samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Given recent experience, a decade would seem to be a reasonable timeframe to provide sufficient time and space for any illegal actions or violations of the firm’s culture to materialize and fines and legal penalties realized. As I will argue below, I also believe that this longer vesting portion of the deferred compensation should be debt as opposed to equity. 6 I noted earlier that improving a financial firm’s culture will take sustained determination and commitment from its senior leaders. Deferred compensation can play a useful role in reinforcing buy-in of senior leadership to this endeavor. As I discussed last November, an important element of a Title II resolution under Dodd-Frank is that there is sufficient long-term unsecured debt at the holding company level to recapitalize a failing bank. I indicated in my remarks that it would be useful if a meaningful component of this debt was contributed by the senior management and the firm’s material risk-takers. That is, if a bank ran into solvency problems, this component of deferred compensation would be used to recapitalize the restructured bank. The goal is to incent senior management and the material risk-takers to focus on maximizing the long-term “enterprise” value of the firm, not just the short-term share price. In this framework, I would expect the relative size of the debt component of deferred compensation to increase as one moved up the management ranks to the senior managers of the firm.

All of these elements need to be aligned with the desired culture. Through our supervisory process, we have seen that a number of firms have started this process by developing or refining employee surveys and 360 feedback processes to target issues of behavior and  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  culture. Some firms are incorporating case study discussions into training programs to highlight ethical dilemmas and decision-making. Some are revamping senior level promotion criteria to reinforce what are the desired characteristics and behaviors of leaders. These efforts are at various stages in terms of their depth, breadth and maturity. Supervisors will need to see how these frameworks evolve, and more importantly, see evidence of how these efforts yield results in the form of more open and routine escalation of issues, consistent application of “should we” versus “could we” in business decisions, rigor in identifying and controlling of conduct risk, and how compliance breaches factor into compensation. Measurement and accountability for progress in developing a healthier culture across the industry is paramount to us as supervisors and central bankers. An important measurement of progress is employees’ assessment of their firm’s culture. To this end, we encourage the industry to harness the various individual efforts that have been initiated at a number of firms in order to develop a comprehensive culture survey. This anonymous survey would be fielded across firms each year by an independent third-party and the results shared with supervisors.
Similarly, the Kwacha depreciated against the Pound Sterling and Euro by 3.6% and 8.3%, respectively. This was partly on account of the US dollar appreciation following the strengthening of the US economy during the latter part of the year. The Pound and Euro weakness moderated on the back of optimism that their economies would continue to rebound. The Kwacha, appreciated against the rand by 10.7% to an average K0.5596/ZAR, reflecting the slowdown in mining output, following continued labour unrest in the South African mining sector. In the first quarter of 2014, the Kwacha depreciated by 10.0% to K6.09 per US dollar. This development was largely attributed to a high demand due to a higher growth in imports relative to exports, as well as investor sentiments associated with the tapering of quantitative easing in the United States of America coupled with falling copper prices on the global markets. Similar weakening of currencies was observed in most emerging market economies such as Ghana, South Africa and Turkey. It should be noted that the Bank of Zambia has continued to implement a market determined exchange rate and has intervened in the market to smooth out volatility and accumulate reserves. According to a recent study conducted by Professor John Weeks of the University of London, there is strong evidence that, the Bank of Zambia’s participation in the foreign exchange market to minimise volatility in the exchange rate has in general been effective.

