samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Part of this is active engagement with threat intelligence to understand likely adversaries, their motivations and ways of working. For all these reasons, addressing cyber risk in the financial sector is a high priority for the Bank of England. It touches on most of our responsibilities – as prudential supervisor of financial firms, as supervisor of financial market infrastructure – and operator of financial market infrastructure (of real time gross settlement (RTGS)) – and as UK authority responsible for financial stability. Financial stability is the unifying objective in all of these responsibilities. It means that, in the spectrum of cyber attacks, we are much more concerned about those that have the potential to disrupt the UK system by damaging the operations of key firms or financial  1  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-30512032. 2  http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/22/south-korea-nuclear-power-cyber-attack-hack. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  market infrastructure and to understand how that damage could transmit through the sector, than to deal with individual cases of cyber fraud. Such cases of consumer detriment are for the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), law enforcement agencies such as the National Crime Agency, the police and the Home Office to address. In response to the rise in the potential threat to UK financial stability from cyber, the Financial Policy Committee (FPC) in June 2013 recommended that the UK authorities should work with firms at the core of the system to test and improve cyber resilience. I want to spend the rest of this speech outlining what we have done in response.

All parts of an organisation need to understand cyber risk and their responsibilities towards improved cyber hygiene. This includes Board level engagement. Front line business areas need to understand and own the risk. Management of cyber vulnerabilities needs to feature in strategic planning. 3  2  The Bank, Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). BIS central bankers’ speeches  3. Cyber requires effective and regular testing: Of people, processes and technology. Industry investment in cyber is significant but testing the effectiveness of this investment has not kept pace. Assurance is often based on audits and control sampling which is not sufficient, not least because of the challenge for internal audit departments to keep pace with change in this area. And of course, given the dynamic nature of the threat, such tests should take place on a regular basis. This leads me onto the other element of our response to the FPC recommendation I wanted to talk about: vulnerability testing through the CBEST 4 program. CBEST is a framework that we have developed working with government, industry and commercial providers of penetration testing and threat intelligence. The idea is to bring to bear the best available intelligence on potential threats to test directly a firm’s ability to protect, detect and respond to cyber attacks. The scope of a CBEST test is tailored to the business of the firm and the critical services it provides.
(2020), as of late 2019 central banks representing a fifth of the world’s population reported that they were likely to issue CBDCs very soon. [https://www.bis.org/publ/bppdf/bispap107.pdf] 3  “An Update on Digital Currencies”, a speech by Governor Lael Brainard at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, August 2020. [https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/brainard20200813a.htm] 4  “Payments in a digital world”, a speech by Christine Lagarde at the Deutsche Bundesbank online conference on banking and payments in the digital world, September 2020. [https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2020/html/ecb.sp200910~31e6ae9835.en.html] 3  interoperability across borders. In this sense, I believe the role of international organisations and standard-setters, such as the BIS in its role as a hub for central banks, could prove essential. Cross-border payments: another topic of growing interest Regardless of its importance, expanding access to a central bank’s balance sheet by making a CBDC available to households and non-financial corporations is only one of many ways in which technological innovation may help enhance the monetary and payment system. Indeed, given how dynamic the payments market is nowadays, we need to keep abreast of and closely monitor any private initiatives that may overlap in the field of action of a CBDC. This is because they may ultimately prove to be equally viable options for achieving the same goals or remedying some of the common and long-standing shortcomings that traditional channels have faced. In that respect, the current landscape of evolving market infrastructures poses several telling examples, but in the interest of time I will concentrate today on one particular area, namely payments that have a multi-country dimension.

