samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
And if we focus on infrastructure, which is so important for any country's growth potential, the last 20 years have seen the weight of investment in infrastructure in Spain far exceed the European Union average. Specifically, over the past two decades, the weight of public investment in GDP in Spain has held, year by year, at 1.25 pp above the European Union average. That has allowed almost full convergence in terms of our public capital endowment, in proportion to our population, with the core European countries. From this standpoint, which we should not lose sight of, I shall refer to the economic and financial situation in Europe and to recent developments in the Spanish economy, with particular reference to economic policies and to the draft budget for 2014. To conclude I have some comments, which I feel bound to make, on the headway in our bank restructuring. The euro area For some months, the economic and financial situation in Europe has shown some improvement, against an international background marked by signs of recovery in the United States and Japan, and by some loss of momentum in the emerging economies, most particularly China. Following six consecutive quarters of contraction, euro area GDP growth has moved back into positive territory. Underpinning this change in sign is a pick-up in internal demand, which has added to the progress in net exports.

Norman T L Chan: Symposium on Financial Stability – opening remarks Opening remarks by Mr Norman T L Chan, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, at the HKMA Financial Stability Symposium, Hong Kong, 30 May 2013. *  *  *  Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen, 1. Welcome to the HKMA Financial Stability Symposium. The Symposium marks the 20th Anniversary of the HKMA, which is a very young central banking institution comparing with its peers. It is very timely and appropriate for the HKMA to convene this Symposium on Financial Stability because Hong Kong, like many of our Asian neighbours, have learnt from our own bitter experience in the few years after 1997 just how painful and devastating financial crisis can become. So it is clearly our common wish to do what we can to reduce the risks of financial crisis recurring or at least mitigate the damage that it can cause to the financial system and the economy when it occurs. 2. In this connection, it may perhaps be useful to look back and observe how the mainstream thinking on financial stability have changed or evolved since the time when the HKMA was set up in 1993. I would list a couple of key issues below: (i)  there was the belief that financial crises would only occur in the developing economies because they had weak financial institutions and poor regulatory regimes. Advanced economies would be immune as they had mature financial institutions and robust regulatory systems.
The second task of macroprudential policy is to manage structural risks, or cross-section risks, which could for instance mean that close links between different parts of the financial system at any given time will affect the risk of a crisis affecting the system as a whole. Here, I will primarily focus on the cyclical dimension of macroprudential policy. However, it is not so easy to draw any clear boundary between structural and cyclical problems on the financial markets, just as in other areas, such as the labour market. 1  2  For a few examples, see Geanakoplos (2009), Aikman, Haldane and Nelson (2010) and Borio (2012). BIS central bankers’ speeches  In Figure 1, the red line represents the normal cyclical fluctuations in the economy, the business cycle. The second curve in the figure represents the financial cycle. As I noted, the economic cycle and the financial cycle need not coincide, but can develop differently. Often, the financial cycle is assumed to have a lower frequency, fluctuate more slowly, than the business cycle, as illustrated in the figure.2 Links between the financial cycle and the business cycle can create problems A situation where both cycles definitely coincide is when the financial cycle shows a rapid downturn, as at the end of the figure. This was what happened in many countries during the financial crisis, and in Sweden during the crisis at the beginning of the 1990s.

