samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Climate change is further amplifying the risks of extreme weather events and sea level rises, where wildfires, droughts, heatwaves, torrential rain and coastal flooding would bring to mind grey rhinos, and not just black swans. Here in Asia, home to many densely populated megacities, such natural disasters can inflict even greater damage. 5. Already, half of the top ten countries which are most impacted by climate risk 1 in terms of fatalities and economic losses, are located in emerging Asia. A large proportion of these countries’ population and economic activities are concentrated along coastlines and low-lying areas, which make them highly exposed to extreme weather and rising sea levels. Moreover, many of these countries are also heavily dependent on agriculture, forestry and fisheries for livelihoods, and which are most vulnerable to climate change. 6. Yet, Asia remains under-prepared and under-protected against natural disasters. Currently, less than 10% of Asia Pacific’s catastrophe losses are insured, compared to 40% in developed countries. United Nations has estimated that economic losses due to catastrophe events in Asia Pacific are set to rise, and could exceed $ billion annually by 2030. Against this backdrop, countries will face a widening protection gap, if no intervention measures are taken. ASEAN and its governments must act today, and chart a sustainable course to ride out the brewing storm. 1/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  7. So far, disaster risk financing initiatives in Asia have largely been limited to raising funds on an ex-post basis, or post disaster response funding.

ASEAN Disaster Risk Financing and Insurance Programme Today, I am pleased to announce the official launch of Phase 2 of the ASEAN Disaster Risk Financing and Insurance Programme. ADRFI Phase 2 will be impact-focused, 11.  and targeted at strengthening ASEAN’s capabilities in ex-ante risk financing and risk transfer strategies. ADRFI Phase 2 was approved by the ASEAN Finance Ministers at the ASEAN Finance Ministers Meeting in April 2018 and the 3-year detailed Plan of Action was subsequently endorsed in April this year. 12. To drive ADRFI Phase 2 forward, the Plan of Action will be implemented by a dual programme office, to be led by the ASEAN Secretariat and the NTU-ICRM. The dual programme office will adopt an open architecture structure to support global collaboration with stakeholders including policy makers, governments, multilateral development banks, international organisations and the private sector. 13. Allow me to provide an overview of ADRFI’s 3 focus areas over the next 3 years. These are: (i) Risk Assessment, as I mentioned earlier (ii) Risk Advisory; and (iii) Capacity Building. Leveraging on their respective strengths, ICRM will lead the Risk Assessment and Risk Advisory pillars, while ASEAN Secretariat will lead the Capacity Building pillar. 14. These are upstream activities which will strengthen ASEAN’s disaster risk management capabilities, and complement the downstream public and private disaster risk financing solutions, such as the SEADRIF. Let me elaborate further on the 3 key focus areas. 1 5 . First, Risk Assessment.
Thank you. BIS Review 19/2010  3

This is important because in future while computer knowledge will perhaps not immediately get you a job, it will ensure that you are one step closer to being employed. Ladies and Gentlemen, I also recognize the efforts of the former Students Association who have been soliciting for donations from various organizations. As former students we all have the responsibility of helping the school that has played a key part to what you are today. Let us continue to support our beloved school. I thank you. BIS Review 14/2010  2
Transforming our payments infrastructure  Speech given by Victoria Cleland Executive Director, Banking, Payments and Financial Resilience Payments International, London 27 November 2018  I would like to thank Sam Leighton, Richard Lewis, and Cameron Penny for their contributions. 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  Transforming our payments infrastructure Payments are an essential part of our lives, and of the UK economy. Last year UK payment systems processed more than 26 billion transactions worth over £ trillion, covering everything from small scale card payments and cash withdrawals to major corporate transactions. The UK payments landscape has undergone considerable change in recent years. Increased take-up of new types of payment technology in retail and wholesale markets has been facilitated by factors including increased ease of use, the growth in e-commerce, and increased confidence in their reliability and security. Looking to the future, we expect this transformation to continue, driven by incumbents but also the growth of new Fintech firms who will continue to find innovative ways of meeting demand for faster, simpler, cheaper and more flexible payments. This wave of innovation could deliver positive outcomes ranging from better choice for consumers, to improved access to finance for businesses, to lower transaction costs, enhanced resilience and greater capital efficiency.

