samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Against the background of this centralised decision-making structure, the role of the 11 national central banks consists mainly of the practical implementation of monetary policy and other tasks of the Eurosystem, such as the issuance of banknotes, the collection of monetary statistics or the operation of the Eurosystem’s payment systems. The fact that these tasks have to be carried out on the basis of agreed rules and specific instructions given by the decision-making bodies of the ECB, however, by no means lessens the importance of the national central banks in the overall set-up of the Eurosystem. *** Another particular characteristic of EMU is that, while Monetary Union has led to the introduction of a single monetary policy, Economic Union has not resulted in the development of other common macroeconomic policies, which instead remain in the hands of the national governments of the Union’s Member States. With a centralised monetary policy and decentralised fiscal and structural policies, the economic and monetary pillars of EMU can appear to be somewhat uneven at first glance. But we should not be fooled by appearances. In fact, the structure of EMU’s economic pillar reflects the need to strike an appropriate balance between providing flexibility and diversity, while - at the same time - ensuring that all of the economic policies of the euro area contribute to the success of EMU. Two factors have to be considered in this regard.

*** Talking with hindsight, after one year of experience since the successful launch of the euro on 1 January 1999, the most important challenge to the Eurosystem was the definition of the appropriate monetary policy for the euro area as a whole. In this respect, the Eurosystem had to navigate uncharted waters, since it could neither build upon practical experience with policies for the euro area as a whole nor on any reputation of its own, although it could draw upon the reputation and experience of the national central banks. In fact, apart from theoretical considerations and econometric test runs, we had - in that sense - to start right from scratch. The complexity of this challenge can easily be derived from the fact that the Eurosystem has to define a single monetary policy for a quite heterogeneous area that, as mentioned earlier, stretches from Lapland in the north of Europe to Andalusia in the very south. From a US point of view, this might not appear particularly demanding. The Federal Reserve System has always been confronted with the challenge of defining a single monetary policy for an even larger and likewise not fully homogeneous area. However, there seems to be a substantive difference. The US economy has evolved over decades, even centuries, under the conditions of the specific political set-up of the United States.
A few years later, a group of researchers: Rafael Anes, Carlos Fernández Pulgar, Diego Mateo del Peral, Pedro Tedde and Gabriel Tortella, undertook a far-reaching project on the history of the Spanish banking system. The result was La banca española en la Restauración, published in 1974. Since then, a number of books have been published by the Bank of Spain, sometimes in collaboration with commercial editors. To mention just two of these books: El Servicio de Estudios del Banco de España, 1930-2000; and Un siglo de historia del sistema financiero español (in Spanish and English). Moreover, the early history of the Bank has been covered by three volumes written by Tedde de Lorca: El Banco de San Carlos (1782-1829); El Banco Español de San Fernando, 1829-1856; and El Banco de España y el Estado liberal, 1847-1874. The Banco de España has also shown its interest in Spanish economic history through its annual research grants programme, financing the collection of Estudios de Historia Económica (or, in Banco de España parlance, “the red books”). There are now 72 of these studies, the first ones dating back to 1980. The aim of the Banco de España with this collection is to disseminate economic history papers written by its own staff or by researchers to whom it has awarded grants, in order “to enhance knowledge of Spanish economic history, paying particular attention to quantitative aspects”.

Keynes, both on microfilm, makes the library an excellent repository for undertaking any study of economic history. Let me conclude with a few words about today’s III Seminar of Economic History that we are opening now. As you can see in the programme, we have about thirty participants from a dozen universities, central banks and research centres. Economists from the Banco de España are participating as authors and also as discussants of a number of papers on historical episodes that are relevant to our understanding of the world of today. Many thanks to all the participants, authors and discussants. We are really honoured this year to have with us one of the leading expert in the history of central banking, Professor Charles Goodhart, for many years at the Bank of England and now at the London School of Economics. Thank you very much, Professor Goodhart, for joining us today. Now, without further ado, I give the floor to Pablo Martin Aceña, for his introductory remarks. 4/4
It is much more likely that it reflects the magnetic attraction of the US at present as a destination for long-term investment. And while that may partly reflect relatively greater flexibility on the supply-side of the US economy, it does not have much to do, as far as I can see, with the introduction of the euro. Of course, whatever the cause, the euro’s weakness complicates the task of monetary policy within the Eurozone. It adds to inflation in itself and amplifies the inflationary effect of the rise in oil prices. The ECB is rightly concerned to ensure that these effects do not feed through into an increase in the rate of core inflation. Given the importance of the Eurozone as far and away our major trading partner, the weakness of the euro, in this case more specifically its weakness against sterling, also, of course, complicates our own monetary policy task in the UK. Looking at the aggregate economic data the UK has had a rather good run now for the past seven or eight years. We have grown fairly steadily quarter by quarter at an average annual rate over that period of some 2¾%, which is well above our longer term trend rate - usually estimated at around 2¼%. Employment has risen steadily so that the number of people employed is the highest on record. And the rate of unemployment is as low as it has been for about twenty years.

