samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The requirement normally made of a settlement system is that settlement can be achieved even if the largest party should fail. This requirement is not met in Sweden and the security in the Swedish payment system would not be regarded as satisfactory in an international evaluation. VPC's owners, i.e. the banks, undertook to remedy this problem when they purchased VPC from the government. That was in spring 1999, and as far as I know nothing has yet been done. Common to all methods, unfortunately, is that they cost a lot of money to implement and this money has to come from the market players in some way. However, it should be in the interests of the market players that something is done. In the long run, it is unlikely that the banks' international counterparties will accept that settlement in Sweden is done through systems that are inferior to those in the rest of Europe, and with questionable security. It is reasonable that we should live up to the international standards now being established. It would be a defeat for the market if the government had to enforce solutions in this field through legislation. Starting point for a renaissance These brief comments show that there are challenges awaiting those who work on the Swedish fixed income market.

This is a question that in itself does not concern the choice of whether or not we should have electronic trading. All business is settles, whether this is done through a traditional market-maker system or by electronic trading. Those buying fixed income instruments want to be sure of receiving what they have bought an those selling want to receive the money they have been promised, regardless of the trading form. On the other hand, it is clear that it would be desirable to take the opportunity to design a new system that would provide a good means of handling settlements. This is particularly important as the increased volumes hoped for, which are the whole point of the new system, will create increased risks in terms of settlement. Today settlement on the fixed income market is done by means of net settlement in VPC. This works well in many ways and the routines are perceived as manageable by the market players, as far as I understand it. However, the system is nevertheless obsolete and involves risks. If one of the parties involved failed to meet its payments during the daily settlement, for instance, if one party was forced to make a suspension of payments or simply lacked sufficient liquidity, the situation could become troublesome. The existing routines can be called into question. One can imagine situations where settlement is not achieved, which could have consequences for the liquidity of the banking system. From the point of view of financial stability, this is an unsatisfactory situation.
So, on top of the various internship programmes we have been organising, we have just launched the Industry Project Masters Network pilot scheme which provides internship opportunities to postgraduate students to work on real-life fintech projects of banks. Another major initiative is the launch of a brand new Future Banking Bridging Programme in collaboration with HKIB and the industry. This Bridging Programme is free and provides good opportunities for university students to gain practical knowledge in the hottest areas of banking. The inaugural class will be open for application very soon. 33. In saying all this, we should not miss out existing banking practitioners. So, the second direction is to better “connect” our workforce to the future of banking to ensure they stay relevant in the new era. Our success will be all about upskilling our people to meet the future needs of the industry. For this to happen, an essential ingredient is the availability of in-demand training programmes with credible certification frameworks. 34. To date, more than 13,000 banking practitioners have obtained certifications in numerous professional areas under the Enhanced Competency Framework, or ECF. As the industry demand for fintech and green finance knowledge is strong, we will launch a new ECF on fintech later this year to provide more structured and comprehensive training programmes for fintech practitioners. We will also look into the feasibility of developing an ECF on green finance. 35.

The new service will be materially stronger and more resilient in an increasingly complex and sophisticated environment. It will be flexible to protect against the threats we understand today and the ones we will need to adapt to in the future. RTGS Renewal will promote greater access to payment systems. We have already made policy changes to allow non-bank payment service providers direct access to payment systems and RTGS Renewal will reduce 3  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  3  some of the barriers that we know exist today. It will speed up on-boarding times to the system and reduce the operational overheads of membership. These changes will further accelerate the number and range of firms that can gain direct access to payment systems. Since 2018 five non-bank payment service providers have opened accounts in RTGS and around twenty further firms are exploring the possibility of joining. These firms can benefit from faster transaction times and reduced individual transaction costs. Consequently, the Bank hopes to encourage a greater diversity of players in the payments market, thereby encouraging innovation and competition through development of new business models and ultimately creating a more diverse payments landscape. This will increase efficiency and reduce concentration risk thus supporting financial stability. RTGS Renewal will also promote resilience and efficiency through greater interoperability across payment systems. An important step to achieving this is the introduction of a new payment messaging standard for UK payments: ISO20022, the emerging global standard for payments messaging.
We need mechanisms to foster collaboration and co-creation ... … to translate ideas into products; bridge problems with solutions. People Let me start with the most critical part of ecosystem - people. The shortage of tech skills and talent is a global phenomenon. For a small city-state like Singapore, it is almost existential …. and that is why it is our top priority. Singapore is taking a multi-pronged approach: our institutes of higher learning are adapting their curriculum with industry input to develop students who are able to work with emerging technologies; our FIs are putting in place programmes to help re-skill mid-career professionals to take on the jobs of the future; and we will continue to welcome and embrace top talents from across the world to augment our own talent pool and raise the game here. Minister for Education, Ong Ye Kung, will speak more about skills and talent this Wednesday. Identity Let me then move on to the pain of verifying identity – the KYC problem. 3/9  BIS central bankers' speeches  For personal KYC, the Singapore government has taken the first step with National Digital Identity (NDI) … … which every resident of Singapore can use to establish his legal identity in a secure manner - with two-factor authentication and a public-private key pair - when making online transactions. A powerful component of NDI is MyInfo. This is a digital service that enables citizens to authorise third-parties to access their personal data sitting across many different government agencies.

