Public Intelligence

A draft version of the EU Heads of Mission report on Jerusalem for 2012 was authored in January 2013 and reportedly leaked to a number of major news outlets by the organization Breaking the Silence.

This document contains detailed recommendations on how to implement the best practices identified in the Clean IT project. It will be developed further in the months ahead. After the end of the Clean IT project it will only be shared with organizations that have committed to implementing the best practices. It will be developed further with these organizations participating in the Clean IT permanent public-private dialogue platform.

Shadow banking, as one of the main sources of financial stability concerns, is the subject of much international debate. In broad terms, shadow banking refers to activities related to credit intermediation and liquidity and maturity transformation that take place outside the regulated banking system. This paper presents a first investigation of the size and the structure of shadow banking within the euro area, using the statistical data sources available to the ECB/Eurosystem.

The FSB has roughly estimated the size of the global shadow banking system at around € 46 trillion in 2010, having grown from € 21 trillion in 2002. This represents 25-30% of the total financial system and half the size of bank assets. In the United States, this proportion is even more significant, with an estimated figure of between 35% and 40%. However, according to the FSB estimates, the share of the assets of financial intermediaries other than banks located in Europe as a percentage of the global size of shadow banking system has strongly increased from 2005 to 2010, while the share of US located assets has decreased. On a global scale, the share of those assets held by European jurisdictions has increased from 10 to 13% for UK intermediaries, from 6 to 8% for NL intermediaries, from 4% to 5% for DE intermediaries and from 2% to 3% for ES intermediaries. FR and IT intermediaries maintained their previous shares in the global shadow banks assets of 6% and 2% respectively.

This study grew out of the 1997 STOA report, ‘An Appraisal of the Technologies of Political Control’ and takes that work further. Its focus is two fold:(i) to examine the bio-medical effects and the social & political impacts of currently available crowd control weapons in Europe; (ii) to analyse world wide trends and developments including the implications for Europe of a second generation of so called “non-lethal” weapons.

Three confidential draft copies of the European Financial Stability Facility’s guidelines on primary market purchases, secondary market interventions and precautionary programs dated October 19, 2011.

Since the fourth review, the situation in Greece has taken a turn for the worse, with the economy increasingly adjusting through recession and related wage-price channels, rather than through structural reform driven increases in productivity. The authorities have also struggled to meet their policy commitments against these headwinds. For the purpose of the debt sustainability assessment, a revised baseline has been specified, which takes into account the implications of these developments for future growth and for likely policy outcomes. It has been extended through 2030 to fully capture long term growth dynamics, and possible financing implications.

WikiLeaks Financial Blockade Complaint Against Visa and MasterCard concerning infringements of Articles 101 and 102 of the EU Treaty.

U.S. Confidential Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) August 25, 2010 Draft.

EU Restricted, U.S. Confidential Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) July 2010 Draft.

The existence of a global system for intercepting private and commercial communications (the ECHELON interception system)

A. whereas the existence of a global system for intercepting communications, operating by means of cooperation proportionate to their capabilities among the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand under the UKUSA Agreement, is no longer in doubt; whereas it seems likely, in view of the evidence and the consistent pattern of statements from a very wide range of individuals and organisations, including American sources, that its name is in fact ECHELON, although this is a relatively minor detail . . .

Restricted US-EU ACTA Copyright Treaty Civil Enforcement and Special Requirements Position Paper, February 12, 2010.

U.S.-Japan-EU-Mexico-Canada Confidential Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) Draft Text, January 18, 2010. This is the 56-page full version of the “consolidated text” of the treaty.

EU G-MOSAIC Chile Earthquake Preliminary Damage Assessment Maps, March 3, 2010.

This briefing note covers Toussaint L´Ouverture, Port-au-Prince International Airport in Haiti and provides image analysis of the status, activity and facilities of the airfield with particular regard to any observed damage due to the recent earthquake. The note has been produced using a GeoEye multispectral image, dated 13 January 2010 which has been combined with open source collateral information. The information cut-off date of this briefing note is 22 January 2010.

