samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Among state banks in the US during the 19th and early 20th centuries, double liability is believed to have helped constrain risk-taking. 17 This practice was ended at the time of the Great Depression in the US. Given the likely need to rebuild bank equity in the future, now may not be the time to return to unlimited liability. Fortunately, there are two alternative approaches to adapting capital structure which alter the balance of risk-taking incentives, without jeopardising the flow of risk capital. Both involve operating not on equity, but on debt. And both involve making debt, like equity, a more loss-absorbing instrument in stress events. First, contingent capital is a means of automatically converting debt instruments into equity in the event of a capital top-up being needed. The capital structure of banks  16  Caprio and Honohan (2008). 17  Grossman (2001). 8  BIS Review 139/2009  thereby becomes more malleable. There has been recent interest in contingent capital instruments as a means of providing banks with an extra degree of freedom in stress situations. 18 The benefits in principle seem clear. The difficulties in practice include whether there is likely to be sufficient investor demand for such hybrid instruments. Second, wholesale debt instruments at present rank equally with retail deposits in the UK in the event of a wind-up. In the US, depositor preference has operated nationally since 1993, with retail deposits ranking ahead of wholesale debt.

New facilities were introduced that extended liquidity for longer durations against expanded sets of collateral (public and private) to new counterparties (bank and non-bank). This took last-resort lending to a new level. Some central banks went one step further, becoming effective market-makers of last resort in some assets to secure market liquidity. These were new and bold steps. A fourth dimension was transparency. With monetary, regulatory and operational policies all working in overdrive, central banks have had plenty of explaining to do. During the crisis, their actions have shaped the behaviour of pretty much every financial market and institution on the planet. So central banks’ words resonate as never previously. Rarely a day passes without a forensic media and market dissection of some central bank comment. These, too, are significant steps to have climbed. Where does this leave central banks today? We are not in Kansas any more. On monetary policy, we have gone from setting short safe rates to shaping rates of return on longer-term and wider classes of assets. On regulation, central banks have gone from spectator to player, with some granted micro-prudential as well as macro-prudential regulatory responsibilities. On operational matters, central banks have gone from market-watcher to market-shaper and market-maker across a broad class of assets and counterparties. On transparency, we have gone from blushing introvert to blooming extrovert. In short, central banks are essentially unrecognisable from a quarter of a century ago. Up or down? The key question, then, is where next?
This is why inflation did not shoot up and financial stability indicators were normal during the new spirals of oil price fall in August-September 2015 and December 2015 – January 2016. The floating exchange rate also allowed us to save gold and currency reserves, a cushion for the national economy. The second one is a moderately tight monetary policy, which allowed us to drag inflation down and move towards the 4% target by the end of 2017. In spring 2015, inflation came up to 15.0%, stood at 12.9% as of the end of last year, now it is 7.3%, and we expect a 5-6% inflation by the year end. When deciding on the key rate we always consider the economic environment. Therefore, after a dramatic key rate hike to 17% in December 2014, we were cutting it to 11% in the first half of 2015 and subsequently suspended the reduction as inflation risks had grown. On 10 June, the latest Board meeting decided to cut the key rate to 10.5%. Our monetary policy is guided by strategic priorities, consistency and adherence to market methods. We relied on conservative forecasts in our decision-making; unfortunately, it was a reasonable thing to do during the whole of 2015. As a result, we have managed to preserve confidence in the financial system, and the alarming assumptions that capital flow can be restricted or the printing press can be launched are no longer taken seriously. The third one is special measures of temporary or limited nature.

