samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
On the one hand, strong household spending has been induced by a strengthening of consumer confidence, especially confidence on future income as farm income and non-farm employment continue to expand favorably. On the other hand, consumers have benefited much from lower interest rates and greater access to loans from financial institutions, leasing firms, and other non-bank institutions. This pick-up in consumption is most clearly seen in the double-digit growth rate of durable consumption such as passenger cars and motorcycles, which in part reflects a large portion of the stock adjustment or the replacement of old cars bought prior to the 1997 crisis. And more recently, rising stock index, higher corporate profitability and higher dividend yields as well as recovering property prices have boosted household wealth, which would be positive for consumption. Therefore, even though we have seen some moderation in consumption growth from the beginning of this year, favorable underlying factors regarding income, wealth, and financing are likely to stay supportive of consumption growth in the near term. It is thus likely that consumption will continue to be an important contributor to GDP growth, though not as strongly as in late 2002 and early 2003. With consumption growth moderating, the big question is, “How then can people be talking about stronger GDP growth in Thailand next year?” Ladies and gentlemen,  2  BIS Review 46/2003  No economy can or should rely on private consumption as the main growth driver for an extended period of time.

Eddie Yue: Hong Kong: the natural gateway to Islamic finance in Asia – current developments Keynote address by Mr Eddie Yue, Deputy Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, at the 2009 Asia Sukuk Summit, Hong Kong, 18 February 2009. *  *  *  Ladies and gentlemen, It is a great honour to be invited to speak at today's inaugural Asia Sukuk Summit in Hong Kong, and a pleasure to welcome you all, especially those of you who are visiting Hong Kong. This is the first Sukuk Summit to be held in Asia and it takes place at the beginning of the Year of the Ox in the Chinese calendar. The ox symbolises strength, resilience, and – of course – bullishness. For, while it may be true that we are still in the middle of unprecedented financial turbulence, every crisis brings with it new opportunities for renewal and change. The remarkable turnout today clearly reflects a desire to explore new ways of restoring financial market stability and, most important of all, promoting growth. This Summit has assembled an impressive gathering of colleagues from both the public and private sectors from many parts of Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The theme of the Summit – "Towards A New Silk Route for Islamic Finance" – is an apt one: it is a call for partnership in creating new regional bonds and links of the kind that once allowed this ancient trade route to flourish in a diverse yet co-operative world.
As the name suggests the safety net is there to catch banks that are in trouble or, if not the banks, then at least their depositors. This is part of the other aspect of our reform measures that are aimed at promoting the safety and soundness of the banking system. One aspect of this is already in place in the form of a policy statement issued by the HKMA in June of last year on its role as Lender of Last Resort to authorised institutions. The major safety and soundness issues however lie ahead. The first is whether we should introduce a commercial credit reference agency in Hong Kong which would gather and collate information from participating institutions about the indebtedness and credit record of their corporate borrowers. This would enable lenders to obtain a more complete picture of the financial position of their customers, and thus improve their credit assessment and perhaps make them willing to lend. That is the theory, BIS Review 69/2000  4  which seems to be supported by both academic research and the experience of overseas countries. We are currently nearing the end of a consultation period and will consider the way forward in the light of the comments received. As this consultation ends, we are about to embark on another that may be more contentious. I am referring to the possible enhancement of the deposit protection arrangements in Hong Kong.

In addition, this expansion has also fostered the development of complex banking structures and, in some cases, unsustainable business models. The Icelandic banks are illustrative examples in this respect, attracting depositors’ money from the UK and the  2  BIS Review 50/2010  Netherlands and investing these funds in high yield structured products overseas. When their balance sheets had grown to around ten times the size of the Icelandic economy, it was quite clear for anyone to see that, if turmoil broke out, managing the situation was not going to be easy. But to be fair, it was difficult to anticipate the perfect storm in advance. Another lesson from this – and the strenuous and protracted negotiations between Icelandic and, primarily, British politicians that followed – is the need for establishing deposit guarantee schemes that are built up before a crisis occurs. The international expansion of banks and the home country principle have also had other effects on crisis management. Authorities have simply not kept up with developments in the banking system. Contingency arrangements between home and host countries are not highly developed and neither are there any concrete suggestions for how to share the costs of a crisis. While we have achieved economic integration and maintained national sovereignty, we have renounced effective supervision and crisis management. But national sovereignty does not mean that our hands are tied. The remedy is quite simple, at least on paper: we need better and more extensive cooperation between supervisory authorities, central banks and finance ministries in Europe.
Most  fundamentally, the more seamless are global and domestic payments, the more UK households and businesses will benefit from the new global economy. Third, as we overhaul RTGS, the Bank is making it easier for the UK financial system to realise the promise of big data. The new RTGS will capture much richer data on every payment made in a format that defines international best practice. The Bank is currently consulting on how to do this, including on the desirability of embedding the best corporate identifier, the Legal Entity Identifier (or LEI), in RTGS and all the UK’s main payment 11  systems. This will improve access to the domestic and global financial system, support greater choice and  competition for corporate end-users, and advance anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism efforts. The Bank is also ensuring our rules and regulations – or soft infrastructure – are fit for the new finance. We have streamlined our approach to authorising banks to make it easier for banks with innovative business models to be approved. Since 2013, 37 banks have been authorised, of which 16 are new UK bank startups and four are internet-only. With the FCA we’re are exploring how artificial intelligence and machine learning could be used to make the reading of our rulebooks easier, the reporting of regulatory data quicker and the analysis of that data more efficient.

