samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The ones already developed over many years and which the crisis is now leading us to adapt, or the new ones under scrutiny, are only meaningful and will only produce their desired effects if they are applied by all countries and, needless to say, first of all by those that negotiated them. From that viewpoint, the adoption of the Basel II framework by the United States looks to be one of the most important and urgent issues. It is also very important to improve and harmonise accounting standards. The views of G20 countries sometimes differ as to the role of accounting. For instance, one contentious issue is marking-to-market and the extent to which fair value accounting should be applied. It is vital that the accounting choices of standard setters better take on board the financial stability dimension, since they have an impact on the latter. Lastly, the crisis has also highlighted the limitations of self-regulation; it is also essential that the regulation of all systemically important institutions and markets be proportional to their potential impact on financial stability. However, in order to implement such an approach, agreement would have to be reached at the international level on a standard definition of the systemic nature of an entity, which clearly does not depend on its size alone. Moreover, the consistency and the appropriate balance of such potential specific rules with the general rules must also be ensured.

The promotion of more effective international cooperation on training and skills development to meet the changing demands of the industry, more comprehensive strategies on talent development and greater mobility that is consistent with the realities of the global economy will support such talent development. Despite these demands, under investment in learning remains in a significant proportion of financial institutions. This is largely due to the focus on keeping short term costs low. This has however resulted in drawing talent from the existing pool which has in turn resulted in rising costs of talent. Surveys suggest that the biggest skills and knowledge gaps faced by financial institutions are in knowledge of regulatory standards, communications, management skills and risk assessment and management. Professional and technical skills, particularly in the middle to senior levels, are still very much needed in many parts of Asia. These skills shortages will intensify as financial institutions expand their operations. Strategies for talent management and development must therefore change if financial institutions want to be competitive and well positioned to adjust and adapt to the changing conditions. The Asian Institute of Finance (AIF) was initiated by Bank Negara Malaysia and established jointly with the Securities Commission in [2009] to respond to the growing needs of the financial industry for high quality and efficient training opportunities that would develop indemand skills.
If they are not, the model will break-down out of sample, as did the (deductive) DSGE model and the (inductive) Google flu model. A gaming environment could be used to understand behaviour in a way which placed fewer restrictions. People’s behaviour would be observed directly in the act of game-playing which, provided this behaviour was a reasonable reflection of true behaviour, would give us new data. Because this is a virtual rather than real world, with shocks controlled and regulated, that could make it easier to address issues of causality and identification in response to shocks, including policy shocks. There are already multi-person games with primitive economies attached to them, which allow goods and monies to change hands between participants. These include EVE Online and World of Warcraft. Some economists have begun to use gaming technologies to understand behaviour. 52  For example, Steven Levitt 53  (of Freakonomics fame) has used gaming platforms to understand the demand curve for virtual goods. The idea here would be to use a multi-person dynamic game to explore behaviour in a virtual economy. This would include player interactions – for example, the emergence of popular narratives which shape spending or saving. And it could include player reactions to policy intervention – for example, their responses to monetary and regulatory policies. Indeed, in the latter role, the game could serve as a test-bed 54  for policy action – a large-scale, dynamic, digital focus group.