As such, digitalisation has once again proved to be not a goal in itself but rather a means to serve a much broader purpose, as it offers a novel toolkit to push out the boundaries of what has been possible in the past, allowing us to address well-known and often challenging problems in a convenient and much more effective manner. Exploring the pros and cons of issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) Since the previous panel has already covered these COVID-related themes quite extensively, I would rather use my time to draw your attention to something different and yet equally important as a reflection of the impact of digitalisation. Hence, in the next few minutes I will comment on the way in which this transformational process echoes in a specific context, namely that of a central bank in its role as service provider, and the crosscutting impact this may have on the broader ecosystem. As in other realms, the large-scale adoption of new technologies is also likely to disrupt both the environment in which we, central banks, carry out our tasks and the choices we need to make on the best possible approach to those tasks. Indeed, this is true for all central banks’ functions and responsibilities. However, to illustrate this point, I will focus primarily on one that is attracting much interest lately: our role as the sole issuer of legal tender.
Second, the legislative amendments must strike an appropriate balance between the rights of creditors and those of debtors, especially the socially excluded, and I should like to highlight the advisability of concentrating efforts in the field of social policies: a country as economically, socially and institutionally developed as Spain has sufficient resources to face up to and resolve the most dramatic and unacceptable situations of exclusion and need without affecting financial stability in the process. All these issues have been duly discussed in this Congress, which is why I shall focus on the situation of our banking system and on our economic outlook. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  Role and situation of Spanish banks I should first like to highlight the crucial importance of banks in resource allocation and their role of intermediation between those supplying and demanding financing. Mass access to owner-occupied housing would be almost inconceivable without their intermediation. Mortgage lending is a very important segment of the financial intermediation in which credit institutions engage. As at December 2014, mortgage loans for house purchase extended by credit institutions to households amounted to slightly over € billion, more than 40% of total bank lending. The number of outstanding mortgage loans for house purchase is at present 5.8 million, a large percentage of which (82%) are at floating rates, which has allowed for the transmission of the Eurosystem’s more accommodative monetary policy to household financing conditions.

The key thrust of this plan is to develop a new real-time Retail Payments Platform that will serve as both a catalyst and enabler for innovative payments in Malaysia. This should meet the needs of consumers and businesses who increasingly expect payments on-demand where funds are available to the recipient immediately. In this regard, I would like to call upon the financial industry to jointly work with MyClear in the development of such new real-time Retail Payments Platform. Conclusion Payment and Settlement Systems are the foundation that underpin the financial market infrastructure and serve as a catalyst for economic growth. Hence, efforts to promote the  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  resilience, interoperability and competition of such systems are of utmost importance. This has been and will continue to form the key thrust in Bank Negara Malaysia’s policy work in delivering our mandate of fostering safe, efficient and reliable payment systems. There are immense opportunities and new sources of growth including expanding financial accessibility to the underserved that is made possible from greater standardization and interoperability of the payment systems, as well as, innovation. Hence, in today’s rapidly evolving and highly competitive environment, the financial community should capitalise on such enabling environment, and collaborate through standardisation and interoperability, to lower costs, foster innovation and deliver better value proposition and choices to their customers. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches
Then there is economic policy’s commitment to stability, with price stability as a statutory objective, as well as a successful consolidation of the government finances. In the inflation forecast we are presenting today, productivity growth is judged to be marginally higher than we foresaw in the June forecast. That in itself is a sign that the economy is functioning better. The Riksbank’s assessment of productivity has been revised gradually over the past few years. Higher productivity means that more can be produced with the same input of resources. So a lasting improvement raises the economy’s potential long-term output. The higher productivity growth does not seem to be solely connected with the economy’s upward phase. Whereas productivity growth in the period from 1974 to 1993, for example, averaged less than 1.5% a year, the average rate since 1994 has been almost 2%. At the same time I want to underscore that there are not yet any clear signs of the kind of accelerating productivity growth which has occurred in the United States. One explanation for the discrepancy between our economies may lie in the different ways in which productivity is measured in the United States and in Europe. There are also some indications that productivity growth may accelerate in the future but they are still too uncertain to support any more far-reaching conclusions in the formation of monetary policy.

