samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The good news is that today isn’t the beginning of this process. Over the past seven years, a huge programme of reform has been underway to fix the fault lines that led to the crisis and to build more resilient sources of finance to serve the real economy.3 The UK has played a leading role, consistent with our position as the pre-eminent global financial centre. 40% of global foreign exchange trading goes through London. Half of all trades in OTC interest rate derivatives. Two-thirds of trading in international bonds. And more international banking activity is booked here than anywhere else. 2  Bank of England survey results. Bank of England survey results. Respondents were asked for their views on the statement ‘I believe that financial markets work in the interest of society’. Possible responses were: strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, strongly disagree. 3  See the FSB Chair’s letter to G20 Leaders, available at http://www.financialstabilityboard.org/2015/11 /financial-reforms-achieving-and-sustaining-resilience-for-all/. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Great strides have been made in making the system more resilient. The banks that sit at the centre of many markets are safer, with capital requirements that have increased ten-fold and liquid assets on balance sheets that have risen four‐fold. A new, simple leverage ratio requirement protects the system from risks that we think are low but in fact are not. Banks’ trading assets have fallen by a third since the crisis, and their interbank borrowings have been cut by almost a half.

The Bank has also strived to increase its customer base as well as provide convenient banking services by increasing its branches and agencies to 13 and ATM machines to 44 at end June 2009. Chairperson, I have stated at various fora that it is important for banks in Zambia to take initiatives which support growth and development of our economy. I am glad to note that Stanbic Bank Zambia Limited has embarked on this project of constructing a new Head Office at a bigger site and away from the Central Business District or town center. This reflects the bank’s growth and rising demand for convenient facilities. I must congratulate the management of the bank for their relentless efforts to facilitate its journey towards providing efficient and convenient banking services to a fast growing market. I must however, warn that the journey entails more challenges and responsibilities including the challenges of adoption of new technology and the responsibilities of serving a growing number of customers which must be addressed. I have no doubt you will rise to the occasion and deliver. As you are no doubt aware, congestion and inadequate parking space along Cairo Road has posed serious challenges for all banks whose head quarters are located in the city centre. The decision by Stanbic Zambia Limited to relocate to this very convenient area is a positive development as it will go a long way not only in decongesting Cairo Road but also in making it easier for Stanbic to service its cherished customers.
It was precisely under the extreme pressure that the financial system proved its stability. The market participants mastered the crisis situation spontaneously and networked their efforts: for example, the tasks that would normally have been performed in downtown Manhattan were carried out in New Jersey or in London. Or they agreed to extend the settlement period to five days and to conclude general money market trades at the official Fed rate (instead of fixing prices via brokers, some of whom could not be reached due to the collapse of technology). Furthermore, market participants practised restraint in stock sales and abstained from taking personal advantage of the general state of emergency. Creditors, notably the banks, also endeavoured to fulfil merely implicit commitments as far as possible and to ensure the functioning of the markets. All this would not have been possible without the tireless creative and networked efforts of thousands of shocked and grieving staff of the enterprises concerned and of the international financial community. The private measures for overcoming the crisis were also actively supported by the central banks, first and foremost by the Fed, which had fully retained its capacity to act from the outset despite being located in the immediate vicinity of "Ground Zero". It injected additional liquidity into the market and allowed the rate for one-day repos to fall to 1%. It also opened its counters to foreign banks operating in the United States and, when necessary, offered foreign central banks one-month dollar swaps.

