samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Már Guðmundsson: Iceland – recent economic developments, conditions and outlook Keynote address by Mr Már Guðmundsson, Governor of the Central Bank of Iceland, at the 51st Annual General Meeting of the Central Bank of Iceland, Reykjavik, 29 March 2012. *  *  *  Prime Minister; Minister of Finance; Chairman; Directors and Ambassadors; Ladies and Gentlemen: As we convene for the 51st Annual General Meeting of the Central Bank of Iceland, the economic recovery that began late in 2010 is gaining momentum in spite of international headwinds, while inflation has been higher and more persistent than was considered likely last year. It is important, too, to note that inflation is driven much more strongly by domestic factors than it was around this time last year, with wages rising in excess of increases in productivity and the nominal exchange rate declining in the recent term. According to preliminary estimates, GDP grew by 3.1% in 2011. In international terms, this compares well, as output growth in the OECD averaged 2% last year. However, it should be borne in mind that the economic recovery began later in Iceland than in most OECD countries. Business investment and private consumption contributed equally to growth, about 2 percentage points each. The contribution from factors was negative, however. This growth was not borrowed, either: last year’s underlying current account surplus measured roughly 3% of GDP. In some respects, the composition of last year’s output growth lays a sound foundation for continued economic recovery.

These efforts will all contribute to a more resilient system, one that is better able to withstand the effects of a major decline in asset prices or deterioration in credit. Are there other tools that policy makers and market participants could use to address this risk? Some policy makers have argued that public disclosure of information could help reduce the risk of future systemic financial crisis, by preventing the buildup of "excessive" leverage or concentrations of risk. The principal focus of attention, as in the immediate wake of the failure of Long Term Capital Management, has been on two quite different types of public disclosure. The first is information that would make it easier to evaluate the overall leverage or risk profile of major hedge funds and their counterparties, and thereby judge their vulnerability to a sharp movement in asset prices. The second is information about the actual positions of individual funds or institutions: information that would make it easier to identify concentrated exposures to specific risk factors, and thereby assess more accurately the potential impact of the failure of a major fund or institutions on the market as a whole. These pose very different challenges and offer different benefits. There are a number of crude measures of overall risk profile that, if disclosed to the market, would give counterparties information they do not now typically get about the risk of failure of the fund.
All these issues must be tackled with the impact on the financial system as a whole in mind. And I think the ESRB is key in that endeavour. For every challenge we face and overcome, we learn. We learn and that makes us better prepared for tackling even more difficult challenges further down the road. That is in my view certainly true for the ESRB. We learned from the financial crisis and there has been a substantial amount of learning by doing since. I must say that the blueprint was good to begin with; pretty much all the necessary nuts and bolts were already in place to create a macroprudential body. Having central banks and supervisors around the same table as European institutions, and not least, adding the independent views of the Advisory Scientific Committee to the mix, is in my view a good set-up. Furthermore, I think that the plan for how all those nuts and bolts and other components should be connected and work together has proven to be a good one too. While many probably doubted that the ESRB’s somewhat complex set-up with so many members could function well in practice, the institution has gone all the way from that original blueprint in 2009 to where it stands today as the EU’s macroprudential watchdog. Its machinery brings together all the components that its founding fathers had in mind, with a set-up that has allowed the broad composition and large membership to, in my view, become main strengths rather than impediments.

The ESRB also has a formal role in the CRR/CRD, among other things through opining on some national macroprudential measures. A macroprudential framework extending beyond the banking sector But the ESRB’s macroprudential mandate extends beyond the banking sector, and not every spot on the map over the financial system is as well-known and covered from a macroprudential viewpoint as the EU banks in the remit of the CRR/CRD. The financial landscape is constantly evolving and subsequently the potential sources of systemic risks. One aspect reflecting this is that the share of credit provided by other financial institutions than banks has grown over the past few years. Hence, after making the macroprudential framework for the EU banking sector operational, targeting the parts of the map where we find the non-bank financial institutions, and working on how to provide a holistic view regarding all parts of the financial system, is a natural and important next step. The ESRB recently published a strategy paper on macroprudential policy “beyond banking”, which complements the guidance already provided on the policy framework for the banking sector. That strategy paper is meant to provide a point of reference as we now move on to further enhance the macroprudential policy strategy, regulatory data and instruments for addressing risks in non-bank financial sectors. I should mention that other work related to non-bank financial institutions has also been conducted, where the recently published annual ESRB Shadow Banking Monitor will hopefully provide important insights.
William J McDonough: The review of the Capital Accord  Remarks by William J McDonough, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, before the Eleventh International Conference of Banking Supervisors, held in Basel, 20-21 September 2000. *  *  *  I am greatly honored to be here as Chairman of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. I’d like to begin by thanking the Swiss National Bank, Kurt Hauri and the Swiss Federal Banking Commission, and Andrew Crockett and the BIS for organizing and hosting this important conference. They’ve done a wonderful job, for which I know we’re all very grateful. It is also a great pleasure to be with you under such dramatically different circumstances than when we last gathered together. Just two years ago, turbulence in the financial markets around the world had affected, in one way or another, the banking systems of virtually every nation, and bank supervisors were struggling to preserve confidence and stability. Today, of course, the global financial situation is much more stable and the outlook is very favorable. In the United States, we continue to enjoy the longest economic expansion in our nation’s history, and, following passage of financial modernization legislation, banks and other financial institutions now enjoy unprecedented strategic opportunities. In Europe, following monetary union in January of 1999, the banking industry, along with other corporate sectors, is becoming more efficient and competitive as economic and political reforms have sharpened the focus on shareholder value.

