samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
29 November 2018  Deputy Governor Rannveig Sigurðardóttir. Introductory remarks at the 2nd Annual Nordic Cyber in Finance Conference, Helsinki, 29 November 2018  Let me begin by saying that this conference is both timely and interesting for me, as I have only been in office for five months. Given that I come from the monetary policy department at the Central Bank of Iceland, cybersecurity has not been much on my agenda until now. It is, nonetheless, a very important topic. The Central Bank of Iceland, and other central banks are facing several new challenges in this area, both in the financial sector generally and central banking more specifically. Last week I attended an interesting macroprudential policy conference at Danmarks Nationalbank. The discussion paper prepared for that conference was called While the sun is shining, prepare for a rainy day. Sitting there, I pondered what the discussion paper for this conference today might be called. Perhaps something like The snowstorm is here – what do we wear? Cybercrime is now the world’s fastest-growing type of crime. It has shot up to second place on the list of the top ten business risks worldwide, after not even making the list five years ago. The financial sector is particularly important because it greases the wheels of our economies, and cyber risks pose mounting threats to the financial system. Developments since the emergence of the internet show that new technologies have brought with them new challenges.

For the legislator, it is a challenge to stay on top of rapid technological developments, as rules tend to lag behind technological changes. Financial market participants must commit fully to guarding the system. Cybersecurity needs to be promoted at all levels. With respect to this fast-changing technology, keeping one step ahead of antisocial elements is a constant challenge. As I see it, cooperation is the only way forward. It is vital that all financial system entities work together on all fronts – within and between countries – to identify and address vulnerabilities. We need to share both our successes and our mishaps. We must do as mountain-climbers do – tie ourselves together  – because we are all in this together: central banks, financial service providers, FinTech firms, consumers, regulators, and politicians. And our success in combining forces will determine whether we reach the mountain peak or have to go back to base camp again. All systems can break. This is why some of us still use paper banknotes, even though they are not the most sophisticated technology. But their security has been improved upon over recent centuries. Try imagining what would have been the main topic at a conference in Florence at the time of the first Medici’s. As with paper money, the technologies we are discussing here today will become more secure, although we will encounter blizzards. Our role is to prevent or reduce the likelihood that those blizzards will create systemic risk.
These operations, as set out below, are carried out for the benefit of promoting general market stability, having regard to the level of sophistication of present day financial arrangements: (a)  when Initial Public Offerings of shares and other large scale Hong Kong dollar transactions risk creating extreme conditions in the interbank market and affecting the stability of the exchange rate, the HKMA may lend to or borrow Hong Kong dollars from the interbank market temporarily to dampen such extreme conditions; and  (b)  the HKMA may enter into intraday repurchase arrangements (Repos) of Exchange Fund Bills and Notes and other eligible paper and overnight Repos through the Liquidity Adjustment Facility (LAF) to facilitate the smooth settlement of interbank transactions. It does not, however, encourage “repeated borrowings” from LAF, a term which has been clearly defined in the HKMA circular dated 12 November 1997. Other HKMA activities 7. In all other activities conducted by the HKMA which may have the effect of varying the clearing balance of the banking system, the HKMA ensures that such effect is neutralized as the case may be, by recycling or sterilizing Hong Kong dollar liquidity. For example: (a)  a transfer of fiscal surpluses from the Government held temporarily in commercial bank accounts to the HKMA for the account of the Exchange Fund will be recycled to ensure that there is no effect on the clearing balance of the banking system.

3 This has further been enshrined in Article 107 of the Basic Law which specifies that “the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall follow the principle of keeping expenditure within the limits of revenues in drawing up its budget, and strive to achieve a fiscal balance, avoid deficits and keep the budget commensurate with the growth rate of its gross domestic product.” 4 The amount of foreign reserves as at end-1997 at $ billion was equivalent to 7.8 times the amount of currency notes  and coins in circulation, 7.1 times the monetary base, 3.8 times Hong Kong dollar M1, 54% of GDP or 15 months of retained imports. 5 Public expenditure, which comprises total government expenditure and expenditure by public sector organizations, currently  accounts for only around 18% of GDP. 6 Employment in the services sector rose from 1.1 million workers in 1986 to almost 1.8 million in September 1997,  absorbing more workers than the job losses incurred by the contraction of the manufacturing sector during the period. BIS Review 19/1998  -38. Hong Kong’s robust financial system has also provided an important foundation for exchange rate stability. We have seen many examples in which the maintenance of a stable exchange rate has been undermined by a fragile financial system. Examples include the Mexican peso crisis in 1994 and the recent currency turmoil in Asia. In Hong Kong, however, we have a robust monetary management mechanism, a modern system of prudential supervision and a sophisticated financial infrastructure.
42  15  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  15  Of course, there would be many execution challenges, not least the risk of fragmentation across Digital Currency Areas.44 But by leveraging the medium of exchange role of a reserve currency, an SHC might smooth the transition that the IMFS needs. Conclusion 20 years ago, the theme of this symposium was “New Challenges for Monetary Policy”, and my predecessor, Mervyn King, was one of the speakers. His reflections were on the merits of inflation targeting and flexible exchange rates. The applications of his insights have contributed greatly to improved economic outcomes around in the world in the intervening years. But during that same period, the deficiencies of the IMFS have become increasingly potent. Even a passing acquaintance with monetary history suggests that this centre won’t hold. We need to recognise the short, medium and long term challenges this system creates for the institutional frameworks and conduct of monetary policy across the world. Given the experience of the past five years, I will close by adding urgency to Ben Bernanke’s challenge. Let’s end the malign neglect of the IMFS and build a system worthy of the diverse, multipolar global economy that is emerging. 44  For more discussion of this, see Brunnermeier, MK, James, H and Landau, JP (2019), ‘Digital currency areas’, VoxEU. 16  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  16  Annex I.

