samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
I would now like to examine the areas that I consider need to be reviewed first of all, but I would also like to repeat that it is not part of the Riksbank’s mandate to suggest optimal tax systems or give instructions for how housing policy should be designed. On the other hand, it seems reasonable that we should continue to highlight those factors that are contributing to the housing market functioning poorly and to the accumulation of imbalances in the financial system. Tax policy: As I mentioned earlier, the taxation system contributes to the imbalances on the housing market. Tax reforms to reduce households’ incentives to take on debt could reduce these imbalances. Tax policy is not optimally designed either from the stability of financial stability and the Riksbank has previously pointed to tax relief on interest expenditure, property tax and capital gains tax as areas that need to be reviewed. This is not necessarily a matter of having to increase total taxation or adopt individual measures, but rather of reforming the entire taxation system in a way that creates incentives for increased mobility and makes it easier to utilise existing housing at the same time as it decreases incentives for indebtedness. With regard to tax regulations for homeowners, these could be designed in different ways, either by regular taxation of the actual home or by taxing their purchase and sale.

It needs to place more emphasis on a pure protection plan like a simple Term Assurance which is a more cost-effective way of addressing the protection needs of Singaporeans. The insurance adviser plays a critical role here. He or she is the first line of contact with the consumers and wields the greatest influence over what they purchase. He should sell what is appropriate to the protection needs of the customer and not maximise his or his company’s returns. He should always place the interests of his clients above his own. And it is the responsibility of every insurer to ensure that its advisers are properly trained and incentivised. This is especially important for customers from lower-income households where there are competing demands for limited income. Otherwise, getting adequate insurance protection will be relegated to a lower priority in a working adult’s life, hence exposing his dependants to risks of the breadwinner’s premature death. 15. The insurance industry should also find ways to reach out to more Singaporeans who are either uninsured or underinsured, and be prepared to go beyond the tied agency distribution model. I am pleased to note that over the years, the insurance industry has diversified its distribution channels to include banc assurance and direct sales. I urge the industry to do more, such as working with more employers and associations to offer group term insurance to cover the lives of their employees or their members.
Consequences for Swedish monetary policy When determining Swedish monetary policy, there are several reasons why we should pay particular attention to the conduct of fiscal policy in Sweden and abroad over the next few years. Firstly, the large deficits in public finances around the world will dampen the growth of GDP. Fiscal policy will be tightened sooner or later, which will also dampen GDP in the short term. The fact that nearly all countries will need to strengthen their public finances at more or less  4  See Blanchard (2010). 5  See Leeper (2009). 6  BIS Review 56/2010  the same time means that we can assume that growth impulses from abroad will be weaker then normal. There is also a risk that the major public deficits will drive up long-term interest rates for government bonds, which will have an additional dampening effect on growth. Secondly, there is a risk that developments will be more dramatic than we expect. Greece is not the only country with serious problems. Several countries in southern Europe also have major problems with their public finances. The deficits in the United States and the United Kingdom are very substantial, too. What we call sovereign risk has recently become the main risk to the financial system. When risk premiums for countries increase, banks in these countries may also experience financing problems, and these problems can spread to banks in other countries. Thirdly, monetary policy will be affected by fiscal policy in Sweden.

