samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
To illustrate my points, let me use the work that the Bank of Thailand has been engaging with the financial institutions during the past couple of years. We have provided guidelines to improve corporate governance within the Thai financial sector to complement the on-going change within the corporate sector. Bank directors are now required to have no more than 3 directorships in other profitseeking institutions, so that they will have more time to carry out the required duties, as directors should do. Before, 82 directors did not qualify, but 60 of those have now complied. And for the rest, arrangements were made for them to observe the guideline. To improve internal management, we ask major shareholders not to vote for the independent directors so that minority shareholders are better represented on the board. Audit committees are now a requirement and many banks now have nomination and compensation committees to reduce the power of the major shareholders. Most also have risk management committee or, at least, asset and liability management committee. To further increase transparency, commercial banks now have to announce at the end of each month their NPL level, penalties and fines imposed by the authorities, as well as the amount of their related lending. By year-end, we will launch the Director's Handbook for the financial community and further encouraging increased transparency of appointment and compensations. Of course, we cannot change others without changing ourselves at the Bank of Thailand.

In this context, the BIS envisages 5 different scenarios on how the fintech explosion might impact banks that range from a scenario where the incumbent banks digitize and modernize themselves to retain the customer relationship and core banking services, leveraging the technologies to change their current business models (which is not far away from the currently observed trends) to a scenario where banks have become irrelevant as customers interact directly with individual financial services providers as the need for balance sheet intermediation or for a trusted third 2/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  party is removed and banks are displaced by agile platforms and technologies. Following the example of the European Banking Association, early this year, we made a short survey of domestic banks to obtain information regarding their experience with modern-day technological solutions. The results of the survey indicate that almost two thirds of domestic banks do not have any experience with fintech companies and even surprisingly, they do not have plans to establish any relationship in the near future. The banks that have some experience with fintech companies point that it is rather a commercial partnership with existing fintech firms for launching new products or services. In addition, a few banks answered that they prefer to develop in-house fintech solutions without formal cooperation with external parties.
Lack of transparency can result in delay in tackling the problem and erode public confidence in the soundness of the banking system. Innovation and technological change 21. Asset quality is thus one main issue which Asian banks have to tackle. But one of the results of globalization is that even banks in relatively undeveloped banking systems are now having to cope with the challenge of product innovation and new technology. This can accelerate the transformation of such banking systems: modern computer systems can be installed and banks can make the jump straight from cash to smart cards. The downside is that banks may have less time to build up the skills properly to use the new technology and the new products which their counterparts in developed banking systems have taken many years to BIS Review 55/1997  -5-  acquire. Derivatives are a case in point. While the derivatives markets in the region other than Tokyo are still quite small, these products are certainly being sold to, and in some cases being traded by, local banks in the region; and a number of them have suffered losses as a result. 22. Looking further ahead, the opportunities provided by new technology will pose important strategic challenges for the banks. To what extent, for example, should they invest in new delivery mechanisms such as telephone or internet banking? These channels offer the potential to bring down dramatically the cost of transactions compared with the traditional branch network.

Further advancement towards greater international integration will be considered to provide Malaysian consumers with greater access to world-class products and services, while further catalysing the development of the domestic industry towards meeting international best practices and standards. This will include the issuance of new licences in specialized lines and greater opportunities for internationally-reputed insurers to acquire equity interests in, or forge strategic alliances with domestic players, both in the direct insurance as well as re-insurance sectors. The progression towards further deregulation and liberalisation will continue to be managed at an appropriate pace, taking into account the development of the supporting infrastructure and the level of substantive progress achieved by domestic institutions, in order to ensure market stability. Next on the agenda in the development of the domestic financial system is the formation of investment banks. This is aimed at further enhancing the delivery of financial services to the wholesale and corporate sector. With this rationalisation, the business community will have a more streamlined access to banking services to fulfil their wider range of requirements. Comprehensive changes to the organisational structure of the development financial institutions have also been undertaken to provide a clearer scope and focus to service the needs of targeted sectors. At the same time, measures were also instituted to expand the role of the credit guarantee agency to further facilitate the development of the small and medium enterprises, a critical component of the nation's economy.
Finally, I am not yet convinced that breaking up large, complex firms is the right approach. In particular, these firms presumably exist, in large part, because there are scale or network effects that allow these firms to offer certain types of services that have value to their global clients. These benefits might be lost or diminished if such firms were broken up. In addition, the costs incurred in breaking up such firms need to be considered. Finally, the breakup of such firms would not necessarily result in a significant reduction in overall systemic risk if the resulting component firms were still, collectively, systemic. As always, what I have to say reflects my own views and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve System. Defining the too big to fail problem The root cause of the too big to fail problem is the fact that the failure of a large, complex financial firm is likely to generate significant, undesirable externalities. These include disruption to the ability of the financial system to provide credit and other essential financial  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  services to households and businesses. When this happens, not only is the financial sector adversely affected, but its troubles spill over and harm the real economy. Although there are negative externalities associated with the failure of any financial firm, these externalities are disproportionately more damaging in the case of large, complex and interconnected firms.

