samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
In the last three years, MAS has imposed financial penalties on 27 FIs for AML/CFT offences. In a couple of cases, where ineffective management oversight resulted in inadequate implementation of AML/CFT controls, we have asked the senior management to be replaced. In the last six years, MAS has revoked the licenses of 15 money changers and remittance agents for serious AML/CFT breaches. 6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  But here too, we can do better. MAS will further strengthen its enforcement capability to conduct rigorous investigations and to take swift and dissuasive actions against errant FIs. We will take stronger regulatory actions against those FIs whose AML/CFT practices fall short of the expected standards. And we will make public our sanctions against persistently or egregiously errant FIs. Our closure of BSI Bank shows that we will not hesitate to take the most punitive actions where warranted. We are centralising all our enforcement functions across MAS in a new Enforcement Department. The new department will be responsible for not just AML/CFT offences but all other breaches of regulations and rules administered by MAS, including market conduct offences under the Securities and Futures Act. We are using data analytics to enhance market surveillance, to help us identify potential market misconduct and investigate specific offences. For example, we are exploring the use of machine learning algorithms to identify manipulative trading behaviour in the capital markets or to detect patterns across suspicious money laundering transactions. Finally, good cross-border cooperation with our foreign counterparts.

Mervyn King: Monetary policy developments Speech by Mr Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, to the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce Annual Banquet, Birmingham, 23 January 2007. *  *  *  Lord Mayor, Lady Mayoress, President, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, Two weeks ago your Chamber of Commerce called on the Bank of England to take manufacturing more seriously when it sets interest rates. In arguing against an interest rate rise, the Birmingham Chamber said, “we would urge the Bank of England to once again consider the effects this will have on the beleaguered manufacturing sector”. It will not have escaped your attention that Bank Rate did rise in January and has now increased by 75 basis points since the beginning of August. So tonight I want to explain why the Monetary Policy Committee took that action, and why the Bank believes that the control of inflation is essential for the success of Birmingham – and all British – manufacturing. Last week we learnt that inflation, as measured by the Consumer Prices Index, was 3% in December, the highest level since the Monetary Policy Committee was set up almost ten years ago. If it rises by one further decimal point to 3.1%, I shall have to write an open letter to the Chancellor explaining why inflation has risen to more than one percentage point above the target of 2%, and what measures the Committee are taking to bring inflation back to target.
Per Jansson: The Riksbank’s monetary policy strategy – in tune or out of tune with the rest of the world? Speech by Mr Per Jansson, Deputy Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at a meeting at SEB, Stockholm, 2 June 2014. *  *  *  Was the strategy for monetary policy that was formulated in the decades before the global financial crisis – and which long appeared so successful – actually too narrow? Does monetary policy need to put greater effort into preventing financial imbalances from arising? The crisis turned many things upside down and forced both central banks and researchers around the world to rethink their arguments and theories.1 Today I intend to talk about the rather lively discussion conducted among central banks and in the academic world on this issue. This is a discussion that is both interesting and important, but which I feel has made very little impact on the debate in Sweden. While the discussion here in Sweden for the most part is based on the answer being already given, the attitude in the international debate is much more open and inquiring. Most people agree that macroprudential policy should be the first line of defence against financial imbalances. But an increasing number have also begun to take the view that monetary policy may need to give macroprudential policy support by, as it is often called, “leaning against the wind”.