Consequently, it would convert the tendency of the region to be negatively contaminated from global developments into an opportunity, a positive impact, in order to achieve high and stable economy growth in the long run. Thank you! BIS central bankers’ speeches  3
The third pool of local talent that we want to tap on is our network of overseas Singaporeans. Overseas Singaporeans in finance and in technology are well placed to excel in Singapore’s international financial centre. They have a solid understanding of overseas markets, useful networks, and good experience working in a cross-cultural environment. Indeed, many returning Singaporeans have progressed well in their careers and taken on leadership roles here. Take for example Melissa Lim who returned from Germany. Melissa is a Technology & Innovation Strategy Director at Standard Chartered Bank, where she is involved in driving the bank’s tech strategy and other transformation projects. Prior to that, Melissa spent five years in Frankfurt, Germany, where she was the Head of Investment Platform Transformation at Allianz Global Investors, leading a global team to deliver strategic investment transformation programmes. Melissa is one of the panellists for the Relocation Fireside later today, so do tune in to hear more from her. I hope that more overseas Singaporeans – when you are ready to return home – will take up opportunities in Singapore’s vibrant financial sector, grow further in your careers, and make a difference here in Asia. As important as growing the Singaporean Core, we must continue to welcome and embrace high quality global talent. I know questions have been raised on Singapore’s continued openness to global talent. First, the pandemic-related border controls were very difficult for many of our expatriate staff and their families. Many firms faced challenges bringing in foreign manpower due to our border controls.

Notwithstanding some recent signs of improvement in the economic outlook, it is premature to declare the financial crisis over. From today’s perspective, the need for enhanced credit support remains. Therefore, for the time being central bank liquidity is likely to remain abundant. This does not mean, however, that the broader concept of liquidity in terms of monetary aggregates grows strongly. And it is this broader concept, not central bank liquidity itself, which is related to inflationary pressures over the medium term. Of course, central bank credit and broader monetary aggregates are linked over time. In a modern banking system, and in normal circumstances, central bank credit is largely used by banks – in the form of required reserves – to create bank credit, and expand deposits and broad money aggregates. So, an increased provision of central bank credit can lead – more or less automatically – to an increase in broad money. In current conditions, that link has been weakened, however. Today, banks – in the aggregate – tend to hold part of the central bank credit that they obtain in our refinancing operations not as a reserve against an expansion of loans and deposits, but in the form of  8  BIS Review 103/2009  excess reserves deposited with the Eurosystem. This attenuates the automatic link between the provision of central bank liquidity and broad money. And, as a consequence, it attenuates the inflationary potential of the Eurosystem’s outstanding credit to banks.
Such a difference would also be motivated if the market rate were to be affected by short-term shocks in financial markets. In the light of what we know today, however, the direction of the krona’s path seems to be clear: ERM2 membership, if it occurs, will be arranged at an exchange rate that is stronger than the recent level. 7  BIS Review 48/1999

