samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Monetary policy therefore involves balancing the risks of acting too soon against those of acting too late. Acting prematurely is liable to lead to unemployment being higher than it need be. If the Riksbank acts too late, on the other hand, price and wage increases may already have got under way. In that case, the economy may ultimately land in a recession, perhaps with even higher unemployment. Fortunately, it is not a question of either/or. A monetary policy adjustment can be decided gradually, with stepwise changes in the repo rate. Consequently it is always possible to compare forecasts with outcomes, assess the policy stance continuously and make the adjustments that are considered to be necessary. If monetary policy is successful, a foundation is laid, not only for low, stable inflation in line with the target and the Riksbank’s statutory objective, but also for a stable long-term growth of output and employment. Seen from this angle, low inflation, besides being our objective, is accordingly a means of trying to achieve a stable economic development in general. That is something which should be underscored. Inflation prospects In an analysis of the situation in the run up to the next Inflation Report, due to be published on 7 December, the following can be noted: •  The price trend to date is approximately in line with the forecast that was presented in the October Report. •  As expected, there have been signals that international economic activity is tending to become somewhat slacker.

Let me now refer to what I call a new set of instruments and their consequences for monetary policy. So far I have assumed that dealing with financial stress involves only “traditional” instruments. But if financial stress is too severe, some unconventional actions may be in order. In particular, if financial stress damages financial intermediation substantially, the channels through which “traditional” policy responses operate will be shut down. This is a “financial crisis”: a severe disruption of intermediation in financial markets. The policy response in this case is going to depend crucially on the type of financial market we are operating in. During the recent financial crisis, we saw direct interventions of some  6  BIS Review 76/2010  central banks in financial markets. This direct policy intervention has been called credit policy. Given that financial intermediation is severely impaired, central banks have stepped in to replace private financial intermediaries. In this way, central banks avoid a collapse of the economy and the self-reinforcing forces of deflationary spirals. In economies where banks are the most important financial intermediaries, credit policy may be less effective. That may be the reason why in some emerging market economies, state-owned banks apparently played an important role in mitigating the recent crisis. And also why in the past, a common policy action following a financial crisis was to intervene private banks. Coming back to credit policy, this policy has resulted in a significant increase in the balance sheets of central banks necessary to finance those operations.
In 2022, when the oil price exceeds the cut-off level, the current account balance will return to positive territory and the accumulation of reserves will be resumed via fiscal rule-based foreign currency purchases. We do not expect a noticeable change in the private sector financial account balance over the forecast horizon. According to our estimates, the private sector financial account deficit will reduce from USD 18 billion in 2019 to USD 15 billion this year. This is linked to decline in GDP, decrease in economic revenues, as well as less possibilities for borrowing in foreign markets at the end of the first quarter — the start of the second quarter amid intensified volatility and uncertainty. Further ahead, as global markets stabilise, the potential for external bollowings will recover and this will pass through to a reduction in the private sector financial account deficit to USD 10 billion in 2021–2022. This baseline scenario, without doubt, has many uncertainty factors. They concern both the duration of the restrictions in Russia and worldwide, and the pace of recovery of the global and Russian economies. Besides, new spikes of volatility may occur in global financial and commodity markets. Therefore, in our discussions of the key rate decision and its path, we have a proper regard to the objective of sustaining financial stability. As I noted, the baseline forecast incorporates only the fiscal decisions already made by the Government. We assume that further on the situation may require additional decisions to support the economy.

