samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Access to Markets Third, Southeast Asian economies need to boost external demand by strengthening their access to the major developed markets. In the short term, there is little we can do about the cyclical downturn. But for the longer term, favourable and assured access to key trading partners will allow Southeast Asian countries to maximise benefits from free trade and globalisation, and make themselves more attractive to investors. One basic approach is to promote multilateral trade, and contribute to a successful outcome of the Doha Development Agenda of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). But we need to complement the multilateral approach with bilateral Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with our key trading partners. This is why Singapore is actively pursuing an FTA strategy. We have concluded FTAs with New Zealand, Japan, and the European Free Trade Area (EFTA), and hope to conclude agreements with the US and Australia very soon. Singapore’s aim is not just to boost our own trade links with our FTA partners, but also to catalyse broader economic engagement between ASEAN and its trading partners. This is indeed happening. After New Zealand concluded its FTA with Singapore, Australia and New Zealand proposed starting a Closer Economic Partnership Agreement with ASEAN. Last year, ASEAN and China agreed to set up an ASEAN-China FTA within 10 years. Weeks later, Prime Minister Koizumi of Japan proposed a Japan-ASEAN Comprehensive Economic Partnership, to be modelled on the Japan-Singapore bilateral agreement.

Mervyn King: Monetary policy developments Speech by Mr Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, at a dinner hosted by Scottish Financial Enterprise (SFE) and Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce (ECC), Edinburgh, 12 June 2006. *  *  *  It is 230 years since David Hume died and Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Economists will be forever indebted to two of the greatest minds of the Scottish Enlightenment. Both Smith and Hume were members of the Poker Club in Edinburgh, formed, as the name might suggest, to stir up opinion and make the sparks fly. Alexander Carlyle described the Club as so “frugal and moderate” that “a very constant attendant told me that he never observed even an approach of inebriation on any of the members”. Perhaps that’s why it faded away in the 1780s. In any event, I’m glad we are not at the Poker Club tonight, but enjoying your splendid hospitality here. Given Edinburgh’s importance to the Scottish Enlightenment, it is appropriate that I start by discussing an intellectual puzzle. The puzzle is the following. After 1945 governments felt they had the secret to managing the economy. They thought that by boosting the level of demand through higher government spending and lower interest rates, they could secure permanently higher levels of output and employment. If we were prepared to accept a somewhat higher rate of inflation, then we could achieve a somewhat higher rate of economic growth.
This is in line with the credit growth rates observed in some euro area members since the mid-1990s. Some recent empirical literature has indicated that the probability of bank failures and banking crises increases with credit booms. Banks may become less cautious in granting loans during the boom, due to the prevailing optimism and good performance at the macroeconomic level. And even if the optimism is justified by the fundamentals, it may go a bit too far, leading to an eventual build-up of financial imbalances. Their subsequent bursting could hit the real economy to such an extent that it would have repercussions for the financial system. Here I come back to the issue of euro adoption, which may be a very relevant factor in this debate for several reasons. First, by providing easier access to external financing for banks, adoption of the euro may amplify a credit boom. Second, it may be associated with a wave of optimism about the future economic prospects of the acceding countries, given the positive net benefits expected from euro area entry. Third, euro adoption requires nominal convergence, including a reduction in nominal interest rates to the euro area level. This may support a credit expansion to some economic sectors. Finally, in a currency union a national credit boom cannot be addressed by monetary policy actions. To take the current euro area members as an example, the ratios of private credit to GDP a decade ago in Ireland, Portugal and Spain ranged between 45 and 75 percent.

