samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Thus, during 2010, the banking sector credit growth, albeit lower than in the pre-crisis period, was considerable, around 9%, while in some Central and South-Eastern European countries, it was negative. The deceleration of credit growth, which was initially driven by supply-side factors, is mostly a phenomenon attributed to the decline in the demand for loans. As a consequence of weaker expectations for activity development, businesses decreased their production capacity utilization, lowering investment objectives and the demand for loan. In spite of weathering the direct impact of the crisis, important challenges lay ahead of the banking sector and the Bank of Albania. First, the performance of credit quality should be monitored prudentially, aiming to timely identify non-performing loans, assess them correctly according to possibilities of their repayment and pursue proper policies, in order to recover the loan value within an appropriate time. Second, during this phase, it is necessary to strengthen the banks’ internal audit systems, not only related to credit risk but also to provide a higher standard of management. Third, banks should assess their expectations about the performance of their activity and take measures to strengthen their capital position in advance, in case of need. The Bank of Albania deems that in the periods ahead the Albanian banking sector and the economy need to determine and pursue more suitable development policies, which should include: setting realistic development objectives; setting more competitive prices for banking products and services; and increasing lending in the national currency.

This rate is in compliance with the provided demand of the economy for money, coming from its real growth by 6 percent. The Bank of Albania monetary program is designed in line with other policies of the economy, where its harmonisation with the government fiscal policy is highlighted. The Bank of Albania estimates that like in the past years, even in 2005, the country's economic development will be in conformity with the overall development program objectives. The last developments of the banking system consolidate the optimism that it will fulfil to the best of its knowledge the role of financial intermediation in the economy. We deem that its consolidation will continue with accelerated rhythms throughout this year, providing to the large public more credits, more services and more security in the savings conduct. 2/2
Petar Goshev: Problems in measuring inflation Opening speech by Mr Petar Goshev, Governor of the National Bank of the Republic of Macedonia, at the workshop “Problems in measuring inflation” organized by the National Bank of the Republic of Macedonia, Skopje, 22 May 2007. *  *  *  Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, Please allow me to welcome you on behalf of the Central Bank, to thank you for your participation in today's workshop, and to wish a fruitful day for all of us present here today. This is the third workshop in the past two years, organized, or as it is now the case, co-organized by the Central Bank, which along with the international conferences and seminars on expert level, which increase in number, have been our new component of activities aimed at: increasing our own professional capacity, opening of the National Bank to the domestic and international expert community for the purpose of mutual improvement of the abilities to identify and solve the problems in the area of macroeconomics and for increasing the transparency in our communication with the public. Today's workshop has been organized in cooperation with the State Statistical Office, and the topic of discussion are the problems related to measuring of inflation. I do not think it is necessary to explain why the State Statistical Office: the State Statistical Office produces the data on inflation, while the National Bank is one of the main users of those data. Why this subject – problems in measuring inflation?

Notwithstanding the above, the French lessons programme is a very challenging one to our staff in that students are not only required to attend, at least, 90 per cent of class work conducted twice a week for two hours, but are also required to take examinations every ten (10) weeks; implying that only those employees who succeed in the examinations are allowed to proceed to the next advanced level. Your Excellency Following the commencement of the French lessons, I am pleased to inform you that this programme has already started showing encouraging results, as evidenced by the fact that at the end of the first segment of the beginners’ course, all those who took the examinations passed and are progressing to the next stage. The results could have been even better had all the 78 enrolled students attended tuition and taken the examination as scheduled. Let me also clarify here that some employees missed the examinations due to the call of duty and not out of lack of commitment. In this regard, I wish to assure Your Excellency that as a sign of commitment on the part of individual employees and the bank, a crush programme has been put in place to enable those who missed the first examination to sit for it and catch up with the rest of the class by April this year.
Therefore, I would say that this risk is less acute than at the moment of our previous key rate meeting. Furthermore, investment from the National Wealth Fund and geopolitical risks are still in the focus of our attention. Disinflationary factors are much weaker. A rich harvest might result in a more significant seasonal decrease in food prices. The pandemic situation is still uncertain. The spread of new coronavirus strains worldwide might force countries to introduce new restrictions and disrupt production and supply chains, which in turn might slow down global economic recovery. For Russia, this would involve a decrease in external demand and intensify disinflationary risks, on the one hand. On the other hand, if borders are closed, domestic demand will remain elevated longer, which might become a proinflationary factor. In conclusion, I would like to comment on monetary policy prospects. Beginning from March, we have raised the key rate by a total of 2.25 percentage points. We will assess how our earlier decisions have been influencing monetary conditions, aggregate demand, and inflation. We will also consider how quickly supply-side constraints have been weakening and, accordingly, what level of the key rate is needed to bring inflation back to the target. According to our revised forecast, the average key rate next year will equal 6.0–7.0% per annum. Further on, as inflation expectations go down and inflation decelerates, the key rate will return to its long-term neutral range.

