samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Jacqueline Loh: Act now to transition to SORA Keynote speech by Ms Jacqueline Loh, Deputy Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, at The Association of Banks in Singapore’s Roundtable Session on SGD Interest Rate Landscape Changes, Singapore, 9 September 2020. * * * 1 Good morning to everyone. First, let me thank Ai Boon and her team in ABS1 for organising this Roundtable session, and inviting me to speak. It is heartening to see the large number of participants comprising banks, as well as corporates, SME and retail customers joining this virtual session. This reflects the importance of the topic that we’re discussing today – the shifts in the interest rate benchmark landscape, and what we must do in preparation. 2 Interest rates in Singapore are determined by global developments given our exchange rate centred monetary policy framework. Against that, robust market-driven interest rate benchmarks, play an important role in the domestic financial system and the broader economy. Similar to other economies, interest rate benchmarks reflect the cost of borrowing in underlying markets. They are used widely by – banks, to price loans to individuals and businesses; financial market participants, in pricing financial products such as bonds, floating rate notes and interest rate swaps; and corporates, as a discount rate for financial reporting of its assets. 3 In Singapore, SIBOR and SOR2 have served as the key interest rate benchmarks in  Singapore Dollar (SGD) financial markets for decades.

Second, to facilitate market adoption, MAS also started publishing, on a daily basis, Compounded SORA rates for 1-month, 3-month and 6-month tenors, and a SORA Index.7 These provide market participants with a standardised and simplified way of obtaining compounded rates for any given tenor, and can easily be referenced in new SORA products of different maturities, to suit the needs of different customers. Third, to provide a market-based pricing reference for SORA cash products, and spur hedging activities through the SORA derivatives market, MAS has broadened our suite of money market instruments by issuing floating rate notes based on SORA (MAS SORA FRN). We are encouraged that the first two MAS SORA FRN auctions were met with strong market demand. Fourth, to facilitate price discovery in a nascent SORA derivatives market, MAS established in June, a daily auction process for SORA Overnight Indexed Swaps (or OIS) and SOR-SORA Basis Swaps up to 5-years in tenor. These are the key instruments for developing the SORA derivatives market and for facilitating a transition from SOR derivatives. Going forward, MAS will extend the auction tenors, and  make available this process to the wider interdealer market. 11 But MAS’ efforts alone are not enough to achieve a successful transition from SOR to SORA. The financial industry and its stakeholders have a critical role to play, given that you are the ultimate end-users.
But, like the SIB, the SROs operate indirectly under statute, and have a duty to regulate in the public interest. We therefore have no self-regulation in the strict sense, rather a variety of statutory and statute-backed bodies with practitioner involvement, each with different relationships with the industry and with Government. Effective regulation needs the input of all BIS Review 21/1997  -4-  participants in the market if it is to offer appropriate protection without stifling innovation. Regulators can benefit greatly from effective practitioner input but to retain the confidence of the investing public they must persuade them that regulation puts their interests, and not those of the firms and their shareholders, first. The system we now have is undoubtedly capable of achieving an appropriate balance between market sensitivity and consumer confidence; it has, in many respects, worked well. But it has been stress-tested in a number of difficult episodes: the Maxwell affair, the private pension mis-selling saga, the collapse of BCCI, Barings Bank and Sumitomo. These episodes have taught us something about the strengths and weaknesses of our system, just as the S&L crisis and the Daiwa New York problem have done in the US. Furthermore, markets themselves have moved on. The financial landscape of today is almost unrecognisable from the one which informed legislators’ views in the early 1980s, before the Banking and Financial Services Acts were put on the statute book.

