samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
By taking it into demesne control, instead of receiving a fixed nominal rent, the lord of the manor could take receipt of the real output of the land, which could be consumed, traded, or sold for silver at the going spot price. The consequence was that the richer the baron, the more land he had to exploit, and the greater his potential profits. The effect was to create a massively wealthy elite of oligarchs, now breaking free both of the middling ranks of the gentry at one end, and of the hard-pressed King (or public sector) at the other. In all of this, the option of demesne management was infeasible for the King, likely because it would have involved destabilising relations with the administrative class of “sheriffs” and other royal officials upon whom the King’s political stability depended. 6 Causes of the inflation Forget royal infighting, wars or the whiff of revolution, it is inflation that really sets the pulses of central bankers racing. And for good reason because closer inspection suggests that inflation may have been a significant catalyst to Magna Carta. Historians estimate that prices were rising sharply in the early 1200s. The prices of agricultural goods, including wheat and oxen, probably doubled in that period. 7 Evidence suggests that prices of linen, wax, lead and even palfreys – the Toyota Prius of medieval horses – were also rising rapidly. Wages were rising as well – and to a greater extent than could have just been the consequence of medieval real-wage resistance.

17  The coronation charter of Henry I issued in 1100 (which was also endorsed by Henry II at his own coronation in 1154) is a pertinent example because it was effectively the draft on which Magna Carta was later based, containing several of the clauses now regarded as the most significant. The original text was written in one continuous flow. Its division into clauses is a modern construct. 18  Moreover it came after a lacuna of sixty years during which the House of Plantagenet had issued no similar conciliatory charters and whose actions in the meantime had caused sufficient damage to the relationship between nobility and monarchy as to make an uprising inevitable. BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  Despite the efforts of Coke and others, Charles I’s rejection of all enterprise to constrain his authority led to the English Civil War and to the king’s beheading in 1649. Meanwhile, Coke’s unstoppable Magna Carta redux had been set in motion. In contradiction to their behaviour at home, James and Charles had been busily granting royal charters promising the liberties of Englishmen to the American colonists. Coke himself had been involved in the drafting of the first charter of the Virginia Company in 1606, and similar English liberties were extended in the charters of Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Carolina over the next sixty years. Some have argued that references to Magna Carta, however irrelevant its provisions might by then have been, were used as a way of “drumming up” New World settlers.
Rachel Lomax: The MPC comes of age Lecture by Ms Rachel Lomax, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, at De Montfort University, Leicester, 28 February 2007. I am very grateful to Gareth Ramsay for his help in preparing this speech, and also James Proudman, Tony Yates and other Bank colleagues for their help in preparing this speech, and to a number of colleagues at the Bank of England for useful comments. * 1  *  *  Introduction  It’s a great pleasure to be in Leicester tonight, particularly given my long association with De Montfort University, as a Governor. Tonight I want to focus my remarks on the Monetary Policy Committee, which is ten years old this year. This is a blink of an eye in the life of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street as she approaches 313. But UK monetary policy frameworks have lived dangerously and died young. For them, ten years is good going. To mark the occasion the Treasury Committee has launched a special enquiry. An impressive weight of written evidence has already been published, including a detailed review by the Bank of England. Everyone agrees that the UK has experienced an unprecedented degree of economic stability over the past decade. The average rate of inflation has come down from nearly 10% in the seventies and eighties, to 2.5% since 1993, and the volatility of inflation has fallen very sharply. At the same time, output growth has been higher on average and less volatile.

