samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
This increase is believed to have been adequate to supply the demand of the economy for money under the conditions of an economic growth of 6 percent and of an inflation rate within the two-to-four percent targeted range. Money supply and the closest money aggregate (M1) have known faster growth rates during 2004 compared to year 2003. This is a consequence of a rising demand of the economy for monetary assets, reflected even in the invigoration process of lending to the economy throughout the year. Also, the controlled inflation level has rendered possible the maintenance of a real interest rate in positive terms, despite the ongoing reduction of nominal interest rates. The real positive interest rate has maintained the tendency of households to deposit their savings in the banking system, bringing about further reductions of the relative level of currency outside banks that circulates in the economy. The rising demand for monetary assets has been shaped mainly as the demand for monetary balances in Lek. The demand for Lek has been particularly evident in the summer time, being partially supplied even by means of liquidity injection through the Bank of Albania intermediations in the foreign exchange market. The annual growth rate of deposits in Lek was 12.9 percent, being a satisfactory growth compared to the average historical rate. It was adequate to cover Government demand for the financing of deficit and the economy demand for credits in Lek. Meanwhile, deposits in foreign currency grew by 17.1 percent during 2004.

Some indicators of the economy over the years  Real growth of GDP (in %)1 PBB (with current prices, in millions of Lek2) PBB (with current prices, in millions of USD) PBB (in USD per capita)3 Number of the employed (in thousands) Unemployment rate (in %)  1  1999  2000  2001  2002  2003  2004  8.9  7.7  6.5  4.7  6.0  6.0  488611  530900  588700  630000  695100  780100  3548.4  3694.5  4102.4  4496.8  5702.2  7,581  1052.0  1086.3  1329.0  1460.0  1833.5  2,434  1081.0  1068.0  1065.0  921.0  928.0  917.0  18.0  16.9  14.6  15.8  15.0  14.6  Data on GDP and its real growth for the period 1999-2000 are originated from INSTAT. For the rest data are estimates from Ministry of Finance, IMF and also data from Bank of Albania. 2  The table is being constructed based on the reviewed nominal GDP. 3  Nominal GDP converted at the average rate of the period.
Central bankers rightly become nervous - or at least slightly uncomfortable - if public expectations become too high or are elevated to quasi-religious dimensions. Moreover, if a central bank - for whatever reasons acquires prestige and standing that transcends the strict confines of its mandate and becomes an object of faith or mythical devotion, this may suggest that it fills a void left elsewhere. In particular this may be an indication of a lack of confidence in other - more important - institutions in society. To my mind independent central banks fulfil an important function for the benefit of society. Their job is to maintain price stability, maintain trust and confidence in the currency. Nothing more and nothing less should be asked of them. This reflects a clean division of labour and a clear allocation of responsibilities vis-à-vis other economic policy actors and, especially, vis-à-vis democratically elected governments. Stable money is too important to be overburdened with other purposes. This is especially important in the process of European integration. 7  BIS Review 96/2000  5. Faith in the European Central Bank, faith in Europe? The move to European Monetary Union is an important step in the long history of closer European integration. In particular, in the field of monetary policy the Maastricht Treaty represents a decisive act of delegation of decision-making authority or sovereignty. The Treaty entrusts the objective of price stability to an independent and supranational body, the European Central Bank.

