samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The main driver of the improvement in ordinary profit was the reduction in impairment losses, which fell by 43.5% compared with 2020 to € billion, a somewhat lower level than in the two years prior to the pandemic. The recovery in profit in 2021 was widespread across the main countries where Spanish banks pursue significant international business. Profitability also improved at the European level, following the notable decline in the previous year, returning to close to prepandemic levels. As in Spain, the main driver of this improvement was the significant fall in impairment provisioning. The breakdown shows that gross income rose by close to 3% in 2021, driven by the timid recovery in net interest income9 and, above all, by a 10.4% increase in net fees and commissions, which more than offset the drop in gains on financial assets and liabilities. In any event, net interest income remained lower than in 2019.10 Fee and commission income has increased in recent years,11 mainly on account of payment services, although it is still low compared with Spanish banks’ main European peers. Profitability remained positive in 2022 Q1. Thus, ordinary profit at the six listed banks rose by more than 30%12 year-on-year, with increases of 9%-10% both in net interest income and fee and commission income. Meanwhile, impairment losses fell by 9% compared with March 2021. It must be noted, however, that the full economic impact of the war in Ukraine did not materialise in the first quarter of the year.

As much as public bodies are willing to step in as coordinators before and during times of crisis and eventually as lenders of last resort, they also want to see private sector entities being involved and actively participating in shaping resilience and resolving crises. The responsibility for financial stability is a shared responsibility. I am fully aware that none of us can precisely estimate today the economic consequences of what we all yet have to do in order to increase the resilience of financial systems. Since this resilience is bound to be tested again harshly sooner or later, there is no alternative to rapid, serious, adequate and if necessary costly preparations by all of us. Let me end by expressing my gratitude. I enjoyed contributing to the exchange of information, evaluations and views. This is the essence of the SIBOS conference. I am particularly grateful since I know that all of us in this room as well as those financial sector professionals who were unable to attend this conference, those of the private sector as well as those from the public sector, willingly share the noble responsibility for the efficiency and stability of today’s and tomorrow’s financial systems. Thank you very much for your attention. BIS Review 55/2002  5
They must have a healthy dose of skepticism, and never place their commercial interests above the need to ensure that a company is suitable for a public listing. MAS will not hesitate to take advisers to task for poor due diligence work. If the regulators, issuers, and advisers each do their jobs well, we can reduce the likelihood of poor quality companies gaining access to our markets. Investors – safeguarding their interests This brings me to the second component of the capital market ecosystem – investors. Well-informed and empowered investors are at the core of a well functioning capital market. Investors will lose confidence in a market where disclosure is misleading and where selling practices are irresponsible. Safeguarding the interests of investors, particularly retail investors, is therefore a key focus of MAS regulation. But this objective has to be balanced against the need for investors to take ownership of their investment decisions. A regulatory approach that requires issuers or intermediaries to bear all the risks and losses will not work. If investors expect their losses to be always made good, there will be moral hazard and it will encourage reckless investing.

Zeti Akhtar Aziz: Nurturing young talent in Malaysia Speech by Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz, Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia (Bank Negara Malaysia), at the Kijang Emas Scholarship Award Ceremony for High Achievers, Kuala Lumpur, 6 May 2014. *  *  *  While the global economy continues to face uncertainties and significant challenges, the Malaysian economy has every potential to remain on a steady growth trajectory and move up the value chain. This is however only achievable if we can nurture the required talents. Talent development strategies and implementation is therefore one of the key priorities of the nation. We need to invest in our talent pipeline The Kijang Emas Scholarship Award is an eminent scholarship award reflecting the Bank’s commitment in creating a sustainable talent pool for the nation. The Kijang Emas scholarship is distinct from the Kijang scholarship whereby the recipients are given the freedom to pursue any field of study at top-notch universities in any country of their choice. The Bank also does not impose any bond on the recipient except that they return, contribute and take part in the progress and development of our beloved nation. To date, 42 high potential talent have been awarded the Kijang Emas scholarship. The recipients are currently pursuing their studies in diverse field of studies including Medicine, Dentistry, Genetics, Biochemistry, Dietetics, Physics, Engineering, Law, Psychology and Architecture in top universities around the world such as M.I.T., University of Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge.
This is unfortunate, as the situation in Sweden, as I noted earlier, is actually slightly more sensitive than that in many other countries, where housing prices have already fallen and households have begun to amortise their debts to a more significant extent. Well in line with the international discussion One thing I think it is important to emphasise – and which is not always clear in the Swedish debate – is that the Riksbank's aim to give consideration to the risks arising from household debt and the housing market is well in line with the international view that has emerged in the wake of the financial crisis. The Riksbank's way of reasoning, and the policy we have conducted, are thus not unusual or strange, but are characteristic for the present time. 21  The Swedish National Debt Office (2013) writes, for instance, in its consultation response that with the solution they advocate, "it would not be possible to justify any macroprudential policy measures if the conclusion was that the risks inherent in current household debt were primarily a demand-related problem (rather than a problem for the banking system)." (p. 2). BIS central bankers’ speeches  9  There is even reason to claim that the Riksbank was one of the first central banks to highlight this type of risk.

