samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
1990s crisis: “Things abroad were quite OK, but Sweden was not OK” I hope that it is clear from what I have described so far that the 1990s crisis was in many ways domestically generated. Inflation was far too high in relation to other countries, and the deregulation of the credit market and the too expansionary economic policy created an overheating that ended in disaster: the banking crisis, a currency crisis and also a public finances crisis. In somewhat simplified terms, I usually describe the crisis of the 1990s like this: “things were quite OK abroad, but Sweden was not OK”. There were thus many lessons to be learned with regard to domestic economic policy and not least monetary policy. Important lesson – increased elements of “norm-based thinking” give credibility to the nominal anchor Perhaps the most important individual lesson learnt from the 1990s crisis was the importance of “norm-based thinking” and long-term game rules for economic policy. 5 This came to mark the thinking behind the new monetary policy regime. 4  See Englund, P., “The Swedish Banking Crisis: Roots and Consequences”, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, no. 3, 1999. 5  This way of thinking had been brought up earlier in the debate in Sweden, particularly by the Swedish Centre for Business and Policy Studies’ Economic Policy Group, but did not have a broad impact on practical economic policy until the 1990s.

The longer you wait to settle, the more money you will owe since interest will be charged each month on the unsettled balance. Cardholders therefore need to be careful not use the card liberally. If you think, the card makes you throw caution to the wind as you spend; you might consider leaving the card alone. The possibility of falling into a debt trap is another real danger that cardholders need to watch out for. Interest rates on credit cards can be high. In some countries interest rates on credit cards can be as high as ten times what banks are willing to give on deposit balances. We will keep our sight on what rates apply in the market as a central bank and may even intervene if necessary. But the responsibility of avoiding falling into a debt trap lies primarily with the cardholder. It is prudent to remember that whilst a credit card can make your life easier and can be a wonderful tool for facilitating payments, if you do not use it wisely, it will become a massive financial burden for you. We must learn some lessons from how failure to keep track of purchases and the uncontrollable propensity to spend outside budget, has led to the financial ruin of many people in the developed economies. The last risk, I want to talk about is pertinent to both cardholders and issuers of cards – and that is the risk of credit card frauds.
Since pegging these crypto-assets to central bank money – the only legal tender in our monetary system and hence its anchor – is complex and tricky, to say the least, allowing such settlement assets to spread unchecked could affect the transmission of monetary policy and undermine financial stability. II. Our three levers for responding to these challenges I would like to share with you what we are doing to respond to these challenges. The Banque de France is working on three complementary areas: regulation, facilitation and experimentation. A) The first of these stems from the observation that security depends on having an appropriate regulatory framework in place that guarantees financial stability, but also encourages financial innovation in order to enhance end-user services and system performances. At the European level, we have welcomed and are supporting the proposed Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation and the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), presented in September 2020:  With the publication of the MiCA proposal, the European Union was the first G20 jurisdiction to respond to the urgent need to regulate the crypto-asset market. We also support the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA). The text will create a harmonised framework for strengthening the IT security of the overall financial sector. I’m thinking in particular of cloud players, whose role in critical segments of the sector raises the question of whether they should be located in the European Union.

Our institutions – such as the Banque de France’s Lab, its Infrastructure, Innovation and Payments Directorate (DIIP), the ACPR’s Fintech-Innovation Unit, with its ACPR-AMF Fintech Forum – are fully mobilised to facilitate these initiatives and help them grow. Among these initiatives, three in particular are worth highlighting. First, those in the field of instant payments, which open a new chapter in the payments industry. Second, the continuing development of open banking, thanks to the European financial sector’s work on APIs. Last but not least, the European Payments Initiative (EPI) which will provide European citizens with a pan-European solution for everyday payments, via both a payment card and a smartphone, covering all retail use cases. With some major decisions scheduled to be taken this autumn for the actual launch of EPI, I would like to remind you here that the Banque de France fully supports this initiative, alongside the other Eurosystem national central banks and the European Commission. We are counting on you all, as participants in the financial ecosystem, to make this unique opportunity for European payments into a reality. C) We are also actively supporting financial innovation by conducting an ambitious experimentation programme for a central bank digital currency (CBDC) Several central banks have begun working seriously on the idea of issuing a CBDC, if it were to prove necessary, to preserve the anchoring role of central bank money in the digital era.
However, given the uncertainty inherent in assessing future performance of long-term assets, it is particularly important that the regulatory regime does not allow firms to over-anticipate future profits on these assets, before it is clear whether the profits will truly be earned. In the reform process, we are challenging ourselves to consider the extent to which the existing Solvency II regulations are unduly constraining diversity and innovation in firms’ MA portfolios. And we are contemplating changes that we consider will loosen requirements in a few key areas. To materially expand MA portfolios in the absence of a sound quantitative basis is again likely to be detrimental to policyholders and could also threaten the resilience of the BPA sector. This is why any work to further extend MA eligibility needs to be coupled with firms having effective risk  Page 7  management and a reassessment of the appropriateness of the quantification of the MA. Resilience As noted earlier, for very long-term business – with liabilities that can stretch several decades into the future – it is critical to make appropriate assumptions when undertaking balance sheet valuations and when calculating the amount of capital that is required now to support that business. This brings us to the third R, which is resilience.

