samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
These positive developments have been fostered and supported by the pass-through of the ECB’s monetary policy measures, which have significantly eased borrowing conditions for households and firms, notably also for small and medium-sized enterprises. Considering all of the monetary policy measures taken between mid-2014 and October 2017, the overall impact on euro area growth and inflation is estimated, in both cases, to be around 1.9 percentage points cumulatively for the period between 2016 and 2020. Our measures have put the euro area economy on a solid growth pathway, driven by endogenous domestic dynamics and thus more resistant to a potential slowdown in global demand. At the same time, inflation has yet to show more convincing signs of a sustained upward adjustment. After lingering at levels well below 1% for three years, with occasional dips into negative territory, euro area headline inflation has fluctuated between 1.3% and 1.5% since May last year. Annual inflation stood at 1.3% in January. The changes in headline inflation have been driven by movements in the more volatile components, namely energy prices and, to a lesser extent, food prices. Measures of underlying inflation – which we monitor for their information content concerning inflation dynamics – have remained subdued. Inflation excluding energy and food was 1% in January, and has ranged between 0.9% and 1.2% since April 2017. Let me now focus on the factors behind these moderate inflation developments from a longerterm perspective.

My speech today focuses on 3 areas: •  Firstly, I will provide an update on the recent developments in Malaysia’s payment ecosystem and the progress that we have made thus far in accelerating the country’s migration to e-payments;  •  Secondly, I will highlight how JomPAY helps to address the current limitations in online bill payments and how it complements the existing efforts to expand epayment services; and  •  Finally, I will elaborate on the importance of industry-wide collaborative efforts and the role that MyClear and the industry can play in bringing the online bill payments market to greater heights. Recent developments in Malaysia’s payment ecosystem The use of cash and cheques remains prevalent in Malaysia. Malaysia’s cash usage measured by currency-in-circulation (CIC) over GDP was about 6% in 2013, which is 100% higher than the average in advanced economies 1. Likewise, Malaysia’s cheque usage per capita was 6.6 in 2013, which is 33 times higher than that in advanced economies 2. But the recent measures being instituted have shown tangible results. I am pleased to inform you that promising progress has been made since the introduction of the Pricing Reform Framework in May 2013 and the more concerted efforts taken to improve and promote the use of Interbank GIRO (IBG). In 2014, cheque usage declined at a faster rate of 10%, compared to only 3% in 2013. At the same time, the number of IBG transactions increased by 36% in 2014 compared to 19% in 2013.
One tool available to all central bankers to address such concerns is to raise awareness, so that traders appropriately price risk. And that is why it is only fit and proper for me to finish on a cautionary note: market participants take heed. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Appendix Chart 1 Option-implied volatilities across selected asset classes Pre-crisis: 01 Jan 2003 - 08 Aug 2007 Crisis: 09 Aug 2007 - 31 Dec 2009 Jun 2014 FSR: 26 Jun 2014 11 Mar 2015  USDGBP Gold 1.5 Oil EM FX  Japan long rates  0.0 -1.5 -3.0  Japan short rates US long rates US short rates  JPYUSD USDEUR FTSE 100 S&P 500 Nikkei 225  UK short rates UK long rates  Sources: Bank of England, Barclays Live, Bloomberg and Bank calculations. (a) Number of standard deviations from historical mean of three-month implied volatilities. Historical means calculated over the period since 2003.