32 For example, limits on foreign currency borrowing and restrictions on the activities of open-ended investment funds. History has shown that capital flow management measures can be both addictive and highly distortionary. That is why the IMF’s Institutional View makes clear that CFM should not substitute for domestic institutional reforms or warranted macroeconomic adjustments. 30  12  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  12  become more fragmented and its core – IMF resources – has shrunk relative to the size of the global financial system (Chart 11). Pooling resources at the IMF, and thereby distributing the costs across all 189 member countries, is much more efficient than individual countries self-insuring. To maintain reserve adequacy in the face of future larger and more risky external balance sheets, EMEs would need to double their current level of reserves over the next 10 years – an increase of $ trillion. A better alternative would be to hold $ trillion in pooled resources, achieving the same level of insurance for a much lower cost. This would imply a tripling in the IMF’s resources over the next decade, enough to maintain their current share of global external liabilities.33 One of the many advantages of this approach is it would reduce the demand for safe assets and with it, the downward pressure on r*. V. Long term: Changing the Game While such concerted efforts can improve the functioning of the current system, ultimately a multi-polar global economy requires a new IMFS to realise its full potential.
Ravi Menon: Introducing Zhou Xiaochuan Opening remarks by Mr Ravi Menon, Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, at MAS Lecture 2019 by Zhou Xiaochuan, Singarpre, 19 September 2019. * * * Dr Zhou Xiaochuan, President, China Society for Finance and Banking, and former Governor, People’s Bank of China Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Senior Minister and Chairman, MAS Mr Goh Chok Tong, Emeritus Senior Minister and Senior Advisor to MAS Distinguished guests, friends and colleagues, good morning. Welcome to the tenth MAS Lecture. Since its launch in 2000, the MAS Lecture has featured leading members of the international financial community to share their perspectives on the economic and financial issues of the day. I have been trying to get Dr Zhou to speak at the MAS Lecture almost since the time I became MD MAS eight years ago. On at least a couple of occasions, Dr Zhou actually agreed to deliver the Lecture, only to be prevented from doing so by pressing issues back home in China. And now, the stars have finally aligned to bring Dr Zhou to Singapore and to deliver the MAS Lecture. Perhaps, there is a deeper significance as to why the stars conspired to make Dr Zhou deliver the MAS Lecture in 2019 and not earlier. This year marks the 10th anniversary of China’s bold move to gradually internationalise the RMB. It was in 2009 that the People’s Bank of China launched a cross-border RMB trade settlement pilot scheme.

