samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The Bank of Japan (BoJ) responded by reducing overnight interest rates from a peak of more than 8 percent in early 1991 to ½ a percent by the fall of 1995.2 Most studies of this period suggest that policy was generally appropriate given economic forecasts at the time, but too tight relative to the actual outcomes.3 Economic forecasts for Japan – both by the official community and by private sector agents – were consistently more optimistic than the actual outturns. It is noteworthy that as late as January 1995 – on the eve of deflation – 10-year Japanese Government Bond (JGB) yields were still at 4.7 percent. With the benefit of hindsight, we now understand that the disinflationary consequences of the asset price bust and financial stress where vastly more powerful than was widely realized at the time. As we later saw in the U.S., the forces of contraction and disinflation operated through many different channels – not just directly on household wealth, for example, but also through the impact of the asset price bust on the health of financial intermediaries and the supply of credit to households and businesses. Over time, the Japanese banking system came under mounting stress. This was a slowmotion crisis, as the assets were mainly loans that were not marked-to-market. Accounting practices and regulatory forbearance allowed banks to delay charging off bad loans and recapitalizing at the cost of impairing the availability of credit to new potential borrowers. A full-blown banking crisis finally materialized in 1997.

No decision has yet been made regarding its issuance or its final design, but we launched the investigation phase of the project last year in order to ensure we are prepared in the event that future developments warrant its launch. Our work is now focused on deepening the conceptual analysis by assessing the different design options, as well as the distribution model. The first step was to identify the use cases to focus on, namely those that better support the policy objectives of a digital euro and facilitate network effects. Payments in e-commerce and physical stores, as well as person-to-person payments are, clearly, natural candidates. They either represent important market segments or have a clear potential to grow, and they rely heavily either on cash or on non-European providers and technologies. Payments between governments and individuals have also been considered a priority, given their potential synergies with the aforementioned ones. In any case, focusing now on these payment segments does not mean ruling out others, but simply leaving them for future stages. The next step of the analysis has covered what we consider to be the foundational design options. They refer to the way a digital euro should be transferred, the level of privacy and the tools to control excessive use and, hence, limit its impact on the stability of the financial system.
Estimates of equilibrium unemployment are uncertain, however, and it is important that the Riksbank’s monetary policy does not unnecessarily hamper decreased unemployment. All the other information about labour market tendencies has to be considered as well. A deeper analysis is needed as a foundation for any conclusions that the economy is approaching full capacity utilisation. When an economy is moving closer to its capacity ceiling, certain statistical phenomena can be expected to occur more clearly and frequently. The same applies to anecdotal information in such a situation. This can take the form of, for example, bottleneck problems in the labour market and signs of difficulties in recruiting skilled labour. Other signs are an increased propensity to resort to labour disputes, either regular strikes or wildcat behaviour. Moreover, firms may have to compromise over job qualifications and take on less skilled personnel in order to cope with demand for their goods and services. Some such signs have been observed in recent months. Firms are already finding it difficult to recruit computer consultants, for instance, as well as some other categories of personnel. The situation in some parts of Sweden is also more strained than elsewhere. This suggests that firms will find it increasingly hard to keep up with demand for their products. In other words, a situation where demand is rising too rapidly. To date, however, the bottleneck problems are fairly limited.

At the end of that process of realising the assets in the rump, the Deposit Insurer learns how much it has lost. I want to stress that the DI typically incurs losses but discovers how much ex post. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  Now imagine that the commercial bank subsidiary in question is big and complex. The realisation of the assets via a standard rump-administration is liable to destroy a lot of value, increasing the Deposit Insurer’s losses. And in any case that strategy may not be consistent with maintaining stability (or containing disorder). A way of cutting through that would be to bail in the Deposit Insurer. Rather than the Deposit Insurer waiting until the end of the process of a potentially destructive realisation of the assets, it would hear up front how much it had lost. In the scenarios I have described, its losses should be smaller that way. That approach could, if necessary, be applied in different regions to different distressed subsidiaries of the group. In the world of real banks, the firms have uninsured as well as insured deposit liabilities, and they typically combine deposit taking with some bond issuance. That means that, after equity and subordinated debt holders were extinguished, losses would be shared amongst the DIS and those bonds etc that could be bailed-in. Whether they got bailed-in together or in sequence (bonds first) would depend on whether a jurisdiction operated depositor preference in its insolvency regime.
However, such transitory movements should have no material effect on financial conditions or the broader economy. What matters for policy transmission is the predictability that on most days money market rates will be close to the target range set by the FOMC. 13 Of course, if rates were to move substantially outside the target range and those changes were expected to persist, the Fed would take appropriate action to assure that its intended stance of policy is achieved. In addition, as highlighted in minutes to the Committee’s recent policy meetings, an operating regime with a reasonably large positive spread between the IOER and ON RRP rates would support active trading in the funds market like we see today, and would likely prevent the Fed’s involvement in the repo market from growing too large. This would, in turn, lessen the possibility that patterns of financial intermediation could be altered in unanticipated and potentially undesirable ways by the Fed’s actions. Recent changes to the overnight RRP test exercise Now I’d like to return to the ON RRP testing that the Fed has been conducting over the past year, and discuss the changes to the testing exercise that were introduced following the September FOMC meeting. You’ll recall that we began testing ON RRPs in September 2013, when the Committee instructed the Desk to examine how a potential ON RRP facility might work and how it might affect short-term interest rates.