Fines for bad behavior drain resources that could be better used to expand access and improve services, but billions of dollars in avoidable penalties are just the start. The time spent handling a legal crisis is time not spent on more productive pursuits. Moreover, I worry that, in the long term, an industry that develops a reputation for dubious ethics will not attract the best talent.3 In contrast, a trustworthy financial services sector will be more productive and better able to support the economy. Reliable financial intermediaries can help increase the flow of credit, promote economic growth and make the financial system more stable. This is why restoring trustworthiness must be the ultimate goal of reforming culture. The industry’s shared norms—its culture—will not change by mere exhortation to the good, whether from me or from the industry’s CEOs. In my experience, people respond far more to incentives and clear accountability than to statements of virtues and values. The latter are worthy and necessary, but remain aspirational or even illusory unless they are tied to real consequences.4 What does it mean for a firm to profess to putting the customer first, if employees are compensated and promoted regardless of what’s good for customers? Or, worse, if they are not held to account for activities that can harm customers? If we focus on nothing else in today’s conference, let’s explore how best to structure incentives and reinforce accountability to align with core purposes and first principles.
This bias is prevalent in complex and opaque situations which are surely predominant in the modern financial system. Turning to the indebtedness of sovereigns, we cannot put the blame for excessive indebtedness on financial incentives. But the overweighting of current benefits and the overdiscounting of future costs can easily be attributed to electoral considerations and the finite career of elected politicians, careers which become shorter when they cannot “seduce” their electorates. At a cognitive level, I would also put the blame on another factor that could be called a “Keynesian bias”. Here, I refer to the conviction that countercyclical policies should be activated in downturns to mitigate the social cost of output and employment losses, but that they need not be reversed in upturns. This conviction is based on the view that there is no natural, theoretical or even apparent practical limit to state indebtedness, at least for developed economies. This cognitive bias is, in my view, a major explanation for the observed structural deficits in government accounts leading to an ever-rising debt to GDP ratio. In the OECD as a whole, for instance, the public debt to GDP ratio has increased from 70% in 2000 to 103% today! While we can dispute the precise diagnosis, we cannot disagree with the fact that the present crisis should and will serve as a wake-up call. Sovereigns, like banks, need to build up a buffer ahead of potential unfavourable economic developments.

How can we ensure that financial liberalisation does not lead to excesses that can endanger financial stability? How can we make sure that finance in advanced countries is conductive to the public good? Again, the answer is most evident in the case of the banking sector. Excessive leverage is the result of a faulty system design. Hence, we must improve the system design. This is what Basel III and the TBTF work programme are about. On the one hand, it aims at removing the main incentive distortion – the implicit state guarantee. The critical element here is to make sure that it will be possible to allow a big complex institution to fail, which means resolving it in an orderly manner. On the other hand, increased capital and liquidity requirements as well as a leverage ratio serve as stronger safeguards in the event that incentives cannot be fully corrected, and also because externalities are present in the case of large and complex institutions. In my view we are on the right track, but we have not yet reached our destination. It is important that we stay on this path, and do not get caught in the “disaster myopia trap” which means, as the crisis fades in our memory, forgetting progressively the dismal consequences of the identified faults in the system and – as a consequence – losing our determination to correct them.
This trajectory considers that the transmission to prices of the peso depreciation accumulated in the past year will be in line with its historical patterns; that real wages will be adjusted as a function of productivity; and that output gaps will remain over the projection horizon. For the RER, the methodological assumption used is that, the same as now, it will fluctuate in the upper part of the range believed to be consistent with its long-term fundamentals. As for the MPR, the working assumption is that the gradual withdrawal of the monetary impulse will be similar to what is suggested by surveys over a one-year horizon, meaning that monetary policy should start normalizing by the turn of next year (figure 8). The baseline scenario reflects those events that are believed to be the most likely to occur with the information at hand at the closing of this Report. There are risks, however, which, if materialized, may reshape the macroeconomic outlook and, therefore, may alter the course of monetary policy. Abroad, the main sources of risk remain, only more moderate. The possibility of specific events generating episodes of high volatility in global financial markets persists, affecting funding costs, the exchange rate and the short-term inflation outlook. On the one hand, any surprises regarding the timing or the pace at which the Fed will increase its benchmark rate can cause fluctuations in asset prices.

Turning to our estimates, the baseline scenario foresees that this year GDP will grow between 2.25% and 3.25%, a range that is somewhat lower than estimated in the last Report 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  (table 3). This projection considers that the floods in the north of the country and one-time effects on important mines reduce the mining growth estimate, with a downward incidence on the estimate for annual GDP growth of one tenth of one point compared with the March forecast. Meanwhile, since the partial data of recent months show weaker private expenditure, it is foreseen that the recovery that was expected for the second half will occur at a slower pace than was projected in March. The Business Perceptions Report of last May confirmed bounded expectations regarding the performance of businesses and investments in 2015. Moreover, the CBC’s survey continued to point to a fall in valued projects for this year compared with 2014 (table 1). On the external front, our projection assumes trading partners’ growth to drop by one tenth of a point in 2015 and 2016, to 3.3% and 3.7%, respectively. This adjustment responds largely to the reduced projection for the US. In the Eurozone, prospects remain unchanged because first quarter data brought no surprises other than some differences within the region. Growth is revised down for China and Latin America, because of actual first-quarter data and weaker prospects.
Our overhaul of RTGS is helping to reduce complexity and costs in other areas as well. Take cross-border payments, where the Bank is leading by the adoption of emerging global standards for payments messaging and by working with other central banks and the private sector to explore the scope for cross-border payments in central bank money through synchronised national RTGS systems. This all could increase the speed and safety, as well as lower the costs, associated with cross-border transactions to support purchases and travel overseas. When coupled with the capture of richer payments data made possible by its renewal, RTGS will help support innovative services for the more effective management of personal and company finances. These benefits will be amplified by the UK’s ambition in implementing the Open Banking standard– under which the largest banks will be required to make customer data available to other existing firms and innovators, if the customer demands. In turn, this will help improve aggregator, comparison and switching services. Taken together, these advances will support innovation that allows you to manage your finances seamlessly, from tracking how much you spend on beer and books, to managing your future savings and current loans.