Last year alone, oil revenues in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries were estimated to be about $ billion.3 Mainland China has been one of their favourite investment destinations given its strong economic growth and emerging market opportunities. 9. On the other side, Mainland China is facing huge funding needs for infrastructure development projects. As China’s global financial centre, Hong Kong is an important conduit for Mainland companies to access the international markets and the preferred offshore capital raising centre for Mainland issuers over the past decade. This is apparent from the fact that over half of our stock market capitalisation is Mainland-related and from the high participation of Mainland entities in our dim sum bond market. 10. Against this backdrop, we believe Hong Kong is well-placed to meet the strong investment demand from the Middle East and other parts of the world for Mainland-related Islamic financial products. At the same time, Hong Kong can also provide an ideal platform for issuers from the Mainland and other parts of Asia to issue Islamic financial instruments for satisfying their funding needs. Bringing Islamic capital markets to the mainstream 11. Addressing one of the key issues to be discussed today, Hong Kong’s involvement in Islamic finance will also help to bring Islamic capital markets to the mainstream in two ways: provide a level playing field and encourage market participation in Islamic finance. 12. To bring Islamic financial products to the mainstream, a key task would be to level the playing field with their conventional counterparts.
Market rates and probability forecasts It is well understood in theory why the market-implied path of the policy rate usually differs from survey measures of policy expectations.50 Even if the marginal investor’s probability distribution for future outcomes coincided with that of the average survey respondent, she would want additional compensation for bearing risk in states of the world that are unfavorable to her. It is conceivable in the current environment that outcomes in which the federal funds rate would return to the zero lower bound, or more generally remain low, are not good news for the overall portfolio of the marginal investor. Thus, in assessing the price at which she would be willing to trade interest rate derivatives like federal funds futures, she would weight those “negative” states of the world, such as states involving a return to the zero lower bound, more than her subjective probability distribution would imply – and the opposite would hold true for “positive” states of the world. In other words, in this environment the risk premium compensation she requires would pull the market-implied path downward, away from survey expectations. While risk premia, especially at this juncture, are likely very important, looking only at pointforecasts may overemphasize their role when these point forecasts coincide with modal forecasts. In particular, when the implied policy rate from federal funds or Eurodollar futures changes, while the point forecasts from surveys do not, it is customary to attribute all the change in the market rates to risk premia.

This could be achieved by having the private operators of this infrastructure issue a ‘settlement token’ on the DLT system, with the securities then being settled against these tokens. An initiative launched by a consortium with Swiss participation is working on such an approach under the project name ‘Utility Settlement Coin’. This example shows how a market solution could ensure cash-side settlement of securities on the distributed Page 5/8  ledger. This scenario is outlined on the slide 7. Such a privately issued settlement token would be equivalent to commercial bank money, and fully secured by central bank money. However, it would also be possible in principle for central bank money to be tokenised for the settlement of interbank transactions. Central banks in some countries – Singapore among them – are conducting experiments to gain a better understanding of the associated risks. As you can see on the slide 8, this is similar in concept to the previous option. However, there are a number of questions still to be answered in this respect as well. As you can see, there would be various forms that this coexistence could take. What is crucial is that the safety and reliability of the FMI be maintained. The central bank has an important part to play in the reliable foundation, that is to say with regard to payments in the RTGS system. Around this solid foundation, however, it is the market that has the main role.
Prudential bank regulation: present and future Speech given by Vicky Saporta, Executive Director for Prudential Policy, Bank of England  Westminster Business Forum Keynote Seminar: Building a resilient UK financial sector – next steps for prudential regulation, structural reform and mitigating risks  4 July 2018  I would like to thank Matthew Willison for working with me on this speech. Thanks are also due to Thom Adcock, Omar Ahmed, Dana Andreicut, Tamiko Bayliss, Stuart Dossett, Orlando Fernandez Ruiz, Mariana Gimpelewicz, Marc Hinterschweiger, Alex Holmes, Antoine Lallour, Jack Leslie, Damien Lynch, Sinead O’Leary-Barrett, Sam Miller, David Murphy, Santosh Pandit, Thomas Papavranoussis, Rajan Patel, Joshua Plank, Jakob Schedlbauer, Jon Sepanski, Dominic Shaw, Jonathan Smith, Ruth Smith, Anthony Veal, and Sam Woods for contributions and comments. 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  Introduction  I am pleased to be here today to give this speech. The Westminster Business Forum has a fascinating agenda – from policy priorities for UK manufacturing, to the development of FinTech, even the future of the UK space industry! And your roots are in Parliament, which gives the Bank of England its objectives to maintain monetary and financial stability. Today is also a special day for me personally. Exactly two years ago, on 4 July 2016, I was appointed in my current role as Executive Director for Prudential Policy.

