samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
And second, the level of concentration of bank lending to the non-financial private sector in the construction and real estate sectors, which before the global financial crisis was over 25%, has continued to correct and now stands at 9.6%. This has been fundamental in the fall observed, as a proportion of GDP, in real estate sectorrelated lending (understood in the broadest sense, i.e. including loans for house purchase), which has gone from 101% in 2009 to 50% at present. It also partly explains the fact that the allocation of new lending has improved considerably since the international financial crisis. In particular, the empirical evidence available suggests that banks now discriminate more between firms according to their credit quality and productivity. This should help contain any increase in non-performing loans in the future. 21/29  Moreover, the economic recovery, lower borrowing costs and the intense deleveraging undertaken by firms have prompted a widespread decrease in the financial vulnerability of Spanish firms. Indeed, since 2013 the debt service-to-profit ratio has fallen very significantly, from 24% to 11% in 2017 in the 50th percentile when firms are ranked by profitability. However, this has been an uneven reduction and there are still firms that show a certain degree of vulnerability to potential shocks that reduce their capacity to generate income or raise the interest rates at which they borrow funds. Specifically, in the first three deciles, the average of this ratio is around 20%, indicative of a certain degree of fragility.

The nature and speed of change pose some opportunities for smaller firms that are not weighed down by massive infrastructure and can be nimble in decision making; but there are also a number of threats from the bewildering investment choices, the costs of investment and the ongoing need to adapt. Mutuals face particularly difficult decisions as you are essentially investing your members’ (past, current and future) money and will be highly aware of the potential damage caused by delays and cost overruns; and balancing the need to invest to meet the needs of today’s and tomorrow’s customers with the the risks to the firm’s future if investment doesn’t pay off. It is also important to note that maintaining technology can come with high fixed costs alongside the people associated with supporting that technology. Gaining relevant technical expertise at Board and senior management is one option that some firms determined to make the most of the right technological advances take. Pooling expertise or outsoucing – subject to tight and expert oversight – are other options. Organisational transformation projects are always difficult to achieve in a fast-paced environment. Firms, faced with declining demand for their current services and lacking the resources to invest in new services, may take the path to merge. For Friendly Societies, this could be achieved through a Part Eight transfer. The PRA currently has an open consultation on Insurance business transfers, CP16/211, which welcomes comments and feedback until 28 October.
For insurance, our main challenge is to ensure that all Singaporeans have access to the right products, at an affordable rate. That is our main priority for insurance. We must help consumers to meet their insurance needs for themselves and their families without paying for something they do not need. 10. That’s why we have the Financial Advisory Industry Review or FAIR over the last year. Two of the initiatives of FAIR will help consumers by making insurance products more affordable and their pricing more transparent. First, consumers will be able to buy basic life insurance products directly from the insurer, without paying commission. Second, consumers will be able to use the internet to use a web aggregator to compare prices and coverage of similar insurance products offered by different insurance companies. So they can choose what is suitable to their needs, and at the most affordable rate. The competition that comes about because of this transparency will also help keep costs low for consumers. Financial education 11. The second approach is reaching out to Singaporeans through MoneySENSE. This is the work of our partners, not just the MAS – including the community, the media, financial industry associations, advocacy groups like CASE and SIAS, our educational institutions which will play a larger role in the future, and a whole set of government agencies, all working with MAS to propagate financial education to as many Singaporeans as possible.

