samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Ong Chong Tee: Regulatory landscape for 2016 – positioning for a dynamic, trusted and vibrant market Keynote address by Mr Ong Chong Tee, Deputy Managing Director (Financial Supervision) of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, at the SGX Equities Dialogue 2016, Singapore, 28 January 2016. *  *  *  Mr Loh Boon Chye, CEO of SGX Ladies and Gentlemen Good afternoon. I am delighted to join you at the inaugural SGX Equities Dialogue. A challenging start 1. 2016 has started on a challenging note for global stock markets. The first trading week of this year alone saw global markets losing close to $ trillion, 1 led by sharp declines in the Chinese stock market. The STI Index has fallen by more than 20% during the last 12 months to the lowest level since October 2011. Oil prices are testing lows last seen in 2004 and many other commodity prices are also under downward pressure. 2. The prevailing negative market sentiments reinforce the importance of various measures undertaken by both MAS and SGX together with different market stakeholders, to build a more robust and resilient financial market. These include areas relating to capital, liquidity and margin rules, infrastructure resilience and so on; all of which complement various measures on promoting high standards of professional conduct, improved corporate disclosures as well as retail investor education. We have also worked with the industry at large on regular stress tests and crisis management exercises.

Therefore, with respect to member supervision, MAS will redefine the scope of regulatory responsibilities between MAS and exchanges so that overlaps faced by intermediaries who are members of different exchanges, and at the same time regulated by MAS, are minimised. To elaborate, exchanges typically supervise intermediaries to ensure that they comply with the exchange rules, uphold high standards of market integrity and are financially sound. MAS, on the other hand, supervise intermediaries for compliance with MAS’ statutory licensing requirements pertaining to systemic and conduct risks. 23. In practice, exchange rules can and do overlap with the statutory requirements under the Securities and Future Act. The regular dialogue and co-ordination between MAS and SGX have allowed us to manage inspection visits in a way that reduces the burden on intermediaries who are both licensed by MAS and are members of SGX. 24. However, this will become more challenging when more than one exchange operates in Singapore. For example, an intermediary that is licensed by MAS, can also be a member of both SGX and ICE Futures; it should not have to undergo three separate inspections a year, especially if a number of areas are duplicative. 25. In the US which has many more exchanges, they have either set up a separate industry SRO to undertake member supervision in the case of the securities market or relied on an exchange to play a “lead SRO” role in the futures market. 26.
8  In this regard, over the years more and more countries are easing the requirements to work with the micro and administrative data produced by the public sector. I believe 13  that Spain should not lag behind in this endeavour. In keeping with this assessment, Banco de España provides researchers with the micro data of some of the surveys it conducts, such as the Survey of Household Finances and the Survey of Financial Competences. But more needs to be done. In this regard, we are committed to extending the availability of micro data to other products, such as the balance sheet data of non-financial corporations and some banking data. In this respect, Banco de España has recently joined INEXDA, a network of central banks whose aim is to exchange experiences in the management of granular data in order to facilitate their use by external researchers. Also, we must strive to have other public institutions join us in this initiative. Although the Spanish public sector currently provides samples of administrative data regarding, among others, tax returns and social security records, there is ample room for improvement in this area.

03.09.2018  Welcome address Second Annual Research Conference of Banco de España 3 September 2018  Pablo Hernández de Cos Governor  Good morning. I would like to welcome you to the second Annual Research Conference, which this year is jointly organised by Banco de España and the Institute for Fiscal Studies. 1  Let me start by thanking our colleagues from IFS. The IFS is a benchmark for rigorous policy analysis, far-reaching influence and frontier academic research, and it is indeed an honour for us to collaborate with them. This meeting has become our flagship research conference with the main goal of bringing together leading scholars and policy-makers to discuss frontier research on recent economic developments and the policy options to address them. Last year the conference focused on macro, monetary and macroprudential policies. This year we want to turn our attention to tax and transfer systems. After several years of sustained recovery, the Great Recession has left a legacy of high public debt ratios, low potential output growth and rising inequality in some countries. For instance, the euro area aggregate public debt 1  I would like to thank Olympia Bover and Roberto Ramos for their contributions to this speech. 1  stands at close to 90% of GDP, almost 25 percentage points up on its pre-crisis level. Also, the IMF estimates that potential output growth in the major advanced economies has been declining since the early 2000s, this trend being further aggravated by the global financial crisis.
Here we must accept that we still have not dealt with the fundamental problem that systemically important banks cannot currently be allowed to fail. The truth is that, if tomorrow morning a systemic institution were once again to find itself on the brink of failure, we would again face the terrible choice between either coming to its rescue at the expense of taxpayers or putting the stability of the financial system at risk. Moreover, as long as banks can expect public support, market discipline will always be undermined. Moral hazard has been exacerbated by the fact that there is no longer any ambiguity about the willingness of the public sector to bail out large banks. In other words, we must acknowledge that the wide-ranging public support measures have aggravated the moral hazard problem associated with large and complex financial institutions. Frankly speaking, we have no choice but to address the specific challenges of banks that are “too big” or “too interconnected” to fail. If we are committed to a market-based system, the financial system of the future must expose financial institutions of all sizes and structures to the ultimate test of the market place. The very definition of a market economy is that it must allow for failure as a sanction of excessive risk taking or managerial incompetence. In the event that large, systemically relevant financial firms face the threat of failure in a next crisis, the financial system of the future must allow for their orderly resolution.