those which the Bank’s analysis identified as being systemically important to the CHAPS system in terms of the total value of payments they send and receive. 5  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  5  the first non-bank PSP to join CHAPS directly. Direct access allows non-bank PSPs to reduce their operational dependence on the banks they are trying to compete with. Over the longer term, this should also create a more diverse payments sector with fewer single points of failure. Reducing the cost of access. We continue to seek to avoid the costs of direct access being prohibitive to prospective and existing participants. We have enabled third-party aggregators to provide technical connectivity to RTGS for smaller CHAPS direct participants, reducing the upfront costs of direct access without reducing overall resilience. The RTGS Renewal Programme will further reduce the barriers to direct access. Its technical architecture will be designed to support several hundred Direct Participants in CHAPS; allowing for a significant increase from the current 33. We also intend to introduce automated testing to streamline the joining process. We will build simulators to help new joiners better familiarise themselves with CHAPS and provide broader RTGS functionality before going live. The renewed RTGS will also feature enhanced functionality (e.g. enhanced liquidity management and the capability to extend opening hours), facilitating innovation by both established participants and new joiners.
My address this morning will focus on these initiatives. Allow me to also take this opportunity to share with you Malaysia’s experience in this endeavor. II. Current trends in the international financial landscape  The international financial landscape is constantly being reshaped and transformed by the rapid pace of globalisation, financial liberalisation and the advances in technology. Globalisation has manifested itself with the geographic expansion and consolidation of financial establishments beyond national boundaries and the massive flow of financial resources across borders. This has unleashed a greater volume of resources through the financial system, increasing the importance of the financial sector. These trends have been reinforced by the advances in technology, which has radically changed the way we do business and the structure of markets and their dynamics in the national and global economy. This has resulted in an environment in which businesses, markets and economies are becoming internationally more integrated and inter-dependent. Financial liberalisation and deregulation of the financial services industry has also resulted in increased competition and the proliferation of new financial products and services. Also, the business operations of global financial conglomerates now span over multiple jurisdictions. Against these developments, regulators have reassessed existing prudential rules and have adopted a consolidated supervision framework to prevent regulatory gaps that could become a source of systemic concern. While deregulation of the financial sector has expanded the range of opportunities, it has also increased the incidence of instability in the financial markets.

But consumer spending appears to be weak, nominal wage growth remains relatively muted and once we strip out the impact of rising commodity prices, output price inflation has been steady. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, if expectations have become detached, it is curious that those dogs haven’t barked. So in my view the news on that front has been encouraging. The impact of the credit crunch And of course, we have been balancing that upside risk to inflation from the commodity price shock against a downside risk that the credit crisis would drive down activity too far and push inflation below target in the medium term. And the news on that front remains worrying. The headlines are about the drama on Wall Street but the failure or rescue of even big and well known financial firms matters mainly because of their knock on impact on the wider economy. The last year has brought home once again why central banks have to be concerned with financial stability as well as monetary stability and inflation. For the biggest risk to the financial sector is also the biggest downside risk to the economy: namely that damage to bank balance sheets would lead to tighter credit conditions, lower asset prices, lower consumption and investment and to a severe feedback loop into more losses for banks and so on down a spiral. That feedback is already working to some degree not just in the US but in the UK too.
In this regard, the public can use their ATM cards at participating merchants to make purchases. This would lessen the need for the public to carry cash in their wallets, as well as, reduce the number of cash withdrawals from ATMs. As ATM card is a safe payment card, users ought to use PIN for the authorisation of purchase transaction, similar to ATMs withdrawals. In the event a user lose their cards, fraudster would not be able to illegally transact banking services without the PIN. MEPS and the banking industry should also promote the use of the ATM cards at the Point-Of-Sale terminals. Industry effort should be made to increase the number of Point-Of-Sale terminals to provide the public with the convenience of using their ATM cards for purchases of goods and services and to reduce the need for cash usage. Banks need to address ATM robberies Over the last 24 months, there was a rise in the number of ATM robbery cases. There were only 5 cases in 2010 and in 2011. These numbers had increased to 63 cases between January – September 2013 (51 cases in 2012). This is a serious trend. If the banking industry does not tackle this issue quickly, it could dent public’s confidence in the safety of the ATMs services. Banking institutions ought to take this matter seriously and take remedial measures immediately.

