samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Our vision is to create a bill payment experience where consumers and businesses can: •  electronically apply for GIRO bill payments;  •  seamlessly pay bills via a “request for payment” function that leverages off FAST fund transfers without needing to bank with the same bank as the biller; and  •  manage their standing payment instructions online or on their mobile phones. MAS is working with the banks and the payments industry to create seamless bill payments and collections. Mobile payments for public transport – account-based ticketing The way we pay for public transport is also due for a refresh. The Land Transport Authority has recently announced that by the end of this year, it will be conducting a pilot for its Account-Based Ticketing System. •  This system will allow commuters to use their existing contactless credit and debit cards to pay for train and bus rides. •  No longer will users have to queue to top-up their stored value transit cards. •  Users will even be able to use their mobile wallets to pay for public transport. An Account-Based Ticketing System will bring Singapore in line with other cities with worldclass public transport payment infrastructure such as London. Pervasive digitisation – maximising productivity gains from e-payments The fourth strategy is to help businesses to digitise their processes and integrate them with electronic payments solutions, so as to maximise productivity and efficiency gains.

A society: •  that spurs continuous innovation in payments technology;  •  that gives consumers maximum convenience and confidence in making payments;  •  that enables firms to increase productivity through payments integrated with business processes; and  •  where swift, simple, and secure payments is a reality for everyone. MAS has been working closely with the financial industry and other government agencies to drive electronic payments. We have also engaged KPMG Advisory to study Singapore’s payments landscape; KPMG’s report will be released later today. Let me elaborate on the four key strategies to create an e-payments society: •  streamlined regulation;  •  inclusive governance;  •  interoperable infrastructure; and  •  pervasive digitisation. Streamlined regulation – targeted, activity based, risk appropriate First, we will streamline our regulatory framework for payments; strengthen consumer protection; and make regulation more targeted based on the specific payment activities that businesses undertake. The existing regulatory framework for payments cuts across the Money-Changing and Remittance Businesses Act (“MCRBA”) and the Payment Systems (Oversight) Act (“PS(O)A”). The MCRBA was introduced in 1979, an era when bricks-and-mortar money changers and remittance agents were the norm. •  For more than three decades, it has served us well. •  We have a thriving remittance industry that provides an essential service to residents, including the many foreign workers in Singapore. The PS(O)A was enacted in 2006, with the objective of keeping our key payment systems safe and efficient.
This fable, known as “blessing or curse”, is essentially about how the true significance of developments is often not immediately apparent – and how the wise observer therefore pays due attention to unintended consequences, both positive and negative. In my view this describes rather well the situation in the euro area financial sector today. The euro area banking sector has suffered a substantial shock that has triggered widespread deleveraging, and on the face of it this is a negative development: it harms economic growth and constrains access to finance. Yet, it is also clear that before the crisis the European banking system had become unhealthily large. It was too leveraged, too big relative to the size of national economies, and perhaps too dominant relative to capital markets. Thus, the effect of a downsizing banking sector might in fact be a blessing in disguise – that is, a shift towards safer banks and a more balanced financing mix. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  Yet, we have to be careful that this too does not turn out to create problems. For example, the transition to a new financing mix may favour some jurisdictions over others, thus reinforcing imbalances. A shift from bank to non-bank financing may create new sources of systemic risk in less transparent sectors. In other words, the challenge for policy-makers in Europe today is to capitalise on the potential positives from the situation that has befallen us, while making sure that we do not simply end up creating new problems for the future.

For example, the average cost of borrowing for non-financial firms in Portugal is more than 5% per year, whereas the equivalent for French firms is around 2% per year. One would imagine in this situation that a Portuguese firm would seek out a French bank, but the euro area banking market does not facilitate such arbitrage. Direct cross-border loans to firms account for just 7.5% of total loans to firms. And local affiliates of foreign banks represent on average only around 20% of national markets, and much less in larger countries. Thus, firms depend heavily on the health of their domestic banks. Moreover, while corporate bond issuance has partially substituted for bank lending, it is strongly concentrated in non-distressed countries where there has been no decrease in the net flow of bank loans. The net issuance of debt securities, quoted shares and bank loans in non-distressed countries was plus € billion in 2013, whereas it was minus € billion in distressed countries. Of course, in principle firms from distressed countries can issue securities in non-distressed countries. In practice, however, it is legally complicated due to issues of different governing law, especially when securities are traded along a chain of financial intermediaries. This analysis points to two missing pieces in the euro area financial market: lack of retail banking integration and lack of capital market integration. The low level of retail banking integration reflects several factors, but diverging approaches to supervision and resolution are certainly among them.
And likewise, we are working across the institution to maximise our very considerable international engagement;  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  •  fifth, while it is a real strength of the new system that conduct and prudential supervision have their own institutions that can provide the focus that is essential, where we should work together we do, as the example of mortgage underwriting standards illustrates;  •  sixth, our approach is to use judgment to set the right incentives for the firms that we regulate to take the actions themselves rather than default to the regulators to do the work. I welcome the action taken by firms on mortgage underwriting standards as an example of that process, and more broadly I welcome the recommendations of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards not least because they put the whole issue of incentivisation of the right behaviour at the front of their recommendations;  •  and last, returning to my earlier theme, we want to create and preserve financial stability as a platform to enable choices to be made in other areas of public policy free of concerns that our objective might be put in jeopardy by doing so. A prime example of this is to enable conditions to exist which can enable people to buy homes. I hope this gives a good sense of what we are about. Thank you. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches

How can research help address these issues and, more generally, improve the overall supervisory stress testing regime? I want to suggest two general areas of research – one tactical and the other much bigger picture and strategic. The tactical area is research that helps improve supervisory models. First, developing additional ways of projecting revenues and non-credit expenses in stressed environments is a particularly ripe area for additional work, in my view. As I noted, an important innovation in the SCAP was the recognition that a comprehensive stress test focused on net income needed to incorporate projections of interest and non-interest income and non-interest expense. While a number of models already existed for making such projections – for instance, those used by banks in their budgeting and planning processes – these were nearly all calibrated to produce projections assuming business as usual conditions, rather than the stressed environment assumed in the SCAP. The SCAP PPNR projections were thus based on stylized supervisory models that used available historical data on bank performance during recessions. Since then, the supervisory PPNR models have become considerably more sophisticated, but at their heart, they continue to rely on historical outcomes for revenues and expenses, rather than fully incorporating the fundamental drivers of those outcomes at the business line level. Additional research and data 5/8  BIS central bankers' speeches  collection on these fundamental drivers and their performance under stress could make the PPNR projections more robust to changing business strategies and focus. A second tactical research area concerns measuring model risk.
Elvira Nabiullina: Speech - Federation Council’s Financial Market Development Board meeting Speech by Ms Elvira Nabiullina, Governor of the Bank of Russia, at the Federation Council’s Financial Market Development Board meeting, Moscow, 8 December 2020. * * * Good afternoon, dear Speaker and fellow colleagues, There is no denying the fact that the financial sector plays a critical part in the context of our efforts to deliver on the national development agenda. Financial intermediaries and the stock market work to ensure that savings transform into investment, businesses obtain the resources they need for development, and consumers gain the tools to grow their wealth. It is within our regulator’s mandate to oil the gears of all these mechanisms and make sure the financial sector provides excellent performance. This means that the costs of businesses and consumers related to their financial objectives should go down. And this means, as the Speaker has mentioned, that we should secure the emergence of long-term money. My deputy, Sergey Shvetsov, is here today to tell you more on our financial market agenda. In my opening remarks, I would like to expand on a number of key points in our operations as a regulator, which have, in my view, major implications. It would be fair to say that this year has spurred transformation in the financial sector. Among key developments are accelerated digitalisation, the Bank of Russia’s switch to soft monetary policy, falling interest rates in the economy, pandemic-induced borrowers’ problems and a large volume of restructured loans.