Speech at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, 29 November. BIS central bankers’ speeches  17  Figure 1 Business cycle and financial cycle  Business cycle Financial cycle  Table 1 Increases in expenditure for standard households due to policy measures SEK and per cent Luleå 39 000 Disposable income (SEK/month) Total debt (SEK) 1 100 000 Debt ratio (%) 235 Increase in expenditure in SEK Countercyclical capital buffer 128 1 100 Tax relief Mortgage cap 1 229 Amortisation expenditure 1 078 Interest expenditure 151 Amortisation 1 833 Increase in interest rate 1 283 Increase in expenditure as a percentage of disp. income Countercyclical capital buffer 0.3 2.8 Tax relief Mortgage cap 3.2 Amortisation expenditure 2.8 Interest expenditure 0.4 Amortisation 4.7 Increase in interest rate 3.3  Upplands Väsby  Central Stockholm (high debt ratio)  44 000 1 750 000 331  55 000 3 950 000 598  204 1 750 1 956 1 716 240 2 917 2 042  461 3 950 4 415 3 873 542 6 583 4 608  0.5 4.0 4.4 3.9 0.5 6.6 4.6  0.8 7.2 8.0 7.0 1.0 12.0 8.4  Source: The Riksbank. 18  BIS central bankers’ speeches
I believe this is one of the main reasons why X in T+X in the settlement of some financial transitions is still a number other than zero, or why T+X is still not replaced by RTGS DVP even though the technology to do so has been available for some time. Very simply therefore there is a case for the authorities to get involved, as a developer or a service provider, when a private sector solution that is in the public interest is not available. And the public interest is not just in the enhancement of financial efficiency but also in the limitation of contagion and the more effective achievement of financial stability. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority has devoted much effort to the building of the financial infrastructure of Hong Kong. I can assure all of you that it is well worth the effort and the amount of public money involved is really quite modest, although it may take a little time, and some appropriate prudential guidance concerning, for example, the management of payment and settlement risks, to convince potential users before traffic in these financial highways builds up. Allow me to end this address with an advertisement. In Hong Kong we now have RTGS systems for the Hong Kong dollar, the US dollar, the euro and the RMB. They are all linked together to achieve cross-currency PVP in our time zone and they are linked up with our debt-clearing system to achieve DVP.

In a slowly developing crisis there is time to prepare action, which may even include new legislation, for instance on bank resolution. BIS Review 58/2003  3  To detect such a crisis may sound easy, but is in practice very difficult. For instance, when does a gradual increase in asset prices actually turn into an unsustainable bubble and no longer constitute a reflection of fundamental values? Look at the housing markets in some countries around the world right now. Are there bubbles and, if so, where are they? Another problem is timing. At what point should the central bank sound the warning bell? By acting too early, we might add to the volatility in the market place and hence worsen the situation. Remember that the central bank will be held accountable for the negative repercussions of pricking the bubble, not only for the potential but less tangible benefits of having done so. By acting too late, on the other hand, we do not fulfil our mandate and a full-blown crisis might not be prevented. In addition to the problem of timing, there is the problem of selecting an appropriate response to the threat. The first line of defence is moral suasion, i.e. trying to convince the banks and other market participants to act in a proper fashion. The problem with moral suasion is that it may be difficult to calm a market that is rushing to new heights.
MAS and the industry will together develop four interoperable platforms under Project Greenprint: • a Common Disclosure Portal for financial institutions and corporates to make reliable and comparable ESG disclosures;  5/8  BIS central bankers' speeches  • a Data Orchestrator to aggregate ESG data from different sectoral platforms and trusted data sources; • an ESG Registry to record and maintain ESG certifications on a distributed ledger; and • t he Greenprint Marketplace to connect green technology providers with investors and corporates. Third, COSMIC – a platform for financial institutions to collaborate using data analytics to combat the risks of money laundering. This platform for information sharing and analysis will generate a rich and dynamic data pool of high-risk actors and their webs of anomalous activities. COSMIC will enable seamless data exchange with financial institutions’ own data analytics systems so that they can effectively identify and disrupt criminal networks sprawling across multiple financial institutions. MAS has been co-creating COSMIC with six major banks in Singapore and the platform is scheduled to go-live in 2023. In its initial phase, COSMIC will focus on risks related to the abuse of shell companies, illicit misuse of trade finance, and evasion of United Nations sanctions. But the future of Finance cannot be divined without considering the future of the Internet. Plutus will be crossing paths quite often with Mercury. MERCURY AND THE ADVENT OF WEB 3.0 This new age of the Internet has been dubbed Web 3.0.

