Hostility towards the media is spreading from dictatorships to democracies, encouraged by U.S. President Donald Trump’s and other leaders’ attacks on ‘fake news,’ according to the 2018 World Press Freedom Index. The annual yardstick produced by the advocacy group Reporters without Borders, which measures media freedom in 180 countries, found assaults on the press – ranging from taunts to murder – were becoming graver. The worst decline in freedom was in Europe, though the region is still the world’s safest for journalists, according to the index. Two murders helped drive the decline. In October 2017, Daphne Caruana Galizia, a prominent Maltese journalist who probed corruption by the country’s elites, was assassinated in a car bomb. In Slovakia, 27-year old investigative reporter Jan Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kusnirova were shot to death during Kuciak’s investigation of ties between Slovakian officials and Italian Mafia figures.
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The European Central Bank (ECB) publishes the European Framework for Threat Intelligence-based Ethical Red Teaming (TIBER-EU), which is the first Europe-wide framework for controlled and bespoke tests against cyber attacks in the financial market. The ECB promotes the safety and efficiency of payment, clearing and settlement systems in the euro area under its oversight mandate, guided by oversight regulations, standards, guidelines and expectations. At Eurosystem level, the ECB is the competent authority for the systemically important payment systems in the euro area: TARGET2, EURO1 and STEP2-T, and is the lead overseer for TARGET2-Securities; oversight of other payment systems lies with the national central banks.

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The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) estimate a panel Bayesian vector autoregression model for a cross-section of seven advanced European economies and produce out-of-sample forecasts of GDP conditionally on observed developments of interest rates and credit. BIS shows that, by using a smooth transition version of the model and allowing the parameters to vary across economies conditionally on their liquidity dependence (i.e. dependence on the availability of funding from external sources), it is possible to improve the accuracy of the forecasts. BIS concludes that the degree of liquidity dependence is likely to be among the important predictors of heterogeneity in macro-financial linkages across countries.

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In his speech, IMF First Deputy Managing Director David Lipton, address the important issue of multilateralism. The high level of attendance and representation in Bulgaria at this conference is testament to how seriously these issues are taken in Europe, and that is encouraging to all of us at this juncture. Until recently, the theme of multilateralism probably would have prompted me to focus on governance reforms at the IMF. But times have changed.
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The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) issued the Fourteenth progress report on adoption of the Basel regulatory framework. The report sets out the adoption status of Basel III standards for each BCBS member jurisdiction as of end-March 2018. It includes for the first time the finalised Basel III post-crisis reforms published by the Committee in December 2017. These recent reforms will take effect from 1 January 2022.
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The European Banking Authority (EBA) launched a consultation on its Guidelines on disclosure by credit institutions of information on non-performing and forborne exposures. The Guidelines specify the information related to non-performing (NPE) and forborne exposures and foreclosed assets that banks should disclose and provide uniform disclosure formats. By addressing potential asymmetries of information and providing common disclosure on the quality of banks’ assets, the Guidelines seek to foster transparency and market discipline. The consultation runs until 27 July 2018.

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In his speech, Benoît Cœuré, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, reflects on five years after the crisis: “Perhaps the biggest mystery facing policymakers today – and especially central bankers – is what is happening on the supply side of the economy.” Subdued price and wage pressures globally are raising questions about both the true level of supply capacity, and about how much it is being lifted by strong current demand. Given that the supply side was traditionally thought to be determined by structural factors alone – Say’s law in short – this is sparking many questions in the current public debate about the outlook for the economy, the likely path of inflation and the appropriate stance of macroeconomic policies.
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In his speech, William Coen, Secretary General of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, will focus on the issue of market risk. First, some perspective. Ten years have passed since the start of the global financial crisis. During this period, the Basel Committee has finalised its wide-ranging and comprehensive set of post-crisis reforms. These greatly improve the quality of regulatory capital, increase capital requirements, enhance risk capture, while specifying a minimum leverage ratio requirement, adding a macroprudential overlay, and introducing international liquidity standards (BCBS (2010), (2015a), (2017)).

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The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is urging the public to be alert to the growing threat of loan fee scams targeting borrowers. This plea comes as last year over £3.5 million was lost to loan fee fraud and reports to the FCA consumer helpline increased by 44%. Victims of loan fee fraud are often targeted while searching for loans online and are then contacted by fraudsters offering a loan. The scammer tells the victim they have to pay an upfront fee for the loan which they ultimately never receive. Once the first payment is made victims are often persuaded to make multiple payments – last year the average loss was £740.
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