There is also scope for greater leverage on the advances of technology and new institutional arrangements that can enhance operational excellence, particularly distribution channels for extending outreach to the range of users from households to microenterprises and small and medium scale enterprises. In addition, innovations in Islamic financial solutions will need to take into account the higher regulatory expectations for more transparency, and the need for the effective management of risks and capital. This involves strengthening the resilience of the Islamic financial system in alignment with the evolving international regulatory developments thus raising the bar of industry performance. The IFSB has made significant advancements in leading the efforts to review specific measures put forward by the Basel Committee for possible adoption in Islamic finance. Further to this is the imperative to cultivate a strong risk culture within institutions. Reinforced by a robust shariah governance framework, it will ensure that innovation for furthering the development of Islamic finance is harnessed within the boundaries of the Shariah, which would avert overzealous innovative activities that could undermine financial stability. Let me conclude my remarks. Much has been achieved, both in terms of the role and contribution of the IFSB, and the advancement made by Islamic finance in this recent decade. This has been an outcome of cumulative efforts to strengthen the foundations of the Islamic financial system.
That can, nevertheless, still leave room for tension between the need to moderate the upswing in domestic demand in order to meet the Government’s inflation target (of 2½% or less) not this year, but in 1998 and beyond on the one hand, and unwanted strength of the exchange rate on the other. There is no easy monetary policy answer to this dilemma. How far it persists depends upon just why the exchange rate suddenly strengthened as it has; and that is not easy to explain in terms of developments in the UK alone. Some of the suggested influences may well prove to be exaggerated or indeed reversible. This may be true, for example, of the rise in the oil price. It may be true, that expectations about a prospective relative rise in UK, and US, interest rates, reflecting the relative strength of our cyclical positions compared with those in Japan or continental Europe, are overdone, and they should in any event reduce as recovery takes hold in those other countries. And present market perceptions of the euro as a potentially weak currency if the Maastricht convergence criteria are not rigorously enforced, may also come to be seen to be exaggerated. There is in fact some suggestion, in currency options prices, that markets see a larger downside than upside risk to sterling against the DM in the course of this year. In the meantime, policy judgments are likely to remain unusually difficult.

If there is one message that a wider public audience takes away from my remarks this morning, I hope it is that. Returning inflation to its 2% target is at the heart of the MPC’s actions over the past 10 months. Ceasing asset purchases; starting to raise Bank Rate; beginning to shrink the asset portfolio; considering starting to sell gilts acquired via QE: all these actions serve to tighten monetary conditions and weigh against inflationary pressures. Of course, there is always the question of whether these actions should have come earlier or been more aggressive. In assessing these claims, we need to be wary of hindsight bias, and recognise the benefits of adopting a measured, determined and purposeful approach to the transition from the very accommodative policies introduced during the global financial crisis and maintained more or less ever since. But now that the initial stage of that transition have been successfully navigated, an immediate issue for monetary policy makers is whether the pace of policy tightening now needs to change. In May, inflation reached 9.1%. [4] The MPC forecasts a further rise to around 11% later in the year, once rises in international commodity prices stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pass through to UK utility and food prices. For an MPC member charged with achieving the inflation target of 2% – someone in ‘the price stability business’, if you like – this is obviously a very unsatisfactory situation.
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.

The first authorised in Bulgaria providers of the two new payment services started their activities in 2020. In conclusion, we can sum up that the trends in Europe are related to the development of a single European payments infrastructure based on common standards and instruments, aiming to ensure a pan-European scope and reach. Instant payments, which are in a process of introduction also in Bulgaria, open banking, and the increasing use of mobile technologies are topical issues both in the country and in the European Union, issues that we will continue to talk about. The payment services in Bulgaria are evolving in line with the dynamic processes in Europe, gathered around digitalisation, new technologies, and the ensured security of the payment process. 1 Contactless Payments on consumer off-the-shelf devices (COTS) and Software Based PIN Entry on COTS 2 Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) 3 Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2018/389 of 27 November 2017 supplementing Directive (EU)  2015/2366 of the European Parliament and of the Council with regard to regulatory technical standards for strong customer authentication and common and secure open standards of communication (RTS on SCA and CSC) 4 www.eba.europa.eu/regulation-and-policy/payment-services-and-electronic-money/eba-working-group-on-apis-  under-psd2 5 Opinion of the European Banking Authority on obstacles under Article 32(3) of the RTS on SCA and CSC 6 www.eba.europa.eu/single-rule-book-qa  3/3  BIS central bankers' speeches
Perhaps it is because we now find ourselves confronted by a pandemic and climate change, and relying greatly on original thought, and scientific innovation, that Turing's values and achievements resonate so strongly with us today. Banknote character ‐ speech by Andrew Bailey | Bank of England  Page 2  Banknote features And we’ve tried to reflect those many achievements on this new note, which I’m very pleased to now unveil. Turing is perhaps best known for his code breaking work at Bletchley Park during World War Two. Here, far from being the solitary genius he is sometimes caricatured as, Turing led a team of codebreakers who designed a machine which could be used to decipher German military codes, something once thought impossible. This machine was known as The Bombe, and the technical drawings for it are featured here on the note. Until Turing and his colleagues invented this machine, British Intelligence had employed codebreakers to crack these German cyphers manually. But the sheer complexity of the codes meant they had little success. The early computers which Turing helped design would decipher some of these codes in as little as 15 minutes, giving the allied forces an invaluable military advantage. Historians have credited this work that Turing led at Bletchley Park, with shortening the war by as much as 2 years, saving many millions of lives in the process. But Alan Turing’s contributions to the field of computing start even before his wartime efforts.