Collaborative Data Platforms Industry collaboration through technology and data sharing platforms will become an important driver of innovation in the future of Finance. MAS has been promoting such collaboration since the beginning of our FinTech journey in 2015. Let me highlight three recent initiatives. First, ChekFin, a decentralised credentials platform to support partnerships between financial institutions and FinTech firms. Financial institutions seeking collaboration with FinTech firms often have difficulty ascertaining their reliability and capacity. ChekFin will enable financial institutions to obtain verified credentials of FinTech firms, such as business references, awards they have obtained, and investor funding records. These credentials are immutably stored on a blockchain as a golden source of information. FinTech firms decide who they want to share their private credentials with. ChekFin is a partnership among the ASEAN Financial Innovation Network, BCG FinTech Control Tower, and Affinidi, with MAS as a founding partner. Ten global financial institutions have already signed up for ChekFin, and the platform will be launched next month. Second, Project Greenprint – a technology and data platform to support the green finance ecosystem.
When we allow for this the cost – in terms of the lost output of a permanent change to bank capital of +1% of assets – almost halves from just over 3% of annual GDP to about 1.7% Next I allow for less than 30% of investment in the economy to be financed by bank lending. PNFCs’ liabilities with banks are made up of direct loans from banks’, but also banks’ holding of corporate bonds and equities, issued by PNFCs. I assume that only PNFCs’ bank loans are affected by the increase in banks’ funding costs. Chart 5 illustrates that over the past year the share of bank loans in PNFCs financial liabilities has declined from close to 20% to close to its average over the past two decades of 16%. Allowing for this halves again the estimated cost of higher bank capital – which falls from around 1.7% to 0.8% of annual GDP. This estimate is based on the impact of higher cost of bank lending feeding through to a (Cobb-Douglas) production function, and that implies a high sensitivity of investment to the cost of funds (a unit elasticity of substitution between capital and labour). Bank of England research 11 suggests that this elasticity is probably substantially lower. If that elasticity is 0.4, which looks a central estimate, then the cost of higher bank capital (of 1% of assets) falls from 0.8% of GDP to around 0.3%. Table 1 shows the estimated costs of higher bank capital under various assumptions about the economic environment.

However, there is a risk that African countries could become the biggest casualties of a crisis they did not create. The impact is already severe and has dealt a huge shock to our continent while posing a great threat of reversal to the hard earned social and economic gains that most of our economies had achieved in the recent past. Ladies and Gentlemen, for more than a decade, most African countries had continued to register unprecedented economic growth rates averaging 5% and above. We saw a rise in income levels and a reduction in poverty among our peoples with improved education,  BIS Review 44/2009  1  health, water and infrastructure development. The continent also experienced a surge in investment flows in many sectors including mining, manufacturing, tourism, transport and construction. Progress in governance and accountability had also been noted in most African countries. Mr Chairman, allow me without pre-empting the deliberations to mention some problems the global financial crisis has created for most African economies. Commodity exporting countries have experienced a decline in their export receipts. This has been due to the decline in commodity prices reflecting the weak demand of such commodities arising from the scaled down output in industrialised and emerging market countries. The declining export earnings as well as changing investor sentiment toward investing in emerging markets, which has been reflected in the reversal of investment flows, have been exerting pressure on the exchange rates.
Still as a student at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Sciences at the Warsaw University, back in the late 1980s, I assisted in the works on a model of the Polish economy carried out at the Faculty of Economic Sciences. Soon afterwards, as a result of the fundamental changes in the structure of the Polish economy, consisting in liberalisation of prices and opening to foreign trade, the model became useless as a tool of macroeconomic analysis. Nowadays, the changes observed in the Polish economy are neither so rapid nor radical any more. However, intensification of changes in the global economy, reported in the recent years, must have brought in many economic relations other than those known so far. There have been many structural changes whose force, permanence and significance cannot be assessed on an ongoing basis with the use of econometric models. In principle, such an assessment is feasible only after a few years, which - from 1 the point of view of pursuing an effective monetary policy - is too long a period . This is why in such periods the so-called soft data and information, obtained directly from entrepreneurs, gain particular significance. There are numerous examples of such changes taking place in many countries.