To illustrate the problem, let’s begin by examining net debt flows in the private nonfinancial and government sectors over the last 10 years. As can be seen in Chart 1, borrowing by the  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  private nonfinancial sector rose rapidly from 2003 to 2006 and remained high until the crisis hit. Then borrowing turned negative as new loans were more than offset by repayments and write-offs. Only recently has borrowing turned weakly positive. Chart 2 illustrates how the stock of net debt in different sectors of the economy evolved throughout this period. It shows that much of the credit boom was concentrated in the household sector. The business sector only experienced a surge from 2006 onward. During the boom, leverage also increased in the financial sector. As the boom proceeded, credit losses were low and earnings strong. But once the bust began, this dynamic reversed. Credit losses at financial institutions surged and the sector was forced to deleverage rapidly and raise new capital. This resulted in a significant contraction in the availability of credit and was a major direct shock to the global economy. Crucially, this tightening of credit standards exacerbated how much many households and firms had to deleverage. It also crimped demand, inhibiting economic, employment and income growth, which in turn made the deleveraging process more challenging.
Philipp Hildebrand: The challenge of sovereign wealth funds Speech by Mr Philipp Hildebrand, Vice-Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, at the International Center for Monetary and Banking Studies, Geneva, 18 December 2007. I would like to thank Signe Krogstrup for her valuable support in drafting this speech. I also want to thank Rita Kobel, Urs W. Birchler, Daniel Heller and Bertrand Rime for helpful comments and discussions. * 1. *  *  Introduction  I am very pleased to be in Geneva. The International Center for Monetary and Banking Studies (ICMB) provides a wonderful platform to discuss a wide range of economic and monetary policy challenges. On behalf of my ICMB Foundation Board colleagues, I would like to thank Charles Wyplosz for his successful and long-standing stewardship of the ICMB. Tonight, I want to talk about Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs). Broadly defined, SWFs are government-owned investment corporations. For the most part, they invest their funds in foreign currency assets. SWFs are usually managed separately from central bank reserves. Unlike other publicly owned pools of capital, such as social security funds or public pension funds, SWFs have no explicit liabilities. As you can see in slide 1, the estimated assets currently managed by SWFs exceed the combined pool of assets managed by hedge funds and private equity firms. Total assets held by SWFs remain small, however, in comparison to the combined assets managed by pension funds and mutual funds worldwide.

So we do know, I promise you, about the job losses and plant closures particularly in manufacturing. Those on the receiving end won't thank me for saying this but some of those problems at the micro-economic level are an inevitable characteristic of every economy. Needs, tastes, technologies and productive techniques are constantly changing even in the most benign macro-economic environment, and the rise and fall of individual businesses or business sectors, as comparative advantage shifts - nationally and internationally - is a painful but necessary facet of economic  BIS Review 85/2001  1  progress. Obstructing such change cannot help in anything but the short term. The more constructive approach is to encourage the redeployment of resources to alternative activities where there is a prospect of comparative advantage. Happily that is the path - the path to greater supply-side flexibility - that is increasingly being followed by UK regional and national authorities. And it's the path being followed here in Wales by the National Assembly under First Minister Rhodri Morgan. It is the path that is being followed by the WDA and its subsidiary Finance Wales, as well as ELWa. If we know at the Bank about plant closures and job losses, we know, too, about NEDS (the Welsh National Economic Development Strategy) and we know about the new activity, creating new jobs, including, for example, Technium. I said a moment ago that some of the current micro-economic problems are inevitable - a normal and necessary facet of economic progress.
An important achievement within the EMEAP process has been the establishment of a Monetary and Financial Stability Committee, or MFSC, which is charged with the mandate of facilitating greater regional collaboration in preserving monetary and financial stability as well as in the development of regional financial markets. Since its establishment, the MFSC has exceeded expectations in terms of the commitment towards supporting regional monetary and financial surveillance, and in advancing efforts to institutionalize cross-border crisis management and resolution arrangements. These developments will contribute towards reducing any procyclical impact of Basel II and facilitating over time, refinements to the risk parameters that are more appropriate to local and regional experiences. The continuation of such efforts at the national and regional levels will reduce the prospects for potential disruptions in the regional financial systems. One of the most important consequences of Basel II lies in the effect that it will have in sharpening the focus on corporate governance in banking institutions. While there has been considerable attention focused on the quantitative implications and operational aspects of the Basel II framework, there has been less attention given to the corporate governance dimensions associated with its implementation. The expectations on the board and senior management oversight are significantly higher under Basel II. The board of directors is expected to ensure that a sufficiently strong risk control framework is in place before banks can adopt the more advanced approach.

