samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
First, it sets out an account of the developments in the economy and the conduct of monetary policy and financial sector policies in the year 2006. It also presents an evaluation of the key sectoral developments in 2006, the policy measures taken and the expected impact of such measures on the country’s macro-economic environment. Second, it examines the challenges in meeting monetary policy objectives and financial stability in 2007 and beyond. Third, the statement provides a detailed account of the Central Bank’s monetary policy strategy in 2007 and beyond, as a major mechanism to drive the economy along a low – inflationary/high - growth path, supported by a series of other policies and strategies. Fourth, it discloses the policies for financial system stability in 2007 and beyond. BIS Review8/2007  1  Fifth, it presents the identified policies for strengthening the economy, through the encouragement of high savings and investment. While we hope you would find our statement of interest, we wish to mention that, in the light of any unexpected external and internal developments, we may sometimes deviate from the strategies or targets as explained today. In such an event, we would, at that time, communicate our reasoning for such deviations for your understanding as well. 3.

It might be of some interest that the possibility that the Icelandic banks might fail in precisely the way they did was much more widely foreseen than is currently acknowledged. Available on the BIS website is a speech that I gave on 18 May 2007 before the Institut International d’Études Bancaires, entitled Financial globalisation and challenges for prudential policies and macroeconomic management, where I said: “...emergency liquidity assistance will be complicated or even impossible for central banks to deliver when internationally active banks face liquidity problems in currencies other than that of their home country. Iceland is a case in point.” 4 But this was before the breakout of the financial turmoil in August of the same year, and in company with many others, I saw this as a tail event rather than an immediate possibility, although concern was beginning to creep in. However, as the financial crisis intensified, the risks mounted, and by early 2008, both the banks themselves and the Icelandic authorities were acutely aware of it. 5 This is why the Central Bank was actively seeking to conclude FX swap agreements with major central banks and why, in May 2008, parliament authorised large-scale foreign borrowing in order to boost reserves. Both efforts were largely unsuccessful, except for the € bn swap agreement with the Nordic countries. The committee investigating the collapse will probably throw light on why that was. 3  Moody’s Global Credit Research (2009). Corporate Default and Recovery Rates, 1920–2008. 26 February 2009. 4  Gudmundsson, Már (2007).
A risk management unit has been established to manage operational risks more effectively, by reviewing and monitoring areas of risks in central bank operations with a view to taking forward looking risk mitigation actions. Another important area that has been strengthened is in the process of monetary policy operation. The inflation targeting framework adopted by Thailand provides sufficient flexibility to take care of the challenges facing the economy. Through regular communication with the market and through open discussions on public policy issues, the central bank has fostered and enhanced the participation of academic and market interests. The Bank of Thailand’s monetary policy-making process was reformed to ensure a balance of transparency, independence and accountability. This is with the belief that transparency of operation limits discretion and leads to accountability. The Bank quickly moved towards greater openness in the provision of data and timely economic information. It is our belief that public acceptance and understanding of monetary policy is most important. And this will come about only with greater transparency and predictability. Conclusion Ladies and gentlemen, In conclusion, I hope that I have given you some updates and direction of where we are heading in this current environment. The experiences of Thailand are not significantly different from other countries emerging from a crisis and I therefore welcome any comments and suggestions which you may have. Before leaving you today, may I thank you once again for the honour to address this distinguished forum.

