samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The Kuala Lumpur branch used to provide retail banking services to the Government as part of our role as banker to the Government. This role has now been transferred to banking institutions. It was also where currency was processed. This has also now been outsourced to MEPS Currency Management Sdn. Bhd. The branch premises is therefore now being transformed to a centralised service centre. Ladies and Gentlemen, Bank Negara Malaysia LINK will also provide support to the Bank's SME Special Unit in a number of areas associated with access to financing. The SME Special Unit was established within Bank Negara Malaysia almost two years ago. Initially, the functions of the SME Special Unit was to provide information on the various sources of financing available to the SMEs; facilitate the loan application process; and to provide advisory services relating to the financial requirements of SMEs. The role has subsequently been enhanced to monitor, coordinate and evaluate SME financing across all sectors, to  BIS Review 12/2005  1  review policies to enhance access to financing and coordinate the implementation of all SME financing policies. In addition, the SME Special Unit also acts as the Secretariat to the Small Debt Resolution Committee, which facilitates the restructuring of non-performing loans (NPLs) of SMEs with on-going businesses. The SME facilities available at Bank Negara Malaysia LINK will greatly increase the outreach capabilities of the SME Special Unit. Ladies and Gentlemen, As the financial system becomes more developed and sophisticated, there needs to be increased financial literacy.

This is best illustrated by the following statistics: •  According to the Bank for International Settlement's triennial survey in 2004, our average daily foreign exchange turnover was close to $ billion, which was the sixth largest in the world;  •  On average, transactions settled through the various RTGS systems in Hong Kong amounted to $ billion each day in 2005;  •  New debt securities issued in 2005 amounted to $ billion; and The total amount of funds raised through IPOs reached $ billion in 2005. 3. Our treasury markets have done well in servicing the financial businesses behind these impressive numbers. Further globalisation of financial markets and financial liberalisation on the Mainland will likely place new and increasing demands on our treasury markets. We need to move with the times, if we are to maintain our status as an international financial centre, and I think the establishment of the TMA provides a good mechanism for us to do so. In my view, there are four key areas which the TMA should focus on: professionalism, market development, codes and standards, and publicity. 4. The professionalism of market practitioners contribute significantly to the competitiveness of a financial centre. An important area of work of the TMA is therefore to enhance the professionalism of the practitioners in the Hong Kong treasury markets.
In the words I used when addressing Occupy in 2012, there is now a broader acceptance that “they were right” in their diagnosis (Haldane (2012)). Criticism of Occupy today tends to focus not on their diagnosis, but on their lack of prescription for curing the ills of inequality.   Bill de Blasio. He was elected Mayor of New York in November 2013 on a signature theme of tackling widening inequality in the city. His campaign slogan was “a tale of two cities”. And this was no ordinary victory. Bill de Blasio won with a remarkable 73% of the popular vote.   And finally, Thomas Piketty. Enough has already been said and written about a book bought by many, read by few and understood by even fewer (Piketty (2014)). I am guilty on all three charges. I suspect never, in the field of human endeavour, has so  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  simple a line chart done so much to fuel the debate among so many, not just in the salons of Paris but in the Starbucks of London and New York. Suffice to say, the inequality issue seems unlikely to be a French fashion. It is a global public policy trend and a rising one. Inequality is emerging after a half-century in the wilderness. The surprise may be that it has taken so long. It is well-known, from survey and experimental evidence, that a sense of “fairness” is a deeply-held and richly-valued psychological trait in humans (Bowles (2012)).

6  BIS central bankers’ speeches
The more closely a specific financial instrument is matched to the risk preferences of an individual investor, the harder it is to find another investor willing to trade that exact instrument in the event of a shock to those risk preferences. 32 In other words, the improved matching of risk to an individual’s risk profile has given rise to an increase in basis risk within the system. As one illustrative example, any investor wishing to hedge any exposure to the US sub-prime mortgage market over the past year or so would have little alternative but to trade in the standardised ABX indices (which themselves have often been relatively illiquid) rather than in the specific instrument they held. The developments over the past year have illustrated that hedges have often provided less effective than envisaged, and that there was a significant under-pricing of the inherent basis risk of many innovative structured instruments at the point of origination, given the lack of secondary market liquidity for such specific risk. Looking forward, it is quite likely that there will be greater unbundling of complex instruments into standardised components that are likely to be liquid and readily traded with low transactions costs, and bespoke elements that will command a higher risk premium given their inherent illiquidity. 8  BIS Review 93/2008  Strengthening financial infrastructure 33 Because of the specificity of the risk, innovative financial products are rarely exchange traded. Non-standardised products require the services of a broker-dealer to trade.