Another factor that is often indicated is the change in the economic policy of the Asian countries after the crisis of 1997-1998, when a decision was taken in many countries to establish huge foreign exchange reserves for the purpose of hedging against similar changes in the sentiment of financial markets in the future 12 . Other hypotheses indicate higher investment attractiveness of the USA in comparison to other regions, measured - inter alia - with the higher potential economic growth rate 13 . There exists another hypothesis, according to which such a high current account deficit is optimal 14 , in the face of the expected higher future growth rate of the American economy in comparison to that of other developed economies. This hypothesis is based on the assumption that Americans increase their present consumption financed from loans, anticipating high future earnings that will allow them to pay off the loans, which is perfectly correct. Finally, there are papers which try to prove that ... there is no deficit. The above-mentioned article by Hausmann and Sturzenegger 15 arguing for the existence of “dark matter” is an example of this approach. In spite of many attempts to prove that the US current account deficit is in fact lower than it is believed to be and that it is even desirable, a vast majority of academic economists and many central bankers are seriously alarmed by the scale of global imbalances.
The world economy is facing tremendous difficulties. I express my confidence that, the coordinated and appropriate policies of the most developed international economies will help prevent a crisis similar in size to that of 1929-1933. It is beyond any shadow of a doubt that this period will have a decisive impact on the world economic model. During such hard times worldwide, it is necessary, now more than ever, that the Romanian authorities should exert caution and wisdom as concerns both public spending and specific promises. The run-up to elections is usually a period when hard to keep promises are easily made. At present, however, despite the most difficult international economic conditions in the post-war period, the pre-election public promises seem far more unrealistic. I would like to reiterate the fact that the NBR policies focus on the euro adoption in 2014. In the medium run, we envisage not only the resumption of disinflation and bringing price hikes in line with the European standards, but also the alleviation of imbalances, especially the gradual narrowing of external deficit, in order to render disinflation sustainable. In terms of monetary policy, it is crucial to foster savings with a view to narrowing the current gap in relation to investment. The increased contribution of the domestic component, amid the rise in saving ratio, can ensure the same high investment rate. In fact, the increase in interest rates, which is part of the current monetary policy stance, was aimed at fostering savings.

A gradual normalisation of the interest rate level and a larger supply of new dwellings are expected to curb the rise in resale home prices in the years ahead. The question of whether financial stability considerations should be explicitly included in monetary policy is a subject of widespread debate, both in academia and within central banks. The answers diverge and international consensus has not yet been reached. A flexible inflation targeting regime provides scope for taking into account the impact of potential financial imbalances on future inflation and output. Asset prices and household credit and debt are inputs for the analysis of future developments in inflation and the output gap. In this way, the assessment of asset prices and debt levels may influence interest rate policy. Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind that the unwinding of financial imbalances may lie many years ahead, well beyond the horizon for the inflation target. It is questionable whether monetary policy today should respond to potential repercussions of possible financial imbalances well beyond the monetary policy horizon. First, it is well documented that asset price bubbles and financial imbalances are very difficult to identify ex ante. Second, the appropriate timing of a proactive monetary response is likely to be difficult to determine, given the lags in the impact of monetary policy.
Bernanke (2004) argues that in such a scenario of inefficient monetary policy, the volatility of both output and prices can be reduced by moving to better policies. In other words, in the presence of an inadequate monetary policy, the outcome could be excessive volatility of output and inflation, and, hence, moving to an efficient policy can “shift the tradeoff to the origin” between output and inflation volatility, reducing both of them. In other words, improvements in monetary management can allow reaching an efficient frontier. For example, a monetary policy that reacts insufficiently to changes in inflation, without fulfilling the Taylor principle, or a policy too optimistic on the full employment level of output, could end up generating unnecessary volatility and inflation. These are reasonable explanations for the conduct of monetary policy in the US before the 1980s’ disinflation. This policy inefficiencies could be even aggravated by a belief on a permanent unemployment/inflation tradeoff, leading potentially to Friedman’s accelerationist hypothesis. However, I want to emphasize the credibility bonus that comes with commitment to inflation stabilization. In a standard Phillips curve framework, inflation depends on the output gap (the reason for the output/inflation volatility tradeoff), inflation expectations, and a set of other variables including inflationary shocks. Let’s consider the case of low credibility in a low inflation objective. In such a case, an inflationary shock may feedback into price and wage formation, requiring a more aggressive monetary policy response, and hence, making it costlier to reduce inflation.

Bartering is a complicated and time-consuming process. Someone who wants to sell an item has to find a buyer who wants that particular item at that particular time. And the buyer must also be able to offer something in exchange that the seller wants. The need for a third item that could serve as an intermediary in the bartering process thus arose at an early stage in the history of civilisation. Metals of various kinds, especially silver and gold, soon acquired a central position as a currency for trade as they are relatively durable and easy to transport and divide. An important step in the development process was taken when people began to use the metals to mint coins. This made it possible to use an authorised stamp that guaranteed that the metal content and weight were correct. The next logical step was taken when people realised they could use pieces of paper to represent the value of a metal coin. In other words, notes that could be exchanged for metal coins on request. This made handling and transportation even easier and worked as long as the public accepted the notes as a means of payment and had confidence in those who issued them. A further stage in the development process was reached when it became possible to issue money without the back-up of reserves in the form, for example, of gold and silver.