samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
If the FOMC did not make this adjustment, the stronger dollar could result in an undesired tightening of U.S. financial conditions. The expected forward interest rate paths in Europe and Japan have fallen considerably this year. If the FOMC had followed the median federal funds rate path from the December 2015 SEP projection, then the U.S. dollar would likely have appreciated much more significantly. Instead, the U.S. interest rate path has come down in tandem with the foreign interest rate paths and the dollar has appreciated only modestly. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  This is a crucial point and I want to make sure there is no misunderstanding. The Federal Reserve is not targeting the exchange value of the U.S. dollar. What the FOMC considers are financial conditions broadly defined, because they affect the saving and investment decisions of households and firms. The dollar is but one component of these financial conditions. The level of short- and long-term rates, credit spreads, and equity prices are also important components of the financial conditions that we closely monitor. If international developments shift U.S. financial market conditions – including the dollar – then we need to take this into consideration in our U.S. monetary policy decisions. Third, I have found that market participants broadly appreciate that the FOMC needs to take a risk management approach in its conduct of monetary policy. There are at least two important aspects of this approach.

With respect to communication, in recent years the Federal Reserve has shifted towards much greater transparency. This includes quarterly press conferences by the Fed chair following FOMC meetings; publishing growth, inflation and short-term interest rate forecasts of FOMC participants on a quarterly basis; and a concerted effort to lay out the guideposts that the FOMC will look at in assessing progress towards our dual mandate objectives. On the communication front, although we have come a long way, I would admit that there is still room for further improvement. For example, the focus of the SEP on the each participant’s modal forecast does not convey how much uncertainty there is about the economic outlook. Similarly, language used in FOMC statements can become stale over time. We tend to make relatively few changes to the statement language each meeting because of the acute market sensitivity to such changes. One could argue that this might not be the best practice to follow, but we should recognize that there would also be significant transition costs if we were to make more extensive revisions to the statement at each meeting. 6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  For monetary policy to be effective, it is important to have clarity about what the FOMC can be clear and consistent about – its manner of responses to mitigate the potential harmful effects of disturbances and the goals of policy. In contrast, our monetary policy projections and the actions we take cannot be static.
The dispersion of services sector productivity is more than 50% higher in the UK than in other advanced economies (Chart 20a). It has also widened by materially more in the UK. Even in a world of long and lengthening tails of low-productivity companies, the UK is a striking outlier. One potential explanation for this longer tail of UK companies than elsewhere is poor management practices. Using the database developed by Bloom and Van Reenen (2007), we can plot a normalised distribution of management skills for a subset of UK firms. 51  This suggests (a lack of) management quality is a plausible  candidate explanation for the UK’s long tail of companies, as Bloom and Van Reenen find (Chart 21). Looked at quantitatively, there is a statistically significant link between the quality of firms’ management processes and practices and their productivity. And the effect is large. A one standard deviation improvement in the quality of management raises productivity by, on average, around 10%. This suggests potentially high returns to policies which improve the quality of management within companies. Decomposing the Distribution  We can go further in uncovering some of the characteristics of the companies in the upper and lower tails. Might they simply reflect sharp regional differences in productivity, with frontier companies clustered in some regions and laggards in others? Might it simply reflect some sectors, such as manufacturing, generating higher levels of productivity and sitting in the frontier while others, such as services, occupy the lower tail?

The latter episodes have typically been associated with periods of rapid technological th  th  th  change, as after the three industrial revolutions of the mid-18 , mid-19 and mid-20 centuries. In each case, there was a significant lag between the arrival of new technologies and their impact on productivity. Rates of technological diffusion were relatively slow and sedate. This is typically felt to have reflected the time it takes for new technologies to find widespread use and become General Purpose Technologies (GPTs). 34  After the first Industrial Revolution, it took around 70-100 years for technological  diffusion to occur, GPTs to emerge and TFP and living standards to rise. 35  Subsequent industrial revolutions have also seen a lag between the emergence of new technologies and their impact on productivity. But there is evidence this diffusion lag may have shortened. Comin and th  th  Mestieri (2014) estimate the diffusion lag during the industrial revolutions of the late 19 and 20 centuries to have been 20-30 years, roughly a third of that during the first industrial revolution. This may have reflected increased flows of labour, capital, ideas and information between firms, regions, sectors and countries. Table 1 looks at average rates of UK TFP growth over the past 2000 years. It tells a tale of long waves of productivity stagnation and innovation. The historical data do not reject either hypothesis. Table 1 also puts into historical perspective the UK’s recent productivity slowdown.
Caleb M Fundanga: Improved financial services in Zambia Speech by Dr Caleb M Fundanga, Governor of the Bank of Zambia, at the official opening of The Barclays Bank Zambia Plc, Chilenje Branch, Chilenje, 9 January 2008. *  *  *  • Mr Fritz Seegers – Barclays Global Retail and Commercial Banking ChiefExecutive • Mr J J Sikazwe – Barclays Bank Zambia Plc Chairman • Mr Ahmed Khan – Barclays GRCB Emerging Markets Chief Executive Officer • Mr Michael Miebach – Barclays Sub-Sahara Africa Managing Director • Mr Zafar Masud – incoming Barclays Bank Zambia Managing Director • Mr Danie Nel – outgoing Barclays Bank Zambia Managing Director • Invited Guests • Ladies and Gentlemen I am delighted to be the Guest of Honour at the official opening of the Barclays Bank Zambia Plc Chilenje branch. My appreciation of this opening is because it reflects a fundamental change in strategy by Barclays Bank Zambia over the last few years. I recall that only a few years ago, Barclays Bank Zambia closed a number of its branches in several towns and locations. We were greatly concerned because it meant that even the few that were serviced by commercial banks would have greater problems in accessing financial services. Barclays Bank Zambia obviously had its reasons for taking such an action and we cannot fault them for attempting to curb their costs. However, it is now evident that there is a turnaround in the situation.