Philipp Hildebrand: The new investment policy of the Swiss National Bank Introductory remarks by Mr Philipp Hildebrand, Member of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, at the half-yearly media news conference, Geneva, 17 June 2004. *  1. *  *  The evolution of the new investment policy  The new National Bank Act has been in force since 1 May 2004. The management of monetary reserves is explicitly mentioned in the NBA as part of the Swiss National Bank’s mandate for the first time. The management of these reserves is subject to the primacy of monetary policy and implemented according to the criteria of liquidity, security and return. In so doing, the National Bank must guarantee professional, modern asset management and risk management. Until the mid-1990s, the National Bank only had limited possibilities for managing its assets. Monetary reserves were mainly held in the form of gold and foreign-currency government bonds with a maturity of less than one year. Accounting for approximately 80%, the US dollar was the main reserve currency. An easing of investment regulations came about in 1997 when the legally prescribed maximum term for bonds was repealed and repo and gold lending business was introduced. At the same time, the National Bank began to diversify currency risks on its investments to a greater degree and gradually reduced the US dollar portion. The new Act takes this a step further and leaves the permissible investment universe completely open. 2.
We are, though, conscious that we still have much to learn in operating this new framework, including from the experience of others. I do not know what Sir Leslie would have made of the Global Financial Crisis and the Great Recession. But I think we can take it for granted that he would have risen to the challenge of preventing a repetition. That is a challenge future central bankers must also aspire to meet. Apparently there is an old Chinese curse that wishes “interesting times” on the recipient. The past four years have, I am afraid, been rather more “interesting” than I would have liked. Times will no doubt continue to be interesting, but let us hope in the English, rather than the Chinese sense. Thank you! 7  This is analogous to the relationship between monetary and fiscal policy, where the fiscal authority is in effect a Stackelberg leader. BIS central bankers’ speeches  9  References Adrian, Tobias, and Hyun S. Shin (2009). “Money, Liquidity and Monetary Policy”, American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 99, 600–605. Bean, Charles R. (2003). “Asset Prices, Financial Imbalances and Monetary Policy: Are Inflation Targets Enough?” in Anthony Richards and Timothy Robinson (eds.) Asset Prices and Monetary Policy, 48–76. Reserve Bank of Australia: Sydney. Bean, Charles R., Matthias Paustian, Adrian Penalver and Timothy Taylor (2010). “Monetary Policy after the Fall” in Macroeconomic Challenges: The Decade Ahead, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas: Kansas City. Bernanke, Ben S. (1983).

For instance, the Bank of England has introduced regular auctions of liquidity in which loans can be secured against either the safest collateral or, at a cost, a wider collateral set, including high-quality private securities. An increase in bids offering the wider collateral as security then provides an early warning of financial stress. And here, the Reserve Bank of Australia has also permanently widened the range of collateral it accepts. More recently, the movements in the size and composition of our respective balance sheets reflect transactions carried out for monetary policy purposes, especially our large-scale purchases of government debt (and, in the US case, also government-backed GSE debt and mortgage-backed securities) financed by the issuance of reserves. Commonly called “quantitative easing”, I shall say more about the efficacy of these operations later. Before the crisis, central banks saw these two objectives of monetary and financial stability as largely complementary in nature. According to the conventional wisdom, the maintenance of price stability would help foster stable macroeconomic conditions more generally by anchoring expectations. And the consequent reduction in macroeconomic volatility should help reduce the likelihood of episodes of financial instability. All that was necessary, then, was to ensure that banking regulators and supervisors ensured individual financial institutions followed appropriately responsible policies with regard to their lending decisions and were sufficiently well capitalised and all would be well. We know now that this confidence was misplaced.
This story was much more unique, as involved the first banking crisis in Europe since the EU single market was formed in the early 1990s. Today I am not going to talk about the build-up to these events, and I will have little to say about the second story. I have expanded on both in various publications and speeches that I can refer you to. Instead, I am going to talk about what happened to the Icelandic economy afterward – its deep recession and its recovery – and then reflect on some of the policy challenges that still face us. But let us first reflect on the distance that has been travelled since that fateful autumn of 2008. Iceland’s financial sector was crumbling, and the authorities had to take extraordinary measures to keep basic domestic banking services up and running, including letting the international part of the banking system go into resolution, wiping out all equity in the banks, and removing their managers. Many expected the sovereign to default on its obligations, which would have left Iceland shut out of international capital markets for years. A key aspect of crisis management was therefore to ring-fence the sovereign from the failing banks and minimise the socialisation of private sector losses. And Iceland was well on its way into its deepest post-war recession, where GDP contracted by 12.5% from its peak in the fourth quarter of 2007 to its trough nine quarters later, in the first quarter of 2010.