This growth was mainly driven by expansions in the transport, storage and communications;  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  construction; community, social and personal services; financial institutions and insurance as well as manufacturing sectors. In line with the expansion in real GDP, per capita GDP has increased from 332 US Dollars in 2000, to 655 US Dollars in 2005 and 1,784 US Dollars in 2013. We are, however, alive to the fact that more growth is required in order to have a lasting dent on high poverty levels and even more important, there is need to do more to make growth more inclusive and equitably distributed among the citizens of our country. Distinguished Participants, to ensure sustainable economic growth, the Government has been pursuing appropriate macro-economic policies. To this effect, inflation has declined from the double digits of the early 2000s to single digit levels as recorded in recent years. Annual inflation slowed down to 7.1% in December 2013 from 7.3 in December 2012, although it was 1.1 percentage points above the end-year target of 6%. This outturn reflected higher non-food inflation which was moderated by lower food inflation. Higher non-food inflation was largely due to higher fuel prices, coupled with pass-through effects of the depreciation of the Kwacha against the US dollar. During the first four months of 2014 inflation rose to 7.3%, 7.6%, 7.7%, and 7.8% in January, February, March, and April, respectively.
Another example is the execution of payments; transactions that used to take 3 to 5 days to process can now be completed in 3 to 5 seconds, and for less than one-tenth of the original cost. Although banks have generally been slow to innovate, they have sought to stay ahead of the game by partnering with or acquiring FinTech firms. According to a recent PwC report, over 54% of banks surveyed have already established partnerships with FinTech firms, and 82% expect to increase such partnerships in the next 3 to 5 years.7  Central Bank of Kuwait - Public ‫ عام‬- ‫بنك الكويت المركزي‬  -6-  While banks can potentially manage the onslaught by the FinTech firms, the real challenge will be posed by the Big Techs. What would happen when the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Whatsapp, and Alibaba start competing with banks to provide financial services? These technology giants come with large and captive user bases, low online acquisition costs, and a better understanding of their customers through their utilization of big data. Moreover, they don’t face the same regulations and associated costs that banks do. Tech firms have had their eyes on the banking industry for quite some time. Over 20 years ago, Bill Gates compared banks to dinosaurs that could be bypassed and argued that “we need banking, but we don't need banks anymore.” That was an early warning for the industry.

Today, the global banking industry is at a major inflection point, facing several internal and external challenges that are coming  *  Keynote speech delivered by H.E. Dr. Mohammad Y. Al-Hashel, Governor, Central Bank of Kuwait at CBK International Banking Conference: Shaping the Future, September 23rd 2019, Four Seasons Hotel, Kuwait City – Kuwait. Central Bank of Kuwait - Public ‫ عام‬- ‫بنك الكويت المركزي‬  -2-  together to create a perfect storm. Certainly, the industry will not be able to weather this storm by holding on to the same course it has pursued for decades. Rather it must reinvent itself for the future. That is why CBK is organizing this event under the theme of ‘Shaping the Future’. We believe that all stakeholders in the banking industry need to take a proactive role in shaping the way banks operate in the future, rather than continuing along the well-trodden path, no matter how well that path had previously served them. Taking this opportunity, I would like to share a few thoughts on our vision for the evolution of the banking industry. I will begin with a brief overview of the major challenges that the industry faces today. Second, I will reflect on the key areas that banks will need to focus on in order to stay relevant. Finally, I will touch upon the role that enabling stakeholders need to play to support the banking industry through its transformative journey.
Few are those who can define it and fewer still those who can measure it. Yet it has entered the popular lexicon and with good reason: the one thing we do know is that productivity is crucial to our pay and living standards over the longer run. Productivity is what pays for pay rises. And productivity is what puts the life into living standards. History, distant and recent, makes this only too clear. It is no coincidence that productivity, pay and living standards have moved in lock-step over the past millennium – flat-lining for the first three-quarters before sky-rocketing in the final quarter - as each new industrial revolution has dawned (Chart 1). Pay and living standards have increased over fifteen-fold since 1750. Productivity explains why. More recent experience has been more painful. Since 2008, productivity in the UK has essentially flat-lined. This is almost unprecedented in the modern era, a “lost decade” and counting. And it has been mirrored, as in the past, in a lost decade for pay too (Chart 2). Inflation-adjusted pay has stood still since the crisis, something also almost unprecedented in the modern era. 1  This prolonged pause has become known as the productivity problem. In the UK, the problem is a big one by any historical standard. And it is cold comfort that the UK shares this problem with much of the Western World and a decent chunk of the emerging market world.