This is not something we will do for one or two years. We will have to continue this work as our children become young adults and eventually retire, giving rise to a whole new cycle. Hence the work on financial education has to be done continuously, as it is a very important area to help Singaporeans. 1  Financial Literacy Survey of over 1,800 Singaporeans and PRs conducted by The Nielsen Company on behalf of MAS between August and October 2013. Respondents answered questions and participated in focus groups on their knowledge of, attitudes and behaviour towards financial products and management. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  Towards better financial wellbeing Financial protection 7. What will MAS do? We have a two-pronged approach to help Singaporeans to enhance their financial well-being. The first is to regulate the conduct of our banks and financial institutions. For banking, the key issue is to discourage the imprudent use of unsecured credit facilities. Consumer research has shown the immediate pleasure of purchasing a designer accessory or purchasing the latest gadget using a credit card. If you have a credit card, the immediate pleasure of using it to purchase the latest good that you’re interested in can lead people to spending more than they otherwise would. There was an experiment with a group of students in the US who were asked to bid for a pair of tickets to a basketball match.
After focusing on the developments in inflation and our policies regarding interest rates and exchange rates, now I would like to talk about the growth of the Turkish economy. As you all know, the Turkish economy has been displaying a high growth performance for the last four years. Since 2001, cumulative real growth has been 35.1 percent, whereas the average annual growth has been 7.8 percent. The point that stands out in the growth figures is that growth is led by the private sector and that the investment-originated base is growing. In the 2001-2005 period, investment expenditures of the private sector increased by 105 percent, while those of the public sector increased by 15.5 percent. On the consumption side, expenditures of the private sector increased by 30.3 percent in the same period, whereas those of the public sector increased by 5.9 percent. These developments indicate that the ongoing strong investment trend enhanced the growth potential and that the dynamics and actors of growth changed parallel to Turkey’s structural change process. Growing with public resources is no longer the case. In this respect, it is clear today that the public sector assumes and should assume, a strong supervisory and regulatory role in the framework of good governance principles. This is emphasized evidently in the Ninth Development Plan Strategy, which comprises the period between 2007 and 2013.

Another change, which is created by the ongoing structural change in our country in growth dynamics, is closely related to the increases in productivity. According to SPO data, the contribution of total factor productivity to growth reached 51.3 percent in the 2002-2004 period, while this rate was 3.3 percent in the 1990-2000 period. In other words, the largest contribution to growth comes from the increases in productivity. In the 2001-2005 period, productivity increases in the private manufacturing industry reached 36 percent, in cumulate terms. Hence, the increase in productivity was the main determinant of growth, during this period. Moreover, it should be kept in mind that the increases in productivity not only enhance the quality of growth, but also contribute to the sustainability of growth. I would like to talk about another factor in the scope of the changing growth dynamics in the Turkish economy. That is the fact that our economy is getting more and more integrated with the world. High export rates have made a remarkable contribution to growth in the past four years. In this period, the average annual rate of increase of exports realized as 24 percent. In the 2002-2005 period, our exports increased by 104 percent. Parallel to this development, firms are increasingly shifting to exports and reaching international markets by quitting local production processes and local markets. As our economy opens to the outside world, profit margins narrow, due to increasing internal and external competition in the sectors.
Stronger analytics around funding •  Firms should have be able to produce analyses by material legal entity on a timely basis about its funding arrangements, including: –  Inter-affiliate funding arrangements;  –  Where liquidity reserves are held;  –  Stressed funding and liquidity outflows and inflows at the legal entity level; and  –  Impact of restrictions on transfer of liquidity between entities imposed by regulatory or resolution regimes. MIS by legal entity •  Firms should be able to produce on a timely basis detailed monthly balance sheets by material entity, as well as identify all credit exposures with a level of specificity including type of exposure, counterparty and maturity. •  Firms should also have inventories of key management and support functions; property owned, leased or licensed; internal shared services; and key third party contracts. •  Finally, firms should have inventories of key legal information, including legal entity types, purpose and relevant licenses, physical location, regulator, senior management and directors; and applicable resolution regime and authority, as well as sufficient information on legal agreements, such as parties to the agreements, key terms of agreements, and any relevant interdependencies. Arrangements for shared or outsourced services •  The final area for additional work is ensuring robust arrangements for the continued provision of shared or outsourced services needed to maintain operations.