Les données sur la solvabilité et la liquidité bancaires.

When a particular part of the population is especially important for a survey, oversampling that group can help the survey to provide better estimates. However, oversampling is not always easy or inexpensive. The ideal situation is one where information exists for the population that can help to discriminate the interesting sub-group and that information is available for sampling. Sometimes the information is weak for the intended purpose and sometimes there are restrictions on the use of information that make sampling difficult or impossible.

Like all large-scale programmes, the T2S programme consists of a huge number of activities that will have to be conducted in a “flexible order”, involving many different stakeholders and resulting in a series of deliverables that will lead to the successful launch of the T2S system, currently scheduled for Q2 2013.

On 11 March 2009 the T2S Team organised a conference for EU issuers, primarily of equity securities. The aim of the event was for the Eurosystem to clarify the scope of T2S and discuss the project’s impact on issuers and their agents. The most important topic identified in that conference was the need for issuers to be able to identify their shareholders in a cross border environment. It is evident that T2S per se does not create the problem. This is an existing issue where- and whenever cross border transaction activity is present. However, the creation of a single settlement engine for Europe may intensify the issue due to the expected increase in cross border activity associated with T2S and may thus increase the desirability of a harmonised approach.

The T2S User Requirements Document (URD) states that “The T2S Interface shall use ISO 20022 as its single standard for all communications, both inbound and outbound”. Therefore messages have to be either ISO20022 registered, or at least compliant with the methodology of ISO200221. SWIFT plays an important role in the registration process of ISO 20022standards and in the development of messages for T2S. Therefore, at its meeting of 9-10 October, the AG agreed that clarification was needed on the relationship between ISO 20022standards and SWIFT2.

Clearing fund – A fund composed of assets contributed by participants in a CCP, or by providers of guarantee arrangements, that may be used to meet the obligations of a defaulting CCP participant and/or in certain circumstances to settle transactions and cover losses and liquidity pressures resulting from such defaults. A Clearing Fund serves as insurance against unusual price movements not covered by the margin calculation in case of a member default. Each Clearing Member typically has to contribute to the Clearing Fund. It may consists of Clearing Members’ directly- deposited capital, or securities or third-party bank guarantees. It is used for securing the counterparty risk not covered by margin deposits.

The T2S Advisory Group (AG) agreed on the User Requirements Document (URD) at their meeting on 15 May 2008. The URD was subsequently agreed by the ECB decision-making bodies as the reference for the specification phase: only those requirements described in the URD will correspond to T2S delivered functionalities, unless changes are adopted by the ECB Governing Council.

During its 28/29 November 2007 meeting, the Advisory Group agreed to add possible functionality in the URD on the prioritisation of multiple T2S dedicated cash accounts. The AG also asked TG3 to analyse the issue in more depth and the 3CB+ to calculate the additional costs of this approach. The AG agreed to review the matter in view of the feedback from the public consultation and the cost and the consequences for the market. Following the AG decision, the prioritisation of multiple T2S dedicated cash accounts functionality was immediately added into the URD by the project team.

On 18 December 2007, the ECB published the TARGET2-Securities (T2S) User Requirements Document for public consultation. In parallel, the ECB published a note setting out the proposed methodology for the economic impact analysis (EIA) of T2S. This note proposed two indicators to evaluate the potential benefits of T2S for market participants and the European economy. The first indicator is the average cost per settlement instruction. The aim of this indicator is to focus on a direct comparison between the cost per settlement instruction with T2S and the current market structures without T2S.

This consolidated programme plan encompasses all Eurosystem activities and is based on the ECB’s internal detailed planning and an extract of the 4CB’s internal planning. As part of the consolidation exercise, the project office of the ECB and of the 4CB tried to minimise the impact of the 7 additional months needed for the validation of the General Functional Specifications, without impacting the scope of T2S, the expected quality of the final delivery, the price or the go-live date. This was achieved through an increased parallelism of activities, in particular in the production of the UDFS and the conduct of the Eurosystem and User Acceptance testing phases.