Jean-Claude Trichet: Interview with Le Monde Interview with Mr Jean-Claude Trichet, President of the European Central Bank, in Le Monde, France, conducted by Mr Frédéric Lemaître, Mr Stéphane Lauer and Mrs Marie de Vergès, on 31 May 2010. *  *  *  Is the euro in danger? The euro is a very credible currency which keeps its value. Since its introduction 11½ years ago, average annual inflation has been below but close to 2%, in line with our definition of price stability. The euro’s capacity to maintain its value is absolutely essential for the confidence of investors both inside and outside the euro area. So what is the problem? The issue is that of financial stability within the euro area on account of bad fiscal policy in certain countries, in particular Greece. It is imperative that this be corrected. The responsibilities of each of the countries concerned are the primary cause. But there is also a true collegial responsibility. Close multilateral surveillance, which is fundamental in the spirit and the letter of the Stability and Growth Pact, has been terribly neglected. This is not particularly surprising, given that in 2004 and 2005 the Pact was unfortunately subject to severe criticism, including from large countries such as Germany, France and Italy. They set a very bad example, both in terms of managing and being accountable for their own fiscal policy, and as members of the Eurogroup and thus essential figures in the surveillance of the fiscal situation in each country.
Percent and in billions of NOK 20  1400 1200  15  1000  Risk in percentage terms (l.h.s.) Risk in NOK terms (r.h.s.) 800  10  600 400  5  200 0 2013  2015  2017  2019  2021  0  Source: Norges Bank  We cannot shield ourselves from such an outcome. Volatility is the normal state of equity and other securities markets. Nor are there any guarantees that markets will recover quickly and capital be built up again in the years following a fall. The GPFG is invested in a wide range of assets, countries and companies. We can therefore benefit from broad-based market upturns, but we must then also ride out the downturns. The certain knowledge that the GPFG’s value will fluctuate has important consequences for the fiscal stance. The fiscal rule provides for spending on average the expected real return over time. As long as the GPFG is growing, it is tempting to increase spending in tandem. It is not as easy to reduce spending in years with negative returns. In the event of steep declines, nor would that be sensible. The fiscal rule still has a role to play as a long-term guideline for fiscal policy. The rule supports the idea of the GPFG as an intergenerational fund. But rather than aiming for the 3 percent path, we would be wise to set petroleum revenue spending below the expected real return. Otherwise, we run the risk of regularly eating away at the GPFG’s capital.

