samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
I think it merits serious consideration for more widespread adoption, irrespective of the accounting and tax treatment such reserves might attract. One key feature of such reserves is that they should be useable. That is, the markets and analysts need to accept that using such reserves to absorb write-offs when losses are high is the natural counterpart of building them up when losses are cyclically low. It is not a sign of  BIS Review 145/2008  5  weakness or of inadequate capitalisation, but of prudent management of the cyclical pattern of losses. From the point of view of market acceptability, separating cyclical reserves from more structural capital requirements seems a valuable idea. The second scheme I want to promote is growth-related capital requirements. Losses tend to be lower in the early stages of a loan’s life than when it is fully seasoned because borrowers are more certain of their own and the economy’s near-term prospects. A loan book which is growing more rapidly than average will be weighted towards such unseasoned loans, and so will appear to be performing better than a balanced portfolio of loans of different vintages. In addition, rapid growth of lending tends itself to be associated with taking on poor business – even if that is not obvious at the time it is written. Typically, rapid growth can only be achieved by drawing in marginal borrowers to the market. That is true of the banking sector as a whole.

Today, we are well into our ninth consecutive year our thirty-third consecutive quarter of relatively steady growth (despite having to absorb the global emerging markets financial shock of a couple of years ago) at an annual average rate of 2.8%; the number of people in employment has risen to an all-time high; the rate of unemployment, on a claimant count basis, has fallen to 3.6%, which is the lowest rate for 25 years for the UK as a whole and the lowest rate for 20 years in every individual region of the UK; and retail price inflation on the target RPIX measure has now averaged 2.7% over the past eight years, and on the standardised HICP measure is currently the lowest rate in Europe. And if you ask me today the same question - can we keep up that performance, my answer is still a cautious yes - on the same three conditions - low and stable inflation, fiscal prudence and supply-side flexibility. Now I am very well aware that some of you - perhaps many of you - thinking of your own businesses may conclude that I’m living on a different planet.
For instance, among the many findings in the report released by the Senior Supervisors Group is that firms which weathered the recent crisis better have senior management members who have expertise in a range of risks. This underscores the need to attract and develop talent not only in the frontline, but across critical functions and at various levels of the organisation. Financial institutions planning to expand must treat talent development as a strategic priority, and such development has to be undertaken in a holistic way, across the entire organisation. But this is not an easy task. There is a Chinese saying that it takes ten years to grow a tree, and a hundred years to develop an individual. Talent development requires consistent focus and commitment, from leaders at all levels of the organization. The efforts need to be sustained over many years, through good times and difficult times. The demographic changes in Asia coupled with rapid growth in the economies will make this task even more challenging in the coming years. Building a world class financial sector workforce IBF is committed to working with the industry to drive the development of talent in the financial sector. Let me now turn to some of the key initiatives undertaken in the last twelve months. Last year, we focused on increasing the industry’s adoption of the Financial Industry Competency Standards (FICS). The FICS is a comprehensive framework for continual development of our financial professionals. We reached an important milestone in July 2007 with the appointment of 5 lead providers.

Attracting talent into the financial sector To increase the flow of talent into the financial sector, IBF has also been reaching out to our institutions of higher learning. Under the financial sector seminar series, IBF and our industry partners have delivered a series of talks at our universities and polytechnics to highlight the dynamism and the diverse career opportunities in the financial sector. These talks attracted a total audience of over 1000 participants. To increase the supply of job-ready graduates, IBF spearheaded intensive finance preparatory programmes (FPP) for jobs in high demand. The first batch of students for the FPP in Global Banking and Securities Operations, which was introduced in July 2007, will be completing their programme next month. IBF is currently exploring the need for FPP in Insurance. These programmes will continue to attract 70% co-funding support from the Financial Sector Development Fund Gaining international mindshare To create greater international mindshare, IBF launched the FinanceConnectSingapore website to profile Singapore’s financial sector, to provide more information on the career opportunities here and to promote Singapore as a choice location to live, work and play. To date, the website has registered over 100,000 visits. IBF recently partnered with Contact Singapore to provide a job portal for financial institutions to post job openings targeted at financial professionals from overseas. Bringing value to IBF members I have outlined some of the initiatives undertaken by IBF over the past year.
4) The Norwegian economy at a turning point The Norwegian economy continued to expand at a relatively strong pace in 1998, albeit somewhat more moderately than in previous years. In Norges Bank’s December Inflation Report, the central bank projected a period of slower growth. Several years of robust growth have contributed to high capacity utilisation. Labour shortages and high wage growth will have a dampening impact on growth in the years ahead. Forecasting is a challenging enterprise at a stage when the economy is nearing a turnaround. It is difficult to pinpoint the timing and the amplitude of the turnaround. However, evidence now suggests that Norway is entering a period of slightly weaker growth. The international environment has led to slower growth in demand and lower prices on the world market. This is weakening profitability in the export sector in Norway. In addition, the wage settlements have increased business costs, which will increase the need for enhancing the efficiency of enterprises. Reduced earnings and higher interest rates will have a dampening effect on business investment. The extraordinarily high level of oil investment recorded in recent years has been expected to fall for some time. The drop in oil prices may lead to more pronounced cyclical fluctuations. Restructuring, streamlining and cost cuts in the oil industry will also affect employment. The local government sector, where employment has increased sharply during this cyclical upturn, placed itself in a very difficult situation during the last income settlement.

