samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
10  BIS Review 11/2002  The picture becomes more mixed when average working hours are taken into account. The average is lower in Norway than in other countries. The sickness absence rate is high. Part-time employment is widespread. The average number of person-hours worked in the working-age population is relatively low, despite high labour force participation and low unemployment. Among OECD countries, the only countries with lower figures than Norway are those with very high unemployment. In Norway, average working hours have fallen by more than 20 per cent in the last thirty years. This can be partly explained by the way working life and child care are organised, but similar trends also exist in many other countries, especially in Scandinavia. We cannot simply assume that people want to work more, even if an increased labour input will result in higher income and greater prosperity. It is natural to use some of the increase in prosperity for leisure. The considerable share of part-time employment may reflect choices that individuals do not necessarily want to change. BIS Review 11/2002  11  On the other hand, if we increase our labour input to the level in Sweden, without reducing productivity, our future income would increase by more than the wealth increase resulting from a doubling of our petroleum wealth. The structure of the tax and pension system influences the choice between work and leisure. Lower tax rates on employment income could boost labour input.

Over time, the inflation target and labour productivity set the standard for wage growth. Thank you for your attention. BIS Review 11/2002  13
Moreover, as loose or uneven fiscal moves or reckless legislative initiatives hindered the efficiency of the overall macroeconomic policy mix in Romania, the central bank openly voiced its concerns regarding the sustainability and impact on growth potential of such populist measures, triggering harsh criticism from their promoters. The global crisis proved once again that price stability cannot be achieved in the context of  financial instability, whose resolution calls for far more than monetary policy words and deeds and by far more knowledge and confidence. Austerity measures, the recession, slower-than-expected recovery, along with the view that the  banking sector alone is to be blamed for these misfortunes – even though in Romania, unlike elsewhere, no bail-outs were resorted to – created a mood that eroded the high prestige that the National Bank of Romania had enjoyed prior to the crisis. A reputation that had been earned thanks to a more transparent, flexible, effective policy and to a greater openness to the general public. We were not alone. That sentiment became mainstream across the globe, as well. Central bankers are nowadays cornered to deliver more in their countries, to actively punish the offenders of fiduciary and prove more empathic with debtors and, why not, more compliant and tolerant with populist measures that affect the financial sector and macroeconomic stability. Otherwise their independence would be put at risk, as it is already challenged by public representatives.

3, A "353 9 33 3 3 93  9  4 4 6752 554     465477 752 -0  75  752 901 74:  2 1" 4 752 W 57  47   74752 552 712 2 1 714 552   $  6    4 53 ! 5  4 437 53  2 $ &7'1 74 " 1 +,,-.-/ %973  4  !23(%&  2 7 %3 5332 3279  +6*9 A6(4)9 1 f 34,4/.4( &9(04 (7/4*   0C')0)    T T T T  ? @ 5Z!412
In the first half of the year, annualised growth was close to 6 per cent, and even if GDP growth in the third and fourth quarters should be zero, annual growth will be well over 4 per cent. As the chart shows, a four-year period of such strong growth has not been seen since 1971. The strong rate of growth has only to a limited extent fed through to a higher rise in prices for consumer goods and services. Consumer price inflation adjusted for tax changes and excluding energy products (CPI-ATE) has admittedly picked up gradually since late summer 2006, but in relation to the economic situation, underlying inflation remains low. After hovering around 1-1½ per cent over a longer period, the year-on-year rise in the CPI-ATE was 1.8 per cent in August. Other measures of underlying inflation show approximately the same rise in prices. The year-on-year rise in the total consumer price index (CPI) has been just under ½ per cent in recent months. This is because electricity prices have been substantially lower this year than last year. There are a number of reasons why inflation has been low in an environment of high economic growth. First: Norway’s terms of trade have improved. Prices for export goods such as oil and gas, freight, fish, industrial commodities and engineering products have increased considerably. In addition, market growth abroad has provided market opportunities for Norwegian export goods.

