samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Finally, the Riegle-Neal Act of 1994, which took effect in 1997, largely lifted restrictions on interstate branching for both domestic BHCs and foreign banks. The rationale for this change of heart was a mirror-image of the 1920s. Large banks convinced politicians of the high private costs of restrictions, which inhibited the efficiency of their offering to the public. In Weitzman’s framework, private costs trumped social benefits. The effects of the removal of interstate restrictions were dramatic. The average size of US banks, relative to GDP, has risen roughly threefold over the past 20 years (Chart 1). Too-bigto-fail was reborn in a new guise. The US Banking Act (1933) was co-sponsored by Senator Carter Glass and Representative Henry Steagall – hence “Glass-Steagall”. It prevented commercial banks from conducting most types of securities business, including principal trading, underwriting and securities lending. It also banned investment banks from taking deposits. The key functions of commercial and investment banking were effectively prised apart. The Act was motivated by stability concerns in the light of the Great Depression. The stock market boom of the 1920s had been fuelled by cheap credit from the banks. The stock market crash of 1929 brought that, and a great many US banks, to a shuddering halt. Among many banks, net losses on securities were as great as losses on loans. These losses transmitted to the real economy through a collapse in lending, whose stock halved between 1929 and 1933.

Adequate and consistent information on capital flows will also greatly improve Balance of Payments Statistics for Zambia and serve as an early warning system for Government on potential financial crises and other external shocks. Mr. Chairman, Zambia has adequate technical capacity to collect, analyse and disseminate data and information on foreign private investment. It has, however, lagged behind in terms of the frequency of these surveys compared with some other countries in the region. For instance, while we are now at the third phase of the Survey, Uganda, Tanzania and Malawi are in their eighth, fifth and fourth phases, respectively. This only emphasises the critical need to conduct this enterprise survey more regularly. To this end, I wish to reiterate the Bank of Zambia’s, continued support and commitment in working in close collaboration with Government and other Balance of Payments Statistical Committee member institutions in ensuring that the collection of this vital information is done on an annual basis. Accordingly, it is my hope that participants at this workshop will appreciate the importance of this survey and find the results useful. Distinguished Guests, I am particularly happy to learn that compared to other countries in the region, the Zambian team has conducted this enterprise survey in record time. It shows true commitment and dedication of the team to this project. Please keep up the good work. Be reminded, however, that you have established a benchmark, which can only be improved on.
Christian Noyer: Challenges facing France’s Prudential Supervisory Authority Speech by Mr Christian Noyer, Governor of the Bank of France, President of the Prudential Supervisory Authority (Autorité de contrôle prudentiel) and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Bank for International Settlements, at the press conference of the publication of the Annual Report 2011 of the Prudential Supervisory Authority, Paris, 14 May 2012. *  *  *  Ladies and gentlemen, Let me say first of all how pleased I am to host this press conference which has been organised to coincide with the publication of this second annual report of the Autorité de contrôle prudentiel (ACP). The “newness” of this institution, which was officially set up in 2010, has no doubt contributed to the dynamism that it has shown during this crisis period. Independent, but operating under the aegis of the Banque de France, the ACP has acted efficiently and quickly to ensure financial stability and enhance the protection of customers and clients of banks and insurance companies. It has also effectively projected France’s voice in international negotiations concerning its domains of competence. Before saying a few words about the challenges facing the Authority in 2012, I would like to develop two points that in my view best characterise 2011: the solidity of our financial system in a period of severe crisis on the one hand, and the evolution of our prudential supervision methods and instruments on the other.