Otmar Issing: Should we have faith in central banks? Speech by Professor Otmar Issing, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, held at St Edmund’s College Millennium Year Lecture, Cambridge, on 26 October 2000. *  *  *  Ultimately, trust must be earned, it is granted temporarily, it must be checked, and it must be backed up by hard evidence, not be based purely on faith or belief. It is a great honour and a great pleasure for me to deliver the St. Edmund’s College Millennium Lecture on the topic of faith in central banking. I must confess that when Professor Heap first invited me to give a talk on “Faith and Finance in the New Millennium” as part of a series of lectures on the general theme “Faith in the Future” I suffered an initial instant of hesitation or lack of faith, if you will. As you can imagine “faith” is not a natural subject to discuss for a central banker and economist, who is trained to look at facts and hard evidence. To address such a difficult issue in such a distinguished seat of learning as Cambridge University would seem to require a good measure of courage. But then, of course, courage - if not faith - is an attribute that central bankers should undoubtedly possess. I am also much reassured and grateful for the faith, if I may say so, that you put in me by inviting me to talk about this subject.
This is to say that crises can happen in any economy, whether it is large or small, developed or emerging, with or without a sophisticated financial system, and regardless of whether the country has a fixed or flexible exchange rate system. And once a crisis happens, the impact will be large because of the globalized nature of markets that drives the spillover and contagion. For emerging markets, this means that the risk of future crises is wide-ranging and can be both internally and externally induced. The externally-induced crisis can either be because of imprudent policy choices elsewhere or because of failures of systemically important markets or institutions. And we have seen in the current crisis, the impact from an externally-induced crisis through contagion can be as, or even more severe, as an internally-induced or a home-grown crisis. BIS Review 36/2010  1  Therefore, to lessen the risk of future crises, prudent and good policy choices must be made in all countries. If not, the chance of crises repeating will remain high in this globalized world because of the interdependence between economies in policies, and because of the interconnectedness of countries in trade and financial flows. The second lesson is that, while monetary policy must remain focused on maintaining low and stable inflation environment, which is crucial for sustainable growth, it is clear from the current crisis that low and stable inflation alone is not sufficient for ensuring financial stability.

In this way, it was possible to retain overall liquidity in the bank system at an appropriate level. As you will see in graph 3, the average level of bank sight deposits changed very little throughout the year, if we compare each minimum reserve period with the next. Our other operational processes have also stood up well in the turmoil of the past few months. Payment transactions carried out between banks in the SIC system ran smoothly at all times, although banks have made greater use of SNB intraday loan facilities. In order to bridge liquidity bottlenecks at the end of the day, the National Bank provides a liquidityshortage financing facility to banks. This allows them to obtain liquidity on a temporary basis 2  BIS Review 150/2007  when needed, provided they have a limit with the SNB and provided this limit is continually covered with eligible securities. The continual coverage of the limits ensures that the banks have access to a liquidity cushion, even in critical situations. Actual use of the limits is generally restrained, and this has also been the case in recent months. Lessons learnt I would like to draw your attention to some of the lessons that we have already learnt from the current crisis. I will mention four points. First, the worldwide money market upheaval clearly shows how highly integrated international financial markets are today. Local crises can spread around the globe in a flash. The money market crisis is unlikely to have been overcome yet.
30 November 2017  Speech on the 60th Anniversary of the National Association of Specialised Lending Institutions (ASNEF) Luis M. Linde Governor  Good evening everyone. It is a pleasure for me to take part in this celebration of the 60th anniversary of the National Association of Specialised Lending Institutions. As your president, Fernando Casero, has just mentioned, throughout its history your Association has played a very important role in promoting and enhancing consumer lending, which is a key factor in driving economic growth. Indeed, consumer lending has a series of characteristics that make it especially relevant both for the financial system and economic activity. On the one hand, it is highly cyclical and is, therefore, a leading indicator of confidence among both consumers and financial institutions. On the other, it generally leads the way in terms of adaptation to innovation. As is well known, in the past consumer lending played an important part in the expansion of credit cards, and more recently it has been at the forefront of the incorporation of new technologies. In the expansionary phase that began after 2000, consumer lending grew rapidly in Spain, reaching a balance outstanding of € billion in mid-2008. The financial crisis reduced these figures, down to almost half that amount by early 2015. Since then, in keeping with the economic recovery, consumer lending has been very dynamic.