He believed “the policy was the one and only policy which ultimately would place the City and the country again on that eminence which it occupied before the war”. Such was his confidence that Norman mentioned only once, in passing, that “the policy” in question was to “attempt to regain the gold standard”, and he spent no time at all explaining what, apart from normalcy, would be achieved by it. Of course, this return to past certainties would eventually plunge the country into deflation and a deep recession. The old policy was not suited to the new normal and the UK was forced to abandon it a few years later. After all, what is normal when there are tectonic shifts? This dinner may look traditional, but its attendees have always recognised that the most longstanding and revered tradition of the City is its ability to anticipate, adapt to and accelerate change for the common good. That is why the UK’s financial system remains both a national asset and a global public good. Domestically, there are over 1 million financial services jobs, two-thirds outside London. Financial services run a trade surplus of 3% of GDP, while the rest of the economy runs a deficit almost twice as large. Last year, the UK financial system channelled £ billion in finance to UK businesses and helped 700,000 households to purchase homes. It provides pensions to 21 million people and insures the contents of 20 million homes.
UK regulatory structure and proposals for change Across the world we see a lively debate on how the regulatory cake should be cut. There has been change in France. The Australian Government has set up the Wallis Commission to look at the institutional arrangements there. Their first report has just been published. Reforms are in progress in Japan. In the US the new legislative season is about to open, with a number of runners and riders already saddled up in the financial regulation steeplechase. Similarly, in the UK, a variety of think tanks, and the opposition Labour Party, have produced proposals to amend, or in some cases fundamentally reorder, our regulatory structure. But, before describing these exciting proposals, perhaps a brief description of the British system would be in order. Responsibility for financial regulation in the UK is divided between two Government Departments. Department of Trade and Industry  STRUCTURE OF UK FINANCIAL REGULATION  HMTreasury  Insurance Companies Act 1982  Banking Act 1987  Financial Services Act 1986  Bank of England  Securities and Investments Board  Personal Investment Authority Retail Regulator  Investment Management Regulatory Organisation  Securities And Futures Authority  Insurance Companies  BIS Review 21/1997  Banks  Financial Advisers  Securities Houses  Fund Managers  -3-  Most falls to the Treasury, but prudential supervision of insurance companies is the responsibility of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI).

These includes the ways the loans are classified, their provisioning requirements, their potential individual or group guarantees, the supervisory norms of the loan quality etc.. In addition, the counterparty risk is indirectly controlled by the requirements in capital adequacy of the institution. There are also other risks that are considered in the regulation, for which certain requirements have been defined. For the liquidity risk, there have been set up various norms for maintaining sufficient liquid assets and limiting the duration of the loans. For the concentration risk, the regulation requirements focus on the lending activity, and set out the norms for the net exposure in relation to the total assets of the institution. This regulatory framework is  2  BIS Review 88/2005  meant to be actively orienting the activity of the microfinance institutions, and as such, will be revised as the developments may require. Besides these two regulations, the examinations manual of these institutions has been prepared. It is based on the CAMELS system we use for banks, and is aiming at assessing the adequacy of the internal policies and procedures, the quality of the management and the identification, assessment and monitoring of risks. The Accounting Manual is also prepared and is based on the national accounting standards, adjusted for the microfinance activity. We retain current regulatory framework, after some expected changes and approval, is adequately monitoring microfinance activity in Albania while not becoming an impediment for its development.
As they say, necessity is the mother of all invention, and nowhere else is this more pressing than in Asia, where a high proportion of unbanked population is concentrated. In 2017, the World Bank found that China, India, Indonesia and Bangladesh alone contributed to one-third of the world’s unbanked adults5. 7 . This has resulted in a well-trodden path among digital businesses in Asia: Build a digital business around something non-financial, say ride-hailing, food delivery, groceries or gaming. Then offer your customers a seamless payment experience through an e-wallet, to pay for the things that they buy from you. Let me offer a few examples: a. In Singapore, Carousell offers an online marketplace for individuals like you and me to sell or buy anything. You take a photo of what you want to sell, the app can recognise items like shoes and suggest an appropriate category, and you post it for sale. They have about 150 million listings today, including cars and property. And they are launching CarouPay to help its customers to pay for all of them. b. Some of you, like a couple of my colleagues, may have come here this morning using the ridehailing service, Grab. It is very convenient. You book the ride, the driver arrives, you reach your destination, you thank your driver, and you are on your way. No money needs to be exchanged with the driver. You don’t even click “pay”.