4  BIS Review 70/2001  The Bank of Thailand has announced new rules for the Internet banking – simply what can be done over the counter, will be allowed over the Internet. This should facilitate development of financial products in this area. ·  And for the alternate forms of financial intermediaries, capital market, bond market, and equity market will play a greater role in the future. They will help increase the efficiency of our banks’ operations by providing new instruments to help manage, mitigate and repackage risks. ·  The second agenda of the financial sector reform is enhancing our risk management capacity, particularly of the Thai regulatory bodies and financial institutions. On this front, our Supervision Group have moved from regulation and transaction-testing toward riskbased supervision early this year. ·  From our preliminary assessment, these changes have fostered corresponding and encouraging changes in the Thai financial institutions. Several have hired foreign consultants to transfer the know-how and adopted the best international practices on risk management, while many have imported several standard off-the-shelves risk management software to help improve their current practices. Of course, there remain several impediments to change; these include scarce and expensive human resource in this particular field, and it is even more difficult to re-engineer the business process to ensure that such resources are employed productively. ·  The New Accord is a major challenge and milestone in this area.
One lesson that authorities in this part of the world drew from the financial crisis in the late 1990s was that strong policy fundamentals are not always enough to guard against the vagaries of international capital flows. A sizable cushion of international reserves is important as a buffer to guard against sudden changes in market sentiments that can lead to capital outflows and pressures on the currency. Starting shortly after the Asian financial crisis reserves were thus accumulated in the region to build up such buffers. But holding large amounts of reserves is of course costly as they are typically invested in highly liquid assets with relatively low yields compared with some alternative uses of the funds. It is partly for this reason that authorities in the region have taken steps to create a mechanism for pooling some of their reserves in the form of the Chiang Mai initiative which started in year 2000 and its multilateral extension which was agreed on in 2010. While the size of the pool of reserves under the Chiang Mai agreement is relatively modest compared to the potential needs for some of the larger economies in the region, the importance of the agreement goes far beyond the aggregate amount of reserves involves. It reflects a desire by authorities in the region to foster financial cooperation in the region while at the same time creating arrangements which will help safe-guard financial stability.

Conclusion As a source as well as a destination for investments, Asia presents compelling prospects for the hedge fund industry. Singapore’s strategic location makes us well-placed to serve as a hub with strong physical connectivity, trade and financial linkages to the rest of Asia. Together with our strong commitment to growing a well-regulated fund management industry, this makes Singapore an ideal vantage point for asset managers to understand Asia and to manage pan-Asian investments. So it leaves me now to congratulate SALT on its inaugural Asian leg of the SALT Conference. I wish all of you a fruitful conference ahead. Thank you. 7  Preqin/Global ARC Study of Asian Institutional Hedge Fund Investments 2012  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3
Firms specializing in automated trading generally participate in trading venues with “protocols” that allow for highspeed activity, most notably those operating with a Central Limit Order Book (or “CLOB”). CLOBs have long been a fixture of the futures, FX, and equity markets, and allow participating firms to place anonymous orders to buy or sell securities into a standing queue, and to rapidly execute such orders at any given moment in time.7 In the Treasury market, automated trading has become most pronounced in the Treasury futures market and the interdealer market for on-the-run securities, both of which operate with a CLOB protocol. In fact, proprietary automated trading firms are believed to account for over half of the volume transacted over the major interdealer trading platforms. It is helpful to think of two basic types of automated trading strategies: those whose primary purpose is to earn a return by making markets, and those whose primary purpose is to generate excess returns – what market participants sometimes call “alpha-seeking” strategies. A market-making algorithm might be designed to supply liquidity to a CLOB under a set of rules that depend on, for example, historical analysis of market and order book dynamics. An alpha-seeking strategy, on the other hand, might better describe a set of trading practices that is more likely to consume liquidity to produce excess returns. Examples of alpha-seeking strategies might be momentum detection, statistical arbitrage, and spread trading.8 One important difference between most automated trading firms and traditional brokerdealers is their balance sheet properties.

Clearly automated trading likely played an important role in the speed of transmission of price movements from the Treasury market to other markets, since such technology allows investors to quickly identify and execute trades that are predicated on tight linkages between different markets. At the same time, some have suggested that firms engaging in automated trading may have “unplugged” their systems or carried out strategies that prompted or exacerbated the volatility. To be sure, the response of firms relying heavily on automated trading strategies to market volatility may be different than that of non-automated participants, given the ability of automated systems to rapidly adjust their risk exposure in response to evolving order book and market price dynamics. However, a wholesale retreat on October 15 is inconsistent with the extraordinarily high trading volumes observed throughout the day, and the continuous nature of trading that occurred even during the most volatile periods. Indeed, some past periods of very sharp changes in financial asset prices have been characterized by prices “gapping” from one point to another, with little trading in between. But this appears not to have been the case on October 15. Even so, it is possible that changes in the participation or behavior of firms employing automated strategies – including broker-dealers and proprietary trading firms – had an effect on market liquidity and price movements that day, even if there was no wholesale disengagement.
I now come to central banks’ foreign exchange market interventions. The exchange rate is an important variable for a small open economy like Switzerland, and thus for its monetary policy. Yet the SNB only rarely intervened directly in the market in previous decades, and 5  6 7  In addition to the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan have also introduced securities purchase programmes. With respect to Switzerland, the SNB’s purchases of Swiss franc bonds in 2009 and the large-scale repo transactions and foreign exchange swaps concluded in August 2011 may be termed quantitative easing. These are exchange-traded funds which replicate the TOPIX, Nikkei 225 or JPX-Nikkei 400 indices. Andrade et al. (2016), The ECB’s asset purchase programme: an early assessment, ECB Working Paper Series, No. 1856, September 2016. Page 4/8  then only with small amounts. Since March 2009, this has changed. It was at this point that the SNB began buying foreign currency on a large scale, in order to counter excessive upward pressure on the Swiss franc and prevent an undesirable tightening of monetary conditions in Switzerland. Alongside the negative interest rate, our willingness to intervene in the foreign exchange market as necessary constitutes a key element of our current monetary policy. To sum up my remarks so far: the sphere of influence of monetary policy on the financial markets has increased markedly with the broad application of unconventional measures.