We collaborated successfully in several areas over the years, particularly in promoting the greater use of RMB in the region. PBoC’s decision in 2013, under Dr Zhou’s leadership, to appoint the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China as Singapore’s RMB clearing bank was a significant milestone and spurred the growth of Singapore as a key RMB offshore centre. In 2016, MAS announced that RMB assets would be included as part of our Official Foreign Reserves, three years ahead of the inclusion of Chinese bonds in key global bond indices. At the personal level, I have had the pleasure and privilege to interact with Xiaochuan at many international and bilateral meetings. I have always found his views insightful. At our bi-monthly meetings of central bank governors in Basel at the Bank for International Settlements, I would sometimes ask Xiaochuan some rather inconvenient questions – about risks related to shadow banking or industrial overcapacity in China. Xiaochuan would always answer these questions, as well as those from other governors, with a disarming candour and clarity, never avoiding the hard issues. This not only helped to build trust among his counterparts in the international community but also endeared Xiaochuan to many of us as someone we could count on for insights into the complexities of the Chinese economy and financial system. Today, Dr Zhou will speak on “The Rise of Technology in Finance – Opportunities and Challenges for Central Banking”. Many of us are familiar with Dr Zhou’s views on financial and economic reforms.
  In Indonesia, the urgent need is to shift fiscal spending from costly food and fuel subsidies to infrastructure investment and human capital development. The newlyelected President Jokowi has just announced a “working cabinet” and a resolve to deliver on reforms.   In Singapore too, we are in the midst of economic restructuring – to reduce our dependence on labour inputs, move into higher value-added activities, and increase productivity as the basis for sustained and healthy wage growth. Structural reforms are often painful. They take time to bear fruit and entail significant adjustment costs in the interim. Growth may slow temporarily, as margins are squeezed and resources flow from declining activities to emerging ones. Restructuring is a process of creative destruction, and quite often the destruction of the old must take place before the creation of the new. But if reforms are delayed, or worse still reversed, in response to short-term pains, the long-term health of the economy suffers. Countries ranging from China to Singapore are facing this trade-off today, between the imperative to restructure the economy for more sustainable long-term growth and the need to minimise the transitory effects on short-term growth. Governments must get businesses and workers to understand these trade-offs, and work together to press on with restructuring while smoothening its rougher edges. But avoiding reform or restructuring is not a choice. Financial development and integration is an enabler for the broader structural reform effort underway in Emerging Asia.

Over the past decade, monetary policy has had to assume almost sole responsibility for getting these economies back on their feet. After a few years of solid growth in the euro area, growth has fallen back. The interest rate level in Europe remains low, and monetary policy normalisation will take time. In this environment, new negative shocks would be very untimely for those economies. The policy space available for coping with a new downturn is limited. CONCLUSION To conclude, globalisation, digitalisation and structural changes are facets of the same long-term trend – we are in the midst of a technology-driven growth process that encompasses much of the world. It is easy to focus on the downsides, but we must also keep our eyes fixed on the big picture: never before have so many taken part in a journey with such a great leap in prosperity. But growth is unevenly distributed. The winners in global competition are reaping substantial rewards, while broad categories of wage earners in the traditional industrial economies have been left behind. The harmful effects of rising inequality must be taken seriously. 15  Our friend Kristoffer from the year 2030 awoke to rain and mild weather, and the news that an electronic platform had been hacked. Perhaps the money he had on that platform had vanished. But some of the news was positive. Today’s two major economies, China and the United States, had worked together and made progress in addressing climate challenges.
In the medium term, the renewed service will enable access with a simpler and more proportionate onboarding processes including streamlined testing requirements and interfaces such as Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). And increasing capacity significantly to facilitate more participants. This in turn should support greater innovation and competition within the payments sector in the future. Wider interoperability: Further down the line the CHAPS implementation of ISO 20022 will align with the UK’s forthcoming new retail payment system – the New Payments Architecture (NPA) for retail payments. The implementation of a common messaging approach – through the UK’s ISO 20022 Common Credit Message (CCM) – will deliver wider interoperability between payment types and makes it easier to switch between payment systems should the need arise. The Bank also continues to work with other central banks and operators to ensure that as a global standard, this provides greater interoperability and harmonisation with other international payment infrastructure – leading to an improved user experience, more efficient fraud detection and increased efficiency. Improved user functionality: The new system will be designed to better support the needs of users, for example enhanced liquidity management, the introduction of APIs and greater data availability. 3/6  BIS central bankers' speeches  Strengthened end-to-end risk management: Since the operation of CHAPS was brought inhouse in November 2017, we have introduced a more robust system with greater oversight and governance.