Because different banks were acquiring the same merchant so that they could offer the merchant lower on-us rates for their cards dipped in their own terminals. This was good for merchants, and even for the consumer as the merchants passed on some discounts to them. But there were hidden costs: Cashiers had to be trained on different terminals, customers at self-checkout lanes fumbled with which terminal to dip their card into. So we set out to study the market, see which merchants had more than one POS terminal, prioritise them by the volume and value of transactions that they handled, and worked closely with their acquirers one-by-one to on-board onto a single terminal that can accept all schemes that use chip and contactless near-field communication (NFC). Today, the process is still underway, but you can already see these UPOS terminals deployed in supermarkets, convenience stores and petrol stations – these are merchants that we visit daily, if not weekly. Besides addressing the challenges I mentioned above, this has certainly made the self check-out experience a delight. 17. Second, Singapore Quick Response (SGQR) code. Besides chip and contactless NFC payments, many mobile payments are optical via a Quick Response (QR) code. Just as we started to tidy up the POS terminals at merchants, we started to observe a proliferation of payment QR codes as each e-payment company deployed its own QR code sticker at each merchant’s cashier. We identified the problem early and immediately formed an industry task force comprising payment schemes and acquirers.
Chances are, not really. I certainly do not, but then I’m just a lawyer. There may be a tendency to believe 4/7  BIS central bankers' speeches  that brilliant people built and tested the product. Surely they know better than you or I about how it works. We should therefore just trust the experts. I have seen this movie before. Similar assumptions existed a decade ago about CDOs and other complex securitizations and hedges. It has been said that the financial crisis occurred because of a failure of imagination—of not anticipating risk.13 There was also a more basic failure. Not enough people understood how complex financial products actually worked. It is critical that all three lines of defense—and, especially, the first line of defense—understand technology. I urge you to question your current technology, and to think ahead to further changes. For example, how will artificial intelligence challenge traditional methods of testing and assurance, which address static coding rather than dynamic learning? How will machine choices about access to financial services, or the cost of those services, avoid perpetuating or exacerbating historical disparities of race, gender, age, or zip code? These questions do not have easy answers, and they will likely lead to more questions. So don’t rest. Keep learning so that you can better anticipate risks. Professionalism and the first line of defense Finally, I encourage you to continue to develop a sense of your field as a profession. Now, I do not mean to imply that anyone in this room is unprofessional.

The changing geopolitical landscape  In conducting monetary policy, in supervising financial institutions and in developing Singapore as a financial centre, MAS must be keenly aware of the larger geopolitical picture. International events and politics play a big part in the economic prospects of our region, including Singapore. Let me first sketch for you the geopolitical situation. Though there are many uncertainties and serious challenges, international relations are essentially stable. The US is unrivalled as the pre-eminent global power. As terrorism is a serious threat to the American homeland, the global fight against terror will remain President Bush’s overriding priority. He will have to find a way to stabilise the situation in Iraq, hold elections and hand over the task of rebuilding Iraq to the Iraqis. He will want to rebuild ties with Europe. On the economic front, President Bush will try to keep the US economy humming, while managing the growing trade and fiscal deficits and weakening dollar. In Asia, both China and India are on the rise. They will exert an increasing influence on global economic developments and trade and capital flows. China is now the location of choice for a wide range of manufacturing activities. It produces goods so cheaply that even Bangladesh complained about it. When I was in Bangladesh recently, they complained that Chinese textiles were edging out their own textiles in Bangladesh. But China is not a sweatshop for cheap, shoddy consumer goods. MNCs and Chinese companies produce high-quality goods there for the international market.
2/7  BIS central bankers' speeches  Arrears grew more in the retail loan portfolio than in the corporate portfolio but also moderately — from 6.6 to 7.9%. Impairment was mostly seen in unsecured loans, while mortgage quality has remained consistently high. At the same time, non-performing loans are well covered by reserves (more than 75%). Significant loan impairment was avoided thanks to numerous support measures for borrowers by the Government and support measures for banks, and the easing of the reserves on restructured loans adopted by the Central Bank. Since the start of the pandemic, banks have restructured within the framework of their programs as well as repayment holidays about 10% of the total portfolio; the significant amount of 1.5 trillion Mr Aksakov referred to mostly concerns small and medium businesses and individuals. And if you take all the restructuring that banks carried out on large loans and large enterprises — it comes to more than 5 trillion, i.e. it is a rather large amount of restructuring. Its peak was in May, and as of July there has been a steady decline in the demand for restructuring from borrowers, which also suggests there is a normalisation and gradual recovery of economic activity. Restructuring was really important during the most serious period of the pandemic when a significant chunk of businesses ceased operating and many people’s incomes declined.