In other words, the critical point for the Bank is to assure that the impacts of the above-mentioned developments are confined to 2006 and avoid any deterioration in expectations, which stand as a significant determinant of the inflationary process, for the sake of achieving medium-term targets. At this point, I would like to draw your attention to a few important points about the interest rate policy of the Bank and underline some issues once again. Short-term interest rates are the main policy instrument of the Central Bank. The Central Bank makes its policies and interest rate decisions in line with its main goal of achieving price stability and inflation targets. The Bank makes all its policies and decisions in view of medium-term trends rather than daily or shortterm ones, and these policies and decisions are grounded on main trends. In this framework, while making its interest rate decisions, the Bank uses a very wide data set including supply-demand conditions, costs, model forecasts, expectations, domestic and external developments; and evaluates all these data with a forward-looking perspective. This process is certainly a dynamic one, and every new piece of data and development is being closely monitored within the framework of the Bank’s inflation forecasts. Another significant fact about the interest rate decisions of the Bank is that the impacts of these decisions are observed with a time lag. The impact of the decisions on economic activity becomes evident within a period of 3-9 months, while their impact on inflation is observed within a period of 9-18 months.
W A Wijewardena: Why inflation tax is an evil? Article by Mr W A Wijewardena, Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, published in Sunday Times on 10 June 2007. *  *  *  A popular folk story talks of a villager making a chance meeting of a demon in the forest and using his craftiness to get the demon to work for him. Understandably, the demon being an untiring person proves to be a marvelous worker. His contribution to the villager far exceeds that of even a thousand workers. According to the story, everything is well and good as long as the villager is able to keep the demon under his control. But, on the day the villager loses his grip over the demon, it would set upon the villager and devour him. So, though the villager would have a jolly-good life in the short run, he runs the great risk of losing everything, including his life, in the long run. Governments’ use of inflation as a tax to force-mobilize resources for funding government projects has been equated to the fate of the villager in that folk story. In the short run, a government could forget about all its fiscal problems and enjoy the temporary solace provided by it. But in the long run, when inflation becomes uncontrollable, it will have to sacrifice all its temporary gains. When an initially mild inflation degenerates into an uncontrollable hyper-inflation later, it has been termed as a mass killer.

According to SWIFT data, almost 40% of transactions are denominated in euro. It truly is the second most important currency in the world after the dollar. The European Commission has recently taken steps to further strengthen the role of the euro, which are most welcome. iv Among other things, the Commission has launched the Capital Markets Recovery Package that introduced targeted amendments needed to develop euro-denominated derivatives for energy and raw materials. 1. Supplying euro denominated safe assets and enhancing Capital Markets Union An international currency is only as strong as the safe assets it can offer. The euro sovereign debt market is still fragmented and only a few Member States are issuing global assets in a sufficient quantity. In this regard, there have been interesting recent developments in Europe. In June 2021, Europe launched Next Generation EU (NGEU) which will raise over 800 billion euros through a joint issue of European bonds. More broadly, the deepening of European Capital Markets Union should, at end, be instrumental. v It would help both for the allocation of capital within the euro area and for the stability and balance of the International Financial System. Such an initiative is important as we face new policy challenges. The transition to a greener economy will require immense financing, and the digital transformation will also require both public and private investments. This all calls for investments in global public goods to be increasingly managed at the EU level. Two open questions remain.
Without them, it would have been impossible to make sense of the chaotic dynamics of global economies and financial systems at the time. In other words, nothing could have provided a better case study of the importance of Max’s work than the crisis. And it is lessons from the global financial crisis with which I want to begin. These are of course many and varied. But among the most important is also perhaps the simplest: to safeguard against systemic risk, the financial system needs to be managed as a system (Haldane (2009)). As put, this statement seems rather obvious, perhaps even tautological. Yet, pre-crisis, it was far from obvious. The orthodoxy then was that safeguarding individual financial firms was a necessary and sufficient condition for system-wide stability. This was the financial stability equivalent of the English aphorism: “look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves”. And so it appeared during the long pre-crisis period of stable growth and stable banks – the “Great Moderation” (Bernanke (2004)). The crisis has rewritten that orthodoxy. It revealed that the safety of individual banks was neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for systemic stability. Not necessary because, in any well-functioning system, individual banks can and should fail. Not sufficient because, in an integrated web, the chain is only as strong as its weakest link. In focussing on individual banks, policymakers had been, to coin another English aphorism, “penny-wise but pound-foolish”. That is why Great Moderation gave way to Great Recession (Gai and Kapadia (2010)).

