samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Abdul Rasheed Ghaffour: Roundtable Meeting of Centralised Shariah Advisory Authorities in Islamic Finance Welcoming remarks by Mr Abdul Rasheed Ghaffour, Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia (Bank Negara Malaysia), at the Roundtable Meeting of Centralised Shariah Advisory Authorities in Islamic Finance, Kuala Lumpur, 2 October 2018. * * * It is an honour for me to be here today at the inaugural Roundtable Meeting of Centralised Shariah Advisory Authorities in Islamic Finance. On behalf of Bank Negara Malaysia, I would like to welcome the esteemed Shariah scholars and delegates who are gathered here this morning to share their experiences and exchange perspectives. We are at a time where our economies and financial systems are more connected. We are seeing greater cross-border trade and services, and mobility in capital. Technological advancements are shaping the way businesses operate and influencing dynamism in customer behaviours. This gathering today therefore is an important first step – towards strengthening relations and connectivity among the scholars and regulators who share common goals – that Shariah principles are embraced not only in form but more importantly in substance, – and that Islamic finance consistently delivers positive impact to the broader economy and society. The global Islamic finance industry has seen remarkable progress over the last decade. Global Islamic banking assets have doubled over the last 10 years and Islamic financial services are now available in more than 48 countries.

Secondly, there are certain features of the prevailing financial and economic environment that give us pause for thought. Market prices are at historically unusual levels: real and nominal returns on risk free assets are low and credit spreads are tight, both in traditional and structured products. It is of course hard to say definitively the extent to which today’s markets are merely reflecting changed fundamentals. But it is quite possible that some investors have unwittingly taken on higher levels of risk in pursuit of what they would consider to be “normal” levels of return. And it is certainly prudent to plan for the possibility of a sharp reversion of prices to historically more normal levels (or even beyond them, given the tendency of markets to overshoot). There could be a period of impaired market liquidity during any such correction. One could imagine a number of potential catalysts for such a correction, ranging from a geo-political event to some form of major operational disruption. The Bank concurs with the widely held view that the growth of markets in risk transfer should contribute to greater financial stability, by allowing a more efficient dispersion of risks. But the depth and reliability of the more recently developed markets in risk under stressed conditions has not yet been fully tested. Moreover, risk transfer markets can, and probably at present do make the ultimate destination of risks more opaque. This hampers our ability to assess the overall stability of the financial system, and, potentially, to react effectively in a crisis.
A minimum requirement for central banks is that they don’t contribute themselves to exacerbating global warming. Instead, it is reasonable to expect that the activities of central banks are gradually adapted in line with international treaties such as the Paris Agreement.20 Second, central banks  14  This section is based on Olovsson (2020). See also Buchanan (1965), Böhringer et al. (2012) and Nordhaus (2015), who also advocate carbon tariffs. 16 An advantage of carbon taxes is their relative simplicity. If set at an appropriate level, the tax will cause individuals and companies to consider or internalise the cost of additional carbon emissions when they take economic decisions. Emission trading is the measure that has so far been implemented on a global level to reduce carbon emissions. It is currently applied within the EU’s Emissions Trading System. The basic idea is to limit total emissions by auctioning off emission rights to companies and other players. These rights can then be bought and sold by various market participants. It is important that measures to reduce carbon emissions are introduced at the global level. Otherwise, ambitious measures in one region only risk leading to companies moving production to other less ambitious regions and thus no effect on emissions materialising. One way of reducing this risk is to introduce carbon tariffs on imported goods. 17 In the early-1990s, Sweden introduced a carbon tax that has formed the basis of Swedish climate policy.