At the same time, we must avoid  BIS Review 10/1999  – 10 –  a situation whereby interest rates are so high that monetary policy contributes to a downturn that undermines confidence in the krone. Interest rates are set based on these considerations. *  BIS Review 10/1999  *  *
François Villeroy de Galhau: Central bank digital currency and innovative payments Speech by Mr François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Bank of France and Chairman of the Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de resolution (ACPR), at the ACPR, Paris, 4 December 2019. * * * Ladies and Gentlemen, One of the great things about the conferences organised by the ACPR is their sense of timing: they always come in the middle of heated debates. Today is no exception with the issue of the challenges faced by life insurance in a low interest rate environment. By way of introduction, let me agree with and sum up Bernard Delas’s message of this morning: French insurers are resilient and thus have the capacity to make the necessary dual adaptation. First, the rates paid on life insurance policies need to be lowered this year from last year’s average of 1.8%. Next, insurers must actively restructure and diversify their offering for savers, while at the same time paying very close attention to the quality of advice they offer. If, as a complement – and only as a complement – regulatory adjustments are needed to facilitate this change in life insurance, then we are ready to support them. I would like to turn now to the topic for this afternoon which is dedicated to innovation. Allow me to both restrict and extend the scope of the subject: restrict it to the field of payments which has seen a proliferation of innovations over recent years.

This pan-European solution would be a major step forward that would help European banks withstand the challenges posed by the BigTechs. There is also another important area where we need to make headway: reducing the cost and speeding up the execution of cross-border payments by identifying concrete and useful solutions. Our aim should notably be to harmonise the technical standards used for transfers of funds, and to enhance the interoperability of payment systems and solutions. Between now and the autumn, the FSB, under the aegis of the G20, will propose concrete measures to make cross-border, extra-European payments significantly cheaper and faster. I shall turn now to a topic that is a major challenge for the future of the international monetary and financial system: the possible creation of a central bank digital currency (CBDC). The creation of a new form of currency by central banks goes beyond the challenges I have just mentioned: it is neither a precondition for nor a guarantee of more efficient payments. However, we as central banks must and want to take up this call for innovation at a time when private initiatives – especially payments between financial players – and technologies are accelerating, and public and political demand is increasing. Other countries have paved the way; it is now up to us to play our part, both ambitiously and methodically. To this end, the Banque de France is to be reorganised.
Widespread theoretical and empirical research shows that changes in policy rates have little effect on house prices, but a substantial effect on production, jobs and unemployment. A typical conclusion is that, all else being equal, an increase in the policy rate of 1 percentage point reduces house prices by around 1.5 per cent, but at the same time reduces GDP by around one third, that is, about 0.5 per cent. So to reduce house prices by 15 per cent may require raising the repo rate by as much as 10 percentage points. But this would cause GDP  BIS Review 158/2010  3  to fall by around 5 per cent. These estimates are of course uncertain, but nevertheless imply very high real costs in terms of GDP. 2 If house prices and household indebtedness would be regarded as a problem, there are more effective instruments than the policy rate, which also have less negative effects. Some examples are the mortgage ceiling introduced by Finansinspektionen (the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority), a mortgage tax or limited tax deductions for mortgages, a property tax, a reserve requirement for mortgages, and so on. As a comparison, a higher repo rate functions not only as a tax on mortgages, but also a tax on loans for production, investment and trade. This in turn leads to the large costs to the real economy I mentioned earlier. Are house prices and household indebtedness a problem?

