samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
4 Đ Đ The agenda of this year’s WFE General Assembly and Annual Meeting will further the WFE’s objectives and work as it covers a wide spectrum of issues that are forward-looking and relevant to how WFE members can navigate the changing world.Đ These include the future of capital raising and the adoption of distributed ledger technology.Đ In the same vein, I will speak about three trends that continue to shape the financial markets of tomorrow - sustainable finance, technology and innovation, and the evolving dynamics of our public and private markets. 5 Đ Đ Before I outline these trends, let me first start by setting out the macroeconomic picture, as this is the backdrop against which we must view these developments. Global Economy – Heightened Uncertainty 6 Đ Đ There is no doubt that these are challenging times. Global growth is expected to slow going forward.Đ IMF’s World Economic Outlook forecast for April 2019 sees global growth moderating to 3.3% this year, from 3.6% in 2018 [1] .Đ Indications are that the October World Economic Outlook to be released next week will likely paint a cautious assessment of global growth prospects and include downward revisions to growth forecasts.Đ Slowing global growth is chiefly due to an elevated level of policy and geopolitical uncertainty, with ongoing trade tensions that continue to dent business sentiment and investment. These ongoing developments have important implications for the financial industry and we need to be vigilant and flexible to adapt and respond.

• We have also set up a deal making platform called MATCH, or Meet ASEAN’s Talents and Champions) [15] , to connect global capital and the ASEAN enterprise community in 2018. This will help to grow the pipeline of companies that will eventually require listing in our public markets. • Singapore also organises the annual Singapore FinTech Festival (SFF) and this will be combined with the Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology (SWITCH) that is coming up on the 11-15th November, to provide a platform for industry players to gain greater understanding of fintech applications and developments as well as support innovative solutions to find commercialisation opportunities. • SGX is also working with licensed private market platforms to facilitate the listing process for portfolio companies. Such platforms provide PE/VC managers with opportunities to invest or exit, and provide a pipeline of companies that could list on SGX. Such private-public markets partnerships can serve as an engine of growth for our public markets and provide support for enterprises throughout their corporate lifecycle. 28 Đ Đ In keeping up with changes in our public markets, such as the rise of neweconomy start-ups and technology firms, exchanges have continued to innovate to provide product owerings that support the varying needs of these companies. • For example, SGX has joined global exchanges in Canada, Europe, and the US, in introducing the Dual Class Share (DCS) structure to support firms which have shares with diwerent voting rights to raise funds.
High charges and commissions and the use of cheque float by banks, despite the introduction of the Cheque Imaging System, which aimed at preventing paper cheques from being transported to different destinations, are clear deterrents in disbursing funds at the recipient’s level. Similarly, the delays and paperwork involved transactions through the formal sector has been a deterrent. The distant work  4  BIS Review 3/2007  sites in some of the Middle Eastern countries with no access to banking facilities has been reported as another factor which provides opportunity for informal channels to capture remittances. On the recipient's sides too, the unnecessary expenditure incurred on their savings through purchases of non-priority consumer items has been cited as an imprudent way of spending valuable foreign currency. In addition, migrant workers are faced with numerous social issues due to family breakaways and health hazards through consumption of liquor and drugs etc. by remitter's family members. This is not the forum to discuss these issues, although they are also important factors affecting the remittance industry. Part III - possible solutions Macro level In discussing possible solutions to improve remittance flows across countries, it is important to refer to the General Principles for International Remittance Services prepared by the WB and the BIS. These guidelines are prepared at a global level and require both host/home country support to implement the recommendations underlying these principles.

We consider that our work has been both interesting and rewarding and we hope that it has also helped some of our colleagues to make their own institutions stronger. 2  BIS Review 123/2006
In any given country, a monetary expansion aimed at boosting domestic demand will tend to reduce effective interest rates 9 relative to their equilibrium level, generating an excess of domestic investment over domestic saving that must be met with a capital inflow from abroad. But viewed from overseas, the corresponding capital outflow will tend to raise the short-term equilibrium rate (Chart 12), giving conventional monetary policy overseas more traction. In this way, the rising tide of global demand would raise all boats. 8  Svensson (2003), “Escaping from a Liquidity Trap and Deflation: The Foolproof Way and Others”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, makes the case that exchange rate intervention can help fight deflation in a small open economy. 9  That is, interest rates adjusted for the effects of any quantitative or credit easing. BIS central bankers’ speeches  13  Chart 12 Smaller domestic current account (CA) surplus lifts all boats  Wider policy implications Ultimately, for monetary policy at the zero lower bound to bridge to a better equilibrium, it must be reinforced by other policies. That is, the low interest rate environment puts a premium on domestic and international policy coordination. For example, lower interest rates create space for fiscal policy to boost domestic demand directly, should it be necessary, by lowering the financing cost faced by governments. And it doesn’t take a genius to recognise that a prolonged period of low interest rates can lead to a build-up of vulnerabilities which could derail an expansion and deepen a subsequent recession.