Although we fully appreciated the benefits that Switzerland would draw from the creation of the euro in terms of increased transparency and lower transaction costs, we were also quite concerned about the possible risks. Three of these came to mind. First, we feared that the Swiss franc might be in for a bumpy ride. In the past, whenever the dollar was under attack, international investors turned their attention to the German mark and the Swiss franc. Their status as safe-haven currencies meant that at times of turbulences on foreign exchange markets they would move well beyond what economic fundamentals could justify. In fact, the Swiss franc often revealed a tendency to appreciate even more than the German mark, a phenomenon that was generally attributed to the relative narrowness of the Swiss financial markets. Now with the German mark gone, wouldn’t all attention focus almost exclusively on our currency? Would it not mean that in a dollar crisis the franc would have to bear even more of the adjustment than in the past? Even more frightful, what would happen if the euro itself were under attack? The last thing we needed was for the franc to become the first currency in the line of fire, or something like the lightening rod of the international monetary system. A second apprehension that we had was that it might become very difficult in the future to conduct an autonomous monetary policy. Switzerland, together with Liechtenstein, would now be totally surrounded by a single monetary zone.
Tharman Shanmugaratnam: Taking charge of your financial wellbeing Opening address by Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, at the MoneySENSE 10th Anniversary Roadshow, Singapore, 19 October 2013. *  *  *  Good afternoon Members of the Financial Education Steering Committee, and everyone who has come to Toa Payoh hub for one reason or another. Please enjoy the shows and exhibitions which we have planned, that are all aimed at helping Singaporeans to manage their money better. 2. We all know that managing money is important, regardless of your income level. You may be low, middle or high income, but managing your money is very important for your quality of life. Research supports this, but we all know from our own family members, friends, and colleagues at work – that it is not just how much money we make but how we manage, spend or share our money that determines how satisfied we are. Financial Literacy Survey 3. MoneySENSE commissioned a Financial Literacy Survey earlier this year, which shows that Singaporeans are generally quite careful with their finances.1 80% of Singaporeans save some money each month and 86% of people do not like taking on debt. Many people take on loans because of housing, but they don’t like to borrow more than they can comfortably service with their income. 4. But there are some people who over-spend and over-borrow, which we find in every society, and Singapore as well.

Over the last 10 years, MoneySENSE has reached out to Singaporeans through many  2  Prelec and Simester, “Always Leave Home Without It: A Further Investigation of the Credit Card Effect on Willingness to Pay”, Marketing Letters 12, no. 1, February 2001. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  channels – schools, community events, workplace talks, newspapers, TV, radio, and now increasingly the internet – to reach out in every way we can to as many Singaporeans as possible. 12. We set up a new institute last year called the Institute for Financial Literacy (IFL) which was set up jointly by MoneySENSE and the Singapore Polytechnic. This institute has helped to bring financial education to working adults, who don’t have much time, but they can attend lunchtime talks and workshops free of charge at their workplace. To date, IFL had reached out to 12,000 people. Translating knowledge into action 13. What will be our focus for the next 10 years? First, we have to recognise that financial education is not just about knowledge, but also about inculcating the right values from young, and encouraging everyone to be pro-active rather than passive about their finances. At every income level and for every family, it really pays to prepare for the future. 14. Many think that they don’t have enough time, or just say they are not interested, or that there’s too much to plan for because it’s too uncertain. But it’s precisely because life has uncertainties that we need to make plans for the future.
The song “Roll out the Barrel” was written by the Czech composer Jaromir Vejvoda, and the New World Symphony was composed by the world famous Czech composer Antonín Dvořák. So you can find at least some Czech marks in many areas of everyday life. How about my domain, finance? Well at least one thing originates in this country. You sometimes pay with US dollars, or Canadian dollars or Australian dollars for that matter, so you should know that the name dollar comes from the original Czech name tolar – TOLAR – which was a small silver coin minted in Western Bohemia in the 16th century. Now it is world famous. And while I am talking about the traces left by the Czech language, I should not forget that there is at least one Czech word which has spread from my very complicated mother tongue to almost all languages. That word is robot – the invention of Czech writer Karel Čapek. It comes from the Czech word “robota”, which means unfree and unpaid labour, or corvée in English. Ladies and gentlemen, I can only hope that I have succeeded in convincing you that this is a country with a long track record in many areas and that it is not a waste of your time to explore its history, beauties and treasures, be it here in Prague or elsewhere. I’d say you might find many other surprises as well. I wish you every success with your conference. Enjoy it, enjoy Prague and enjoy the Czech republic.