Thus, the stand alone approach was in many ways the only practical choice at the time the initial supervisory stress tests were conducted. A final set of design choices affecting how stressed capital ratios are measured involves the actual models that produce the estimates of net income and capital. The models used in the CCAR and DFAST supervisory stress tests are developed and implemented by supervisors – they are almost entirely independent of stress test models used by banks. This is something that has evolved over time. The SCAP results were based on a variety of sources, including projections made by the banks, simple supervisory models, and historical data on bank performance. The blending of sources reflected that the SCAP was the first broad-based supervisory stress testing program, conducted in a crisis environment, with significant learning along the way. Over time, supervisory estimates have become increasingly independent from the projections made by banks. Supervisors and economists in the Federal Reserve System have developed models to capture the impact of the stress scenarios on various elements of net income, including different categories of loans and securities, interest and non-interest income, non-credit expenses and balance sheet evolution, as well as the flow through of net income to regulatory capital. This was a policy choice intended to provide consistency of treatment across banks involved in the stress tests and to counteract any incentives banks might have to understate the impact of the stress scenario.
But, in contrast to that prophecy, at the end of the day the countries that did not have to bail out any of their financial institutions were, with one exception (Malta), located typically in the CEE region. So it seems to me that GDP per capita, human development and industrial tradition are not the criteria driving the market’s classification of “emerging” economies. Should euro membership automatically make a country “developed”? In other words, does giving up independent monetary policy make a country more “stable”? But why, then, isn’t Bulgaria considered a developed country, when it holds a fixed exchange rate against the euro? Why not Kosovo and Montenegro, which have adopted the euro unilaterally? Much space has been devoted to the so-called decoupling debate, in which many experts 1/2  BIS central bankers' speeches  claimed that emerging countries were less affected by the global financial crisis. But with the benefit of hindsight, we now know that the GDP declines in emerging countries were, on average, just as steep as those experienced by developed countries. A part of the explanation, once again, lies in the confusing taxonomy: we see huge differences among individual emerging countries as well, even within BRICS. I suggest an analogy to the decoupling debate: we are now observing a “BRICS decoupling” to the power of two: only China and India have shown robust growth since the Great Recession. Russia, Brazil and South Africa have been stagnating, each for its own specific reasons.

The SFBC is mainly responsible for the supervision of banks and institutions, while the National Bank is entrusted with overseeing payment and securities settlement systems and promoting the stability of the financial system. Our activity in this area focuses on analysing the structures, the behaviour and the results in the Swiss banking system. Up until now, the National Bank was known primarily for its banking statistics. Furthermore, it frequently conducted and published banking surveys. We are now increasingly turning our attention to the analysis of topical issues, including a periodic analysis of the situation in the financial system. In so doing, we concentrate on those aspects which are relevant for assessing system stability. For this reason, banks are the main focus. Developments in the insurance world jeopardise system stability only indirectly at the most, e.g. in the case of a financial conglomerate. The situation in the Swiss banking sector The Swiss banking sector found itself in a hostile environment in the past few months. There was a slowdown in economic development. Hope for a prompt recovery was dampened. The number of corporate bankruptcies increased substantially compared with the previous year. Uncertainty surrounding company profits hit the stock markets with full force. As elsewhere, Swiss stock prices dropped significantly amid high volatility. While the Swiss market as a whole (SPI) lost 22% from the beginning of the year, the SPI banking index weakened by 30% and the share index of insurance companies plummeted by as much as 47% (as of 9 December 2002).
Increased competition means that companies must become more efficient and cost-conscious, which in turn should have a positive effect on productivity. In addition, a new competition act came into force in Sweden in 1993, containing an expressed prohibition of co-operation between companies that limits competition, as well as a ban on the misuse of a dominant position. There has also been deregulation in a number of areas. For instance, government monopolies have been abolished and freedom to establish businesses has been introduced with regard to, for instance, transport, communication and energy. Changed conditions for competition thus affect productivity growth, but they can also affect price trends in a more direct manner. Despite the fact that we gained much tougher competition legislation in 1993, it appears that developments in this field are moving rather slowly. Swedish prices continue to lie at a higher level than those in other countries in most areas, without this being fully explained by differences in VAT rates and wages. Increased competition could contribute to a convergence of price levels. High food prices Swedish food prices were, for instance, more than 18 per cent higher than the average prices in the 3 EU in 1998 . The difference has declined somewhat since then, but apparently at a very slow rate. If one regards 1998 prices in current terms with the aid of HICP development since then, one finds that  3  Eurostat's survey of the price level index for 1998, published in 2000.