Even in the predominantly agricultural areas, the trend has been the same. Consequently, it has become a nearly impossible task to keep the rural youth occupied in agricultural activities. This has made it necessary for opening new employment avenues for such youth. An additional factor has been the natural limitation for growth of agriculture due both to the slow growth in demand for agricultural products and the supply constraints of land for further extensive cultivation practices. Hence, in the beginning, agriculture may be the growth promoter, but later, its growth would slow down due to the above limitations. The global experience has been that the average rate of growth in agriculture has been less than 2 percent per annum during the last 100 years. With higher and higher numbers being added to the job market every year, agriculture has, therefore, a limitation for providing jobs for all. Sri Lanka’s agriculture sector has made its utmost contribution to create wealth and employment in the past. Its current ability to do so has been a matter for debate. With employment in agriculture being seasonal and the concentration of a large farm-based work-force on a limited extent of cultivable land, underemployment has been the natural corollary in Sri Lanka. The new evidence shows that the under-employment in agriculture in Sri Lanka is not only the highest but also on the increase.
Már Guðmundsson: Iceland’s crisis and recovery – facts, comparisons, and the lessons learned Speech by Mr Már Guðmundsson, Governor of the Central Bank of Iceland, at the Institute of International and European Affairs, Dublin, 27 April 2015. *  *  *  Accompanying charts can be found at the end of the speech. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen, It gives me great pleasure to speak here at the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin about Iceland’s crisis and recovery and some of the lessons that could be learned from this experience. This is not least because of our historical bonds and the affinity that I feel exists between our people, to which we can now add the common experience of being hard hit by the Great Financial Crisis. It is well known that Iceland was the first advanced country to experience a full-scale banking crisis during the autumn of 2008, when its three big cross-border banks failed. It was also the first advanced country to go on an IMF programme. What is probably less well known is that at that point, Iceland was already on its way into a recession after an unsustainable boom and serious overheating during 2005–2007 and a currency crisis in the first half of 2008. The banking collapse and the associated wealth loss and further currency depreciation made the recession significantly worse, of course, as did the recession that hit the global economy in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Moreover, Iceland’s investment-grade credit ratings from Moody’s and S&P were preserved throughout the crisis. This is why the sovereign has been able to tap international capital markets twice so far since the crisis struck. You can see from this that the key characteristics of crisis management and bank resolution in Iceland were that shareholders lost all their equity, unsecured bond holders were bailed in, vital infrastructure elements of the domestic banking system were preserved, and deposits were given preference over other unsecured claims. Today this seems in many ways a standard approach, but it was not universally well received at the time. On the whole, these measures were successful, which mitigated the effect of the banks’ failure on the economy. The domestic payment system functioned more or less seamlessly throughout, and there was continuous access to deposits and basic banking services in  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Iceland. International payment flows were seriously affected, however, not least because of the freezing order imposed by the British authorities on Icelandic banks, but also because of general distrust among foreign counterparties. Let me now turn to the macroeconomic part of the story. I will paint with a rather broad brush here, both because time is limited and because the issues are somewhat better understood.
[12] Although these advantages are not rooted in financial regulation, regulators have an important role  Page 5  to play in providing an environment that protects and enhances these advantages. We know, for example, that firms value predictable and consistent regulation. [13] So the first thing the PRA can do to facilitate competitiveness is to help maintain trust in the UK as a good place to do business. And it can do so by maintaining a regulatory regime that is open to international business, nondiscriminating, predictable, transparent, responsive to threats and opportunities, and which provides clear and accessible rules. One thing I want to make clear is that I don’t believe regulators should engage in risky compromises such as regulatory races to the bottom to win business. These compromises plant the seeds of future instability, as anyone who has studied the causes of financial crises will attest. There is no need for the UK make those compromises in pursuit of the underlying advantages and agglomeration effects I described earlier. This approach may possibly be suited to centres that are seeking to start from scratch or from modest beginnings, and do not have much to lose if these risky bets backfire. It is not suited to global financial centres that already enjoy and want to enhance their existing strengths. Rather, regulators can contribute to the success of UK financial services by maintaining a record of strong and predictable rules, openness to international business and alignment with international standards that they have a strong hand in influencing.

