samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
This was in the 70s. If you think of the iconic figures who have been on the Central Bank staff, they were legendary figures in this country. I don’t want to mention any names because I might miss some out but you just look back through the history of the Central Bank and you see some great names, people who have made massive contributions to this country. So I wanted to be part of that narrative and so I came back and started life as a probationary staff officer of the Central Bank. And I must tell you, when I was working for the Commonwealth Secretariat, almost for twenty years as Dr. Nandalal said, obviously one travels around. There are 54 members of the Commonwealth and I have been to many countries. And invariably there are various occasions when you are introduced. I was always introduced by saying I started my career in the Central Bank of Sri Lanka and that was a great source of pride, to be able to say that I started my working life in this institution, and I continue to be enormously proud that I was part of this staff of this great institution for fifteen years. So in a way, it is coming the full cycle. It’s like coming back home after a long absence. It is a great pleasure, privilege and an honour to be able to come back.

Of course, I am deeply indebted to His Excellency the President for appointing me as the Governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka. I am also indebted to the Hon. Prime Minister and the Hon. Finance Minister for supporting my appointment and I very much hope that I will be able to fulfill the trust they have reposed in me. When I met the President, he just told me one thing, he said “Do your work in a straight way and do not fear anybody in discharging your duties.” Now my intention is to follow his direction. When I met the Honourable Prime Minister, he laid out his vision for where he wants to take this country and there is a big role for the Central Bank. And in many ways, if we are not able to fulfill our functions in the way it should be fulfilled – in-terms of creating a platform for macroeconomic stability with strong macroeconomic fundamentals, having financial sector stability so there is confidence right through the system – nothing else is possible. That is the first step, to get strong macroeconomic fundamentals, to have the financial sector which is the lifeblood of the country stable, and people within the country and outside having confidence in it. So that is our responsibility. And as I said, because I genuinely believe that nothing else will really take off, unless we are able to do our job well, to fulfill our functions well.
This has helped inform our work to partner financial institutions and prepare our financial sector workforce for the future, by expanding and deepening workforce capabilities in technology, and accelerate reskilling of workers in functions aﬀected by technology shi s. For example, we can expect to see a shi in the role of a buy-side trader, who will move from trade execution to becoming proficient in multi-asset trading, with increased focus on generating good trading ideas using sophisticated tools and technology such as programming and coding skills to develop quant strategies. 16. Getting this right is an important priority for financial professionals, and there are good avenues and schemes to support this. Amidst the economic challenges arising from COVID-19, MAS and IBF enhanced our support for training, by raising training subsidies and introducing training allowances, so that firms can manage their manpower costs and support the skills upgrading of their employees. The Industry Associations, including ACI Singapore, are important partners in this journey. I am also pleased to hear that ACI has been an active supporter in workforce upskilling, through the courses it provides on relevant financial markets and products upskilling courses for the industry. MAS and IBF are also actively driving the expansion and deepening of workforce capabilities in technology and specialised fields, to meet the needs of the rapidly evolving financial sector landscape in Asia. Beyond the technical skills, it is also important to have a deep understanding of the markets we serve.

Speeches Published Date: 08 December 2020  "FinTech for an Inclusive Society and a Sustainable Planet" - Remarks by Mr Ravi Menon, Managing Director, Monetary Authority of Singapore, at Singapore FinTech Festival 2020 on 8 December 2020 In his keynote speech at SFF x SWITCH 2020, Mr Ravi Menon, Managing Director, MAS, spoke on leveraging FinTech to create a more inclusive society and a more sustainable planet. VIEW ALL NEWS  © 2021, Government of Singapore. https://www.mas.gov.sg/news/speeches/2021/riding-the-growth-momentum-in-asia  11/11
To conclude, I would like to reiterate the importance of preventive measures to combat fraud, and I applaud your efforts in holding a conference on this topic as it shows that you place a high degree of importance in this area. While no institution can ever be expected to be completely fraud proof, institutions maintaining key elements I discussed will have taken a big step towards fraud mitigation and avoidance. I wish you great success for this seminar. I hope you accomplish your objectives and I know you will all take a lot of valuable information from this timely and meaningful event. Thank you again for inviting me to join you today and thank you very much for your attention. BIS Review 52/2008  3

