samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
This percentage is expected to decline over the next few years, as banks tend to move towards vendor provided common solutions. Many Sri Lankan banks take pride in operating their own propriety systems, which may not be sustainable in the future. There appears to be reluctance on the part of the banks to move to common switches, common platforms or shared systems. This is partly because of the inordinate fear of one bank peeping into another’s operations, huge sums already spent on propriety systems or due to pressure from the staff or management to retain existing and workable systems. As long as these reservations exist and there is reluctance to use common or pooled infrastructure or shared technology, customers will continue to have limited or no benefits with no reduction in transaction costs. This is not to suggest that  6  BIS Review 13/2008  propriety systems and bespoke solutions should be discarded altogether. But, it is important to realize that many more benefits can be achieved and the same can be passed on to customers with integrated core banking solutions. 9.3  Design a customer-centric business vision  9.3.1 To begin with, banks should have a clear vision for future business directions and operating models and they should align IT processes accordingly. With respect to core banking solutions, they should use flexible, robust and future-oriented IT architecture based on a customer-centric approach.

Second, it can also provide perverse incentives for financial firms to grow bigger, more complex and more interconnected simply to secure public support and finally take on more risks. To answer these concerns, the policy response has focused on the issue of ‘too- big- to- fail’ institutions. The Financial Stability Board (FSB) has proposed that global systemic financial institutions should be better capitalized and be submitted to higher capital surcharges, proportional to their contribution to systemic risk. It has also recommended a tighter supervision of these institutions, notably by setting up Crisis management groups in charge of monitoring that these institutions develop appropriate resolution and recovery plans. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  It may be useful at this point to step back a little. The TBTF problem was not born with the crisis. The official recognition of a TBTF policy and the coinage of the term itself date back to 1984 during the testimony before Congress of the then US comptroller of the Currency on the government rescue of the bank Continental Illinois. Afterwards, a further 11 banks were identified as TBTF in an article in the Wall Street Journal. The fact that continental Illinois rescue led to a subsequent decrease in market discipline for these banks has been confirmed by several academic studies. The last crisis however gave rise to two important developments in the TBTF problem.
It would be dangerous to financial stability if we gave so large a capital carrot to banks to use the internal ratings based approach that many of the world's most important financial institutions, which account for the vast bulk of global and G10 domestic banking activity, saw a significant reduction of their regulatory capital requirement. It is the need to balance incentives with the maintenance of overall capital levels which makes this issue a difficult one. This, along with a large number of other questions about the impact of the proposals, will be further examined by the Committee in the course of a quantitative impact study to be carried out before finalising the proposals. The Bank of England has been asked to co-ordinate this work calibrating the impact of the new Accord on individual institutions and on the system as a whole. I recognise that the time allowed for this exercise is short, but I hope very much that we can count on the contribution and co-operation of the banking community. 2  BIS Review 29/2001  Turning to the second possible consequence of maintaining a risk insensitive alternative approach, we may find that the combination of having some banks on the IRB approach and some on the standard approach will, perversely, introduce a financial stability risk that is not present with all banks on the standard approach. This is that the more sophisticated institutions would have to hold more regulatory capital against weak loans than banks that remain on the standard approach.

Over the longer term, the instability, whether inherent or not, would decline if we have more developed financial and capital markets and also, by default, a multi-currency system as they reduce the risk concentration on one individual financial market and currency. Conclusion In closing, I believe that policymakers over the world need to focus our effort on all aspects of policy challenges in parallel including surveillance, financial market developments, regulations, and risk management. I strongly believe that market players respond to policy incentives and therefore policymakers have the responsibility to put the right policy and incentives in place. There is no quick fix and it will take a long time and painful adjustment before countries that were at the epicenter of the global crisis can resume normalcy. In Asia, we have taken a decade to strengthen our economic resilience. Because of our past efforts, we have been able to weather this crisis relatively well. That said, our work in Asia is still ongoing to strengthen the policy framework and tools to deal with future crisis that will surely not be the same as the last. Importantly, we are mindful that the world will have much less fiscal space to cushion potential global contraction, should the next crisis hit. While it may be easier to advance these efforts at the national level, achieving policy coordination on the global level will be much more difficult.
Therefore, in conclusion of this speech, being aware of the importance of statistics, I would like once again to emphasize the readiness of the officials in the National Bank of the Republic of Macedonia to cooperate with every institution in the country for the purpose of improving this, I would call it, "unsubstitutional food", for any kind of more serious economic analyses and providing fundamentals for economic decision-making of any kind. 4  BIS Review 100/2006