I hope this report will inspire new ideas to help solve corporate KYC problems in the most cost-efficient way because this is a problem that needs to be solved. We tried, we failed, we will learn, and we will do better next time. Innovation is about experimenting and learning from setbacks. Just as we showcase our successes, let us also be open about our setbacks. This is the spirit of enterprise we need in the financial sector and in Singapore. And we will continue to explore other ways to alleviate KYC pain for FIs and their customers. MAS and the GovTech are now working with the industry to facilitate FIs’ credit assessment of SMEs using trusted government data. 4/9  BIS central bankers' speeches  Today, young SMEs that wish to obtain bank financing may face difficulties due to the lack of credit history. We will help pool trusted data from government sources on the business and key individuals associated with the SMEs to facilitate a more informed credit assessment. We will run a pilot with three banks in the first half of next year. Payments Next, payments. We have substantially completed Singapore’s national e-payment infrastructure. There is FAST, a 24x7 real-time funds transfer infrastructure. There is PayNow, which rides on FAST to enable instant money transfer to an individual or business, using their personal ID number, mobile phone number, or unique entity number.
Children and youth are participants as well. They are undoubtedly part of every economy, part of the societies and their opinion matters. What we need to do today and tomorrow, is to make sure that all 70 children and youth participants from across Europe and Central Asia will present to the policy makers their action points for creating appropriate and sustainable youth economic opportunities. As the mission of Child and Youth Finance International states: “By ensuring youth are included as active participants in the decision-making process we believe that the policies shaped will be more youth-focused and inclusive, and the youth themselves will be more inclined to agree with the policies as they helped create them.” There is an existence of appreciation that the level and quality of financial education and financial inclusion of youth in every economy will have a significant impact on the prospect for sustainable growth. The financial inclusion will also provide an opportunity for further advancement that would support and facilitate sustainability of financial stability. A key point for ensuring the financial stability is the financial capability of consumers itself so that they can meaningfully participate in the financial system. Financial education is a powerful driver of empowerment of consumers’ skills. It empowers them with tools and knowledge on how to manage and make their personal financial decisions and budget. Smart financial planning such as the personal budget, savings, investments and retirement can help every household to enjoy better lives while diminishing financial shocks at the same time.

We will conduct a review of the effectiveness and the potential side effects of the monetary policy toolkit developed over the past decade. Finally, the review will include an examination of directions in which the economic and monetary analyses through which the ECB assesses the risks to price stability could be enhanced, as well as an evaluation of our communication practices. Our strategy review will have a long-term perspective, with the aim to build an efficient and lasting framework. It will not interfere with our meeting-by-meeting policy agenda, in which we will continue to set policy as appropriate given the evolving outlook. Our reaction function is clear and entirely data-driven. As we said after our last monetary policy deliberations, “the Governing Council continues to stand ready to adjust all of its instruments, as appropriate, to ensure that inflation moves towards its aim in a sustained manner, in line with its commitment to symmetry”. 3/3  BIS central bankers' speeches
International economic activity may result in inflation being even lower than in our main scenario, at the same time as a lastingly weak exchange rate that has no counterpart in poorer economic fundamentals could lead to upward pressure on prices. Increased financial unrest Financial unrest has grown since the September Report was published. It is difficult to foresee to what extent the crisis that began in Thailand almost a year and a half ago will affect the real industrialised economies in the West. The direct real economic effects via foreign trade will probably be relatively small. For economic activity and inflation in Sweden, the effects that could arise from decreased general confidence are more important. Share prices in Sweden have gone on falling since the September Report was published, wiping out not just the gains during 1998 but also a part of last year’s increase. Since the high in July, the Stockholm Exchange1 has dropped nearly 30 per cent, giving a fall of about 8 per cent from the level at the beginning of the year. Since the Inflation Report was published, share prices have fallen nearly 6 per cent. 1  Affärsvärlden’s general index. BIS Review 81/1998  -6Continued unrest and falling asset values would affect the behaviour of firms and consumers. If households and firms postpone investment and consumption decisions, economic activity will be lower.