47 Looking ahead, however, ideas are being developed to lower some of the frictions from which innovative structured credit instruments in particular have suffered during recent months. Removal of these frictions will, in some cases, necessitate recognition of additional  8  12  Report of the Financial Stability Forum on enhancing market and institutional resilience, 7 April 2008; Ratings in structured finance: what went wrong and what can be done to address shortcoming, CGFS Paper 32, July 2008  BIS Review 93/2008  costs, for example in the screening of information and in the provision and cost of liquidity, that were severely underplayed in the earlier boom in financial markets. Recognition of these costs will, however, strengthen the resilience of the financial system and underpin the durability of the manifold benefits from financial innovation. BIS Review 93/2008  13
This may be, for the future, an interesting precedent: a new global currency can emerge without destabilizing the system. It is also worth noticing that the euro crisis had no major effect on its international role. In particular, the share of foreign reserves invested in Euro securities has barely moved. And, when the Swiss authorities decided to peg their currency, they chose the euro as an anchor. Does the euro have a “sphere of influence”? As you know, we have taken a very neutral stance on this issue and neither encouraged or discouraged the use of the euro as a reserve currency. In fact, the euro is increasingly used in international transactions and accepted for payments (including retail ones) in many countries – as European tourists can experience every day. Recently, the Eurozone seems to exert a stronger influence on global monetary conditions. For the first time in many decades, long-term rates in Europe have significantly decoupled from those of the US. Also, there is some evidence of “reverse causality” with Euro long term rates increasingly impacting US rates, creating new channels for monetary spillovers and feedbacks. However, the euro is not yet widely used as a unit of account: most global transactions – especially in commodities – are denominated in dollar. A majority of new securities issuances are also denominated in dollars. New global currencies? As the geography of the world economy changes, so will the shape of the international monetary system.

With this strict definition in mind, I will make four main observations. An asymmetric world First, the current world is highly asymmetric. Two major currencies – the US dollar and the Euro – account for most of the foreign exchange reserves. One of them, the dollar, clearly dominates in financial markets and payment systems. This asymmetry has many well-known and self-reinforcing consequences. US monetary policy has significant effects well beyond the US economy. Those monetary spillovers may be especially important when unconventional monetary policies are implemented. They cast new doubts on the insulating properties of floating exchange rates. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  They create new incentives, for many emerging economies, to manage their exchange rate and, for that purpose, accumulate dollar-denominated foreign exchange reserves. As a consequence, most, but not all, of the official liquidity provided through multilateral mechanisms is denominated in dollars. The rise of the euro The major innovation of the last decade has been the rise of the euro. It offers some interesting insights and lessons. Most economic models and historical examples suggest that the appearance of new world currencies would trigger huge portfolio adjustments and create major turbulences. Economists also hypothesized that, in a multicurrency world, portfolio shifts would create permanent exchange rate instability. None of this has happened. In fact, the euro has neither stabilized nor disrupted the international monetary system. Exchange rates have moved significantly but, most of the time, in an orderly fashion and have followed low periodicity cycles.
For us to be confident in the second criterion – that inflation is not just converging towards our aim, but stabilising around it – we would need to see signs of such pressures building. But there is so far scant evidence of this. Much of the increase we have seen in headline inflation in recent months has been driven by its volatile components. Of the 1.4 percentage point rise from November last year to February this year – when inflation peaked at 2% – more than 90% was explained by energy and food price inflation. Measures of underlying inflationary dynamics, by contrast, remain subdued. One such measure, HICP excluding food and energy, has hovered around 0.9% since mid-2013 and still shows few convincing signs of an upward trend. Most alternative measures are also sluggish by historical standards and show little movement towards our aim. An important source of subdued underlying inflation trends has been weak domestic price pressures, driven partly by subdued wage growth. Despite the domestic nature of the recovery, annual wage growth in terms of compensation per employee reached the historical low of 1.1% in the second quarter of 2016. Wage growth has since recovered somewhat – rising to 1.4% by the end of last year – but remains well below historical averages. This is where the issue of levels comes in – that is, the significant degree of labour market slack.