Speech  Embargo 17 November 2016, 6.30 pm  Financial markets and monetary policy implementation – an evolving relationship Money Market Event  Andréa M. Maechler Member of the Governing Board ∗ Swiss National Bank Geneva, 17 November 2016 © Swiss National Bank (speech given in French)  ∗ The speaker would like to thank Dirk Faltin and Martin Weder for their valuable support in drafting this speech. She also extends her thanks to Roman Baumann, Oliver Gloede and Marco Huwiler for their helpful comments, to Ramon Jud for preparing the data and to the SNB Language Services. Page 1/8  Ladies and gentlemen Welcome to the SNB’s Money Market Event in Geneva. It is a great pleasure for me to be able to address you here today for the second time. Last year, my speech centred entirely around monetary policy itself. Today, I would like to focus on its implementation in the financial markets. As you know, central banks in the advanced economies have expanded their monetary policy toolkits considerably since the peak of the global financial crisis in 2008. This has changed the way in which they act on the financial markets. Traditionally, the money market interest rate has been the key monetary policy variable. In the last few years, central banks have used unconventional measures to exert a more or less direct influence on other financial market prices as well. This was and is the only way to fulfil their mandate in difficult times.
Second there is a long-standing convention that the MPC only factors announced fiscal policy into its forecasts and actions. With those two points in mind I want to distinguish between two types of fiscal news over the last month; those that the MPC has factored in to its decisions already and those that it has yet to. In the first category on 8 September the government announced the Energy Price Guarantee scheme which will cap energy bills to £ for the typical household and for businesses. The Guarantee will therefore insulate households and businesses and the broader economy from  the direct impacts of further shocks to energy prices. As such it represents another very significant fiscal intervention, which can be thought as a shock which supports demand relative to what it would otherwise have been. The MPC was able to take account of the Guarantee, based on an initial assessment of its impact, at its September meeting. In the second category of fiscal news which the MPC has not yet incorporated, on 23 September the Government announced its Growth Plan which contained a range of fiscal measures, particularly on the tax side. The Government has followed this up with further policy announcements, and has also set out that it will publish its Fiscal Plan on 23 November, alongside an updated forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility.

I would now like to discuss three questions in particular. The first is whether CSR is a stable concept or one that is still evolving? This concept broadly stems from that of sustainable development, which is defined as development that meets present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own. Its blueprint was set out at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro (the first Earth Summit). It is based on the principle of development that is economically efficient, socially equitable and ecologically sustainable. CSR, whose initial objective was accountability, still largely appears to be an evolving paradigm closely linked to the current transition towards a new economic model. BIS Review 132/2008  1  In this respect, Rio brought to the fore the need for an ISO standard at the company level in order for companies themselves to take account of their impact and change their processes as part of a preventive approach. The UN addressed this dimension and brings together, under its aegis, the initiatives of the major companies that adhere to a relatively general charter. The Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (also known as Rio Plus 10 or the Second Earth Summit), largely focused on companies wishing to take centre stage in the protection of the planet and adopt a proactive role. The ethical dimension of CSR lends strength to the questions of stakeholders and employees as to how their funds are used.
To increase the chance that project developers can attract private funding, they need to enhance their communication with investors by understanding their risk concerns and speaking in their risk language. This is how we can make projects more bankable. On this front, IFFO has developed a reference term sheet for infrastructure investments in Emerging Markets together with key institutional investors last March. To further facilitate the use of this common language, IFFO has also rolled out a number of capacity building initiatives the past year for all partners. Fintech Apart from infrastructure financing, fintech counts as another most frequently discussed topics in industry events and international conferences in the past year. But like infrastructure financing, we are not just talking about it, we are also doing something about it. HKMA announced September this year a series of measures to facilitate the financial services industry to grasp the opportunities in fintech, covering financial infrastructure, regulatory sandbox, research and talent development, etc. I will leave this to my colleague, Shu-pui, to share more with you in the panel on fintech later this afternoon. But I wish to highlight one point, and that is, fintech is borderless. It requires collaboration among financial centres like Hong Kong and London. A fintech solution that works only in a particular jurisdiction is of little value to clients and financial institutions that are often located half-way across the globe.