There are two possible explanations and equivalent interpretations of the main scenario. One is that the main scenario in reality assumes higher long interest rate abroad than current market rates. As the exchange rate is affected by the difference between long domestic and foreign market rates, that is, the difference between domestic and foreign market yield curves, the main scenario thus underestimates the appreciation in the krona. In Figure 7 the grey curve shows TCW-weighted implied forward rates according to market rates abroad. In Figure 8 the grey curve shows the corresponding TCW-weighted yield curve. The difference between the blue and grey curves in Figure 8 for a 5-year maturity shows that the current difference between a Swedish and a foreign five-year rate is around 70 points. If the repo rate path becomes credible, the difference between the red and grey curves in Figure 8 shows that the difference between a Swedish and a TCW-weighted foreign five-year rate would rise to around 160 points. This large interest differential in the main scenario should lead to a large krona appreciation. Such an appreciation of the krona would in turn contribute to significant tightening over and above the increase in long interest rates, which would have a particularly severe impact on exports and inflation. The reason why this does not occur in the main scenario is that the main scenario assumes higher long-term market rates abroad than the actually prevailing market rates.
I hope that after the forthcoming election, the new government will be able to pass this law through Parliament. Now I must state clearly that I do not believe there are serious problems in the Turkish banking system. There are not many that interfere with the system. We, the public authorities, evaluate the real financial standing of banks. We know the reality well. If we find a problem in the system, we can take the necessary actions within the framework of the law. We have the necessary tools to do this. The Turkish banking sector has existed for 130 years and knows how to manage risks. It has credibility in the international arena. It is sounder than many of the world’s national banking sectors. It is dynamic. Its human resources are well trained. Supervision and auditing requires several years of experience. A correct judgment of the system cannot be obtained by focusing on a couple of difficulties in isolation. These facts should not be overlooked. BIS Review 31/1999  6

1  Relevant documents are published on our website: https://www.snb.ch/en/ifor/finmkt/fnmkt_benchm/id/finmkt_reformrates  Page 3/5  Berne, 13 December 2018 Andréa M. Maechler  News conference  Charts  Page 4/5  Berne, 13 December 2018 Andréa M. Maechler  News conference  Page 5/5
As I noted in my introduction, the fact that I am pointing out these rather subtle and technical discrepancies is only because I have chosen to highlight various correlations over the past decade by using monthly data. In Swedish statistics, there are monthly data on job openings, while job vacancies are only reported quarterly. Even though it would be desirable in many ways to use vacancies, I therefore have to use job openings as an approximation. If we look at the data, it does not make much difference in this context, but it can still be good to know that I am simplifying a little here as job openings and job vacancies are not really the same thing. If we now view job openings as a measure of labour demand, we could see the relationship between job openings and wage increases as a kind of inverse Phillips curve. In the same way as the relationship between wage increases and unemployment can be expected to be negative, the correlation between wage increases and job openings should be positive. 9 [16]  Figure 5. Wage increase and job openings  Wage increase  Annual percentage change and as a share of the labour force 5  5  4  4  2007  3  3 2018  2011  2  1  2  0  0.5  1  1.5  2  2.5  1  Job openings  Note. Moving averages over 12 months.

For the SNB, the focus is on measures that reinforce the long-term resilience of our financial system with a view to future financial market crises. BIS Review 101/2008  1
Beyond the headline growth rates, Singapore has also made significant strides as an international financial centre in recent years. We are consistently ranked among the top five financial centres in the world, sometimes even top three. Singapore, along with Hong Kong, remains the dominant centre in the Asia-Pacific for offshore lending, debt markets, and derivatives trading. Our role as the leading regional hub has grown in re-insurance and infrastructure finance. We have a global position in foreign exchange, private banking, and asset management. But we have quite some way to go in the equities market space, beyond of course REITS where we are still Asia’s largest hub. Financial services are a major export engine for the Singapore market. Singapore runs a surplus in financial services trade. This surplus has grown by 40% since 2011. Singapore has been gaining market share in the imports of financial services by several major economies including China, India, and ASEAN. The medium-term prospects for the financial sector are good. 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  I say this, with full recognition of the daunting challenges facing the industry. But our challenges are not without silver linings – which, if we are smart and nimble, we can harness to our advantage. Global growth is very unlikely to pick up to the levels that we saw in the heady days before the financial crisis. But Asia will remain the most dynamic region in the world. Its middle class is rapidly growing and its businesses are expanding across the region.