Supervisory follow-up Let me now outline the next steps that the ECB plans to take to follow up on the results of our assessment of banks’ C&E disclosures. We have sent individual feedback letters to all banks under our direct supervision, setting out the key gaps in their disclosures and conveying our explicit expectation that they will take decisive action to address these gaps. In doing so, banks will ultimately ensure that their risk profile is transparently and comprehensively reflected in the information they disclose to the public. Addressing such gaps will also mean banks are well prepared to meet impending technical requirements. As I mentioned, the consequences of non-compliance with minimum transparency standards are only going to increase for banks, as legal and reputational risks are starting to materialise for banks which fail to step up the quality of their disclosures. More and more, clients, investors and other market participants want meaningful, comprehensive information on the climate-related actions of their banks. That way, they can make conscious, informed decisions about where their money goes. Moreover, failing to disclose exposure to risks, including C&E risks, constitutes a breach of the Capital Requirements Regulation. As such, we stand ready to use the full array of supervisory tools at our disposal to ensure banks’ C&E disclosures are up to our standards, and ultimately that eligible banks are prepared for the new regulatory requirements.
The position of the interest expense line is a deliberate choice to split the returns from business and the outflows to capital providers. This could be included in other lines to reflect the business funding model in order to support understanding of individual business lines economic returns however this tends to obscure our analysis and therefore supervisors prefer this approach.

A ‘D to Z’ of current issues in Insurance Supervision Speech given by David Rule, Executive Director of Insurance Supervision  Bank of America Merrill Lynch 23rd Annual Financials CEO Conference, London 26 September 2018  1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  Today I want to take you on a quick tour of a number of live issues in our supervision of insurers. Why a ‘D to Z’ and not an ‘A to Z’? Because I am not going to talk about ‘A’ for assets as I gave a speech earlier this year on the use of illiquid assets and particularly equity release mortgages to back annuities. I am not going to talk about ‘B’ for Brexit. And I am not going to talk about ‘C’ for Climate Change, on which the Bank is today releasing our banking climate change review.
The creation of a macroprudential framework with its own objectives, authorities and tools provides an important complement to monetary policy. In the long term, the complementarity naturally arises because the respective objectives are intertwined and one cannot be achieved without the other. At the same time, they complement each other equally well in the short term. When asset prices, leverage, financial exuberance and strength of the economy and inflationary pressures move in the same direction, monetary policy and macroprudential policy typically pull in the same direction too. On the other hand, when financial imbalances increase amid an environment characterised by relatively muted inflation, the twin goals of price stability and financial stability can be best achieved by resorting to two separate instruments, in line with the Tinbergen principle.4 While more restrictive monetary policy may be able to lean against the build-up of financial imbalances, targeted macroprudential measures are typically a more efficient way of addressing their causes. This is especially relevant in the euro area, given its multi-country composition. Macroprudential measures can be targeted to specific member countries to address the build-up of local imbalances, which cannot be addressed in an efficient manner by the single monetary policy. The presence of macroprudential policy should, however, not lead monetary policy to neglect financial stability issues.

Weak design of crisis management frameworks may also lead to ex ante excessive risk-taking in the private sector (e.g., “too-big-to-fail” behaviours) and, in cross-border crises, to a lack of trust and free-riding behaviours by crisis management authorities, amplifying the initial shock. Since the 1970s, the frequency of financial instability episodes has increased globally. This prolonged trend appears to coincide with the gradual undoing of the post-war financial and regulatory structures. The shift towards less stringent financial regulation, combined with 1/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  breakthroughs in financial innovation, has profoundly altered the incentive structures underpinning the financial industry. This is likely to have been a primary cause of the episodes of financial instability that punctuated the global economic history of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s and reached a climax with the global financial crisis.1 To prevent the emergence of such bad outcomes, a sound, system-wide approach to financial regulation is of the essence. But what is the role of monetary policy? Can monetary policy be conducted in a way that reduces the likelihood of financial instability? The long-running debate on these issues within academic and policy-making circles can be broadly broken down into three different viewpoints.2 The first is the “pre-crisis consensus” view, which argues that monetary policy should maintain a relatively narrow mandate of price stability, leaving financial stability to prudential authorities. Under this view, the monetary authority should only take financial stability concerns into account in so far as they affect the outlook for price stability and economic activity.
Fish, iron and steel exports showed the steepest declines. Employment stagnated early last autumn, but picked up again towards the end of the year. Unemployment edged up somewhat in the latter half of 2001, but has remained low. In February 2002, registered unemployment was 3.1 per cent, or 0.3 percentage points higher than one year earlier. Norwegian households seem relatively unaffected by the international downturn. Overall consumer confidence rose sharply in the first quarter of 2002, back to the level recorded early in 2000. Households’ confidence in their own financial situation remained high throughout the autumn, reflecting solid growth in real disposable income and a comfortable net asset position. BIS Review 20/2002  3  We estimate that price inflation, with unchanged interest rates, will be 2½ per cent two years ahead. The overall uncertainty surrounding the inflation projection is illustrated in this chart. On the whole, the risks seem balanced around our central projection of 2½ per cent. Norway’s real disposable income is highly affected by export prices. As most of the income from exports of oil and gas is transferred to the Government Petroleum Fund, the effects of the global downturn on the activity level in Norway have been limited. The Norwegian economy may weather the downturn without any substantial impact on the level of activity or employment, but with a continued risk of high growth in labour costs in the business and public sectors. Economic policy The guidelines for economic policy were revised last year.

