samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
For this reason, the ECB has been very clear that the measures it has taken are designed to be temporary in nature. Let me also emphasise that our non-standard measures do not in any way impinge upon our capacity to tighten our monetary policy stance in response to inflationary pressures. In all our actions, we have been careful to keep inflation expectations well-anchored and have remained faithful to our mandate to preserve price stability in the euro area over the medium term. Our mandate is what has guided, and will continue to guide, all our monetary policy decisions. But the success of the ECB’s crisis measures in maintaining monetary stability in the euro area should not let anyone believe that monetary policy is the medicine that can solve the underlying, more structural problems in the euro area. The lasting resolution of the crisis is the responsibility of the euro area governments. The euro area governments’ responses to the crisis Euro area governments face three main challenges. First, they need to address the internal and external macroeconomic imbalances. Second, they have to restore confidence in, and stability to, the European financial system. Third, they must deal with the remaining shortcomings in the institutional design of EMU. Let me elaborate on these factors in turn. First, the rebalancing of the euro area economies requires, first and foremost, that public sector expenditure is brought back to a sustainable path and that the debt overhang is reduced.

The report to Parliament underlying the establishment of the National Bank of Romania in 1880 saw Belgium as – and I quote – “a small but happy country”, which developed rapidly with the assistance of its national bank, rendering it a suitable model for the institutional set-up of Romania. As regards the neighbouring Netherlands, the name of Romania’s domestic currency – the leu (meaning lion) – comes from a Dutch silver coin very popular in this part of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries: the lion-thaler. Crossing the channel, our most beloved Queen Marie was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. It was her son, King Charles II, who reconstructed this Royal Palace. Moving west again, let us not forget that the Irish writer Bram Stoker took Vlad the Impaler as an inspiration for his famous novel Dracula, creating a myth that Romania is frequently associated with. Returning to Romania’s monarchs, under whose reign the country saw a remarkable modernisation, they belonged to the German House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. As for the economic ties with Germany, I would mention the fact that the name of the street where the Old Palace of the National Bank of Romania is located, i.e. Lipscani, derives from Leipzig (Lipsca in Romanian), the place where long ago local merchants used to bring their goods from. Going further back in time, the Saxons (originating also in the Luxembourg area) settled in Transylvania, which they called Siebenbürgen (seven fortified towns).
Much of the complexity in making progress in cross-border payments arises from the significant number of stakeholders in the public and private sector. The building blocks under this Focus Area are intended to drive meaningful, coordinated change at a global level over a sustained period. This will address frictions where complex regulatory, political and operational issues are prevalent. It will also provide the foundations to deliver interdependent building blocks in other focus areas. To date, much focus on removing frictions in cross-border payments has centred on technology and operations. But divergent regulation, legislation, supervision and oversight frameworks across jurisdictions, or overlaps and underlaps in frameworks, can reduce any benefits of such initiatives. The building blocks in Focus Area B are intended to foster greater coordination by advancing consistent international rules and standards. And this covers not just regulation of firms, or infrastructure providers but broader compliance and Anti-money laundering type issues too. That does not mean everything will end up being identical, but rather it seeks to promote greater consistency in rules and standards. The building blocks in Focus Area C are targeted at improving the existing payment infrastructures and arrangements to support the requirements of the market. This is at the heart of what we, as central banks, are doing. Addressing technical and operational restrictions rooted in the design of both international and domestic systems can tackle the key frictions underlying the challenges in cross-border payments, including different operating hours, access criteria and long transaction chains.

