samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The White House believes that the commercial and technological environment is changing far too rapidly for it to be able to develop policy that is both timely and appropriate. In the near term, therefore, the White House is calling for case-by-case monitoring of electronic payments experiments. In keeping with the spirit of the White House Framework, Federal bank supervisors in the United States have expressed a clear willingness to listen to what the private sector has to say on issues involving emerging electronic payments. For example, in 1996 the Board of Governors issued proposed regulations concerning the applicability of Regulation E to stored-value cards. As part of that proposed rule making, the Board requested comments from the public as to whether part or all of Regulation E should apply to electronic money or value residing on a computer system or personal-computer hard drive. Similarly, the FDIC requested public comment on the application of Federal deposit-insurance coverage to electronic value represented on computer systems. This openness, combined with an increasing willingness to let the banking industry partner with technology and other industries, reflects a commitment on the part of bank supervisors in the United States to allow the private sector to direct the future of electronic commerce and payments. From a longer term perspective, however, the market-place and industry self-regulation alone may not fully address all of the issues associated with e-money.

This will support the banking sector’s ability to make long term sustainable business plans into the future. In fact, central bank governors and heads of supervision indicated that they are committed to not significantly increase overall capital requirements across the banking sector. In the euro area, the situation in the banking sector now is very different from what it was in 2012. Perhaps most importantly, euro area banks have significantly strengthened their capital positions over the past few years, notably as a consequence of the Comprehensive Assessment conducted in 2014. For significant institutions, the CET1 ratio has increased from around 9 to 13%, making them more resilient to adverse shocks. In addition, the quality of the banks’ capital has also been substantially improved. With the 2015 Supervisory Review and Evaluation Process (SREP), the ECB has outlined the steady-state Pillar 2 supervisory capital requirements. This means that, all things equal, capital requirements will not be increased further. Hence, the banking sector can now conduct much better capital planning. Moreover, in 2015, the banks under ECB supervision further increased profits relative to 2014. This allows banks to have appropriate distribution policies while still meeting regulatory capital requirements and buffers, and to support lending to the economy. In addition, the ECB’s monetary policy actions continue to support banks’ financing conditions and, more broadly, economic activity. Clearly, some parts of the banking sector in the euro area still face a number of challenges.
It would mean in total approximately 2-3 years from a referendum until the euro were introduced completely. However, I believe that this preparation time can be shortened somewhat, assuming that the political process is open and establishes a clear timetable and that a transition process is chosen. It is worth remembering that there is nothing to say that EMU membership or a currency changeover should take place at the start of a year. For practical reasons it might be better to introduce the currency changeover in particular in, say, March or October. Another alternative described in the report is what is known as Big Bang, i.e. to begin the currency changeover at the same time as the krona exchange rate is fixed and membership of the third stage of the EMU takes place. This scenario would require a preparation period of 2-2.5 years. It would require that the euro could be processed in all transactions in Sweden, both physical and electronic, and by everyone in Sweden, from the local tobacconist to the Swedish national social insurance board and the major banks, right form day one. As this alternative at the same time requires a changeover in IT systems, other practical items such as accounting, tax payments and a physical currency changeover, it makes great demands for co-ordination and information.