Today, I will also share some of our developing views on the form that regulation and supervision may take in light of our work on Solvency II reform. This reform is expected to have implications for all insurers but is particularly important for annuity writers given the areas under consideration. I would like to start by thanking those of you here today who have been providing both input and feedback on the areas for Solvency II reform. The UK life insurance sector is vital to the security of millions of policyholders’ income, and important to the wider economy via its long-term investment; so the direction that the industry and its regulation takes matters. Your engagement is an essential part of making the right choices as we reform the regulation of the UK life sector. Regulation is unsurprisingly one of my Rs today; but first I’ll recap on the growth of the BPA sector in recent years and its potential trajectory. Then I will talk about the foundations  Page 3  for sustainable growth on which regulation needs to be based. So let me begin with what the BPA market looks like today and how we got here. Bulk Pension Annuity market developments Starting with growth, Chart 1 of the slides (in the Annex) shows the growth in the BPA market over the last decade or so, highlighting that insurers have taken on around £ of pension scheme liabilities over that period.
BIS central bankers’ speeches  inflows into U.S. Treasuries in order to keep the renminbi from appreciating too rapidly. The U.S. terms of trade improved as the cost of imported goods dropped, and U.S. interest rates stayed relatively low as China recycled its trade surpluses back into U.S. financial assets. For China, the benefits included strong economic growth, technology transfer and the creation of many manufacturing jobs. These developments, in turn, helped foster rising living standards and political stability in China. These outcomes were by no means all the result of a deliberate grand strategy. But I think this is a reasonable, albeit overly simplistic, description of what happened. Although the pre-crisis arrangements worked reasonably well for a while, the flaws became increasingly evident over time. Looked at from the lens of the developed world, the combination of rapid gains in production capacity and relatively repressed consumption in the EME world helped foster a global deficiency of demand relative to supply. In these circumstances, the United States and many other industrialized economies had to sustain domestic demand at elevated levels in order to achieve “full employment” and prevent deflation. For the United States, the consequence was elevated consumption facilitated by asset price inflation, easy underwriting standards for credit and structural budget deficits. Of course, this particular outcome was not preordained or caused by the EMEs. There were multiple combinations of domestic demand consistent with full employment in the United States during the pre-crisis period.

The banking sector has maintained ample liquidity and capital levels thanks to the further rise in public deposits and added capital by parent banks. In terms of non-performing loans, obvious efforts have been made to restructure credit and sell off non-performing loans to non-bank financial institutions. The Albanian Association of Banks has played an active role in discussing the problems with relevant authorities and identifying solutions through the regulatory treatment of nonperforming loans, notably, the legal amendments to collateral execution process, which entered into force in September 2013. Through its activity, the banking industry may transform 2014 into a better year for both the banking industry and the Albanian economy. I think that this may be achieved through harder work in the following aspects: The first aspect pertains to restoring lending to adequate levels in Albania. This objective may be achieved by interlinking these three elements: a)  Cleaning up balance sheets from non-performing loans. It is indispensible that you should mark evident progress during 2014 to write off loss loans from their balance sheets and engage in cautious credit restructuring, where necessary. The improvement in the fiscal handling of loan write-offs, in the near future, is expected to better support this process; however, this does not justify the sluggish and protracted action. I, therefore, call for your utmost commitment to successfully implement projects initiated with the World Bank in this regard.
Jacqueline Loh: Unlocking insurance linked securities growth through Asia Opening speech by Ms Jacqueline Loh, Deputy Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, at the Artemis ILS Asia 2018 Conference, Singapore, 12 July 2018. * * * Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, a very good morning to all of you. 2 I am very pleased to be here today at the Artemis ILS Asia 2018 conference. The third time that it is held in Singapore, the conference is a good market barometer that Insurance-linked securities (ILS) are becoming more prominent in Asia, and prospects are bright for the coming years. Alternative Capital becomes Mainstream 3 We are gathering here at an exciting time for the global Insurance-linked securities industry, with alternative capital being an increasingly important part of an insurer’s risk transfer toolkit. Born from a need to bring additional loss absorbing capacity following the devastating disasters in the mid-1990s – Hurricane Andrew and the Northridge earthquake in California – the development of the ILS market has been a remarkable story of innovation. 4 Twenty years later, the global ILS market continues to thrive. Emerging from the HIM (Harvey, Irma and Maria) hurricane losses, earthquakes in Mexico and wildfires in California, 2017 has been widely billed as the Global Financial Crisis equivalent for the ILS market, as it registered the largest losses in more than a decade. Yet, the ILS market has remained largely resilient.