Institutional investors have been leveraging on Singapore’s strong connectivity and vibrant fund management ecosystem to access regional markets. There are currently some 220 VC and PE managers located in Singapore. VC and PE assets under management in Singapore has grown at an average 28% p.a. over the last 5 years. More than 75% of their investments are across ASEAN, South and North Asia. Third, the Singapore FinTech Festival. This is the largest financial technology event in the world. It drew more than 30,000 participants from more than 100 countries last year. There were 300 FinTech exhibition booths from 30 countries. The FinTech Festival is a platform for the global and Asian FinTech community – to learn new developments, exchange ideas, network and collaborate. The third edition of the Festival will be held in two weeks’ time, 12-16 Nov. A key component of the Festival is the Global Investor Summit, which brings together FinTech start-ups and investors and facilitates deal-making. This year, we have a new deal-making platform - called MATCH – to curate and showcase promising ASEAN start-ups and enterprises to local and global investors. Do check out the Global Investor Summit. To sum up, Asia is undergoing a digital transformation. The Asian FinTech scene in particular is blooming. Opportunities abound for long term investors. And Singapore sits at the centre of this exciting ecosystem of innovation and growth, from which to tap these opportunities. Thank you, and I hope to see you in two weeks’ time at the Singapore FinTech Festival.
Another benefit of a clear framework, which I think has received too little attention in academic circles, but which in my opinion has been important for the favourable outcome, is that it helps bolster both the internal work and the economic discussion. Other considerations than those purely related to inflation have most likely been put to a more rigorous intellectual test than would otherwise have been the case, which I think has been useful. However, the fact that inflation targeting has worked well does not mean, of course, that all problems have been solved and that there are no more issues worth discussing; if that were so, there would have been no reason to arrange this conference. By way of introduction, I intend to describe some Swedish experiences of a problem area in inflation targeting that I see as one of the more significant, perhaps even the most significant - how to deal with the trade-off between stabilising inflation and stabilising the real economy. I will focus in this regard on two of the areas central to this conference how policy is implemented and communicated. The inflation-real economy trade-off Flexible inflation targeting policy It is presumably safe to say that all inflation-targeting countries today conduct what Lars Svensson would call a flexible rather than a strict inflation targeting policy, even though the degree of flexibility  BIS Review 45/2005  1  probably varies somewhat from country to country. In other words, they are not, to use Mervyn King’s well-known expression, “inflation nutters”, i.e.

Compared to the Asian financial crisis twelve years ago, the dynamic of macroeconomic adjustment in this crisis also looks similar, although the trigger point this time is more bankled than currency-led. The real surprise, however, was in the timing, the scale, and the intensity of how the problem quickly deteriorated into a major global turbulence. According to the IMF, compared with the previous crises, the cost of the current crisis in terms of financial losses could be as high as 10 percent of US GDP. This implies a very substantial welfare loss. Is this the time of upheaval? My answer is both yes and no. The “No” part refers to the fact that, despite the magnitude of the current crisis, aggressive policy response and the willingness to do more by Governments have successfully contained the fallout to the extent that collapse of the global financial system has been avoided. Financial markets, to an appreciable extent, are stabilizing, risk appetite is returning, and signs of improvement in the real economy are beginning to emerge on a world-wide basis. Although it is still early days, they do point to the beginning of stabilization which is an important first step for economic recovery to take hold. The “Yes” part of my answer comes from what I see as a major challenge in the ideas and policies on how best to manage the global economy going forward in this era of globalized finance.
The storm last year in Asia struck essentially the ASEAN four - Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia - spreading subsequently to South Korea and intermittently battering Hong Kong and elsewhere. It is still not wholly clear - to me at least - quite why the storm struck suddenly when it did. Most crises of this sort have their origins in some evident macro-economic policy failure. At least in hindsight there are usually fairly clear tell-tale signs of expanding fiscal deficits and/or lax monetary policies, classically accompanied by evidence of imbalance in the form of accelerating inflation or a rapidly deteriorating balance of payments. There were such signs, perhaps most notably in Thailand; but they were not for the most part particularly pronounced in Asia. In fact through the first half of the 1990s, and in some cases for much longer, the countries in question had been remarkably successful. They attracted, by their very success, huge inflows of capital from the rest of the world, where yields had fallen, in the hope of sustaining higher returns. There is no question that this capital inflow made a very big contribution to the economic expansion in Asia; but with the benefit of hindsight, the accelerating scale of the inflow, and particularly the forms that it took, became an important part of the problem. It was not all in the end productively employed. There was over-investment in some sectors; much went into ambitious property development; and much went into financial rather than real assets.