Anyway, they cannot offer as good financial services as commercial banks or credit card companies! (c)  Monetary autonomy  The last fear we had was related to the potential loss of monetary autonomy. Could Switzerland, a country completely surrounded by the euro zone, possibly hope to implement an interest rate policy different from the one of the European Central Bank? With the loss of its monetary identity, Switzerland would have seen its interest rates, traditionally below German rates, converge to higher European interest rates causing severe pains to the Swiss economy. Fortunately, we did not experience this outcome. First, in the months following the introduction of the euro, it became apparent that markets were not anticipating a pegging of the franc to the euro. An expected peg would have generated a convergence in interest rates, which simply did not happen. Second, and as could have been expected, the monetary needs of the Swiss economy differed from those of the euro zone: •  As an open economy strongly oriented towards global markets, the Swiss economy felt more deeply the slowdown in global trade than the euro zone. •  Furthermore, the Swiss franc kept playing its role - although to a smaller extent - of safe haven in tense international situations. •  Finally, Swiss inflation was considerably lower than inflation in the euro zone, where adjustments and catch-up phenomena occurred.
On the one hand, the central bank’s legitimacy among the general public could be lost if short-term interest rates have to move sharply and cause output to fluctuate widely while inflation is being held stable and exactly on the target. Maximum stability in output could, on the other hand, result in sharp fluctuations in the rate of inflation and erode the target’s credibility. Instead it is a matter of finding a point somewhere midway between the two extremes. Looking ahead, I believe there are at least two major questions that central banks have to address more thoroughly. First, how should monetary policy react to asset prices, such as equity and/or real estate prices? We know from history that the development of asset prices can have a significant impact on both inflation and real economic activity. We need to establish whether or not there are actions that central banks can and should take to minimise the likelihood of macroeconomic instability arising from extreme fluctuations in asset prices. Second, how should monetary policy react to structural changes in the economy? On this issue quite a lot of thinking has already been done, both among academics and policymakers. Nevertheless, I believe that more must be done in this field, especially since at least some parts of the world economy have seen something of a productivity shock in recent years. I am carefully trying to avoid using the buzzword “new economy” here, since history has been full of expressions like that ever since the turn of the 19th century.

Sweden’s price stability norm in the 1930s lasted only a few years and was followed by a return to a fixed exchange rate regime. During those years, however, it performed the central function of stabilising expectations as well as prices. This was important not least because to some extent it helped shield Sweden from the global economy’s depressive impulses and thereby contributed to the recovery being speedier than in most other countries. Here I should perhaps add that although this Swedish price stability “experiment” attracted a good deal of attention at the time, it certainly did not leave any deep or lasting mark on the modern approach to inflation targeting. In the aftermath of the depression and the second world war, Keynesianism gained ground. The introduction of inflation targeting in Sweden in the 1930s was therefore not as pioneering as when this kind of regime was introduced in the early 1990s, first by New Zealand and later by others. 1  BIS Review 50/2000  A great advantage with a regime that explicitly targets inflation, is that the central bank adjusts the interest rate continuously in the light of inflation prospects. Compared with a fixed exchange rate regime, imbalances can then be prevented from building up to the same extent. A slight upward adjustment of the interest rate at an early stage, to reduce the risk of inflation picking up, is something quite different from having to hike the short-term interest rate in order to defend a fixed exchange rate.
Mario Draghi: A route for Europe Address by Mr Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank, at the day in memory of Mr Federico Caffè, organised by the Faculty of Economics and the Department of Economics and Law at the Sapienza University, Rome, 24 May 2012. *  *  *  A teacher, says Eco, “teaches that everyone must become individual and different”.1 Professor Federico Caffè, albeit with a coherent vision and deeply held convictions, was a teacher. He taught his students to think for themselves and did not pass on a binding creed. He helped his students – economists, thinkers, servants of the state and of the institutions, alert citizens – to discover themselves. I’ll start with the subject which, without a doubt, was the most precious to Caffè, namely welfare. Probably nothing in his intellectual heritage is more topical than this painful protest of his: one cannot, he would say, “accept the idea that an entire generation of young people should consider themselves as having being born at the wrong time and having to suffer job insecurity as an inevitable fact”.2 Work: a European matter “Full employment is not only a means of increasing production..., it is an end in itself, since it leads to overcoming the servile attitude of those who find it hard to obtain a job opportunity or live in constant fear of being deprived of one. In other words, the benefits of full employment are considered as well, and above all, in terms of human dignity.