Ravi Menon: The work of the NGFS in four emerging issues in climate change Opening remarks by Mr Ravi Menon, Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore and Chairman, Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), at the NGFS Workshop, Singapore, 26 April 2023. *** Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am delighted to welcome you to the inaugural NGFS Workshop in Singapore. We held our annual NGFS Plenary meeting yesterday. We discussed how the NGFS can continue to push the envelope in greening the financial system: to strengthen the resilience of the financial system to climate and environmental risks and; to encourage financing flows to support the transition to a net-zero world. The NGFS is well-placed to do this – we are a coalition of 125 central banks and financial regulators from over 90 jurisdictions. Our size enables us to make an impact globally and our diversity enables us to harness multiple perspectives. The work we do is not only important but urgent. Climate change is already happening – its physical manifestations are becoming increasingly evident – especially here in Asia. We are already seeing unprecedented heat waves, floods, and agricultural degradation. One of the key roles of the NGFS is to build capacity and capabilities among central banks and supervisors to deal with the climate challenge. This inaugural NGFS Workshop, with more than 150 participants from over 60 institutions, will discuss cuttingedge economic and financial issues related to climate change and nature loss.
In particular we need much stronger cross border crisis planning – a subject on which I have been chairing a group under the FSF. This has been bedevilled, in practice, by the sheer lack of information and time to consult widely in the heat of a crisis. That we can do something about. I hope we will agree two things to put to the G20 summit – a statement of principles on how countries should cooperate in planning for and handling crises in cross border institutions and a programme to put in place better arrangements for information sharing and cross border dialogue on the largest banks in the world. Building on the core international colleges of supervisors we would aim in peacetime to establish a shared information base among the relevant authorities and jointly to think through the implications of failure for different countries. That would at least give us the basis for considering a coordinated solution in wartime. In time we should also try to establish greater harmony on national resolution regimes which is on the Basel Committee’s agenda. Lesson 4: Develop a new generation of macroeconomic models So far I have concentrated on lessons for financial policy but this recession has also set some challenges for the economics profession and cast doubts on the macroeconomic modelling. In truth, much of my critique of the models that financial institutions use to calibrate risk could equally be levelled at the workhorse DSGE models that most economists and central bankers use to describe and forecast macroeconomic developments.

For example, we published analyses of the vulnerabilities in our Financial Stability Reviews in 2006 and 2007 and highlighted the declining price of risk, the build up of global imbalances, the growing dependence of banks on wholesale funding, and the risk that structured credit markets could seize up in a downturn. When we took that message to Chief Executives of banks in London and New York, they generally accepted the analysis and agreed that a correction was bound to come. However, almost to a man (and they were all men), they took comfort from the sophistication of their risk management systems and hedging strategies. They were confident they could ride out the storm. But as it turned out their systems were preparing them for a shower not for a hurricane. The limitations of their risk models were cruelly exposed in August 2007. One CFO remarked last year “We were seeing things that were 25-standard deviation moves, several days in a row”, which in plain English means that according to their models, the outright impossible was happening on a daily basis. According to the Value at Risk (VaR) benchmark for example – which measures the amount an institution stands to lose on its portfolio given an abnormal movement in market prices – there shouldn’t have been a big problem But that was partly because recent experience grossly underestimated what the truly abnormal really was.