In fact, during those early days, some of those countries were able to freely utilize the labour and resources of the countries that were colonized by them, and benefit immensely by the fruits of the foreign lands and natural resources. They had to adhere to very few laws and regulations relating to education, training, health or labour practices, or standards on working conditions. There were no environmental laws or treaties, and the environment was often the first casualty in their quest of accumulating wealth. Capital accumulated by illegal means or criminal activity was used freely without any restriction. 2  BIS Review 29/2008  But, today the situation is completely different. Today, emerging countries are acting in a much more responsible manner in driving their economies forward. In fact, the present day emerging economies are achieving their attractive levels of growth, while adhering to, and respecting international conventions on copyright, anti-money laundering and terrorist financing, environmental, labour, human rights, safety, health, etc., etc. This situation is sometimes forgotten by some of the economic and political analysts, particularly from advanced nations and therefore it may not be too inappropriate to remind the world of this state of affairs, on and off. All in all, from the point of view of individual developing countries, the most important economic need at present is to maintain the high economic growth momentum that they are currently achieving, in a sustainable manner.
In exchange for being allowed to profit from taking the risks inherent in providing liquidity, or monetary and credit, services to the economy, banks have been subject to prudential regulation; given access to liquidity insurance at the central bank; and required to finance industry-wide insurance schemes to protect depositors. All three components have needed to be redesigned. I offered a few thoughts on the first – the regulation of banks – at the conference on the FSA’s Turner Report a few weeks ago. On microprudential supervision. I wanted to add four  BIS Review 83/2009  1  points. First, that supervisors must be expert, unafraid to substitute their judgment for that of management and the board where necessary, but restrain themselves from doing so except when needed. Second, that concentrated exposures, on either side of the balance sheet, must be limited. Third, that complex structures rendering a bank unsupervisable must not be permitted, as the BCCI crisis taught us nearly twenty years ago. And fourth, that regulatory requirements for capital, liquidity and so on should take into account how much risk a bank brings to the system as a whole. As one of my predecessors, George Blunden said over twenty years ago, “Supervisory standards are set with an eye to protecting [banks] from problems which could be created by wider, systemic developments. A bank may consider a course of action it wishes to take to be acceptable – as it may well be in a limited context.

I hope that the Financial Stability Board Working Group on the Crisis Management Principles will not hesitate to report back to the FSB, and through it to alert G20 Ministers, if implementation is or looks to be stalling – whether because it is meeting with resistance from the authorities or the industry, or blockages in national laws and practices. 8  BIS Review 83/2009  Concluding comment This crisis has reminded a generation of some old truths. Banks can fail. But they matter enormously to our economies, and so the authorities cannot afford to stand back and allow disorderly systemic failure. Going forward, we cannot have a regime where the upside for risk-taking goes to shareholders and management, but the downside falls to the general taxpayer. All three elements of the Social Contract for banking need to be reformed. Better regulation and supervision, including a macroprudential element. Better arrangements for liquidity insurance, which the Bank has tried to introduce alongside our international peers. And, my main topic today, a new regime for resolving bank distress. In particular, banks must structure and run themselves to permit orderly wind down. And they must invest to provide the authorities with the information they need to do so. This will not be easy. And it will not be cheap. Together with higher capital and liquidity requirements – lower leverage and reduced maturity transformations – over time it may well mean a lower headline return on equity for some banks.
** To conclude, let me quote one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, Benjamin Franklin: “we must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” Hanging together is exactly what we should aim for within Europe – to build a more integrated Union – and outside Europe – to work on a renewed multilateralism. 1 Cf. Speech at the Paris School of Economics, 24 September 2019. 3/3  BIS central bankers' speeches

So, from this point of view it means they can operate as a stand-alone but due to parent bank strategies they are inhibited. Do you think there is opportunity for more entrants in the banking sector? Currently at 16 banks, we have too many. In that case, do you see more mergers and acquisitions occurring? Yes, absolutely, in fact it is a process that I have been encouraging in the last 2 years, sending signals and urging banks towards this end. 7–10 banks would be ideal. There is another strong possibility that parent company banks may decide to sell their Macedonian subsidiaries, which are very solid banks, possibly resulting in some strong international brands entering the market. Based on your position and knowledge of the Macedonian marketplace. Please offer a personal message to our American Investor readers. Macedonia’s market is not yet saturated and there is room for investors at the earliest stages. We are actively pursuing and obtaining EU standards and EU accession is certainly something to benefit from when it does occur. First-movers entering this market will be the ones benefiting from the immediate and privileged market access. The beauty is that there are strong returns available now, not just after accession! BIS central bankers’ speeches  3
These measures needed to be implemented rapidly and central banks were in an advantageous position for acting swiftly due to their vicinity to financial markets, their operational framework and their clear and independent decision structure. But these measures ultimately have their limits in terms of effect and legitimacy. The risk of undermining the primary mandate of central banks needs to be taken into account. Yet, I will argue that indeed crisis management and, hence, the preservation of financial stability is an integral part of our role as central bank, serving ultimately to fulfil our mandate. The Treaty commits the ESCB primarily to maintain price stability in Article 127/1 and confers the task on the ESCB to contribute to the stability of the financial system in Article 127/5. Our mandate is clear, it is comprehensive, it is adequate and it should not be questioned. Clearly, central banks should not be overburdened. In the ECB’s case, short-term stabilisation measures were important and necessary. However, structural problems require a structural response. These deficits need to be addressed by reinforcing the available policy instruments outside the purview of the central bank. The work for the report by the four presidents of the European Council, the Commission, the Eurogroup and the ECB, which will be submitted to the Heads of State and Government at the end of this year, is an important step to address the economic misalignments and institutional shortcomings in the euro area.