We still estimate this neutral range to be at 5–6%, provided that inflation is close to the Bank of Russia’s target of 4%. Thank you all for your attention. 3/3  BIS central bankers' speeches
It is true that people who get their pension from an insurance company which fails should have some protection from a compensation scheme which spreads the cost of failures across the industry, but we should not underestimate the risks to them, the industry and the public purse of a major failure – we need to be sure that the basis on which pension promises are  Page 5  made is solid. What have we learnt about the Matching Adjustment since its invention? Given its size and the very important role in plays in our economy, it might surprise some listeners to learn that the MA is a relatively recent invention. It only came into force in the UK as part of the EU’s implementation of Solvency II a little over six years ago. Before that we had for many years allowed insurance companies to take some capital benefit from future returns – the MA took the basic idea of this older regime, and through the process of EU negotiations turned it into a new form. In many ways the EU’s MA has done its job well over those six years, but our experience of seeing it in action has made us worry about three things: First: the past may not be a good guide to the future. I explained that the MA allows insurance companies to recognise as capital up-front part of the income they expect to earn on their assets in the future.

First, the nature of the business for which it is primarily used: pensions provided by insurance companies. When an individual puts their life savings into an insurance company in return for a promise that the company will pay their pension right up until their death (potentially decades later), we need to be very confident that the company is going to be able to make good on that promise. The same is true when companies of all sorts pass their pension liabilities over to an insurance company, which is happening in very high volumes – for those pensioners too we need take care that the foundations of that insurer are robust. We estimate that over 8 million policyholders are served by this sector. [3] And second, the MA is a vital part of those foundations simply because it is so large – on the most recent figures, the total assets in MA portfolios amount to around £ billion, and the MA confers a capital benefit on insurers of around £ billion – up from around £ billion when the regime was introduced. To put that £ billion figure in context, the entire capital base of the life insurance industry is around £ billion, and for a number of insurers the MA by itself makes up the bulk of their capital. In short, millions of pensioners rely on their insurer for their livelihood, and in turn those insurers rely very heavily on the MA.
Its aims were shaped by an extreme tail event (the Great Depression) and were explicitly minimax (to avoid a repetition). It sought to achieve this by acting directly on the structure of the financial system, quarantining commercial bank and brokering activities through red-line regulation. In other words, Glass-Steagall satisfied all three robustness criteria. And so it proved, lasting well over half a century without a significant systemic event in the US. The contrast with Basel II is striking. This was anything but simple, comprising many thousands of pages and taking 15 years to deliver. It was calibrated largely to data drawn from the Great Moderation, a period characterised by an absence of tail events – more minimin than minimax. Basel II was underpinned by a complex menu of capital risk weights. This was fine-line, not red-line, regulation. In short, Basel II satisfied few of the robustness criteria. And so it proved, overwhelmed by the recent crisis scarcely after it had been introduced. (c)  Incentives  Tail risk within some systems is determined by God – in economist-speak, it is exogenous. Natural disasters, like earthquakes and floods, are examples of such tail risk. Although exogenous, even these events have been shown to occur more frequently than a normal distribution would imply. 24 God’s distribution has fat tails. Tail risk within financial systems is not determined by God but by man; it is not exogenous but endogenous. This has important implications for regulatory control. Finance theory tells us that risk brings return.

