samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Regional manufacturing sector  Background The manufacturing sector is important to our region because it provides a substantial number of high-wage jobs and, in some parts of the region, is a key driver of business cycles and longer-term trends. To understand manufacturing in our region, it is important to note that different parts of the region specialize in different products. For example, New York City’s largest manufacturing industry is apparel; motor-vehicle parts is a large industry in western New York, as are computers and electronics in Syracuse, Binghamton and the Hudson Valley. The pharmaceuticals industry is dominant in Northern New Jersey and Puerto Rico. Over the past several decades, manufacturing wages have risen, while the number of workers it employs has fallen, These long-term trends stem from fundamental structural changes in trade, technology and consumption patterns. Some manufacturing has moved to other parts of the United States or overseas. The advent of information technology and computerization has also profoundly altered many manufacturing processes. And, the mix of products demanded by consumers has evolved over time. All of these factors have combined to reduce the number of factory jobs across the nation, with the New York/New Jersey region hit particularly hard. What is less well known is that despite this employment decline, manufacturing output has actually continued to grow moderately in much of the New York/New Jersey region. This means that the sector has experienced substantial gains in productivity.

These productivity gains – the result of innovation and adaptation – have been accompanied by rising average wages in manufacturing. Like the rest of the country, our job losses have been heavily concentrated in lower-skill positions, resulting in a leaner and more skilled manufacturing industry. The manufacturing sector and its structural job-wage dynamics are particularly important in upstate New York. Upstate (especially in its rural areas) manufacturing workers tend to earn higher wages than the average in their region, and the sector employs a larger share of the workforce there than it does nationally. 2  BIS Review 100/2010  Outlook How will the current recovery in manufacturing employment play out? Nationally, the growth in manufacturing output over the past year has occurred in a variety of industries, including autos, machinery, and computers and other electronic equipment. This growth reflects a combination of the restocking of inventories, domestic demand growth (particularly in investment goods), and higher exports. The concentration of these industries in parts of our region meant that those areas were poised to take advantage of this growth. The region has seen some increase in factory jobs in recent months, which undoubtedly reflects the expansion of production that has occurred nationally in these industries. A number of indicators suggest that the inventory cycle may be largely complete – that is, the recent restocking has brought inventories into a better balance with sales. If so, we will lose restocking as an impetus for growth.
I am pleased to inform all of you that Bank Negara Malaysia has accorded Islamic Financial Planner module as a recognised qualification for financial advisers’ representatives and we are currently considering to also recognise the Shariah Registered Financial Planner module as a qualification. Apart from takaful products and services, Bank Negara Malaysia has also allowed banking institutions and Labuan offshore financial institutions to draw on the services of financial advisers as one of their distribution channels. This measure was taken in view of growing interest from financial product providers to leverage on the expertise and capabilities of financial advisers in reaching out to the wider community and at the same time promote access to financial services. 2  BIS Review 136/2008  As some of you may be aware, Bank Negara Malaysia and the Securities Commission have signed a Memorandum of Understanding in August 2007 which provides for the mutual recognition of financial advisers licensed by the Bank and financial planners licensed by the Securities Commission. In addition to providing for the mutual recognition of both licensing regimes through the harmonization of licensing requirements, the MOU also introduces green-lane processes for financial advisers and financial planners licensed under the respective regimes to apply for licences under the other regime. Bank Negara Malaysia will fast track the issuance of a financial adviser’s licence upon the financial planner having a RM100,000 paid-up capital as a corporate body.

It involves actively engaging individuals within our community to participate more fully in the economy as well as reaching out to the marginalised community and bringing them into the mainstream financial system. It has now been three years since the financial adviser framework was first introduced. We are encouraged to note that consumers’ needs and demands continue to evolve to the extent that financial products and services must now be tailored to meet individual requirements. Being independent from any product provider or manufacturer, financial advisers are indeed in a unique position in terms of capability and capacity to compare and tailor-made various financial products in order to get the best deal for their customers. Such unique position underscores the importance of the financial advisers’ role in providing value-added service to consumers as they can expect financial advisers to provide financial advice on needs-based approach rather than merely product-push approach. Ultimately, this will contribute to a higher standard of professionalism in the sale of life insurance products and preserve public confidence in the insurance industry. Let me briefly share with you the outlook of life insurance and takaful sector in Malaysia. The insurance and takaful sector recorded a strong growth of 11.4% in 2007 with combined premiums and contributions totaling RM29.7 billion. New business premiums and contributions for life insurance and family takaful sector grew by 7.6% to RM9.1 billion driven primarily by stronger demand for savings and investment-related products.
The main goal of monetary policy is to maintain price stability. This is of course not an end in itself, but a means to an end. A non-inflationary climate facilitates the free play of market forces and keeps socially damaging developments at bay. Fiscal policy must, basically, aim in the longer term to balance the public budgets. As with monetary policy, it is a question of steady, ongoing efforts. This should be no surprise, considering that the whole spectrum of public sector activities is reflected in the public budgets. This in turn raises the question of what services the state should perform, who should pay for them and how public-services can most efficiently be provided. Where competition policy is concerned, the aim is to create conditions conducive to the free play of market forces. In recent decades, it has unfortunately not always been possible to gain consensus support for the idea of free competition, which is still regarded with scepticism and suspicion by many people. Provided that free competition is able to develop in a stable environment, there can be little doubt that it is the best means to assure optimal use of available resources. When things go wrong, it is generally due not to the principle of free competition itself but to the lack of a stable environment. I would like to stress once again that the task of creating a stable economic framework is a never-ending one: it is a question of constantly working towards - but never actually reaching - the intended goal.