These included funds transfer, bill payment, card and loan repayment, purchase of share application and reload of mobile prepaid applications, which was valued at RM37 billion on average per year. So the usage of ATM for e-payment purposes was underutilised and the industry should do more to improve this situation. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  ATMs to cater to those that have not adopted online banking 92% (or 18.4 million) of the total adult population in Malaysia has banking accounts and of these, the internet banking population accounts for about 74% (13.7 million) of bank account holders. Whilst 74% of the bank account holders have internet banking access but only 43% (5.9 million) of the internet banking subscribers are active users in conducting financial transactions. Still a long way to go to encourage users to adopt electronic means in conducting their banking transactions. In this regard, we have to do more to reach critical mass where the public are familiar with or comfortable in using internet banking to conduct their financial transactions. To achieve this aim, banks should continuously increase their efforts to educate their customers and businesses on the safety of online banking practices and provide incentives to them to migrate away from cheques and cash. MEPS’ initiative on widening the ATM network would also provide convenient access points across the country to enable those who have not yet adopt online banking to migrate to cashless banking services. In particular, the target groups are the SMEs and microenterprises.
2 Much earlier, Minsky had already stated the same type of acid test “...for an economic theory to be relevant, what happens in the world must be a possible event in the theory”. 3 Under the ideal imagined conditions of prevailing thinking before the crisis, the market mechanism operates smoothly and since financial frictions are disregarded, financial intermediaries were generally absent from macro models and without leveraged financial intermediaries, financial instability is not an issue. It is true that there some frictions linked to the credit channel had been included in macro models, basically related to the Financial Accelerator developed by Bernanke and Gertler and Gilchrist. 4 This is, however, only a  1  Caballero, R (2010) “Macroeconomics after the Crisis: Time to Deal with the Pretense-of-Knowledge Syndrome” NBER WP n. 16429. 2  Buiter, W. (2009) “The irrelevance of most ‘state of the art’ academic monetary policy”, available at www.voxeu.org. 3  Minsky, H. (1986) “Stabilizing and unstable economy” in Chapter 12 “Introduction to policy”, McGraw-Hill Professional, new edition, 2008. 4  Bernanke, Ben, Mark Gertler, and Simon Gilchrist, 1999, “The Financial Accelerator in a Quantitative Business Cycle Framework,” Handbook of Macroeconomics, John Taylor and Michael Woodford editors. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  mechanism that could aggravate an on-going crisis, but was not strong enough to trigger one. Recently, Adrian, Colla and Shin examined which frictions should, at a minimum, be included to be relevant.

In Germany, it is a widely held belief that last Thursday, the ECB changed its monetary policy paradigm, that it is no longer the orthodoxy of the Bundesbank, as promised at the time the euro was created. The German audience should acknowledge that it is not a question of a different monetary paradigm. We need to deliver on our primary mandate, which is price stability in the medium term. This is a strategy which we inherited from the Bundesbank. Only the instruments are new. This could not have been foreseen in 1992, but in the Treaty it is nevertheless clear that the ECB can conduct monetary policy by means of asset purchases. And yet the Germans are still concerned. They are rightly concerned about the possible side effects of QE: the creation of asset bubbles and reduced incentives for countries to initiate reforms and reduce their debt. However, the response cannot be to ask the central bank to internalise these unwanted consequences. We have a narrow mandate. Instead, we need strong prudential policies and, in terms of fiscal policy, the strict application of the Stability and Growth Pact. But was it necessary to humiliate the Bundesbank? No such thing occurred. There was unanimity in the Governing Council that asset purchases are a legitimate monetary policy instrument. And then we discussed when to use it and whether the situation was bad enough to decide to use it.
These will require a more delicate and effective monetary policy action. 2. New forms of protectionism Another reason that makes monetary policy decisions more difficult is the rising trend of new forms of protectionism. When Russia invaded Ukraine, businesses throughout the world attempted to untangle their supply chains from the warring countries, and governments were hard-pressed to act as gas and food constraints became a reality. Many nations selected 'protectionism' measures to shore up their trade and economy, prioritizing domestic resources to meet domestic requirements, frequently through export restrictions. Temporary protectionism provides security during a crisis, but its widespread adoption, with no clear end point, can distort trade and shut off important suppliers from the global supply chain. As a trend, it is a cause for concern: Because, while food and oil are popular targets for protection programs, this list is expanding. As the pace of global economic integration slows, the downward pressure that globalisation has had on inflation diminishes. We can therefore expect higher inflationary pressures and volatility in the medium term and this situation will make the objectives of Monetary Policy even more complex to be achieved. Developments in the Cyprus economy and the Cyprus banking sector Let me now turn on the developments in Cyprus. Domestic economy  3/6  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  The Cyprus economy, continued to record noteworthy GDP growth despite the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