I am reliably informed that the number of branches has increased from 17 at the beginning of April last year to 55 at the end of November 2007. What is even more impressive is that these branches are found in areas which were previously not serviced by commercial banks. This indeed is a bold move and for this we must commend Barclays Bank Zambia. I am aware that the expansion programme is backed by a capital injection of approximately K40.0 billion which will make it possible for Barclays Bank Zambia to increase its services in the country, particularly to the SMEs sector. Ladies and Gentlemen, the 2005 Finscope Survey undertaken by FinMark Trust confirmed that levels of access to financial services in Zambia are low. Fewer than 15% of adult Zambians are reported to have had access to commercial banks. The reasons given for this low accessibility varied but some of the critical reasons included the distance to banks, the time spent getting to a bank and the cost of getting a bank service. With Barclays Bank Zambia opening branches closer to the people it is our conviction that the number of Zambians to have access to banking services will increase. We therefore encourage as many Zambians as possible to use these facilities. To the residents of Chilenje, I urge you to utilize the services offered by Barclays Bank, otherwise the bank may opt to close its branch due to lack of business and you will be left with no bank in your area.
Indeed, according to these projections, in some Asian and European countries such as Japan, Korea, Spain and Italy, there will be just 3 working-age individuals for every 2 people over 65 in the year 2050, compared to an average of 11 working-age individuals for every person over 65 in 1950. Even African countries, home to the youngest populations in the world, will see a moderate increase in the dependency ratio in the years to come. I mentioned earlier that net migration inflows can help sustain the current workforce levels in Europe. However, the obvious fact that migrants become part of the retired population once they reach the retirement age implies that the benefits in terms of old-age dependency ratios are less evident. Its effect will last only to the extent that immigrant flows increase further in future. Hence, we may conclude that the role of migration, when it comes to addressing population ageing as measured by dependency ratios, is probably limited. 4  Certainly, we must bear in mind that there is considerable uncertainty over how fertility, mortality and migration flows will evolve in the coming decades. Accordingly, the point estimates of future population levels and dependency ratios must be viewed with some caution. In fact, when the analyses explicitly account for this uncertainty, the results show there is a high degree of variation in the intensity of future population ageing.

Such payments services  4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  make the payments safer and faster. Payments are the circulation of money which is the life blood of the economy. Sixth, agent of the government This is the function that leads to a lot of criticism on the independence of the Central Bank. Six most important agency functions are the management of public debt, fiscal agent, official depository, financial adviser, management of Employees’ Provident Fund and Administration of Exchange Control Act. The most important agency function of the Central Bank is the financial/economic adviser to the Government. In this regard, as the Central Bank is responsible for the monetary policy in its entire scope and escalation. Conventionally central banks have had the responsibility to advise the Government on fiscal and other operations to the extent that they impinge on the economy and advise as to what should be the best course of policy action for the economy. Given the nature of the central banks’ functions, advance access to macroeconomic and financial information and their expertise, central banks are the closest economic advisers to the Government. The Central Bank statutorily submits a number of reports such as the Central Bank Annual Report as part of this advice. In addition, the Central Bank provides advice on various policy matters on an on-going basis to the Government. However, central banks world over are blamed for not providing constructive and impartial advice because of the independence issue. I will talk on central bank independence in a moment.
“Measuring the Natural Rate of Interest  ”, The Review  of Economics and Statistics, vol. 85, no. 4, 2003, pp. 1063–70. Lisack, N., R. Sajedi, and G. Thwaites (2021). “Population Aging and the Macroeconomy International Journal of Central Banking, 17, 43-80. Melolinna, M., H. Miller, and S. Tatomir (2018). “Business Investment, Cost of Capital and  "  Page 20  Uncertainty in the United Kingdom — evidence from firm-level analysis,” Bank of England Staff Working Paper 717, Bank of England. Mian, A., L. Straub, and A. Sufi (2021). “What explains the decline in r*? Rising income inequality versus demographic shifts  ," Proceedings of the 2021 Jackson Hole Symposium. Mian, A., L. Straub, and A. Sufi (2021b). “Indebted Demand  .” Quarterly Journal of Economics,  136(4), 2243–2307. Moll, B., L. Rachel, and P. Restrepo (2021). “Uneven growth: automation's impact on income and wealth inequality," Bank of England working papers 913, Bank of England. Rachel, L. and L.H. Summers (2019). "On Secular Stagnation in the Industrialized World  "  Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, 50(1), 1-76. Rachel, L. and T. D. Smith, (2017). “Are Low Real Interest Rates Here to Stay?," International Journal of Central Banking,13(3), 1-42. Reis, R. (2021). "The constraint on public debt when r," CEPR Discussion Papers 15950, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers. Vlieghe, G. (2017). “  Real interest rates and risk," Speech by Gertjan Vlieghe at the Society  of Business Economists' Annual conference, London. Vlieghe, G. (2021).