The role of the FROB was adapted, enabling it to acquire ordinary shares temporarily (up to 5 years), which was known as FROB II. The FROB covered shortcomings in the pre-existing arrangements on two main fronts: the insufficiency of the deposit guarantee schemes’ funds, as their capacity was not calculated to tackle systemic crises, with potential contagion arising in the event of their members being demanded to make extraordinary contributions; and to provide swift capital contributions for ailing banks, obviating the problems posed by mercantile regulations and, in particular, the need to obtain the approval of banks’ General Meetings. As detailed in Table 2.8 of the Report, the contributions from FROB I and FROB II totalled € million, assigned in their entirety to savings banks and conditional upon restructuring and the enhanced efficiency and governance of the recipient institutions. In April 2010 the regulations governing IPSs – dating from 2007 –were amended to afford them greater stability, reinforcing banks’ commitment to permanence, requiring that the central institution should take the form of a public limited company and that it should be at least 50%-held by the savings banks. The IPSs offered a flexible formula for integration analogous to mergers for practical purposes, but retaining the institutions’ individual legal personality and thereby facilitating integration processes principally between savings banks which, given their nature, did not have the same flexibility as banks to conclude merger agreements.
The resulting systematic mis-pricing of, in particular, the super-senior tranches of these securities was a significant source of losses to banks during the crisis, with ratings downgrades large and frequent (Chart 33). A similar risk-taking strategy was the writing of explicit insurance contracts against such tail risks, for example through CDS. These too grew very rapidly ahead of crisis (Chart 34). Again, the writers of these insurance contracts gathered a steady source of premium income during the good times – apparently “excess returns”. But this was typically more than offset by losses once bad states materialised. This, famously, was the strategy pursued by some of the monoline insurers and by AIG. For example, AIG’s capital market business, which included its ill-fated financial products division, reported total operating income of $ billion in the run-up to crisis from 2003 to 2006, but reported operating losses of around $ billion in 2008 alone. What all of these strategies had in common was that they involved banks assuming risk in the hunt for yield – risk that was often disguised because it was parked in the tail of the return distribution. Excess returns – from leverage, trading books and out-of-the-money options – were built on an inability to measure and price risk. The productivity miracle was in fact a risk illusion. In that respect, mis-measurement of the contribution of banking in the National Accounts and the mis-measurement of returns to banking in their own accounts have a common underlying cause.

Andrew Haldane: The contribution of the financial sector – miracle or mirage? Speech by Mr Andrew Haldane, Executive Director, Financial Stability, of the Bank of England, at the Future of Finance conference, London, 14 July 2010. This text is taken from a co-authored chapter by Andrew Haldane, Simon Brennan and Vasileios Madouros in “The Future of Finance: The LSE Report” published today by The London School of Economics. *  *  *  We would like to thank Stephen Burgess, Melissa Davey, Rob Elder, Perry Francis, Jen Han, Sam Knott, Nick Oulton, Peter Richardson, Jeremy Rowe, Chris Shadforth, Sally Srinivasan and Iain de Weymarn for comments and discussion on earlier drafts, and Alexander Haywood and Laura Wightman for research assistance. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Bank of England. 1. Introduction  The financial crisis of the past three years has, on any measure, been extremely costly. As in past financial crises, public sector debt seems set to double relative to national income in a number of countries (Reinhart and Rogoff (2009)). And measures of foregone output, now and in the future, put the net present value cost of the crisis at anywhere between one and five times annual world GDP (Haldane (2010)). Either way, the scars from the current crisis seem likely to be felt for a generation. It is against this backdrop that an intense debate is underway internationally about reform of finance (Goodhart (2010)).
Today, inflation is 9.3 per cent and the Riksbank, like other central banks around the world, has raised the policy rate in rather large steps. This is as good an illustration as any of how quickly and unexpectedly things have happened or, to refer to my initial quotation, that decades have happened within a few weeks. A natural conclusion is that this development was genuinely difficult to predict. There are, of course, things that we could have predicted better, such as the boost to inflation that came from the rapid recovery after the pandemic. However, it would also have been necessary to foresee, for example, that Russia would invade Ukraine in February 2022, that Russia would throttle its exports of natural gas to Europe and that this would bring electricity prices up to exceptionally high levels. Two opposing types of criticism of monetary policy There will always be those who claim, after the event, that things should have been anticipated – and not rarely that they themselves actually did so. One argument in the Swedish debate is that today’s high inflation is an obvious result of the expansionary policy previously pursued by the Riksbank and many other central banks, during the rather long period when the problem was the reverse; that is, it was difficult to bring inflation up to the target level.