As demonstrated by the thrift crisis, if many firms are all vulnerable to the same shock, ensuring that these firms are small and numerous won’t necessarily reduce the systemic risk they collectively pose to the financial system. Third, the costs incurred in breaking up such firms also need to be considered. Others have argued in favor of separating commercial and investment banking activities of the large banks. In my opinion, there are shortcomings to re-imposing Glass-Steagall-type activity restrictions. It is not obvious to me that the pairing of securities and banking businesses was an important causal element behind the financial crisis. In fact, independent investment banks were much more vulnerable during 2008 than the universal banking firms which conducted both banking and securities activities. More important is to address the well-known sources of instability in wholesale funding markets and to give careful consideration to whether there should be a more robust lender of last resort regime for securities activities. Evaluating the socially optimal size, scope and organizational structure of financial firms is a complicated exercise, and so is establishing a viable transition path to a system of much smaller banks. It would be helpful in this regard if advocates of the break-up solutions would develop detailed proposals that address the essential questions of how such downsizing or functional separation would be accomplished, and what the expected benefits and costs could be from such a restructuring. The recent financial crisis underscores the importance of financial stability as a necessary condition for a vibrant economy.
The observations to make here are that, first, the Mainland authorities have many options for managing the risks created by substantial capital inflow, and they are making very active use of some of these options; and, secondly, that there is no need to take risks by playing around with the  2  BIS Review 44/2003  exchange rate, which should be the absolute final resort. The Mainland authorities have made it clear that they have no intention of taking such risks, and have stressed the importance of gradualism in the reform of the exchange rate system. They have said that keeping the renminbi stable is conducive to the economic stability and development not only of China but also of the region and the world at large. I believe that this approach is right, and that, in particular, a stable renminbi is also conducive to stability in Hong Kong. Signs of recovery Although the trigger may have been the political pressure on the renminbi, the strengthening of the Hong Kong dollar was also attributable to a large inflow of funds into the Hong Kong dollar, which, among other things, was reflected in the rise in the Hang Seng Index. Clearly, sentiment towards Hong Kong, and within Hong Kong, has improved in recent weeks. Recent indicators suggest a gradual recovery in the economy following the trauma inflicted on Hong Kong by the SARS crisis. There has been improvement in local consumer spending and a sharp revival in inbound tourism.