There is thus hardly any support for low interest rates in themselves causing problems for financial stability or for high interest rates in themselves improving financial stability. 9 The current situation in Sweden is rather that higher policy rates may have a negative effect on financial stability. Swedish banks are now choosing to fund themselves by short-term borrowing in foreign currencies, which is cheaper than borrowing in Sweden as interest rates are higher here than abroad. But this entails some risks as foreign investors are an unstable source of funding (Sveriges Riksbank 2012a). When the policy rate in Sweden is raised in relation to interest rates abroad, it becomes even more attractive for the banks to borrow in  9  Is the United States an exception? Hardly. A very fragile financial sector arose there without resilience, as a result of a lack of regulation, exaggerated confidence in risk management, very excessive leverage, gigantic hidden off-balance sheet liabilities and large information problems with a large spread of uncertain assets. A modest shock in the form of loan losses due to untenable sub-prime mortgages with low-quality credit assessments then led to a major financial crisis. It was not low interest rates that led to this lack of resilience and to these untenable sub-prime loans, and it is difficult to see that higher interest rates would have prevented the crisis. 8  BIS central bankers’ speeches  foreign currency.
The higher international prices of foodstuffs have a strong impact on inflation in these economies, considering that they weigh more in their CPI baskets. Inflation forecasts for 2011 have been raised everywhere. Worth noting is the case of emerging Asia, where by mid-2010 the market consensus expected inflation to average 3.8 percent annually this year, and revised it upward to 4.8 percent last March (figure 4). The baseline scenario assumes that during this year the external inflation relevant to Chile will exceed December’s forecast. In this scenario, the central banks of several economies have either started or continued their monetary policy normalization processes, implying that inflation might be temporarily above their targets, which coincides with the market consensus expectations. Some of them have continued applying alternative measures to tone down increases in liquidity and credit, such as China, India, Brazil and other countries in the region. In some developed economies, although monetary policy has remained very expansionary – with unconventional measures and record-low interest rates – policy makers have explicitly exposed their concerns about future inflation and a few have even considered the option of beginning their cycle of normalization sooner. Thus, in the U.S. and Europe, market expectations regarding the timing of the process’s kick-off have changed (figure 5). Hence, the outlook for world economic growth is somewhat brighter than it was last December. Actual output data in developed economies, especially in the U.S., have exceeded expectations and market consensus projections have been revised upwards.