Indeed, in a perfect world we might wish to see workers moving from higher-productivity to lower-productivity firms to enable good practices and processes to be effectively diffused from the upper to the lower tail. 39  The US job-to-job flow data are more comprehensive than those in the UK at picking up job moves within a given quarter. This methodological difference means that estimated US churn rates will be stronger than those in the UK, but this can only explain part of the gap between the UK and US job-to-job transition rates. 40 We combine the ASHE and BSD data for this analysis. 13  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  13  Table 4 shows a matrix of transition probabilities for workers between four quantiles of the probability distribution for companies. 41  All of these probabilities are conditional on a worker moving in the first place  and so sum horizontally to one. Two points stand out. First, there is a high degree of stickiness in job moves. Workers tend to move between jobs in the same productivity quartile. In the upper and lower quartiles, around 40% of jobs moves are within-quartile. The second point is that there is rather limited evidence of technological diffusion being supported by jobs flows from firms in the frontier to the long tail. The probability of a worker for a company in the upper quartile moving to one in the lowest quartile is around 20%.
Lars Heikensten: Monetary policy and potential growth Speech by Mr Lars Heikensten, Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, to the Swedish Economics Association, Stockholm, 28 March 2003. *  *  *  Let me begin by thanking you for the invitation to come here to the economic association. As a former secretary of this association it is a particular pleasure to be invited here. My intention today is to discuss a broader question than I normally have reason to take up, namely the Swedish economy's capacity for long-term growth. The greater the economy's capacity for long-term growth, the better the development in welfare. And here I am not thinking merely of material aspects, but also of the possibilities of providing young people with a good education, elderly people with good quality care and the environment with a long-term sustainable development. The long-term potential growth rate is also important for monetary policy. A high potential growth rate allows the economy to grow rapidly without inflation accelerating. I shall begin with a brief description of the intellectual framework the Riksbank uses with regard to potential growth and how this affects the shaping of monetary policy. After that, I shall discuss two factors determining potential growth, namely productivity and labour supply. Finally, I shall round off with some conclusions. My hope is to be able to contribute to initiating continued discussions and in-depth analyses in this field, both among researchers and more policy-oriented economists.

In December last year we held a Stakeholders Workshop at which the drafts of the Revised Companies Act, the Securities Bill, the Bankruptcy Bill and the Collective Investment Schemes Bill were tabled for discussion by all stakeholders. These pieces of legislation are now being finalized and would be presented to the next Parliament for enactment. The Other Financial Services Amendment Act 2007 will serve to provide the legal basis for the operation of the stock exchange until the enactment of these legislations. We have also invested in training of personnel to guarantee the professional conduct of operations, and in this regard, we have collaborated with relevant institutions and professional bodies to make sure that the codes and practices underlying the operations of the market meet established standards. Today, as we inaugurate the Sierra Leone Stock Exchange we note with pride and confidence that we have achieved a significant milestone in the development of our financial system. In the coming weeks we will commence actual operations. In this regard, I wish to solicit the support and cooperation of all institutions and the general public to work towards the success of this venture. In closing, I wish to thank all those who have helped us in getting to where we are today, and seek your continued assistance as we traverse this very difficult terrain.
This comprises a programme to purchase public debt on secondary markets, subject to compliance with specific conditions, as part of the financial support programmes of the European Financial Stability Facility and its successor, the European Stability Mechanism. Since the start of this crisis the ECB has adopted a series of conventional (short- and medium-term liquidity provision, changes in the deposit rate) and non-conventional measures (long-term liquidity provision, debt purchases) aimed at preserving the sound functioning of monetary policy, which is tantamount to saying the transmission of the policy rates the ECB wishes to maintain at all maturities. These measures have also been useful in buying time for governments to correct the macroeconomic imbalances and the shortcomings in the institutional design of the euro which are, in part, at the source of the current fragility. The Outright Monetary Transactions are a further example of this type of non-conventional measure. The new initiative is aimed at making sovereign debt markets work normally again, as their yields bear indirectly, but significantly, on households’ and firms’ financing costs. The aim is fully compatible with the ECB’s mandate, as the President of this institution has stressed on various occasions. Evidently, the announcement of this programme has had a stabilising effect.