Some of the gains of the past few years have dissipated, and our disposable income might fall by close to 10 per cent in 2009. In periods of substantial uncertainty, investors will seek to repatriate investments in foreign currency. The fragility of the Norwegian krone was illustrated when investors fled the currencies of small countries, and the krone weakened considerably. When speculators withdrew, daily fluctuations increased and hedging against exchange rate volatility became  BIS Review 37/2009  5  more expensive. The krone fell to a record-low level in December last year, but has appreciated since then. Consumer price inflation reached a peak in October of 2008, and has slowed markedly thereafter and was 2.5 per cent in February. Underlying inflation is still above the inflation target, and stood at approximately 3 per cent in February. Even though inflation has been falling, the rise in prices has been somewhat sharper than expected recently, particularly for imported consumer goods. The depreciation of the krone last autumn has probably fed through to prices more rapidly than usual. Nevertheless, looking forward inflation will abate. Norges Bank has over a number of years focused on anchoring inflation expectations around  6  BIS Review 37/2009  the target of close to 2.5 per cent over time and given weight to predictability, with a recognizable response pattern. The downturn has not affected long-term inflation expectations to any great extent.
One study finds that capital market risk-sharing in the US dropped by almost half in the crisis period.19 But this does not alter the conclusion that deepening private risk-sharing in the euro area would be beneficial for macroeconomic stability. So how can we achieve it? The experience of other monetary unions, and our own up to now, suggests that it does not happen by itself. Rather, private risk-sharing has to be enabled by public sector policies at both the national and union levels. In this sense, private risk-sharing cannot be seen as a substitute for the further development of EMU. It is a complement to it and follows from it. The policies we need fall into two main categories. 3. Creating a more stable financial sector First of all, we need policies that make the financial system more stable, both by increasing the resilience of banks and by completing the banking union and the capital markets union. The euro area has already made good progress on these fronts. The post-crisis regulatory reforms have significantly strengthened the banking sector. The Common Equity Tier 1 ratios of significant banks have risen from 8.7% in 2008 to 14.5% today. In the same period leverage ratios have risen from 3.7% to 5.8%.20 And banks have much more stable liquidity and funding. 4/9  BIS central bankers' speeches  The creation of European banking supervision has also brought about a more uniform approach to how banks are supervised.

During the crisis, around 500 banks were resolved in the US without triggering financial instability. In contrast, one estimate puts the total number of banks resolved in the euro area in that period at around 50.25  5/9  BIS central bankers' speeches  An orderly resolution of this magnitude was possible in the US because of confidence in a wellfunctioning resolution framework. And the presence of the Treasury backstop was fundamental in creating this confidence. Indeed, the FDIC ultimately did not have to draw on its credit line, but it was clearly reassuring to markets and to depositors that it had that option as a last resort. In fact, the FDIC has only borrowed from the Treasury once, during the savings and loans crisis in the early 1990s, and it repaid in full a few years later.26 This example underlines that the dichotomy between risk-reduction and risk-sharing that characterises the debate today is, in many ways, artificial. With the right policy framework, these two goals are mutually reinforcing. Public risk-sharing through backstops helps reduce risks across the system by containing market panics when a crisis hits. And a strong resolution framework ensures that, when bank failures do happen, very little public risk-sharing is actually needed as the costs are fully borne by the private sector.27 So we need to put first things first and complete the resolution framework in all its dimensions. And creating a properly designed European deposit insurance scheme would be an additional element that could further reduce the risk of bank runs.
On 11 February the Bank announced that, with effect from 1 July 2011, it will accept in its narrow collateral basket sovereign debt securities denominated in Sterling, Euro, US and Canadian Dollars and issued by the UK, the US, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Canada. That is a wider range of currencies than many of its international counterparts. For example, the ECB, Federal Reserve and Bank of Japan only accept securities denominated in domestic currency. The Bank of England takes a broader range of currencies, to make sure that the narrow collateral set is large and deep enough for our monetary policy operations not to cause frictions in the sovereign collateral markets. The risk is offset by additional haircuts for foreign currency. The choices of which currencies and issuers were to be allowed in the narrow collateral set were decided principally on grounds of liquidity, not credit. A number of AAA issuers are assigned to the wider collateral set principally because their debt stock in issue is too small and/or too tightly held such that bid-offer spreads are relatively wide and/or more volatile in the secondary market. Chart 3 shows a simple analysis of some of these factors. Those changes were not a response to short-term conditions in some sovereign debt markets. Rather, they form an important part of the transition to the Bank’s long-term collateral policy, which was initiated following the October 2008 consultative paper on the Bank’s market operations. The changes have expanded the universe of collateral eligible in the Bank’s operations.

