samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
See tables 4.4 and 4.5 of Scottish Government (2014), “Government expenditure and revenue, Scotland 2012-3”. 12  Exchange rate effects alone led to an improvement of £ billion to the UK’s net international investment position between 2006 and 2008, estimated in Whittard (2012), “The UK’s External Balance Sheet – The International Investment Position (IIP)”, ONS, March. 13  See Carney (2014), Speech at the 146th Annual Trades Union Congress, Liverpool. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Our remit recognises that the inflation rate may, on occasion, depart from the target and that attempts to keep it at the target may cause undesirable volatility in output. That flexibility and focus meant that the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) could provide additional stimulus through historically low interest rates, large scale asset purchases and monetary policy guidance even when inflation was temporarily above target. Inflation has recently dropped sharply to 0.5% – equalling its lowest rate on record. So next month I will write the first open letter from a Bank of England Governor to a Chancellor explaining why the inflation rate is too low and what we are going to do about it. The why is relatively straightforward. The majority of the weakness is caused by sharp falls in commodity prices, most notably oil, which has suffered its third largest fall in the past half century. Lower energy and food prices are unambiguously positive for the UK. Temporarily low inflation will boost real take-home pay and help household finances.

The Asset Management unit then implements this strategy, monitored by the Risk Management unit. Risk Management is also tasked with reporting regularly to the Governing Board and the Bank  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Council, which oversees the entire process. This multiplicity of players involved in foreign exchange reserve management, as well as the division of responsibilities, enable conflicts of interest to be reduced as far as possible, and allow effective control of the actual management of reserves. How do these guidelines translate into foreign exchange reserve allocation in practice? Last week, we published the data on the allocation of our foreign exchange reserves for the third quarter of 2012. I would like to take you through those data, and highlight the main areas which may have given rise to discussion. This is the breakdown of foreign exchange reserves by currency (cf. slide 3). As you can see, the euro is our principal investment currency, and its share in our investments has remained largely unchanged for the past number of years. If we take quarterly data as a basis, we can see that this share has fluctuated between 45% and 65%. These fluctuations come about because of the time it takes us to reallocate our portfolio following large inflows of new foreign exchange reserves. These amounts are then gradually diversified across other currencies in order to restore the original allocation.
More than once, they brought on political tension, between those in the government who believed in it and those in the opposition, or even the military, who thought otherwise. In one incident, it even caused a change in the central bank governor. Finally, we had to float our currency in 1997. Since then, we have adopted Inflation Targeting as our monetary policy framework. A core inflation target was announced at between 0 and 3.5 % per annum. The central bank will regularly monitor economic changes and make forecasts. If we see that the rate of inflation has a tendency to exceed the range, we will adopt a tighter monetary policy stance by increasing the policy interest rate, and vice versa if we see it going under the range. The policy rate that we use is the 14 day repurchase rate. BIS Review 48/2002  1  This is completely different, of course, compared to the days of fixed currency regime when interest rates in Thailand would move mostly in tandem with the US rates. The change in the monetary policy framework therefore affects the financial environment and your businesses a great deal. Development of the bond market What other change also happened? One very important change that has occurred in Thailand is the rapid development of the bond market, which took off after the 1997 crisis. The bond market is an important tool for safety and soundness of the financial institution system.