Willem F Duisenberg: The transformation of the European financial system Welcome speech by Dr Willem F Duisenberg, President of the European Central Bank, at the Second ECB Central Banking Conference, 24-25 October 2002, Frankfurt am Main, 24 October 2002. *  *  *  Ladies and Gentlemen, I am pleased to welcome you to Frankfurt, to the second ECB Central Banking Conference, entitled "The transformation of the European Financial System". This event is the largest and most important open ECB conference and is held every two years. The first ECB Central Banking Conference took place in November 2000. It focused on price stability, which is the ECB's primary objective, and that of many other central banks worldwide. It was a successful event, and I am convinced that this year's conference will be too. Indeed, looking around, I am happy to see that this second conference has evidently aroused much interest and attracted researchers from leading institutions, officials from most of the major central banks, from ministries of finance, various European and international bodies and the media. In view of this year's topic, we also decided to invite representatives from commercial financial institutions and from supervisory authorities. I should like to extend a special welcome to the representatives of the central banks of the countries that are negotiating to join the European Union; these negotiations will hopefully be concluded fairly soon. I should, of course, also like to thank the speakers, discussants, panellists and chairpersons of the sessions.
The period at the end of the 1890s, just prior to the housing market collapse in Christiania, has some features similar to today’s situation. It was a period of rising house prices, a housebuilding boom in Christiania, rising equity prices and rapid credit growth. At the same time, the level of prices for goods and services was stable. After the housing market crash in Christiania in1899, house prices fell by more than 50 per cent over 5 years. The fall in house prices for the country as a whole was more moderate. Higher debt will become a mounting financial burden for many households and limit the willingness to pay in the housing market. Long-term interest rates are unusually low and will probably rise over a few years. Moreover, the current level of population and income growth is not sustainable. On balance, developments in these variables will eventually stem the rise in house prices and lead to a period of stagnating or declining prices. 12  BIS Review 15/2007  4  Modernisation of the economic system  The global economy has become increasingly integrated. Norway and the other Nordic countries are tackling the challenges. Adaptability in the business sector, the willingness to integrate new technology, a relatively efficient public sector, high growth, low inflation and moderate unemployment are now characteristic features of our region. Since the mid-1990s, the Nordic countries have expanded at a faster pace than other European countries and almost as fast as the US economy.

Norwegian companies have also been able to be considerably bolder in undertaking new assignments and investments knowing that they can procure labour throughout Europe. In addition to increased labour inflows from Poland, Lithuania and other central European countries, we have long benefited from inflows of labour from Sweden. Many workers are on temporary assignment and their consumption is primarily concentrated in their home country. The Norwegian economy has seen a net capacity increase. Third, the Norwegian business sector has been quick to integrate information technology. This applies both to companies competing on international markets and those supplying goods and services to the domestic market. In comparison with other countries, it is particularly productivity gains in banks and other service sectors that stand out. Examples are automated processes and swifter payments in the financial industry and improved inventory and management systems in commerce and transport. In Norway, monetary policy is oriented towards low and stable inflation. The operational target is consumer price inflation of close to 2.5 per cent over time. We operate a flexible inflation targeting regime. Both variability in output and inflation are given weight in interest-rate setting. BIS Review 15/2007  3  A decline in import prices, ample supply of labour and high productivity growth have boosted the growth potential of the Norwegian economy and led to very low inflation. Against this background, it has been appropriate to stimulate demand for goods and services. We consider a normal real interest rate to be in the order 2½ to 3½ per cent.
Loss absorbing capacity for CCP resolution Let me start by discussing the loss-absorbing capacity needed for CCP resolution. The use of a bail-in tool on a bank unlocks the loss absorbing capacity of the non-equity part of its balance sheet, the part that would otherwise only bear loss in insolvency or in a voluntary restructuring. Applying this concept of going and gone concern resources to CCPs is a less straightforward task. Unlike a bank, a CCP’s own loss absorbing resources sit both on its balance sheet as margin and default fund and off it in the form of contingent claims on its members. Consistent with the PFMIs, these arrangements are intended to be comprehensive at least insofar as they cover losses that could arise from clearing member default. That begs a question as to what additional loss absorbency the resolution of a CCP can currently unlock that recovery cannot unlock already. The question of loss absorbency is one that the FSB is looking at. Do we need additional resources in the waterfall beyond existing funded and unfunded resources? If additional resources are required, should the initial margin held by a CCP be made available if it would have suffered losses in insolvency? Or should CCPs hold other resolution resources instead? BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  I will not prejudge that debate here. However, I do think there is value in clarifying what is meant by the expression “TLAC for CCPs”. Total loss absorbing capacity is not simply shorthand for subordinated debt.

For CCPs the task of assessing an insolvency counterfactual is likely to be harder still – particularly if it must rely upon a forecast of how the rest of the waterfall would have unfolded, the behaviour of the CCP’s participants and the movements of the markets in the days that would have followed if resolution had not taken place. A liquidation counterfactual must also confront the argument that the CCP would have protected itself from insolvency through full tear-up. Given these valuation challenges, I suspect there will need to be careful further consideration given to the formulation and practical application of the NCWO safeguard; we must end up with a safeguard that is sufficiently certain and capable of estimation in advance that both creditors and resolution authorities are able to make sensible decisions before, during and after resolution. With that, let me conclude by summing up some key points: •  CCP resolution is both a necessary and inevitable part of the overall post-crisis reform agenda to end Too Big to Fail. As private, profit-making enterprises CCPs must be allowed to fail, but, given their systemic importance, many will need to be allowed to do so in a manner that maintains the continuity of their critical functions. •  Having a credible resolution regime for Clearing Members is a big step forward in helping to reduce the risk of clearing member default and from that the risk of CCP failure.