8  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Figure 6 GDP growth (percent) 8  8  6  6  4  4  2  2  0  0  -2  -2  -4  -4  -6  08  09 Annual change  10  11 (1)  -6  Quarter-on-quarter change (2)  (1) Dark blue shows growth range for GDP forecast for 2011 in Monetary Policy Report of March 2011. (2) Seasonally-adjusted series. Source: Central Bank of Chile. Table 2 Economic growth  (annual change, percent)  2009 GDP Domestic demand Domestic demand ((w/o inventory change) Gross fixed capital formation Total consumption Goods and services exports Goods and services imports Current account (% GDP)  -1.7 -5.9 -2.9 -15.9 1.9 -6.4 -14.6 1.6  2010 5.2 16.4 11.5 18.8 9.3 1.9 29.5 1.9  2011 (f) 5.5-6.5 7.6 8.7 13.9 7.0 6.8 9.6 1.2  (f) Forecast. Source: Central Bank of Chile. BIS central bankers’ speeches  9  Figure 7 MPR and expectations (percent) 9  9  8  8  7  7  6  6  5  5  4  4  3  3  2  2  1  1  0  0  07  08  09  10  EES Mar.11  11  FOS 2Q Mar.11  12  13  MPR  Source: Central Bank of Chile.
In addition, there is limited information on regional consumer prices and how much variation there is in regional inflation rates. 8  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  8  Here in the UK, interest rates were lowered from 5% to 0.5% between September 2008 and March 2009 by the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). This took interest rates to their lowest levels in the Bank of England’s over 300-year history. This was augmented with £ of asset purchases between 2009 and 2012, almost exclusively in government securities. In interest-rate equivalent terms, this amounted to a monetary stimulus worth around 7 percentage points. 16  Exceptional times called for exceptional measures. What impact have these exceptional measures had? One simple way to begin to answer that question is to look at how aggregate activity has evolved in the period since. Chart 11a looks at the growth in inflation-adjusted GDP per head across the UK regions since the MPC’s monetary stimulus was put in place. All regions have experienced a rise in nominal GDP per head over that period, averaging 12%. Not all regions have experienced an inflation-adjusted increase, with growth strongest in London (a rise of 6.6%) and weakest in Northern Ireland (a contraction of 4.6%). Unemployment rates rose sharply during the financial crisis. But they have since fallen across every region in the UK since 2011 and by roughly similar amounts, on average 3 percentage points (Chart 12a).

One Car, Two Car, Red Car, Blue Car Speech given by Andrew G Haldane, Chief Economist, Bank of England  Materials Processing Institute, Redcar 2 December 2016  The views are not necessarily those of the Bank of England or the Monetary Policy Committee. I would like to thank Mauricio Armellini, Sandra Batten, David Bradnum, Ben Broadbent, Angelina Carvalho, Fergus Cumming, Jeremy Franklin, Alex Haberis, Andrew Hebden, Gabor Pinter, Alice Pugh, Tom Smith, Gertjan Vlieghe, Matt Waldron and Chris Yeates for comments and contributions. The title draws its inspiration from “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” by Dr Seuss, a children’s book first published in 1960, whose use of simple language contains an important lesson for economists like me. 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  As someone whose family hails from the North-East, and who themselves was born in the North-East, it is wonderful to be here in Redcar. Regional visits like this are crucial for the Bank of England. They enable us to take the temperature of the local economy by speaking to a broad cross-section of businesses, charities, social enterprises, schools, further and higher education institutions and trade unions. Here in the North-East, it is clear the temperature of the local economy is not as high as either you or I would wish. Despite having come down rapidly over recent years, the unemployment rate, at over 6%, is still higher than for any other region in the UK.
Furthermore, a large amount of research has highlighted that higher uncertainty in general has a negative impact on the economy, particularly through lowering the investment level, see e.g., Bloom (2009) and Bloom, Bond and van Reenen (2007). [2]  See Coibion and Gorodnichenko (2015) and Aastveit, Bjørnland and Cross (2023). [3] Research on energy prices has shown that energy price fluctuations may have an adverse effect on the macroeconomy. The impact is likely to depend on the source of the shock (energy demand shock or energy supply shock), the persistence of the shock and the sign of the shock. See e.g., Kilian (2009), Aastveit, Bjørnland and Thorsrud (2015) and Baumeister and Hamilton (2019) on the effects of oil supply vs. oil demand shocks. See e.g., Hamilton (1983, 1996, 2003, 2011), Mork (1989) and Davis and Haltiwanger (2001) on the non-linear effects of oil price changes on the macroeconomy. [4] See Auclert, Monnery, Rognlie and Straub (2023) and Chan, Diz and Kanngiesser (2022). Published 30 June 2023 14:15

More importantly, it is to avert a sharp slowdown in economic activities. Financial liberalisation Bank Negara Malaysia has also remained committed to the objectives of the Financial Sector Master Plan (FSMP) issued in 2001. The recently announced liberalization measures, for example, forms part of the concluding phase of the FSMP which is to liberalise the banking sector by allowing for the increase in operational flexibilities, product offering and, the issuance of new licenses by 2011. But, as capacity and institutional building efforts continue to be pursued, it must be complemented by enhancements in regulatory, supervisory and surveillance framework to preserve the integrity and resilience of the financial system. Clearly this is the distinction which must be made with de-regularisation per se. Islamic banking Islamic banking also remains as one of the key agendas under the FSMP. Also in the recently announced liberalisation measures, we will issue up to two new licenses given the growing demand and the need to give further boost to the MIFC initiative. As we have more than two decades of experience in this area, Bank Negara Malaysia will continue to build on this competitive advantage to ensure Malaysia remains at the forefront of global Islamic banking. It is therefore encouraging to note that Islamic finance has continued to demonstrate its evolution and strong growth as assets have expanded by 22% to RM192 billion in 2008 alone and now accounts for 15.0% of the total assets in the industry.