The projected tax revenue for 2013 is subject to downside risks because it is based on the assumption that the revenue targets for 2012 will be achieved. However, on the information currently available, it cannot be ruled out that revenue performs worse than expected in 2012. If this risk materialises and is not countered by appropriate action in the remainder of the year, that would make it difficult to achieve the targets set for 2013, compounding the possible effects of a bigger decline in GDP than that assumed in the budgetary programming. Expenditure On the expenditure side, the weight of three items should first be underlined: Social Security system contributory pensions, unemployment benefits and the interest on government debt. In 2012, these three items are equivalent to 20% of GDP and will account for approximately 36% of total public spending. In 2013, these percentages will foreseeably increase significantly. 6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Noteworthy among the measures considered on the expenditure side are: the freezing of civil servants’ and public-sector employees’ salaries, although they will recover their December extra payroll, which, together with not filling vacancies, will result in a very low increase in personnel costs in relation to serving employees of around 0.1%. Real investments are reduced by 46%, whereas the interest burden increases by more than € billion. In the Social Security system, spending on contributory pensions, sickness and other benefits will grow by slightly more than 5%, factoring in the raising of pensions by 1%.
In this respect, African countries may have to consider the utilisation of domestically generated resources such as international reserves’, pension funds as well as the enhanced use of stock markets in raising financial resources required to finance development in Africa. However, it is important to stress that the effective utilisation of  1  IMF World Economic Outlook Database, April 2009. BIS Review 126/2009  1  resources will be dependent on the credibility of the institutional frameworks within which these resources are deployed and the quality of the projects themselves in terms of their economic and social returns. Sources of development finance (a)  International reserves  The global economy has witnessed an unprecedented accumulation of foreign exchange reserves in the last ten years, particularly in developing countries and Africa has been no exception. According to the IMFs currency composition of official foreign exchange reserves (COFER), between 2001 and 2008 total world reserves increased by 227 percent from $ 2,049.6 billion to $ billion while emerging and developing country foreign reserves grew by 418 percent from $ 818.1 billion in 2001 to $ 4,237.7 billion in 2008. The rapid build up in foreign reserves resulted mainly from high commodity prices and increased portfolio and foreign direct investments in emerging and developing countries. Most developing country central banks approach foreign reserve asset allocation with a view of preserving capital and liquidity. This normally means that central banks invest in low risk, highly liquid assets with short-term investment horizons.

For instance, in 2007 total foreign reserves held by African countries amounted to $ billion translating into an average of 9.2 months of import cover for each country. In the same year the African Development Bank (AfDB) raised funding from international capital markets amounting to UA724 million $ million) at a weighted average cost of 6-month US Dollar LIBOR minus 32 basis points. 2 The amount raised by the AfDB accounted for a mere 0.3% of the total reserves for African countries as at 2007. Hence, an allocation of some of African countries’ foreign reserves to fund African development institutions in which most of the countries are members would greatly enhance  2  2  African Development Bank Annual Report, 2007. BIS Review 126/2009  the capacity of these institutions in the provision of development finance, thereby assist the continent’s development programmes and poverty reduction efforts. In summary, it is important for African countries to consider alternative ways of making use of foreign reserves in the financing of development using resources that are already available, including the direct use of foreign reserves in financing development and making available part of the reserves to African multilateral development institutions to augment the resources available in the financing of African development. (b)  Pension funds  African countries need stable sources of development finance and as long-term investment vehicles, pension funds seem intuitively to be one potentially good source of domestically generated financial resources.
And the Australian terms of trade have risen by 40% since 2000, providing a substantial boost to the growth rate of real incomes. Nothing could be more damaging to the prospects of developing and developed countries alike than the abandonment of further trade liberalisation. But protectionist sentiments are abroad again, even with high employment rates around the world. In Europe they are concealed as cries for “national champions”; in Latin America as populism; in the United States as complaints about unfair competition. But the damage that protectionism can wreak is clear – the experience of the Great Depression should be enough to ring alarm bells. If that is to be avoided and we are to maintain widespread support for an open international trading system, it is in all our interests to establish clear rules for what we will and won’t do in areas where our  2  BIS Review 126/2006  decisions affect stability elsewhere. And if those commitments are to be upheld, we will need international institutions. The role of international institutions was thrown into sharp relief last week by the visit to Beijing of the new US Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, and a high-level team for a “strategic economic dialogue” with the Chinese Government.

Central banks probably invest greater resources than any individual agent into studying the economy, assessing the economic situation and making forecasts. Reasonably, central banks should also know more about their own intentions than any other agent. It is therefore possible to construct theoretical cases where a lower degree of transparency is preferable to a higher degree. But on the whole the research appears to indicate quite clearly that a high degree of transparency is something the central banks should aim at. It is easy to agree with this conclusion. Here I think that the demands on a public authority in a democracy have great importance. Then I believe that in practice there are limits as to how transparent a central bank can be. In some respects it is quite simply difficult to be open and clear. This applies, for example, to how much emphasis the central bank places on stabilising the real economy relative to stabilising inflation. In theoretical models this is usually represented by a special parameter in the central bank’s so-called goal function. However, placing a value on this parameter which is then published would probably be  2  Morris, S. and H.S. Shin, (2002), "The Social Value of Public Information”, American Economic Review 92, 1521-1534. 3  Svensson, L.E.O., (2006), “Social Value of Public Information: Morris and Shin (2002) Is Actually Pro Transparency, Not Con,” American Economic Review 96, 448-451. BIS Review 40/2007  3  very difficult in practice.