It fell from an unsustainable peak, of course, but the drop was spectacular nonetheless. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  Where are we now, almost five years later? First, there is hardly any talk of a potential sovereign default any more: the public sector has a primary surplus, the overall deficit is estimated to have been around 2% of GDP last year, government debt as a share of GDP is on a downward trajectory, and Iceland has investment-grade ratings from all three major rating agencies. Second, we are far advanced in rebuilding a domestically oriented financial sector. The new domestic banks, which were built on the ashes of the three failing cross-border banks, are profitable, well capitalised, liquid, and with nonperforming loan ratios that, although still high due the crisis, are falling to normal levels as private sector debt restructuring progresses and the economy recovers. Third, the economy has indeed recovered, as can been seen on Figure 1a. The economy has been growing since the second quarter of 2010, and unemployment has fallen from a peak of over 9% to around 5½%. And as Figure 1b shows, this year Iceland is projected to be among the world’s five fastest-growing advanced economies, with growth estimated at 2.1%, although that is due in part to the recent slowdown in many other advanced countries.
Other initiatives such as the harmonization of the regulatory framework in the region will also help foster an investment-friendly environment that encourage issuers to tap funds across the region using procedures, prospectus, and disclosure requirements they are familiar at home. Savers will also have a greater choice of diversification of their savings. As finance people, we are always conscious that finance always follows trade and production. Today, our region trades more with one another and invest more in each other’s market, which is confirmed by the ranking of Asian trading partners as top export destination  1  From 950 USD billion as of December 2001 to 5,700 USD billion at end 2011. 2  From 2,800 USD billion at end 2001 to 14,000 USD billion at end 2011. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  for most of our countries. It is therefore only natural that our financial markets become more integrated to enable our firms and enterprises to allocate resources where they most benefit themselves and the region. Notwithstanding these progress and ongoing works, there are challenges that come with a maturing and more integrated market. Some Asian bond markets experience, from time to time, market turbulence as foreign investors leave the market during the recent crisis period. These point to the limited ability of the market to manage large amount of foreign capital flows.

But harmonization takes time as the devil is in the details. And harmonization may go beyond regulations on the trade or issuance of bonds. As cross border initiatives, they inevitably involve regulations over international capital flows which we need to also respect both host country and home country authorities. For instance, the home country may allow their savers to invest abroad, but the recipient countries still maintain controls on inflows. Other regulators may permit non residents to make use of tools such as repo, as liquidity enhancing mechanism, but others may look at this measure as way to engage currency speculation. These are all delicate balancing acts which we would need to tackle as we strive to integrate our financial markets further. And while we pursue development and liberalization objectives we also need to strengthen our regional safety net. Today our regional cooperation has multilayer safety net consisting of Cross Border Collateral Arrangement (CBCA) for our banks to avail themselves of liquidity from the host central bank using collaterals at their home or head office, bilateral foreign exchange swap line, and the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralisation (CMIM) serves as second line of defense and should continue to be enhanced to counter possible market turbulence. As you have heard from the Minister of Strategy and Finance of Korea, Mr. Bahk Jaewan, the ASEAN+3 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors have made progress on important features of the CMIM. We have announced the doubling of the total size of the CMIM from $ billion to $ billion.
BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  information on household inflation expectations at the time; tested alternative wording of potential inflation expectations questions; studied the feasibility of eliciting individual uncertainty about future outcomes for inflation, house prices, and earnings growth; and introduced a panel dimension to the experimental data collection effort in order to study the persistence of inflation expectations and their responsiveness to inflation surprises. The HIEP considered different potential time horizons for its inflation expectations questions. For the short-term expectations, we settled on the one-year-ahead horizon – similar to the Michigan survey. We also examined the feasibility of asking for inflation expectations over a longer time horizon. The Michigan survey asks respondents by what percent per year they “expect prices to go up or down on the average, during the next 5 to 10 years”.17 We replicated this question in our experimental surveys, and found that the Michigan question elicits a mixture of interpretations, with some respondents using a 10-year horizon and others thinking about a 5-year horizon.18 From the results of our cognitive interviews and experimental surveys, we decided in the SCE to elicit medium-term inflation expectations at the one-year two-year-forward horizon.

The May results of the SCE showed an increase of 29 basis points from April in the median of the individual means (see Slide 6) and this can also be examined by holding the sample constant using the panel structure. In this case we find an increase of 27 basis points from April and the distribution shifting to the right, although the statistical significance of the change is more marginal than the decline over the longer period.38 As can be seen in Slide 9 there is a wide dispersion in views about future inflation held by consumers.39 This sort of analysis highlights the value of the panel nature of the SCE in yielding more robust measures of expectations. Let me turn next to the surveys of market professionals conducted by the New York Fed. Probabilistic questions on the surveys of primary dealers and market participants Ahead of each meeting of the FOMC, the Trading Desk of the New York Fed asks a group of financial market participants, including both primary dealers and buy-side investors, to provide their views on a range of economic and financial indicators. The Desk has surveyed the primary dealers for over a decade, and since 2011 it has made the questions and results of the Survey of Primary Dealers (SPD) publicly available.40 Beginning in 2014, the Desk also launched the Survey of Market Participants (SMP), which solicits views from active investment decision makers, such as mutual, pension, and hedge fund managers as well as corporate treasurers.