This argument reverses the conventional reasoning: Monetary policy would then no longer affect inflation by influencing demand and inflation expectations, but by affecting interest expenditure – the higher the interest rate and interest costs, the higher the inflation rate. I find this way of reasoning unconvincing. It would mean that central banks would in future have to act in a completely new way, which is not supported in either economic theory or practical experience. It can also be noted that this argument was not put forward during the period when inflation was low – that is, that the Riksbank would then have needed to raise the interest rate in order to raise household interest costs and ultimately inflation. Temporary break from the low-inflation environment rather than lasting change? Before continuing, I would like to stress that, although much has happened in a short space of time, this does not change the conclusion in my speech a year ago – that fiscal policy and monetary policy need to interact in a better way than has been the case in recent decades. My reasoning then was based on the fact that the policy rate had for a long time been at, or very close to, its effective lower bound – a bound below which it is not possible to reduce the rate further or where the negative side-effects of doing so risk being very large.
Businesses incur an estimated RM2.7 billion 6 annually for cash handling, in addition to bearing the risk of pilferage and theft. Businesses also incur an estimated RM113 million 7 annually for cheque handling. Migrating to electronic  3  Internet banking, mobile banking and ATM. 4  BNM’s Financial Stability and Payment Systems Report 2014. 5  Calculated based on the average monthly transactions of B-PAY (Australia) and the population in Australia. 6  Based on the European Central Bank’s (ECB) study “The social and private costs of retail payment instruments” on 13 European countries, the social cost incurred by retailers for cash handling amounts to 0.269% of GDP. 7  Based on the ECB study, the social cost incurred by businesses for cheque handling amounts to 0.012% of GDP. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  bill payments would lower the cost of transactions and provide businesses with a faster, more secure and more efficient means of collecting payments. Businesses should leverage on JomPAY not only for bill payments, but also for invoice payments to facilitate a more efficient management of their receivables. Consumers, on the other hand, should also take advantage of the increased convenience of making bill payments via this new channel. JomPAY provides a one-stop centre for consumers to make bill payments electronically anytime, anywhere and without any transaction fee. By migrating to electronic bill payments, a lot of time and effort previously incurred by travelling and queuing to make over-the-counter payments can be saved and redirected to more productive use.

Examples of such intermediate variables could be current price tendencies, the money supply or resource utilisation. I intend to discuss such possibilities and then conclude by harking back to the Riksbank’s current monetary policy strategy. Alternatives to basing monetary policy on forecasts Actual price movements One alternative to the present rule of thumb could be to set the interest rate in the light of the prevailing rate of inflation. The Riksbank would then adjust the instrumental rate every time Statistics Sweden publishes a CPI outcome that is above or below the 2 per cent target. The primary argument against such an arrangement is perhaps that, compared with the present rule of thumb, it would lead to larger fluctuations in real economic activity. This is because the repo rate and inflation are not directly linked. The Riksbank’s possibility of influencing price movements is more indirect and works, in simple terms, via market interest rates, credit flows and asset prices before impinging on demand in the real economy and such variables as employment, profits, investment, consumption and net exports. Demand’s impact on prices depends in turn on potential output and resource utilisation. We still do not know exactly how this complex transmission mechanism functions, how quickly it works or how it varies both over time and in its effects on the economy. Concerning the time lag, the view adopted by most central banks is that most of the effect materialises after an interval of one to two years.
Concluding remarks  The Central Bank’s vision is to continue being a credible and dynamic institution contributing to the prosperity of Sri Lanka. In that endeavour, we will strive to effectively utilise the productive resources of our country by maintaining economic, price and financial system stability, and offering sound policy advice to the government. Further, in keeping with our values, the Central Bank will also continue to maintain transparency by announcing its policies to the public, which will, in turn, enhance the policy effectiveness. Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentleman, we do hope our statement to you today helped to clarify our policies and would assist you in your economic endeavours. May we also assure you that, we, at the Central Bank remain deeply committed to contributing towards the prosperity of our country and appreciate very much your endeavours that are directed towards such goal. It is our wish and hope that the year 2007 will be a highly successful year for all of us and we offer you our closest co-operation and support. Once again, I wish all of you a Happy, Prosperous and Peaceful New Year. 14  BIS Review 8/2007

The latter shows how important it is that the participants and users of the financial system have confidence in its functioning. The Commission on Business Confidence wrote in its final report that it is important to have a basic assumption that agreements will be upheld in the economy as a whole, and that this is essential in the financial sector. If this trust is lost, it can create difficulties for the banks to conduct their activities and thereby for the financial system’s functioning. However, it is not merely confidence in the individual banks that is essential to the efficient functioning of the financial system. The participants in the system must be able to rely on all of its parts. This means that the oversight role in practice covers more than just the obvious work of overseeing the banks in the payment system. The Riksbank must also to some extent analyse developments in the financial markets and any tendencies in these that might lead to threats to stability. What is financial stability and why should the Riksbank concern itself with it? What is financial stability? There is no unequivocal definition of stability. It is often described as a negative - the absence of instability in the financial markets that would hamper growth. The Riksbank usually focuses on systemic risk in its analyses and the aim there is to prevent problems spreading from one operator to others and having repercussions for the real economy. The work on financial stability has many dimensions.