Risk factors related to domestic conditions Events that have taken place abroad are actually more a liquidity crisis rooted in uncertainty about the valuation of assets and the distribution of losses among institutions than a crisis due to the size of the losses themselves. The credit risk for the more senior tranches of subprime CDOs is probably manageable. But we should not forget credit risk in the traditional sense when we assess risk elements. Loans to Norwegian households and enterprises account for approximately 70 per cent of banks’ balance sheets. Risk factors related to these customer groups are therefore very important to financial stability in Norway. Households Strong household debt growth and the sharp rise in house prices constitute a risk factor with regard to financial stability in Norway. Household debt growth has been high since 2000, primarily driven by low interest rates and a sharp rise in house prices and income. Loans secured on dwellings have shown high and increasing growth. Strong competition between banks has pushed down lending margins. The new capital adequacy rules (Basel II), which involve a substantial reduction in risk weights for mortgages, may also have contributed to the rise in mortgage growth and the decline in lending margins. Real house prices, deflated by consumer prices, building costs and house rents, are historically high. Deflated by disposable income, however, house prices have only risen moderately over the past ten years. In recent months, there have been signs of a slackening in the housing market. The rise in house prices has slowed.
In fact, what did I do last weekend? Well, I was in Basel, Switzerland, at the BIS. This is where central bankers get together from across the world, exchange information with one another. So, the first thing is to explain ourselves to people in the community. Because the Federal Reserve is pretty mysterious in terms of – when I went to grad school even, I wasn’t really sure again what the Federal Reserve was. Had to be explained to me. The second thing we do in the community, and this is the more important piece, is to really learn what’s going on, on the ground, in the community. What’s happening in terms of businesses – are they successful? If they’re having trouble, what are the reasons for the trouble? Do they have access to the credit? Can they find people with the job skills they need to support their businesses? What are the challenges in the community, in terms of education, in terms of transportation? Queens, one of the issues is that if you’re not located near a subway line, it’s pretty hard to get around in Queens, and that has pretty significant implications for people’s ability to get to and from work, which is important in terms of economic development. Another issue is the affordability of housing. Queens is actually doing quite well. If you look at the employment growth in Queens over the last few years, it’s been very strong. Just like New York City as a whole.

More importantly, it is to avert a sharp slowdown in economic activities. Financial liberalisation Bank Negara Malaysia has also remained committed to the objectives of the Financial Sector Master Plan (FSMP) issued in 2001. The recently announced liberalization measures, for example, forms part of the concluding phase of the FSMP which is to liberalise the banking sector by allowing for the increase in operational flexibilities, product offering and, the issuance of new licenses by 2011. But, as capacity and institutional building efforts continue to be pursued, it must be complemented by enhancements in regulatory, supervisory and surveillance framework to preserve the integrity and resilience of the financial system. Clearly this is the distinction which must be made with de-regularisation per se. Islamic banking Islamic banking also remains as one of the key agendas under the FSMP. Also in the recently announced liberalisation measures, we will issue up to two new licenses given the growing demand and the need to give further boost to the MIFC initiative. As we have more than two decades of experience in this area, Bank Negara Malaysia will continue to build on this competitive advantage to ensure Malaysia remains at the forefront of global Islamic banking. It is therefore encouraging to note that Islamic finance has continued to demonstrate its evolution and strong growth as assets have expanded by 22% to RM192 billion in 2008 alone and now accounts for 15.0% of the total assets in the industry.
As a third country, the UK is no longer involved in the development of EU legislation and regulation. As new challenges emerge, as EU regulation no longer needs to cater for the greater complexity and scope of risk and activity in London, and as the complex processes and structures needed to manage the regulatory framework within the EU are no longer needed in the UK, there may well be divergence. The issue, from a financial stability perspective, is how we will manage that to provide the necessary assurance on the import and export of risk on both sides. The EU needs assurance on financial stability risk once the UK is no longer subject to the EU framework. Indeed, as an importer of risk from EU jurisdictions, the UK regulatory authorities have the same need. And the degree of assurance is related to the degree of risk. Equivalence assessments are, in the words of the EU/UK Political Declaration, ‘autonomous’ matters for each side. But if we want the relationship to work, the following considerations matter. First, and I think self-evidently, the UK cannot outsource regulation and supervision of the world’s leading complex financial system to another jurisdiction. That argues against a relationship built on textual alignment of our regulatory frameworks.