Hence, the auditor, including the internal auditor, is still a watchdog and not a bloodhound. 4  BIS Review 143/2007
6  BIS Review 81/2010  announcement had to direct thousands of institutions in the appropriate direction on equal terms, including a majority that had not been misbehaving in the run-up to the crisis. In particular, stronger institutions might view their agreement to use the guarantees and issue equity to the U.S. Treasury as stigmatizing and make them more vulnerable to runs. The solution was to obtain agreement from nine systemically important institutions to participate at the start of the time-out on the same terms available to thousands of other eligible financial institutions. The time-out announced on October 14 was a critical success in terms of stopping the run on the global financial system, but it could not and did not address all the aspects of the crisis. The global propagation of the financial shock had already triggered an economic slowdown at least as abrupt as any during the Great Depression period. The underlying question was now how strong the adverse feedback loop would be between the rapidly deteriorating real economy and the condition of the banking sector. One clear lesson from this phase was the need for formal coordination among the diverse authorities in the U.S. in establishing and maintaining financial stability. Another lesson that emerged was that some forms of regulatory and accounting capital were very weak defenses against the fear of insolvency. Both lessons are informing the ongoing work of regulatory reform and of enhancing the resiliency of the financial system through stronger capital and liquidity requirements.

Circumstances proved very different in this episode. For one, the rise of the shadow banking system meant that a preponderance of financial intermediation in the United States was being performed by non-depository institutions that funded themselves in wholesale rather than retail markets. Further, traditional discount window loans have always been vulnerable to stigma – that is, if a bank borrows from the central bank it runs the risk that markets and counterparties may infer that it is closer to insolvency than was previously thought. The potential for stigma to damage the effectiveness of this crucial backstop facility explains why the identity of discount window borrowers is not disclosed by the Federal Reserve. Indeed, we saw early in this crisis that many depository institutions proved unwilling to take the risk of possible stigma, the result of which was an increasingly severe impairment to the flow of liquidity to the rest of the financial system. In late August 2007, a new facility was designed to help overcome stigma through the use of an auction mechanism. As the market calmed in September to late October, this facility was shelved but was ultimately introduced on December 12, 2007, as the Term Auction Facility in a coordinated announcement with other central banks. This phase has some obvious lessons for financial stability.   Financial products that are new and complex should be treated with caution. Regulators, credit rating agencies and market participants all have limited ability to evaluate the properties of such complex products at their inception.
William C Dudley: US monetary policy and emerging market economies Remarks by Mr William C Dudley, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at the Roundtable Discussion in Honor of Terrence Checki “Three Decades of Crises: What Have We Learned?”, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City, 27 March 2014. *  *  *  The scaling back of the Federal Reserve’s asset purchase program – both the prospect and the actuality – has created significant challenges for many emerging market economies. Although this shift in U.S. monetary policy was inevitable at some point, it seems to have triggered a broad-based sentiment shift in global markets. Recent events are a reminder that U.S. monetary policy can have powerful effects abroad. What lessons should we draw from these events? That will be the general theme of my brief remarks today. Before I go on, though, I first would remind you that the thoughts I offer today are my own, and should not be interpreted as representing the position of the Federal Reserve System. I also want to call attention to Terry Checki, who is being honored today and has been at the center of events in global finance for more than three decades, and who has done so much to shape them.