Market discipline After effective management at the bank level, the second line of defense against financial instability is market discipline, which is an increasingly important ally of the official supervisor. When armed with timely and meaningful information on banks’ performance, market participants can, by way of their investment and credit decisions, encourage bank managers and boards of directors to manage their risk exposures soundly. Equally as important, market participants can penalize those institutions that do not. But, of course, effective market discipline is not possible without meaningful public disclosure. While significant progress has been made in recent years, it unfortunately remains the case that disclosure practices have not kept pace with the rapid changes in banks’ business activities and risk exposures, and with how these exposures are measured and managed. For this situation to be fully remedied, notions of what is proprietary information and what should be in the public domain must change. Knowing a company’s appetite for risk and its approach to, and methodologies for, managing risk is essential to understanding the risks of being a shareholder, a creditor or a counterparty. All financial market participants should approach the issue of disclosure as users of financial statements rather than as issuers. There should be little question about the urgency of achieving dramatic progress in this area. Clearly, a full appreciation of risk cannot be achieved without sufficient information.
Let’s now turn to the “skillset” part of the equation, in terms of efforts to equip our talent pool with the right set of skills to face the upcoming challenges. Recently, there have been media reports about talent shortage in Hong Kong. I’m sure you will appreciate that Hong Kong is a small open economy with a significant and vibrant financial industry. So it is really natural to see people come and go. Undoubtedly, the travel restrictions given the need to contain the spread of Covid would have brought a degree of inconvenience to travellers, in particular expatriates with families elsewhere. We at the HKMA have maintained a close dialogue with the industry and reflected the views of the industry to the Government. Despite the tough balancing act of pandemic controls and facilitating travelling, I’m pleased to see that our travel restrictions have in fact been adjusted gradually in the past few months. 16. Talking about the overall talent landscape, in fact many markets around the world are facing the very same issue of talent shortage. In recent years, the increasing prominence of Fintech and Green and Sustainable Finance have been a game changer to the global financial industry. Financial institutions across the globe are actively looking for experts with relevant knowledge and skillsets to help develop innovative Fintech solutions or sustainable investment products, manage the climate risks, so on and so forth. 17. Many markets resort to competing for talent globally by trying to secure talent from other jurisdictions to fill the gaps.

In addition to career talks and workshops, we will launch a virtual resource centre in the next few months, so that university students and graduates can conveniently find out the various job types, career paths and job opportunities available in the banking industry through this “one stop directory”. Conclusion 24. Ladies and gentlemen, let me finish by emphasising that, as with any other industry, the success of our financial sector depends on a solid foundation based on the expertise of people working in it. Those expertise needs to be guided by a proper mindset, and they have to possess a deep pool of skillsets that evolve over time to cope with developmental challenges. The HKMA, together with the industry, have invested a lot of efforts over the past few years to cultivating both a proper mindset and essential skillsets for our talent pool. I hope my update today will offer the audience a glimpse of hope that we do have a solid foundation for our financial industry’s future development. And hopefully what I said would also set the stage for fruitful discussions in the several panels later in the day. 25. Thank you very much. And I wish today’s Conference a great success.
The IMF does not only envisage risks of a poorer development than expected – it may also be worth pointing out that they also see the possibility of an even more positive development. The Riksbank’s overall assessment is that international economic activity will enter a calmer phase over the coming two years, but at the same time global economic developments are very good right now. Sweden: Continued strong economy leads to slightly higher inflation The situation in the Swedish economy is also good. Last year growth was over 4 per cent. For instance, strong global growth has meant that exports have developed strongly for several years. Domestic consumption is also increasing rapidly now, at the same time as employment is rising. But the slightly weaker international economic activity means that activity in Sweden will also be dampened somewhat in the coming years. Inflation is the Riksbank’s particular responsibility. The Riksbank’s objective is to maintain inflation at around 2 per cent a year. We measure inflation as a change in consumer prices. Last year inflation was over 1.4 per cent. Over the past twelve months the main contribution to the increase in the consumer price index, or CPI, came from increased interest costs. However, higher electricity prices, rents and food prices also contributed to the increase in price levels. Price reductions on post and telecommunications had a dampening effect on inflation, as did falling prices for computers, DVDs and TVs.