Consideration is thus given to the sustained implications of monetary stability measures on the real economy. The law therefore requires the Bank to take a balanced view to avoid the adoption of rigid frameworks that may result in strong biases that would lead to a fundamental and sustained damage to the economy. This balance is also extended to the explicit role of the Bank in developing an inclusive financial system in its responsibility to develop a sound and progressive financial system. These considerations are particularly important for emerging market economies so as to ensure balanced economic progress and development. The new Central Bank of Malaysia Act 2009 also institutionalises the autonomy for the formulation of monetary policy, thus providing for the integrity and credibility of the decisions made. It also provides for greater flexibility in monetary policy implementation, allowing for a diversified range of instruments that can now be deployed for the implementation of monetary policy. As financial markets trend towards greater sophistication and demonstrate periods of extreme volatility, central banks must have commensurate capabilities to conduct monetary policy operations in order to maintain price stability. Equally important is the mandate to provide oversight over the money and foreign exchange market to ensure the orderly development and functioning of the markets. These necessary powers are however, combined with a system of checks and balances to enable the Bank to act decisively, but yet having in place safeguards so as to enhance transparency and accountability.
As the financial stability authority we are also responsible for monitoring stability at the level of the sector as a whole. While we have multiple policy hats the common denominator in this space is ensuring that the sector has adequate operational resilience – that is that firms can continue to provide critical services that are important for their own integrity and the functioning of the sector. If a firm’s operations are interrupted, we want to be sure that they can be recovered quickly and reliably especially where they are systemically important. Three observations at this point: a)  First to stress our accent on financial stability. Our efforts target first those firms where operational failures may result in disruption to the provision of vital financial services to the real economy or in dislocation to the rest of the sector. That does not mean the failures in customer facing applications do not matter. It is just that, where no immediate systemic dislocation results from such an outage, any consumer detriment will be a concern for our colleagues at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) more than it is for us. b)  Second, operational resilience is different from operational risk. In operational resilience we are describing a policy outcome we want to deliver in terms of the system functioning. This may be a by-product of effective operational risk management.

Compromise of networks or attacks themselves will not always be obvious. Diagnosis may take time. By contrast physical threats to operational resilience – bombs, fires, floods – are immediately apparent. And apparent too to the rest of the sector. Fourth capacity to recover may be threatened. Standard approaches to achieving continuity – operating with common systems environments between primary and secondary sites and mirroring data between the two, could, in the face of a successful cyber attack, be vulnerable to complete loss of applications or destruction of data, disrupting a firm’s capacity to operate and leaving the timeframe and route to recovery uncertain. Hence the FPC recommendation in 2013 that relevant authorities should undertake work to test and improve resilience to cyber attack of the firms at the heart of the financial system 2. You will have seen from the FSR published yesterday 3 that interest in and awareness of this risk continues to grow. This is why it is so vital that firms – and authorities – take the necessary action to address their cyber vulnerabilities. In response to the FPC’s 2013 recommendation our work has been mostly diagnostic, concentrating on assessing the vulnerability of the UK financial sector to cyber attack. Our focus has been twofold: a cross-sector review of current risk management processes via a detailed firm self-assessment questionnaire and bespoke voluntary vulnerability testing, known as CBEST 4. The conclusions we have drawn from this work can be broken down into three core areas: 1. Defensive capabilities  2  http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/records/fpc/pdf/2013/record1307.pdf.
2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Conversely, I would be willing to consider tightening policy at a somewhat earlier stage if growth strengthened sufficiently to materially improve the medium-term outlook and substantially reduce tail risks, or if there was evidence of a genuine threat to medium-term inflation, including a rise in inflation expectations. In such a case, I would anticipate that the first step would be to bring in the late 2014 date of the policy guidance. This would effectively tighten financial conditions not only by changing the expected path of short-term interest rates, but also by bringing forward the expected start of balance sheet normalization. Regional economic conditions Let me turn now to the regional economy, the focus of our presentations today. Since our last briefing, the recovery in the region has picked up some steam. As attendees at previous regional press briefings may recall, the New York Fed produces economic activity indexes to help monitor the performance of the regional economy. Based on these measures, activity in New York State and New York City has expanded at a healthy clip, while New Jersey’s growth continues at a more moderate pace. In Puerto Rico, the activity index produced by the Government Development Bank for Puerto Rico shows that the Island’s downturn appears to have ended, but the pick up that we noted at our last briefing has not persisted and the level of activity there has stalled.