11  The FSF was established by the G7 finance ministers and central bank governors in 1999 to promote international financial stability through enhanced information exchange and international cooperation in financial market supervision and surveillance. 12  Financial Stability Forum, 2007. 13  The Counterparty Risk Management Policy Group II (CRMPG) is comprised of senior officials from major financial institutions. 4  BIS Review 74/2007  As mentioned above, I do not see HLIs as a direct threat to financial stability. The Achilles heel of the system is the link between HLIs and banks of systemic importance. Thus, the systemic risks originating from HLIs are better addressed through indirect measures aimed at the HLIs' counterparties and creditors, which are mostly large international banks. This has the advantage that best practice guidelines are focussed directly on the transmission channels through which the risk would be propagated and on the institutions which are cornerstones from a financial stability perspective. An example of guidelines for the counterparties and creditors of HLIs is the May 2007 report by the FSF. The FSF published recommendations to address potential financial system risks relating to HLIs. The focus of the report is clearly placed on systemic risks. Investor protection issues associated with institutional or retail investments in HLIs are not addressed. The aim of the two most important FSF recommendations (no. 1 and no. 2) is to mitigate the two transmission channels discussed above: First, core intermediaries – i.e.
These movements can be explained by several factors: risk aversion, preference for liquidity, tightening of remuneration spreads, tax-regime uncertainty, “re-intermediation” of savings ahead of the new prudential rules (Basel III and Solvency II). I would like to emphasise just how complementary the approaches that will be presented to you in this first session can be. While the topic of savings touches upon a wide range of well-known macroeconomic issues, it is the individual decisions of households and their financial services providers that ultimately generate the fundamentals. II. Following on from this, what challenges do movements of household savings pose for the marketing of financial products? The rules framing the marketing of financial products play a fundamental role in modern economies because they contribute so much to consumer confidence, particularly when the consumer wishes to make long-term investments. In a highly complex economic environment, the advisory duty is an essential link in the chain between household satisfaction and the economic efficacy of their investments. The numerous questions concerning life-insurance received by the legal specialists on the ACP information platform bear witness to this reality. The marketing of financial products also raises questions of consumer protection. The financial services provider must take into account the client’s profile including his/her age, assets, investment horizon and degree of risk aversion, and adapt the investment opportunities offered accordingly so that the recommended investments are tailored to the client’s wishes and needs. Guaranteeing that savers receive the right information is therefore indispensable.

Bearing these two requirements in mind, we invest our assets according to the criteria of liquidity, security and return. What does that mean specifically? First, our portfolio must be as liquid as possible. This is crucial, particularly as regards our objective of being able to use the balance sheet for monetary policy purposes. We have to be in a position to buy and sell assets quickly in crisis situations. It should always be possible to expand or reduce the SNB’s balance sheet if necessary. At the end of 2016, the SNB held approximately 70% of its foreign exchange reserves in foreign government bonds. A substantial proportion was invested in the world’s most liquid bond markets, where liquidity does not dry up even during a crisis. This ensures the SNB’s ability to act at any time. Second, the SNB’s portfolio must be as secure as possible. We regard security in this context as a comprehensive concept, aimed at preserving the value of the currency reserves in the long term. One of the first prerequisites for ensuring that a portfolio is as secure as possible is to make sure we invest in bonds with a high credit rating. In this way, we minimise the risk of large-scale defaults. Another prerequisite is to diversify as broadly as possible. This is why we spread our investments, not just over different currencies, but also over different investment categories. We are continuously expanding our investment universe.
Students spend about one to two days in class, and three to four days at work each week for a period of one or two years. Now in its fourth year, the programme has taken in 37 students. This includes 22 who have graduated from the programme, of which 9 students have successfully secured a job oﬀer at the bank before graduation. The WSDeg programme is a win-win proposition. The students get an early taste of what the industry is like which can help them make better informed career decisions. For the firms, internships are an eﬀective talent attraction tool – employers can tell a lot more about the suitability of prospective employees through a short internship on the job compared to any number of interviews and tests. We need to dramatically scale up such programmes. https://www.mas.gov.sg/news/speeches/2020/gearing-up-for-new-and-evolving-jobs-in-financial-services  14/18  04/12/2020  "Gearing up for New and Evolving Jobs in Financial Services" - Remarks by Mr Ravi Menon, Managing Director, Monetary Authorit…  MAS will introduce a new Work-Study Support Programme to co-fund the internship stipend of students who are trainees at financial institutions under WSDeg programme. Funding will be at 80% of the monthly stipend, capped at $ per trainee. MAS has been working with the private banking industry for an indicative commitment of about 200 trainees over the next 3 years. We plan to expand our eﬀorts in other growth areas too, such as asset management.