Some of these relate to the characteristics of the individual worker – for example, their number of years in employment, their tenure in post, where they live, their age and their educational qualifications. Other factors relate to the nature of the job itself – whether it is full or part-time, the occupation, sector and job-type. Both factors, individual and job-specific, are likely to be important in explaining pay. Chart 18 shows the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition of the gender pay gap over the sample, when the average gender pay gap in the UK was close to 22%. From the decomposition, around half of that gap can be accounted for by compositional effects, arising from the different characteristics of either the worker or the job they are carrying out. That leaves around 11 percentage points of the pay gap unaccounted for by these factors. In other words, around half of the gender pay gap is difficult to justify on fundamental grounds, consistent at least with some significant degree of gender pay “bias”. Of those factors explaining the gender pay gap, the most important relate to the characteristics of the job rather than the individual. Occupation, sector, and the full/part-time nature of work are the most important factors accounting for the gender pay gap. It is difficult to know how much these reflect personal choice (workers’ preference for a certain sector or way of working) rather than legacy environmental factors (such as the preponderance of males in certain professions or sectors).
In an environment of low inflation, solid economic growth and low unemployment, a conflict may arise between inflation considerations and considerations relating to the real economy. In that situation, we would be less worried about low inflation than if real economic prospects were also weak. We can then choose to bring inflation up to target over a longer horizon, particularly if interest rates are already low and there are signs that financial imbalances are building up. With flexible inflation targeting, monetary policy can make an important contribution to stabilising the economy. When the economy is exposed to shocks, we can respond rapidly by adjusting the policy rate, as we did in 2008 and 2014. Nevertheless, monetary policy cannot assume primary responsibility for output and employment. The level of economic activity depends on overall economic policy, including wage and income formation, the tax and social security system and the functioning of the labour market. Monetary policy is only one component of this framework. 14  Norway as a financial investor  Norges Bank  While high public debt has made it difficult for many countries to cope with a downturn, Norway has been in a fortunate position. We have built up one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds. It has provided us with fiscal space both during the financial crisis and in the wake of the fall in oil prices in 2014. The first transfer of close to NOK 2 billion was made to an account at Norges Bank in 1996.

Percent 16  16  Consumer price index Five−year moving average Inflation target  14 12  14 12  10  10  8  8  6  6  4  4  2  2  0  0  –2 1973  1978  1983  1988  1993  1998  2003  2008  2013  –2 2018  1) Projection for 2018 Q1. Sources: Statistics Norway and Norges Bank  The formal monetary policy regimes remain intact, but lessons have been learned along the way. Initially, central banks had high ambitions to steer inflation to target within a clearly defined time horizon. But the experience with these regimes provided useful insight, and the ambitions were later adjusted. When confronted with shocks, small open economies in particular experienced that a rapid return to the inflation target could have undesired consequences for the real economy.11 Norges Bank addressed this concern by giving greater weight to output and employment. The inflation target horizon has been extended and monetary policy has gradually become more flexible. 11 See for example Wheeler G. (2014): “Reflections on 25 years of Inflation Targeting”, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, speech delivered on 28 November 2014 and Norges Bank (2017): “Experience with the monetary policy framework in Norway since 2001”, Norges Bank Papers 1/2017. 12  Monetary policy shall contribute to monetary stability. It does so by ensuring that inflation stays within a range somewhat above zero, while being kept under control.
Mario Draghi: Structural Reforms, inflation and monetary policy Introductory speech by Mr Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank, at the ECB Forum on Central Banking, Sintra, Portugal, 22 May 2015. *  *  *  Accompanying charts can be found at the end of the speech. Summary Structural and cyclical policies – including monetary policy – are heavily independent. Structural reforms increase both potential output and the resilience of the economy to shocks. This makes structural reforms relevant for any central bank, but especially in a monetary union. For members of monetary union resilience is crucial to avoid that shocks lead to consistently higher unemployment, and over time, permanent economic divergence. It therefore has direct implications for price stability, and is no less relevant for the integrity of the euro area. This is why the ECB has frequently called for stronger common governance of structural reforms that would make resilience part of our common DNA. Structural reforms are equally important for their effect on growth. Potential growth is today estimated to be below 1% in the euro area and is projected to remain well below pre-crisis growth rates. This would mean that a significant share of the economic losses in the crisis would become permanent, with structural unemployment staying above 10% and youth unemployment elevated. It would also make it harder to work through the debt overhang still present in some countries.

Consequently, the current overall situation of the Swiss economy remains difficult despite the many rays of hope with regard to the economic cycle. Also, the danger of deflation does not yet seem to have been entirely averted. We have not yet reached the moment for a change of direction in monetary policy in Switzerland. After analysing the available economic data and forecasts and taking various risk considerations into account, there is no need for the SNB to take monetary policy action at present. The SNB can afford to adopt a holding stance. However, this holding stance should not be mistaken for inactivity. The SNB continues its firm implementation of an extremely expansionary monetary policy and the unconventional measures launched on 12 March 2009. The Swiss franc money market is still being provided with a generous and flexible supply of liquidity, interest rates remain low, Swiss franc bonds are still being purchased to dampen the level of risk premiums on the Swiss franc bond market as and when needed and the appreciation of the Swiss franc will continue to be prevented. BIS Review 27/2009  1