The agenda for this conference – covering topics such as cyber security, artificial intelligence and digital currencies - gives an insight into the scale and pace of innovative thinking currently taking place in the payments industry. Innovation is at the heart of the topic I will be focusing on today – cross-border payments. I will cover why greater innovation is needed in cross-border payments and outline the G20 initiative to develop a roadmap for action. I will then seek to bring it to life by outlining some of the key developments already underway at the Bank of England to support the international agenda in this area. Cross-border payments lag behind  Over the last decade or so, there has been a strong focus on further enhancing domestic payments with a significant increase in instant payments and great innovation at the customer-facing end. Just consider our ability to pay for goods and services not just with cards and phones but also with watches and smart speakers. There is also a move to enhance the core underlying infrastructure. In the UK, the Bank of England is renewing its Real Time Gross Settlement Service and Pay.UK is developing a New Payments Architecture for retail payments. Many other countries are undergoing similar transformations, including the US with FedNow and Australia’s New Payments Platform. Traditionally, however, there has been less focus on cross-border payments even though they are so significant in both value and volume.
Twenty years of low and stable inflation had provided confidence in central banks’ ability to control inflation, which in turn had paved the way for a sharp reduction in real interest rates without compromising the overall monetary policy target. This contrasts with the downturn in the late 80s, as illustrated in the case of Norway, as well as during the Depression, when real interest rates were kept high due to faltering credibility. Fiscal policy has also been used everywhere, and has prevented an even sharper fall in output. After two years of extensive fiscal measures, many governments are facing the wall. They are unable to finance further deficit spending and have to cut spending and increase taxes now. The graph shows the increasing government deficit in the UK. The government has no choice but to tighten policy. The Swedish government, on the other hand, in spite of expansionary policies in the aftermath of the crisis, had maintained a surplus in the years before, and the Swedish economy has thus fared well. Although countries were hit by the crisis in a fairly similar way, they emerged from it very differently. Some countries have experienced good growth rates and falling unemployment. Others are struggling to keep their head above water. Production is still far below the precrisis level, with unemployment hovering at record levels. Are these differences predictable? As a participant in OECD meetings for many years, I have sometimes been among the backbenchers, trying to check the pulse of the economy in various countries.

According to Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, the Norwegian banking crisis is in the top five list of the most severe banking crises in history, which also includes Spain 1977, Finland 1991, Sweden 1991 and Japan 1992. Three of Norway’s four biggest banks received capital injections from the government, after writing off the entire equity capital. The banks were fully nationalised. Two of them were later sold 100 per cent to private owners, while the government retained a large share (34 per cent) in DnB Nor. The banks had too little capital, as much of it was unable to bear losses. Therefore, the Norwegian definitions of Tier 1 capital were stricter than most countries. Like many resource-rich economies, Norway expanded its welfare state rapidly after the discovery of oil. During the latter half of the 1970s, the government increased its ambitions in many key areas of the economy: the pension age was cut, agricultural subsidies increased, industrial policy widened and the government reduced taxes to bring wages under control. The consequences were galloping inflation, a depreciating currency and worst, meager productivity development in the Norwegian economy. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  After 1986, steps were taken to get back on track. Interest rates were increased to subdue lending and the fiscal deficit was reduced. By 1990, Norwegian government believed a potentially upcoming crisis had been averted. But Norway, like most European countries, was hit by the high interest rates following the German unification.
At the beginning of the year 2017, our country faced several challenges and uncertainties. Nevertheless, supported by the proactive stabilisation policy measures adopted by the Central Bank and the government, we have moved steadily towards achieving overall stability of the economy. But we do not want to be complacent with the achievements so far, and we acknowledge that several challenges continue to weigh down on the overall macroeconomic performance of the country. Therefore, we need to work hard in order to restore the stability of the economy on a permanent basis in order to create an enabling environment to raise the living standards of our people, and we believe that the policies outlined in the Road Map will help us in this endeavour. In the meantime, we require broad based reforms and commitment to enhance the country’s growth potential if we are to become an enriched nation as envisaged in the government’s vision. As the agent for macroeconomic stability, the Central Bank will always work hand in hand with the government to enhance economic growth through maintaining low and stable inflation and ensuring financial system stability. We believe that our future policy directions and actions set out in the Road Map will serve as guidance for you to plan ahead and to formulate and align your actions in line with broad policies of the economy. We would also like to note that we will be prepared to introduce new policies and measures not in the Road Map, as warranted by dynamic macroeconomic conditions and market developments.

In this context, the Road Map 2018 reviews the policy actions that have been pursued during 2017 and more importantly, proposes policies and actions for the forthcoming period. Accordingly, the outline of the Road Map 2018 is as follows: Section 2:  The Central Bank’s monetary policy strategy and policies for 2018 and beyond  Section 3:  The Central Bank’s policies related to the financial sector performance and stability in 2018 and beyond  Section 4:  Key policies related to strengthening the broader economy through the Central Bank’s agency and ancillary functions  Now, let me elaborate on these sections in a detailed manner. 8  2. Monetary Policy Strategy and Policies for 2018 and Beyond The Central Bank is entrusted with the task of maintaining price stability. Price stability remains a key fundamental in fostering an environment conducive for sustained growth and securing rising living standards for the people. The Central Bank seeks to achieve its price stability objective through the conduct of monetary policy. Based on the current monetary policy framework, we have been able to maintain inflation in single digits for close to a decade. Going forward, the introduction of an effective Flexible Inflation Targeting (FIT) framework will improve our capacity to deliver price stability. This will provide a more propitious environment for growth and employment generation.
Durmuş Yılmaz: Islamic finance – during and after the global financial crisis Speech by Mr Durmuş Yılmaz, Governor of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, at the Conference on “Islamic finance – during and after the global financial crisis”, IMF-World Bank Annual Meetings 2009, Istanbul, 5 October 2009. *  *  *  Distinguished Guests, I want to begin my speech with expressing my heartfelt condolence to the loss of lives by earthquake in Indonesia. I am honored to address such a distinguished audience in Istanbul. It is a great pleasure for us to host this conference. In my presentation today, I will address the growing interest in Islamic finance, which has been proven to be relatively immune to financial crisis during the current episode, especially compared to the conventional financial institutions. Increasing popularity of Islamic finance can be attributed first to the enormous volume of loanable funds that accumulated in geographies that host Islamic practices of living. Islamic finance as yet another alternative to mainstream finance can be mentioned as a second reason. It is by now a de facto practice and this makes enough motivation to study, talk about and assess Islamic finance. Dear Guests, Islamic financial institutions have started to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century and become one of the fastest growing segments in the global financial system over the past three decades.

