samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The banks then have to borrow from the Riksbank at an interest rate normally close to the repo rate; this occurs by means of “fine tuning” transactions on the part of the Riksbank. As long as the Swedish banks feel sufficient confidence in one another and the banks have adequate collateral to borrow from the Riksbank, the banks will encounter no difficulties in obtaining refinancing. Refinancing can then normally occur at the repo rate or at a rate close to the repo rate. So do the banks have sufficient confidence in one another, or is there any possible cause to reconsider the size of credit lines because of uncertainty about the year 2000? I can see no reason for any such revisions. For one thing, solvency in the Swedish banks is high. The Riksbank publishes stability reports twice a year in which we analyse the Swedish banking system. In our judgement, the financial  1  Nationalencyklopedin (The Swedish National Encyclopaedia). BIS Review 97/1999  2  strength of the banking system and its capacity to resist disruptions is good. Furthermore, the reports of the Financial Supervisory Authority make a “second opinion” available on the progress of preparations for the year 2000. The Financial Supervisory Authority will publish its next report on 1 October. One further question is whether the banks possess adequate collateral to finance increased borrowing requirements from the Riksbank.

But now that the economy has undergone a period of deep crisis and it is difficult to assess what structural changes the crisis may lead to, the process becomes even more complex. One illustration of this is how one should assess future developments in the labour market. So far employment has not fallen as much as might be justified given the historical relationship between unemployment and GDP, and the large fall in GDP. This has come as a surprise to us and to other forecasters. But what conclusions should one draw with regard to the effects in the slightly longer term when the economy recovers? Employment and the number of hours worked are now beginning to increase. Normally, one might have expected a greater adjustment in the number of hours worked than we have seen in this economic downturn. The fact that the  6  For further information on resource utilisation, see Jonsson, M., Nilsson, C. and Palmqvist, S., 2008, “Should monetary policy stabilise resource utilisation?” Economic Commentary, www.riksbank.se or Öberg, S. “Monetary policy and the elusive resource utilisation”, speech published on 25 May 2009, www.riksbank.se. 4  BIS Review 58/2010  adjustment has not corresponded to the fall in production means that productivity has been very weak. But as we observe in our most recent Monetary Policy Update, which was published last week, we expect productivity to improve in the future, which also means that the number of hours worked and the number of employed will grow slowly.
The falling price level has to do with transitory effects, above all the Riksbank’s marked reduction of the repo rate during 1996. Excluding house mortgage interest costs, the rate of inflation in January 1997 was about 1.5 per cent. The outlook for inflation points to room for a fall in bond rates. Moreover, underlying economic factors suggest that, after the depreciation in recent months, the krona is undervalued and should be capable of appreciating. The present monetary stance appears to be well balanced. After the major changes in the past year, for example in the repo rate, time is needed to assess their effects. Another matter to consider is the recent months’ developments in financial markets. They, too, call for a cautious line in monetary policy. I note that the Swedish economy seems to have made good progress in adjusting to a low inflation regime, with stable, sustained growth. What gives cause for concern, however, is that the recovery of employment appears to be much more sluggish and that unemployment is persistently high. High cost of unemployment  As shown in Diagram 1, registered unemployment in Sweden rose sharply in the early 1990s; from a level between 2 and 3 per cent, it shot up to around 8 per cent. This was accompanied by increased participation in labour market programmes. Total unemployment accordingly reached around 13 per cent, an increase of almost 10 percentage points or up to half a million people. This is the highest level since the 1930s.

12  10  10  8  8  6  1 6 -6 4 y rs . 6  4  4  2  2  0  0  76  77  78  79  80  81  82  83  84  85  86  87  88  89  90  91  92  93  94  95  96  S o u rce : S ta tis tics S w e d e n  approximately the same magnitude as the unemployment rate.1 Sweden’s increase in unemployment can in this way be estimated to cost around 10 per cent of GDP a year, which is equivalent to SKr 150 billion. Considering the sensitivity of general government finance to variations in unemployment and production, the cost to the public sector, in the form of lower  1  Assuming that changes in the capital stock roughly parallel employment and that average productivity is constant. BIS Review 38/1997  -4-  tax revenue and increased expenditure on unemployment support, for example, may actually be as high as 9 per cent of GDP or SKr 135 billion.2 Conversely, an appreciable reduction of unemployment implies decreased social tensions as well as substantial economic gains.
The Thai Economy: The Current State and the Way Forward Dr. Sethaput Suthiwartnarueput, Governor of the Bank of Thailand Japanese Chamber of Commerce (JCC) Seminar, The Athenee Hotel, 29 March 2021  Mr. Shoichi Ogiwara, President of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce, JCC Board of Directors, JCC members, Distinguished guests,  It is a great pleasure and honor for me to be here this evening. I would like to speak on three topics today. The first topic is to discuss where we are today in the Thai economy. The second topic will be about where we are heading next and what to expect in terms of the economic outlook. Finally, I will conclude with the discussion of why I think, despite all of our problems, Thailand is still a good place to do business. I would like to start by sharing some thoughts on where we are in terms of the Thai economy. The short answer is the economy is recovering but slowly. When we were hit by the COVID-19 shock last year, we experienced a GDP contraction of about 6 percent. This year, we expect to register a GDP growth of about 3 percent. Therefore, even by the end of this year, our economy will still not be back to the pre-COVID-19 level. Why has the recovery been slow and perhaps even slower than other countries in the region. There are a couple of reasons I would like to share with you.