19 Similar behavior was observed during the 2011 “slow-motion run” on prime MMFs that occurred during the  European debt crisis, when investors reacted to the increased risk associated with MMFs’ exposure to European banks. See Sergey Chernenko and Adi Sunderam, “Frictions in Shadow Banking: Evidence from the Lending Behavior of Money Market Mutual Funds,” Review of Financial Studies 27, no. 6, June 2014. 20 Robin Greenwood, Samuel G. Hanson, and Jeremy C. Stein make this argument in “A Comparative Advantage  Approach to Government Debt Maturity,” Journal of Finance 70, no. 4, July 2015 and in “The Federal Reserve’s Balance Sheet as a Financial-Stability Tool,” Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Jackson Hole Economic Symposium Conference Proceedings, August 2016. They additionally argue that the central bank is better positioned than the Treasury to provide such assets because the central bank does not face auction and rollover risks and because it can better adjust the supply of money-like assets to high-frequency shocks. This is related to but distinct from my discussion here on the provision of overnight liabilities since I focus on the composition of the central bank’s balance sheet shifting in response to supply and demand shocks in the private sector. 21 For example, Arvind Krishnamurthy and Annette Vissing-Jorgensen have documented a significant convenience  yield for Treasury bills, stemming from their liquidity, and related its size to the supply of Treasuries. See “The Aggregate Demand for Treasury Debt,” Journal of Political Economy 120, no. 2, April 2012.
6  BIS Review 8/2007  Therefore, continued regulatory vigilance and timely interventions would be necessary to avoid and/or mitigate any harmful effects of all such threats. It should also be noted that a continuing high budget deficit could also pose a formidable challenge in the conduct of monetary policy, as such deficit requires borrowings by the Government from the banking system, making it difficult to maintain the monetary expansion along a pre-determined, tight path. As seen from the case studies of many successful countries, rapid infrastructure development is a strong contributory factor towards achieving sustainable high growth. However, the timely mobilisation of necessary resources for infrastructure development while maintaining budget deficits and debt at reasonable levels would be particularly challenging for a developing country like Sri Lanka. At the same time, maintaining a comfortable and reasonable level of foreign currency reserves in order to be able to mitigate the impacts of external shocks is also a challenging task for any developing country. Needless to say, it is vital to manage the foreign reserves at an appropriate level, while ensuring that the exchange rate fluctuations are within reasonable limits, in order to enhance the confidence in the economy. These and other challenges would need to be faced by our country and it is clear that our policies and actions would have to be so designed in order to deal with, and respond to, such challenges if we are to be successful. 5.

Figure 2: Gross O fficial Re se rve s 3,000  USD mn  2,500 2,000 1,500 1,000  2006P  2005  2004  2003  2002  2001  2000  500  It is useful to recollect that since moving to the “Floating exchange rate” regime in 2001, the gross official reserves have continued to increase except in 2004 when the country was hit by the sudden increase in oil prices. As of now, the gross official reserves have been sufficient to meet about 3 months of average imports in the recent years despite the rising expenditure on oil imports. We also note that according to the overall policy vision announced in the “Mahinda Chintana”, the Government’s commitment to reduce the budget deficit to a sustainable level in the medium term has been made clear. In that context, the fact that the total revenue during the first nine months of 2006 increased, and thereby led to an improved Revenue/GDP ratio is laudable. In addition, it was noted  BIS Review8/2007  3  that several measures were introduced by the Government to rationalise recurrent expenditure, especially adjusting domestic fuel prices to reduce the burden on the Government. Nevertheless, the Government has had to resort to borrowings from the banking sector to meet shortfalls in the face of many challenges, and in order to avoid such a situation in the future, it would be highly desirable to further improve the Revenue generation and collection process in 2007 and beyond.
At the same time, the degree of correlation between hedge fund returns across different strategies, shown in the chart on the right of slide 7, remained around the same relatively high level as in mid-2006. There are concerns about the implications for market dynamics if there was to be an event which would prompt many funds into “rushing towards the exit” at the same time due to the crowding of trades, i.e. that many funds are positioned similarly. 4. Euro area financial system  Euro area corporate sector Let me now focus on the euro area corporate sector. Against a background of strong economic conditions, low financing costs and abundant market liquidity, the rate of borrowing by the euro area corporate sector began to quicken after mid-2005. As a result, key indicators of the leverage of the sector had reached unprecedented heights. However, as analysed in Box 7, the recent re-leveraging in the euro area corporate sector has not been broad-based, but rather it has been concentrated among unlisted firms – including not only small and medium-sized enterprises, but also firms which have been de-listed through private equity deals. Data is obviously lacking on unlisted firms, but comparing trends in the debt-to-asset ratio for listed non-financial corporations and the debt-to-GDP ratio for the non-financial corporate sector suggests that a sharp rise has taken place in the debt-toasset ratio of unlisted firms in the period since 2004 (see chart on the left of slide 8).