Our April 1995 derivatives survey showed US firms (including securities houses) accounting for around 40% of turnover in both foreign exchange and interest rate derivatives. We therefore attach particular importance to international regulatory cooperation; and as the trend towards globalisation and multi-functionality continues it is becoming increasingly necessary. The Barings and Daiwa cases have highlighted the difficulty that banks can experience in controlling operations which are far from their head offices. Barings, in particular, demonstrated that losses in a subsidiary in a remote location, in a unit which was not thought to be assuming any significant market risk, can be big enough to bring about the failure of the parent. So home and host supervisors have a mutual interest in the health of the subsidiaries. Regulators will rightly be blamed if any reluctance on their part to work together either exacerbates a crisis or fails to prevent one that could otherwise have been avoided. It is possible to argue that an individual regulator can successfully meet his own objectives, by seeking to build firewalls between his entity and the rest of the group to which it belongs. These might include restrictions or even prohibitions on both financial exposures and operational interlinkages. In addition capital adequacy and other requirements might be set at a more onerous level than if the potential for parental support was taken into account. Such measures may be the best that can be achieved at present; they certainly provide host supervisors with a measure of comfort.
But it would have meant putting the whole of the economy, including the exposed sectors, at risk of accelerating inflation, and it would in all probability have meant a much sharper downturn in the economy as a whole a little further ahead. We’ve been round that buoy all too often before. And so we tightened policy, trying as best as we could through our tactics to minimise the unwanted upward pressure on the exchange rate. I know, Chairman, only too well that this will be cold comfort to many of you in the exposed sectors - but there’s no point in pretending things are other than they are. The present imbalance means that we are trying to maintain stability in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. But I will make one final point. The inflation target we have been set is symmetrical. A significant, sustained, fall below 2½% is to be regarded just as seriously as a significant, sustained, rise above it. And I give you my assurance that we will be just as rigorous in cutting interest rates if the overall evidence begins to point to our undershooting the target as we have been in raising them when the balance of risks was on the upside. There is now evidence that domestic demand growth is moderating, as it must do, and that the labour market is tightening more slowly than before.

And that, of course, is exactly what we do in fact do - using the vast array of official economic statistics and financial market data, all the publicly available and some private surveys and commentaries, as well as a wealth of anecdotal and structured survey evidence that we collect BIS Review 71/1998  -3-  ourselves, through our 16 non-executive directors, through the frequent visits which MPC members make around the country, and through meetings in London, and through our network of 12 regional, information-gathering and disseminating, agencies with their 7000 industrial contacts throughout the United Kingdom. And we openly display the facts as they are available to us, as well as our analysis and our conclusions, regularly through the publication of the minutes of our monthly meeting and in the quarterly Inflation Report. So when people say to me that the economy is headed for recession, I’m interested in comparing the evidence on which they base their views with our own evidence, and I want to know whether or not they are also saying that they expect us to undershoot the Government’s inflation target. Let’s just for a moment turn down the noise and look at some of the relevant facts as they relate to the economy as a whole. Since the economy started to recover from recession in the spring of 1992 - some 6½ years ago - overall output has grown at an average rate of about 3%.
We have seen a spike in borrowing costs in past few days. Do you believe that this debate about restructuring can become a selffulfilling prophecy? In the case of a euro area member state, and Greece is a euro area member state, talk of restructuring cannot become a self-fulfilling prophecy in the same sense that could have been the case for other countries that are not part of the European Union. The reason for that is very simple; in the European Union a member state can count on political support and solidarity from other member states. It would take a political decision against supporting a member state in need in order to force a restructuring in the sense you describe. So in my view, to the extent the Greek government continues to implement the programme of structural reforms that it is implementing right now, and to the extent that it recognises that a restructuring would be undesirable and unnecessary, then restructuring can be avoided so long as the Greek government enjoys the support of other member states in the European Union. Under these circumstances the support from other member states is critical. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  Q. Greece is expected to go back to the markets next year. Do you think this could still happen or do you think there is a need to extend the programme? I think this will be evaluated as time goes by.