These include: the extension of IBF’s 5% course fee credit, which when stacked with the enhanced training subsidies under IBF, will bring the total course fee support to 95%; and the extension of the Training Allowance Grant of $ per training hour for companysponsored trainees. IBF will expand the list of courses eligible under the Financial Training Scheme to include deep-technology courses and certifications for a time-limited period. I urge all financial institutions and fintech firms to continue to tap on the enhanced training support measures to help your workers upskill and acquire new capabilities to stay employed. CONCLUSION Let me close now. Growing timber is a long-term commitment. So is the jobs and skills eﬀort - creating job opportunities, fostering job readiness, and supporting job retention. The eﬀorts take time to bear fruit. But with persistence and an enterprising spirit, we will create a lush forest: a world-class financial sector workforce ready for the future. © 2020, Government of Singapore. https://www.mas.gov.sg/news/speeches/2020/gearing-up-for-new-and-evolving-jobs-in-financial-services  18/18
This is a dangerous situation, as continued price increases then become a condition for continued mortgage increases and to uphold consumption. But this is evident in a low saving ratio. The saving ratio at the end of the 1980s was strongly negative. This indicates that households were living above their means, which is an unsustainable situation. This was also the case in the United States before the recent crisis, when the saving ratio was very low and consumption was funded by higher mortgages. The situation in Sweden now is quite different. House prices may rise or fall because of changes in the real economy. The consequences for monetary policy of a fall in house prices need not be so problematic. If this led to a fall in consumption, it would be a demand shock, which would cause lower inflation and resource utilisation. However, this could to a large degree be counteracted by more expansionary monetary policy, particularly if a relatively high percentage of borrowers with variable-rate mortgages meant that monetary policy had a greater impact. 3 Levels are more important than growth The main message in the most recent Monetary Policy Reports and Updates has been that the Swedish economy is strong. GDP growth is good and unemployment has begun to fall. This has justified raising the repo rate. But at the same time, the levels of GDP, investment and exports are still low, compared with the pre-crisis levels. At the same time, the level of unemployment is much higher.

There are several measures that have a greater effect on house prices and household borrowing than the policy rate, and at the same time entail lower costs for the real economy. In general, the problem needs to be analysed and specified, for instance, in the form of which market failures or which externalities or which consumer protection inadequacies it entails, to determine what measures can be used to deal with the problem closest to its source and at the lowest cost. The most suitable measure is probably one that is currently under the jurisdiction of another government agency, and not the Riksbank. To avoid the current problems with large differences between the repo rate path and market expectations, the decision-making process should start with forecasts for inflation and resource utilisation conditional on market expectations of interest rates in Sweden and abroad, that is, forecasts for the repo rate and policy rates abroad that are in line with market expectations according to implied forward rates in Sweden and abroad. The Riksbank used to make such forecasts earlier, before forecasts conditional on an own repo rate path were introduced, and the Bank of England and the ECB make such forecasts now. The methods for producing these forecasts may need improvement. The forecasts can then be used as a starting point for assessing whether a repo rate path that deviates from market expectations is necessary to best stabilise inflation and resource utilisation.