, in Germany for example, she would only have been able to invest for the long term at a negative interest rate – the 30 year bund yielded minus 0.27% in August. Nominal interest rates do vary through time of course. Since the Napoleonic wars and outside wartime, UK long term nominal rates moved mainly in a 2-5% range until the decades of inflation following the Second World War, during which they rose above 15%, before falling back as inflation was brought under control. They have been falling ever since. The fall in long rates is a phenomenon that has been building since the late 1980s, gathering pace after the financial crisis (Chart 1). During the past couple of months, UK long nominal rates have dropped to around, and sometimes even below, 1%. They have not been this low in the past 200 years. The same is true, more generally, for other advanced economies. 1 See Avery Jones (2019). 2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  2  Some of this likely reflects low current and expected inflation. But it is a great deal more than just an inflation story. Long term real rates – in the United Kingdom and in other advanced economies – are extremely low and indeed are negative. I want to look briefly today at why we are in a period of low interest rates and why we might expect it to persist – ‘low for long’ in other words.
François Villeroy de Galhau: Financial supervision and the role of national authorities in Europe Opening address by Mr François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Bank of France, at the Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de resolution (ACPR) Conference on Financial Supervision, Paris, 18 September 2018. * * * Mr. President [M. Draghi], Ms. Chair [D. Nouy], Mesdames, Messieurs,  Bonjour et bienvenue à Paris, It is a particular pleasure to welcome you to this conference on financial supervision and the role of national authorities in Europe. What better way to inaugurate the new headquarters of the ACPR – France’s supervision authority – than to bring in colleagues and experts from across the continent. I urge you to look at a few street names in the neighbourhood: this borough is called in Paris “quartier de l’Europe” – very much in the spirit of what we are doing together at the SSM. I warmly thank President Mario Draghi for being here. Before giving him the floor, let me stress that we all have reasons to be proud of what has been achieved for Banking Union in the past few years. But we must not be complacent. There are two priorities: one in substance, and one in method. **  I. Our priority in substance: strengthening the second pillar on resolution Now that we’ve had the Single Supervisory Mechanism up and running for four years, it’s easy to forget that there were many sceptics who were sure that such a union could not be achieved.

I welcome the current initiatives, including the creation of the Simplification Group chaired by Petra Senkovic from the ECB and Edouard Fernandez-Bollo from the ACPR. Various measures are under development, like the growing use of delegation, the streamlining of SREP or JST functioning. However, an essential challenge will be to make sure that all processes will remain optimised over time and that simplification becomes a full and permanent part of decision-making, from conception to execution. To do so, simplification has to become one of the values that guide the SSM. The second priority is to promote mobility, thanks in particular to staff secondments and more on-site supervisors working on banks outside their home country. Other initiatives could include very short staff exchanges or swaps within JSTs, between the ECB and national authorities, to allow members to better understand the culture and practices of their 2/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  counterparts. The third and final priority is to develop synergies. Just as with the Eurosystem, the Banking Union constitutes a system with a strong center and strong national components, which ultimately have to act as one team. The goal is to make the best use of national resources by fostering their participation in all key tasks of the SSM. National authorities should not hesitate to step up their involvement in the SSM. In return, the ECB should further empower national authorities, especially in the framework of day-to-day supervision and in the field of on-site inspections in branches or subsidiaries of significant institutions.
If the marginal social benefits foregone of the wrong choice are large, relative to the private costs incurred, then quantitative restrictions are optimal. Why? Because fixing quantities to achieve pollution control, while letting prices vary, does not have large private costs. When the marginal social benefit curve is steeper than the marginal private cost curve, restrictions dominate. The results flip when the marginal cost/benefit trade-offs are reversed. If the private costs of the wrong choice are high, relative to the social benefits foregone, fixing these costs through taxation is likely to deliver the better welfare outcome. When the marginal social benefit curve is flatter than the marginal private cost curve, taxation dominates. So the choice of taxation versus prohibition in controlling pollution is ultimately an empirical issue. To illustrate the framework, consider the path of financial regulation in the US over the past century. The US announcements in January are in many respects redolent of US financial reforms enacted during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Then, restrictions were imposed on both bank size and scope, in the form of the McFadden (1927) and Glass-Steagall (1933) Acts. The history of both, viewed through Weitzman’s lens, is illuminating for today’s debate. 9  Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (2009). 10  For example, Brunnermeier et al (2009), NYU Stern School of Business (2009). 11  For example, Kay (2009), Kotlikoff (2010). 12  Stern (2006). 13  Weitzman (1974).

