samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
This is a clear example of how the quality of the overall statistical system is higher than what the mere sum of independent products would be, were such products not well-connected. Micro data as the Holy Grail We can all agree that statistics have been undergoing a revolution in the last few years. Important technological advances have increased the ability to process huge amounts of data and productivity in this area has surged: policymakers and analysts have more and more information and details at their fingertips and now have the possibility of applying  1  more sophisticated models, designing more refined economic policy responses and answering more complex questions. Some of these changes stem from the experience of the Great Financial Crisis of the last decade. Then it was felt that only the availability of detailed information on economic agents’ positions (including cross-border ones) would allow the relevant policy authorities to thoroughly analyse the exposures of an increasingly interconnected global financial system and to better understand the monetary policy transmission mechanism and the massive deleveraging that followed. To close these gaps, the Eurosystem promoted a number of projects based on granular information. These included AnaCredit (to build up a Central Credit Register at the European level), the Securities Holding Statistics Database (which contains exhaustive security-by-security information on European portfolios) and Money Markets Statistical Reporting, where daily information at the transaction level is collected from financial institutions. In Spain, we also learned the lesson.

Those who accuse the ECB of an indirect violation of the prohibition on financing public debt with central bank money are making the same conceptual mistake as those who accuse the ECB of not having forced the banks to the use the funds acquired via the LTROs to supply credit to the private sector. In the first case, banks would have had to have been forced not to purchase government  BIS central bankers’ speeches  7  securities, and in the second case, to give credit to the private sector. Both groups of accusers forget that the policy of precise allocation of credit was a norm in various countries until the end of the 1970s. In the 1980s the operational system for monetary policy was radically redefined, principally on account of the heavily distorting effects of such an operational framework on economic activity. Moreover, legal arguments relating to the Treaty and to the current contractual form of repos underlying the LTROs, as well as considerations relating to feasibility, would make it difficult to reinstate such a framework. Finally, the behaviour of credit institutions with respect to households and businesses is not uniform across countries: while some countries saw negative credit developments, others saw growth in credit, in some cases even significant growth.
However there continues to be a lot of mixed views around how the changes can and should be initiated and implemented. The interconnectedness of the industry has resulted in the public viewing the industry as “one.” Therefore, I believe to address the tarnished reputation of the industry as a whole in a credible and sustainable way, firms must be willing to address it with a unified front. 6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Culture is a bit of a nebulous concept that tends to go unattended. Accepting that cultural change is a necessity, not a “nice to do,” is the first step in a long road that will require the participation of management, boards and every employee on your payroll. The culture within the organization will guide the behavior of employees, particularly when there are shades of gray. Therefore, if organizational values and norms conflict with the rules or guidance you are required to follow, the organization is headed for trouble. The failure to understand the purpose of a law or regulation may lead one to adopt an overly technical or game-like approach to compliance. Left uncorrected, this type of compliance arbitrage can fester and lead to micro-cultures lacking in respect for law. The recent enforcement actions addressing sanctions violations offer prime examples of this unfortunate and costly phenomenon. Last week we hosted a workshop on “Reforming Culture and Behavior in the Financial Services Industry” at our offices downtown.

In order to dampen shocks in a country and mitigate the contagion effects on other countries, close collaboration between a financial corporation’s home country and the host country in which it operates is necessary. In its latest annual report, the BIS writes the following: “Close cooperation between home and host authorities will be inevitable. And some responsibility will have to shift to host authorities for deciding on the settings that apply to exposures in their jurisdictions and for advising home authorities of local financial conditions.” Norwegian banks are part of a common Nordic banking market. The rapid expansion of foreign banks in the Norwegian market in the growth period from 2004 to 2008 was trimmed back during and after the crisis. I am afraid it must be said that they have amplified fluctuations in Norway. However, we assume that the decline in their market share is due to the impact of the international crisis, which has generally been more severe for foreign banks than for Norwegian banks. BIS Review 113/2010  9  Under the Basel Committee proposal, the time-varying capital buffer requirement will apply to all banks operating in a country, including branches of foreign banks. Home country authorities will enforce the buffer requirement imposed by host country authorities. This means that Norwegian supervisory authorities, for example, can impose a supplementary capital requirement in periods of high credit growth in Norway. The requirement will apply to Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and other banks that provide loans to Norwegian households and businesses.
It is far better to get individuals to invest their funds directly, instead of relying on the Government to do it for them. This will not only be better for developing the fund management industry. It will also promote the spirit of self-reliance and personal responsibility that is essential to Singapore’s success. Dr Richard Hu announced in the Budget Speech that MOF will introduce a Supplementary Retirement Scheme. This is a tax-advantaged vehicle for individuals to save for retirement, over and above CPF  BIS Review 30/2000  8  contributions, like US 401(k) accounts. If this scheme takes off, it will give a boost to the fund management and annuities industry. But the main issue is the CPF funds themselves. The CPF already allows members to invest their savings in unit trusts or other privately managed long term investment schemes. But most members still just leave their money with the CPF. We should find more effective ways to encourage and enable CPF members to look after their retirement 6. Conclusion  There is no turning back from our quest to liberalise and to go global. We will continue developing a more open and competitive environment, in order to create a dynamic and vibrant world-class financial centre. In this new regime, local financial institutions must upgrade and match international standards of management and technology, or risk becoming marginalised. MAS will work together with the industry in their efforts to meet this challenge.