And, households appear quite far along in the deleveraging process by a number of important measures. For example, the ratio of household debt service relative to income is back to levels last seen in the early 1990s. For these reasons, I expect that growth will gradually strengthen over the next few years. Nevertheless, significant downside risks remain, especially those related to the challenges in Europe and how the potential “fiscal cliff” in the United States will be resolved after the fall elections. Even if these risks do not materialize, I anticipate only slow progress toward full employment. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  On the inflation side, in recent years our forecasts have been noticeably more accurate than on the growth side, and we have succeeded in delivering inflation very close to our 2 percent price stability objective. Through March, as measured by the personal consumption expenditures deflator, overall consumer prices have risen 2.1 percent over the past 12 months, and prices excluding food and energy have risen 2.0 percent. But price trends have been a bit stickier than one might have anticipated given the large amount of slack in the economy. To some degree, this likely reflects the anchoring exerted by stable inflation expectations. But some of the price pressures can be attributed to other, more temporary, factors:   Higher oil and gasoline prices and their pass-through into the costs of other goods and services.   Upward pressure on imputed homeowners rents due to increased demand for rental housing.
The policymaker re-optimises 𝜆 when moving from point C to D. 38  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  38  Chart 20: Impact of mark-ups on inflation and nominal interest rate volatility Standard deviation of inflation 5 D  Baseline 4 Higher mark-up shock variance  3  Higher mark-up shock variance and higher markups  2  B A  1  C 0 0  1  2  3 4 Standard deviation of policy rate  5  6  7  Sources: Galí (2008) model and Bank calculations. Notes: Parametrisation such that 𝛽 = 0.99, 𝜃 = 2/3, 𝛼 = 1/3, 𝜑 = 𝜎 =1. Standard deviation of mark-up shock increases from 0.1 to 0.125 when moving from the blue to red line. The steady-state mark-up level increases from 1.1 to 1.6 when moving from the red to the green line. The policymaker re-optimises 𝜆 when moving from point C to D.  Chart 21: Mark-ups and inflation bias Annualised inflation bias  40  30 Estimated increase in global mark-ups 20  10  0 1.0  1.2  1.4  1.6  1.8  2.0  Mark-up level Sources: De Loecker and Eeckhout (2018), Galí (2008) model and Bank calculations. Notes: Parametrisation such that 𝛽 = 0.99, 𝜃 = 2/3, 𝛼 = 1/3, 𝜑 = 𝜎 =1.