This is a question that in itself does not concern the choice of whether or not we should have electronic trading. All business is settles, whether this is done through a traditional market-maker system or by electronic trading. Those buying fixed income instruments want to be sure of receiving what they have bought an those selling want to receive the money they have been promised, regardless of the trading form. On the other hand, it is clear that it would be desirable to take the opportunity to design a new system that would provide a good means of handling settlements. This is particularly important as the increased volumes hoped for, which are the whole point of the new system, will create increased risks in terms of settlement. Today settlement on the fixed income market is done by means of net settlement in VPC. This works well in many ways and the routines are perceived as manageable by the market players, as far as I understand it. However, the system is nevertheless obsolete and involves risks. If one of the parties involved failed to meet its payments during the daily settlement, for instance, if one party was forced to make a suspension of payments or simply lacked sufficient liquidity, the situation could become troublesome. The existing routines can be called into question. One can imagine situations where settlement is not achieved, which could have consequences for the liquidity of the banking system. From the point of view of financial stability, this is an unsatisfactory situation.
Monetary policy  2  For example, John suggested in February 2008 to lower the standard Taylor Rule prescription by 50 basis points to take into account the increase in the LIBOR-OIS spread at that time. See Monetary Policy and the State of the Economy, Testimony before the Committee on Financial Services, U.S. House of Representatives, February 26, 2008. 3  See James D. Hamilton, Ethan S. Harris, Jan Hatzius, and Kenneth D. West (2015), The Equilibrium Real Funds Rate: Past, Present and Future, working paper for U.S. Monetary Policy Forum, August. 4  See Thomas Laubach and John C. Williams “Measuring the Natural Rate of Interest”, Review of Economics and Statistics, November 2003, Vol 85, No. 4, pp 1063–1070. Updated estimates available from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  affects economic activity through its impact on financial conditions – including the level of equity prices, bond yields, the foreign exchange value of the dollar and credit conditions. If the relationship between the federal funds rate and other indicators of financial conditions were stable, then one could just focus on the level of short-term rates. 5 But, because financial conditions vary considerably relative to short-term rates, as we have seen in the financial crisis and its aftermath, one needs to consider developments in financial conditions more broadly in setting monetary policy.

At the same time, I do not favor total discretion in which the monetary policy strategy is determined in an ad hoc fashion as we go along. For monetary policy to be most effective, market participants, households and businesses need to be able to anticipate how the Federal Reserve is likely to respond to evolving conditions. That is because the transmission of monetary policy to the real economy depends not only on what policymakers decide to do today, but also on what the public anticipates that the FOMC is likely to do in the future as the economic outlook changes and evolves. Our experience at the zero lower bound in recent years underscores how important expectations are in influencing the effectiveness of monetary policy. Policymakers thus need to act in a systematic and consistent manner so that expectations are formed accurately and economic behavior can respond consistently with those expectations. In my view, this consideration rules out a totally discretionary monetary policy. Before I critique the use of prescriptive rules in monetary policy-making, I’d like to make it clear at the start that the Taylor Rule (by which I mean the formulation based on John’s 1993 and 1999 papers) has a number of positive attributes that make it a useful reference for policymakers. First, it has two parameters – the long-term inflation objective and the level of potential output – that map directly to the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate objectives.
However, the treatment of OFCs varies a lot across the G718, and so their data are not strictly comparable with the UK M4 numbers. More important, so far as I can tell, most current calculations of world money growth19 simply add up domestic money supplies, and so leave out cross-border money holdings. That might be a material omission. For example, external holdings of sterling deposits with the UK banking system have increased by more than domestic money since the late 1990s; and by around 15% over the past year. How much of this growth is attributable to non-bank financial groups, whether based in the UK or overseas, is not known. Like much of the monetary analysis of the early 1980s, I fear that this is rather inconclusive, other than underlining that one has to get one’s hands dirty in analysing the money numbers. It is plausible that a decent chunk of recent UK M4 growth should be seen in the light of structural change in the financial system. Essentially, some types of non-bank financial intermediation have become more significant, and seem to have entailed higher money holdings on the definitions currently employed. If so, recent OFC money growth does not of itself obviously have malign implications for money spending and inflation. Originate and distribute: what’s going on on bank balance sheets? Much of the debate about this renewed process of disintermediation has revolved around whether the burgeoning growth of, for example, structured credit vehicles and hedge funds increases or impairs the resilience of the system.