When we began our FinTech journey in 2015, we imagined a Smart Financial Centre where innovation and technology are pervasive. We said we want to increase efficiency, manage risks better, create new opportunities, and improve people’s lives. We didn’t know – we still don’t know – how the future will look like… … but we imagined what we want it to look like, and set about trying to create it. Imagine a world where financial services are built around us – around our life and our needs. Imagine a world where identity is human. Imagine a world with no identity cards, no passwords, no mothers’ maiden name. We are who we are, not just what we have or what we remember. This is how we have always identified one another throughout history – by recognition, more human, more natural. But when we have large numbers of people and we don’t know one another, we had to resort to artificial means. 1/9  BIS central bankers' speeches  But advances in biometrics are now making identity human again. Many banks are already letting us use our face as our new banking password. Here in Singapore, OCBC Bank is already doing this. Next, imagine a world where payments are invisible. Our shopping experience will be transformed. Cameras and sensors identify us and the items that we place in and out of our shopping bag. And when we are done, we just walk out of the store!
Mr Duisenberg gives some views from the European Central Bank on EU enlargement  Text of the Zolotas Lecture given by Dr Willem F Duisenberg, President of the European Central Bank, held at the Bank of Greece, Athens on 15 October 1999. *  *  *  Introduction Ladies and gentlemen, Let me begin by saying that it is a great honour to be invited here to speak to you on such a prestigious occasion. This is particularly so given Governor Zolotas’ – or should I say Professor Zolotas’ – stature as perhaps the most significant contributor to Greek monetary history over the past few decades. Indeed, during Professor Zolotas’ time as Governor of the Bank of Greece, a period which, as we are all aware, extended well beyond two decades, the achievements of monetary policy were certainly quite impressive. The Greece of the early 1950s was certainly not the same as it is today. At that time the Greek economy, suffering from large fiscal deficits and high inflation, was in urgent need of a stable currency. It is thus a great tribute to Governor Zolotas that, for many years following his arrival at the Bank of Greece, the monetary stability that had only just been achieved was both maintained and combined with a particularly rapid rate of economic growth. It is therefore not surprising that this period in Greece’s economic history has so often been referred to as the “golden era of the drachma”.

In order to work on these issues, central banks and financial supervisory authorities have formed the Central Banks and Supervisors Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS). Norway is represented by Norges Bank and Finanstilsynet (Financial Supervisory Authority of Norway). The aims of the network include building knowledge and sharing best practices on climate risk management within the financial system. Climate change, the macroeconomy and monetary policy Natural disasters and extreme weather have an adverse impact on the production of goods and services. The agricultural sector is particularly vulnerable. But extreme weather events have also disrupted infrastructure and production chains. In the years ahead, climate change will lead to an increase in the frequency and intensity of weather events that have a negative impact on output. In Norway, monetary policy is the first line of defence against economic shocks. When Norges Bank sets the policy rate, most weight is usually given to the outlook for the Norwegian economy over the next few years. Thus, there could be implications for monetary policy if extreme weather events occur that affect inflation and output prospects within this horizon. Economists refer to events that unexpectedly reduce output as negative supply shocks. Such shocks typically push up the price of the affected goods. There are many examples worldwide of spikes in food prices following extreme weather events or long periods of drought. Electricity prices vary considerably in Norway depending on the amount of precipitation.
6  See also Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa: “…the sovereign debt crisis has finally alerted those who had not yet woken up to the fact, that interdependence has developed to such a degree that all of the Union’s member states – the strong, and the weak, the virtuous and the sinners – have lost their full economic, and even political sovereignty.”, in: The Debt Crisis in the Euro Area: Interest and Passions. Notre Europe Policy Brief No 16, May 2010. 7  See Ron Chernov (2004): Alexander Hamilton, The Penguin Press, New York NY. 4  BIS Review 87/2010  states will have no choice but to take decisive steps to address the underlying institutional flaws that led to the current debt crisis in Europe. This is decisively not the first time the European integration process arrives at a crossroad. Since it began in earnest sixty years ago, many severe challenges had to be overcome to bring Europe to where it is today. As Jean Monnet, the pre-eminent founding father of the EU wrote in his memoirs in 1976: “Europe will be forged in crises and it will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises”. 8 I have no doubt that Europe’s authorities will once again rise to the occasion. They will ultimately adopt the necessary solutions to overcome the current public debt and confidence crisis. In doing so, they will safeguard the long-standing European integration process that has proven so valuable to Switzerland and to the rest of the world.