The scope is relatively moderate, but appears nonetheless to have reduced bottleneck tendencies in some industries where demand has increased sharply. Traditionally, many workers from our neighbouring countries have contributed when the labour market in this country has been tight. In 2001, close to 30, 000 persons resident in Sweden were employed in Norway for all or part of the year. Swedes who have registered as residents in Norway come in addition. An increased supply of labour from new EU member states to Norwegian enterprises may lead to a higher-than-normal increase in potential output for a period. Many of the foreign workers work for a shorter period in Norway without being employed in a Norwegian enterprise. Examples include foreign contractors and self-employed in the construction industry who carry out various building projects in Norway, as well as others who carry out other types of projects. Aker Kværner, for example, has contracted 300 consultants in India who are working from India on the Ormen Lange project in the western part of Norway. An increase in the use of these short-term contracts will appear as an increase in Norway’s service imports, which contributes to increasing the supply of goods and services without drawing on domestic resources. Protectionist measures may dampen the impact on the Norwegian economy of an increased supply of labour from the new EU member states. The transitional rules from 1 May last year stipulate that foreign workers shall have Norwegian wages and working conditions.
2  BIS Review 134/2009  In terms of composition the ESRB’s decision-making body will consist of the governors of all the EU central banks, including the President of the ECB, as well as representatives from the European Commission and the three new EU supervisory authorities. National supervisors will be represented in the ESRB, but not have any voting powers. Taken together these pillars imply quite substantial changes in the EU supervisory structure. And even if there is broad agreement among member states on the overall concept, some parts remain highly controversial. The issue of handing over power to the EU supervisory authorities is particularly sensitive. Some member states argue that this cannot be done unless guarantees are in place that it will not impinge on national fiscal responsibilities. Hopefully, the Swedish Presidency will be able to sort out these issues and make its ambitious implementation plan a reality. If so, an agreement will be reached by the end of this year and the new supervisory structure will be up and running already during the course of next year. Supervisory reforms need to be complemented by robust and harmonised frameworks for crisis management and resolution After going through this list of reforms you may ask to what extent they will actually work in practice to promote and maintain financial stability within the EU? A number of questions can be raised, of course, but overall I would say that it looks very promising.

To address these problems the European Commission last fall initiated a fundamental overhaul of the EU supervisory structure. A group chaired by the former head of the IMF, Mr. Jaques de Larosière, was mandated to come up with proposals for needed reform. The recommendations made by the group were broadly embraced by the EU member states and we are now at that stage in the process where final details are being negotiated. The new supervisory structure will rest on two pillars. The first pillar – micro prudential supervision The first pillar consists of several initiatives to strengthen micro prudential supervision in the EU. Regulatory measures at the EU level shall ensure strengthened and more consistent  BIS Review 134/2009  1  supervisory powers at the national level. Supervisory colleges will be mandatory for all the major cross-border firms in the EU. Differences in national laws will be indentified and removed. All these reforms will take place within the new European supervisory network, the European System of Financial Supervisors (ESFS). The main element of this reform is the transformation of the three existing EU supervisory committees into independent EU authorities. These authorities will form a central hub of the European supervisory community and will be equipped with both regulatory and supervisory powers. The day-to-day supervision will still be a national responsibility and carried out on a decentralised basis. The new authorities are therefore primarily to be seen as a complement to the national regulators and supervisors and not as a replacement.
In the third quarter, inflation developments were marked by the downward dynamic of energy prices and the persistence of moderate rates in services and industrial goods. The annual rate of change in the harmonised index of consumer prices (HICP) held steady at 1% in August, for the second month running, while underlying inflation, which excludes energy and food prices, stood at 0.9%. In fact, since 2013, inflation in the euro area has stood on average at 0.9%, practically half the level observed during the first 10 years of EMU, of 2.1%. In parallel, the indicators of long-term inflation expectations, based on financial market information, have fallen sharply since the end of last year and stand at very low levels, which broadly coincides with the signals obtained from surveys. These indicators are regularly used to monitor the degree to which inflation expectations are anchored to the ECB’s medium-term inflation target (below, but close to, 2%). Although most of the reduction in inflation expectations, according to market indicators, seems to stem from the fall in the inflation risk premium, the level of this premium is in negative territory, which would indicate that agents are hedging the risk of very low or even negative inflation rates. This absence of inflationary pressures and the weakness of demand, along with expectations of falling oil prices and a deteriorating global environment, led to a further downward revision to the Eurosystem inflation projections.