If the governments of the Member States of the euro define jointly and irrevocably their vision of what the political and economic construct that supports the single currency will be and what the conditions to reach that goal together should be. This is the most effective answer to the question everyone is asking: “Where will the euro be in ten years’ time?”. The second pillar is that of structural reforms, especially, but not only, in the product and labour markets. The completion of the single market and the strengthening of competition are crucial for growth and employment. Labour market reforms that combine flexibility and mobility with a sense of fairness and social inclusion are essential. Growth and fairness are closely connected: without growth, and the events of recent months also reflect this, the temptation to “circle our wagons ”gains strength, and solidarity weakens. Without fairness, the economy breaks up into multiple interest groups, no common good emerges as a result of social and economic interaction, and there are negative effects on the capacity to grow. Recent Italian history has no shortage of examples. These reforms have long been indispensable in a global economy very different to the one which witnessed the creation of the institutions still operating today. In the political structure that will emerge from the crisis it is likely and desirable that for these reforms a system of European rules will be introduced similar to that for the fiscal compact, a discipline leading over time to the European harmonisation of objectives and tools.
A special Financial Analytical Unit (FAU) has been established as an autonomous part of the Czech Finance Ministry, to which all suspicious transactions must be reported. The regulators of the individual financial market segments, most importantly the Czech National Bank and the Czech Securities Commission, examine the regulated financial institutions’ compliance with the AML Act by means of both off-site and on-site supervision. The home regulators co-operate with the FAU, and also among themselves based on a mutual co-operation agreement. Co-operation with foreign supervisors is being established by signing Memoranda of Understanding. In this respect, the AML activities are  2  BIS Review 40/2003  thus following the same trend as the financial supervision in general. A crucial role is, of course, played in the AML system by the law-enforcement authorities, i.e. the police, prosecutors and judges. In previous years, one of the most sensitive measures in the AML system was the cancellation of the remaining anonymous saving-book accounts, which had a tradition of more than one hundred years in the Czech Republic. This issue, however, has now been resolved, contributing to stricter compliance with international standards in the Czech Republic. I am also pleased to tell you that the most recent progress in this area is the approval of a regulation issued by the Czech National Bank in August 2003 that specifies requirements for banks’ internal AML systems. It is based on the BIS’s “Customer Due Diligence for Banks”.

5  Within the EU a discussion has come up as to which type of authority is best suited to exercise supervision of the financial system: the central banks with their overall responsibility for the safe and efficient functioning of the payment system, or independent financial supervisory authorities, which are not involved in monetary policy decisions that can have consequences for individual institutions. In Sweden we apply the latter model, which I consider to work well in our environment. On the one hand, the risk of a conflict of interests between monetary policy decisions and supervisory decisions will thereby be avoided, and on the other hand it provides scope for a co-ordinated supervision between financial operations pursued in different institutional forms, e.g. banking and insurance, within financial conglomerates. Other EU countries have other models and there are also ambitions from some quarters to change the division of responsibilities. In my opinion, there is no reason to settle for a particular institutional solution for the supervisory work; it is more important to ensure the good functioning of the arrangements that apply. A larger issue that might have institutional consequences is whether it is sufficient in a more integrated EU to rely on co-operation and co-ordination between national authorities or whether a controlling authority is needed that can take on a leader role as required to ensure that the co-operation functions well.
We probably won’t know for sure just how effective the new regime is until we reach another crisis. Meanwhile we need to guard against the reforms being rolled back as a result of a period without crisis. Let’s complete the programme, give it time to work, be supportive of growth wherever we can, and be open minded about change. But let’s also be cautious about the siren voices of financial self-interest that were partly responsible for luring us on the rocks in the first place. 12  BIS central bankers’ speeches  BIS central bankers’ speeches  13  Annex 1 – Risk based minimum capital requirements and buffers under CRDIV  14  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Annex 2 – Key policy initiatives, by intended implementation date  This diagram, which appeared in the PRA Annual Report 2014/15, highlights some of the major policy work streams that will support delivery of the PRA’s strategy. It includes initiatives for which there is a publicly identified implementation date at UK or international level; however these may be subject to future revision. BIS central bankers’ speeches  15

Our definition of price stability is that, in the medium term, prices have to grow less than but close to 2%. Inflationary expectations seen by various panels tell us that, over the next five years, inflation is seen at around 1.9%. I believe it is essential that citizens, savers and investors can trust in the fact that we will take all decisions necessary to ensure that inflation remains at these levels in the medium term. For three reasons: because it is our primary mandate; it is what citizens are asking us to do, and because it is a major contribution to sustainable growth and job creation in Europe. Where do you see risks of price increases? Further increases in oil and commodity prices and in goods and services prices due to past oil price increases. Also additional unexpected increases in administrative prices and indirect taxes. Then, more fundamentally, there are the so-called second-round effects, that is the risk of increases in wages and salaries that would derive from a loss of credibility regarding our capability in countering price increases. It is essential to intervene before these effects materialise. Do your concerns include the increase in VAT to be implemented in Germany in January? The increase in VAT in Germany, which was decided upon some time ago by the government, had already been incorporated in our analysis. BIS Review 87/2006  1  You were in Cernobbio, Italy, in early September. What was the mood among Italian entrepreneurs, politicians and economists?