This significant step frontloads the transition from the prevailing accommodative level of policy rates towards levels that will enable the timely return of inflation to our two per cent medium-term target. Current challenges of monetary policy Let me now elaborate a bit more on some of the most important challenges that Monetary Policy faces today. The crux of the matter is that the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have created significant macroeconomic uncertainty, associated with a high degree of output growth and inflation volatility. In such an environment of lasting output and inflation volatility and uncertainty, one of the main questions is how governments and central banks should formulate policy. Fiscal policy will be critical in improving the robustness of our economies. With debt ratios at record highs, expenditure should be targeted and prioritise social cohesion and productive green investments that will help assure long-term prosperity and develop fiscal flexibility needed to cushion future shocks. Non-targeted fiscal policy will counteract monetary policy efforts to contain inflation. At the same time, central banks must safeguard price stability through, mainly, monetary policy. When the degree of inflation persistence is unclear, effective policy suggests a strong reaction to deviations from the target in order to limit the risks of inflation continuing to be high for an extended period. The risk of high and persistent prices, together with signals of tightening in the labour market, create an environment which makes it possible for higher inflation expectations and higher prices to become entrenched.
18  Ulrich Bindseil, Monetary Policy Operations and the Financial System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 19  Central bank assets include securities held outright or under repurchase agreements, as well as credit extensions and foreign currency-denominated assets. Central bank liabilities include currency, reserve balances, term deposits held by depository institutions, and reverse repos. BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  sheet policies away from very low interest rates in supporting the macroeconomic and macroprudential objectives of central banks.20 That said, a large central bank balance sheet relative to currency in circulation raises a number of questions about the monetary authority’s footprint in money markets, which some policymakers say presents potential risks to central bank independence.21 A large footprint may also increase the central bank’s role in money markets in ways that are difficult to anticipate and that may prove to be undesirable.22 One simple principle for monetary policy implementation regimes is to avoid structures where central bank intermediation crowds out activity that private participants can do more effectively and efficiently. Applying this principle is not simple, since expectations of central bank interventions affect private incentives and can produce changes in the structure of markets.23 So central banks need to be mindful of potential unintended consequences of their implementation regimes.

Staying on the media, but shifting to another, concrete contribution of it, professionalism and integrity in covering news related to economic and financial developments in Albania increased notably this year. Let me emphasise. We are glad to say that we find your work has advanced in all its dimensions. The language you use as well as the breadth and depth of your analysis in presenting our reports to the public reflect a serious approach and professionalism. Thanks to you, our decisions have been passed on in a timely fashion. Further, they have been translated and adapted using simple and easy-to-assimilate language, not only for market actors, but also for the general public. The media is a unique ally in our efforts to enhance the effectiveness of our decision-making. Please allow me to thank you once again for your work, filled with passion and dedication during the course of this year. I am confident that in the coming year your dedication, truthfulness and objectivity in reporting economic and financial news will continue to characterise your work. I would like to assure you that the Bank of Albania will continue be a transparent institution, ready to provide opinions and assessments as necessary in all public debates related to the performance of our economy and financial markets. For the Bank of Albania, macroeconomic stability and financial solidity in Albania are essential and long-term objectives. We work incessantly to enable such stability, which is vital for all the citizens of Albania.