We may be more familiar with “less is more”, which is the mantra for designing friendly user interfaces or cool technology products. But new platforms in retail payments, data infrastructure and cross-border payments tend to be more successful and sustainable when they achieve widespread adoption and leading to strong network effects. 23. Just think about FPS. Would you still use it every day if your friends and family were not on the platform? From the design stage, we aimed to include more currencies and payment institutions, so as to attract a rapid build-up of users. The result is the world’s first multi-currency instant payment system connecting banks, e-wallets, and customers. With this strong network effect, FPS adoption in Hong Kong is perhaps one of the fastest in the world. We are strengthening this network effect further by introducing FPS payments for merchants and government bills. 24. Or think about why we launched CDI. Data is an essential nutrient to technological development. Currently, commercial data is scattered across isolated data islands built bilaterally between banks and individual data providers. The idea of CDI is to provide a common data infrastructure that will replace these compartmentalised, one-to-one connections with an efficient many-to-many connection. Banks will have common access to a sea of data which allows them to compete on innovation in service delivery. For this to happen, we need scale. We need to connect as many data providers, data consumers and data owners as possible in order to create the network effect. 25.
But it certainly has helped us to achieve a significantly better macro-economic performance over the past few years, and that in itself has helped in addressing at least some of our social problems. Over the eight years or so since the last recession in the early 1990s retail price inflation - on the Government’s target measure - has averaged some 2¾%. That’s a lower rate for longer than anyone can remember. This much greater degree of price stability is a “good thing” in itself - economically because it contributes to more rational, longer-term, decision making, but also socially, because it is typically the poorer, less financially sophisticated, sectors of society - for example those living on low fixed incomes - that suffer most from inflation. But low inflation is not simply an end in itself. The real benefit is that alongside sustained stability we have experienced the longest period of quarter-by-quarter growth since quarterly records began. Over the whole period annual output growth has averaged a little over 2¾% which is significantly higher than the earlier trend rate of around 2¼%. But more even than that, employment has increased steadily by nearly 2½m people over the same period, so that the number in work is today the highest on record. And unemployment has progressively fallen almost month by month on a claimant count basis (though with a slight setback last month) and the rate of unemployment is just about the lowest rate we’ve seen for about 25 years in the UK as a whole.

There is the same need therefore to make hard choices between alternative means, and the international process for making those choices is inevitably more complicated than in our national environment. To take some examples, there is substantial evidence that increasingly free world trade and increasing freedom of international capital flows are contributing to unprecedented rates of growth in the global economy as a whole and more rapidly rising living standards in almost every region of the global economy. It is certainly possible to argue even so that the free trade playing field remains tilted against poorer countries, or that it should be tilted more in their favour: distinguishing between self-interested protectionism and “fairness” or equality of competition is not wholly straightforward. But there would be a real cost to all of us, including particularly the poorer countries, if we were to be tempted to throw the baby out with the bath water and retreat behind trade barriers. 5  BIS Review 110/2000  Similarly we have recently seen all too clearly the damage that can be caused by the volatility of international capital flows - but we need to set that against the positive benefits - in terms of potential growth rates - that had previously resulted from massively greater private sector capital investment in many of the emerging markets, and which has now resumed.
This is because the bank may be disinclined to abandon its special vehicle if only to protect its name and reputation. Whatever the case, it means that the financing problems that affect the special vehicles can easily lead back into the bank. What one has regarded as true sale may in reality not always have been so. Credit ratings attracted investors but were used wrongly As you realise, the result has been an extremely complicated structure. Many asset classes have arisen, each with their own unique conditions and idiosyncrasies in pricing. This has in turn made it difficult to assess the different products. Then they can instead obtain help from the credit rating agencies. With the aid of the credit rating the agencies have issued, investors have been persuaded to invest in the products. Credit ratings are excellent aids that measure the probability of a failure or an expected loss. But they do not take into account how the risks covary and are otherwise distributed. Unfortunately, many investors appear to have disregarded these limitations. In addition, all of the repackaging, special middlemen and more or less visible guarantees have made it difficult to gain insight into where the risks are. In particular the geographical spread appears to have been greater than in earlier episodes of financial turbulence. 2  BIS Review 30/2008  Uncertainty increased and liquidity disappeared When the problems in the subprime market began to show here and there, this caused great uncertainty.