5  1  An additional element has been exchange rate targeting which was based on an external anchor. Effectively, this represents an intermediate objective if domestic credibility of the central bank may be weak. 2  See Greenspan (2002), Blinder (2005), Mishkin (2007) and Bean, Paustian, Penalver, and Taylor (2010), “Monetary Policy after the Fall”, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Annual Conference, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, August. 3  See the discussion in Christiano, Ilut, Motto, and Rostagno (2010) on “Monetary policy and Stock Market Booms.”  4  See “A Monetary Policy Strategy in Good and Bad Times: Lessons from the Recent Past” Fahr, Motto, Rostagno, Smets and Tristani, ECB Working Paper Series No. 1336, May 2011. 5  See the evidence in Fischer, Lenza, Pill and Reichlin (2008): “Money and monetary policy – the ECB experience 1999–2006” and Trichet (2008): “Risk and the Macro-economy”, Keynote address at the conference “The ECB and its watchers X”. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Nonetheless, I think it is fair to say that nobody – including central bankers – has expected a crisis of the dimension that we have been experiencing since five years. 6 The overall favourable macroeconomic constellation from the Great Moderation, with low volatility and robust growth, has certainly induced some benign neglect – also on the policy side.
In one example, a PPI policy bundled with a mortgage – cost the customer more than £ over the term of the loan, even though the maximum amount claimable was only £ The FSA reported that this abuse stemmed from “a culture in banks and other firms that focussed on profit over customer outcomes”. Closer to our region, we saw in 2001 the unexpected failure of the Australian HIH Insurance Group, which experienced estimated losses totalling AUD 5.3 billion. This was attributed in part to a culture where the board was “unduly deferential” to management, and staff simply did not question leadership decisions. In fact, instances of failures in professionalism and integrity do not seem to have waned since the global financial crisis. According to the Boston Consulting Group, banks have paid fines amounting to USD 321 billion to regulators around globe since the crisis through the end of 2016. Instances of misconduct range widely – from the well-known rigging of LIBOR and Euribor rates, to the more recently uncovered case of Wells Fargo, where over 2 million fake accounts were 1/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  opened under a senior management who fostered “an atmosphere that prompted low quality sales and improper and unethical behaviour”. Our financial industry is not invulnerable to the ethical challenge. In the 1980s and 90s, we had cases of Malaysian banks that suffered significant losses arising from imprudent lending under ethically questionable decisions by top management.

Denis Beau: Navigating the digital transition, maintaining a stable payment system Opening address by Mr Denis Beau, First Deputy Governor of the Bank of France, at the France Payments Forum – Les Rencontres Digitales Conference 2021 – Crypto-payments, 8 April 2021. * * *  Introduction The health crisis that we have all been living through for a year now has affected people’s day-today habits, changing not only how we consume but also how we like to pay. This has sped up the transition towards more digital approaches. This acceleration raises major challenges for Europe’s payment ecosystem, but also for payment regulators and supervisors. Thinking now specifically from the viewpoint of the latter, the central question to be addressed is as follows: how to facilitate and support the transition whilst at the same time maintaining the foundations that underpin a safe and efficient payment system. From a safety perspective, these foundations are built on an appropriate regulatory framework and on the availability under any circumstance of central bank money, which alone has legal tender status and which anchors the stability of the whole system; efficiency, meanwhile, relies on having diverse and competing payment solutions and participants, to ensure inclusivity and competitiveness. I would like to share with you my perspective on the answers to this question.
Ravi Menon: China-Singapore financial connectivity Speech by Mr Ravi Menon, Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, at the 2nd RMB Internationalisation Summit, Singapore, 7 June 2016. *  *  *  Mr Jiang Jianqing, former Chairman of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China His Excellency Mr Chen Xiaodong, Ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to Singapore Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, good morning. I am happy to join you and would like to thank ICBC for the invitation. China’s economic transformation China’s economy is at a major inflection point, balancing three objectives. •  First, to manage a moderation in its economic growth without undue disruption. •  Second, to resolve vulnerabilities in its economy and financial system without triggering a crisis of confidence. •  Third, to implement perhaps the most comprehensive and ambitious structural reform programme of any country in modern times. In the short term, these three objectives may at times be in conflict, presenting a trilemma of difficult trade-offs for policymakers. But if successfully executed, they are mutually reinforcing and will lay the foundation for a more sustainable and vibrant economy. China’s economic restructuring has deep implications for Asia. A new configuration - a new regional value-chain - is taking shape across the region, driven by three features of China’s economic transformation. First, China is shifting from a labour-intensive industrial structure to a more skill and technology-intensive one. •  China is inshoring more high value-added production within China.