Names like Kvitová, Navrátilová, Lendl, Čech and Rosický won’t be completely unknown to many of you. This in itself is an achievement for a country of just 10.5 million. But that’s not all. I tried to jot down a couple of things I hope you will not necessarily know. The Czech Republic has the highest consumption of beer per head in the world, at roughly 160 litres per capita. That may not come as a surprise, but what you also might not know is that we have the highest consumption of pork per head as well, our only close competitor in this regard being China. According to some European statistics, we also have the highest number of garden pools per head in the whole of Europe. There is a garden pool per every 50 inhabitants here, while in wealthier Germany the figure is just one per 103 inhabitants. If you don’t believe this, just take a look out of your window as you take off from Prague Airport on your way home. So this is about lifestyle: good beer, heavy food and bathing. Actually, many Czechs would say that this is the very definition of how to relax and be cool about the world and life. But this would also be a rather simplistic caricature. So let’s go further. Ours is a country with a long and entrenched tradition of industrial production and manufacturing.
When voting and excluding individual equities, the SNB works together with external proxies. BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  That brings me to the third challenge – market liquidity. In some markets, liquidity conditions have deteriorated. Yet it is difficult to gauge how liquid the various financial markets really are, because there is no single measure that can fully capture all aspects of market liquidity. For example, we are seeing a worsening of liquidity conditions in corporate bond markets. The blue curve in slide 8, for instance, shows that trading volumes at traditional marketmakers in the US have more than halved since 2007, whereas the market has grown considerably over the same period. However, both for market participants and as regards financial stability, it is not only the level of market liquidity but also its resilience that is important. In recent years, we have repeatedly seen how market liquidity can fall sharply in times of stress. 3 There have, in particular, been a few days on which – for no apparent reason – there was a sudden surge in volatility. This was the case in October 2014 in the US, when ten-year yields dropped by 37 basis points in a single day. Japanese government bonds experienced something similar a few weeks ago, falling by 26 basis points in one day. The two charts in slide 9 use histograms to illustrate how unusual the price movements were on these days.

It is this excessive credit cycle – the risk of “go and stop” seen during financial crises – that a moderate capital buffer must seek to smooth out. It should be noted in passing that a clear majority of Member States of the European Union have adopted other macroprudential measures  Page 3 of 6 to specifically limit residential lending, constraining households: in my view it is out of the question in France. II. To reduce fragmentation and improve private risk sharing in Europe, we must now complete the Banking Union. We must now resolutely work towards completing the European Banking Union. I would first like to explain why. The finalisation of the Banking Union should, alongside the Capital Markets Union, contribute to improving private risk sharing within the euro area. Private risk sharing fulfils an economic stabilisation function: in the United States, for example, private financial flows between the federal states are a more powerful damper than budget mechanisms involved in public risk sharing. Furthermore, this private risk sharing should help to channel the euro area’s large savings surplus – EUR 390 billion in 2017 – towards European companies, within a real Financing Union for Investment and Innovation at the European level. We have taken a step forward with the agreement of 25 May at the Ecofin Council meeting on the "banking reform package" set out in the Commission's legislative proposal of 23 November 2016.
This reflects the heightened state of vigilance in Bank Negara Malaysia as we continue to direct significant effort and resources towards strengthening our surveillance. In addition to macro surveillance, the supervision framework is also more forward looking including increased engagements and dialogue with senior management of financial institution, industry leaders, trade bodies and various chambers of commerce for the early detection of emerging issues and developments. BIS Review 58/2009  1  Facilitating access to credit and easing monetary policy Another area of importance is the continuing availability of credit from the banking sector. We have earlier highlighted the rate of growth in outstanding loans. In addition, the government has introduced specific guarantee schemes while Bank Negara Malaysia also, on its part, maintained a monetary policy easing stance that is conducive to achieve the same goal of facilitating access to credit at reasonable cost. At the same time, to assist the household sector, the Agensi Kaunselling dan Pengurusan kredit (AKPK) is also an avenue for individual borrowers and potential borrowers to seek advice and assistance in managing their finances and debts. Clients of the banking industry may also contact Bank Negara Malaysia hotlines and its LINK and TeleLINK for assistance for info. LINK refers to Laman Informasi Nasihat dan Khidmat. Association of Banks in Malaysia (ABM) has also introduced toll free lines for the benefit of its stakeholders. These combined efforts seek to lower borrowing costs and ease cash flows while at the same time promote financial discipline.