In the current state of constant change, building the capacity of supervisors is one of the most critical priorities to guard against threats to stability without impeding growth and innovation. Finally, we need to create room for experimentation. While rules are not meant to restrict innovation, they often have the effect of doing so. This might end up leaving customers worse off, 4/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  and insurers exposed to higher business risks than necessary or appropriate. When faced with the stark choice of doing nothing and risking harm to public interests, or writing rules to control something that we do not yet fully understand, it is only sensible to experiment and learn from it. This point is also crucial, when technology offers so much potential to increase financial inclusion. Platform-based solutions and insure-tech companies are opening up insurance access to large segments of the population at a fraction of previous costs. To fully benefit from such possibilities, some regulators have adopted “regulatory sandboxes” to test solutions and design regulations that are appropriate. There will no doubt be other approaches taken to experiment and innovate. And when things do not work, we must be prepared to change tactics and strategy. Conclusion Over the last few decades, the global regulatory community has come together to build stronger supervisory systems and more resilient markets. Insurers have built extensive networks in their pursuit of growth.
Jürgen Stark: Towards a safer financial system Speech by Mr Jürgen Stark, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, at the Transatlantic Business Conference, organised by the American Chamber of Commerce, Frankfurt am Main, 9 November 2011. *  *  *  Ladies and Gentlemen, It is a pleasure for me to speak to you tonight at the Transatlantic Business Conference. 1. Looking back to 2008/09  It is exactly three years ago that the G20 Finance Ministers and Governors met for the first time after the Lehman default. In Sao Paulo, on 9th of November 2008, the Group of Twenty recognized that “the global economy is facing its most serious financial crisis and economic slowdown in decades”.1 In that meeting, they also pointed to the root causes that have led to the crisis: “[…] the current financial crisis is largely a result of excessive risk taking and faulty risk management practices in financial markets, inconsistent macroeconomic policies, which gave rise to domestic and external imbalances, as well as deficiencies in financial regulation and supervision in some advanced countries.” The G20 members drew the conclusion that “all countries […] must improve their regulatory and supervisory regimes.” Let me in my remarks tonight discuss where we stand with this G20 process and assess, particularly, what has been achieved regarding the financial market regulations agenda. My focus will be on the Basel III framework and the priorities for the future.

Jessica Chew Cheng Lian: Corporate governance at the Central Bank of Malaysia Opening speech by Ms Jessica Chew Cheng Lian, Assistant Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia, at the Third Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia-The Malaysian Institute of Certified Public Accountants (ICAA-MICPA) Audit Forum, Kuala Lumpur, 27 September 2012. *  *  *  It gives me great pleasure to be here this morning at the 3rd ICAA-MICPA Audit Forum. The theme for the Forum this year is the role of the audit committee within the context of corporate governance in insurance companies. It has been said that an audit committee is like a good insurance policy - it is better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it. I am certainly happy to know that we have established strong audit committee practice within our financial industry, and while admittedly, some institutions have moved further than others in improving the effectiveness of the audit committee, it represents without exception a core pillar of governance systems in our financial sector. I say this because as we speak, there are countries that are now debating the requirement for financial institutions to establish separate audit committees. There are a number of reasons why the theme chosen for this forum is particularly relevant in current times. Corporate governance problems have once again come under intense global scrutiny since the outbreak of the global financial crisis.
Domestically,3 UK households had accumulated a lot of debt in the run up to the crisis, much of it matched by an accumulation of assets. But households were dependent on economic growth being sustained and on house prices holding up. Property companies likewise, but with the added spice that there had been a boom in commercial real-estate construction. When crisis hit, the government’s balance sheet deteriorated dramatically, because the public finances were highly sensitive to taxes from finance and property and, most important, the UK’s fiscal “automatic stabilizers” are strong. Households and government have subsequently cut spending to repair their balance sheets. The corporate sector has built up what amounts to a cash mountain, some of which will probably find its way into investment as the cloud of uncertainty lifts, helping recovery. Sterling’s 2007/08 depreciation has softened the blow to demand. And if anything, that strengthened the country’s balance sheet because, in contrast to the EMEs discussed in the Draghi Report, the UK’s external liabilities are largely denominated in sterling while our external assets are denominated in foreign currency. 3  2  See Annex 1. BIS central bankers’ speeches  I could go through many other countries picking out ex ante vulnerabilities in their national balance sheets, and consequent ex post strains. Banking failures brought on a credit crunch, impaired economic growth, lowering wealth, and adding to the debt burden of borrowers, in what threatened to be a vicious circle.