Unlike most accession countries, Malta has always had a functioning market economy, driven by private ownership of productive assets and with much of it exposed to international competition. In general, therefore, the private sector has already proved that it can cope with adverse shocks. In this regard, the flexibility of the labour market has been especially important. This flexibility must, however, be enhanced in order to safeguard competitiveness. The EU accession process itself has stimulated important structural reforms in product and factor markets, ranging from the removal of barriers to trade to the liberalisation of the telecommunications industry. The privatisation of state-owned firms has also triggered important inflows of foreign direct investment, while the restructuring of the shipyards – a key employer - has begun to yield positive results. The pace of reform must, however, be sustained if we are to secure the productivity gains that would increase competitiveness in the tradable sector, buttress the exchange rate peg and bring about real convergence. Another crucial precondition for maintaining the exchange rate peg and ensuring a smooth transition to the single currency is financial sector stability. In this respect, a regulatory and supervisory framework based on high international standards is already in place. Maltese legislation in this area in fact incorporates almost all the features of the corresponding EU directives, and legislative amendments currently before Parliament will bring about almost total harmonisation.
Underscoring this more positive sentiment, the data on new orders and shipments of machinery and other capital goods have been increasing at a good clip and surveys of business purchasing managers point to growth in both the manufacturing and nonmanufacturing sectors. However, there are still some sectors – such as single-family housing markets – that continue to struggle. Starts of new single family houses are only about half of the way back to where they were even before the housing boom. In part, the weakness here reflects continued fallout from the financial crisis, as it is still the case that mortgage credit is hard to come by for those without the most pristine credit ratings. So what does this economic outlook mean for the achievement of the Fed’s dual mandate objectives? Underutilization in the labor market Let’s consider labor markets first. Output growth is key for producing healthier labor market conditions. Although the economic recovery generally has been weak, there has been enough cumulative progress to generate considerable improvement in the labor market. So where do we stand today? How much further do we have to go to fulfill our employment mandate? We can point to several measures to mark the progress we have made to date. Employment has been growing over 200,000 per month for quite some time. With expanding employment, the unemployment rate has fallen relatively rapidly.

As an institution, we have been blessed to have had pioneers who upheld the highest standards of excellence in our corporate conduct. The late Tun Ismail Ali, the first Malaysian governor from 1962 to 1980 was well known as a person of the highest integrity. I can recall his younger brother relating an episode in this regard. An aspiring architect at that time, he was told by the late Tun Ismail, not to ever set foot in the Bank while he was the Governor. Uncompromising and unyielding, we certainly should strive to assimilate Tun’s values and standards. Indeed, we are fortunate that his successors have continued his trademark standard of integrity, to the extent that it is deeply ingrained in our corporate DNA today. The Bank does not tolerate any wrongdoing which may tarnish its reputation, given that our solid reputation has been diligently built over the decades. We owe it to the public and future generations to preserve the integrity and credibility of the Bank. Thus, we have zero tolerance for unethical behaviour leading to fraud, including corruption. Staff must be mindful that their conduct must not give rise to any perception of corrupt practices. The Bank’s management will take stern action against those who perpetrate, facilitate or are complicit in such acts. We will not protect such wrongdoers and will cooperate with the relevant authorities to ensure that the appropriate punishments are meted out. In the last few years, the Bank has expanded its activities into project management.