(X)  Bank behaviour  It can be expected that the following trends, observed in the previous part of the current year, will continue into 2010: (1)  stagnation in high foreign sources of financing (standing at EUR 10 billion, of which about EUR 2 billion represents short-term inflows from parent banks in late 2008, which remained in the country throughout the year) and a very slight increase in domestic deposits (by 3.2%, suggesting that there is no potential for any significant strengthening of banks’ credit activity;  (2)  gradual extension of the maturity structure of both foreign sources (62%– 68%) and domestic ones (73%–77.4%), which is good in terms of safety, and facilitates longer maturity placements, but these sources are more expensive;  (3)  an increase in the foreign-currency portion of reserve requirements (71%– 76%), which also magnifies the currency risk, both on the assets and liabilities sides;  (4)  banks trying to reduce credit risk, which also leads to changes in the credit structure: an increase in the share of credit to government (from 8.7% to 13.1%) at the expense of consumer credit (declining from 27.5% to 25.0%);  (5)  an increase in bad placements (to 6%), but still a relatively strong resistance to shocks (provided that the currency shock is prevented);  Conclusion: Banks’ policies are expected to be very cautious in 2010, without any significant changes, with regard to both the growth and purpose of placements.
Barbro Wickman-Parak: Monetary policy and unemployment – a constantly topical debate Speech by Ms Barbro Wickman-Parak, Deputy Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, to the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO), Stockholm, 24 January 2012. *  *  *  I would like to thank Maria Sjödin and Magnus Wiberg, at the Monetary Policy Department of the Riksbank, for their help with writing this speech. High unemployment implies the failure of the welfare state. In Sweden, unemployment increased strongly in conjunction with the crisis of the 1990s, following which it has never fallen below 6 per cent. In this situation, it is important to use every means to improve conditions on the labour market and also to debate the role that could be played by monetary policy in the fight against unemployment. But it is equally important that this debate is realistic. From time to time, we have to remind ourselves that the possibilities monetary policy has in this area have their limits. This is primarily a matter of influencing the more short-term area of unemployment, which depends on economic activity, via effects on total demand in the economy. The area of unemployment that also exists in balanced economic cycles is harder to deal with. This unemployment is usually called long-term unemployment or equilibrium unemployment. The degree of equilibrium unemployment is highly dependent on how well the labour market is functioning, which is affected by policy areas other than monetary policy.

Finally, I will take up the three issues I have just mentioned and explain the reasons for my views on these issues. For the sake of clarity, let me also add that the opinions I will be expressing in this speech are my own. They are not necessarily shared by my colleagues in the Executive Board of the Riksbank. The years prior to the financial crisis When I first arrived at the Riksbank, I did not suspect that we were about to experience one of the worst international financial crises of our times. I had been through two previous crises. The first of these was the deep recession at the end of the 1970s and start of the 1980s, when, through a series of devaluations, Sweden attempted to restore the competitiveness it had lost due to the severe price and wage inflation of the 1970s. The second was the crisis we experienced at the start of the 1990s. This was a fairly typical financial crisis, starting with the deregulation of the credit market and leading to a banking crisis, a deep recession and large public finance deficits. The Riksbank had built up its analytical capacity Its experiences in the Swedish banking crisis at the start of the 1990s had led the Riksbank to build up its analytical capacity before my time at the bank started. In 1997, the Riksbank started to publish a Financial Stability Report twice per year.
7/9  BIS central bankers' speeches  An Open API Architecture And saving the best for the end: creating an API economy. APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, are likely to be one of the most important building blocks for innovation in the future economy. APIs are basically a set of protocols that define how one system or application interacts with another, usually from the perspective of information exchange. They allow systems to interact with one another without the need for human intervention. Publishing these APIs allows FIs to collaborate with external users to: – seamlessly merge multiple data sets from different sources into an integrated rich data set; and – deliver more functional and customised solutions faster and cheaper. MAS aims to establish Singapore as a centre of excellence for APIs on financial services. We are actively pushing FIs to develop and adopt APIs, and to offer as many of them as possible to the broader community. APIs are the essential ‘plumbing’ – the pipes – that enable the connections and collaborations that foster innovation. The financial industry has come together, in partnership with MAS and the Association of Banks in Singapore, to develop guidance on APIs. I am pleased to announce that we will publish today what we call the “Finance-as-a-Service API Playbook”. The API Playbook provides guidance on common and useful APIs that FIs could make available. For instance: Many of us struggle today to track and use our rewards points on our credit cards issued by various banks before they expire.