Thirdly, most countries have implemented extensive fiscal policy stimulus measures. The OECD estimates that these measures have accounted for just over half of the reduction in general government net lending in the OECD area. In the United States, where stimulus packages have been introduced on an unprecedented scale, the OECD estimates that these active stimulus measures have accounted for as much as three-quarters of the deterioration in public-sector finances. In the euro area it is instead the automatic effects on tax revenues and cyclical expenditures that have predominated. Consequences of the deterioration Extensive historical studies of financial crises show that they are often followed by a severe weakening of public finances and prolonged periods of subdued GDP growth. 2 The deterioration in public finances that we have seen during this crisis will keep GDP growth and inflation down in many regions for some time to come, as the weak finances will enforce fiscal policy contraction and/or may lead to higher interest rates. A tighter fiscal policy is inevitable to make public finances stable in the long term. Restoring the deficit to the level that prevailed prior to the crisis, and one might ask whether this will be sufficient, is not simply a case of replacing the fiscal policy stimulus measures implemented during the crisis with corresponding tightening measures after the crisis. In addition, expenditures have to be replaced as potential GDP and thus potential tax revenue have fallen due to the crisis.
In that context, we made clear that we have to keep a very close eye on domestic inflationary pressures reflecting a tight labour market. My reading of the evidence since our February meeting – the data we have had for economic  Page 13  activity, the labour market, and inflation – is that the economy is evolving much as we expected it to. Inflation has been slightly weaker, and activity and wages slightly stronger, though I would emphasise ‘slightly’ in both cases. A further set of data will be coming in before our next monetary policy decision later this month. At this stage, I would caution against suggesting either that we are done with increasing Bank Rate, or that we will inevitably need to do more. Some further increase in Bank Rate may turn out to be appropriate, but nothing is decided. The incoming data will add to the overall picture of the economy and the outlook for inflation, and that will inform our policy decisions. As always, we will reach our conclusions with a determined focus on achieving the 2% inflation target on a sustained and lasting basis. I am grateful to James Bell, Ben Broadbent, Fabrizio Cadamagnani, Swati Dhingra, Jonathan Haskel, Andrew Hauser, Andrew Hebden, Andrew Hicks, Karen Jude, Zaar Khan, Elizabeth Levett, Catherine Mann, Katie Martin, Huw Pill, Andrea Rosen, Martin Seneca, Fergal Shortall, Silvana Tenreyro and Laura Wallis for helpful comments and assistance in helping me to prepare for these remarks.

The MPC’s inflation target sits within the Bank’s wider mission – set out in our founding charter from 1694 – to promote the good of the people of the United Kingdom. These are not just words from an old charter. It is the heart and soul of what we do. It is therefore important to us to listen to what the people of the United Kingdom have to say. We of course also talk to financial market participants through our market intelligence gathering, and our Agents travel to all corners of the country. We join them regularly in this work. I personally go on visits to each of the 12 regions and nations of the UK at least once a year to hear from businesses and organisations first-hand. Page 3  Bank of England outreach programmes Listening to people from all parts of the United Kingdom  But today I would like to focus on our outreach programmes: our citizen’s forum consisting of 12 regional panels, each chaired by a devoted volunteer from the local community, and currently counting 4,000 members; our community forums for charities and the people they support; and our youth forum specifically for young people aged 16 to 25. These are the events where we talk with and listen to people from all walks of life. We set out some of the high-level themes from those conversations in a report from the chairs of the regional panels published today. What we hear from them is sobering.
As the saying goes: “two – or rather more – heads are better than one”. And in order to have something to “pool”, the people on the committee should not be too alike. If they all are cast in the same mould and think in the same way, one might just as well have one single policymaker. If there are so many different wills and ways of thinking, how can we actually manage to agree on a detailed, quantified forecast and an exactly determined repo rate path? Also here we can receive guidance from the survey I mentioned earlier. One question in the survey was whether the members had refrained from entering a reservation against one or more monetary policy decisions, despite considering that another decision than the majority view would have been better. Seven of the members, that is, more than half of them, replied that they had. The most important motivation given for this was that they said there was some “bargaining margin” in the repo rate decisions and that the decision reached was sufficiently close to what they would have advocated. In terms of the mean squared gap analysis, one could express this as the members actually preferring different dots, but given that the main scenario dot was sufficiently close to their own, they accepted the main scenario. I believe that this is a fairly important insight: The forecasts we present are often a compromise and an approximation.