This is because traceability in our food products allows customers to realize the added values; whether they are transgenic or organic. This is one of the examples that the presence of the digital technology gives us the potential to move up the value chain in terms of food, which will provide large benefits in terms of employment and income due to Thailand’s high employment exposure in the agricultural and related sectors. Apart from food, tourism is another sector that would benefit from digital technologies. Currently, most of our tourism would stay for a short period of time and hence do not spend much. However, the digital technology’s trend towards work-from-anywhere provides the opportunity for us to attract different types of tourists who come, work, and stay for a long time. They are able to work from anywhere using working-from-anywhere technology which provides significantly higher value-added for the tourism sector. Because of that, one area that needs the improvement immediately is our visas and other regulations which are preventing us to realize possibilities from increasing values that we get from foreigners and foreign workers. Another area that people talk about is medical tourism. With the help from telemedicine technology, patients will able to come here because the technology allows them to talk to their doctor back in their home country while the actual medical treatments are provided by the doctor here in Thailand.
This Leadership Energy Summit will hear from the experience of successful individuals on the source of their energy in generating outcomes and results that have made a difference. We will also learn about other sources of energy from which we can tap on and strengthen. This is the challenge of the new generation of leaders if they will truly be able to make lasting and meaningful changes in their environment. On this note, let me wish you a highly energised Summit. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3

Today, growth is low in many countries that are also overwhelmed by high unemployment, especially among the youth. The general situation of lack of internal demand when some external markets start also to decelerate, explains that investment is still almost 20 per cent below what it was in 2007 which affects our potential growth. A declining demography and insufficient progress in total factor productivity, further limit Europe´s growth capabilities and make it more difficult the absorption of the existing high unemployment. Such dynamics thwart the deleveraging process of sovereigns and households, and complicate the return of bank balance sheets to financial health. 4 In my view, the legacy of the crisis constitutes still a vulnerability for the transition process to a more effective and robust EMU. It stokes scepticism, which itself impedes the solutions to  1  Constâncio (2013), “Fragmentation and rebalancing in the euro area”, Joint EC-ECB Conference on Financial Integration, Brussels, 25 April 2013. 2  See Schoenmaker and Wagner (2011), “The impact of cross-border banking on financial stability”, Duisenberg School of Finance – Tinbergen Institute Discussion Paper, TI 11–054/DSF 18. 3  See Shambaugh, Reis and Rey, “The euro’s three crises”, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring 2012, pp. 157–231. 4  See Constâncio, “Growing out of the crisis: Is fixing finance enough?”, speech delivered at the Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference on the State of the US and World Economies, Washington D.C., 10 April 2014. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  the crisis.
After the Global Financial Crisis, there is some reduction in the private sector debt in some countries, notably in the US. However, the levels of government debts have continued to rise. Before the Global Financial Crisis, the US federal debt was $ trillion. In 7 years’ time, the federal debt increased by almost 100% to $ trillion. This is equivalent to an increase from 63% of GDP to 103% of GDP. In the euro-area, the level of public debt was 100% of GDP prior to the eruption of the European Sovereign Debt crisis in 2011, and it went up by another 2.7 trillion Euros and reached 120% of GDP in Q3 2014. In Japan, the situation is even worse. Public debt to GDP ratio went up steadily in the last twenty years and now reaches a stunning level of about 260%. Together with private-sector debt, the total debt of Japan adds up to about 480% of GDP, the highest in the developed world. So we don’t have a pretty picture in the developed world as a whole. 9. Such rapid growth of public debt in major advanced economies reflects the lack of fiscal discipline and unrestrained spending behaviour of their governments. Except for Germany, most European governments have never been able to record fiscal surplus in any year since the early 1980s, with average annual fiscal deficits amounting to about 3–8% of GDP.