The order of priority for these considerations does not dictate the weight the central bank can give to stable output and employment in the short term. Norges Bank does not interpret “high and stable output and employment” to mean that the Commission is advocating that monetary policy should have greater responsibility for stabilising the economy than it does today. Monetary policy cannot have primary responsibility for the level of output and employment. There is broad consensus among economists that monetary policy cannot influence the long-term growth potential of the economy. The level of economic activity, and thereby employment, is a result of overall economic policy, particularly with regard to more structural factors such as wage and income formation, the tax and social security system and the functioning of the labour market. Monetary policy is only one piece of this picture. But monetary policy can make important contributions to stabilising the economy. First, the policy rate can be rapidly adjusted in response to shocks to the economy, as for example in 2008 and 2014. Second, the policy rate has a direct and pronounced impact on many segments of the real economy. This means that as long as there is no conflict with the inflation outlook, monetary policy can be oriented to influence average output and employment over time. Many countries, including Norway, have experienced that employment losses in connection with an economic downturn are not fully reversed following a turnaround; for example, unemployment may become entrenched at a high level or the labour force may be reduced.
To my mind this was because regulators and governments bought completely the view that “equity capital is scarce and very expensive” – which in some ways is a proposition remarkable in its total incoherence (as shown with clarity and precision by Admati, De Marzo, Hellwig and Pfleiderer (2010) and with wit and humour by Merton Miller (1995)). I believe there is a need to break out of the way of thinking that leads to the “equity is scarce and expensive” conclusion. That would help us get to a situation where it will be normal to have banks hold very much more capital that had been assumed in recent decades to be acceptable. And that change would be a return to the past. Having higher bank capital will make the job of monetary policy (which has now to deal with the after-effects of massive instability in financial markets) much easier. Using limits on gearing to help maintain financial stability and monetary policy to help maintain price stability is an efficient allocation of instruments to goals. But it makes little sense to expect this extra bank capital to be in place immediately. Curbing lending and dealing with a debt-fuelled asset price boom is not the problem for today. Higher capital needs to be in place by the time that does emerge as a problem.

Caleb M Fundanga: Strengthening the Zambian banking sector Address by Dr Caleb M Fundanga, Governor of the Bank of Zambia, at the Commissioning and Official Opening of Access Bank (Zambia) Ltd, Lusaka, 24 September 2008. *  *  *  • H.E, Acting President of Republic of Zambia, Mr. Rupiah Banda M.P; • Honourable Ministers; • H.E Nigerian High Commissioner to Zambia; • Access Bank Group Deputy Managing Director; • Access Bank Zambia Chairman; • Access Bank Zambia Managing Director; • Distinguished guests; • Ladies and Gentlemen. I am greatly honoured to be given this opportunity to make brief remarks at this formal commissioning and opening of Access Bank (Zambia) Ltd. I wish to extend a warm welcome to all of you gathered here today, particularly those who have travelled from outside the country. Your Excellency, Honourable Ministers, today’s event is a crowning moment and demonstrates the fruits of the economic reforms that the Government has continued to implement in the financial sector in particular and the economy in general. Indeed it is a landmark achievement in the Government’s concerted efforts aimed at attracting foreign investors. It is also gratifying to note that Access Bank Zambia Limited is the first bank to be registered in the country since 1999. I am also happy to inform you, Ladies and Gentlemen, that the Bank of Zambia is currently reviewing other applications for banking licenses. In this regard, we expect a few more banks to be registered in the near future.
To do so, we must make global finance more resilient and fair. To make the system more resilient, funding and derivatives markets are being overhauled. Formerly risky areas of shadow banking, such as securitisation, are being transformed into sustainable market-based sources of finance. Financial institutions are being made stronger, with a seven-fold increase in the minimum capital requirements for the world’s largest banks. In the UK alone, major banks have raised over £ billion in new capital over the past few years and the Bank of England is now regularly testing their resilience to severe shocks. To make the system fairer, we should look to the insights of a third great Scottish figure, Adam Smith. Smith was a great advocate of competition. Its frequent absence in financial services has been corrosive. The most prominent examples are large, complex banks which privatise gains but socialise losses. The G20 summit later this year in Brisbane will be decisive in determining whether we can end too-big-to-fail. A more pernicious development has been the widespread rigging of some financial markets for personal gain. This has both diminished the effectiveness of markets and undermined trust in markets themselves. Adam Smith emphasised the importance of conduct, or what he referred to as “the established rules of behaviour,” by which “many men behave very decently, and through the whole of their lives avoid any considerable degree of blame.” 3 Those established rules of behaviour – social capital – underpin the functioning of the free market.