The explanation the members themselves considered to apply the best was that the idea that one can use a figure to explain the relative weight of stabilising inflation against that of stabilising resource utilisation in the economy is overly simple. Many also considered that it was meaningless to try to quantify the relative weight given to inflation and resource utilisation, partly because this could depend on the situation in the economy and thus vary over time, and partly because the measures of resource utilisation are so uncertain. 6  In the academic literature one usually calls a policymaker who gives a relatively high priority to stabilising inflation, a small λ, conservative. A well-known theoretical result reached in the mid-1980s by Kenneth Rogoff, nowadays adviser to the Riksbank, was that under certain circumstances it might be optimal to appoint a governor who was more “conservative” than society in general (Rogoff, K., (1985), “The Optimal Degree of Commitment to an Intermediate Monetary Target”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 100, pp. 1169–1189). 7  Apel, M., C. A. Claussen and P. Lennartsdotter, (2010), “Picking the Brains of MPC Members”, Sveriges Riksbank Working Paper Series No. 237. 8  BIS central bankers’ speeches  It thus appears that there is fairly broad scepticism among the members towards drawing farreaching parallels between how monetary policy is described in theory and how they view it as practitioners.
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).

For the most part, these measures are implemented without delay. Plans for cooperation on a logistical level and in connection with raising capital have become more attractive as well. It is to be hoped, however, that the reluctance to give up an often only presumed autonomy will be overcome sooner rather than later. The idea that a bank is only a «real bank» if it is itself involved in the entire value chain as much as possible is a thing of the past. Moreover, further development will depend heavily on the economic trend and the stabilisation on the financial markets. Two things merit particular mention: firstly, the capital ratio of Swiss banks is on a comfortable level overall, allowing them to act from a position of strength. Secondly, banks in Switzerland have mostly used the prosperous years since the end of the nineties to bring their lending business in line with the risks and to reform their liquidity and risk management. Under the current difficult circumstances, these efforts are now paying off. In other words, the problems facing the Swiss banking system will be solved. The banks in Switzerland have the necessary strength. Structural changes are taking place at a fast pace and are likely to progress even more quickly. The banking system may be undergoing radical changes, but is nevertheless stable. The role of the euro in payment transactions A little less than a year ago, the euro was introduced in the European Monetary Union in its physical form.
For the insurance industry, longevity risks for the different markets will need to be better understood before appropriate products and services can be developed and offered. To support such efforts, I am glad to note that our local universities have initiated research institutes and projects in these areas. One example is the new Centre for Silver Security under SMU’s Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics. The Centre will focus on research in retirement security issues such as retirement planning and pensions. AXA University could thus leverage on the research community here to enhance the knowledge of risks in our region. The other aspect is the competency and availability of skilled professionals in the insurance industry. Having a pool of talent with the necessary skills is critical for the industry to maintain its competency and remain competitive. To support the specialised need of the insurance sector, the Nanyang Technological University launched a new minor for Risk Management and Insurance this year. We are also pleased that the General Insurance Association has launched the Global Internship Programme in May last year to provide deserving undergraduates with exposure to the wider insurance industry, both locally and overseas. We believe that the current downturn is also an opportunity to invest in developing talent for the longer term. We have, as part of a nation wide effort to encourage manpower development, recently announced enhancements of up to 90% co-funding for training schemes under the Financial Sector Development Fund.

We want to share the risks and costs with financial institutions in this climate to retain and develop talent. In addition, MAS has also announced that it would set aside $ million to support fresh local university graduates in industry attachments over the next 1-2 years. Closing As an international financial centre, Singapore needs to continually build on its fundamentals. We have to retain and enhance trust and confidence among investors and businesses here by continuing to provide socio-political stability, respected regulatory standards and a wellregarded legal regime. Underpinning all these efforts is a highly skilled and professional talent pool. AXA’s decision to locate its training centre here will therefore go a long way to support this effort. On that note, I would like to extend my heartiest congratulations once again to the AXA Group for the launch of the AXA University Asia-Pacific Campus in Singapore. I wish you every success in this very important endeavour. Have a great evening, thank you. 2  BIS Review 45/2009
One might say that it is a question of giving the right information at the right time and about expressing oneself clearly. This is an important aspect that ties in with a survey of central banks recently made by JP Morgan. There the Riksbank was ranked as the most open central bank. But the main message of the study was that a central bank, once it had passed a particular degree of openness, perhaps did not become much more predictable by providing even more information. And I believe there is some truth in this. At least if the central bank is already very open, the quality of the communication may be more important than the quantity. And we are consciously working all the time to become even better with regard to clarity and efficiency in our communication. As recently as a couple of weeks ago, we Executive Board members decided to take a few further steps in this direction. To begin with, the public minutes of the monetary policy meetings will now state which of the Board members has said what in the general discussion. This means that we have both a correct decisionmaking procedure and everyone will be able to follow the reasoning of the individual Executive Board members with regard to each interest rate decision. Stating the names in the minutes will make us even more open and clear. It will provide better opportunities for evaluation and accountability.