I think this is now a conclusion shared by all Central Bankers in the world, whatever the regulatory environment they live in. An intimate knowledge of the banking sector and of different financial institutions is extremely helpful in managing periods of tensions and stress on money and credit markets. Central Banks have had to make almost instant judgment on the provision of liquidity in different forms and different maturities. There are circumstances where being able to assess the creditworthiness of market participants and the effective amplitude of their needs is of extreme help. More generally (and somehow academically), in times of crisis, the distinction between liquidity and solvency problems becomes both more important and much more difficult to make. Having, so to speak, all the cards in your hands, minimizes the risk of making mistakes. Second, as concerns the supervision infrastructure, it seems to me that clear, simple, robust and pragmatic arrangements have performed better than more sophisticated and elaborate schemes. As you know, I had myself to face a situation of acute crisis and make decisisions in real time, concerning a major, and internationally active, financial institution. At no time did I have the feeling that our current arrangements were deficient and prevented me for getting the necessary information and making the necessary decisions. As you also know, seen from a public interest perspective, we could solve the situation without any significant disturbance to capital market. Nobody knows about the future.
The low inflation in recent years has of course also made its mark on our internal work and we have invested considerable resources in trying to understand which factors lie behind it – both from a short-term perspective and in a more structural perspective. So, to conclude by returning to the question of whether everything will go back to the way it was before the financial crisis, I think the answer depends on what one is talking about. When it comes to analysis and working methods, the answer is very clear: they need to be adapted to new experiences and changed conditions to remain relevant. This type of change can be difficult to see for outsiders, but I can assure you the changes are taking place. With regard to major changes in the actual inflation-targeting policy, the answer is not so clear-cut. This remains an open question that spans legislation, research and all those working with monetary policy. References Ball, Laurence M. (2014), The Case for a Long-Run Inflation Target of Four Percent. IMF Working Paper WP/14/92. Bernanke, Ben S. (2015), Why are interest rates so low, part 2: Secular stagnation. Ben Bernanke’s blog, Brookings, 31 March. Billi, Roberto and Vredin, Anders (2014), Monetary policy and financial stability – a simple story. Sveriges Riksbank Economic Review, 2014:2, Sveriges Riksbank. Blanchard, Olivier (2015), Contours of Macroeconomic Policy in the Future. Blog post on iMFdirect 2 April 2015, http://blog-imfdirect.imf.org/. Blanchard, Olivier, Dell’Ariccia, Giovanni and Mauro, Paolo (2010), Rethinking Macro Policy. IMF Staff Position Note SPN/10/03, International Monetary Fund.