In this second  BIS central bankers’ speeches  9  phase, some macro-prudential decision-making would naturally reside at the international, rather than national, level. (d)  Improved international liquidity assistance  This is plainly the thorniest of the issues. Fifteen years ago, then-IMF Deputy Managing Director Stanley Fischer set out the case for the IMF becoming a quasi-international lender of last resort (Fischer (1999)). His argument was that the IMF’s financial firepower had failed to keep pace with the scale of cross-border capital flows. At the time, I remember being sceptical about the feasibility and desirability of this proposal. In the period since, there has been a further dramatic ratchet up in cross-border capital flows. This has not been matched by IMF resources. The mismatch between global financial risk and global financial resources has widened. Fifteen years, and several crises on, I think it is clear that Stan was right. Ratification by the US of the 14th general review of IMF quotas would help close the gap but, by itself, would not prevent it from yawning. Various proposals for augmenting IMF resources have been put forward (Lachman (2006) and Farhi et al (2011)), but have foundered on political rocks. Partly in response, regional facilities have sprung up as a partial substitute, growing broadly to match in scale multilateral facilities. But the financial system is a global, not regional, one – indeed, increasingly so. Regional facilities can be a complement, but are no substitute, for multilateral insurance mechanisms.
The combination of illiquidity, growing concerns with the real estate market, and ebbing confidence in the ratings resulted in dramatic declines in the pricing of Triple-A securities as the financial crisis worsened.4 Myth 3 – The “originate to distribute” model limited the balance-sheet risk of banks Over the decade preceding the crisis, large commercial and investment banks had become increasingly involved in securitizing mortgage assets. They argued that this provided a steady stream of fee income but generated little risk for the bank. While they packaged mortgages, they were not retaining the risk in their own portfolio – instead, the risk was taken by those that purchased the mortgage securities, particularly the lower-rated mortgage securities. What was frequently ignored by many was the rapid growth of Triple-A mortgage securities holdings elsewhere within the banks, as well as in off balance sheet structures. While these off balance sheet structures were considered separate entities, banks found the potential reputational risk of not supporting their sponsored off balance sheet risk sufficiently great that many ended up supporting these off balance sheet structures. In a sense, “originate to distribute” was, in practice, something more like “originate to hold, loosely, somewhat off to the side.”5 In addition, risk managers, bank management, and regulators were sufficiently lulled by Myths 1 and 2 to develop their faith in Myth 3.

In particular, the energy situation in Europe, the loss of purchasing power due to inflation, and tighter financing conditions are having a dampening effect. Inflation will remain elevated for the time being. However, the importance of temporary factors such as supply bottlenecks is likely to diminish over the medium term. The increasingly tighter monetary policy in many countries should also help inflation gradually return to more moderate levels. Our scenario for the global economy is subject to significant risks. For example, the energy situation could worsen again. At the same time, high inflation could become embedded and require stronger monetary policy responses abroad. Finally, the coronavirus pandemic continues to pose important downside risks to growth. Swiss economic outlook  In Switzerland, GDP growth in the second quarter was lower than expected, at 1.1%. This was mainly due to weaker performance in manufacturing. The short-term outlook has deteriorated. By contrast, the situation on the labour market has remained positive. The further development of the economy is likely to be shaped by the economic slowdown abroad and the availability of energy in Switzerland. To date, the prices of natural gas and electricity in particular have risen sharply. For this year, we anticipate GDP growth of around 2%. This is roughly half a percentage point lower than at the last monetary policy assessment. The level of uncertainty associated with the forecast remains high.
We end up with a lot of white noise and no real substance on what both markets and supervisors really want to know: how exposed is a bank to C&E risks and what is it doing to manage that exposure? It is of course relevant for banks to publicise their efforts to, for example, reduce the electricity consumption of their branches. However, it would be much more significant if they were to announce how they are steering their activities towards risk management practices that are aligned with a carbon-neutral economy. Looking at the world through “green-coloured glasses” is not quite the same as a sound management of all material C&E risks. We also observe a lack of concrete detail in how banks substantiate their climate-related and environmental metrics and targets. For example, when reporting on their commitment to align with the Paris Agreement, only around one in five institutions disclose the methodologies, definitions and criteria for all of the figures, metrics and targets reported as material. More than one-third of institutions do not disclose these aspects at all. In light of the increasing importance of such commitments, interested parties will increasingly seek information on these alignment metrics – and banks’ disclosures must become meaningful in this regard. Best practices Like many other institutions and agencies, the ECB is committed to sharing the best practices we have found across the industry. Not only do they serve as inspiration for banks who need to catch up, they also show that the ECB’s expectations can, in fact, be met.