Thirachai Phuvanat naranubala: The role of non-bank financial institutions in relation to monetary policy Speech by Mr Thirachai Phuvanat naranubala, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Thailand, at the Regional Seminar on Non-Bank Financial Institutions in East Asia Region, Bangkok, 4 September 2002. *  *  *  I wish to congratulate the Securities and Exchange Commission of Thailand and The World Bank for organizing such an interesting seminar in Bangkok, and to thank them for inviting me to share my thoughts with you today. I can see that the topics in the seminar will cover many important aspects of non-bank financial institutions’ operations -- ranging from the regulatory and supervisory framework to capital market development as well as the issue of governance. But I am the only person touching on monetary policy aspect. Monetary policy does affect an important part of your business, which is the bond market. Because the one factor reflected in the bond market yield curve is inflation expectation. Therefore, if the framework and the conduct of monetary policy result in low and predictable inflation, it will help curb volatility of the yield curve and support development of the bond markets. Change in monetary policy stance also directly affect interest rate and hence the bond market. Thus, it pays for you to understand monetary policy. Monetary Policy in Thailand In order for you to do that, I have to start by telling you about how the monetary policy framework has evolved here in Thailand.
The Federal Reserve is also standing up programs to support the flow of credit to households, businesses, and state and local governments, so that they can weather this storm and continue to do their work, both now and when normal life resumes.7 Last week, we announced more details on these programs, which altogether provide additional funding of up to $ trillion.8 These programs are executed with the full support of the Treasury. We are also deeply committed to providing transparency around matters such as usage, eligibility, governance, vendor selection, and fees for these programs. The actions by the Federal Reserve, while sharing some similarities with those undertaken during the financial crisis, are specifically designed to deal with the unique economic challenges posed by the coronavirus. Our efforts supporting the provision of credit include a number of programs aimed at different 2/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  parts of the economy and work through different channels. One set of programs supports the availability of credit to businesses—importantly, including small and medium-sized businesses— through loans, commercial paper, and corporate bonds. The second set of programs targets the availability of credit to states and municipalities. But we cannot act alone: fiscal policy is also playing a critically important role. In particular, it can do what monetary policy cannot: provide for the public health response and transfer income to those most affected by the outbreak.

2 See Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Federal Reserve Issues FOMC Statement, March 15,  2020. 3 See Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Statement Regarding Repurchase Operations, March 17, 2020. 4 See Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Federal Reserve Announces Extensive New Measures  to Support the Economy, March 23, 2020. 5 According to the Open Market Desk at the New York Fed, between March 16 and April 14, the Desk has  purchased over $ trillion of Treasury securities, over $ billion in agency MBS, and $ billion in agency CMBS. For comparison, over the course of the 2012 – 14 asset purchase program, the Desk added about $ billion of Treasury securities and $ billion of agency MBS to the System Open Market Account portfolio. 6 For the discount window, see Federal Reserve Actions to Support the Flow of Credit to Households and  Businesses, March 15, 2020. For the Primary Dealer Credit Facility and the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility, see Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Federal Reserve Board Announces Establishment of a Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) to Support the Credit Needs of Households and Businesses, March 17, 2020; and Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Federal Reserve Board Broadens Program of Support for the Flow of Credit to Households and Businesses by Establishing a Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF), March 18, 2020.
But the underlying message of these models remains: a policy aimed at stabilising inflation and the output gap at a horizon around two years ahead is both desirable on welfare grounds and consistent with price stability over the medium term. Given our experience over the past few years, these strong conclusions are now rightly treated with scepticism. With the benefit of hindsight, it is apparent they served to breed complacency among both policy-makers and market participants, resulting in overconfidence in the ability of macro policies to stabilise the economy. Such complacency contributed to both poor policy choices and destabilising private sector behaviour. Such decisions may help to explain the emergence of financial crises in recent years. Critiques of the benchmark New Keynesian model are legion. 13 I will not repeat them here. Suffice to note that an important weakness of these models was the absence of a financial sector. As a consequence, the financial intermediaries, financial frictions and asset price bubbles and corrections that have played a key role in the events of the past three years were neglected. To illustrate, imagine a scenario where inflation falls because of a positive supply shock, such as a reduction in manufacturing import prices from Emerging market economies. An inflation-targeting central bank would decrease its policy rates to boost inflation back towards its target level, simultaneously raising output closer to its new (temporarily higher) potential level.