So let me conclude with a few remarks on the prospects for the global economy, bearing in mind the potential economic aftershock from Asia’s financial disturbances. In fact those prospects are less bleak overall than you might suppose. The last few years have seen world growth at around 4%, against a longer-term average rate of just under 3½ % - with the improvement extending across both the industrial and the developing countries as a whole and with stabilisation now in the transition economies. Meanwhile, inflation has declined almost everywhere. The latest IMF projections suggest world growth of just over 3% this year - more than 1% less than was projected as recently as last October. The slowdown - and downward revisions are heavily concentrated on the Asian countries themselves, notably Japan, which, because of the massive size of its economy has a large impact on world growth. Elsewhere among the major industrial countries weaker demand from Asia is expected to be offset by relatively strong domestic demand, so that overall output growth is not much affected - indeed it is expected to pick up on the continent. A troublesome feature of these projected developments - coupled with recent exchange rate movements - is that they imply large external payments imbalances which will need to be carefully managed if they are not to lead to protectionist pressures and exchange market volatility.
Upon reflection, this makes sense given that, by definition, old small businesses are not growing. If they had been growing fast, they would no longer be small. A related fact is that the failure rate is quite high for new small businesses. Taken together, this implies that it is important to provide an environment that is conducive to new business formation. The more new businesses that are created, the more that have a chance of surviving and growing into larger, prosperous members of the local economy. On earlier visits in the District, I heard several small business owners voice their concern over their ability to access credit. Based on these conversations, I asked my research staff to investigate the degree to which they could substantiate with data whether Bronx small businesses seem credit-constrained relative to other boroughs or relative to other comparable counties across the country. They first looked at the share of small business loan amounts made in each borough relative to the share of small businesses located in each borough, using data for 2013 (the latest available at the time). If small business credit is equally available, then we would expect to see ratios of approximately one for each borough. What the data show is that the ratio is well below one for the Bronx and Staten Island, with the Bronx being the lowest. This is consistent with what I heard during my last visit.

Lending to small businesses and entrepreneurs requires deep knowledge of local business conditions and potential borrowers, both of which community banks have a comparative advantage in acquiring. Former Chairman Ben Bernanke in a 2012 interview summarized this point quite well. He stated that “community banks have the capacity to respond with greater agility to lending requests than their national competitors; they have more detailed knowledge of the needs of their customers and closer ties to the communities they serve.” 2 Given this critical role played by community banks for localities such as the Bronx, it is important to ensure that the local banking sector remains vibrant. The financial crisis offers important lessons for community banks in this regard. Lessons for community banks from the financial crisis America’s banking system began with community banks, and today they continue to play a critical role in the financial system. However, the number of commercial bank charters has declined by 50 percent since 1985, with the recent financial crisis contributing to this decline. A total of 417 banks and thrifts failed between 2006 through 2011. 3 Many community banks, though, not only survived but also thrived during the crisis. Why? What sets those banks apart from others that failed, or that survived but did not thrive? What were some common  2  The Importance of Community Banking: A Conversation with Chairman Ben Bernanke, Community Banking Connections, Third Quarter 2012.
Interest rates charged from the borrowers were set deliberately at levels higher than the normal going rates in the market to avoid any subsidy element 20 . This was necessary to maintain credit discipline, keep undeserving groups away from the project and ensure the long term viability and sustainability of beneficiaries who now have to reckon market costs when preparing micro business plans. The failure of many microfinance projects to realise their goals in many parts of the world can be traced to the failure of the promoters to adopt market based interest rates when designing credit schemes. The objective of subsidising the rates has been to make available low cost funds to the poor, but the subsidy itself generates an excess demand for funds and leads to a higher transaction cost for the borrowers. The transaction cost comes in the form of the opportunity cost of time, money and energy of the borrowers who now have to spend days and days around bank branches to have their loans approved and funds released. Hence, subsidised credit, instead of helping the poor, drives the poor to a greater agony and does not serve its true purpose 21 . Training, in both skills development and leadership, formed an integral part of the Isuru Project. This is because training was necessary to convert an otherwise unbankable group of poor people into bankable individuals with a high credit discipline and determination to take effective lasting measures to come out of poverty.