Mr. Meyer addresses the competitiveness of financial centres from a Swiss perspective Address by the Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, Mr. Hans Meyer, at the International Bankers Club Luxembourg, held in Luxembourg on 23/3/98. Both Luxembourg and Switzerland are major financial centres in Europe. The performance and competitiveness of the financial services industry are thus of key economic and social importance to both countries. I should like to use this opportunity to say a few words on the subject from what may be a somewhat unusual perspective. The factors which determine the competitiveness of an industry are basically the same as those determining the success of the entire economy. In both cases, we are looking at a multitude of quite diverse factors with varying degrees of importance. Today, I would like to single out just three of them which I believe are of particular significance: economic stability, social equilibrium (i.e. political stability), and the human factor. Although each of these elements could be dealt with separately, they should ultimately be viewed in a broader context. Let’s start with economic stability. I define this as a state of balanced development across the economy as a whole, characterised by steady growth, a modest inflation rate and low unemployment. One of the main prerequisites for achieving such a state is the ability not only to create but to sustain an appropriate economic framework. This is primarily an objective for monetary policy, fiscal policy and competition policy.
In fact, the closure of domestic output gaps – i.e., the difference between actual and trend growth – that a year ago we expected to occur over the course of 2011, took place in the first part of the year. The unemployment rate has fallen rapidly and is now below its historic average. Inflation, meanwhile, has concluded a process of convergence to the 3-percent target. Inflation fears resurfaced during the first quarter of this year, but subsided after the Board’s monetary policy decisions and the changes in the external macroeconomic scenario. We have thus arrived at a situation where the monetary policy interest rate (MPR) stands within a range that is considered normal. However, the events of 2008 still cast their shadow over the world economic outlook. Despite the time elapsed and the economic and financial measures adopted by economic policymakers around the world, we are still seeing the aftereffects of this episode. The underlying problems that caused the disaster have not been totally resolved, and continue to hold back the recovery of private demand. Added to this is the erosion of trust in the public finance management in some Eurozone members and in the U.S., which prompted a new episode of financial stress in early August, and still another one a few days ago. The world economy is going through an extremely complex situation. Certainly, Chile has tools to soften the impact of adverse external conditions.

Add to this that monetary policy interest rates are at their all-time lows, with which the capacity of central banks to increase the stimulus is also limited. In short, the tools traditionally used to boost growth have little room for maneuver in the developed world. Another source of risks that is being increasingly debated is the possibility of developed economies, especially the U.S., enduring a long time of slow growth. Excessive private debts, particularly of households, and public debt, combined with weak labor markets, are determinants of this assessment. This could shape a similar situation to that of Japan after the bursting of its housing bubble in the late 1980s, which gave way to a period of stagnation that has seen no end. Although we believe this to be an unlikely scenario, its consequences on the global economy could be severe. Amidst these conditions, emerging economies continue to grow strongly. The risks of overheating we saw only a few months back have diminished, partly because of the very action of the adopted economic policies and, especially, of monetary measures. There are still risks, however. For one, it is obvious that if developed economies continue to lag, the external demand facing the emerging world will fall, hurting their growth potential. Although in the current scenario some dynamism and a certain degree of decoupling are expected, this cannot go on indefinitely. Given the weakness of domestic demands in developed countries, they rely on their exports to grow and to resolve their global imbalances.
Within a few years, the former Soviet empire, China and other Asian economies, with their combined workforce of over a billion people, entered the world trading system as market economies. Their focus on export-led growth allowed consumers in the West to enjoy rising living standards as the prices of traded goods fell. But the trade surpluses in emerging economies implied an outflow of capital. Relatively poor countries were lending money to richer western ones – the reverse of the traditional model of development. In the process, countries like China built up huge holdings of foreign assets – running into trillions of dollars – matched by equally huge debts in the deficit countries. Such massive imbalances were never likely to be sustainable, and so it proved. If the first fundamental cause of the crisis was the scale of imbalances in the world economy, the second was the inability of our banking system to absorb such large inflows of capital  BIS Review 117/2010  1  without taking excessive risk. In the five years leading up to the crisis, the balance sheets of the West’s largest banks doubled – mainly because banks lent more to other firms within the financial sector than to the wider economy. And the proportion of capital held by banks shrank so that their leverage – the ratio of total liabilities to equity capital – rose to unprecedented levels. Immediately prior to the crisis, the leverage ratios of some UK banks approached 50.