Central banks are playing an active role in digital innovation. To support innovation while safeguarding the vital anchoring role of central bank money, the Banque de France is exploring the question of issuing a central bank digital currency, or CBDC. We carried out nine trials 5/6  BIS central bankers' speeches  between September 2020 and December 2021 on the issuance of a “wholesale” or interbank CBDC, acting in partnership with a diverse line-up of participants, including commercial banks. These trials showed that a CBDC could significantly improve cross-border payments and interbank processes, such as securities settlement, more generally. On the question of a retail digital euro, the Banque de France is making a full contribution to efforts by the Eurosystem, which, following preliminary work, began an investigation phase on 14 July 2021 aimed at analysing the pros and cons of such a currency. A final decision on whether to launch a digital euro will be taken in the final quarter of 2023 [SLIDE 8]. To preserve the strong complementarity between central bank money and commercial bank money that lies at the heart of our monetary system, the intermediation role of banks must be maintained and banks must be fully involved in this project. A CBDC will be created with banks, not in opposition to or in spite of them. On the climate front, the ECB has adopted an ambitious actionplan [SLIDE 8] to which the Banque de France made a decisive contribution.
Lars Heikensten: The Riksbank’s work on financial stability Speech by Mr Lars Heikensten, Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at Göteborgs University, Göteborg, 25 November 2003. *  *  *  First a word of thanks for the invitation to address you today. I feel privileged to be speaking at a Felix Neubergh lecture. In autumn 1992 a decision at very short notice was required of Sweden’s government and parliament: should they choose to support Swedish banks without really knowing how large the support might have to be, or risk a financial crisis with unforeseeable consequences for the Swedish economy? All the Swedish banks had incurred large loan losses. And regardless of how much a particular bank had lost, the international credit market had little confidence in the Swedish banking system. The banks faced severe financing problems that might ultimately have led to their failure and could have made it difficult in the shorter run for Swedish companies to cover their funding requirements. The decision was the only reasonable alternative - to rescue the Swedish banks. The government issued a general guarantee for the banks’ liabilities and set up an authority, Bankstödsnämnden, specifically to cope with the banks that were in serious difficulties. The government, explicitly supported by the opposition, acted just as vigorously and promptly as the situation required.

Oversight of the infrastructure concentrates on the systems that are vital for the functioning of the financial market in Sweden. Besides RIX, the system for large-value payments provided by the Riksbank, these are primarily the central securities register (VPC), the Stockholm Stock Exchange and the clearing system for retail payments (Bakgirocentralen or BGC). BIS Review 53/2003  3  The Riksbank has also chosen to work on practical matters to do with risk management. These issues are invariably complex. Financial crises can arise at very short notice, not least on account of the massive payment flows and because banks tend to have a large element of short-term funding. The ongoing integration may have made things even more difficult. The Riksbank has therefore built up an internal crisis organisation and clearly documented who does what in the event of a crisis, including those who are to be contacted and put in the picture, how the press is to be informed, and the legal consequences of various measures. Another important element in the work on readiness is regular crisis exercises. Crisis management has also come to feature prominently in Sweden’s international profile. This has to do with our experiences as well as our basic stand on the importance of transparency. The Riksbank is leading Nordic and European working groups in this field. One of the articles in the latest Financial Stability Report that was published yesterday deals with the role of the Riksbank as lender of last resort.
In most developing nations, particularly those in South Asia and Africa, populations are booming with urbanization, modern lifestyles, and better access to healthcare and basic infrastructure. These two often overlooked markets are filled with big and growing young population, and a fast-growing share of the middle class that are expected to play an  3  important role in driving the global consumption and economy in the future. By 2030, these regions will be home to more than 45 percent of the world population. These huge young markets with high potential for income growth will have to be the new promising market for Thai businesses to explore. These two markets currently account for only around 7 percent of our exports, and although exports to South Asia has been steadily increasing in recent years, there is much room to grow and we need to move fast. 2. Climate change The second trend that will play a major role in the coming years is climate change. Indeed, climate change is hardly anything new; scientists have been talking about it for decades. But the impact of climate change keeps coming closer. Perhaps it started with melting ice cap and changing bird migration pattern; now we started to really feel climate change in the forms of more frequent and severe draughts and floods, wildfires, and other natural disasters. Climate change will impact businesses in many ways.