We, here in Cyprus, know what a challenge is and how to overcome it. A country at the edge of the Mediterranean sea, has managed to place itself to the political and economic core of the European continent. A small island with a part of it under occupation, thrives thanks to its extroversion and its people, who despite having been put to the test so many times in the past, have never stopped creating, evolving and moving forward. I have no doubt that together with our European partners we will take all the necessary actions to overcome this challenge as well, guided by our common core values and principles. As the great French novelist Victor Hugo said, "Changez vos opinions, gardez vos principes; changez vos feuilles, gardez intactes vos raciness" "Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots". Here in Cyprus we often say that "a captain is proven capable when she is in a storm". And hence, I consider ourselves lucky since our ECB captain steering us through both the Covid and geopolitical storms is Christine Lagarde, a leader of undoubted capacity and experience, whom I thank again for being with us today and would like to invite her to the podium to share her thoughts with us. 3/3  BIS - Central bankers' speeches
But the editor cut it, leaving it "for future research." What's Past is Prologue Fast forward a decade, and an entirely new question about r-star arose: Why had estimates of r-star fallen so low? It's a topic Thomas and I explored in our "Redux" paper.8 And in 2017, Kathryn, Thomas, and I expanded the set of economies for which we estimated r-star.9 Indeed, before the pandemic, historically low estimates of r-star characterized advanced economies across the globe. This is illustrated by the Holston-Laubach-Williams (HLW) estimates of r-star for the United States and the Euro Area using data through 2019, shown in Figure 1. Both were around ½ percent before the onset of the pandemic, far lower than estimates from preceding decades. Back to the Future One of the features of the LW and HLW models is that both are designed to be flexible and to "let the data speak" in measuring changes in the natural rate of interest. Even this flexibility, however, has its limits. And the economic turmoil brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic went far beyond what the models were originally designed for. In particular, the pandemic violated two key assumptions about the nature of macroeconomic disturbances underlying the models.10 First, the Kalman filter statistical method that serves as the models' workhorse assumes random disturbances to the economy follow a normal, or bell-shaped, distribution. Relative to historical experience, COVID-19 represented an extremely rare tail event in terms of its effect on the economy.

At the end of 2022, the COVID-adjusted level of potential output (the black line) is 4.2 percent below the pre-pandemic projection for the fourth quarter of 2022, with nearly half of that shortfall explained by the COVID shock measure and the remainder a permanent change in the natural level of output (the gold line). In summary, according to the model estimates, the main longer-term consequence from the pandemic period is a reduction in potential output, but the imprint on r-star appears to be relatively modest. Importantly, there is no evidence that the era of very low natural rates of interest has ended. The Future of R-star? These estimates indicate that r-star today is about where it was before the pandemic. But where is it headed in the future? Of course, this is impossible to know with any certainty. One way to gauge how forecasters perceive the future of r-star is to use forecast data to estimate it. Figure 5 shows the HLW-based estimates of r-star in the U.S. through the end of 2024. It uses published data in the first quarter of 2023. The May 2023 Blue Chip forecasts for inflation, GDP, and interest rates are used as proxies for data from the second quarter of 2023 through the fourth quarter of 2024. The resulting estimate of r-star is about ½ percent in the first quarter of 2023, and subsequently falls to slightly below zero. Evidently, the value of r-star implied by private forecasts is, if anything, even lower than today's estimate.
A second firewall is related to public institutions such as the Superintendences and the Central Bank, which have complementary roles in the monitoring, supervision and regulation of the financial system. The continual improvement of regulations and laws, as well as the search for best practices at the global level is one objective that must always be present in our actions. Within this monitoring role, our Financial Stability Report plays a key role. In it we identify developments which, if intensified, might create risks, or where we believe there is room to reduce residual risks. I would like now to describe some of these developments as well as the main regulatory amendments that have been implemented during the last six months. In our Financial Stability Reports a couple of issues ago we warned about some developments in the real estate sector which, if intensified, could become a source of risk. We were particularly concerned about the combination of dynamic prices with a credit acceleration originating in this sector. In this context, one good element is that mortgage credit growth has remained stable, with no relaxation of lending standards for mortgage loans or credit to construction and real estate firms. However, housing price indexes are as dynamic as in previous periods, in a scenario of high demand and low inventories. Meanwhile, the expected supply of office space continues to rise and is in historically high levels.