Banks of all shapes and sizes have the opportunity to benefit from the recovery in the Hong Kong economy when it comes. Some banks will however do better than others, and our research indicates that a more efficiently operated and diversified bank will achieve higher profits. I hope that all the banks sitting here today will be among those that fall into this category. BIS Review 32/2003  3
Still, the services component of inflation continues to be the largest contributor to its increase, so medium-term risks remain present, due to the closing of output gaps and the tight labor market (figure 2). Market inflation expectations have moderated for the short term and remain around 3 percent over the projection horizon. The baseline scenario foresees GDP growing this year between 4 and 5 percent, which is the same range forecast in March. Although the economy outgrew forecasts in the first quarter, the worsened external conditions will result in output slowing down more deeply than  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  forecast in March. Still, GDP growth will not drift substantially away from the trend, which the Board estimates at 5 percent. This projection also considers that y-o-y growth in consumption will moderate further, in line with decelerating labor income and less expansionary lending conditions than some months ago. Interest rates on consumer loans have risen lately, coinciding with a decline in the y-o-y growth of these credits. In addition, the Survey on Lending Conditions of the first quarter revealed greater constraints in the supply of consumer loans by some financial institutions. Demand for consumer loans continued to rise, according to this survey. For investment, the more persistent construction and infrastructure component – largely associated to the execution of mining and energy projects – suggests that it will remain strong in the coming quarters.

In summary, the baseline scenario considers a reduced external impulse associated to slower world growth and somewhat tightened external financing conditions. It also considers that new stress episodes will occur in external financial markets (table 2). As has been observed in recent months, these events can be triggered by negative news coming from the fiscal accounts, economic growth and the banking situation in the Eurozone. The feeble external outlook contrasts with the performance of Chile’s domestic demand and output in the last few quarters. In the first quarter of this year, GDP grew 5.6 percent, exceeding forecasts in the March Monetary Policy Report. In quarter-on-quarter terms, it expanded at trend rates, leading the Board to estimate that output gaps are still narrow. This view is based on the fact that, although the labor market continues to show signs of being tight, these signs have not intensified: employment has reduced its rate of expansion, the unemployment rate has settled at low levels and y-o-y growth in wages, while still strong, has moderated lately. In the first quarter, domestic demand grew somewhat less than output, but private consumption and investment are still robust. Inflation has behaved favorably in the past few months, below March’s forecasts. This, combined with oil prices falling in external markets, has reduced the risks that were envisioned then for its short-term trajectory.
1 Given the problems in defining and measuring financial stability, why should we pay any attention to it? One answer is that we simply cannot afford not to do so, as financial crises carry with them huge costs to society. This was shown by events in Japan and the Nordic countries during the early 1990s, and in much of South East Asia in 1997. In fact, one could even claim, that financial stability takes precedence over price stability, in the sense that the latter is quite irrelevant if the financial system is on the brink of collapse. An important difference between price stability and financial stability is that while responsibility for price stability rests squarely on the central bank, financial stability necessitates the cooperation of the central bank, supervisors and the government. However, the exact roles played by different authorities differ from country to country. Another difference is the number of instruments available to policy makers. In the case of price stability, there basically exist one instrument (either the short-term interest rate or the nominal exchange rate). Maintaining financial stability, on the other hand, requires a wide spectrum of policy measures, such as professional supervision, a legal framework that does not encourage “moral hazard”-type behaviour and crisis management plans. A recent complication is the surge in cross border banking activities, which means that the national authorities engaged in financial stability work, increasingly must work with their foreign colleagues.