Given this, it is interesting to reflect on why we Swedes prefer to pay by cash rather than by card more often than our Nordic neighbours. The number of card transactions per inhabitant in 2003 was around 130 in Norway, just over 100 in Finland and Denmark and just over 80 in Sweden. There is no clear explanation for this,  2  BIS Review 33/2006  but one clue may lie in pricing. In Sweden, cash withdrawals from all ATMs are free of charge, despite the large costs entailed in cash handling. In the other Nordic countries, cash withdrawals are only free of charge from the customer’s own bank’s ATMs, which has led to a reduction in the use of cash. The Riksbank’s opinion is that to achieve the best possible efficiency with regard to payments, the respective means of payment should bear its own costs and those who make the payments should be aware of these costs in order to make rational choices. However, it is important to be aware that increased card usage would only have a marginal effect on the number of cash transports. It would therefore be no solution to the problem of cash transport robberies. I hope that we can together bring up these issues onto the agenda and contribute to constructive solutions. The security surrounding cash transports can itself be improved in various ways, but it should be emphasised that this entails much more than security cases and bullet-proof glass.
IPSs have to obtain the same improvements in organisation, efficiency, economies of scope, diversification and quality and unity of management as traditional mergers. They must do so in the same length of time as a normal merger, and they must strive to ensure that their results are clearly perceived by the markets as lasting. 2  BIS Review 173/2010  In this connection, it is vital that the initiators should be particularly diligent in countering the danger that the “raw novelty” of this legal formula – whose features have had to be rapidly devised – may be used as an excuse for rigidities, procrastination or half-measures. Compared with traditional mergers, where the combining of objectives and efforts to advance in a single direction is more natural, all the participants in IPSs must be on their guard to prevent the essential goal of unity from becoming distorted. They must strive to ensure that the mind-set of directors, managers and staff alike is geared towards a single goal; individual visions are no longer appropriate here, and nor are decisions not aimed at achieving a better future for the single corporate project that has replaced its predecessors. All the participants in institutional protection schemes are assuming a very specific responsibility here, an institutional responsibility and a personal responsibility.

More recently, Brexit brought to the forefront the concerns over the health of the European economy, leaving the rest of the world with less hope of a broadbased economic recovery. Furthermore, 6 central banks have implemented the negative interest rate policy resulting in irregular financial market structure1. An extraordinary amount of the world’s sovereign debts carry negative yields. Meanwhile, major currencies have been volatile. Relative to the USD, the Japanese Yen appreciated by 18%, whereas the British Pound dropped 1/5  BIS Central Banker's Speeches  by 12% year to date. As for a small open economy like Thailand, domestic financial markets inevitably felt the ripple effects of the developments and growing anxiety at the global level. Once again, risk appetite has turned towards emerging markets – and Thailand is no exception. While last year, we saw a net portfolio outflow of around 7.6 billion USD, the first 7 months of this year already recorded a net inflow of over 5 billion USD into bond and equity markets combined. 10year bond yield hit a record low at 1.54%, while the Stock Exchange of Thailand index has marked about 20% gain to date, compared with a 14% fall just one year earlier. Despite volatile asset price movements, the Thai financial system remains resilient thanks to our sound external position and sound financial system. As in the past, foreign participation in the Thai bond market remains at less than 10 percent, while that in the stock market is around 30 percent of the market capitalization.