When an economy falls into a recession the central bank cuts its policy rate to boost demand and raise the too low inflation rate. If the recession is really deep, as during the financial crisis, the policy rate may need to be cut substantially. The average level of the policy rate largely depends on how high the inflation target is. If the inflation target is low, the average nominal policy rate is also low. This means that a low inflation target does not give very much scope to cut the policy rate before it hits its lower bound. The lower the inflation target, the more often one can thus count on the policy rate hitting this lower bound. Previously, it was assumed that the lower bound for the nominal interest rate was zero, but recently it has become clear that it is possible to have slightly negative policy rates. Less risk of hitting the “near zero lower bound” The higher the inflation target is, the greater the “buffer” monetary policy has if it is necessary to stimulate the economy – the nominal “close to zero rate” corresponds to a lower real interest rate. When the inflation-targeting policy was introduced in the early 1990s, a target of 2 per cent developed into something of a standard.
At end of 2006, the Bank of Albania closely cooperated with the Ministry of Finance in compiling the draft-law “On Preventing Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing”. In accordance with the respective European Union directives and other international recommendations, the Bank of Albania, being the supervisory authority of the banking system, regards with priority the legal framework improvement for preventing the use of banking system for laundering money and wealth that derive from criminal activities. During this year, with the assistance of the World Bank, the drafting and completion of the regulatory framework for foreign reserve management was carried out successfully, reviewing the Bank of Albania’s policy on the management of such reserve, the management criteria and terms, as well as the decentralization of decision-making competences during this process. Internal audit In 2006, 44 audits and 3 verification procedures were carried out. The inspectors presented 269 findings and 197 recommendations out of these audits, which were carried out at the Bank of Albania and at its five district branches, the Printing House included. 11. Bank of Albania balance sheet  During 2006, the Bank of Albania assets further increased, totalling ALL 255.5 billion, about 14 percent higher than at end 2005. The constituent groups, both foreign currency and domestic assets, have reflected growth, while the first group occupies about 68 per cent of total assets, the same level as that of the previous year.

As part of efforts to ensure sustainability in this new and more challenging environment, a Task Force on Islamic Finance and Global Financial Stability was formed by the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) and the Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB). The report, which was completed in April this year, sets out eight areas that need to be further strengthened to bring the Islamic financial system to a  2  BIS Review 95/2010  higher level of performance in this new economic and financial order that is emerging. A recommendation of the report is the establishment of an Islamic Financial Stability Forum (IFSF) based at the IFSB as a strategic platform for productive dialogues to promote financial stability in Islamic financial system. The IFSF would also be a platform for the Islamic financial system to interface with the conventional system via the Financial Stability Board to facilitate the common objective of achieving global financial stability. To enhance the efficiency of the Islamic financial institutions, a solution is currently being developed to facilitate liquidity management at both national and international level. A Liquidity Management Task Force was established by the IFSB and the IDB to develop this solution. This task force is expected to make key announcements later this year to facilitate cross border liquidity flows for efficient resource utilisation by Islamic financial institutions. Islamic finance has come a long way and is set to continue its trajectory upwards and onwards.
Better monitoring the general public's inflation expectations is not an easy task since inflation expectations of firms or consumers are not directly observable. For the moment, reliable data on consumers or firms’ inflation expectations are quite scarce in the euro area whereas in other jurisdictions expectation surveys have been developed quite extensively – famous and recent examples include the New York Fed Survey, the Tankan survey in Japan or the different surveys developed by the Bank of England. In this respect, the new Bundesbank household survey contributes to fill the gap and it is also an excellent example of the recent efforts made by central banks to collect new and better information on expectations of economic agents. II. Communication of central banks should also target households  For the moment, our most reliable information on the general public’s inflation expectations in the euro area comes from the consumer survey conducted by the European Commission. When comparing the different sources of inflation expectations with consumer survey expectations, we can see that they deliver a very different message on the level of inflation expectations, compared to financial markets. European households perceive an inflation rate close to 10% whereas their inflation expectations are closer to 5%. One implication of such a result is that we need to improve a lot our communication to a more general audience. Another conclusion we can draw is that, if households are not well aware of the level of inflation, they perceive quite well the overall evolution of inflation over time (Figure 2).

As a result, the Norwegian financial system only had limited exposure to the subprime mortgage market – notwithstanding some municipalities in the northern part of Norway that got involved, with a less than full understanding of inherent risks. Our banks were therefore relatively unaffected by the recent crisis when it comes to credit risk. The downturn that our economy experienced in 2009 was modest in relation to other countries – but this is of course also due to the composition of our production and exports, with oil accounting for a large share. More than two decades ago, in the early stages of the Norwegian banking crisis, Norges Bank provided a large liquidity loan to a savings bank. The bank, however, soon became insolvent. We learnt how fast illiquidity can turn into insolvency. At the time, the bank was rescued partly by Norges Bank writing off its loan. This incident showed that it was important to clarify the division of responsibilities between the central bank and the fiscal authorities. The Government Bank Insurance Fund was established, which would be able to extend loans and inject capital into distressed banks in the future. The aim was to make sure Norges Bank avoided intruding into the arena of the fiscal authorities. It is not up to an independent central bank to spend taxpayers’ money. When Norwegian banks’ funding dried up in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers collapse, government bonds were swapped for covered bonds issued by banks.