samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
I should say that we are not oblivious to what it takes for accession to be a success. No matter how much one wishes to put accession on a fast lane, success hinges on having achieved a critical mass of real and structural convergence with the Euro area. The lessons of the Euro area crisis remind us starkly this reality. The more robust the Euro area turns, as a result of institutional and policy reforms, the better for us. When it comes to reforms of the Euro area, I would highlight the respect for rules and their 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  enforcement, on one hand, and the introduction of risk-sharing schemes on the other. Among the latter I range a collective deposit insurance scheme (EDIS) which, together with a much stronger Resolution Fund (SRF) would complete the Banking Union, and the introduction of instruments that can help member states deal with asymmetric shocks. A euro area budget does make sense in this respect. Let me make a few remarks on the macroeconomic scene in Europe. The economic recovery of recent years has been heavily dependent on non-standard operations of the main central banks and very low interest rates. There are still large public and private debts, which are especially burdensome in the Euro area – and which complicate the mission of policy normalization, of unwinding special operations of the ECB. Fortunately, some countries in our region (including Romania) enjoy a much better situation in this respect.

Let me focus in the minutes I have at my disposal on several economic issues. Our debate is so more important for it takes place at a time of some economic slowdown all over Europe and of an erosion of multilateralism, of spreading trade conflicts. The prospect of a hard Brexit is very annoying for all of us and I still very much hope that such a denouement would be avoided. Likewise, it is high time to strike a deal on the Multiannual Financial Framework so that the great challenges the Union is facing (protection of borders, cyber fare, climate change, conflicts in near and more remote neighborhoods, etc.) find proper conciliation with the need to preserve the cohesion of the Union and avoid further fragmentation. I also trust that EU leaders will find the right balance to address key institutional and policy related weaknesses of the Euro area. I mention this, for Romania, like other Non-member States, is bound by EU accession treaties to join the single currency area eventually. And hopefully, this will happen in the not too distant future. In this regard I wish to mention that two major documents on Romania’s path to the Euro area (an analytical report and a Plan of action) have been recently completed and have been subjected to the scrutiny and approval of the political parties and the Parliament. I was one of the vice-chairs of the National Commission which guided the completion of the two documents.
For example, we are seeing instances of customers who had funded themselves largely in the capital markets in recent years turning to the banking system for funding in the current, stressful environment. These observations and issues, which also have been made by others, most recently the Willard Group, have led us to add liquidity management to the near-term agenda of the Basle Committee. The third question involved the role that uncertainty as a result of structural change in the financial system may be playing in recent market developments. One lesson from this turmoil is how difficult it is to understand the linkages between markets and economies in light of the changing patterns of financial and economic flows. In the near term, this points to the need to incorporate more guidance on meaningful stress testing into our supervisory policies and devote more attention to it in our supervisory practice. For meaningful stress testing, a bank must have strong information systems that can both aggregate BIS Review 86/1998  -4-  information about the bank’s positions and facilitate analysis of the positions under different scenarios. Better management information systems is one of the primary benefits of the move toward greater modeling of market and credit risk management. Management information systems, however, are not enough. It also is necessary for management to assess the internal and external factors that create risk in relation to the bank’s positions in order to come up with revealing stress scenarios.

2 – What role for regulatory and oversight authorities? In this context, it is first and foremost the responsibility of the private sector to design stablecoin schemes that do not bring undue risks to our payment systems. For that purpose, regulatory and oversight authorities have an important role to play in order to ensure that the risk management requirements to be met are clear, comprehensive and complied with, while preserving the potential for technological innovation offered by crypto-assets. To that end, they should in my view focus on three main tasks:  - Firstly, working on a regulatory response that preserves the positive potential impact stablecoins might have on the efficiency of our payment systems. Given the rapid pace of innovation, which is also characteristic of stablecoin initiatives, this pleads for developing an agile, pragmatic and proportionate regulatory response rather than setting up an ad-hoc, unique and comprehensive framework. This would be simpler, faster to implement and to adjust, and be more likely to achieve level-playing field conditions. In the European context, this is an encouragement for building on and adapting the functional coverage of existing regulatory frameworks and, in some cases extending their geographical coverage. What comes to mind in particular is the framework for crypto-assets service providers created in France with the 2/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  Pacte bill, and the European framework for e-money issuers, investment funds and financial market infrastructures.
To understand the implications, the starting point must be a sufficiently broad-sighted diagnosis of the current situation of the Spanish economy. An idea central to the Annual Report I present to you today is that exiting the recession in Spain involves the need to absorb and overcome the imbalances that built up during the long expansionary phase. That is a prerequisite if the new growth path is to be underpinned by a model capable of generating employment and by a more efficient use of productive resources than in the past. This process can only be successful if economic policies adopt an active and ambitious role removing the obstacles that have emerged and restoring confidence in the Spanish economy’s capacity to negotiate this critical juncture. This message, which I have attempted to convey in recent years, is now a matter of the utmost urgency. Indeed, the government’s latest fiscal, labour market and pensions measures are in keeping with this urgency. Let me begin by summarising those aspects of the recession in Spain that are key to understanding the scale of the challenges we face. In 2009, there was an abrupt decline in Spanish economic activity, the biggest in recent decades. Furthering the fall in activity that had begun in the second half of 2008, this placed the level of GDP in the opening months of 2010 at 4.6% below its peak in the second quarter of 2008.

The war in Ukraine has not affected trade directly  Although the war in Ukraine has affected Iceland’s terms of trade, the net effect is ambiguous, with the prices of both imports and exports rising. Iceland is an exporter of both metals (mainly aluminium) and food products and thus has both gained and suffered from rising raw material and food prices. Terms of trade have remained favourable, although they have declined from their recent peak. Despite access to abundant domestic renewable energy, imported fossil fuels impact the Icelandic value chain both through the price of imported fuels, various imported goods and generally the cost of transportation, which is high given Iceland’s remoteness from major markets. Fuel is also an important cost item in fisheries. Rising import prices, however, result not only from the war in Ukraine, but can be partly explained by supply-chain disruptions and the container cost crisis triggered by a reallocation of resources in the global economy as it recovered from the pandemic. The cost increases seep into the global value chain and affect inflation globally. Eventually those mismatches are being resolved from the supply side, as firms respond to price signals, and from the demand side, with global tightening of monetary conditions and the withdrawal of fiscal stimulus. Mismatches are being resolved by increased supply and global tightening  The post-pandemic recovery in Iceland has two distinguishing features that set it apart from the recovery in most other OECD economies.
Financial service providers, both old and new, can capitalize on modern technology to provide new – and perhaps once unimaginable – products and services. These technologies will allow business to by-pass the traditional stages of financial market developments, especially those that are paper-based or those that rely on brick-and-mortar infrastructure. Let me cite a few examples which I find very encouraging. In Thailand, an offshoot of the TMB Bank, called ME by TMB, is a bank that does not rely on physical 5  World Bank Global Findex 2014, measured by numbers of those not having bank accounts  3  branches. Vietnam has a similar model called Timo Bank. Businesses are conducted online, making full use of digital payment technology. These banks pass on reduced costs to consumers in the form of better offers, such as higher deposit interest rates or better services. As technology provides more choices, there is room to provide more alternatives by easing some of our regulations. Take, for example, local currency usage for trade settlement and direct investment in our subregion. The Bank of Thailand is currently working with central banks in the region to relax regulations on the use of local currency for cross-border trade and investment. Amid volatile global financial markets, this will offer businesses more options in choosing currencies for trade settlements. Exporters and importers are able to reduce their foreign exchange conversion costs and better manage foreign exchange risks by using their local currency for settlement.

While all of us agree that crisis resolution is much more costly than crisis prevention, it is easier for the international community to come to a consensus on what needs to be done to resolve the crisis. At the current juncture, policymakers seem to have some policy space as the global recovery has gained traction. But we are not completely out of the woods yet as there are so many uncertainties along the way. Therefore, this is an important moment for the Fund to take the initiative to bring all stakeholders together and adopt a common understanding on what needs to be done. To do so, the Fund needs to approach these challenges in a balanced manner, by candidly identifying the sources of vulnerabilities and fairly assessing the capacity of member countries to make policy adjustments. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3
Overall, East Asian economies have become more resilient. The managed float exchange rate and Inflation Targeting monetary policy frameworks that a number of regional economies have adopted after the Asian crisis have proven to be effective tools in maintaining economic stability and have had a role in helping spur economic growth. They have also had a role in helping dent financial imbalances especially excessive external borrowings and their maturity mismatches. The latest numbers of external debt to GDP in East Asia (except for the case of South Korea) stood below 30 percent in 2007, declining from the range of 62 to 168 percent from the peak during 1998 whereas the ratio of foreign reserves to short-term debt in most regional economies jumped from approximately 1-3 times in 1998 to 4-8 times in 2007. Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, the direct role of monetary policy in curbing financial imbalances apart from price stability will need to be revisited. It may be very well be the case that some tightening monetary policy is needed along side prudential measures in curbing financial imbalances. On the financial sector side, reforms that have been put in place to foster transparency and governance as well as to strengthen regulation and supervision have also resulted in significantly healthier financial institutions across the region in terms of solvency, liquidity, and profitability.