Eva Srejber: Life outside Euroland Speech by Ms Eva Srejber, Second Deputy Governor of Sveriges Riksbank, at the annual meeting of the Economic Society, Helsinki, 11 February 2002. *  *  *  Let me begin by thanking you for the invitation to speak at the Economic Society's annual meeting. I intend to take developments in Finland and Sweden during the 1980s and 1990s as the starting point for my talk and to illustrate the similar experiences our countries have had. After that, I shall touch on the economic arguments in favour of and against EMU membership and take up the role of the Riksbank in this debate. As the political temperature has risen in the EMU issue in Sweden, I intend to conclude with some words regarding the potential timetable. Sometimes Finland and Sweden are compared in terms borrowed from family life or the world of sport. However, the question is not which brother or sister is the oldest, or who is ahead in the international economy race. Our countries are interwoven to such an extent today that we often go in the same direction. However, in one area our two countries have chosen – at least for the time being – to take different paths. This applies, of course, to membership of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Finland has for various reasons decided to participate fully from the start, while Sweden has decided to "wait and see".
In an attempt to understand what is currently happening in Europe, we have to go back to the 1950’s. European integration as we know it began 60 years ago, and until recently, it has been a success. The signing of the treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Community on 18 April 1951 was the first genuine step towards economic and political integration. The six signatories – Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg –, agreed to run their coal and steel industries under a common management. The overriding goal was to secure a lasting peace on the European continent. The introduction of the Euro in 1999 was just one further – albeit major – step in this long-standing integration process. Throughout these decades, the world benefited from economic prosperity and peace on the European continent; a continent, that had previously been torn apart by two world wars within the span of forty years. From a Swiss perspective, regardless of one’s political or ideological leanings, there can be no doubt that the Swiss economy situated at the very heart of Europe but remaining outside the European Union (EU) has benefited from the continued process of European integration. There are a host of examples to illustrate this. The bilateral agreements Switzerland concluded with the EU in 1999 and 2004 would have been very difficult to reach with 27 individual nations. Among other things, this has led to greater immigration from the EU.

Second, regulations will continue to focus more on facilitating market-led adjustments that will allow the industry to evolve in response to market developments, while maintaining a sufficient degree of regulatory oversight to maintain financial stability and public confidence. This includes the adoption of principles-based regulations and an increased focus on harnessing market forces and discipline, as well as internal oversight functions, to reinforce prudential regulation and supervision. The aim is to promote a more efficient and responsive financial system. In this connection, Bank Negara will soon introduce a more facilitative process for product innovations with revisions to the new product approval framework. The changes are aimed at improving time to market for the introduction of new products by financial institutions, while ensuring that institutions put in place a sound product management programme within their respective institutions. The new framework will provide for more simplified regulatory processes and allow greater flexibility for well- managed banks and insurers to introduce new  BIS Review 83/2007  3  products more quickly in the market. Qualifying banks and insurers are expected to exercise this flexibility responsibly and in particular, with due regard to the interests of consumers. The realignment of the regulatory and supervisory structures within the Central Bank in November 2006 has marked a significant turning point in consolidating these regulatory changes.
Of course, the duration of the period of high inflation was long, but it responded to a succession of different shocks and not to the persistent effect of a single one. 8  On the contrary, whenever we identify medium-term pressures on inflation, either upward or downward, we must react with vigor. The same episode which I have just referred to is illustrative in this regard. While in the short term inflation rose as a result of a shock on the exchange rate, with transitory effects, medium-term pressures diminished as a result of a deteriorating economy. Had our target been short-term inflation, we should have raised the MPR. As it is not, and what we aim at is medium-term inflation, our decision was to lower the MPR to prevent inflation two years out from falling below the 3% target. This response of monetary policy is very different from its not so distant past. In the 1990s, when our economy was not yet sufficiently prepared to deal with a currency shock, the Bank had to choose between an inflation target and an exchange rate target. The result of the exercise was complex for the Chilean economy. Not to mention what happened in the early 1980s, when the defense of a pegged exchange rate and changes in external financial conditions led us to a recession that cost us 15% of lost GDP and escalating unemployment.