Although, Islamic finance institutions are mainly founded in the Middle East and South-east Asia, the interest has extended to Europe and the United States. Today, the size of Islamic banks around the world is estimated to be more than USD 250 billion and expected to grow by about 15 percent annually. Due to the growing importance of the Islamic finance, the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) was established in December 1973. The purpose of the Bank is to foster economic development and social progress of Muslim communities individually as well as jointly in accordance with the principles of Islamic Law. The number of members to the Bank is steadily enlarging and currently consists of 56 countries. The primary functions of the IDB are to participate in equity capital and grant loans for productive projects and enterprises besides providing financial assistance to member countries in other form for economic and social development. The Bank is also required to establish and operate special funds for specific purposes including a fund for assistance to Muslim communities in non-member countries, in addition to setting up trust funds. The Bank is authorized to accept deposits and to mobilize financial resources through Shari'ah compatible modes. It is also charged with the responsibility of assisting in the promotion of foreign trade especially in capital goods, among member countries; providing technical assistance to member countries; and extending training facilities for personnel engaged in development activities in Muslim countries to conform to the Islamic Law.
Page 2 sur 8 But what about the Great Financial Crisis, the Pandemic and the Russian war? If, as Olivier Blanchard said in 2006, “monetary policy must be closer to art when it is frequently confronted to new, poorly anticipated and poorly understood, contingencies”, the economic shocks of the past 15 years must surely have shifted the pendulum back to art. i I would actually argue that, even then, science served us well. Let me here cite Olivier Garnier, chief economist of Banque de France. ii I believe we central bankers can be proud of the joint achievements of policy and research in dealing with the Global Financial Crisis and its aftermath: acknowledging common mistakes in forecasts on the current level of inflation doesn’t imply becoming self-critical on policies. In the euro area, thanks to our “new conventional” tools, inflation is estimated in 2019 to have been around 75 basis points higher, and GDP growth 110 basis points higher than it would have been in the counterfactual. iii Furthermore, nobody can seriously pretend that past accommodative policy is the primary factor to blame for the current return of inflation. This would be forgetting how deep the deflation risk was in 2020 and the pandemic, and being mistaken about the present inflation surge: it finds its origins not in excessive liquidity but in supply bottlenecks arising from the fasterthan-expected rebound from the pandemic, and the sharp increase in energy and food prices, much aggravated by the war in Ukraine.

xii Two hundred years later, Bertrand Russell wrote that “not to be absolutely certain [is] one of the essential things in rationality”. xiii I am glad we still need science, including on the new challenges I stressed, to reconcile uncertainty and rationality. Blanchard (2006). Garnier (2022), Presidential Lecture at the French Economic Association. iii Rostagno et al. (2021). iv See Savignac, Gautier, Gorodnichenko and Coibion (2021) for first results on a new survey conducted by the Banque de France on expectations of French firms. v See Coibion Gorodnichenko Kumar (2018), Coibion Gorodnichenko Ropele (2020), and Rosolia (2021) for the few papers that seek to empirically assess the effect of inflation expectations on pricesetting. vi See Werning (2022) for recent advances on these questions from a theoretical perspective. vii Brunner (1981). viii Brainard (1967). ix Dupraz Guilloux-Nefussi Penalver (2020). x See Cukierman (1991) and Stein and Sunderam (2018). xi See Weidmann (2022), Jacobsson Lecture, for a recent articulation of this idea. xii In a letter to Frederick II, King of Prussia, on April 6, 1767. xiii Russell (1947). i  ii
Accordingly,  we predict that aggregate demand conditions would not restrain inflation for a while. In this context, our revised medium-term forecasts are based on a disinflationary output gap – albeit narrower than envisaged in the previous Report. As I mentioned earlier in my speech, the tightness in credit conditions tend to attenuate with the effect of easing global liquidity conditions and improving risk appetites. The healthy state of the Turkish banking system is conducive for a rapid recovery in credit volumes. In fact, credit markets have been increasingly supportive of domestic activity in the recent period. Accordingly, the first quarter of 2010 was marked by the increasingly benign outlook for credit markets (Figure 30). Consumer loans have continued to recover while commercial loans have accelerated. Credit extended to small- and medium-sized enterprises has also begun to recover after a long period of stagnation, indicating the support of easy monetary conditions on economic activity (Figure 31). Assuming that external finance conditions continue to ease steadily and that the fiscal stance does not crowd out domestic funding, we expect that credit volumes would continue to expand in the forthcoming period. However, expectations that unemployment rates will remain at high levels for a long period, and ongoing problems in the global economy are still potential factors that might restrain credit expansion.