The risks, when highlighted, often temporarily overshadow the long-term gains, which arise in small incremental doses over a long period. Unfortunately, short-term conditions came sharply into focus just when the Swedish people were about to vote, as attention was turned to the global economic slowdown and its effect on the euro area, particularly in the major countries. GDP growth in Germany and France is forecast to decline from 0.2 per cent and 1.3 per cent respectively in 2002 to 0.0 and 0.3 per cent in 2003 (Riksbank forecast). This is the poorest rate of growth in these countries in over a decade. In the debate on the euro, this contraction in growth was largely attributed to the limitations imposed on these countries’ economic policies, as they did not have a national monetary policy, and to the fiscal policy constraints of the Stability and Growth Pact. As we know, the budget deficits of both Germany and France have in both 2002 and 2003 exceeded the reference value of 3 per cent of GDP, which was established in the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact. At the same time, attention in the debate was drawn to the temporary and one-off rise in prices of certain goods that occurred when prices were rounded after the introduction of the euro. In light of this, it is understandable that many voters got the impression that there were no economic benefits of participation in the euro.
A substantial portion of the capital inflows that finance our current account deficit has come from foreign central banks—which have been accumulating dollar reserves to preserve exchange rate arrangements that are unlikely to be sustainable and are already in the process of change. The impact of a reduction in the scale of official accumulation of dollar assets could be fully offset by increases in purchases by private investors. But even in the context of a continued high degree of confidence in the relative return on claims on the United States, it is hard to know with confidence how the preferences of private savers might respond to the process of gradual evolution in their nation’s exchange rate regimes now underway. And most importantly, perhaps, these imbalances matter because at some point they will have to reverse. Market forces will at some point induce an adjustment. And that inevitable process of adjustment will bring with it the risk of large movements in relative prices, greater volatility in asset prices and slower growth in the United States and in the rest of the world. The magnitude of this risk is difficult to measure with any confidence. Past episodes of external adjustment offer some reassurance, but the present circumstances seem sufficiently different from historical precedent that history may not be a particularly useful guide.

The apparent strength in U.S. productivity growth, our greater overall flexibility as an economy and the resilience of our financial system puts us in a stronger position to deal with the challenges in the transition ahead. But we face a number of difficult long-term challenges as a nation—in our fiscal position, in how well we equip our citizens to prosper in a more competitive world and in our ability to sustain political support for the policies, including our relatively open trade policy, that have been an important source of the improvement in U.S. prosperity. Our external imbalances make it more important that we invest in meeting those challenges. Thank you. 3/3
It involves a Star Trek chair and a bank of monitors. It would involve tracking the global flow of funds in close to real time (from a Star Trek chair using a bank of monitors), in much the same way as happens with global weather systems and global internet traffic (Haldane (2011)). Its centre piece would be a global map of financial flows, charting spill-overs and correlations. Such a global financial surveillance system could serve a number of policy ends. It would allow policymakers to monitor the evolution of the financial system in real time, as it expanded, contracted and changed shape. It would also allow them to simulate and stresstest this system to help detect impending financial cliff-edges. The IMF would be the natural guardian of this global-financial-map-cum-stress-testing-machine. To give this concept some (literal and metaphorical) colour, Chart 18 shows a bank of heatmaps of correlations across a wide range of assets (safe and risky) and a large set of countries (advanced and emerging). There are shown at three dates – a pre-crisis period of calm, the Lehmans Brothers crisis of 2008 and at present. These correlations are grouped in two ways, by asset class and by country. The correlation matrix broadly matches the patterns from the earlier heatmaps. Temperatures appear to be rising over time, with flare-ups at times of crisis. With this map now encompassing a wider range of assets and countries, the strength of these correlations underscores the genuinely global nature of today’s international financial system.

For some economists, this is a perplexing and contentious conclusion. It is made all the more so by the fact that the evidence on global trade integration points overwhelmingly towards positive effects (Kose et al (2009) and Berg and Krueger (2003)). Yet, outside of economics and finance, this conclusion would be far less perplexing and contentious. For many other disciplines, it is well-known that the increased integration of a network can be double-edged from a stability perspective (Watts (2002), Haldane and May (2011)): whether it is physical networks, like utility grids; or natural networks, like eco-systems; or social networks, like the world wide web. The logic is straightforward. Within limits, connectivity acts as a shock-absorber. Links in the system act as a mutual insurance device, helping distribute and disperse risk. These systems are then “robust” to shocks. But when shocks are sufficiently large, connectivity may instead serve as a shocktransmitter. Risk-sharing becomes risk-spreading. Links in the system act as a mutual incendiary device, amplifying risk. These systems are then also “fragile”. So connected systems tend simultaneously to be both stable and unstable, calm and turbulent, robust-yet-fragile (Acemoglu et al (2013), Gai and Kapadia (2010)). In other words, integration can be double-edged. It generates a world with instances of more frequent and/or  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  larger dislocations. In short, what is true of natural, physical and social systems is also true of global economic and financial systems. To illustrate that, consider Chart 4.