Chile) External prices (in $  -4.2 3.2 3.2 2.6 2.6 6.9 2.0 -0.4 -9.8  0.4 2.9 3.1 2.3 1.6 6.7 1.6 -1.2 -2.5  LME copper price $ WTI oil price $ Brent oil price $ Gasoline parity price $ Libor $ (nominal, 90 days)  249 49 52 467 0.3  220 43 44 389 0.8  2017 (f) 2018 (f) Dec.16 Mar.17 Dec.16 Mar.17 Report Report Report Report (annual change, percent) 1.9 1.1 4.6 -0.5 -0.5 2.8 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.0 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.5 2.3 2.6 2.8 2.8 2.9 1.6 2.3 2.3 2.3 2.3 6.7 6.2 6.4 6.0 6.2 1.7 1.5 1.7 1.6 1.7 -1.8 1.4 1.3 2.3 2.5 -2.7 1.1 2.1 1.7 1.3 (levels) 221 235 255 240 250 43 54 50 55 50 44 56 52 57 52 389 461 457 464 444 0.7 1.5 1.5 2.5 2.5  (e) Estimate. (f) Forecast. Source: Central Bank of Chile.
Page 6 of 11  The quality of living may not be as well as they are used to, but still might be better than in other countries that do not have that rural sector nor informal social safety net to support them. These factors contributed to our long-standing resiliency and make Thailand, despite all of the problems, is still a good place to do business. The second reason is something that you probably heard many times so I will not go into much detail, is that our business and other infrastructures are acceptable. The logistic-type infrastructure and basic infrastructure - water and electricity- are adequate, and government’s investments in the context of the Eastern Economic Corridor, for example, U-tapao airport, or even some of the railway investments, are being undertaken. Overall, these infrastructures continue to improve. The other infrastructure that we have done a better job recently, is not just on the physical, nor logistics infrastructure but on the digital infrastructure. We have seen that the COVID-19 has actually speeded up some of the underlying trends towards digitalization. For example, we saw our digital payment system called Prompt Pay hit a record high in terms of the number of transactions as a result of the COVID crisis when everybody is shopping and making transactions online. We are also seeing a greater usage of digital technology even in the government support schemes.

Under what we called the “half-half” copayment schemes, even sidewalk vendors in the market have the QR codes and mobile application that allow them to access the digital technology. That is a welcomed change as a result of the COVID-19 and it will improve the ability of the government in providing income supports in a more transparent and timely manner. The last part of infrastructure is the legal, regulatory and business-type infrastructure. For example, according to the Global Competitiveness Index in the area of corporate governance based on the latest World Economic Forum report, we are at 23rd compared to Indonesia which is at 57th, the Philippines at 100th, and Vietnam at 104th. It is the area that we have done quite well and our firms are certainly, compared to 20 years ago, much more professional and transparent in character. In terms of ease of doing business, I am sure many of you heard from the World Bank that our ranking has improved steadily. Back in 2016, we ranked at 46th in terms of the overall ease of doing business, while the latest ranking, we are up to 21st. Page 7 of 11  This is not to say that it is that easy for you to do business already and certainly there are rooms for improvement. One of the important things holding us back is the excessive, cumbersome, and inconsistent regulations issued by different government agencies.
But the more a scheme is underfunded (overfunded) to begin with, the more it will find its deficit (surplus) increased. This is entirely intuitive. By reducing yields, QE increases the cost of purchasing a given future stream of income. So if a fund starts off relatively “asset poor”, the sponsors will now find it more costly to acquire the assets necessary to match its future obligations. A corollary of this is that the cost of provisioning against additional pension entitlements being accumulated by currently serving staff unambiguously rises. That does mean that the effective cost of employing labour, when their pension costs are also included, also rises.8 This is certainly an unwanted side effect of QE. But it needs to be balanced against the higher activity and business profits resulting from QE, as well as the fact that wage growth has recently been exceptionally weak, which work in the opposite direction. Given that pension funds have for the most part seen deficits widen in recent years, whether it be as a result of the crisis and recession or the result of QE, how should sponsors and trustees respond? It makes little sense to rush to close a deficit that is likely to prove temporary. But if a deficit is likely to persist, then corrective action is required, initially to prevent it continuing to expand and ultimately to close it, though that adjustment could, quite reasonably, be spread out over time. This is all recognised by the Pensions Regulator.