And the inability of the money supply to vary in response to demand would likely cause greater volatility in prices and real activity. 17 As the Italian philosopher George Santayana famously observed. 7  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  7  In the short run, the fixed supply of Bitcoin has fed a global speculative mania that has encouraged a proliferation of new cryptocurrencies. As my colleague Agustin Carstens has argued, this surge of competitors and the “forking” of Bitcoin echoes the debasement of private monies in the past. 18  Inefficient Media of Exchange The most fundamental reason to be sceptical about the longer term value of cryptocurrencies is that it is not clear the extent to which they will ever become effective media of exchange. Currently, no major high street or online retailer accepts Bitcoin as payment in the UK, and only a handful of the top 500 US online retailers do. For those who can find someone willing to accept payment for goods and services in cryptocurrencies, the speed and cost of the transaction varies but it is generally slower and more expensive than payments in sterling. That’s because the more heavily used cryptocurrencies face severe capacity constraints compared with other payment systems. For example, Visa can process up to 65,000 transactions per second globally against just 7 per second for Bitcoin. And if you use a debit or credit card in the UK, the transaction is completed in seconds and without exchange rate risk.
Hence, in practice, they have opted to act forcefully, deploying a very broad package of measures in the fiscal, monetary and prudential areas with the dual aim of mitigating the effects of the crisis in the short term and preventing its prolongation over time. Against this background, fiscal policy has naturally established itself as the first line of defence. The COVID-19 shock calls for support of the incomes and liquidity of the agents most affected, by means of swiftly and temporarily injected funds focused on those agents for which this type of support is a priority. And it is fiscal policy that is the tool most suited to this end. In Spain, in the case of households, this has mainly led to a situation in which the temporary employment adjustment measures enacted by many firms have not fed through to a complete loss of income. At the same time, measures have been deployed to alleviate the situation of the most vulnerable households through several instruments. These have included the aforementioned bank loan moratoria, those relating to the protection of households renting their accommodation, guarantees to maintain certain basic supplies and the activation of specific direct assistance for the most underprivileged. Turning to firms, in addition to appreciably lightening the burden of wage costs and social contributions throughout the state of alert, liquidity has been injected through the deferral of certain tax payments, while measures have been enacted to postpone payments arising on the rental of business premises.