Frank Elderson: Full disclosure - coming to grips with an inconvenient truth Keynote speech by Mr Frank Elderson, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank and Vice-Chair of the Supervisory Board of the ECB, at the 14th European Bank Institute Policy Webinar on the ECB’s supervisory approach on climate-related and environmental risks, Frankfurt am Main, 14 March 2022. * * * Some years ago, Andrea Enria, the Chair of the Supervisory Board, gave a speech, precisely at an EBI conference, calling for greater transparency in prudential supervision. When describing the role of transparency and information disclosure, he echoed the words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman”. This couldn’t be truer for climate-related disclosures, too. As I have said before when discussing the supervision and prominence of climate-related and environmental, or C&E, risks, we can only tackle a problem once we get a good grip on its shape and size. Some information may be uncomfortable to face up to – but bringing it to light is the first step in making progress. When it comes to climate change, the information on what Al Gore famously dubbed an inconvenient truth is indeed getting bleaker by the day. The most recent IPCC report confirms the dramatic consequences of not taking immediate action: additional global warming of up to 1.5 degrees Celsius in the near term would increase climate hazards, and present numerous risks to ecosystems and human society.
This will result in an extra 0.1% of GDP in infrastructure spending in 2017/18, rising to 0.3% of GDP by 2021-22. Over five years, the incremental spending amounts to an extra £ billion. This fund will be focussed on transport, housing, telecoms and research and development. 22  Just yesterday, the CBI published a report on differences in regional productivity performance and outlined a sequence of measures to help boost productivity and narrow regional differences. These measures included developing regional scorecards to enable productivity hotspots (and coldspots) to be identified; increased investment in skill-building through improved school and vocational education; increased infrastructure, in particular transport, spending; and improvements in managerial practices. The work of the “Productivity Commission”, chaired by Sir Charlie Mayfield, has identified a long tail of companies across all sectors in the UK whose productivity performance is falling short. 23  The Commission  are developing, among other things, a tool which would enable firms to benchmark themselves relative to others in their sector along several key business dimensions. This could then serve as a prompt for action, enabling firms to boost their productivity performance through targeted action. I think this micro-level assessment of productivity is a useful way to formulate plans which support productivity, and narrow productivity differences, regionally and sectorally. For example, recent work by the OECD has looked at the changing distribution of productivity across firms over time.

Consistent with that, my subjective distribution of risks around these projections is now symmetric. On the upside, the fall in sterling has had a quite pronounced and, as importantly, persistent impact on financial market and, to a lesser extent, consumer measures of inflation expectations. Financial market measures of expected inflation five years ahead over the following five years have risen by around 60 basis points from their mid-year low-point. There has also been a tick-up in equivalent measures in the US and euro-area over the past few months of around 50 and 30 basis points respectively (Chart 16). In each case, this does no more than take inflation expectations back to around where they were at the start of the year. In other words, recent adjustments have removed the downside skew to inflation expectations which had emerged. In that sense, the recent adjustment in inflation expectations is benign and helpful. Nonetheless, a further large upwards shift in expectations from current levels would, I think, be less benign and possibly unhelpful, especially if it were expected to persist. On the downside, I think there is still a material chance that growth could under-perform relative to expectations during the course of next year – for example, if the squeeze on household incomes prompts a larger adjustment in household spending. In that event, the upside pressures on inflation would be weaker than expected.