Trade among the expanding emerging economies now account for more than half of the world trade. This growing demand in emerging economies is also generating investment opportunities. In this environment, Islamic finance has an important potential to facilitate trade and investment flows that will be mutually reinforcing. In evolving Malaysia as  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  an Islamic financial hub, our aspiration is to be a hub that is linked to a network of other financial hubs. In so doing, it will enhance our economic linkages with other parts of the world. The increased internationalisation of Islamic finance would thus influence the patterns of global financial and economic integration, and in particular facilitate the revival of financial and economic integration between the countries along the old silk road from Asia to Turkey and the Middle East, and Africa and to the more established financial markets and developed economies. The start of this decade has already witnessed the shifting of trade activities to the emerging economies, which now account for 63 percent or $ trillion of world trade as at end-2011, an increase of 17 percent from a decade ago. While the Islamic banking sector has been important in intermediating cross border financial flows, the sukuk market has become an important segment of Islamic finance that offers a distinct platform upon which international inter-linkages are fostered. The sukuk market has demonstrated its ability to effectively intermediate funds across borders, contributing towards the efficient allocation of funds in the global financial system.
That story, at least for smaller countries, is somewhat more unique than the first. However, it must be remembered that although these two stories differ, they interact in important ways. Thus the unsustainable boom that Iceland experienced during the years 2005–2007 was fuelled by a combination of favourable external conditions, macroeconomic mismanagement, and aggressive domestic bank lending. 3  An English version of the SIC report summary can be found on the Althingi website: http://sic.althingi.is/. For my views on the subject, I refer you to a speech I made in Bergen early this year: http://www.sedlabanki.is/lisalib/getfile.aspx?itemid=7592 and my speech at the Annual General Meeting of the Central Bank of Iceland: http://www.sedlabanki.is/lisalib/getfile.aspx?itemid=7699. BIS Review 63/2010  3  As so often occurs in great tragedies, the two stories converged in a grand finale in early October 2008, when nearly nine-tenths of Iceland’s banking system collapsed when its three large cross-border banks – Glitnir, Landsbanki, and Kaupthing – were taken into special resolution regimes on the basis of the emergency legislation that had just been passed by Parliament. This added significantly to the recessionary forces that were already at play in the Icelandic economy as the macroeconomic imbalances created in 2005–2007 subsided. However, the question of cause and effect is still open; i.e., what is the specific contribution of the banking collapse over and above an international recession and a domestic macroeconomic adjustment?

Már Guðmundsson: The Icelandic pension system and the financial crisis Speech by Mr Már Guðmundsson, Governor of the Central Bank of Iceland, at the opening dinner of the European Pension Convention 2010, Reykjavík, 2 May 2010. *  *  *  Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, It gives me great pleasure to address you here tonight, and I would like to thank the organisers for inviting me to do so. This is due not least to my past interest in and work on the Icelandic pension system and, more generally, my interest in the optimal design of pension systems. During my tenure as Chief Economist of the Central Bank of Iceland from 1994–2004, I was convinced that the pension system that had developed in Iceland, partly by historical accident, was one of the strengths of Iceland’s economy. This conviction had taken root earlier, when I was involved with pension reform and served for a while as the chairman of the board of a pension fund that has long been among the top ten in Iceland in terms of size. However, this view was reinforced around the turn of the century, when I made an in-depth study of the Icelandic pension system and tried to analyse its effects on the economy and the financial sector. 1 I subsequently tried to propagate the virtues of the system abroad.
As mentioned before, a good number of banks were established, in the main with industrial interests, but on a fragile basis, and most of them became insolvent. Second, banks did not follow prudent and appropriate policies to set in place a comprehensive risk management process to identify and control all risks with proper valuation standards. At that time the assessment of capital adequacy, as in many other countries, was based on a badly designed leverage ratio (capital on deposits) which was totally inappropriate in terms of the risk profile of the banks. Third, the supervisory system was not equipped with appropriate human, technical and organisational tools to ensure a thorough understanding of the operations both of individual banks and banking groups and to monitor them. Additionally, the supervisor did not have corrective and remedial powers to apply timely and efficient surgical measures. Ensuing this episode, the Spanish authorities embarked on a thoroughgoing process of liberalisation, modernisation, de-regulation, re-regulation and promotion of competition. Although there was much ground to be covered, Spain comprehensively reformed the regulatory and supervisory framework in a relatively short period, during the 80s. Supervisory powers and the more detailed banking regulations were placed within the remit of the Banco de España. Among the wide array of measures taken I would like to highlight the following: •  Interest rates and fees for banking operations were fully liberalised and the compulsory investment ratios were gradually lifted.