As I mentioned earlier, the UK economy has been growing rapidly. Over the past year, job creation has been the quickest on record, pushing unemployment down to 6.5 per cent. The economy is finally producing as much as it did on the eve of the crisis in 2008, and inflation is back near its 2 per cent target. In short, the UK economy is starting to head back to normal. 1  Bank of England founding charter, 1694. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  As the economy normalises, Bank Rate will need to start to rise in order to achieve the inflation target. But the MPC has no pre-set course and the timing of any increases in interest rates will be determined by the data. In this regard, the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) is balancing the implications for inflation of hard evidence of sustained economic momentum against conflicting signals over the degree of slack in the labour market. While some indicators such as wages suggest that there was more labour supply than we had previously thought, it is also true that spare capacity is being used up a bit more rapidly than we had expected. A key judgment for the MPC is when and to what extent these developments will translate into real wage growth, and in turn that wage growth into price pressures. Next month’s Inflation Report provides the next opportunity to update our thinking on these important questions. A durable expansion rests ultimately on moving from anaemic to strong productivity growth.
Both the effects of climate change and of the measures geared to sustainably transforming our economy affect credit institutions directly. First, these risks bear directly on the valuation of some of the assets on bank balance sheets. Further, they have macroeconomic consequences which, evidently, likewise affect balance sheets. In either of the two cases, banks’ solvency under our supervision might be affected by processes which, as supervisors, we should monitor. In this respect the Banco de España, as one of the guarantors of financial stability, should contribute to fomenting the correct valuation by banks of these risks and mitigation of their financial effects. These measures may vary in nature, including aspects such as: - urging banks to develop risk models that envisage climate change; - developing stress tests based on different scenarios of ecological transition; - gathering detailed information on aspects such as the physical location of assets or the efficiency strategies of firms that receive financing. As to the role of banks ahead of this challenge, let me stress that if in the near future banks properly identify, quantify and mitigate these risks, this would not only be a contribution to ensuring the stability of the financial system as a whole; moreover, banks themselves would indirectly be acting as a catalyst for change by helping financing reach those activities that most contribute to the sustainable transformation of our economy. They would also be discouraging those activities potentially most harmful to the environment, by having hitherto hidden environmental costs passed through to the price of financing.

Evidently, the attractiveness for investors of issues of green bonds is a sign of the growing concern over the effects of climate change. Yet for the aforementioned transmission mechanisms to work properly, the volume of securities traded on these markets must reach a critical mass and be consistently catalogued. To achieve this, the initiatives developed within the European Commission are essential: these include most notably the taxonomy for determining the activities that contribute to sustainability in environmental terms, and the “ecological” labelling of financial products. We need a common language that can be used both by debt issuers and potential investors, so that these markets may be developed. On this point of financial investments categorised as “green”, it is worth recalling that we as central banks are also active investors in financial markets, both in monetary policy operations and in portfolio management relating to reserves. In this connection, as acknowledged in the report by the network of central banks and supervisors, and as recently indicated by Mario Draghi, we are aware that environmental risks are not yet being built into most of this portfolio’s ratings, whether internal or devised by rating agencies. Accordingly, in the Eurosystem, a thorough review of these risk valuation processes is under way. The aim is to ensure us that all the relevant factors, including environmental ones, for the prudent management of the portfolio held by the central banks are being taken into account.
What we saw in the international financial markets—after the bond markets’ crash in 1994 or the Mexico/Barings unrest in 1995—is an interaction between market tendencies in a more limited sense and weak public finances or other credibility problems. High international interest rates and currency unrest have aggravated the problem of public finances,  BIS Review 56/1997  -7-  so that on these occasions economies such as Sweden’s have moved from a virtuous to a vicious circle. Examples of how one could analyse exchange rate developments in the above terms can also be found in events of the last half-year. An explanation of developments with respect to the krona has to do with the position of the Swedish and continental economies in the business cycle. In recent months the dollar and the pound especially have appreciated relative to continental currencies. Monetary policy in the USA and Great Britain has been relatively tight. (Figure 4). This is still not the entire explanation. The krona has also fallen somewhat against continental currencies, especially during the winter and spring. In part, this has coincided with concerns with respect to the EMU process, possibly strengthened in Sweden’s case because Sweden’s position on the EMU issue is unclear. In addition there has been some uncertainty about the steadfastness of long-term economic policy connected with, inter alia, continued high unemployment. The studies that have been done by the Riksbank indicate that there is room for an appreciation of the krona.