It came care of fixing the exchange rate – first to gold under the Gold Standard and latterly in the post war period to the dollar. With the demise of the dollar standard in the early 1970s, however, the exchange rate anchor had been tossed overboard. At the Bank of England, as elsewhere, the search was on for a new nominal anchor. Into this vacuum stepped Andrew Duncan Crockett. Crockett joined the Bank in 1966 as a graduate entrant, just before the break-up of the Bretton Woods dollar standard. He set to work on the biggest problem of the day, locating a new nominal anchor. In so doing, he began working alongside another young(ish) new Bank entrant, Charles Goodhart. The result was a joint paper published in the Bank’s Quarterly Bulletin in June 1970. It was titled “The Importance of Money”.11 Re-reading it now, it was a prophetic piece of work. In the UK, it laid some of the analytical foundations for what, during the late 1970s and 1980s, became monetarism. More than that, the paper placed commercial bank money and credit at the centre of the macro-economy. It could as well have been titled “The Importance of Credit” or indeed “The Importance of Banks”. After a successful spell at the IMF, Crockett returned to the Bank of England in 1989. In 1994, he then became General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements, the central banks’ central bank. In central bank circles, change was in the air.
Andrew G Haldane: Towards a common financial language1 Speech by Mr Andrew G Haldane, Executive Director, Financial Stability, Bank of England, at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) “Building a Global Legal Entity Identifier Framework” Symposium, New York, 14 March 2012. *  *  *  The views are not necessarily those of the Bank of England or the Financial Policy Committee. We would like to thank Alan Ball, Peter Davies, Priya Kothari and Colin Miles for comments and contributions. In the first book of the Old Testament, God punishes the builders of the Tower of Babel for their folly. The choice of punishment is revealing. God replaces the Earth’s then-common language with multiple tongues. The costs of that original sin are still being felt. Today, there are nearly 7000 languages spoken globally across fewer than 300 nation states. Linguistic diversity has of course cultural benefits. But this comes at some considerable economic cost. A common language has been found to increase dramatically bilateral trade between countries, by more than 40%.2 It has been found to increase bilateral investment between two countries by a factor of three or more.3 In Iceland at the start of the century as much as 3% of annual GDP was, quite literally, lost in translation.4 Finance today faces a similar dilemma. It, too, has no common language for communicating financial information. Most financial firms have competing in-house languages, with information systems silo-ed by business line.

The Financial Stability Board is overseeing efforts to improve data, including on global banking interconnections, shadow banks and OTC transactions data.23  21  Jorgenson et al (2010), Reinsdorf and Yuskavage (2010). 22  Arthur (2011). 23  Financial Stability Board / International Monetary Fund (2011). 8  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Yet the full benefits of this deeper and richer array of financial network information will only be realised if these data can be simply aggregated within and across firms. That calls for common data describers and standards. Recent legislation recognises that. In the US, the Dodd-Frank Act created the US Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR), which has as a core objective data standardisation.24 In Europe, the new European Markets Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) embeds common data standards across the EU.25 The roots of these legislative initiatives were grown during the September 2009 G20 summit.26 Out of this, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) initiated a programme which culminated in a report to G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors in October 2010. This set out a vision of common standards which would allow global financial data aggregation.27 Like Berners-Lee’s 1989 memo, it was vague but exciting. But in the reports that followed, two crucial ingredients were identified: a Legal Entity Identifier (or LEI) and a Product Identifier (or PI).28 Though these acronyms are new, the principles underpinning them are not. LEIs are effectively the nouns of a new financial vocabulary, naming the counterparties to each financial transaction.
This is set to change with the implementation of JomPAY, which is a common and open platform that allows customers of any bank to make online bill payments to any merchant registered with JomPAY. In other words, a merchant will be able to receive payments from customers across all participating banks. This would not only reduce duplication of investment costs by the banks, but also bring about greater convenience, cost savings and efficiency gains to both consumers and merchants. JomPAY is targeted to be rolled-out in phases starting from next month. (In the next presentation, the Director of Payment Systems Policy Department will provide you with further details of the supporting e-payment infrastructure and the strategies undertaken by Bank Negara Malaysia to accelerate the country’s migration to e-payments.) d.  Safeguarding the security of transactions  Ladies and gentlemen, let me now move on to the issue of security and consumer confidence in the use of online banking and e-payments. Considerable efforts have also been taken by the industry to improve user confidence in the use of payment cards. As I mentioned earlier, the banking industry had migrated our payment cards to the more secure chip-based cards in 2005. The investment cost of RM200 million was subsequently recovered through the projected fraud savings in just two and a half years.