To push my point further, not only we should not spend now and ask our children to pay later, I would argue that our generation, like our parents and grandparents before us, must seek to protect our children and grandchildren by standing ready to make sacrifices from time to time for the benefit of a better Hong Kong in the future. 21. 6  Thank you for having me this evening and thank you for your patience. BIS central bankers’ speeches
Tarisa Watanagase: Securing Thailand’s future with capital market development and the role of the Bank of Thailand Keynote address by Dr Tarisa Watanagase, Governor of the Bank of Thailand, at the Thailand Focus 2008, Bangkok, 17 September 2008. *  *  *  Excellencies, Distinguished Participants, Ladies and Gentlemen, Good morning, I would like to begin by thanking the Stock Exchange of Thailand for inviting me to deliver a keynote address at this year’s Thailand Focus. This annual forum, traditionally opened by the Prime Minister of Thailand, has firmly established itself as the event of the year where domestic and foreign investors meet and interact with Thailand’s top policymakers and leading listed companies. It is thus not only my great pleasure but also my great honor to be here. Ladies and Gentlemen, Given the turbulent time we are in at the moment, I am very pleased at the number and the composition of this year’s turnout. Glancing through the list of prospective attendees, I saw participants from Asia, Australia, Europe and North America, representing a large spectrum of investors. This is despite the fact that a number of invited fund managers were forced to cancel their trips due to the declared state of emergency that was lifted on Sunday. Moreover, I see that many of you have been long-time investors in the Thai stock market. All of these are quite reassuring, for they reflect your continued faith in the Thai economy.

Having efficient resource allocation is particularly important now for the Thai economy, given the ongoing structural shift in relative prices of commodities and asset prices which render some businesses obsolete while opening up many other new opportunities. Indeed, the vast body of research over the past decade strongly suggests that improvements in financial developments precede and contribute to economic performance. In other words, the widespread desire to see an effectively functioning financial system is warranted by its clear causal link to growth, macroeconomic stability, and poverty reduction. As for the specific form of financial market development, it is also well accepted by policymakers that economies that have well-developed banking sectors and capital markets are advantageous to others that rely mostly on only one type of the financial markets. Indeed, banks and capital markets are complements, and not substitutes. For some industries at certain times of their development, capital market-based financing is advantageous. For example, financing through stock markets is optimal for industries where there are continuous technological advances and where there is little consensus on how firms should be valued or managed. The stock market checks whether the manager's view of the firm's production is a sensible one. For other industries, bank-based financing is preferable. This holds in particular for industries which face strong information asymmetries. Financing through financial intermediaries is an effective solution to adverse selection and moral hazard problems that exist between lenders and borrowers.
During the mid and late 1990s we did not cut the repo rate as much as our normal principles might have recommended, as our assessment was that some of the fall in prices was due to our own interest rate cuts, which subdued the housing cost component of CPI, and to deregulation that was partly of a temporary nature. In the same way, we did not react as much as we could have done when inflation rose sharply for transient reasons in 2001 and 2003. A more recent example is the decision in March 2005 not to cut the key rate. Our reasoning then was that it might have been possible with the inflation forecasts we had, but that the expected high growth, combined with elevated house prices, called for some caution. Our flexibility can also be said to include a preparedness to react to events where the final consequences are particularly difficult to survey. One such example is the acts of terrorism in the United States on 11 September 2001. In the wake of these attacks, many central banks around the world were quick to cut interest rates. This powerful response can be interpreted as a kind of "insurance" against a really poor outcome, rather than as the result of carefully-considered assessments of the most probable outcome. It would be desirable, for a better understanding of monetary policy, to develop the principles governing how our reasoning in practice weighs future inflation against real or financial stability.