These include moving to risk-based capital requirements and allowing brokerages to enter new businesses such as fund management and corporate finance. This will encourage them to go into higher value-added activities such as product origination. Debt We have made significant headway in developing the $ debt market. Last year saw $ bn worth of non-government $ issues, more than double the amount raised in 1998. To promote the bond market further, MAS will address both the government as well as statutory board issues. We will improve the efficiency and liquidity of the SGS market, and do more to encourage institutional investors to participate in the market. We have worked out a package of measures for this purpose, which we will announce soon. We will encourage more GLCs and statutory boards to tap the bond market for their funding needs. To broaden and deepen the debt market, we are studying ways to promote asset-backed securitisation, in particular mortgage-backed securities (MBS). We will also look at the feasibility of establishing a mortgage corporation. This would pool mortgages from financial institutions so as to jump-start the development of the MBS market. Sustaining a flow of foreign issuers remains the fundamental challenge. Global issuers will seek to diversify their funding currencies, and we have to offer Singapore as an efficient and credible marketplace, with the Singapore Dollar a stable and reliable currency of funding. Asian borrowers will also turn increasingly to the bond markets to reduce their reliance on bank funding.
At 1.6%, the price pressure on domestic goods still clearly exceeds that on foreign goods. The dashed red curve in the graph shows our latest inflation forecast, while the table contains the corresponding average annual inflation. Our new forecast rests on the assumption that after the surprisingly strong first quarter, growth in the US will be considerably weaker in the second quarter of this year. Subsequently, however, the US economy should gradually return to its potential growth path. BIS Review 39/2002  1  In Europe, the economy will stagnate until the middle of this year and should then again accelerate markedly. We expect that the dollar/euro rate will remain at about the current level and that the oil price will be around $ per barrel. On the assumption that the three-month Libor rate will remain stable at 1.25% during the next three years, inflation should average 0.9% in 2002, move up to 1.3% in 2003 and reach 1.6% in 2004. The forecast inflation will accelerate over time. Throughout the forecasting period, however, it will remain within the range of price stability. Until mid-2003, the forecast inflation will be considerably influenced by basis effects, which explains the various fluctuations. After that it will be largely determined by monetary policy effects. Until the beginning of 2004, the new forecast is very similar to the forecast of December 2001. In the new forecast, however, inflation then rises rapidly and at the end of the forecasting period it is only barely within the range of price stability.