In the same manner, interest rates will normally need to be raised in situations in which future inflation tends to get excessive as a consequence of a too high resource utilization. Consequently, when an inflation forecast shows that future inflation does not appear to be in line with the target, policy must be altered. In these situations there is a balancing problem. The question is how forceful the interest rate change should be. If it is dramatic, the adjustment in the rate of inflation to the established target may be faster, but the repercussions in the short term in the form of fluctuations in production and employment will probably be bigger also. Figure 1  P r ice Sta b ilizatio n : Alte r n a tive Pa th s  πt  2%  t+4  t+8  t  The reasoning can be made clear with a simple diagram (Figure 1). By choosing interest rate path 2 rather than path 1, the adjustment to the inflation target will be somewhat slower; however, the development in the economy will also be less spasmodic. BIS Review 56/1997  -3-  The fact that the Riksbank--when the price stability objective was introduced in 1993--chose to postpone its application for about 2 years (the decision that evaluation would only be made when the direct effects of the krona’s weakening had died away in 1995) can be said to have been a way of taking into consideration the above reasoning.
Mr. Yam comments on the financial turmoil in Asia Address by the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Institute, Mr. Joseph Yam, JP, at the Euromoney Asia Pacific Issuers and Investors Forum on 2/12/97. 1. Ladies and gentlemen, I am honoured to have been invited this year to deliver the opening address for Euromoney’s Asia Pacific Issuers and Investors Forum. 2. The year 1997 has been an unusual year for Asia, particularly for Hong Kong. Amidst financial turmoil of the worst kind in the history of Asia, Hong Kong went through political transition to become a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. This was achieved in the smoothest manner one could imagine. And as the currencies of Asia tumbled one after another in a process of competitive devaluation, involving sharp depletions of foreign reserves and requiring financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund and others, and sending shock waves to financial markets throughout the region and beyond, our currency, the Hong Kong dollar, remained very stable and our already very substantial foreign reserves increased. Although our asset markets have been affected by the contagion, some consolidation was in any case overdue; and in the event, for the year to date, the downward adjustment has been significantly less severe than those of many others in the region. 3. Hong Kong has thus held up extremely well under the circumstances.

The ECB has only one instrument at its disposal – short-term official interest rates - and can therefore only aim at one objective. This has been defined by the Governing Council as “a year-on-year increase in the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) for the euro area of below 2%”. The objective of price stability “is to be maintained over the medium term”, emphasising that monetary policy needs to be forward-looking. But this definition also stresses the fact that the focus of the ECB is on price developments “in the euro area”. In reaching its decisions on monetary policy, the Governing Council is concerned with economic conditions in the euro area as a whole, rather than specific regional or national developments. It is sometimes said that while the single monetary policy may be “right” for the euro area as a whole, it is “wrong” for many individual countries within the area. I disagree with this view. First, it overlooks the fact that within a single currency area adjustment can occur via prices and wages. Second, it infers a very narrow perspective on the costs and benefits of a single monetary policy, in isolation from the broader arguments. These broader considerations can be assessed in my view, as being very clearly positive in the medium to long term for growth as well as employment. Nevertheless, an analysis of the causes of and policy responses to the differences across countries is useful.
Speed of payment clearing and settlement is defined as the time from payment initiation to payment completion in final funds. In a world where many other countries are moving to payment systems that support near real-time payments from any bank account sender to any bank account receiver, the U.S. payments system is slow. Countries such as the UK, Australia, Mexico, Switzerland and Singapore have built or are building near real-time retail payment systems. Is the need for faster payments in the U.S. a key gap in the payment industry that should be addressed? As we’ve discussed this issue with industry leaders, we hear that although end users don’t demand this today, they will expect it tomorrow. The sentiment seems to be that a proactive approach to preparing for a real-time future is wise. And near real-time seems likely to be transformative to the transactions of daily life and work. Notification of payment to end-users is an element of speed in payment clearing. End users increasingly expect near real-time informational features, which are lacking in payment mechanisms such as ACH and even in much provision of wire, but typically available with cards and certain non-bank innovator products. For credit transactions, receivers expect to be informed that good funds have arrived or are on their way. Transaction confirmation is expected by both the sender and receiver. If settlement is deferred, the sender’s financial institution may need to send a message to communicate that good funds are on their way.

Christine M Cumming: Enhancing payment system speed, efficiency and security Keynote remarks by Ms Christine M Cumming, First Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at the TCH Annual Payments Symposium and Business Meeting, New York City, 5 July 2013. *  *  *  It is a great pleasure to be here today to speak to you about the evolution of the U.S. payments system and the Federal Reserve Banks’ role in that evolution. The views I express will be mine and not those of the Federal Reserve System or the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, although I will draw on the considerable work being done in the Federal Reserve on the future payments direction. Without question, we are living in an once-in-a-lifetime period of change in the U.S. payments system. Payments providers are seeking ways to bring mobile technology to payments, an integration widely seen as a game-changer by payments industry participants. Person-to-person payments mechanisms have grown rapidly, and the potential for those funds to be immediately credited to the receiver could be another game-changer. Commerce increasingly integrates with a payments mechanism, especially as information about spending patterns are a source of value to firms and loyalty discounts and points become an important part of the business value proposition to customers. Indeed, rather than talk about a payments industry, we find ourselves talking about a payments ecosystem, a web of banks, service companies, alternative payments providers and commercial firms. Some have called these developments a second internet revolution.