BIS Review 45/2010  11  Second, monetary policy should have been less geared to fine-tuning the economy, in particular to trying to reduce the output gaps which ex post turn out to be very different from their real-time measurement. The long and variable lags in monetary policy transmission mean that a medium-term orientation for monetary policy must be maintained. Temporary deviations from a precise inflation objective are inevitable – monetary policy-makers must focus on containing persistent trends in inflation. Distinguishing between temporary and more persistent shocks to inflation is therefore crucial. Experience has shown that paying attention to specific measures of “core inflation” may mislead monetary policy. An overly mechanical view of such indicators can lead to an underestimation of the strength of inflationary pressures at the global level. Third, policy decisions should have been based on better models of monetary policy transmission. Monetary and financial factors have been too easily dismissed, especially by inflation targeting regimes. Placing greater weight on monetary and credit indicators should allow interest rate decisions to be better calibrated to achieve the appropriate medium-term objectives of monetary policy. Can central banks learn from experience? They can if they are able to recognise what went wrong, rather than sweeping the hard questions under the carpet, and if they are able to adapt their analytical and decision-making framework. Suggesting that monetary policy had nothing to do with the crisis will not help, and might encourage us to make the same mistakes in the future.
The Central Bank will be resolute in preserving this achievement of a low inflation environment going forward irrespective of domestic and international challenges that we may face in future. This is the prime reason why the Central Bank has embarked on a mission to upgrade the monetary policy framework with a view to strengthening the ability of the Central Bank to deliver sustained price stability amidst a rapidly evolving environment characterised by elevated uncertainty. During the year 2018, significant progress was made towards the transition to FIT in terms of initiating necessary amendments to the Monetary Law Act (MLA) with a view to establishing a strong Central Bank mandate, building effective fiscalmonetary coordination and further improving technical and institutional capacity. Let me elaborate on a few important areas in relation to the progress towards FIT. Last year, we highlighted the need and the importance of strengthening the existing mandate of the Central Bank to perform its key tasks related to price stability. It is widely accepted that a strong legal mandate is an essential prerequisite for the successful adoption of FIT as it is considered the linchpin that holds the entire framework together.

I do strongly believe that our efforts will persist in the future as well, enabling a smooth shift of the operational target and optimal functioning of their new form. Interbank market development Dear colleagues, Bank of Albania’s role in promoting the interbank market is indisputable. However, we are fully aware that the development of this market mostly reflects the results of the banking system’s own development and efforts. Therefore, the Bank of Albania requires your utmost attention in this regard. More precisely, in our discussion today we would like to have your opinion on the three steps we consider will boost the development of the interbank market. First, setting the prime rates in the functioning of commercial banks. These rates can and should serve as a guide to setting prices on banking products, both on the assets and liabilities’ side. Second, the functioning of the collateralized market through repo or reverse repo contracts. Although in its classical concept the interbank market is an uncollateralized market, its enhancement with the abovementioned instruments would open the way to its thorough development, ensuring a more efficient distribution of liquidity among the market operators. Third, banks can and should be active in quoting the liquidity in the Albanian lek, keeping the same stance as in the foreign exchange market. The constant quotation will encourage a more active liquidity management and it will enable its continuous price setting.
On the other hand, it is in general not much more expensive to produce a large number of payments than a small number of payments due to the benefits provided by economies of scale. However, it takes some time before a new system can reap these benefits. The costs for building, manning and maintaining such a technical system are rather high and it is only when the system is in place that costs begin to fall. Then the cost of processing an additional payment is almost zero. The average cost of making a payment thus falls as the number of payments increases. The price per transaction that the producer can charge without running at a loss is therefore low. Already established payment services that handle large volumes of payments therefore have a cost advantage. The larger the volume the established service has, the greater is its advantage. The situation for a new service is exactly the opposite. At least initially, a new service will have a small number of payments to distribute the fixed costs between. In order not to price itself out of the market, the new service will have to run at a loss until it has achieved a sufficiently high volume. A new service thus has a significant cost disadvantage compared with an established service. Second, a new system has to compete against the so-called network effects. The classic example of a network effect is telephony. Being the first person to have a telephone offers no advantages.