The hypothesis that Ed McKelvey and I put forward in 1997 in response to evidence of the so-called “Great Moderation” seems to be well supported by the past two economic downturns and their aftermaths: Put simply, longer stretches of economic growth imply greater leverage and complacency and thus, greater financial problems when recessions do occur. In brief, longer U.S. business cycles logically lead to four linked consequences – more financial leverage, longer bouts of balance sheet repair, more subdued recoveries and longer periods of decline in inflation and interest rates during the early stages of recovery. 2 If the economy is more stable, then market participants will have more appetite for risk. This works fine during the expansion stage, when growth is relatively stable. However, when a recession finally arrives, it is a bigger shock than when recessions were more frequent. This surprise results in a more substantial adjustment in financial conditions. Ironically, the increased stability of the business cycle during the expansion phase appears to increase the volatility and importance of financial conditions when recessions do occur. At this stage, incorporating indicators of financial conditions into forecasting and into evaluating the conduct of monetary policy probably requires relying on constructing a “rough and ready” index. Macroeconomic models – especially dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models – do not incorporate robust financial sectors. Instead, these models have implicitly assumed that the monetary transmission mechanism and the financial intermediation process always works smoothly and predictably.
With regard to Sweden, a record-low level in the purchasing managers index points to a continued slowdown in economic activity. The purchasing managers’ index for the manufacturing sector fell in October, for the fifth month in a row. Households’ confidence in the economic situation, as reported in the National Institute of Economic Research’s economic tendency survey, plummeted in October to the lowest level since the beginning of 1993. Confidence did not change substantially in November, but remained at a historically low level. The confidence indicator for the manufacturing industry fell further in November and is well below the average. A large number of redundancies have been notified by Swedish companies in both October and November. Inflation fell in October, which was entirely in line with the Riksbank’s most recent forecast, and there are also signs of lower inflation expectations. At the same time, the krona has been weaker than in our most recent forecast, which in all likelihood will somewhat weaken the forces pushing down inflation. The indicators and outcome data that have been received regarding international growth point to a sombre development. The GDP figures for the United States indicate negative growth during the third quarter and a weak beginning to the fourth quarter. The confidence indicators are pointing downwards, the retail trade is weak and orders are falling. The euro area is in a recession as growth was negative during both the second and third quarters. Since the monetary policy meeting on 22 October, growth prospects have deteriorated considerably, both in Sweden and abroad.

We try to fulfil this objective by setting interest rates at a level that enables the general level of demand to grow in line with what the economy is able to sustain in the long run without giving rise to inflation, and that ensures that economic agents have confidence in the Bank to meet the inflation target. So we only have an indirect influence on the general level of demand and employment. And the poorer than expected employment conditions in the past two years have not been due to developments in demand. On the contrary, demand has proved surprisingly strong. Nonetheless it can of course be maintained that employment could have been somewhat higher if the Riksbank had kept interest rates lower, something that would have been possible given what we now know about inflation. It is difficult to object to this assertion, which of course is why the Riksbank’s critics keep coming back to it. But an assessment of what we could or could not have done must be based on what we knew when the decisions were made, not on what we know now. One way to try to approach this issue is to compare our assessments and actions with other players’ forecasts and opinions on policy at the time in question.
According to the most common measurement methods, Sweden has the highest incidence of sick leave in the EU. There has also been an increase in work absence due to holiday and other leaves of absence as well as a decrease in overtime and additional working hours. Meanwhile, the labour market has not made satisfactory use of the immigrant population in Sweden. The employment rate among this group has been markedly lower than among native Swedes. In addition, according to Statistics Sweden, population growth in the years ahead will be less favourable from a labour force perspective than it has been up to now. The number of people of working age will indeed continue to rise but by an increasingly smaller amount. This is because the number of people entering retirement in the years ahead will rise sharply. In particular, large numbers of the 1940s generation will start to retire in a few years. This could have a negative impact on potential growth. Over the coming 10-year period, the number of people over 65 years of age is estimated to rise by 270 000 - some 1.6 per cent per year on average. Between 2012 and 2030, this group will increase by around 1.3 per cent per year. The number of people of working age is forecast to rise by 170 000 over the coming 10-year period, i.e. by only approximately 0.3 per cent per year.

The Chinese government was not willing to allow its currency to float freely and the exchange rate against the US dollar was managed. This disabled an important stabiliser and contributed increasing world trade imbalances. Long-term interest rates remained low in spite of substantial monetary policy tightening in the US between 2004 and 2006. International organisations such as the BIS, OECD, IMF and others noted on more than one occasion that growing imbalances in the world economy were a source of concern. But economic policy decisions are the prerogative of national governments. Given the policy pursued by China, there were probably limits to what monetary policy in Western countries could in reality achieve in terms of rolling back these forces. Increased private saving in the US and other deficit countries would probably have required monetary policy tightening sufficient to push up long-term interest rates. Alternatively, a substantial increase in public sector saving would have been necessary. Both alternatives would probably have led to an economic policy driven downturn. It is demanding to pursue such a policy based on the proposition that a crisis might occur in the future. Improved financial regulation would probably have reduced the severity of the financial crisis. Regulation and insurance have similar features: in most cases an annual premium must be paid in the form of slightly lower growth. This occurs because capital is not allowed to flow entirely freely to the highest yielding vehicles. In return, regulation can counter the build-up of financial imbalances.