Yet, this sector generates less than 20% of value added in the economy, while productivity of labour force employed in agriculture and their income per capital are half of other branches of the economy. In my view, the sustained and balanced development of the country clearly needs a higher attention to agriculture sector, for improving its production capacity coupled with the growing of rural area population’s welfare, and in turn promoting social equity. The agricultural sector faces many and complex problems of development. At a considerable degree, these problems are out the competence and expertise sphere of the Bank of Albania. However, I believe that the topic of our today’s discussion: support with funds and loans to the agricultural sector, deserves a higher attention by the banking system. Currently, agricultural sector benefits only 1.7% of the funding that banks provide to private business. This ratio has not change over the last decade, despite the novelties that banking system has offered to lending market, while it remains far from the real needs of this sector. Specific lending issues to agricultural sector have been identified, from some time now, but a part of them are yet relevant. Nevertheless, I think that some of them are towards addressing, while the other obstacles should become part of a critical assessment and their solution should be an integral part of our next work agenda.
In an ideal world, the global capital market should be one integrated whole, with no restraints on the movement of capital. Then savings could be channelled to their most productive uses and countries could fund their investment needs at the lowest possible cost. But in reality many economies still lack the institutional framework to deal with free capital flows. Furthermore, investors are prone to herd behaviour which can result in large surges of capital into and out of countries. These surges cause bubbles and crashes which can do great harm to economies, especially small and vulnerable ones. The liberalisation of capital accounts must thus be treated with caution. It must not proceed faster than the strength of countries’ domestic financial systems and institutional capability. Controls on “hot money” are difficult to administer and subject to evasion, but they can help make countries less vulnerable to volatile financial markets. For instance in Indonesia, following the liberalisation of the banking sector in the late 1980s, companies made large short-term borrowings in foreign currencies. They circumvented rules intended to prevent this. When the crisis struck, the Indonesian government did not know how much the companies had borrowed. Yet the total was almost $ 50 billion1, more than double Indonesia’s gross foreign reserves. The effects of the capital controls which Malaysia imposed in September 1998 are still being debated. But even Malaysia, which is implacably opposed to speculators out to make a quick profit, still welcomes foreign investors including portfolio investors buying Malaysian shares.

With further reduction in NPLs and higher interest rates, there are better prospects for banks’ profitability. We see demons of the past in our region today and we wish to avoid any doubting of our European and Transatlantic engagements. In order to go further we must prevent the demons of the past from questioning the virtues of opening our economy to foreign investment. The only way to preserve this fine moment for Romania is to steer and balance the economic growth, to advance on our European path and grasp the benefits of this historical process. I will now give the floor to Mr. Jeffrey Franks who will deliver an in-depth presentation on the first chapter of the report – “Europe Hitting Its Stride”, accompanied by his discussant, Deputy Governor Liviu Voinea. I wish you all a fruitful debate today! 2/2  BIS central bankers' speeches
The Agreement on Net Financial Assets Let me conclude by turning briefly to the recent decision to publish the Agreement of Net Financial Assets, also known as ANFA. This is another step to live up to our commitment to be accountable and transparent, both towards you as Parliament and towards the public at large. The ANFA is an agreement between the ECB and the euro area National Central Banks – the NCBs. It ensures that monetary policy is unaffected by NCB operations related to their national, non-monetary policy tasks. The right to perform such tasks dates back to the start of Economic and Monetary Union. At that time, the founding member states decided to centralise only central bank functions and tasks that are necessary to conduct a single monetary policy. All other tasks remained with the NCBs. Such national, non-monetary policy tasks include managing the NCBs’ remaining foreign reserves – including gold – after the transfer of foreign reserves to the ECB, managing some non-monetary policy portfolios including those related to pension funds for their employees, or providing payment services to national governments. When the NCBs hold portfolios not related to monetary policy as part of their national tasks, these portfolios are financed either by central bank money provided by the NCBs or by nonmonetary liabilities. This does not interfere with monetary policy as long as it is limited to less than the amount of banknotes needed by the public.

This will be made up of eight systems that enable real time payments in a safe, secure, reliable and efficient manner and are ready for FinTech deployment. Internally, we are re-engineering all processes in regulations to enhance data gathering and analysis, and fully digitizing processes in all supervisory functions. This will be a pre-requisite for our future implementation of artificial intelligence and SupTech. Central Bank of Kuwait - Public ‫ عام‬- ‫بنك الكويت المركزي‬  - 17 -  In addition, we are working on other initiatives such as the Open Banking Framework, which will provide clients with comprehensive information on their financial standing across multiple banks. We are also in the process of rolling out our E-KYC framework, which will allow anyone to open an account electronically, easily and efficiently. In 2014, Kuwait issued the Electronic Transaction Law, which provides the legal foundation for electronic payments and made digital signatures legally binding. In terms of collaboration, the CBK has undertaken a number of initiatives to increase cross-border cooperation with other regulators in the region. For example, we are working with more than 20 countries on developing the Arab Payment System, in addition to the GCC Real Time Gross Settlement System. In addition, the CBK is spearheading a GCC-wide cybersecurity framework to allow for seamless security information-sharing across the region, in order to safeguard GCC banking institutions and mitigate cyber threats.