If intermediation is costly, however, a spread, S, opens up between the two and the volume of loans will be lower, at L. Relating L to this spread then generates a demand for intermediated funds as a decreasing function of the spread: the XD schedule in the right-hand panel of Chart 6. To determine the value of this spread, we then need a model of the supply of intermediation services, XS. Given our earlier discussion, this is just the net worth of the intermediaries multiplied by their desired leverage. Desired leverage is, in turn, likely to be higher the greater is the spread between the return on investments and the cost of funds. It is also likely to be lower the greater the degree of uncertainty about the environment. So the schedule will be upward sloping, and lie further to the right, the higher is bank capital. Moreover, the schedule should be flat for low levels of leverage, as the prospect of bank creditors losing money is then negligible and the spread just needs to cover the actual costs of intermediation, such as running a branch network. But as leverage rises, so there is an increasing risk of loss to creditors and the interest rate paid to the suppliers of unsecured bank debt needs to reflect that. If the state is believed to guarantee all bank debts, then XS will be flat.
Second, as can be seen on the next slide, increasing excess liquidity has led to a notable decline in the share of trades backed by general collateral (GC), which is traditionally used to obtain funding for cash management purposes. This may suggest that proceeds from the sales of securities, together with the ECB conducting its main refinancing operations at fixed rate full allotment, have increasingly acted as a substitute for funding in the interbank market. At the same time, we have observed an appreciable increase in collateral-driven or specific repos. You can see this on the right-hand side. In other words, repos are increasingly conducted as a means to move securities among market participants, not primarily to raise cash.6 There might be several reasons for this. Smaller inventories held by market-makers after the crisis, for example, may cause them to source bonds in the repo market more often. Alternatively, short-selling activity may have increased, a phenomenon often observed at, or close to, monetary policy turning points when investors expect yields to rise. One factor that is likely to have contributed to the rise in special repos is policy-induced scarcity, however. This can best be seen when considering the German Bund market. Here, our purchases have absorbed a multiple of net issuance in recent years, meaning that we have actively reduced the stock of outstanding bonds held by private market participants.

The introduction of the euro has profoundly changed the environment in which the Swiss economy operates. Since 1999, the Swiss franc has coexisted quite harmoniously with the euro. In fact, the franc has been more stable against the euro than it was against the D mark. This is good news for Swiss companies exporting to the European market. On the other hand, such companies have to contend with a greater concentration of foreign-exchange risks. They are responding to this challenge with hedging policies that are more active than those pursued in the past. Pegging the franc to the euro in order to eliminate exchange-rate risks would entail more problems than advantages, as it would inevitably push up the level of interest rates in Switzerland. Against this backdrop, the National Bank is continuing to pursue an independent monetary policy that takes account not only of economic trends and inflation forecasts but also of the situation on the foreign exchange markets. BIS Review 10/2004  1
A clear illustration of this renewal and redirection of competence at the Riksbank is that the number of employees has fallen significantly in this period from 1,100–1,200 including companies, or 750 excluding companies, to the current level of 350, while personnel costs are at approximately the same level as previously. Today, more than 70 per cent of our employees have an academic degree and we have some 50 PhDs. I am sure that the same tendencies can be seen in other central banks. The concrete effects of this in our case are that we have reduced our involvement in cash management to a minimum, subcontracted the production of statistics, rationalised our administration and so on. In other words, we simply decided to perform only those tasks that we had the potential to perform better than anyone else. Only around 5 per cent of the Riksbank's employees worked directly with monetary policy and financial stability when we began this journey (even fewer if we include all those who worked with the manufacture of cash in our companies); today, more than one third of our employees work in these policy fields. Traditional operational duties for a central bank like cash management, payment system, asset management and statistics still occupy a significant share of our workforce, but they are not dominating the organization like they used to. Managing independent and self-financed institutions, we must find ways to constantly put the pressure of efficiency on the organisation ourselves.

Consequently, applying the policy rate or regulatory tools as the situation requires may be the most practical path. Let me now shift the focus from monetary policy to the work on financial stability, but the issue will still to a large extent be how to achieve a balance between financial stability and monetary policy. Challenges for regulatory design Not only the regulations but also the whole area of macro-prudential surveillance aiming at financial system stability have become a highly topical issue in the aftermath of the latest crisis. Prior to the crisis, financial regulation was excessively focused upon individual institutions under the erroneous assumption that the system would remain stable as long as the individual institutions were stable. Consequently, processes that created risks on the system level were ignored. I certainly welcome the current international discussion regarding the inclusion of more explicit systemic-risk preventive regulations, or macro-prudential regulation, in the regulatory framework. An important challenge for the design of a new regulatory framework will lie in finding an appropriate balance: On the one hand, the regulations will need to be sufficient to effectively reduce the risk of financial crisis; on the other hand they should not be so stringent as to impose unnecessary costs on the financial sector. It is a matter of finding the right level of regulation. In this context it is very illuminating to read the so called MAG and LEI reports which attempt to translate various levels of Basel III-regulation into estimated higher interest costs for the end-borrower.
Prasarn Trairatvorakul: Financial crises and the future of global and Asian banking Statement by Dr Prasarn Trairatvorakul, Governor of the Bank of Thailand, at the Sasin Bangkok Forum 2012 Plenary Session “Financial Crises and The Future of Global and Asian Banking”, Bangkok, 9 July 2012. *  *  *  Theme: “Strategy for Known-Unknown”. The critical success factors are 3 Cs: Coordination of regulators, Commitment forged by Inclusiveness, and Communal responsibility to restore market mechanism as a pillar of governance and financial discipline. Good morning. It is an honor to join all of you today. I would like to thank Sasin for organizing this forum and for inviting me. Over the past three decades, Sasin has played an important role in grooming business and policy leaders who have been instrumental in building Thailand’s open and competitive economy. Today, we are facing another critical juncture for Thailand and the global economy. This forum has brought together the world’s leaders in public policy, businesses, as well as academia, and is therefore a rare opportunity for dialogue on our strategy going forward. Ladies and gentlemen, This brings me to the topic of my remark today. The future of banking industry at the global level and in Asia is being shaped by three major forces, namely, the fragile global economy, global financial regulatory reforms, and the rise of Asia which faces its own developmental challenges. These forces are interrelated and complex, no one can claim to fully understand the final outcome.