Those purchases are currently under way at a pace of £ If we continued at that pace the programme would be complete by the start of November 2021; for that reason, and assuming no material worsening in market functioning, I would envisage some further slowing in pace at some point in the remainder of the year. I continue to see the current stance of policy as appropriate, given the current degree of uncertainty around the health and economic outlook. In particular it remains appropriate for policy to lean strongly against downside risks to the outlook, to support the economy and act as a bridge to help to ensure that weakness in the economy is not amplified by an unwarranted tightening in monetary conditions. I was very conscious in November of the uncertainties and downside risks to the economy and the need to manage those. According to the data published by the ONS last Friday, the UK economy contracted by around 10% in calendar year 2020; a larger one year fall has not been seen for over three centuries (Figure 8). The February MPR forecasts GDP will fall by 4% in 2021Q1, the current quarter, due to the ongoing effects of the pandemic and the renewed lockdown in response to it. With the exception of 2020Q2, when GDP fell by 19%, this would be the largest quarter-on-quarter fall in GDP since the general strike in 1926Q2, based on peacetime estimates.
These jobs require strong programming skills and in-depth business domain and system knowledge. There are not enough Singaporeans applying for these jobs in the first place, let alone qualifying for them. Technology will continue to lead hiring demand in 2021, with 1,700 hiring opportunities. So ware engineers account for about 30% of these jobs Business analysts and jobs in digital transformation account for another 25%. Technology jobs in the financial sector can be classified into three archetypes. Tech-Lite. These are mostly entry-level job roles for university - and increasingly polytechnic - graduates to gain hands-on experience in programming work and business domain experience. They make up about 10% of the tech workforce. Tech-Intermediate. These are roles which require good programming skills and understanding of business domains. About 75% of tech jobs in the financial sector are in this category. There is keen competition for these talents not only globally but also across diﬀerent sectors in Singapore. Tech-Advanced. These are senior leadership roles and in high-value tech functions, accounting for 15% of the tech workforce. Many global financial institutions have chosen Singapore as a hub for such high-value tech work. For example, 70% of Standard Chartered Bank’s global tech leadership and management sits in Singapore. The financial sector’s strong demand for technology talent will persist. MAS estimates that 2,500 to 3,500 tech jobs will be created in the financial sector each year, over the medium term. The competition for tech talent is economy-wide as more sectors embark on digitalisation.

Speeches  Published Date: 04 May 2021  "A Tech-Enabled Financial Sector – Is Our Workforce Ready?" Remarks by Mr Ravi Menon, Managing Director, Monetary Authority of Singapore, at “Growing Timber” MAS-IBF Webinar Series on 4 May 2021 Good morning and thank you for joining us. At the “Growing Timber” webinar six months ago, I spoke about: how jobs are the central economic challenge of our times; where the job opportunities in financial services are; how we can make our tertiary students job-ready for the financial sector; and  how we can help our mid-career workers retain their jobs amid technological changes. Today, I want to focus on two topics: an update on job opportunities in financial services based on MAS’ latest employment outlook survey; and the most challenging part of our jobs and skills agenda – job specialisation, specifically in the area of technology, based on a deep dive study MAS has done. On both topics, I will be sharing for the first time some granular data and information so that we can have a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities on the jobs and skills front in the financial sector. Job Opportunities - Employment Outlook for Financial Sector Let me start with job opportunities. The financial sector added 2,200 net jobs in 2020 – a year when the economy as a whole shed 180,000 net jobs. About 2,800 net jobs went to Singaporeans; non-Singaporeans accounted for a net job loss of 600. This 100% Singaporean share of net job growth is unusual.
With a view to ensuring that the ratio between the desired level of equity capital and the currency reserves can be increased again somewhat, the SNB recently decided to adjust its rule on allocations to the provisions for the coming years. For the financial years through to 2025, the annual allocation to the provisions will be at least 10% of the preceding year’s provisions, compared with 8% per annum previously. A persistent erosion of the SNB’s equity base would undermine the credibility of our institution over the long term and would fuel doubts regarding our ability to act. 1 Ongoing allocations to the provisions are therefore essential for the SNB. The amount remaining after the allocation to provisions is referred to as the distributable profit. However, since a profit in any given year can be followed by a loss the next, the SNB does not pay out all of the distributable profit at once. Instead we seek to smooth the distributions to ensure that they are less dependent on variable annual results. This smoothing was introduced to facilitate better planning for the Confederation and the cantons. However, maintaining distributions at a steady level is also of pivotal importance for the SNB. The reason for this is an underlying asymmetry: the SNB can distribute profits, but it cannot reclaim any money if it makes a loss. If the SNB were to always distribute its profits in their 1  For more information on the importance of a central bank’s equity, cf. inter alia Jordan, Thomas J.