A summary of such proposed revisions are: •  Debt Recovery Law: to expedite the recovery process and create a creditor friendly environment  •  Asset Management Company Law: to enable the speedier resolution of non performing loans of a failed bank  •  Credit Information Bureau Act: to widen the scope of the Credit Information Bureau and to provide greater (including positive) credit information  •  Computer Crimes Law: to reduce any potential risks that may arise through computer frauds. •  Micro Finance Institutions Act: The proposed Act envisages to bring all micro finance institutions under the regulatory framework. The licensing and supervising authority will be the Monetary Board while arrangements will be made to delegate the supervisory functions to agents. •  Finance Leasing Act: The finance leasing law will be amended to permit strongly capitalised leasing companies to mobilise funds from the public through the issue of debt instruments. This will enable them to broaden their funding sources and to expand their operations prudently. •  Finance Companies Act: The law will be strengthened to bring in more stringent provisions for dealing with unregistered businesses and persons carrying on finance business, in contravention of the laws. •  Business Recovery Law: Law proposed to provide a procedure for the resuscitation of sick industries. 7. Policies for strengthening the economy  Among the fundamental requirements in strengthening the economy are high savings and investment.
12  This last factor may create a dangerous vicious circle. Against a backdrop in which it is expected that the lower interest rate bound may frequently limit central banks’ capacity to act, economic agents will expect that any inflation deviations above the target level will be swiftly corrected. But not deviations below the target level. In consequence, expected inflation, in terms of the average over a broad period, will tend to move below the target level. Given that in the long run, the nominal interest rate is the real equilibrium rate plus expected inflation, any fall in the latter implies lower nominal rates on average, which means that these will hit their lower bound more frequently. All the above implies less headroom for providing stimulus measures in downturns marked by low inflation. This in turn leads to lower inflation expectations, and thus it continues. Asset purchase programmes, such as the ECB’s APP and PEPP, are an attempt to break out of this vicious circle. These programmes are conducive to lower interest rates on medium and long-term public and private-sector bonds. In this way, although short-term interest rates are limited by the lower bound, the ECB is able to reduce longer-term interest rates, which are often the most relevant rates for determining economic agents’ spending decisions. This is what is known as “flattening the yield curve”.

In principle, households and companies could be granted access to digital central bank money via both a token-based and an account-based system. Broad access to digital central bank money would call the existing two-tier banking system into question. Instead of being the banker to the banks, as it is today, the SNB would act like a commercial bank, taking on the role that is currently played by the private sector. Moreover, broad access to digital central bank money could pose a threat to financial stability. Switching over from bank deposits to digital central bank money is easier than changing to physical banknotes. In a crisis situation, this could increase the risk of a bank run. Thus, overall, the implementation of this proposal would have far-reaching consequences not just for banks, but also for the entire financial system. These fundamental concerns would argue against opening up access to digital central bank money to all households and companies. Furthermore, cashless payments in Switzerland are already reliable, secure and efficient and the system is continuously being updated and refined. So from that standpoint, too, access to digital central bank money for all households and companies, whether in the form of Swiss franc tokens or sight deposits, would bring virtually no advantages. Now let’s turn to the second potential area of application for state-issued digital tokens: digital token money exclusively for financial market participants.
We believe this improvement reflects the measures taken in the last 2–3 years, of which I would like to single out: a)  Amendments to the law “On income tax” at the end of 2013, to facilitate the loan loss write off from the balance sheet;  b)  Amendments to the Code of Civil Procedures in September 2013, to improve the collateral execution process;  c)  Entry into force of a regulation of the Bank of Albania, which renders obligatory the write off of loans classified by banks as “loss” for a period longer than 3 years;  d)  the work accomplished in cooperation with the commercial banks to restructure loans when the borrowers are exposed to more than one bank;  Albeit the number of non-performing loans subject to the execution process has been significantly up, the improvement of the credit quality reflects mainly the loan loss write offs from banks’ balance sheet. For the first half of 2015, its value amounted to around ALL 11 billion.

1 IMF World Economic Outlook, October 2014 2 IMF World Economic Outlook, October 2016 3 Dealogic data 4 “Learning to Live with Less Liquidity”, Morgan Stanley and Oliver Wyman, 13 March 2016 5 “Infrastructure for a seamless Asia”, Asian Development Bank, 2009 6 "The ASEAN Investment Report 2015 Infrastructure Investment and Connectivity”, the ASEAN Secretariat and  UNCTAD, November 2015 7 World Federation of Exchanges 2015 and 2006 data 8 “EY Global IPO Trends”, Ernst & Young, 2006–2015 and “IPO Watch, Asia”, PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2007–  2014 9 World Federation of Exchanges 2015 and 2006 data 10 Dealogic data 11 “ASEAN, PRC and India”, Asian Development Bank, 2014 12 “United Overseas Bank (UOB) publishes the first global Covered Bond Label Harmonised Transparency 6/7  BIS central bankers' speeches  Template”, Covered Bond Label, 19 January 2013 13 “Grow fast or die slow: why unicorns are staying private”, Mckinsey & Company, May 2016 14 IMF World Economic Outlook, October 2016 15 MAS estimates as at 30 September 2016  7/7  BIS central bankers' speeches