And the flow of credit outside the banking system may improve, helping to support a recovery in nominal demand. Over the next quarter or so, amongst other indicators I will therefore be looking at what happens to firm and household money holdings, as well as credit flows and risk premia. The Bank’s Asset Purchase Facility schemes for corporate paper are designed to help catalyse that process. The fact that the Bank is buying relatively small amounts of paper may have been misunderstood by some. As the central bank, we are not operating the schemes in order to lend in scale to the real economy, but rather to help revive the markets. Some have described this variant of liquidity insurance as acting as “Market Maker of Last Resort”, and I recently aired some thoughts on the kind of principles that might guide central banks in this area. 1 They include consistency with monetary policy; avoiding undue risk to the central bank; acting as a catalyst; and avoiding attempts to prop up markets that would not be fundamentally viable once peacetime resumes. Yesterday, the Bank issued for consultation some ideas on how we might be able to extend our liquidity insurance, through the APF, to facilities for working capital finance. They cover a possible facility for secured commercial paper, where the underlying assets would be portfolios of SME trade-finance credit, and a facility for supply chain finance.
Fear grips the system which, in consequence, seizes. The resulting collateral damage is wide and deep. Yet the triggering event is, with hindsight, found to have been rather modest. The flap of a butterfly’s wing in New York or Guangdong generates a hurricane for the world economy. The dynamics appear chaotic, mathematically and metaphorically. These similarities are no coincidence. Both events were manifestations of the behaviour under stress of a complex, adaptive network. Complex because these networks were a cat’scradle of interconnections, financial and non-financial. Adaptive because behaviour in these networks was driven by interactions between optimising, but confused, agents. Seizures in  BIS Review 53/2009  1  the electricity grid, degradation of eco-systems, the spread of epidemics and the disintegration of the financial system – each is essentially a different branch of the same network family tree. This paper considers the financial system as a complex adaptive system. It applies some of the lessons from other network disciplines – such as ecology, epidemiology, biology and engineering – to the financial sphere. Peering through the network lens, it provides a rather different account of the structural vulnerabilities that built-up in the financial system over the past decade and suggests ways of improving its robustness in the period ahead. Part 1 provides the diagnosis. Using network theory and evidence, it explains the emergence of two characteristics of the financial network over the past decade – complexity and homogeneity.

It has established technical working groups to address inter alia consolidated supervision, crisis management and Basle requirements and has put in place the requisite instrument to facilitate information sharing and cooperation with foreign regulatory bodies. Your members are also active participants in supervisory colleges where banks span several countries and I am aware that yesterday three supervisory colleges were held. Much emphasis has been placed on ensuring that the banking sector remains safe and sound, however, there are non-bank institutions that could severely threaten such safety and soundness and consequently the same level of attention/emphasis should also be directed to those institutions. Perhaps, CGBS could consider expanding its conference scope in the future to include regional non-bank regulators with whom your constituents interface. Both banks and non-bank financial institutions are integral to the safety and soundness of the financial system. Ladies and gentlemen, let me conclude by saying that our approaches to supervision and the depth of our regulation would continue to require proactivity and enhancement as the financial landscape continues to change. The Central Bank Governors of the region will continue to rely on the CGBS to provide the advice and guidance needed to keep our region safe. Success in this regards depend on the thoroughness and robustness of your work and 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  the reliability and efficacy of the methods you employ.
Both its independence and ability to fulfill its mandate are guaranteed even in very adverse economic circumstances. While it should not lead to complacency and negligence, the existence of such buffers should alleviate any concerns about the potential risks that the expansion of the balance sheet may entail. Finally, huge Central Banks’ balance sheets may be seen as influencing the allocation of resources, or effecting implicit fiscal transfers, an issue of special sensitivity inside the euro area. To discuss this question, it is useful to refer to the famous Musgrave classification of public policies between three purposes: allocation, distribution and stabilization. There is no doubt that monetary policy is only and exclusively concerned with stabilization – and a very focused part of it : price stability. No monetary policy action should be taken for any other purpose. So to the extent that “unconventional” tools are implemented, there should be no ambiguity as to their close link with the Central Bank’s mandate of price stability. I believe that has been the case in all major countries and certainly so in the Eurozone. 4. How to mitigate unintended consequences? The truth is, however, that the real world does not always fit perfectly with the beauty of Musgrave’s classification. Some public policies may aim at several objectives. Others may inadvertently, have unintended side effects. All public policies with no exception, health, energy, infrastructures, unwillingly affect some citizens more than others. Those side effects should be minimized, but cannot always be totally avoided.

I am also grateful to Stanley Fischer, the vice chairman of the Board of Governors, who will speak with Christine Lagarde following her remarks. Please join me in welcoming Christine Lagarde. 9  Christine Lagarde, Economic Inclusion and Financial Integrity, Address to the Conference on Inclusive Capitalism, May 27, 2014. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3