What remains for me to do is to help put the dimension of the Year 2000 issue in perspective and suggest some of the actions that are necessary now if we are to avoid potentially serious problems down the road. As recently as the early 1990s, few banks and other financial institutions paid much attention to the Year 2000 problems. After all, using two digits in programs to represent the year made sense for decades. Many institutions didn’t recognize the problem at all; others speculated that changes in technology would somehow appear and solve the problem. Now, however, delays have come back to haunt those institutions that acted passively, or not at all, in marshalling the resources needed to manage the problem. Financial institutions depend on the proper sequencing of events and calculations based on dates, but the logic built into applications to sequence events and perform calculations will not work properly when we hit 2000. As a result, Year 2000 issues pervade every business area of all financial and non-financial institutions. As if that were not enough, the problem is not just limited to the business lines and the applications upon which businesses rely. Operating systems and the equipment on which business applications run also are reliant on microchip-embedded logic affected by two-digit year representations. Unlike business applications where the dates usually are visible, potential problems in operating systems and equipment usually are invisible or embedded in programs.
Of course, ensuring the suitability of its management bodies and key function holders is, first and foremost, the bank’s own responsibility. The ECB acts as a gatekeeper by performing a prudential check on the candidates for these roles, as much as possible under the applicable laws before they take up their positions, and by setting conditions, obligations or recommendations that must be adhered to by the banks to ensure the suitability of its management. When assessing appointees to the board or other key management functions of European banks, we consider their knowledge, skills and experience, as well as their reputation and the time they are able to dedicate to the role. We also take into account any possible conflicts of interest arising from the bank’s various activities and clients which could potentially hinder the independence of mind of those occupying key positions. [3] Most importantly, suitability must be met at all times. The emergence of new facts that may affect the banks’ or the ECB’s initial assessment of a board member’s suitability could lead to a reassessment of the suitability of that member, by either the bank or the ECB. In cases where a board member is deemed no longer suitable, he or she may be removed from their management function, as provided for under EU law. Beyond individual suitability, we also have expectations for the board as an ensemble – i.e. whether collectively its members have the right combination of characteristics to adequately manage the bank.

For instance, we at the Federal Reserve have gone to great lengths to ensure that barriers are in place to prevent Y2K problems with a Fedwire participant from causing problems on the Fedwire system itself. We are also now actively researching additional steps that the Federal Reserve could take to better prepare the financial markets as a whole to function in spite of disruptions at individual firms. It is also important to realize that contingency planning for Y2K is not solely an operational issue. Financial firms may seek to adopt a defensive posture in the marketplace well ahead of Monday, January 3, 2000 (the first business day of the new year in the United States). For example, market participants may seek to minimize the number of transactions that would be scheduled for settlement on January 3 or January 4, or that would require open positions to be maintained over the century date change weekend. Contingency planning involves a series of elements, many of which must be put in place well before January 2000. For example, we must consider many possible sources of disruption and determine what approaches could be available to limit the impact of each possible disruption. The sooner such thinking occurs, the more opportunity we have to plan around the possible disruptions. In this context, members of our External Consultative Committee noted that one of the key obstacles to effective contingency planning is the inability to list and consider all possible disruption scenarios.