Once a group has completed about six months of mandatory savings and gone through the essential elements of social mobilisation, its members would be provided with an opportunity to acquire vocational skills as a prelude to preparing them to be future micro entrepreneurs. With this training, members are also encouraged to select their own micro enterprise and the change agents do not advise them what they should select. The only advice given to these up and coming micro entrepreneurs is that they should select any business line where the output could be sold within a radius of 15 km. from their homes. This way they were guided  18  This is in line with the traditional local culture which has always upheld savings as a core value of life. Even according to Buddhist scriptures, a wise household should save at least a quarter of his income as a safeguard against unforeseen events use a half of his income for further wealth creation. See, Singalowada Sutra. Dheega Nikaya. 19  In fact, as to be expected, the members initially resisted that they could not save that much when they did not even earn that amount of money. But, when it was shown to them that there was a vast amount of resources lying idle around them which could be tapped and they could cut certain inessential expenditures, they willingly participated in the savings programme. BIS Review 22/2008  5  to produce for the market and keep their selling costs at an affordable level.
Besides exchange rate movements, these include the development of world market prices and the level of resource utilisation in Sweden. The importance of domestic resource utilisation has to do, for example, with the fact that most imported goods are handled and processed in Sweden before reaching consumers and that raising prices is generally more difficult when demand is weak. When we look back at the 1990s in order to draw conclusions about the future, all these factors have to be born in mind. Let me cite a couple of examples. During 1994 and much of 1995 a comparatively weak exchange rate led to rising import prices but the pass-through to consumer prices was smaller than the Riksbank had anticipated. One explanation was that capacity utilisation turned out to be below the Riksbank’s assessment both because it was overestimated initially and because demand was weaker, partly as a result of the Riksbank’s interest rate hikes. Another explanation was the krona’s marked appreciation towards the end of 1995. In 1998 the krona weakened again in connection with the Russian crisis. On a 12-month basis the depreciation amounted at most to about 10 per cent. Even so, import prices did not rise; on the contrary, they actually fell a good way into 1999. This largely reflected the factor that triggered the crisis: one of the largest price falls in modern times in commodity markets, including a barrel price of oil down towards USD 10. The result was markedly decreased international export prices - the equivalent of our import prices.

Other reforms, such as the structural changes to banking models that are being contemplated in the UK and the implementation of wide-ranging reforms under the Dodd-Frank Act in the US, although not being imposed outside these countries, are nevertheless charting a path forward that is likely to have wider ramifications, given the significant cross-border operations of affected institutions, including in Asia. Like most jurisdictions, the options for central clearing for domestic OTC derivatives are also being examined. These reforms are already under way in the world’s larger financial markets to meet the G20 mandate for standardised OTC derivatives transactions to be centrally cleared by the end of 2012. For smaller OTC derivatives markets in Asia, the effects on domestic market efficiency and stability are key considerations in contemplating a move towards central clearing arrangements. A key concern is the potential for the offshore central clearing of transactions in key domestic markets to increase the stability risks to the domestic financial system. There will also be limited scope for domestic regulatory authorities to have oversight on such offshore central counterparties (CCP) and to respond during periods of financial stress. Domestic central clearing arrangements, however, could have negative effects on efficiency and the functioning of the market, in particular for cross border transactions. In addition, fragmented clearing arrangements could reduce netting  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  opportunities and collateral efficiencies, in turn raising costs to participants.