In my remarks today, I would like to expand on three points. First, I want to show how a very severe double dip crisis required the ECB to deploy unconventional instruments to ensure price stability. And our measures are proving effective: incoming data confirm that the cyclical recovery of the euro area economy is becoming increasingly solid and that downside risks have further diminished. Second, I will discuss the possible side effects of these measures. I will consider the different dimensions in which our monetary policy affects people’s finances and welfare, which are sometimes overlooked in the current debate. Finally, I will outline why the ECB cannot be the only actor contributing to the recovery. Other economic, financial and fiscal policies are essential to ensure a sustained recovery. Recovering from the crisis: the role of monetary policy Let me start by recalling where we came from. The Great Recession, as it is called, resulted in a protracted period of low inflation and low growth. Specifically, the euro area faced two interlinked and successive crises – a financial crisis in 2008 and a sovereign debt crisis that started to emerge in 2011 and derailed the rebound. The recovery that began in mid-2013 lost steam in the summer of 2014 as the external environment became more uncertain. At the beginning of 2014, credit growth was contracting at an annual pace of more than 3%, while overall economic growth was stalling.
The aim is not only to cement global economic recovery, but also to counter the backtracking seen in inequality and poverty as a result of this pandemic and to jointly tackle the common structural challenges derived from digitalisation and the fight against climate change. And this without forgetting the need to strengthen pre-emptive and common response mechanisms to systemic crises like the present one. In this respect, the G20 resolutions reached to respond to the impact of the crisis on lowincome economies via debt-relief measures are praiseworthy; but consensus must now be forged to address the situation which middle-income countries are also facing (a category in which a good number of the Ibero-American community countries fit), with limited room for manoeuvre in their national policies. With these same objectives, international institutions must complement and improve coordination with regional institutions and mechanisms, which may be more effective in providing solutions for countries that share a common institutional framework or similar economic structures. Following this introduction, allow me to move on to the first panel of the Conference, which will focus on analysing the role of monetary policy in the context of the pandemic.

Perfectly illustrating this flexibility in the distribution of purchases over time is the fact that the average monthly pace of purchases in the April-June period was € billion, whereas from October to December, against a backdrop of greater easing in sovereign debt markets, average monthly purchases barely exceeded € billion. Thanks to this flexibility, along with the large volume of asset purchases initially envisaged, the announcement of the creation of the PEPP on 18 March helped substantially reduce sovereign yields in the euro area, particularly in countries such as Italy and Spain. These countries had relatively high levels of public debt and were also more affected by the first wave of the virus, both in epidemiological terms and given their dependence on more vulnerable sectors such as tourism and hospitality. The outcome was a much more pronounced increase in financing costs in these countries, that the PEPP’s flexibility has enabled us to counter by ensuring a smooth transmission of our monetary policy to all euro area countries. This flexibility is again proving particularly useful in the current situation. Indeed, after extending our programme last December, there was a rise in long-term interest rates in a setting in which our inflation forecast was some distance off target and below that expected before the crisis.
Swiss banks do hold socalled numbered accounts, but a restricted circle of persons within the bank must - by law - know the name of the person(s), i.e. the beneficial owner(s) behind every account. In this regard, the “know your customer rule” is once again essential. Banking secrecy is routinely lifted in the case of criminal investigations and the Swiss judicial authorities have earned high marks for the extent of their cooperation in international criminal affairs, including those involving politically exposed persons. These facts do not mean that our country is especially attractive for criminal money. They rather show that bank secrecy rules are not an obstacle to an efficient and determined action against criminal activities. Let us be frank: the fact that some financial centres only rarely or even never register cases of suspicious transactions is certainly not a proof of integrity but rather of a lack of it. Conclusion Today, we find many financial centres around the globe. They all benefit from easier communication and high capital mobility. Some have a long history of banking activities, others have recently expanded, often by giving foreign investors special legal or fiscal treatment. With its customers from all over the world, Switzerland is as much an offshore centre as London or any other significant financial centre. We do not provide special advantages to foreign investors.

