samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Besides the intrinsic value of the sukuk which are largely asset-backed, convertible for shares or exchangeable with shares, such issuances are attractive as they have a wider investor base that comprise conventional and Islamic investors. With the rising wealth of global investors seeking Shariah compliant investments the market has become highly competitive. More recently, it has prompted corporations worldwide including global multinational companies to consider this as a financing option. The development of the sukuk market in Malaysia has involved extensive and wide ranging initiatives that include facilitating an efficient issuance process, enhancing the price discovery process, establishing of a benchmark yield, broadening of the investor base, promoting the liquidity in the secondary market and strengthening further the legal, regulatory and the Shariah framework. These initiatives have also been supported by the development of the financial infrastructure including the settlement system and the bond information system. To position Malaysia as a centre for origination, distribution and trading of sukuk, further steps have been taken to liberalise the market to allow foreign corporations including multinational corporations and multilateral agencies to raise funds in the Malaysian bond market. Funds raised by these entities may be used to finance investment activities in other jurisdictions. The inaugural ringgit denominated Sukuk issue was in 2004 by the International Finance Corporation, and followed by an issue by the IBRD World bank in 2005. In 2006, the market was further liberalized to allow foreign currency denominated sukuks to be issued from the Malaysian market.

In other ways, though, the aftermath of the attacks on the US has highlighted the robustness of the international financial system. Although several firms suffered grievous losses of staff and destruction of equipment, overall the market place was back up and functioning remarkably quickly. I think there were a number of reasons for this. In the first place the Federal Reserve System did an excellent job in making the necessary liquidity available to markets, both in the United States and in other financial centres through swap arrangements with the ECB, the Bank of England and other central banks. Second, the authorities and systems providers were able to keep the main payment systems (Fedwire and Chips) open during and after the evening of September 11th itself. This was a significant achievement, enabling the huge daily volume of dollar payments to be made, including of course substantial dollar flows from the foreign exchange and other dollar markets based in London. Equally impressive was that most of the big firms affected were using their back-up contingency sites very quickly, allowing them to continue in business with a minimum of obvious disruption. Some of those contingency sites were in New Jersey, others put increased volumes through their London office. In New York itself, connectivity of telephone traffic was initially badly affected because of the routing of so much traffic through connections located downtown. But this problem was short lived.
39 40  11  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  11  Given the importance of these reforms to both global financial stability and trust in the system, the FSB will undertake a thorough assessment of their effectiveness over the next year and report to G20 leaders. Key considerations will be the adequacy of the resolution plans, or Living Wills, whether G-SIBs will have sufficient liquidity in resolution, and whether it will be feasible – both in practical and political terms – to impose losses on the holders of TLAC in resolution. An anti-fragile system must be as robust to operational failures as to financial ones. While past crises had their roots in financial losses, in our digital era systemic shocks can also come from non-financial sources, including cyber-attacks. To improve firms’ cyber defences, the largest banks and market infrastructure at the core of the UK financial system are subject to penetration tests (known as CBEST) and are required by their supervisors to address any deficiencies uncovered. In parallel, we are literally planning for failure. In the UK, we have begun setting standards for how quickly critical financial institutions must be able to restore vital services following a successful cyber-attack. We will conduct cyber stress tests of firms’ ability to meet our impact tolerances in “severe but plausible” scenarios, and prescribe remedial action plans if they fail.

The framework thus promotes a greater awareness and appreciation of the wider range of issues and will allow the potential to see things earlier and thereby respond to them more promptly. Thus, embedding scenario analysis and planning in our organizational activities is aimed at enhancing the potential for the organization to successfully maximize its position in a rapidly changing and highly uncertain environment. Ladies and Gentlemen, This seminar is part of ICLIF's skills building and knowledge sharing initiatives. Our ultimate aim is to create a critical mass of high calibre leaders who can bring their organizations from good to great. Dr. Robert Bood and Mr. Ronald Bradfield, the two domain experts who have been conducting Scenario Thinking and Planning Programme for ICLIF, will shed more light on these areas in the course of the seminar. We hope you will benefit from the session, I wish you a productive and successful seminar. Thank you. BIS Review 93/2006  1
Credit is based on real savings and savings can only earn a return if directly invested in creating activities. Finance and the real economy are closely linked. In the Islamic system, banks can neither carry highly leveraged exposures nor acquire risky financial structured products. By the way, even if the Islamic nature of their finance is not the only explanation, we can note that Islamic finance countries, compared with those of conventional finance, have been relatively less impacted by the crisis. But on the other hand, Islamic banks pose risks to the financial system that in many regards differ from those posed by conventional banks, with respect, for example, to liquidity, operational and legal risks. Indeed, Islamic banks face specific obstacles in liquidity management, as the prohibition of interest has led to the underdevelopment of funding sources. Moreover, operational risk and legal uncertainty can be amplified by the lack of product standardization and the lack of harmonization of Islamic standards, with for example possible differences between Shariah scholars' interpretations, accounting standards, and so on. In the same way, prohibition from financing specific sectors limits the kind of eligible assets for investment, which contributes to increasing the risk of concentration in potentially cyclical sectors such as real estate. This is what happened in certain Gulf countries. •  As the analysis of the principles of Islamic finance does not settle the issue of the relationship between Islamic finance and financial stability, it needs to be supplemented by an empirical analysis.