The protection gap in Asia is set to widen for the following three reasons: a. First, the frequency and severity of natural catastrophes is increasing. According to UN data, the number of natural disasters in the Asia-Pacific has increased from an annual average of 44 disasters in the 1970s to 146 in the 2000s. b. Second, the wealth and value of assets at risk have also increased. Strong economic growth in Asia and growing urbanisation has led to the rise of small highly-populated megacities, many of which lie along areas that are exposed to natural perils. c. Third, insurance penetration is still low in Asia. Just over 8% 3 of natural catastrophe losses are insured in Asia as compared to 40% in developed regions. 9 ILS, together with other risk management solutions including reinsurance and government pools, have significant scope to play a larger role in reducing the financial impact of natural disasters. Globally, UK, Spain and France have already established natural catastrophe schemes that tap on a combination of traditional and alternative capital. 10 There are positive signs of change, with ASEAN making a push to address its rising exposures to natural catastrophe. Let me provide some examples of recent developments: a. ASEAN has commenced a holistic approach to disaster risk management through the ASEAN Disaster Risk Financing and Insurance (ADRFI) Programme. The Programme will strengthen ASEAN’s disaster risk management capabilities through: i. Improving data required for assessing disaster risk exposure and financing solutions. ii. Enhancing knowledge on disaster financing solutions through capacity building. iii.
A more detailed answer to the causes of changes in the degree of impact of individual factors on money supply growth can be found when studying their development in different periods of the transformation. In Czechoslovakia, during the first transformation years (1990-1992) money supply growth was based primarily on the relatively quickly increasing volume of credits granted to enterprises due to growing credit demand, which was very closely connected with the BIS Review 25/1997  -9-  liberalisation of entrepreneurial activities in a newly created market environment (an increasing number of businesses in need of initial capital). Gradually, foreign money creation also expanded, affected by the development of an improving balance of payments, particularly the current account. The gradual stabilisation of the macroeconomic and political environment (apparent mainly after the dissolution of the Czechoslovak Federation in January, 1993, and the relatively rapid calming of price developments following the introduction of a new tax system based on value added tax), the commencement of the activities of capital market institutions and the stability of the exchange rate which significantly decreased the risks for foreign investors, led in the second half of 1993 to a significant strengthening of the influence of the inflow of foreign funds into the Czech Republic on money supply growth. The strong foreign capital inflows continued to influence money supply growth in 1994 and 1995 when capital inflows reached 18 per cent of GDP. This growth was particularly generated by increasing foreign direct investments, portfolio investments and relatively cheaper foreign credits drawn by domestic enterprises.