The currency board arrangements are not just another monetary policy regime. They are a “frame of mind”, a way to view and tackle the economic, political and social processes. Some Western analysts and researchers fail to understand this. But I am sure the contributions by my colleagues from the BNB will clearly illustrate during this conference that the currency board is something more than just a monetary policy regime. Following a dramatic banking and financial crisis in 1996–1997, the economy was stabilised by the introduction of the currency board arrangements, in combination with the strong fiscal  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  discipline, the liberalisation and privatisation of the Bulgarian economy, and the use of a broad range of macroprudential instruments. The current global crisis is not the first one successfully weathered by the Bulgarian economy. In only two decades we have endured the Asian crisis, the Russian Crisis, the “dotcom bubble” burst, the U.S. subprime crisis and the failure of Lehman Brothers, before the euro area financial and sovereign debt crisis came in. But the recent crisis has served as perhaps the biggest “litmus test” for the optimality of our monetary policy regime. We believe that a small open economy, which is not rich in certain commodities or natural resources, cannot succeed in pursuing the so-called independent monetary policy. All these issues will be elaborated today by deputy governor Hristov who will share our experience with you during the afternoon session of this conference.
And one of the most important duties of a central bank is to safeguard the financial system. In a crisis, that means acting as lender of last resort, supplying emergency loans to financial institutions when normal funding isn’t available. The U.S. Treasury Department and other federal agencies were also doing all they could to shore up the financial system. Now, I know that this financial support to big banks and Wall Street firms made many people irate, especially when so many Americans were losing their jobs or their homes. We should remember, though, that ordinary people suffer terribly when the financial system breaks down. The ultimate goal of our programs was to avert a major depression and much higher unemployment. Because of these programs, we were able to avoid a meltdown of the financial system and head off a depression. But we couldn’t prevent a terrible recession. The shock waves from the burst housing bubble and the financial crisis were simply too great. As it happens, it’s normal that severe recessions and sluggish recoveries follow financial crises.1 Research at the San Francisco Fed and other places shows that downturns following financial crises are much more severe when the preceding expansions had unusually rapid growth of credit and leverage.2 When the credit pendulum swings, it takes many years for household and business spending to return to normal. And, in fact, there was extraordinary credit growth before the recession.

If China’s economy has a hard landing, there really aren’t many sources of strength left in the global economy. Let me move now to what this all means for Fed policy. As I noted earlier, our statutory mandate is to achieve maximum employment and price stability.5 We are far short of maximum employment. And I expect inflation to fall this year below the 2 percent level that we view as consistent with our mandate. This is clearly a situation in which we have to keep applying monetary policy stimulus vigorously. The Fed’s monetary policy body is called the Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC. As you know, the Fed influences the economy through its ability to affect interest rates. In December 2008, when the recession was hitting with full force, the FOMC lowered the federal funds rate, the rate banks pay to borrow from each other on overnight loans, close to zero. It’s been there ever since. Given the weakness in the economy, standard monetary policy guidelines indicate that the federal funds rate should have gone deep into negative territory. But, of course, it’s not possible for interest rates to go much below zero. So the Fed has had to look for alternative ways to stimulate the economy. For example, we’ve purchased over one-and-three-quarters trillion dollars of longer-term securities issued by the U.S. government and mortgage agencies. This raises the prices on these securities, which lowers their yields. And lower yields on longer-term Treasury securities tend to push down other longer-term interest rates.
We consider two policy environments: in the first case, the policy maker uses only monetary policy; in the second case, the policy maker deploys both monetary and macro-prudential instruments. We focus on three sorts of shock: a total factor productivity (TFP) shock; a shock to the effort necessary to monitor borrowers, λt; and a mark-up shock in the inflation equation. These shocks are assumed to be temporary, though highly persistent. The TFP and mark-up shocks are familiar from standard New Keynesian models and affect households and firms in the usual way, though, by changing the return on capital, they also affect the equilibrium in the banking sector. The shock to the monitoring cost represents a simple way of altering the equilibrium leverage ratio and we think of it as a metaphor for changes in the willingness to take on risk. A fall in the cost of monitoring – an “exuberance” shock – relaxes the banks’ incentive compatibility constraint and is associated with an increase in the equilibrium 20  BIS Review 111/2010  leverage ratio, a fall in the loan-deposit spread and an increase in loans to firms; a “panic” shock does the opposite. Chart 8 shows the response of the economy to an adverse TFP shock, a financial “panic” shock and a mark-up shock, assuming in each case that policy responds optimally. When TFP falls (upper panel), it is efficient for the level of output to fall and the stock of physical capital to gradually fall back.