Second, unlike interbank funding, central bank refinancing over a 30-day horizon would not count as an outflow in the denominator of LCR, as it always benefits from a 100% rollover rate. As a result of these two features taken together, this could increase demand for central bank refinancing. Banks could exploit regulatory arbitrage opportunities by posting non-HQLA as collateral, which would lead to an increase in the LCR.12 While this also  9  An exception is Hilberg and Hollmayr (2011). They extend a New-Keynesian model introducing an interbank market and allowing the central banks to alleviate the liquidity shortage on the interbank market varying haircuts on eligible assets; see B. Hilberg and J. Hollmayr (2011), “Asset prices, collateral and unconventional monetary policy in a DSGE model”, European Central Bank working paper series, No 1373. For a discussion on collateral used in private transactions see G. Gorton and A. Metrick (op. cit.) and J. Geanakoplos (2010), “The Leverage Cycle” in D. Acemoglu, K. Rogoff and M. Woodford, eds., NBER Macroeconomic Annual 2009, vol. 24, pp. 1–65, University of Chicago Press. 10  Bindseil (2013) discusses how the collateral framework can interact with liquidity regulation; see U. Bindseil (2013) “Central bank collateral, asset fire sales, regulation, and liquidity”, mimeo, European Central Bank. For a description of the Eurosystem collateral framework, see the ECB website, http://www.ecb.europa.eu/ paym/coll/html/index.en.html.
The outcome of these measures would appear to be useful without being decisive, and the illusion of NPM has gradually dissipated. In particular, measuring the performance and quality of certain public services sometimes runs into intrinsic measurement difficulties. v More than twenty years on from this research, twelve years after Philippe Aghion and Alexandra Roulet called for a "Rethinking of central government”, vi it is  Page 9 of 19 regrettable that macroeconomic analysis is still of so little assistance to public management. Research literature focuses almost exclusively on assessing the success of fiscal adjustment strategies, omitting the fundamental aspects of the quality and effectiveness of public spending. Certain questions have barely even been tackled. I would like to mention three, beginning with measurement of the output of public services. How to measure the output of public services? The inherent lack of a selling price for non-market public service output has never really been overcome, and national accounting uses a simplistic arrangement to get around this, consisting of measuring it as the sum of production costs vii - in other words, mainly public employee remuneration. This basically means that the only way to increase public service output today is to increase costs and the number of public employees. But how can we gauge the effectiveness and quality of public spending and public services without having any visibility over their 'real' output?