But what fundamentally distinguishes today’s situation from, say, that of 2014–2015 is that regulatory easing was, in fact, just one additional comfort factor in a period of difficult conditions, and not “the last chance” or the only way to stay afloat. Undoubtedly, in the conditions of the epidemic, it helped greatly that Russian banks boast a high level of digitalisation. Almost all services were available online, and of those in demand on a daily almost all were available. Even before the epidemic, most banking customers extensively used remote services, but even those who previously rarely used remote services started using them without great difficulty. In my speech today, I would like to focus on two clusters of issues. The first deals directly with the impact the epidemic had on the banking business, the current situation, and the measures we are taking to ensure that going forward banks are resilient in their operations. The second concerns what comes next, how to develop the banking business with allowance for the long-term repercussions of the pandemic. How does the current situation look? In the last few months, we have seen a gradual recovery in business activity, the financial markets are stabilising, and lending is also recovering. It has to be said that the economy shrunk less than many expected. The recovery may be uneven, but it is proceeding broadly in line with our forecasts. In particular, this can be seen in our monitoring of sectoral financial flows, which we started conducting during the pandemic.
Dear guests, The fact that the leaders of this Fund offered to present their financial services in the Republic of Macedonia, the Central Bank certainly encouraged and supported this initiative, shows that these important partners consider the Republic of Macedonia a friendly environment for launching various mutually beneficial business initiatives and projects. Yet, we do not forget though, that some of these institutions had no doubts whatsoever about the Republic of Macedonia even in the most difficult periods for us after gaining the independence, since when nobody else was coming, they were here. We certainly appreciate that. Regardless of all above, we still have many reasons that urge us to notice and convince others why is it good to invest in the Republic of Macedonia and to develop partnership with our economic agents and, of course, to inform on the activities that all of us in our country perform, directed towards increasing the attractiveness of the Republic of Macedonia as investment destination. Hence, we definitely need such financial offers. The economic growth could be accelerated by more investments, competitive offer of financial instruments and products, which are likely to eventually bring about lower costs for borrowing capital. The potential investors should be aware that the Macedonian financial sector is booming, but that the room for investments is yet to be opened. The gross national savings is low, not more than 12-17% of GDP, over the recent several years.

But, eventually, the potential investors and creditors have to believe that: -  the political and security shocks in the region and inside the country are behind us,  -  the economy accelerates its growth, which over the recent years is not below 4% real GDP growth,  -  we preserve high macro-economic stability that implies exceptionally disciplined monetary and fiscal policies, which in turn result in low inflation, stable exchange rate and foreign exchange market, sustainable trade and current account deficits and strictly controlled public debt and that these policies for maintaining macro-economic stability will be further conducted, as a prerequisite for good business,  -  the price stability policy will be further implemented,  -  the growth will accelerate registering rates higher than before,  -  serious structural reforms are underway under the leadership of the government in cooperation with the World Bank and the IMF. The tax policy has undergone reforms by reducing the tax burden. The administration has undergone reforms for increasing its capacity. Additional reforms in the financial sector and improvement of the financial market operations have been underway. There are reforms in the cadastre. The conditions for foreign direct investments have been improving. The process of economy deregulation has been underway. The judiciary reforms have improved the efficiency in the contract execution. The ownership rights have been protected. The bank soundness and safety have been strengthening. The depositors feel that and repay with over 20% deposit growth over the last several years.