Consequently an increase in the value of a bank’s equity resulting from, say, a rise in the value of its (risky) assets will lead it to expand its debt (through deposit or wholesale funding) and a corresponding increase in its assets, either through extending new loans or acquiring additional securities. So as looser monetary policy boosts asset prices, it encourages an expansion in banks’ balance sheets, putting further upward pressure on asset prices. Leverage targets therefore act as an amplification mechanism. But the number of relatively safe borrowers/projects is limited. So the extension in the volume of loans is also likely to involve moving along the risk spectrum towards more risky borrowers. Looser monetary policy is not the only factor operating through these channels. Two other macroeconomic factors are potentially relevant. First, a number of authors have focussed on the role of international payments flows in the crisis, with capital flowing “uphill” from emerging economies, such as China, into the United States and some other advanced BIS Review 111/2010  3  economies (see, for instance, Obstfeld and Rogoff, 2009, and the references therein). Bernanke (2005) attributes this to a “savings glut” in the surplus countries. Possible drivers include: an inadequate household safety net and restricted capital market access for enterprises in China; the accumulation of precautionary holdings of international reserves by emerging economies following the Asia crisis; and rational savings of the windfall gains from higher oil prices on the part of oil producers.
Additionally, where suitable, vetiver grass is utilised to reinforce road slopes and prevent erosion. The term "climate-resilient" is used to describe these roads, emphasising their ability to withstand environmental challenges without employing other technical jargon. 3 Water Revolving Fund in the Philippines. [Source] 4 Melaka State Climate Action Plan 2020-2030. [Source] 5 ADB Technical Assistance Report. [Source]  3/3  BIS - Central bankers' speeches

Although the most recent labour market statistics for April point to weaker growth in jobs, at the same time the statistics on job growth were revised upwards for the previous months. In Japan, fiscal policy investments in rebuilding after the tsunami last year will contribute to growth in Japan being slightly higher than we thought in February. In China, the economy is expected to grow by more than 8 per cent in 2012. The overall picture we saw ahead of us in April looked fairly good. Personally, I emphasised the improved prospects for the United States as a possible reason for feeling slightly greater confidence in our international forecast. Global GDP is expected to grow at a rate that roughly corresponds to the historical average. The statistics received since the repo-rate decision in April have so far not had any dramatic effect on this picture. But the risk of a poorer development remains and at present there is greater nervousness on the financial markets than there was in April. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  International risks Even if the euro crisis does not trigger a total collapse in the international economy, there are a number of risks in the world economy that could lead to poorer economic prospects than we predict in our April Update. The first risk is that the deleveraging in the euro area will take longer than expected, and affect the Swedish export industry through lower demand.
I would like to lay special emphasis on the importance of education reforms for the future of our country. The necessary balance should be established between the need for a qualified labor force in the Turkish economy and the human resources provided by our educational system. Within this context, I believe that the Specialized Vocational Centers Project, implemented with the collaboration of The Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey and the relevant ministries, will accommodate a very important need in Turkey and I would like to congratulate everyone who has been involved in this project. Such projects will equip hundreds of thousands of young population with the qualifications required by the labor market, and will not only contribute to the increase of employment but also raise Turkey’s growth rate on a sustainable basis. One of the major concerns of the labor force market is the informal economy. The rate of informal employment in Turkey is 43 percent. Such illegal practices lead to unfair competition and reduce the productivity of the Turkish economy. One of the major causes of the informal economy is the high level of labor costs in Turkey. Of course, the risk of the employment loss that may emerge in the short-term as a result of the reduction of informal employment should be minimized. At this point, we consider the implementation of arrangements regarding the reduction of labor costs to be crucial.

The global economy has displayed a mild recovery since the second half of 2009. Yet, European economies have recently shown signals of deceleration. Although problems in the credit markets of advanced economies have attenuated, they have not been completely eliminated yet. As a matter of fact, credit developments in the USA and the Euro area suggest no significant increase in credit volume. The unresolved issue of troubled assets in  BIS Review 104/2010  1  the banking sector of advanced economies impedes proper functioning of the credit mechanism. Meanwhile, soaring and persisting high unemployment rates in many countries reduce household expenditures and negatively affect the aggregate demand. Soaring budget deficits and public debt stocks stemming from loose fiscal policies implemented in developed countries are an important risk factor that may adversely affect private demand by increasing long-term interest rates in the years ahead. The risks that I have mentioned above also have the potential to affect the Turkish economy in a negative way. Considering that our largest exports market is the European Union, problems prevailing in European economies pose an important risk for our economy, too. As a matter of fact, external demand indicators have recently indicated a partial slowdown. Global turbulence also has the potential to affect the Turkish economy negatively through the channel of expectations. Problems in the global financial markets are likely to restrain the accessibility of external financing.