Secondly, we need to double our efforts to raise the level of awareness on the basic safety steps to deter payment fraud. The recent 2-month long “Think Online Safety, Think C.A.R.D.” campaign, jointly organised by the Association of Banks in Malaysia (ABM) and the NCG, to promote safe online payment practices, is a step in the right direction. The final session of the campaign will be held in Sasana Kijang today. Similar campaigns should be organised and expanded to reach a wider segment of the Malaysian population. iii. Thirdly, the industry should ensure the timely implementation of JomPAY. This would enable both consumers and businesses across the country to benefit from the strong value proposition that JomPay will create in increasing the efficiency and convenience of online bill payments. iv. Fourthly, banking institutions should conduct regular reviews on the adequacy and robustness of payment system risk management measures and the effectiveness of consumer protection measures. Where the review discloses gaps and inadequacies, banks must take immediate steps to rectify the weaknesses to preserve public confidence. Adequate resources must be allocated to this effort. v.  Fifthly, as part of the overall improvement in customer service, the banking industry should keep customers adequately informed of the dispute resolution procedures, in the event of fraud. Any disputes should be resolved in a timely manner.
Furthermore, as suggested by these projections and private expectations, in the fourth quarter the GDP will post a positive annual growth rate. Annual inflation, in turn, is expected to begin rising and become positive during the first half of 2010. Our financial system has been able to weather the external turmoil and the Central Bank has taken actions to avoid inconveniences in the provision of liquidity and implemented a highly expansionary monetary policy, not just reducing the policy rate to its lowest possible. However many risks are still there and we must be extremely careful in our decisions. The economy is beginning a recovery process that is yet to be well grounded. Output gaps are significant and will close gradually; probably taking more than the next two years. Inflationary pressures are generally low. We have said in our communications that we will hold the policy rate at its lowest at least until the second quarter of 2010. However, it is not a mechanical commitment in the sense that after that time we will begin to withdraw the monetary impulse. Experience has taught us the importance of moderation, and a hasty withdrawal could severely hinder economic recovery and jeopardize convergence to the inflation target. As in earlier occasions, our inflation-targeting regime and the credibility it has earned allow us to handle monetary policy very flexibly. Accordingly, we reiterate that the Board will use all the policy tools at hand so that projected inflation stands at 3% over the policy horizon.

BIS Review 9/2010  7  Figure 3 Monetary policy interest rate (MPR)  MPR change  MPR level  (basis points)  (percent)  Japan U.S.A. Canada Switzerland Sweden Chile Hong Kong U.K. Israel Eurozone Peru Czeck Republic Norway Korean Republic Malaysia New Zealand Colombia Poland Australia Philippines Mexico India China Hungary Turkey Indonesia South Africa Brazil Russia Argentina Iceland  Turkey Chile Colombia New Zealand Iceland Peru South Africa U.K. India Brazil Norway Sweden Mexico Korean Republic Israel Australia Eurozone Hong Kong Indonesia Canada Poland Switzerland Czeck Republic China Hungary Russia Philippines U.S.A. Malaysia Japan Argentina -1,200 -1,000  -800  -600  -400  -200  0  0  200  From 4.Sep.08 to 15.Dec.09  2  4  6  8  10  12  At 15.Dec.09  Source: Bloomberg. Figure 4 Liquidity conditions of the interbank market at three months (*) (basis points)  400  400  300  300  200  200  100 0  Jan.07  Jan.08  Japan  U.S.A.  Jan.09  100  Volatility in developed markets (percent)  100  80  80  60  60  40  40  100  20  20  0  0  0  Jan.07  Eurozone  Jan.08  Jan.09  VIX index volatility  (*) Spreads between the Libo rate and the Overnight Index Swaps rate. Source: Bloomberg.