The transformation of the financial landscape seems to be gaining momentum Indeed, since the last edition of the Fintech R:evolution event and my speech – by videoconference – last year, the French fintech landscape has already changed. First of all, of course, the health crisis and the ensuing social distancing have reinforced the digitalisation of practices, sped up the digital transition and strengthened the business models of many fintechs. On the flip side, it has also intensified cyber risks and highlighted the need for greater vigilance in the face of these operational risks, which have, and could have in the future, an increasingly marked systemic dimension. The year 2021 has also been the year of unicorns for French fintechs. More generally, t h e amount of funds raised, as regularly published by France Fintech, has increased spectacularly: EUR 1.7 billion at the end of August 2021, compared to EUR 830 million in 2020... and less than EUR 400 million just three years ago in 2018! It is not my intention today to comment on these figures: I do, however, see in them the undeniable sign of a maturing of the French fintech ecosystem. And also the sign of a diversification: because at the same time as we are witnessing the first French fintech players grow, we are continuing to see a wealth of new projects, new ideas, new practices: in insurtech, fractional payments, the platformisation of services and the early stages of “open finance", to mention but a few examples.
On the other hand, the outcome of last year’s wage settlement, and the debate that followed, indicate that the social partners have not yet internalised the monetary policy response pattern ensuing from 3 the mandate laid down by the Government and the Storting. Exchange rate developments The krone has appreciated considerably since summer 2000. There may be many reasons for this. Relationships in the foreign exchange market are unstable. There are nevertheless some fundamental forces that influence the krone exchange rate. The phasing in of petroleum revenues and the economic situation affect the exchange rate. In addition, the real exchange rate has a tendency to return to its normal level if there are substantial deviations over time. Moreover, the krone can be influenced by shifts and changes in wage formation, and the krone exchange rate can also be affected by external factors. Increased spending of petroleum revenues or expectations of increased use of petroleum revenues may lead to an appreciation of the krone. Increased use of petroleum revenues over the central government budget implies higher demand. The contest for economic resources will then result in a further scaling back of internationally exposed industries to make room for more sheltered activities. With low and stable inflation, this restructuring might take place as a result of a stronger krone exchange rate. Such exchange rate movements will typically come in waves. As petroleum revenues are being phased in, the real interest rate will tend to rise. The real exchange rate may appreciate, which means deterioration in competitiveness.

This practice is also in line with recommendations in economic literature. Commodity-exporting countries tend to experience wide fluctuations in their exchange rate. Australia is one example. Fluctuations in commodity prices lead to changes in countries’ terms of trade, which measures the ratio of export to import prices. Fluctuations in the terms of trade affect the exchange rate. This dampens the effects of commodity price changes on profitability in business and industry. The exchange rate thus serves as a buffer against changes in the terms of trade. In Norway, the petroleum fund mechanism and the fiscal guidelines dampen the effect on the exchange rate of changes in oil prices. We have nevertheless stated previously that we must be prepared for fluctuations in the value of our currency that are more in line with the fluctuations observed in other countries. The exchange rate will vary. The exchange rate may also act as an automatic stabiliser. In periods when economic activity is too high - or there are expectations of overheating - the exchange rate may appreciate, even if Norges Bank does not change the key rates. Similarly, the exchange rate may depreciate if the activity level is too low. 2  BIS Review 2/2003  In the long term, monetary policy determines the average level of inflation. Therefore, over time, monetary policy also has a significant influence on the nominal exchange rate. Output is determined by the supply of labour, capital and technology.