In the old days, when the economy was dominated by manufacturing, it might have been relatively easy to measure the volume of output and value added of different industries. But our economy today is dominated by services. Conceptually even defining the value added in, say, the financial sector, let alone measuring it, is not straightforward. Moreover, the meaning of a series often changes subtly over time as the economy evolves. Manufacturing today is a very different animal from manufacturing 30 years ago: for instance, the value added of Rolls-Royce aero engines today comes as much from the after-sales and maintenance as from the engine assembly itself. Finally, and most saliently for real-time policy analysis, the official data invariably appear with a delay of some months and can be substantially revised as more information accrues and the ONS improve their methodology. For that reason, the Monetary Policy Committee supplements the official data with two other sources of information that are more timely, even if they lack precision compared with the official data. The first are the regular business surveys from the likes of the Confederation of British Industry and the British Chambers of Commerce. As many of these have been going for quite a while, we have in many cases been able to establish their usefulness as predictors of the not-yet-available official data. Second, we also rely on the information provided by our network of regional Agents who have about 8000 business contacts across the country.
The securities in asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) conduits serve as collateral for the issuance of asset-backed commercial paper, while repo conduits fund in the repo market. Most conduits are so-called single-seller conduits that only serve individual banks or finance companies. Multi-seller conduits provide funding for asset pools of multiple institutions. Conduits are backed by credit lines from commercial banks, which allow the conduits to have a credit rating. Asset-backed commercial paper conduits are also defined in “Shadow Banking: A Review of the Literature”. Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports, no. 580, (October) 2011. www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr580.pdf. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Because the boom years resulted in strong earnings, low price volatility and few credit losses, firms were able to operate at extreme levels of leverage. When the housing bubble started to deflate, the vulnerabilities of this type of business model soon became apparent. Heavy reliance on short-term wholesale funding exposed the system to a series of intertwined downward spirals in asset and funding markets. This spread in waves, beginning in the market for asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) issued by off-balance-sheet conduits, and spreading via auction-rate securities, to the repo, money market and financial commercial paper markets that formed the core financing for market-based financial intermediation. Initial declines in asset prices forced leveraged holders with maturity mismatches to sell assets. This increased price volatility and reduced the value of the assets that collateralized other firms’ borrowings.

Simulations by Banco de España staff show that, under plausible assumptions, the deleveraging process of the public sector towards levels considered safer will be very gradual in Spain, and in developed economies in general, possibly taking up to several decades to reach the reference value of the 60% debt-to-GDP ratio. Therefore, continuing with the ongoing fiscal consolidation process to ensure exit from the Excessive Deficit Procedure (EDP) must be a priority. The Spanish Public Administration has been subject to this procedure since 2009, under the corrective arm of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP). In 2016, the EU Council updated the conditions under which the EDP exit would take place, and set 2018 as a deadline. In particular, the Council requires the public deficit to reach 2.2% of GDP this year and to achieve an accumulated structural effort over the period 2016-2018 of 0.6 pp of GDP. While it is very likely that the General Government deficit will be below 3% in 2018, achieving the required structural effort will call for further fiscal adjustments. In fact, according to the European Commission, the structural component of the public deficit in Spain is still very high, at around 3 % of GDP this year, in fact, the largest of the euro area members. In addition, public finances will have to face the challenge posed by ageing population.
Norman T L Chan: HKMA and the protection of bank customers Speech by Mr Norman T L Chan, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, at the KPMG Luncheon Talk, Hong Kong, 11 July 2013. *  *  *  Ayesha (Macpherson Lau), distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, First of all, let me thank Ayesha and KPMG for inviting me to this Luncheon Talk. When I took up the post of the Chief Executive of the HKMA in 2009, we were faced with the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers saga. As most of you would remember, there was immense public pressure on enhancing the protection of consumers and investors. My colleagues in the HKMA and I have regarded this as one of our priority areas and we have put our hearts and souls into strengthening our regime on banking conduct supervision in the past few years. In 2010, I set up two new departments, namely the Banking Conduct Department and the Enforcement Department, within the HKMA. These are important milestones in the development of the HKMA, and we have indeed turned a new page in protecting bank customers, be they consumers or investors. I would like to take the opportunity of today’s luncheon talk to share my thoughts on this. Why should we provide protection to bank customers? First, let me pose a question “Why should we provide protection to bank customers?” The answer is quite simple.

The findings and recommendations of this report, which will be debated at length today, reveal that it is of paramount importance to improve data in a much more concerted and shared framework for a better international coordination. Ladies and gentlemen, Our one-day high-level meeting will cover a number of themes that are challenging to all of us: Is financial inclusion a challenge for national financial stability? How does it affect monetary policy transmission? What measure should central banks take to safeguard the objectives of financial stability and monetary stability while improving access to financial markets? 6  I remain convinced that making this gathering an annual tradition will enable us to provide the most appropriate responses to meet these challenges. I wish full success to this seminar and wish you a pleasant stay in Morocco. 7