Further, under this Act the CNB has at its disposal practically all the tools known to advanced market economies. BIS Review 25/1997  -6-  At the beginning of the transformation process, the main tools of monetary policy were, quite naturally, direct ones. Credit limits, interest rate ceilings expressed as maximum deviations from the discount rate and refinancing loans (in 1991 represented for small, new banks on the average 60 per cent of total sources but for big banks 5-10 per cent only) were used. Credit and interest rate ceilings were abolished in 1992 which can be regarded as a transition year towards indirect control of monetary developments. After credit ceilings on the minor banks were removed in April 1992 and on the major banks in October, central bank control of monetary developments was effected through discount rates, minimum reserve requirements, auction refinancing credits and central bank bills. My predecessors behind this chair, the governors of the central banks from Germany and Switzerland, underlined the role of money supply targets in the kit of tools. In this respect the Czechoslovak and the Czech practice can enrich the experience. Since 1990 the intermediate targets have been set in the form of planned changes in credits or money. For 1990 the target was “to keep the development of credits in total within the scope of -2 per cent to +1 per cent related to the level at the end of 1989”.
Accordingly, the Monetary Law Act together with the subsequent enactments of the Banking Act and the Finance Business Act have empowered the Monetary Board to issue Regulations and Directions to the banking and NBFI sectors with a view to ensuring financial sector soundness, protecting the financial institutions from any mismanagement and failures, and maintaining public confidence. Hence, I believe you can understand that the Central Bank has a pivotal role to play in steering this consolidation process in line with its key objectives and responsibilities as the policymaker and the regulator of the financial system of the country. In this regard, the Central Bank’s role in the financial sector consolidation process will be that of a pragmatic systemic risk mitigator, and a guide that encourages innovation in order to ensure the overall goal of financial system stability. The Central Bank’s policies are forward looking and designed to balance global policies and adjust to sudden volatilities, and to preempt, as much as possible, any possible financial distress or any possible failures in the financial sector in the future. Within this scope, the regulatory framework will be further  6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  improved to promote competition, develop sound and effective institutions, enhance operational aspects including IT and payment infrastructure, and foster a culture of innovation in the financial sector, thereby strengthening and maintaining financial system stability. Basis 2: Evolution of the financial system of Sri Lanka Ladies and gentlemen, now I would like to briefly take you through the evolution of our financial system.

In tandem with the SLDILSS, the Central Bank may direct the existing shareholders to infuse fresh capital, or invite a strategic investor to acquire a strategic stake in the financial institution through an infusion of new capital. Step 4: Implementing the financial sector consolidation plan Ladies and gentlemen, let me now take you through the implementation process of the consolidation plan. The implementation was structured under 4 phases, of which 2 phases have already been completed while the third phase is progressing now. Let me briefly explain to you the accomplishments made under the first 3 phases and our plans under the final phase of the programme. Phase I (from 17 January to 31 March 2014) Action 1: Unveiling of the master plan and meetings with the Boards of Directors As the starting point to the execution of the consolidation programme, the Master Plan on Consolidation of the Financial Sector was unveiled by the Governor on 17 January 2014, giving the necessary guidance to the banking and NBFI sectors on the way forward. This special forum was attended by the Chairpersons and the Chief Executive Officers of all  12  BIS central bankers’ speeches  banks and NBFIs, and all other stakeholders. The Central Bank requested all banks and NBFIs to continue a close dialogue with the Central Bank and obtain guidance if the need arises and also to submit their preliminary proposals regarding the consolidation plan by 31 March 2014.
Parallel to the weak outlook in economic activity, core inflation indicators in developed countries maintain their historically low levels in the third quarter of 2010 (Figure 3). BIS Review 159/2010  1  In line with the outlook I have summarized, the probability that many developed economies, which are already pursuing exceptionally loose monetary policies, would adopt a second phase of monetary easing has increased. This has strengthened the investors’ inclination towards risky assets and therefore has boosted capital inflows to emerging markets, leading to currency appreciation in these countries accompanied by marked increases in commodity prices. Ample global liquidity and accelerated capital flows that are driven by the increasing search for yield have affected many emerging markets, including Turkey. Favorable developments specific to Turkey have further exacerbated these effects. In particular, a better-than expected recovery in economic activity, indications of a possible upgrade from credit rating agencies, an ease of political uncertainty with the completion of the referendum process, and the signal given by the updated Medium Term Program (MTP) that the fiscal discipline would be maintained, have all contributed to Turkey’s relatively better performance. Turkey’s risk premium indicators performed better than many countries and continued to remain below pre-crisis levels (Figure 4). Consequently, interest rates have declined, the stock market soared, and the Turkish lira strengthened (Figure 5). 2  BIS Review 159/2010  1.

SME Financing and Business Linkages in Zambia – Focus Financial Services. Further, the programme will include panel discussions on policy recommendations and an interactive session. The discussion panel will, among others, cover policy issues and outline some possible recommendations for action. Chairperson As I conclude, allow me to thank the presenters and panelists for accepting to facilitate our deliberations at this Forum. I urge all delegates to engage fully in these discussions so that we can collectively develop pragmatic solutions to the financing challenges facing Zambian businesses. Thank you for listening. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches