samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Barbro Wickman-Parak: The financial crisis – where do we stand today and where are we heading? Speech by Ms Barbro Wickman-Parak, Deputy Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at Danske Market's Central Bank Seminar, Snekkersten, Denmark, 11 June 2009. *  *  *  When I joined the Executive Board of the Riksbank almost exactly two years ago, in May 2007, I expected my new job to be varied and exciting. Though I perhaps wasn’t expecting it to be exciting in the way it turned out to be. Of course we were then already aware of the problems with subprime loans in the United States. But, like most other people in Sweden and abroad, I didn’t foresee that the worrying signs we saw then would gradually develop into a global financial crisis of historical proportions. Nor did I anticipate that as a result of this crisis the Riksbank would lend several hundred billion kronor to the banks. Or that the Riksbank would cut the repo rate by 4.25 percentage points during the course of just over six months, to its lowest level ever – the fastest monetary policy easing in the period we have had an inflation target. And of course I could not anticipate that several other central banks would by then have reached the lower limit for their policy rates and have begun to resort to unconventional measures. But nevertheless – this is where we stand now.

Domestic financial institutions must be ready and becomes an active player in the ASEAN economic integration process. On this issue BNM has started investing our international reserves in the regional financial markets, and increasingly a large portion of our reserve management business was being done with Malaysian financial institutions. With this mandate, we hope that Malaysian banks can play a greater role and expand their business by improving regional expertise and reach. Central to this is capacity building as more regional business opportunities will be accessible once we have the capability to offer cross border financial products and services. In this regard, for strategic positioning and to ensure long-term competitiveness, Malaysian banks operating across borders, should position themselves to be the first port of call for foreign investors who are considering to do business in this region. In line with the objective of supporting regional integration, Bank Negara Malaysia has recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Bank of Thailand to promote the use of Malaysian ringgit and Thai baht by the private sector to settle crossborder trades and direct investment. The cooperation is motivated by the strong trade relationship between the two countries. We expect Malaysia-Thailand trade links to reach RM100 billion in 2015. While the US dollar is still the dominant trade settlement currency, the THB and MYR are second and third most used currency by Malaysians and Thais – indicating potential for greater acceptance to settle trade in domestic currencies.
First, the Swiss franc has depreciated by 3% against our 26 most important trading partners, thereby partially offsetting the appreciation that occurred at the beginning of the year. This softening is having a direct impact on inflation, by increasing the prices of imports. To give an example, the impact of oil prices on inflation has been amplified, with the price of a barrel of Brent crude rising 18% by mid-May in terms of Swiss francs, but only 13% in terms of US  2  BIS Review 80/2008  dollars. In the longer term, the weakening in the Swiss franc is indirectly contributing to the increase in prices by stimulating demand. Second, real short-term interest rates have dropped. There has been a rise in expected inflation for the near future and this means – for given nominal interest rates – lower real expected yields for short maturities. An analysis of monetary conditions in terms of volumes leads to similar conclusions. Let us begin with money, which is the best indicator to use if a broad-brush and long-term outlook for the economy and inflation is required. The M1 and M2 monetary aggregates, which were declining until not long ago, have been practically stable for some months. As for M3, it is continuing to exhibit moderate growth. The sub-prime crisis has confirmed the importance of mortgage loans as an indicator of the degree of relaxation of monetary policy. The reason for this is simple.

A recovery is expected towards the end of the year, albeit a tentative one, given that the deterioration in the employment outlook, the erosion of purchasing power and the fall in property prices look set to weigh on consumer sentiment and income. Europe represents the second pole in the global economy. Although the continent enjoyed strong growth during the first quarter of 2008, the remainder of the year should see a slowdown. A number of factors will contribute to this loss of momentum. First, the strong euro and the sharp downturn in the US economy are dampening exports. The sub-prime crisis has led to a tightening of credit conditions, while consumer confidence has deteriorated. This will have a knock-on effect on consumer spending. However, the slowdown in Europe will be much less pronounced than in the US, although the subsequent pick-up in economic activity will also probably be gradual. BIS Review 80/2008  1  The Asian economies, which constitute the third major hub, continue to exhibit strong growth as a whole, since they remain virtually unaffected by the slowdown in the US economy. Nevertheless, they have been hit by rising commodity and food prices, which are seriously reducing incomes. Regional variations aside, it would therefore be reasonable to conclude that the global economy, as a whole, is not witnessing a significant slowdown at present – as opposed to one of the rather more alarming scenarios that were only recently being mooted.
Caleb M Fundanga: Zambia’s economic overview and its accountancy profession Remarks by Dr Caleb M Fundanga, Governor of the Bank of Zambia, at the 2010 Zambia Institute of Chartered Accountants Annual Ball, Lusaka, 24 April 2010. *  *  *  The President – Zambia Institute of Chartered Accountants (ZICA), Mr. Chintu Mulendema The President – Eastern, Central and Southern African Federation of Accountants, Mr. Koos Du Toit The President International Federation of Accountants, Mr. Robert Bunting The Secretary & Chief Executive – Zambia Institute of Chartered Accountants, Mr. Hapenga Kabeta The Chief Executive Officer – Eastern, Central and Southern African Federation of Accountants, Mr. Vickson Ncube Distinguished Members of ZICA Members of the Press Ladies and Gentlemen I am greatly honoured to have the opportunity to join you this evening and to say a few words on the important role that the accountancy profession plays in our economy. The importance of the accountancy profession has indeed been highlighted following the recent global financial crisis in which a lack of appropriate governance arrangements and clarity about the inherent risks taken by financial institutions contributed to the near collapse of financial markets in the developed economies. Clearly the accountancy profession has an important role to play in ensuring that the regulatory response to the crisis leads to more robust and transparent financial institutions that serve the needs of households and firms and avoids the build-up of systemic risks.

Monetary policy can help, and it can underpin the economy by preventing a slide into deflation. So support from monetary policy is necessary but won’t be sufficient to restore sustained real growth until these real determinants are also pushing the economy forwards. One way to think about what has happened during the past 4 years is that there has been a need for balance sheet rebuilding across the economy. The shocks of 2008 revealed that  6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  many parts of the economy had become over-extended: some UK commercial banks are still rebuilding their balance sheets; the Government will take several more years to rebalance expenditure and income; households are still increasing savings rather than spending in aggregate; and some corporates are reluctant – or unable – to take on new debts. And given a very large trade deficit built up prior to the crisis, the overall UK economy had to rebalance, away from domestic demand towards net exports. These are real adjustments that need to be made within the economy. Growth should return, but it is likely that growth can only be sustained at a satisfying pace once the drag on demand and supply from rebalancing lessens. Monetary policy can play a supporting role because the extra liquidity in the economy allows the necessary rebalancing to happen without a disorderly adjustment (eg in asset prices). But patience will be required.
It means we have to be proactive, not just react to events after they have taken place. This is what the work-plan is about - planning our work over the next five years, in the context of likely scenarios. I believe, barring a war in Asia which all countries must work hard to prevent, we can be optimistic about our future. Singapore is situated at the heart of a dynamic Asia. Our economy has undergone major restructuring over the past few years. It has regained its competitiveness. We are expanding our economic space and have shown that we can manage change as a people. There is no reason why Singapore should not continue to do well. The MAS Strategic Planning Exercise has yielded three inter-linked and mutually reinforcing priorities for the next five years. These are not new goals. They are priorities. Let me elaborate on them and the key strategies to support them. Strengthening our position as a leading financial centre in Asia Our first priority is to strengthen Singapore’s position as a leading financial centre in Asia. We will work closely with the financial industry to enlarge our investor base, build greater liquidity and depth in our financial markets, and expand our reach beyond traditional markets. To succeed, the industry needs to attract talented and dynamic professionals from a broad range of disciplines and experiences. I am pleased that the industry has established the Financial Industry Competency Standards Committee to develop internationally-aligned competency benchmarks for the whole financial sector.

More than half of the global population already live in cities. There are 23 megacities today; and it is projected that this number will double by 2030. Most of these new megacities will be in South and East Asia. OECD estimates that more than half of the infrastructure needed by 2030 has not been built yet. Growing cities will need to simultaneously deal with the problems of scarce resources and climate change. Even developed countries can be vulnerable to extreme climate changes. Hurricane Sandy left a quarter of New York City’s population without electricity, and shut down vital transport infrastructure including all 3 airports and all subway lines. Whether or not a global agreement on mitigating the effects of climate change is reached or not, there will be tremendous business opportunities for companies that can provide solutions to address the challenges of resource efficiency and to back up vulnerable systems and infrastructure. Innovative urban solutions and investments in infrastructure R&D will be sorely needed. As an early adopter of sustainable development strategies, Singapore is happy to share our experience learnt from sustainable growth strategies. The annual World Cities Summit, hosted in Singapore, serves as a platform for the exchange of leading-edge ideas on building liveable and sustainable cities. Beyond the exchange of ideas, Singapore is pushing the boundaries in sustainability research. Two National Innovation Challenge programmes are currently on-going,  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  addressing the themes of 1) Energy Resilience for Sustainable Growth and 2) Land and Liveability.
Conversely, when home prices are flat or declining, or mortgage credit is tight, this will put a damper on retail spending. Events of the last decade have driven this point home in a very clear way. It is well known that beginning in the mid-1990s and intensifying in the early 2000s, there was a massive U.S. housing boom that dramatically increased the value of residential real estate in the United States. Over the period from 1995 to 2006, the aggregate value of real estate owned by households and nonprofits nearly tripled, rising from $ trillion to nearly $ trillion. A remarkable, yet not widely-known, fact about this boom period is that while home values were rising very quickly, borrowing was growing almost exactly as fast. Rather than saving the extra wealth that was being generated by the housing boom, households were diverting a large share of it to other purposes. Indeed, the fraction of every additional dollar of households’ housing wealth that was consumed seems to have been higher than that for financial wealth—such as investments in equities and bonds—suggesting that they viewed the increase in home prices as permanent. In order to be able to assess the evolution of household finances more precisely, we worked with Equifax—a major credit bureau—to create a new database that tracks the credit files of a random sample of households over time.

Though such deterioration in  2  BIS Review 104/2007  price competitiveness has been expected for some times, we have not seen real sector adjustments keeping up with the pace of changes in financial environment. For those waiting to hear about the exchange rate trend, I will have to disappoint you as always. I would just like to say that, given the current inflation targeting framework, monetary policy can take care of exchange rate as long as there is no conflict with inflation. And, we have no target level for the Thai baht in mind. Foreign exchange market is intervened when there is too much volatility in the market. The objective is to smooth the country’s adjustment during the transitional period. Looking forward, the baht movement would depend largely on external developments which I have already discussed. Moreover, there are also internal drivers: large surplus in current and capital accounts. The Thai stock market remains one of the most popular destinations in emerging markets for foreign investors, given its relatively low P/E ratio. During the first 7 months of this year, foreign investors became net buy about 4 billion US dollar. Such inflows together with foreign direct investments have also added pressure on the currency. Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to turn to the third and final part of my talk today, which is Thailand’s approach in coping with the risks and challenges posed by globalization. Indeed, the challenges of globalization are constantly changing.
These processes not only help to fight money laundering and the financing of terrorism, but also enable private banks to obtain relevant information to better understand their clients, including their background and, most importantly, their risk appetite and investment needs. By doing so, private banks can agree on an investment strategy with clients and provide suitable products and services that fit their needs. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  As we all know, private banking clients cover a wide spectrum of individuals. At one end of the spectrum there are clients who are highly seasoned investors, at the other end there may be unsophisticated clients with only very basic investment knowledge, notwithstanding that they have substantial wealth. While our regulatory framework is aimed at providing appropriate investor protection to all clients, regardless of the size of their wealth, it does not mean all investors have to be treated in exactly the same way in the process of making investments. In other words, the HKMA agrees that private banking and retail banking clients can and should be treated differently in the investment process. This being the case, we need to have a clear and practical definition of “Private Banking Customer”. After consulting the industry and the SFC, the HKMA is minded to agree that a “Private Banking Customer” can be defined as a customer with either (a) at least $ million of assets under the management (AUM) with the bank concerned or (b) total investable assets of at least $ million.

It also demands greater agility, astuteness and foresight on our part to go beyond and able to ride on the next wave of growth – either at the higher end of the spectrum of financial services that focus on sophisticated and high value added activities or the lower end that cater for the traditionally underserved, as well as opportunity to fully realise the benefits from the greater regional and international integration. At the same time, a myriad of challenges including global regulatory reform, transformational technology and changing generational expectations will continue to drive change in the years to come. This would also mean that financial institutions will need to meet higher standards of how they manage risks and govern their operations. Against this background, the professionalism, productivity and capability of our talents become more important now than ever before. Future success will hinge on our ability to constantly remould the workforce in the banking industry for a new marketplace, with emphasis on a corresponding increase in the levels of knowledge, skills, competencies and  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  overall quality of our talents. We clearly have an urgent and important task ahead of us. The critical questions therefore need to be asked here – Have we done enough to sustain the competitiveness of our workforce to meet the current and future industry needs and what more can be done to propel the industry to new heights?
We must always have knowledge about what is driving prices in order to make good interest rate decisions. The recent developments in the commodities markets are one example of this. And it is then important to analyse measures that illustrate these effects. 4  BIS Review 73/2008  A better way of showing the effects of interest rate changes There will also be a need to look at measures that adjust for the direct effects of our interest rate changes in the future. One can argue that this is particularly important these days, now that we make forecasts based on the fact that the interest rate can change. As opposed to the period when we assumed that the interest rate would remain unchanged during the forecast period, the forecasts for the CPI are nowadays directly affected by our policy. However, the CPIX is not the most appropriate measure of adjusting for our own interest rate changes. As I have pointed out, the CPIX excludes many more items than just interest rate changes – including changes in indirect taxes and the effects on mortgage interest costs for home-owners arising from the rising house prices. A better method is to see how the CPI would develop if we merely exclude the part of the change in the interest rate cost arising from the interest rate index. The Riksbank will use this type of measure of “CPI with a fixed interest rate” more actively in the future. This will be published in the next Monetary Policy Report.

While there is no doubt that unconventional monetary policies (UMPs) have helped stabilise the financial system and supported economic recovery after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), many have argued that the economic or financial benefits created by UMPs have not been shared evenly. Some studies have highlighted that UMPs disproportionately enrich the “haves”, as they tend to hold more assets such as stocks and properties that benefited most from UMPs.3 Hong Kong has been experiencing this trend, especially in the housing market. With a prolonged period of close-to-zero nominal interest rates and negative real mortgage rates, Hong Kong’s housing prices have been rising for over 10 years. This has eroded housing affordability and widened significantly the wealth gap between home owners and those who have yet to buy a home. How should central bankers and policymakers think about this important issue and what can be done about it? We have lined up a couple of presentations focusing on housing today and tomorrow, which I hope will shed some light on 1/2  BIS central bankers' speeches  policymaking in this area. 6. Having looked at UMPs’ implications on asset prices, let’s now turn our attention for a moment to labour income. To the extent that UMPs have driven aggregate improvements in the labour market in terms of job creation, they have nonetheless failed to benefit some segments of the workforce that are the most in need. For example, many of the jobs created are low-paying and/or part-time in nature.
Under net labour income, salary payments to cross-border commuters who work in Ticino but live in Milan, for example, are included  2  The special topic in the SNB publication Swiss Balance of Payments and International Investment Position 2016 (pp. 31–38) summarises the methodology for drawing up the balance of payments and the relationships between the main aggregates. Page 3/13  under expenses. The current transfers item comprises, among other flows, expenses of the Swiss Confederation for economic development cooperation. In most countries, the trade balance dominates the current account balance and the other components often contribute very little. 3 By definition, the current account balance also corresponds to the difference between savings and domestic investment in an economy. This relationship is represented in equation 2. 4 If a country has a current account surplus, it is saving more than it is investing domestically. In this case, the surplus capital is exported abroad. By contrast, a country with a current account deficit imports capital from the rest of the world because it is investing more than it is saving. This view – the so-called financial account – is the mirror image of the current account. A country with a current account surplus – or a financial account surplus – accumulates claims (or credits) vis-à-vis counterparties abroad, so-called foreign assets. A country with a current account deficit, on the other hand, accumulates liabilities, i.e. debt visà-vis counterparties abroad, so-called foreign liabilities. The difference between foreign assets and foreign liabilities is termed the net international investment position.

We have no clear idea laid up in our minds beforehand of exactly what we want. We shall discover it as we move along and we shall have to mould our material in accordance with our experience. Now for this process bold, free and remorseless criticism is a sine qua non of ultimate success. We need the collaboration of all the bright spirits of the age.”  4/4  BIS central bankers' speeches