Similarly, the current unemployment rate of 9 percent is well above most estimates of the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) – the lowest rate of unemployment consistent with sustained price stability. In the pre-crisis period, the NAIRU was likely in the region of 4.5 percent to 5 percent. There are several reasons why the NAIRU may now be higher. First, extended unemployment compensation benefits create incentives for prospective workers to keep looking for better jobs rather than accept less attractive positions. Empirical work on this subject suggests that the NAIRU might currently be roughly 1 percentage point higher because of this factor. However, this effect will only persist for as long as the extended benefits are in place. Second, the rise in unemployment has been associated with an increase in the degree of mismatch between unemployed workers’ job skills and available job vacancies. Some cite the upward shift in the Beveridge curve, which illustrates the relationship between unemployment and job vacancies (Chart 22), as evidence of this effect. Third, the longer that people are unemployed, the more their skills tend to atrophy, which makes it harder for them to become employed in the future. For unemployed workers, the median duration of unemployment has climbed and a growing proportion of the unemployed has been jobless for long periods (Chart 23).
But the ECB has had to take account, too, of domestic demand pressures within the euro area, and of the fact that, even on the core measure, Euro area inflation was moving up gradually to the top of the ECB's 0-2% range. Frankly I don't see how anyone can be confident whether the ECB had it precisely right or wrong - it is perfectly normal for even the best-informed people to disagree on these judgements, as anyone who reads our own Monetary Policy Committee meeting minutes will tell you. But I am wholly confident that the ECB is sensitive to the issues surrounding those judgements, including the downside risks in the US, as indeed it demonstrated a fortnight ago. So, too, are we in the United Kingdom. In our case, we again enjoyed relatively steady overall economic growth through last year, combined with a further fall in unemployment to its lowest rate for over 25 years. Inflation meanwhile continued to run below the Government's 2½% target - and is currently running at around 1½% on the eurozone measure of inflation. This relatively low inflation rate was partly a result of the dampening effect of sterling's surprisingly persistent strength against the euro. The problem for us - and it is a real problem which has been with us for some time now - is the sectoral (and associated regional) imbalance within our overall economy.

The programme has provided 20 students with the opportunity to gain exposure to tech roles in finance that leads to potential employment with the bank. The 12-month programme – double the duration of typical internships – ties in students’ work projects with their final year core curriculum, making their learning more applied and practical. These examples show that with the right support and programmes, polytechnic graduates who are willing to put in their best can succeed in the financial sector. We need more financial institutions to do what JP Morgan, OCBC, and some others are doing. And we need to scale up these efforts. MAS is working with the industry to develop meaningful programmes and support mechanisms to facilitate the hiring of polytechnic graduates by financial institutions. The second group that we’re looking at is mid-career professionals from other sectors who are keen to pivot to the financial sector. This is already happening organically. Take for example Zainon Yussof, who started her career as a customer service officer in the healthcare sector. Last year, she took up a traineeship opportunity offered by BlackRock, a global asset management firm. Zainon learnt to help people plan their financial future and also picked up valuable tech programming skills. Her background in customer service enabled her to address client queries effectively and collaborate with stakeholders to find solutions to problems. This landed her a permanent role, as an analyst with BlackRock’s Aladdin Technology Team. Another example is Edris Boey. Edris started her career as a financial auditor at KPMG.
This week BNY Mellon adopted such an approach motivated in part by the EU’s Directive on Pensions (IORP II).30 Earlier this year UBS launched a pilot project that will allow investors to rate how much weight they want to place on different ESG factors.31 And last month, BlackRock launched six new Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) that combine an ESG uplift and a 30% reduction in carbon emissions.32 These sustainable building blocks can be substituted into many traditional portfolios, improving ESG scores and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity without sacrificing performance. In the future, climate and ESG considerations will likely be at the heart of mainstream investing. Investors will tailor their investments and fulfil their fiduciary duties through: better quality and more widely available data on sustainability and performance; superior data analytics through the advent of AI and Machine Learning; and more informed judgements of strategic resilience. Conclusion: a New Horizon Financial policymakers will not drive the transition to a low-carbon economy. Governments will establish the climate policy frameworks, and the private sector will make the necessary investments. Nonetheless, financial policymakers do have a clear interest in ensuring the financial system is resilient to any transition hastened by those decisions. Our role is to develop the frameworks for markets to adjust efficiently. A market in the transition to a two-degree world is being built. It will reveal how the valuations of companies could change over time as climate policies adapt and carbon intensity declines.

ADB should draw on the experience in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and stand ready to provide timely and flexible crisisrelated assistance to its needy members. While macroeconomic policies and prudential measures could help smooth cyclical economic fluctuations, in the longer term, credible structural reforms are needed to sustain the growth of the region and preserve investors’ confidence. The vulnerabilities now faced by some regional economies are in part due to the overheated domestic demand in the past years amid strong capital inflows. However, they also reflect, to a considerable extent, supply-side constraints on potential output and limited capacity of the region’s financial markets. While the situation differs across economies in the region, there are a number of structural reform needs that are common to the region and in which the ADB can play an active role. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  First, the supply-side constraints in a number of regional economies are linked to weak investments, in particularly infrastructure investments. Many investors have cited that there is no lack of funds or interest in investing in Asian infrastructure projects. The problem, however, is a lack of a pipeline of bankable projects, which in turn is due to fundamental issues such as uncertainties relating to the government’s commitment in supporting a specific sector; lack of a credible PPP framework; political force majeure; and project governance.