Jean-Pierre Roth: Fifteen months of financial crisis – a status report Summary of a speech by Mr Jean-Pierre Roth, Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Bank for International Settlements, at the Associazione Bancaria Ticinese, Centro di Studi Bancari, Vezia, 3 December 2008. The complete speech can be found in French on the Swiss National Bank’s website (www.snb.ch). *  *  *  The financial crisis broke out a little over fifteen months ago. The magnitude of the turmoil experienced by the financial industry has been greater than all the forecasts. So far, our entire attention has been focused on the problems of the financial industry, while the real economy appeared to be passing through this difficult period without too many problems. We now realise that this view was deceptive: the situation in the non-financial sector is deteriorating substantially. This could lead to new challenges in 2009. After having benefitted extensively from the international expansion of the past few years, we are currently experiencing the consequences of a widespread recession. This situation is difficult for our country, but we may be better placed than others for coping with it. BIS Review 150/2008  1
Meanwhile, but sometimes with lags, the French capital account was liberalised. We switched from a situation, in 1983, where the exchange rate controls were at their tightest, following speculative attacks and three devaluations in 18 months, to a gradual removal of these controls beginning in 1984 and completed in 1990. Trade-related operations were gradually liberalised, followed by most financial transactions and, finally, residents were allowed to freely open foreign currency accounts and French banks to lend French francs to non–residents. 2  BIS Review 64/2007  Of course, the Indian experience differs from the French one as there is no "one-size-fits-all" transition process. And I would be very interested in listening to your views on this. 2. But before, let me remind you that, to be successful, it is not sufficient to improve the financial system: shaping appropriate institutions and economic policies is of the essence  The need to set in place strong institutions should never be underestimated. A G20 work entitled "Institution building in the financial sector" (in which both India and France participated) stressed the importance of solid institutions along with deep and sophisticated financial markets as key elements to maximise the benefits of globalisation and reduce the risks of financial crises. An appropriate institutional framework includes among others a well functioning legal system, a reliable payment system, a proper framework for regulation and supervision, an appropriate deposit insurance scheme, and propitious conditions for implementing new developments in information and communication technology.

Should the general economic situation indeed deteriorate further, the solvency of borrowers would also worsen. This would result in losses in the big banks’ lending portfolios. The effect on banks with a domestic business focus would depend on the extent of the deterioration in the international environment. Entering into risk is a bank’s core business and, as such, is desirable. What is important is that these risks can be both calculated and carried. However, experience shows that is not always the case. In each of the three most recent international financial crises, a Swiss big bank was particularly hard hit. Each time a crisis occurred an increasing amount of equity was wiped out. This should serve as a warning. If the wheels are not set in motion now, the impact of the next crisis could be even more severe. Should a big bank collapse, the consequences for Switzerland would be dire. Therefore, measures need to be taken now in order to ensure that the Swiss big banks are sufficiently  BIS Review 80/2008  1  resilient in the future. The SNB and the Swiss Federal Banking Commission recognise a need for action in – basically – four areas: capital, liquidity, monitoring and crisis management. In our stability report we discuss measures in all four areas. Today I would like to focus on the most important measures in the area of capital. It is in the nature of the financial markets that there will always be crises.
First, they expand the possibility frontier of the technology of collective decisions and can be designed to raise the cost of those decisions deviating from pre-announced contingent paths. Second, they are set up explicitly to exercise a degree of discretion - “constrained discretion” - subject to the broad objective of price stability. Discretion is inevitable because of the need to learn about the economic environment. Institutions thereby become repositories of experience and knowledge which they communicate to society as a whole. III. Case Study I: Exchange rate regimes in Brazil and the UK  I want to illustrate the importance of institutions and the credibility of their stability by three case studies. My first example concerns the collapse of exchange rate regimes in Europe and Latin America. It demonstrates that economic institutions require a broad base of political support if financial markets are to believe that those institutions are likely to survive. For a while fixed exchange rate regimes enjoyed a degree of support in both Europe, with the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), and Latin America. But experience shows that, in terms of credibility in financial markets, the design of those policy regimes was less important than the fact of their having broad political support. Brazil in 1998-99 is a case in point. In 1998 Brazil operated a crawling peg exchange rate regime.

Thus, notwithstanding our sense of urgency, we are heading here for an evolutionary change: Athena in her helmet will not spring full-grown from the head of Zeus! And, as with all transitions from one era to another, we can expect risks and uncertainties to persist for some years to come. This makes it all the more urgent to get to work on this new architecture right away. Initial steps for a new architecture In fact, a number of significant steps are already under way. At its April meeting, our governing body, the Interim Committee (of Ministers and Central Bank Governors of IMF member countries), set the broad agenda for the IMF’s own work - and its work with others - for the near future. Five areas have been given priority by member governments: •  1  The central role to be played by the IMF in crisis prevention through its surveillance and its role in encouraging members to strengthen their macroeconomic policies and financial sectors.1  Of course, it is clear that for IMF surveillance to be effective, member countries must provide timely, accurate, and comprehensive data to the Fund. The Interim Committee underscored members’ obligation in BIS Review 43/1998  -4-  The Interim Committee suggests that the Fund intensify its work in surveillance of financial sector issues and capital flows, and focus on the risks posed by potentially abrupt reversals of capital flows, especially those of a short-term nature.