With headline inflation tangibly above target in the run up to the main, New Year wage bargaining season and with the market clearly expecting that policy would be tightened, a small increase in Bank Rate was, on balance, warranted to avoid any misperception that our reaction function had altered. Strategically, the significance of this account is in the uncertainty injected by structural change; in this case, from migration. Of course, there is a host of demand-side uncertainties: about consumption, export growth and so on. But they fit comfortably into the MPC’s framework of producing a conditional forecast of probability ranges around a central projection. The supply-side uncertainties are something else – much harder to calibrate and potentially going to how we read and act on the economy. Inward migration is just the most obvious reason the monetary transmission mechanism might have altered. In reviewing globalisation more generally, others have described how the short-run relationship between aggregate demand and inflation may be weakened by firms’ enhanced capacity to switch production between countries, including via outsourcing, in the face of capacity and cost pressures. As policy makers discuss these issues it could become a commonplace that, in such an environment, central banks would have no choice but to respond more aggressively whenever inflation deviates from target; that, compared with the past, we would need to make bigger changes in interest rates, since bigger shifts in demand would be needed to bring inflation back to target.
A more recent story that comes to mind involves two factory workers who earn approximately 6,000 baht per month. Both were invited to apply for a credit card but only one signed up for the offer. This worker first used his credit card to purchase a TV set, which he could easily finance with his salary. Nevertheless, the TV was followed by a washing machine and a motorcycle, which eventually pushed his monthly debt payment to exceed his income. As he exhausted all of his savings, and could no longer borrow from family and friends, his belongings were repossessed by the creditors, and finally he had to quit his job in hopes of running away from his remaining creditors. The story highlights a dangerous combination in the fabric of Thai society and that is low-income earners who lack financial literacy, or the ability to effectively manage their finances, but yet have very high marginal propensity consume. They in turn are more susceptible to unknowingly consume beyond their means, and like my previous story, become a burden an society. That burden is further intensified by the difficulty in finding and obtaining new employment. This probable risk demands that stakeholders take a more cautious approach to ensure quality growth in Thailand’s consumer finance market. Ladies and Gentleman, In reality there are more than one type of savings behavior in the world, but most importantly the savings behavior should be appropriate for the developmental needs of each country.

This concept refers to the level of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that is consistent with stable inflation around the target and, therefore, it is adequate for measuring the activity gap associated with short-term inflationary pressures. Along with this, from time to time we also make estimates of trend growth, a concept that is related to the medium-term growth capacity of the economy. At long terms, potential and trend growth rate converge to the same number; however, they tend  2  to diverge in the short term due to transitory factors that alter productive capacity, such as temporary shocks to productivity and limitations to factor utilization. On this occasion, our potential growth estimate has been revised upwards, which is to be expected in a context of recovering investment, higher growth and still well-contained core inflation. For 2018, the potential growth of non-mining GDP stands at 3.1%, which compares with our 2.7% estimate a year ago. For 2019, the potential growth of non-mining GDP is 3.2% (2.9% a year ago). Trend growth remains within the 3% to 3.5% range estimated in 2017 and will be reviewed next year, once the updated demographic projections from the Census are released. With this, potential and trend growth should converge sooner than expected. Growth accumulated up to the second quarter of the year—even considering the higher potential growth—has narrowed the activity gap with respect to the forecast, and we estimate that it is near zero in absolute level (Figure 3).
BIS Review 42/2003  1  The salient features of the economic outlook World economic activity has been broadly in line with our forecast in the June Inflation Report. If anything, current tendencies are somewhat better, as concluded by the Executive Board at its monetary policy meeting in August. Signs of a recovery in the US economy have become increasingly evident, which is pleasing of course. The outlook is different, however, for the euro area. Perhaps there is reason to expect a slightly longer delay in the European revival, even if we have recently seen a number of positive signals of a forward-looking nature. On the other hand, it appears that economic activity in Japan will be stronger than expected. On balance, it currently seems likely that international activity will be roughly in line with the forecasts we made in August. For Sweden, the majority of indicators point to an upturn in economic activity in the autumn. In accordance with our forecast during the summer, there are currently some unutilised resources (see Chart 2). This has mainly been due to a weakening in demand over the past two years. In addition to the relatively favourable capacity level, productivity growth has also been unexpectedly fast given the current economic climate. In the near future, demand is expected to mount due to both solid consumption growth and a small rise in investment.