The second defining element over the past decades has been the increase in financial innovation, notably in securitisation and market funding. Securitisation can have many positive effects, e.g. by increasing the supply of bank credit to the private sector thanks to greater bank liquidity. Some crucial segments of the economy, such as small and medium-sized firms, may also significantly benefit from the development of securitisation. At the same time, recent research has shown that securitisation may lead to a lowering of banking standards and ultimately weaken financial stability.5 Once a bank is no longer responsible for a loan that it has made, it has fewer incentives to monitor that loan. Besides, in periods of extensive securitisation, when the bank knows that new loans can be securitised – which in some countries can imply that the risk will be totally borne by investors outside the bank – the ex ante incentives for screening are notably reduced. All these important changes in the banking industry have taken place against an ostensibly benign but potential dangerous macroeconomic backdrop: the so-called Great Moderation. Indeed, the protracted period of high economic growth and low short and long-term interest rates contributed to giving the banking sector some very good years. However, that is precisely when risk builds up – and it can be excessive.6 Moreover, we should not overlook that macro fragilities emerged during the benign macroeconomic context: for example, both the current account deficit and the share of the real estate sector activity were around 10% of GDP in 2006.
This approach combines mobile banking solutions with person-to-person contact, except that the customer is not engaging with a bank, but rather with a supermarket counter staff, grocery shop owner, post office or village headman. The elements of trust, Know Your Customer and value-added advisory services can be more effectively met using this approach, without the corresponding high investment cost of establishing physical banking branches. Today's forum provides an excellent opportunity for all of us here to exchange ideas and experiences in these areas. Policy and regulatory concerns pertaining to branchless banking Let me now turn to my second point, which is about the policy concerns of regulators in relation to branchless banking services. The first concern is related to the need to continuously balance between prudential controls and allowing innovation to flourish within the financial sector. To site a recent well known example, the events in the US sub-prime markets and derivative products serve as a good lesson where innovation significantly outpaced the capacity of the regulatory environment to exercise prudential oversight, and prevent distress to the financial system. The environment within which branchless banking will flourish requires a great deal of innovation in terms of executing transactions, maintaining proper audit controls and ensuring fraudsters do not take advantage of unsuspecting customers. As regulators we are particularly concerned where deposits are accepted by non-bank entities, acting in the capacity of an agent to a financial institution.

Despite the increase of light vehicle sales, overall consumer spending has been sluggish. While growth of retail sales in February was reasonably strong in nominal terms, it was considerably less impressive when the large increase of gasoline prices that occurred that month is taken into account. Based on data for the first half of March, gasoline prices are continuing to move higher which will further sap consumers’ real purchasing power. And growth of business investment spending, which was quite strong in the second and third quarters of 2011, entered the new year with little forward momentum. To put the recent pace of growth into perspective, we believe that the economy’s long-run sustainable growth rate (what economists call the potential growth rate) is around a 2 ¼ percent annual rate. We need sustained growth above that rate to absorb the substantial amount of unused productive capacity. Thus, our recent growth rates are barely keeping up with our potential. Although the sharp decline in the unemployment from 9 percent last September to 8.3 percent in February suggests we are doing better than that, it is important to recognize that about half of that decline was due to a declining labor force participation rate. In fact, had the labor force participation rate not declined from around 66 percent in mid-2008 to under 64 percent in February, the unemployment rate would still be over 10 percent. Also, it appears that productivity growth has slumped recently.
This raises the question, however, whether it is necessary for central banks to carry out all the activities that they perform. As I mentioned earlier, I believe that central banks should assess the scope of their operations on a regular basis. By focusing on core activities at Sveriges Riksbank, it has been possible to cut the number of employees from about 850 in 1995 to around 450 today. In addition, one could go on to compare the costs of certain activities. We per-form benchmarking in several areas, and I know that this is something that other central banks have been doing as well. One should also compare the costs of in-house operations with those of outsourcing. Such comparisons have led us to outsource some activities, such as cleaning services and our staff restaurant. One potential problem when comparing activities separately is that it presupposes that objectives are not interrelated, and that there are no joint costs associ-ated with the different activities. Recently, questions regarding the connection between price stability and financial stability have attracted increasing attention and have given rise to a debate on whether there may be situations where the two goals conflict with each other. In normal circumstances, however, we do not perceive any conflict among our objectives. When measuring costs, it is important not to count the costs of the central bank only, but also of other parties that are important to performance.

In conclusion, I’d like to note that although the current economic slowdown is of both structural and cyclical nature, structural factors and the need to create new growth sources still play a major role. This means that monetary policy measures are not sufficient to solve all the problems facing the economy. Special efforts are needed to promote new investments in the economy, improve business climate, increase the mobility of labour and its skills, enhance the efficiency of natural monopolies and government expenditure, improve state governance, and develop infrastructure and logistics. Only these efforts will ensure sustained long-term economic growth based on increasing productivity and economic structural changes. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches
Access to credit  Mar-17  Oct-16  May-16  Dec-15  Jul-15  Feb-15  Sep-14  Apr-14  Nov-13  Jun-13  Jan-13  Aug-12  Mar-12  Oct-11  May-11  Dec-10  Jul-10  Feb-10  Sep-09  Apr-09  Nov-08  Jun-08  Jan-08  Aug-07  Mar-07  percent 24 22 20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0  Interest rate of mortgage loans, RON (%)  Interest rate for new mortgage loans, RON (%)  ROBOR 3 M  price to income  Source: Eurostat, NBR, Credit Bureau  10  Figure 14. Mortgage credit and the gross savings rate percent 30  percent 16 14  Figure 15. Share of local currency mortgages percent 100  25 75  12 20  10 8  15  6  50  10  4  25  5  "First house" (%GDP) Mortgage credit other than "First House" (%GDP) Gross saving (%GDP) (rhs)  Source: NBR, FNGCIMM, World Bank  dec.-16  mar.-16  iun.-15  sep.-14  mar.-13 dec.-13  iun.-12  sep.-11  dec.-10  mar.-10  Mortgage credit (%GDP)  0 iun.-09  2016  2015  2014  2013  2012  2011  2010  2009  2008  0 2007  0  sep.-08  2  Share of outstanding RON mortgage-backed credit (%) Share of new RON mortgage-backed credit (%)  Source: NBR, Credit Bureau  11  Figure 16.