Since the start of the year, there have been signs of stabilisation in the offshore RMB liquidity pool in Hong Kong, now hovering at around RMB 600 billion. On the other hand, our RMB RTGS system continues to record a high volume of turnover of some RMB 900 billion per day, indicating that a large amount of RMB financial intermediation activities have been taking place in Hong Kong. July this year, the HKMA and the People’s Bank of China jointly launched the Bond Connect. It provides an additional channel for international investors to gain access to the vast bond market in Mainland China, using international common practice in securities settlement and custody. This is made possible thanks to new infrastructure linkages between HKMA’s Central Moneymarkets Unit and relevant onshore institutions. So far, over 200 investors have successfully registered as Bond Connect investors, holding some RMB80 billion Mainland bonds. Daily turnover averaged RMB2 billion per day. This is not bad in four months’ time, but we foresee considerable headroom to grow further. The investment thesis is compelling – Mainland China’s solid economic fundamentals, RMB internationalisation, inclusion of RMB bonds in major indices, etc. And from an investor’s perspective, the nominal yield of around 4% on 10-year government credit is simply attractive. The Stock Connect schemes have been running smoothly and next year, A-share will be included in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, which is tracked by some $ trillion in assets. This will be a big boost to Stock Connect trading.
Fast payment solutions The general public increasingly expects to be able to transfer funds on any day of the week and outside traditional opening hours. They also expect that payees will be credited quickly. In the future, there will have to be a good reason not to credit payees immediately, rather than with a delay, as is the case currently. This means that the payment system must meet new requirements. In Norway, there is a provisional instant payments solution, which an increasing number of banks are adopting. It is positive that the solution is becoming more widely used, but it has its drawbacks. For even though participating banks have entered into a loss-sharing agreement, banks still incur credit risk before payments are settled and the solution cannot be used for certain types of payments. Bits and Norges Bank are therefore jointly developing a better solution, called BRO in Norwegian “Betalinger med raskere oppgjør” (payments with faster settlement). BRO will be an efficient underlying infrastructure that is intended for all types of payments. The solution will be in place by the end of 2019. Norges Bank has initiated an in-house project to make the necessary adjustments to the settlement system. The Bank will do its share to enable banks to settle payments to each other without incurring credit risk. Customers will also be able to make instant payments in larger amounts. Customer services will also have to be modified.

Douglas Elliott has made the point that we entered the crisis at a point in the history of economic policymaking where we had abandoned all macro tools other than the use of interest rates, the price of money. This was fairly unprecedented. We had lost confidence in quantitative tools in monetary policy, and the role of reserve money had been diminished. We had very little in the way of bank liquidity policy, of which holdings of reserve money are an important part. The experience of the crisis tells us that we have to keep working hard to re-develop these tools and to knit large firm supervision into the picture. In my experience, it doesn’t happen naturally. This brings me to the fourth and final thought on supervision. It was absolutely essential and natural that the immediate reaction to the crisis was to re-build regulation and supervision in respect of the core prudential All speeches are available online at building blocks, which are solvency (capital) and liquidity (funding). And, we had work to do, and still have, to get these core elements into better shape. And the work of interpreting these standards will never stop because the precise forms of risk taking will evolve. But, when I have stepped back and looked at the causes of the crisis in firms, another thing stands out.