Fixed gross capital formation, outcomes and Riksbank forecasts Percentage 12-month change 12  12  10  10  Outcome RB Oct 02 (IR02:3) RB June 03 (IR03:2)  8  8  6  6  4  4  2  2  0  0  -2  -2  -4 1997  -4 1998  1999  2000  2001  2002  2003  2004  Sources: Statistics Sweden and the Riksbank. Chart 4. Index for electricity in HICP Percentage 12-month change 30  30  25  Sweden  25  20  Euro area  20  15  15  10  10  5  5  0  0  -5  -5  -10 1996  -10 1997  1998  1999  2000  2001  2002  2003  Source: Eurostat. 6  BIS Review 42/2003  Chart 5. Population growth 16-64 years, actual and forecast 2003-2050 1.0  1.0  0.8  0.8  0.6  0.6  0.4  0.4  0.2  0.2  0.0  0.0  -0.2  -0.2 -0.4  -0.4 1990  1995  2000  2005  2010  2015  2020  2025  2030  Source: Statistics Sweden. BIS Review 42/2003  7
Voting rights are an area where hard work and many hours of persuasion will be needed if countries are to be convinced to see the bigger picture and relinquish some degree of direct control over the IMF in return for the creation of a more effective institution. Hard work, perseverance and dogged determination have been characteristics of this year’s Australian presidency of the G20 under Peter Costello, Ian MacFarlane and Glenn Stevens. Their efforts have been crucial to the progress that has been made towards quota reform over the past year. It is important that the Australian legacy be carried forward if the process of quota reform is to be completed. (e)  Are there overlaps with other institutions? Unnecessary duplication is a waste of both time and money. I have already spoken about the respective comparative advantages of the IMF and OECD. There has also been some discussion about the roles of the IMF and the G7 in respect of exchange rate issues. Over the past three years – especially since the Boca Raton G7 summit of February 2004 – the inability of the G7 to deal with the major spillover effects in the world economy has become more and more evident. Adding new members, even if they were willing to join, is not the answer. More productive would be to use the IMF as flexible forum to bring the relevant group of countries together to handle issues as and when they arise. 5.

I am also confident that this will open up a new chapter in the history of credit bureaus and enable these entities to play an even greater role in the future development of the financial industry in Malaysia. 2  BIS Review 76/2007
Muhammad Al-Jasser: Review of the latest economic developments in Saudi Arabia Speech by His Excellency Dr Muhammad Al-Jasser, Governor of the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA), to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, on the presentation of the 46th Annual Report of the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, Riyadh, 25 September 2010. *  *  *  It is a great pleasure for me that the celebration of our National Day coincides with the submission of the 46th Annual Report of Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency which reviews the latest economic developments in the Kingdom for fiscal year 1430/1431H. (2009) and the first quarter of the current year. Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, The impact of the global financial crisis on the world economy continued during 2009, with the world production of goods and services recording a downturn of 0.6 percent in 2009. However, economic variables over the past months of the current year indicate positive growth rates. Given that our national economy is characterized by its openness to the external world and high levels of trade integration with it, it is natural to affect and be affected by developments in the global economic system. The growth rate of GDP at constant prices declined to 0.6 percent in the Kingdom during 2009 compared to 4.2 percent in the preceding year. The non-oil sector maintained good growth rates, growing by 3.8 percent in 2009 compared to 4.3 percent in the preceding year.

Joseph Yam: ABF Pan Asia Bond Index Fund Opening remarks by Mr Joseph Yam, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, at the listing ceremony of the ABF Pan Asia Bond Index Fund, Hong Kong, 7 July 2005. *  *  *  Deputy Governors and representatives of the EMEAP Central Banks, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1. It gives me great pleasure to be present at the inauguration of trading of the ABF Pan Asia Bond Index Fund (PAIF) on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong. It was barely two weeks ago that I attended the listing ceremony of another ABF fund. Up to now, two components of the Asian Bond Fund Initiative, the PAIF and the ABF Hong Kong Bond Index Fund, have been listed in Hong Kong. In the next few months, the other seven components of ABF2 will also be launched in other Asian markets. 2. All of this activity marks the culmination of one of the largest co-operative enterprises among central banks in the Asian-Pacific region in recent years. I am delighted to see that, after nearly two years of hard work by central banks and monetary authorities in the region, the PAIF has now been turned from a conceptual construct into a real product. The PAIF is an excellent demonstration of how the public and private sectors can work together to strengthen the regional bond market as an effective channel for turning savings into investments in Asia. 3.