Effectively implementing the enhanced governance framework, completing the banking union, and building a capital markets union to reduce risk and to allow for more private risk-sharing while establishing additional public risk- sharing mechanisms in parallel are some of the key near-term requirements in this regard. In the longer run, a more perfect EMU will form the basis for a stable, flourishing euro area economy that will not only enable the euro area to tackle challenges in other policy areas, but that will also be to the benefit of global economic and financial stability. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3
Peter Pang: Developing critical financial infrastructure between Hong Kong and Thailand Opening remarks by Mr Peter Pang, Deputy Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, at the HKMA-BOT Joint Press Conference on the Launch of US Dollar – Thai Baht PvP Link, Hong Kong, 28 July 2014. *  *  *  Deputy Governor, ladies and gentlemen, 1. Good afternoon. It is my great pleasure to welcome you all to this press conference jointly organised by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) and Bank of Thailand (BOT). I would like to thank Deputy Governor Mr. Krirk Vanikkul for joining me here to announce the launch of the payment-versus-payment (PvP) link between BAHTNET, the Thai Baht Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system in Thailand, and the US dollar RTGS system in Hong Kong. 2. Time flies. About a year ago the HKMA and BOT announced in Bangkok to build this PvP link. With the concerted effort of colleagues on both sides, the link went live today as scheduled, after completion of the system development and meticulous testing with the users. The banks in both jurisdictions have been fully engaged to ensure maximum readiness, on both technical and business fronts, for the launch of the link. 3. This PvP link is an iconic project that symbolises the determination of the HKMA and BOT to work together to promote financial integration and financial stability in the region through the linkage of critical financial infrastructure. It will bring significant benefits in three areas. 4.

They showed that GDP fell by only 0.3 per cent between the first and second quarters of this year, which was slightly better than we anticipated. Employment continued to fall in July, but less than expected, and unemployment fell by a tenth of a percentage point, which was better than market expectations. 2  2  IMF, World Economic Outlook Update, July 8 2009. BIS Review 98/2009  CPI inflation in the United States fell to -2.1 per cent in July, but when food and energy prices are excluded it fell to 1.5 per cent (see Figure 7). The underlying inflation rate measured in this way has been relatively stable in recent years and has only declined slightly over the past year. An important condition for a turnaround and stabilisation in the US economy is that house prices touch bottom and begin to rise again. Developments in real house prices in the United States since 1950 comprise a good example of a price bubble (see Figure 8). The question now is how far house prices will fall before the turnaround comes. The Federal Reserve notes in its most recent monetary policy report that developments in the housing market remain weak, although there are some signs of an improvement. 3 Euro area GDP growth in the euro area remains weak. According to the forecast in the Monetary Policy Report, GDP in the euro area will fall by an average of almost 5 per cent in 2009.
This is the right time to be discussing this topic, as we are experiencing the aftermath of one of the largest macroeconomic disruptions of the century. In the last three years, we lived through one of the most challenging times for policymakers, where governments and central banks were pushed to deploy everything at their hands to content the health and economic consequences of the pandemic, and lately to contain inflationary pressures. During these years we have learned that the effects of the Pandemic differed significantly between economies but also within households and firms of heterogeneous characteristics. The different exposure that households and firms have to credit conditions, supply chains, and final demand, affected their reaction to the original shock and also to the different policies. Firm size and household income distribution were important sources of heterogeneity to consider as well. Having widespread access to information regarding these dimensions was critical to develop sound policies. In response to these very challenging times, academia also reacted. Since early 2020, we witnessed an explosion of applied research that incorporated the lessons learned in the last 35 years in terms of the importance of considering firm and household heterogeneity to better understand the transmission mechanisms of fiscal and monetary policies. 1/5  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  This process of knowledge spillover from academia to policymaking is not something new.

Several objectives have indeed to be met: maximizing the spillover effects of 2/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  innovations, protecting the consumer and addressing financial stability issues, and ensuring that innovation is beneficial to all parties, in particular in the form of new services and costs reduction. Such a balance can only be reached through adequate and proportionate rules, based on the risk profile of the service provided and not on the nature or the legal status of the provider. This principle has guided European authorities in the review of the payment services directive, which will be thoroughly discussed during this afternoon’s session. On top of these regulatory changes, technological innovations reinforce the need for fruitful dialogue and cooperation between all parties concerned. At the French level for instance, this is the purpose of the “Fintech Forum” launched in July last year by the French prudential supervision and resolution authority, the ACPR, in coordination with the French Financial Markets Authority. The continuous dialogue between regulators, supervisors and companies will ensure that innovations are properly understood, that the necessary changes in regulation are identified in a timely manner and that information flows appropriately between stakeholders. We have also committed the Banque de France and the ACPR to a gradualist and proportionate approach in the regulation and supervision of Fintechs. We think it is still more appropriate than a “sandbox”, which could create threshold effects. At the European level, cooperation between all stakeholders has been enhanced in the field of payments, so as to prevent market fragmentation.