Lars Nyberg: Monetary and financial stability from a central bank perspective Speech by Mr Lars Nyberg, Deputy Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at the conference on the 10th Anniversary of the Central Bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo, 13 September 2007. *  *  *  Ladies and Gentlemen, What is the interaction of monetary and financial stability? This is one of the most discussed issues in central banks and academia today, and is likely to remain high on the agenda for the foreseeable future. Many central banks, including the Swedish Riksbank, now have dual tasks: maintaining price stability and promoting financial stability. I will begin by discussing these tasks separately, and then turn to the questions the success in bringing down inflation has raised with regard to financial stability, and how this has influenced the conduct of monetary policy in Sweden. Before proceeding, I should stress that the views I am about to express are my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of the other members of the Executive Board of the Riksbank. Moreover, it should be kept in mind that my remarks primarily are based on my own experiences from an inflation targeting central bank, operating in a small open economy. Price stability The taming of inflation, after the destructive price-wage spirals of the 1970s and 1980s, is one of the major success stories in modern economic policy making. Economic theory tells us that high inflation is bad for a number of reasons. These theories now appear to have been vindicated.
2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  This cyclical narrative does not obviate the fact that important structural impediments do exist and need to be addressed. According to the latest Global Competitiveness Report, Thailand compares less favourably in terms of capacity to innovate, quality of workforce, and infrastructure. Labor market efficiency has fallen 42 places in less than four years, against the backdrop of labor shortage that could worsen as the society ages. Improving education and labor market reform are therefore critical as a foundation for innovationdriven development. The integration of manufacturing sector into the global supply chain needs to be a more dynamic and forward-looking process. The old days of easy wins are bygones. Knowledge and vision are necessary preconditions for innovation-led growth. The current government’s reform agenda indeed places a great focus on providing the right incentives and environment for the private sector to undertake the next big leap of improving their productivity and innovative capacity. But the ultimate success will hinge on the private sector rising to these challenges and following through with their actions and ingenuity. Third pillar: strengthening the economy & development Ladies and gentlemen, Let me now turn to the final pillar, that of strengthening the structure of the economy towards a sustainable long-term economic development. I have touched upon several real sector issues that could pose challenge to Thailand’s prosperity. But there are also important financial sector areas that are no less important, despite the immediate consequences being less evident.

In addition, the Bank of Zambia has incorporated financial inclusion as part of its current strategic plan in which it has undertaken to achieve financial inclusion to 50% of the population of the land by 2015 from the current level of 37.3%. The rationale for this objective is that it responds to the need to bring the poor into the financial system and thereby avail them of the opportunities for financial access and growth. It is expected therefore that this branch we are opening today will play its part in enhancing savings mobilization and effectively channeling the savings to support financing of economic activities. Honourable Ministers, Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bank of Zambia has for sometime now, been discussing with commercial banks and financial institutions such as NATSAVE on the need to seek ways and means of introducing branches and agencies in districts which do not have any bank branches or agencies such as Mpongwe, Masaiti, Lufwanyama to name but a few. I am pleased to inform you that, in November 2012, the Bank of Zambia sent a mission to Mpongwe and Masaiti to gather information which could assist in developing a business case for financial institutions to establish branches and support economic activities in these two districts. The report we obtained from the mission provided overwhelming evidence of a viable business case for not only one bank branch but several, to open up in these two districts, especially in Mpongwe district.
Rising importance of this topic is clearly demonstrated by the adoption of the Bali Fintech Agenda of the IMF that provides guidance for national authorities on how to cope with new and evolving financial landscape, and underlines the need for stronger international cooperation as financial services are blurring boundaries, both institutionally and geographically. In what follows, I would like to briefly focus on the challenges of fintech developments for the banking industry and policy makers. We do have to take into account that digitalization of banking is not a new phenomenon; it has been present for more than 3 decades (in the form of automated teller machines, electronic payments, e-banking). The emergence of fintech is only the latest wave of innovation to affect the banking industry. Still, in the last decade, a significant change has occurred in the way of using technology, thus creating environment in which disruption can happen more quickly, and urging traditional banks to adjust faster to maintain market share. Besides the advancement in technology, a few other factors have also contributed to proliferation of financial innovation. The fact that banking industry was dealing with the legacy issues of the global financial crisis-impaired balance sheets, perhaps was important factor that provided space for non-banks to penetrate in financial business. Also, banks’ resources to a great extent were tilted towards implementation of the new Basel 3 requirements aimed at increasing the resilience of the banking system.

Waves of financial innovations from new players, but also from incumbents on the market, create massive changes in the financial industry. In this light, the highlight of the conference is embracing changes, that is opening doors to financial innovations in the payment landscape, while preventing disruptions to the financial markets and to the overall financial stability. New wave of digitalization can have wide ranging positive effects on the economy – it spurs innovation and productivity, transforms public and private services, contribute to higher financial inclusion by reaching underserved households and overall, improve wellbeing of the society as information, knowledge and data become more widely available. Benefits go hand in hand with challenges to jobs and skills needed, to taxation, financial markets, and invite new thinking on how to preserve fundamentals such as privacy and security, as well as how to preserve monetary and financial stability. Financial innovations, underpinned by digitalization, have a potential to gradually reshape the financial sector. “The Pulse of Fintech” report of KPMG1 shows that Fintech investment globally more than doubled during 2018, and reached $ billion. In addition, while new startups sprouted across emerging fintech subsectors, highly mature areas like payments saw some consolidation through mergers and acquisitions of big developed players. Reports also show that highest number of fintech service providers are in the payments, clearing and settlement category, thus, giving them the potential to gradually undertake a paradigm shift in the payment landscape.