Although they capture subtly different dimensions of market power, there is a weakly positive relationship between measures of mark-up and market concentration at the sector level (Chart 4), which is statistically  6  De Loecker and Eeckhout (2018) use a dataset that largely includes publicly-traded companies, but there are also some privately held firms. 7 Similar estimates have recently been provided by Díez et al (2018). 8 OECD data. 9 De Loecker and Eeckhout (2018) estimate that mark-ups in the US are a little larger than in the UK, so the boost to UK TFP from eliminating them would be smaller than the 35% estimate for the US in Baquee and Farhi (2018), albeit of a similar order of magnitude. 10 The methodology is explained in the Appendix. The data include around a little over 1000 firms, on average, per year. These firms account for around one-third of UK employment. Their sales are equivalent to around one-third of UK turnover and around two-thirds of UK nominal GDP. We exclude financial sector firms and, having estimated mark-ups, trim outliers, i.e. those firm-level mark-ups that are below the 1st percentile and above the 99th percentile of the firm-level mark-up distribution in a given year, 5  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  5  significant at the firm level. 11  The same has been found among companies in other countries (Díez et al  (2018)). This gives some degree of reassurance that the rise in measured market power has been a genuine one.
On the other hand, a speculative position against the share price of the banks tended to weaken the króna, as the banks were listed in Iceland and their equity denominated in krónur. Furthermore, as the banks’ official accounts and equity were denominated in Icelandic krónur, while ⅔ of their balance sheet was in fact denominated in foreign currency, they tended to hedge their equity, which, during the weakening phase of the króna, tended to weaken it further. These relationships emerge clearly in the graphs below, which show the strong correlation between international liquidity conditions, as measured by an index constructed by the Bank of England, the exchange rate of the Icelandic króna and share prices of listed financial institutions.

This over-indebtedness was moreover accompanied by a strong bias towards the construction and real estate development sector and, inevitably in an economy as strongly banked as Spain, this also led to excessive growth in bank lending and excesses in banks’ risk concentration. The relative ease with which these debts built up and their subsequent effects on activity, employment and financial stability were not, in any event, an exclusively Spanish phenomenon. Indeed, these and other similar developments have given rise to widespread initiatives at the international level to strengthen the economic policy tool box, with a new instrument – namely macroprudential supervision – being incorporated to head off this type of situation. In any event, the losses in competitiveness and excessive debt led to a large-scale imbalance in our foreign trade, resulting in a deficit of 10% of GDP in 2007 and requiring the resort to large volumes of external saving to ensure trade financing. But other elements of fragility emerged with the crisis. The worsening macroeconomic scenario and, in particular, the collapse in employment had a most adverse influence on public finances. The characteristics of labour market regulation meant that the effects of the adjustment to the sudden change in the business cycle fell basically on employment, and hardly on wage conditions or on greater hiring flexibility. In turn, the marked deterioration in public finances revealed weaknesses in the institutional workings of the public sector; in particular, the insufficiency of the disciplinary framework in place to ensure compliance with budget targets.
These enduring traits are embedded into our geography and culture, and will serve us well for many years. India since the early 90’s India too has been opening up since the early 1990s, although not at a uniform pace. Since independence, India had adopted an economic model that emphasised self-sufficiency, strong central planning, and the state controlling the commanding heights of the economy. By the late 1980s this model had run into difficulties. In 1991 Prime Minister Narasimha Rao started to deregulate and open up the Indian economy. Countries in Asia watched with close interest successive budgets of Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, as decisions that had hitherto been made centrally were devolved to the private sector, the Rupee was devalued, subsidies were reduced, state-owned enterprises were privatized, and industries opened up to competition and foreign participation. They looked forward to a dynamic, prosperous India, participating fully in the regional economy. But the political situation in India changed after several years, and the pace of reform slowed down, or so it seemed to those watching India from afar. However, in the last few years under the BJP government led by Prime Minister Vajpayee, not only have the reforms resumed, but a new spirit and vigour have manifested themselves across the country. Last week’s mini-budget announcements show the resolve of the government to press on with the reforms. 2  BIS Review 3/2004  India is now a fast growing economy.

Thus, additional development and modernization of the Bulgarian government securities market is expected to be achieved and its further integration into the European Union’s single market to be encouraged. This will allow by the end of next year financial institutions to freely select the place where they trade in government securities issued in Bulgaria, in compliance with the requirements under Regulation 2015/61 concerning the assessment of liquid assets in the form of government securities. This would possibly provide the prerequisites for additional diversification of the investors in Bulgarian government debt instruments. These changes are conceived in line with the debt management and financial markets security policy in the context of our future euro area membership and are necessitated by regulatory reforms at EU level. Finally, I would like to mention a project successfully completed recently. On 31 May 2016 Bulgaria subscribed to the Special Data Dissemination Standard Plus of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Bulgaria is the 11th country worldwide to adhere to this highest tier international data dissemination standard. Adhering to this standard is the result of the joint efforts of the Bulgarian National Bank as coordinator for Bulgaria, the National Statistical Institute, and the Ministry of Finance. The BNB oversaw the adherence efforts and was responsible for developing the so-called National Summary Data Page, which is already available on the BNB website. The greater part of the new statistical indicators included in the standard are compiled by the BNB.