•  There is a growing cluster of Chinese asset managers that are keen to set up in Singapore, attracted by our pan-Asian focus and broad base of international investors. •  They cover a broad spectrum of investments, ranging from traditional asset managers to hedge funds to private equity funds. Conclusion Let me conclude. The biggest story for Asia in the last three decades has been the rise of China. Asia’s biggest story in the next three decades will be the transformation of China. It will not be an easy transition, as China deals with the challenges of debt, deflation, and demographics. There will be dislocations and bouts of volatility along the way, with spillovers into Asia. But if China successfully addresses its vulnerabilities and restructures its economy, it will pave the way for more sustained growth and a more advanced economy. The new China that will emerge will open up new opportunities for Asian economies. The RMB will become more international and Chinese corporates and financial institutions more global. Singapore is well-positioned to partner Chinese companies in their regional journey and deepen China’s connectivity to Asia through trade and investment. The next chapter of ChinaSingapore financial partnership will be exciting and rewarding. I wish you fruitful discussions and a pleasant stay in Singapore. Thank you. BIS central bankers’ speeches  5
With respect to borrowing, co-ordination is necessary in order to prevent separate Government agencies from competing with each other and ‘spoiling’ the market, especially in the early stages of its development, and to make possible the formulation of a properly diversified pattern of interest rates and maturities for the entire Government borrowing program.” Those Sections of the MLA that I referred to, and the relevant annotations in Exter’s Report, strongly suggest that the Central Bank should play a dynamic role in the formulation of fiscal policy, particularly in relation to a significant part of fiscal policy’s sphere of influence, namely that of borrowing and lending. In that context, it may be safely argued that, whilst the overwhelming responsibility for monetary policy has to be assumed by the Central Bank, a sizeable part of the responsibility in relation to fiscal policy is also cast upon the Central Bank. Fourth: Exter explains the unique position of the Governor, and the need for the Governor to be independent. This position is assured by the fact that the Governor is appointed for a 6 year term and cannot be removed from office, unless he has done any act, which in the opinion of the Governor General, (now, the President), is of a fraudulent or illegal character, or is against the interest of the Central Bank. Fifth: Exter discusses the limitations of the Central Bank: Once again, let me quote: “A central bank influences the economic life of a nation principally by monetary action.

So, a balance was struck and the decision to increase the petroleum prices was postponed until February 2012, because we knew that, by that time, the inflation figures would be very low, at less than 3%, and that benign situation would then give us a comfortable cushion to make the price adjustment, without harming the inflation numbers or the inflation outlook. This was then, just one, but a representative case study of holding on to a difficult position in the short term, to realize a long term position, so as to benefit by an even more significant outcome. It was, as Exter may have been happy to acknowledge had he been present, a pragmatic decision of the Government working closely with the Central Bank, cooperating on a complex and delicate issue, to deliver stability and growth in the long term. A “shared vision” and “goal congruence” Mr. Chairman, I am often asked by people as to the exact definition of the economic philosophy behind our country’s economic policies. As is usual in any field of learning, academics and scholars like to categorize a series of policies, according to a general character, or to place them in a framework of a pre-determined school of thought. Where then would our current economic policy framework, fit in? Is there a particular model that Sri Lanka follows? To respond to such questions, let us try to understand what exactly our economic planners are doing, and what they are attempting to achieve.