37  Aside from these effects, the estimates available show that potential growth in the Spanish economy is low in comparison with other developed countries. An economy's potential growth, on which the level of welfare in the long term hinges, is the result of the accumulation of the capital and labour factors of production, and the degree of efficiency with which they are combined. The low levels of potential growth in our economy are attributable to both poor total factor productivity and a higher level of structural unemployment. In its recent annual reports,13 the Banco de España has highlighted some avenues of economic policy which, if pursued, could improve the dynamics of these variables in Spain. These initiatives relate to the level of sectoral competition and to the productive structure, tax and regulatory incentives, human capital, R&D and technology, and labour market regulation, inter alia. Here I would like to highlight two areas of action: improving human capital and fostering efficient R&D expenditure, as both could be particularly affected by the situation brought about by COVID-19. As regards human capital, the confinement imposed as a result of the crisis has led to students at different levels of educational attainment ceasing to attend classes in person. This could have significant effects on their academic performance, particularly in lowincome households, where there is a lower possibility of replacing physical access to education.
Financial Integration and Inclusive Development: A view from the Mediterranean countries  Central banks, financial inclusion and digitization: Harnessing technology for inclusive growth  Intervention of Mr. Abdellatif Jouahri Governor of Bank Al-Maghrib  Madrid, December 13, 2019  Governor of the Banco de Espana, President of the European Institute of the Mediterranean, Deputy Secretary General of the Union for the Mediterranean, Dear friends and colleagues Ladies and Gentlemen,  First of all, I would like to thank the organizers, particularly the Governor of the Bank of Spain, Mr. Pablo Hernandez de Cos, and the President of the Executive Committee of the IEMed, Mr. Senén Florensa, for inviting me to participate in this conference. Taking part in the Mediterranean meetings organized by the Bank of Spain has become, for me, a tradition to be preserved, all the more since we are united by a cooperation agreement. It is also my pleasure to speak alongside panelists, both colleagues and friends, on a topic of particular interest to us from each side of the Mediterranean. Inclusive development issues have been one of the key concerns for Moroccan public authorities for several years now. With regard to financial inclusion in particular, which engages us as a central bank, we have, together with the Ministry of Finance and stakeholders, just finalized and started implementing a national financial inclusion strategy, whose preparation has progressed for a few years now.

Hence, a compliance program was set up by the authorities with the aim of remedying this situation in the medium term. As regards personal data protection, Morocco has ratified the 108th Convention of the Council of Europe and its Additional Protocol. Since then, it set up a national control unit to ensure proper observation of the various rights (of information, access, rectification and opposition). In this respect, the central bank plays an important role as an interface between this unit and financial inclusion stakeholders. However, this legal framework is likely to evolve in view of the regulatory progress made in this area, particularly at the European Union level. With regard to cyber security risks, Morocco is moving towards developing a strategy for the security of information systems, which would be based on  5  risk identification to provide specific legal, technical and awareness-raising measures to ensure protection, defense and security. This project is coordinated by the National Defense Administration and the Central Bank also acts as an interface with financial actors. All these developments, particularly the introduction of new actors in the implementation of the national financial inclusion strategy, will have a significant impact on banks' profitability and will put their traditional business models to the test. While these banks may be hampered by their complex architecture and cumbersome organization, the rapid unbundling of banking services to the benefit of non-banking fintechs could result in a substantial loss in their market share.
The costs for the banks' payment services should thus, all else being equal, be lower in Sweden than in countries that apply systems similar to the textbook one. We can therefore say that our system is more cost-effective than the textbook's system. Following the tragic events in the USA the other week, some central banks announced that they were prepared to supply liquidity to avoid a shortage of liquidity on the market. During periods of unease the demand for risk-free investments normally rises. This leads to investors demanding higher compensation for taking credit risks. It can also lead, as a consequence, to an increase in the interest rate on the interbank market. In extreme situations, access to liquidity can be valued so highly that banks and other market participants are not prepared to lend money at any price. As a result of the great uncertainty prevailing, the daily lending market in US dollars functioned very poorly during the days following the terrorist attack, daily rates rose and there were indications that some banks were experiencing difficulty in obtaining dollars at all. Given these developments, the Federal Reserve offered the US banks increased opportunities to borrow dollars from the central bank. However, the European banks were also affected, and therefore with the aim of maintaining the dollar market function, a number of central banks, including the Swedish Riksbank, offered a dollar facility to the market.

It is intuitively easy to understand that the amount of money in the economy is a decisive factor for the price of the goods produced in the country. In modern economies, where payments are largely made electronically, the monopoly on issuing banknotes is no longer an equally evident condition for enabling monetary policy to determine price trends. Today, it is instead the right to determine the terms in the systems for large electronic payments between banks and the opportunity to influence how much the banks shall borrow or deposit in the Riksbank that enable us to steer interest rates. For electronic payments to be able to function as money, it is necessary for the central bank to be perceived as guarantor for these means of payment in the same ways as with banknotes. This role can only be fulfilled by a central bank and in this way one can say that the possibility to determine price trends in the economy still lies with the monopoly on issuing money. The Riksbank governs the shortest interest rate in the interbank market, so that it normally remains close to the monetary policy-steered repo rate. The fact that the Riksbank can steer the interbank rate is primarily due to the fact that each individual bank participating in the system handling large interbank payments - known as the RIX system - always has an opportunity to borrow and deposit money in the Riksbank overnight at the lending and deposit rates set by the Riksbank.