Rodrigo Vergara: The Monetary Policy Report and the Financial Stability Report Presentation by Mr Rodrigo Vergara, Governor of the Central Bank of Chile, before the Finance Commission of the Honorable Senate of the Republic, Santiago de Chile, 3 December 2013. *  *  *  The Monetary Policy Report of December 2013 and the Financial Stability Report of the second half of 2013 can be found at http://www.bcentral.cl. Introduction Mr. President of the Senate’s Finance Commission, Senator Andrés Zaldívar, senators members of this Commission, ladies and gentlemen. I am grateful for your invitation to present the vision of the Central Bank’s Board on the recent macroeconomic and financial developments, its Outlook and implications on monetary and financial policy. This vision is contained in detail in our December Monetary Policy Report and our second-half Financial Stability Report we are presenting now. The macroeconomic scenario has evolved along the trends described in the latest Monetary Policy Reports. In the external scenario, growth is more balanced between developed and emerging economies than it was before the subprime crisis hit. International financial conditions are steadily normalizing, while the terms of trade are declining and approaching their trend values. In this scenario, the Chilean economy will receive a milder boost from abroad than we saw in recent years. The less expansionary monetary policies in the developed world will be coupled with a rebound in developed economies that will favor not only these countries but the world economy at large.
(Figure 3)  3  4  The term “lender of last resort” refers to the central bank’s ability to inject money into the financial system. BIS central bankers’ speeches  Figure 3 The Riksbank’s lending SEK, billions  Source: The Riksbank. We also provided special liquidity assistance to two smaller banks. When the Icelandic bank Kaupthing was impacted by the problems in Iceland, the Riksbank provided its Swedish subsidiary with liquidity assistance. Carnegie Investment Bank also received liquidity assistance when it encountered problems with its funding shortly thereafter. It was against this background of unease on the financial markets and the insufficient legislation we had at that point for managing banks in distress that the Riksbank made the assessment that defaults by any of the banks could give rise to serious problems for the financial system. Under other circumstances, this assessment would probably have been different. The Riksbank was also very active in the international cooperation to strengthen financial stability in our neighbouring countries. Together with the central banks of Denmark and Norway, we entered into a swap agreement with Iceland’s central bank and, together with Denmark’s central bank, we entered a swap agreement with Latvia’s central bank while awaiting support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Riksbank also entered into a swap agreement with Estonia’s central bank. In addition, the Riksbank contributed towards strengthening the IMF’s lending capacity. Sweden’s commitments to the IMF increased heavily during the crisis and now amount to a maximum of over SEK 100 billion.

I hope today’s deliberations would guide the relevant committees and those who are associated in policy formulation to take this important initiative forward. Thank you. 2/2
Willem F Duisenberg: The transformation of the European financial system Welcome speech by Dr Willem F Duisenberg, President of the European Central Bank, at the Second ECB Central Banking Conference, 24-25 October 2002, Frankfurt am Main, 24 October 2002. *  *  *  Ladies and Gentlemen, I am pleased to welcome you to Frankfurt, to the second ECB Central Banking Conference, entitled "The transformation of the European Financial System". This event is the largest and most important open ECB conference and is held every two years. The first ECB Central Banking Conference took place in November 2000. It focused on price stability, which is the ECB's primary objective, and that of many other central banks worldwide. It was a successful event, and I am convinced that this year's conference will be too. Indeed, looking around, I am happy to see that this second conference has evidently aroused much interest and attracted researchers from leading institutions, officials from most of the major central banks, from ministries of finance, various European and international bodies and the media. In view of this year's topic, we also decided to invite representatives from commercial financial institutions and from supervisory authorities. I should like to extend a special welcome to the representatives of the central banks of the countries that are negotiating to join the European Union; these negotiations will hopefully be concluded fairly soon. I should, of course, also like to thank the speakers, discussants, panellists and chairpersons of the sessions.

Regarding inflation, the Board estimates that the risks are unbiased. The updating of structural parameters has a significant degree of uncertainty, particularly due to the macroeconomic effects of immigration. On the one hand, it is possible that the absorption of immigrants into the labor force is associated with a productivity fall that is more persistent, causing a lower potential growth in the projection horizon, a narrowing of the activity Page 7 of 18  gap and, therefore, higher inflationary pressures. On the other hand, it can happen that the increase in the labor supply occur with greater intensity, which would push up potential GDP growth, widen the activity gap, and reduce pressures on wages and prices. It should also be considered that the negative balance of external risks has exchange-rate effects that could raise short-term inflation beyond our current estimate (Table 5). Summing up, the evaluation of the macroeconomic scenario and its outlook, which include the updating of the structural parameters and the recent evolution of the economy, pointed to the need to recalibrate the monetary impulse. Consistent with this, we decided to cut 50 basis points off the MPR, taking it to 2.5%, in our Meeting of last Friday. We estimate that, by keeping this rate until we see clear signs of an upturn in inflation, it will be possible to ensure the convergence of inflation to the target, in a scenario where the capacity for long-term growth is strengthened by the immigrants’ contribution.