The testing operations don’t represent a change in the stance of monetary policy, and no inference should be drawn about the timing of any change in the stance of future policy. Not surprisingly, the exercise to date has confirmed that the level of facility use is sensitive to the rate offered (Exhibit 1). For much of the testing period thus far, the spread between market rates and the fixed rate offered on reverse repos has been relatively wide. However, we’ve seen take-up increase in instances where the spread narrowed. Also not surprisingly, participation increased on quarter- and month-end dates, particularly by GSEs and money funds, which noted that uncertain access to overnight secured investments on these dates, combined with lower unsecured overnight rates, increased the attractiveness of our operations. We’ve also seen that different counterparty types have used the facility differently, reflecting their business models and investment alternatives. Through November, total usage of the facility has ranged from $ million to $ billion and the number of bidders has ranged from 4 to 87 per operation (Exhibit 2). Excluding the quarter- and monthends, daily bids have averaged $ billion from 17 bidders. Operationally, market participants generally characterize the exercise as smooth, with minimal disruptions. From a policy perspective, participants have indicated that they expect that a facility, if executed in full scale in the future, should be an effective tool for increasing the Federal Reserve’s control of short-term money market rates through a stronger floor.
In many countries, it is important to enhance the flexibility of labour contracts and wage-setting to enhance employment growth in a lasting manner. Over the second half of the 1990s, efforts made by some euro area countries to improve the functioning of the labour marked appear to have been fruitful in fostering employment growth and promoting a more job-intensive output growth compared to the late 1980s. In particular, labour market reforms implemented in the second half of the 1990s seem to have benefited those groups facing particular challenges when trying to enter the labour market, such as women, the youngest and oldest age groups and the lowest educated. Reforms are also needed that allow wages to reflect more strongly regional and sectoral productivity differences. This will make the whole economy more flexible and better able to absorb economic shocks. These measures have to go hand in hand with product market reforms and reforms of the pension and health care system. Such reforms are essential to contain expenditures on pensions and health care. They will not only be needed to reduce non-wage labour costs and increase incentives for job creation but also to ensure the sustainability of the social security systems. BIS Review 23/2004  3  The surveillance of fiscal policies We have been very bold in Europe in setting up a single currency. I remember all the remarks made by American friends during the 90's. They were easy to sum up: “You put the cart before the horse.

And in some countries, the process of catching-up in real incomes has been slower than expected at the start of transition. For acceding countries as a whole, per capita income today is less than half of the average of the EU. Given the low starting point for most countries, increasing prosperity and living standards will be a major policy objective for quite some time. In view of that strategic objective, one has to underline that prudent macroeconomic policies are key to support and facilitate progress towards higher GDP-per-capita levels. Accession to the EU is expected to have positive effects on the countries' prospects for convergence. The full integration into the internal market will increase growth prospects and thus foster the catching-up process, mainly through trade and investment (FDI), together with lower interest rates. New Member States will have to implement and enforce the “acquis communautaire” of the European Union, which they have adopted in the course of recent years (excluding, for the time being, those areas where transitional arrangements apply). The EU has also been preparing intensively to make enlargement work. Within the realm of central banking, the Eurosystem has been engaged since 1999 in a constructive and ever more intensive dialogue with the central banks of the new Member States. Already since the signing of the EU Accession Treaty in 2003, the Governors of the national central banks of acceding countries have been taking part as observers in the General Council of the ECB.
2  OECD (2016), Economic Policy Reforms 2016: Going For Growth Interim Report, OECD Publishing, Paris. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  The weak recovery is also very much related to the problem of demand deficiency – a situation associated with aggregate demand being less than the aggregate supply corresponding to full employment level of output in the economy. And this is probably driven by high indebtedness levels in government and private balance sheets across the world including both advanced and emerging market economies. As a matter of fact, the impaired private balance sheets caused the so-called balance sheet recession of 2008–2009 in AEs as in the USA during the great depression and in Japan during the years following the Japanese financial crisis of 1991. Now, not only the private sectors – financial, non-financial and households – of AEs but also their governments and more importantly EME private sectors suffer from high indebtedness levels. For example, some EME households have debt as large as 75 to 95 percent of GDP. Moreover, EME private balance sheets largely consist of external liabilities as opposed to domestic currency denominated assets, which expose them to increases in the cost of debtservicing foreign currency – denominated external obligations in cases of real exchange rate depreciation. Recent research suggests that agents tend to cut back their spending when their debt reaches certain levels.3,4 Going forward, we are likely to see only a gradual improvement in this stock balances problem as they take longer time to heal than flow balances problems.