Most of them were industry-oriented with special tax advantages, but with a fragile financial base and a lack of managerial integrity and experience. Against that background, the system was highly inefficient and proved poorly effective because it was unable to develop its role of channelling saving to the most productive uses and, without any doubt, it held back economic growth. At the same time, the Spanish regulatory and supervisory framework was weak and outmoded, based mainly on a simple leverage ratio. In turn, supervision was geared towards formal compliance with administrative regulations. The need for a change in the supervisory framework to preserve the soundness of the banking system became apparent when the oil crisis of the early 70s prompted the Spanish economy into a profound recession, leading to the deepest crisis of recent Spanish banking history. Up to 50 banks went bankrupt, involving 20% of the deposits of the banking system. It is interesting to analyse the effect of the crisis and the limitations of the regulatory and supervisory framework at that time, in the light of the framework set by the Core Principles [for effective Banking Supervision] developed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. Allow me to summarise the main group of principles that would have been breached. First, the principles related to licensing criteria would not have been accurately met. Indeed, the process of licensing did not consist of a proper assessment of the fitness and propriety of Board members and senior management, including their strategic and operating plan.
By making it safer and fairer we can put in place the conditions for it to thrive. But whether or not it thrives will rest on the efforts of individuals and organisations to re-establish the system’s reputation for integrity. While regulators will fix the mechanics of benchmarks in markets ranging from LIBOR to FX, only private individuals and institutions can reform the behaviour that has made such changes necessary. Changes to the structure of compensation will better align the incentives of bank staff and their shareholders, but not every risk can be anticipated. Even if such a package could be devised it would not internalise the impact of individual actions on systemic risks, including on trust in the banking system. For the system to operate with integrity, penalties for misconduct cannot be seen as a cost of doing business. Rather, banks must recognise that only exemplary behaviour can confer social licence to global financial capitalism. More fundamentally, integrity cannot be legislated, and it certainly cannot be bought. Only a perspective which takes into account the wider implications of actions can guide proper behaviour. And while regulators can promote competition, end the subsidy enjoyed by institutions that are too big to fail, and determine the appropriate split of remuneration between fixed and variable elements to limit risks to financial stability, only society, not regulators, can determine whether the absolute and relative levels of compensation are acceptable. 3.

5  See ECB Opinion of 22 March 2012 on (i) a proposal for a directive on markets in financial instruments repealing Directive 2004/39/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council, (ii) a proposal for a regulation on markets in financial instruments and amending Regulation [EMIR] on OTC derivatives, central counterparties and trade repositories, (iii) a proposal for a directive on criminal sanctions for insider dealing and market manipulation and (iv) a proposal for a regulation on insider dealing and market manipulation (market abuse) (CON/2012/21). 6  See e.g. Madhavan, A., “Consolidation, fragmentation, and the disclosure of trading information”, The Review of Financial Studies, Vol. 8, No 3, pp. 579-603 and Bloomfield, R. and O’Hara, M., “Can transparent markets survive?”, Journal of Financial Economics, Vol. 55, No 3, pp. 425–459. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  opacity enables the extraction of rents and can lead to increased price dispersion7, with negative consequences for market integrity and fairness. Furthermore, a low level of posttrade transparency can significantly distort the informational role of prices by preventing the diffusion of value-relevant information, which may hamper market liquidity because of adverse selection. In line with this rather positive view of post-trade transparency, a number of empirical studies8 have found that the introduction of mandatory trade reporting has significantly improved formerly opaque market segments, such as the market for US corporate bonds. At the same time, one must be aware of potentially negative side effects.