Recently, new business models and arrangements have also emerged to address the prevailing 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  gaps in the cross-border payments space. These among others include the introduction of SWIFT’s Global Payment Initiative (SWIFTgpi), a pioneering attempt at linking payment infrastructure through the experimental usage of distributed ledger technology. These have the potential to improve efficiency, allowing faster, secure and transparent cross-border payments. At the ASEAN level, efforts have been made to foster greater regional integration through linkages of the real-time retail payment infrastructures (RT-RPS). The ASEAN Payments Policy Framework was established as a set of principles to facilitate the linkages of RT-RPS. Bilateral arrangements have also been established by several ASEAN countries, including Malaysia, to enhance the efficiency of cross-border payments. For instance, linking between Singapore’s PayNow and Thailand’s PromptPay to facilitate more seamless cross-border payment transactions in real-time, and similarly to extend the linkage to Malaysia’s DuitNow. Once operationalised, this could enable cross-border payments between participating financial institutions to be virtually as seamless as domestic transactions. At the national level, Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) is directing its regulatory and supervisory resources towards safeguarding the safety and soundness of payment and remittance systems. We are stepping up efforts to reinforce public confidence and acceptance of e-payment and eremittance services, particularly among underserved segments. We are also working to futureproof the country’s payment infrastructure to meet evolving market needs, including migrating to the ISO 20022.
Armed with the whole array of price and quantity indicators of 12  The observer updates her distribution over the probability using Bayes’ law. Chart 9 is the mean of that updated distribution as a function of the number of years of data that the agent has observed. 12  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  12  risk we – and others – can make informed judgements about the right level of loss-absorbing capital in the banking system and about the appropriateness of more targeted policy tools. And if it takes time to demonstrate decisively a reduction in system-wide risk, there are some policies whose effects are more immediately obvious. In 2014, responding to concerns about growth in riskier mortgages, the FPC introduced limits on the share of banks’ mortgage lending at high (>4.5) loan-to-income ratios. Recently, the committee noted that there’s since been quite a bit of “bunching” in new loans just below this limit. I’m not so sure this is a problem: for my part I see it mainly as clear and timely evidence that the policy has had an impact. The point remains, however, that the FPC’s objective is inevitably less precise, and its success less immediately measurable, than that of the MPC. Recalling the results of the analysis I discussed at the start of the talk, on the appropriate allocation of tasks, this suggests that there might well be a cost if you asked a single body – an “FMPC” – to meet all these objectives at once.

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They are means of automatically, if temporarily, halting the trading race if it gets out of hand – a multilateral disarmament device. Following the Flash Crash, the US authorities altered circuit-breaking rules so that they applied on an across-exchange basis to prevent stress simply migrating between exchanges. It would be useful if the revised trading proposals in Europe under MiFID II contained similar provisions. Finally, safety races by bank investors are being explored by financial regulators. Over the past six months, the FPC has paid increasing attention to the systemic risk posed by rising levels of bank encumbrance. The FSA recently undertook a survey of UK banks’ level of encumbrance which the FPC will consider later this year.33 The issue is also being looked at internationally. There are a variety of policy options to forestall self-fulfilling safety races. One would be greater transparency about levels of encumbrance. Lack of transparency creates an uncertainty premium in unsecured borrowing rates, encourages further secured financing and thereby speeds up the seniority race. Reducing that premium through greater transparency would tend to slow the race, if not stall it. An option for stalling the race would be to place maximum limits on levels of bank asset encumbrance. These would be similar in principle to prudential limits on bank leverage and large exposures. ************ Systems, both social and natural, are characterised by a survival of the fittest. But for both, that competitive race can at times generate unhealthy outcomes for the system as a whole.

Andrew G Haldane: Financial arms races Speech by Mr Andrew G Haldane, Executive Director, Financial Stability, Bank of England, at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Berlin, 14 April 2012. All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/speeches  *  *  *  Elephant seals have got too big for their beaches. A large specimen might weigh over 8000 lbs (3700 kg).1 Their size has a simple evolutionary explanation. Large males fight for the right to mate with a whole beach full of females. For elephant seals it is, quite literally, winner-takes-all. And the key to winning is simple – size. No-one is going to argue with a male swinging around his proboscis on the beach. In that way, size has become the dominant gene in the evolutionary trajectory of the elephant seal. But size is not costless for the elephant seal. It makes them easy prey on land. At times in the past, this has threatened their very existence. In the 18th century, their main land predator – man – hunted elephant seals for their blubber and fur. In the 19th century, their numbers fell rapidly to below 100 and for a time they were believed to be extinct.2 Just in time, governments intervened to place restrictions on hunting, nationally and internationally. Today, elephant seal numbers have swelled to above 800,000. The hand of government has protected them from man – and from themselves.
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.

Joseph Yam: The link - 20 years on Graduate talk by Mr Joseph Yam, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority; at the Alumni Link Launching Ceremony, at the Open University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 14 October 2003. *  *  *  Professor Tam, Ladies and Gentlemen, It is always a pleasure to attend Open University events. It is a particular pleasure to be here to participate in the launch of Alumni Link in the presence of so many fellow graduates. Alumni Link will provide information, organise events, and help nurture a sense of community among graduates of the Open University of Hong Kong. It will also, I note, play its part in stimulating the Hong Kong economy by arranging discounts and other privileges. So Alumni Link is very obviously a good thing. This new facility underlines two fundamental principles behind the work of the Open University: first, that education is a lifelong process, which does not end with final examinations or the award of degrees; and secondly, that education is a matter of teamwork and fellowship, and not a solitary pursuit. I congratulate all those involved on having established this useful and imaginative resource. I should also like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the work of Professor Tam Sheung-wai, who will, I understand, be retiring as President next month. Professor Tam has made enormous contributions to the development of open and distance education within Hong Kong and beyond.