Jean-Pierre Roth: Ten years’ experience in steering interest rates – taking stock of the Swiss National Bank’s monetary policy strategy Summary of a speech by Mr Jean-Pierre Roth, Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, at the University of Fribourg, Fribourg, 20 November 2009. The complete speech can be found in French on the Swiss National Bank’s website (www.snb.ch). *  *  *  The Swiss National Bank’s monetary policy strategy has proved successful over the ten years since its introduction. Throughout this period, the SNB fulfilled its mandate of ensuring price stability while taking into account economic developments. The inflation forecasts, produced quarterly on the basis of various indicators, have proved especially useful. It has always been possible to successfully manage the Libor – the operational objective of the SNB’s monetary policy – despite an international environment which, at times, has been extremely turbulent. The Libor was maintained within a range intended to provide the bestpossible conditions for a favourable development of the Swiss economy.
7 [35]  There are many reasons why Swedes are choosing to abandon cash. 14 One example is the rapid emergence of the Swish mobile app. Even if we welcome technological developments and the increased competition on the payment market, there is a risk that developments will move too fast. There are many people who have problems in using digital methods of payment, and when fewer and fewer businesses and restaurants accept cash, some people will experience problems. Cash is no longer easy to use. Many shops and restaurants will no longer accept cash, and it is difficult to deposit and withdraw cash, especially if one is dependent on doing so over the counter and not through an ATM. I, and the Riksbank, have long pointed out that the legal position of cash needs to be strengthened. 15 Some form of activities should be obliged to always accept cash, such as the medical sector and pharmacies. Similarly, it should be possible to deposit both banknotes and coins, and to do so over the counter. There is currently around one million people in Sweden who have limited access to digital technology or who have limited capacity to use it. Many elderly people are dependent on help from a person and therefore have no use for services based on using ATMs. This is a large and growing problem that needs to be resolved at a political level. It is also important for Sweden's crisis preparedness that the use of cash does not fall too low.

If you’re interested in risk in the financial system it isn’t enough simply to look at levels of debt and compare them with those in other countries or long-distant periods of time. For the most part those variations seem to be explained by differences in sustainable levels of debt, not differences in riskiness. Another possible lesson involves the speed of any policy response. The Bank’s Financial Policy Committee, which is responsible for monitoring and stabilising risk in the financial system as a whole, has many tools at its disposal. One of the main instruments is the so-called “Counter-Cyclical Capital Buffer” (CCyB). This is an extra margin the FPC can add to banks’ capital requirements when risks are rising. The aim is to ensure that, in the event of a downturn and losses on their books, banks don’t make it worse by actively cutting back on lending. 13  See Chart 18 in Broadbent (2012). 17  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  17  However, it takes time to implement changes in the CCyB (we have to give banks advance notice). So if it’s true that swings in credit supply develop relatively rapidly, it may be necessary to supplement the CCyB with other safeguards. I would put the 2014 housing measures, which placed limits on high-LTI lending, into this category.
It is a ‘hard’ floor because no participant in the interbank repo market is willing to lend reserves in the overnight segment at a rate below the rate that can be obtained by participating in our fine-tuning operations. However, we must not set this hard floor too high, as otherwise all banks would only trade with us. If we no longer had any interbank trades in the overnight repo market, SARON would be deprived of its calculation basis and quickly lose economic significance. How has the money market adapted to the new situation? We will close our speech with a discussion of how the money market has adjusted to the new situation with a positive policy rate and to our new way of implementing monetary policy. Page 7/10  The positive SNB policy rate took effect on Friday, 23 September, the first business day following the monetary policy assessment. On Slide 11, you can see that on 23 September, SARON – depicted by the red line – jumped all the way up to 0.38%. In other words, it moved to within just 12 basis points of the new policy rate, the blue line on the slide. Over subsequent days, SARON increased further and has remained close to our policy rate since then. In the first few days immediately after the rate hike, we conducted fine-tuning operations on a daily basis to set a hard floor on interest rates used in transactions in the overnight segment.

Maechler and Moser (2022) discuss the transition from Libor to SARON. We also remunerated reserves from January 2015 to September 2022. During this period, we paid negative interest on banks’ reserve holdings at the SNB. To reduce the burden for banks, we exempted reserves up to a bank-specific threshold from negative interest. Maechler and Moser (2020) discuss the SNB’s monetary policy implementation in the negative rate environment. Page 4/10  reserve requirement, so that the threshold generally does not match its reserve holdings. 9 As a result, there are two types of banks: those whose reserves exceed their thresholds, shown in the upper half, and those whose reserves are below their thresholds, shown in the lower half. The SNB now remunerates reserves up to the threshold, shown in dark blue, at the SNB policy rate, which is currently 0.5%. In contrast, the SNB remunerates reserve holdings that exceed the threshold, shown in light blue, at the SNB policy rate minus a discount. Currently, the interest rate on reserves above the threshold is 0%. For the remainder of this speech, we will refer to reserves above the threshold as ‘excess reserves’. Let us examine the banks with excess reserves more closely. As we just noted, part of their total reserves would be remunerated at 0%. These banks therefore have a strong incentive to lend some of their excess reserves to other banks, at an interest rate above 0%.