In our view, the responsibility of the banker should prevail over an automatic reporting of transactions exceeding a certain amount. Tracking down criminal money is even more difficult than identifying money laundering operations. The financing of criminal activities does not require large amounts and the ex ante identity of a criminal is not a source of pertinent information. Furthermore, funds used in the financing of terrorism, unlike cases of money laundering, very often are legally acquired. It is therefore crucial that financial intermediaries in both the banking and the non-banking sectors thoroughly verify their client relationships in order to identify suspicious circumstances. In this connection, strict observation of the “know-your-customer” principle is again of key importance. Switzerland does not hesitate to offer international co-operation in judicial matters and to block incriminated assets. Following the decision of the United Nations to apply sanctions against the Taliban regime in 1999 and 2000, we blocked a certain number of Afghan bank accounts and froze the assets belonging to persons listed by the Sanction Committee of the United Nations. To date, 76 accounts are frozen with a total of 42 million Swiss francs. In the United Kingdom and in Switzerland, the authorities and the banks themselves are fully aware of the utmost importance of successfully warding off criminal funds. We all realise that money laundering is not only morally unacceptable, but that it also clearly undermines the public’s confidence in our financial centre.
There will always be a price at which to export. Thus, the greater impact is a decrease in the prices of our exports, since quantity limitations are smaller (Figure 9). Although lower prices push producers towards reducing their supply, with the ensuing implications on employment, output and investment, it is very different from what happens, for example, to producers of intermediate goods, specific for the automotive industry. Their demand falls dramatically and all their already started production piles up unsold. And this leads to a subsequent production standstill. This explains the intensity with which the crisis is impacting the more industrialized economies of Asia. To sum up, the international crisis is bearing real effects on our output, specifically on our exports, but its reach in Chile is more limited than the effect on other economies which are based on manufacturing exports. (iii)  Global confidence crisis  As from last September, global confidence plummeted throughout the world (Figure 10). Individuals as well as companies adopted a “wait-and-see” attitude in view of the high uncertainty and deterioration of the economic outlook. As it is likely to happen in more uncertain scenarios – and, in this case, extremely uncertain – , individuals stop consuming abruptly and companies dramatically revise their investment and production plans. Therefore, propagation of the financial crisis effects was worsened by a massive loss of confidence. These losses of confidence may lead to recessions which are self-fulfilling prophecies.

Probably, a greater elasticity of housing supply contributed to limit the increase in prices (Glaeser et al., 2008). Maybe, the creation of a bubble was avoided thanks to the way in which mortgage loans and related collateral securities are granted. I consider that a highly probable hypothesis is that, in view of the income levels prevailing in Chile, which are far below those of the developed countries, expansion of consumer loans is more oriented towards financing consumption of durable goods than houses. This issue remains open, but differences are evident. Anyway, this is an area which will have to be particularly addressed in the future (Figure 2). Besides, there were countries which had a housing boom, with housing prices soaring far above their fundamentals, such as Spain and Australia, but whose banking systems have shown much more resilience.3 Consequently, what happened in the United States was rather a growing fragility of its financial system, which passed unnoticed to the market and regulators. There was a deficient assessment of risks. They mistakenly felt that they were adequately covered and diversified by the new “originate and distribute” banking model. Prudential regulation, as well as internal policies on risk assessment of financial agents, resulted in a spectacular failure. This leads me to another important issue in the recent debate on monetary policy: whether monetary policy should take into account asset prices when making decisions on interest rates.
As we said in our press release in September, an early move in interest rates “could lower the level at which interest rates might otherwise need to be set”. That is why we raised interest rates last month and why the MPC is committed to the consistent pursuit of a symmetric inflation target. But that is not all. The new monetary policy regime is probably the most transparent and open in the world. We are committed to explaining our policy – both to improve the efficiency of monetary policy itself and also to build up support for what we are doing. Try going onto the Bank of England’s website – the address is www.bankofengland.co.uk – and you will find there the minutes of our meetings, as well as the Inflation Report, available to everyone. You will even find a copy of this speech. You may not always agree with our decisions, but I do hope you will understand the reasons for them. Since the MPC was set up, there is, I think, a better understanding of what we are trying to achieve. Most of those who disagree with particular interest rate decisions accept that it does make sense to have an inflation target. Some might wish that we interpret the inflation target in a way that better serves the interest of their own sector of the economy, but that would be to court popularity in the short term at the expense of achieving low and stable inflation in the long term.

But at times, even a well-run bank can suffer an unexpected shortage of liquidity. To mitigate that risk, the central bank provides back-stop liquidity insurance to both individual institutions and to the system as a whole under stress (as in the aftermath of Lehman’s collapse, reflecting a system-wide increase in both credit and liquidity risk). The objective is to reduce the cost of liquidity disruptions for solvent and viable institutions and so maintain the flow of payments services of the UK financial system. But in meeting that objective, the Bank must ensure that it guards against moral hazard, by setting the incentives in such a way that discourages anything but exceptional use of our facilities, and that it adequately protects its own balance sheet from risk of loss. 5 Operational Standing Facilities The process of reserves averaging should deal with small unexpected liquidity shortages or long positions. For larger shocks, the most immediate short-term form of liquidity insurance is the Bank’s Operational Standing Facilities which, as well as helping keep short-term interest rates close to Bank Rate, can help individual firms cope with frictional stress such as operational disruptions and short-term volatility in market interest rates. Under these  4  Since lending to the Bank is free from credit risk, it is the secured overnight rate – up to the next MPC decision date – that should be broadly in line with Bank Rate.