In this respect, as implied by the fiscal rule, it is assumed that the fiscal space created by the stronger than expected economic activity leading to better than expected performance in budget revenues since the second half of 2009, would be used mostly to reduce the government debt stock; therefore, the goals set out in the MTP be implemented through institutional and structural improvements in 2011 and onwards. In other words, it is assumed that tax adjustments would be consistent with the inflation targets and automatic pricing mechanisms throughout the forecast horizon. Accordingly, it is envisaged that the rising debt-to-GDP ratios would gradually reverse course starting in 2011, and hence the risk premium would not display any significant changes throughout the forecast horizon. Against this background, assuming that liquidity measures are normalized gradually over the short term and that policy rates are kept constant at current levels for some time followed by limited increases starting in the last quarter of 2010, with policy rates staying at single digits throughout the three-year forecast horizon, the medium-term forecasts suggest that, with 70 percent probability, inflation will be between 7.2 and 9.6 percent with a mid-point of 8.4 percent at end-2010, and between 3.6 and 7.2 percent with a mid-point of 5.4 percent by the end of 2011. Furthermore, inflation is expected to decline to 5.0 percent by the end of 2012 (Figure 34). Despite the upward revision in the output gap, it is expected that the economic recovery would be gradual.
Apart from the measures taken by the Riksbank, crisis measures taken by the Ministry of Finance and the National Debt Office of course affect costs (spreads) on the credit market. Fiscal policy stimulation measures also affect the costs of credit risk and thus the price of credit. We should also remember that supervisory and regulatory measures that establish different forms of constraint, for example capital adequacy requirements for the banks, can indirectly affect the price of credit. A question that we are wrestling with just now is how serious the credit crunch is and whether there is a risk that it will hit the non-financial sector so hard that it will have major repercussions on the real economy over and above the credit crunch that normally follows a recession that undermines the creditworthiness of companies and households. On the one hand the supply of credit declines when the banks want to shrink their balance sheets. Many companies in the Riksbank’s company survey state, for instance, that they are finding it difficult to borrow at longer maturities. On the other hand, the demand for credit should also  BIS Review 41/2009  13  decline as a consequence of weak economic activity. What can be done about this and what is the role of the central banks in easing the credit crunch? The Riksbank's view is that it is the financial system that as far as possible should be strengthened in order to ease the credit crunch.

On its part, the Bank will continue to support transition activities through the RM1 billion Low Carbon Transition Facility and other funds for SMEs which will complement funds extended by financial institutions to help SMEs implement sustainable low carbon practices. By 2024, we have also required all FIs to make disclosures in line with the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Disclosures (TCFD). Given that such disclosures by FIs will ultimately depend on disclosures provided by their customers and counterparties, this will have implications on demands for climate-related information from businesses. Significant efforts are also being pursued to support climate risk management and transition through the Joint Committee on Climate Change, or JC3, which is co-chaired by the Bank and the Securities Commission. The JC3 serves as an industry-regulator collaborative platform to drive and coordinate the financial sector’s response to climate change. As part of efforts to scale up transition finance, JC3 is actively exploring pilot programmes to test new green solutions and instruments. In identifying suitable pilot projects, priority will be given to climate-friendly projects that can help develop the broader ecosystem for green finance, such as carbon accounting and measurement frameworks, climate data aggregators, or green credentialing standards. Another key deliverable of JC3 this year is the upcoming publication of a data catalogue that will point users to credible sources of critical climate data needed to support identified use cases.