This is the best form to test the real possibilities, which may later be supported by amendments to prudential regulatory framework. Our common goal is to stop progression of the value of nonperforming loans and improve the situation gradually. Some banks, thanks to their prudent and steady efforts over the past three years in relations with their clients, have managed to significantly reduce the non-performing loans share. They have continued lending to the economy at good levels. Organisation and management of their work is an example for other banks. The current legal and regulatory framework is comprehensive and in line with the best international standards, although it may require ongoing improvement. Our consolidated opinion, however, is that all the stakeholders need to exhaust all the available tools and gradually make further steps in the legal and institutional framework. More specifically, the banking industry and the business community need to work more closely. I believe there is more space for better understanding and more fruitful cooperation. The business community and the banking system should leave their trenches and cooperate in concrete terms to face future challenges. The banking system is ready to increase its support to the economy with loans. This was confirmed to me in a meeting I had with the management of the largest five banks. Personally, I urged the banking system for a more active approach to lending. This is a real challenge and many institutions and groups of interest are involved in it.
But inflation remains well above the average of 2.5% seen in the decade before COVID-19 (2010-19). Moreover, global core inflation rose from 3.8% in Q3 2022 to 4.1% in Q4. With headline inflation coming off its peak, most central banks have shifted to a more moderate pace of tightening. But with inflation still well above targets, the tightening cycle has some ways to go. The US Fed, European Central Bank (ECB), and Bank of England have stepped down to a more modest range of 25 to 50 basis point rate hikes this year compared to the successive 50 to 75 basis point hikes last year. But expectations by some market participants that the tightening cycle will end soon and that central banks may even start easing are excessively optimistic. Forward guidance by advanced economy central banks indicates further tightening to cool inflation. Both the US Fed and the ECB have reiterated their commitment to achieve their inflation targets of 2%. The key challenge facing most central banks is to secure a return to low inflation without incurring too large a cost to growth or financial stability. Thus far, the disinflation process has taken place in an orderly manner, without dislocations to the functioning of the global economy and financial markets. But continuing to get this balance right will be a challenge, especially if inflation gets stuck at too high a level. There are complex spillover effects from synchronised policy tightening across countries. These effects could help dampen inflation domestically to the extent they reduce imported inflation.

When interest rates rise rapidly, future cashflows will be discounted at a faster rate than the current cashflows can grow. As a result, most financial assets, which represent a stream of future cashflows, will do badly. Last year, the financial markets performed poorly even though there was no economic or financial crisis. Global equities and bonds fell by between 16% and 20%. A traditional 60/40 investor would have lost 18% in portfolio value in 2022 alone. This is in stark contrast to the preceding 30 years, where such a portfolio would have earned a respectable 8.7% per annum. In fact, last year, it did not matter if you were 60/40 or any other combination. So long as your portfolio was exposed to global stocks and bonds, the portfolio would likely have performed negatively in 2022. Against this backdrop, investors will need to consider building greater resilience in their portfolios. What should be the appropriate composition of the portfolios? How will each asset class perform under different growth and inflation environments? What is the appropriate allocation to inflation-protection assets, such as real assets, inflation-linked bonds, and commodities? What should be the exposure to energy given the opposing pulls of short-term inflation dynamics and longer-term climate risks? Is there a role for tail-risk hedges such as gold and how large should that role be? MEDIUM TERM: GEOECONOMIC FRAGMENTATION All said and done, inflation will eventually come down and interest rates normalise, though both are likely to be slightly higher than what we have been used to.