Zeti Akhtar Aziz: Collaboration and challenges of the central bank community Dinner address by Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz, Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia (Bank Negara Malaysia), at the Bank for International Settlements Closing Dinner, Shanghai, 29 February 2016. *  *  *  It is my honour to be invited to speak tonight at this distinguished gathering of Governors. In my 35 years as a career Central Banker, it has been my privilege to have been associated with the BIS for 20 of those years. The BIS had in the mid-1990s initiated a move to have a greater interface with the emerging world. This translated into an expansion of the membership of the BIS in 1996 and then again in 1999 and 2003, when several Central Banks in emerging Asia became members of the BIS. Today, almost half the membership of the BIS is from the emerging world. This initiative by the BIS under the leadership of the late Sir Andrew Crockett has proven to be highly prescient given the growth of the emerging world in significance and influence in the global economy. The BIS has evolved to become an international organisation that is truly global. The BIS has not only focussed on the important issues on financial stability emanating from financial systems of the developed world but has also surfaced the issues that are important to the emerging world.
Our priority throughout this transition has been to ensure that it has been and continues to be managed in a way that promotes the robustness and resilience of the payment systems, and of wider financial stability. And a considerable amount of work was undertaken to achieve this - by the retail scheme operators, their participants and the NPSO. What we now expect to see: Tangible progress has been made, and this should rightly be recognised. But, as with any journey, we cannot lose sight of the work that lies ahead to deliver these benefits from consolidation. The NPSO’s primary focus should be on completing integration of the payment systems and embedding robustness and resilience within all of its activities, including the New Payments Architecture (NPA) programme. There is still much to do to complete the integration of these systems, from an organisational perspective, but also at the system level; completion of which will allow the NPSO to begin realising the ultimate goal of strategic leadership and higher standards of management and control. For this to succeed, the NPSO’s strategy will need to be realistic and consistent with its objectives and capabilities. It will also need to include an appropriate focus on reviewing and enhancing the activities the NPSO has inherited, to manage its own risk profile, its outsourced infrastructure partner, and risks to the wider system emanating from participants.

This, in my view, is a major challenge for all of us in the financial community. The second major challenge to the Thai economy is how to cope successfully with volatile global financial markets and an appreciating baht. This challenge is the more pressing of the two. Let me explain why. Thailand, like many emerging market economies with a small and shallow financial market, is particularly vulnerable to fast-moving international capital. Such rapid movements of capital flows, if vastly out of line with our ability to absorb it, can have negative impacts on the export or import sectors, depending on the direction of the exchange rate movement. In our case, the recent surge in speculative capital inflows caused a rapid one-way appreciation of the baht relative to regional currencies. The appreciation momentum hardly reflected our economic fundamentals. Left unchecked, it could have presented a clear threat to growth and stability – beginning with export, a current engine of growth, trickling down to the real sector, and eventually harming financial stability. In dealing with currency appreciation, the prevailing wisdom of "letting the market work" has been given a chance. Yet the baht kept rising against almost all major and regional currencies at an alarming speed. Letting such rapid appreciation work itself out could have entailed significant risks to our agriculture sector, which employs nearly 40% of the labor force, and small and medium-sized firms in the labor-intensive manufacturing sector. We recognize that the real sector needs to adjust.
José De Gregorio: Macroeconomics, economists and the crisis Speech by Mr José De Gregorio, Governor of the Central Bank of Chile, at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Chilean Economy (SECHI), Antofagasta, 4 September 2009. I thank Luis Felipe Céspedes, Eduardo Engel, Pablo García and Mariana García for valuable comments. *  *  *  This is certainly a great opportunity to speak about a subject that has triggered more than a few reflections in me recently, and that was probably best said by Queen Elizabeth’s famous question, made when she was visiting the London School of Economics last year: Why did nobody notice it? As someone who has dedicated his professional life to academic activities and policy making, the question is surely unsettling. The current global financial crisis and recession, whose depth is unprecedented in recent decades, has cast doubts about the work of macroeconomists, the usefulness of their theories, and their capacity to anticipate and deal with crises. These are the issues I will discuss today. Macroeconomics Over the past few decades, macroeconomic theory has evolved, on the one hand, as a discipline whose purpose is solving problems similar to engineering, and, on the other hand, whose purpose is to explain phenomena embodied in economic reality, similar to science (Mankiw, 2006). In fact, macroeconomics was created to solve the problems of the Great Depression. In its beginnings, it was devoted to building large models to evaluate macroeconomic policies in the tradition of engineering.

15. “Climate-related litigation: Raising awareness about a growing source of risk”, NGFS, November 2021. Copyright 2022, European Central Bank