The run up to the financial turbulence of the 1990s During the past twenty years, the financial systems in many countries have been deregulated. For the first time since the outbreak of World War One, capital can again pass more or less freely across national borders. Moreover, major changes in communication and information technology have paved the way for new instruments and methods for risk management. Taken as a whole, this has led to the financial system being more extensive and global today than ever before. This holds even though capital flows relative to GDP were also large at the end of the last century. The rapid financial development and internationalisation are per se a logical consequence of the production of goods and services being globalised, with a massive increase in cross-border trade. They also have to do with growing wealth in many parts of the world. This in turn has increased the need for new financial solutions for businesses and households. The increasing globalisation of production and trade in goods and services generates a demand for a more developed and internationalised financial system so that the opportunities for increased prosperity can be used to the full. Note that this, as always, involves a trade-off between risk and return. It is of course possible to substantially increase stability, in the sense of lowering risk, by measures that result in very low returns. However the solution is not to turn back to a less turbulent, but also less prosperous past regime of capital controls.
Charles Bean: Quantitative Easing – an interim report Speech by Mr Charles Bean, Deputy Governor for Monetary Policy at the Bank of England, to the London Society of Chartered Accountants, London, 13 October 2009. *  *  *  It’s a great pleasure to be invited to speak to you this afternoon. It is almost exactly a year since Lehman Brothers collapsed, precipitating a near-fatal heart attack for the global financial system. And in its wake came an unprecedentedly sharp and synchronised contraction in global economic activity, from which we are only just starting to emerge. In part, that stabilisation reflects the intensity of the countervailing policy actions by governments and central banks around the world. Injections of capital, funding guarantees, ring-fencing of toxic assets and abundant liquidity support have helped to return the banking system towards normality, though the process of balance-sheet repair still has some way to go. And substantial increases in fiscal deficits and aggressively expansionary monetary policies have helped to arrest the fall in spending, output and employment. For its part, the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee not only cut Bank Rate from 5% in September last year to just 0.5% in February, but also embarked on a programme of large scale asset purchases financed by the issuance of extra reserves – so-called “Quantitative Easing”. This unlovely phrase was originally coined to describe a related policy conducted by the Bank of Japan in the early part of this decade and has perhaps lost something in the translation.

Thus not only does the price of gilts rise as a consequence of the Asset Purchase Facility’s initial purchases, but also the prices of a whole spectrum of other assets. That in turn lowers the cost of non-bank finance and encourages increased corporate issuance. Also the rise in asset prices increases wealth and improves balance sheets. In this way, Quantitative Easing helps to work around the blockage created by a banking system that is still undergoing a process of balance sheet repair. That is exactly what we have seen since the Monetary Policy Committee started its asset purchase program. Gilt yields fell sharply, though they have subsequently risen and fallen again (Chart 2). But gilt yields can move for a variety of reasons, including changing expectations of future interest rates. If we control for that by comparing gilt yields with a measure of market expectations of the future level of Bank Rate (Overnight Indexed Swap rates for an equivalent maturity), we find that this spread has fallen by around ¾ percentage point (Chart 3). Moreover, no such movement is observed in either the United States or euro  1  That is in contrast to the related policy conducted by the Bank of Japan in the early part of this decade, which was instead directed at purchases of Japanese government debt held by the banking sector. 2  BIS Review 126/2009  area, which strongly suggests that the movement may be related to our gilt purchases 2 .