samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
I want to review these claims by examining the cold, hard facts around:   the foundational contributions that monetary policy makes to the good of the people of the UK;    how effective monetary policy has been in achieving macroeconomic outcomes since the crisis; and 10  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  10    what have been the associated developments in the distribution of income and wealth - the financial outcomes - since extraordinary monetary policies were first implemented. Reinforcing the foundations Any assessment of the distributional consequences of monetary policy must recognise that the negative effects of unemployment and volatile inflation fall predominantly on the poorest in society. High inflation hurts those, typically the less well off, who don’t hold equities or property or whose incomes are xxiii  fixed in nominal terms. Equally, if inflation is too low in a highly indebted economy, dynamics can quickly develop that raise real interest rates, increase debt burdens, lower wages, and reduce growth. In extreme, these can morph into debt deflation, causing very high and persistent unemployment. Again, the highly indebted tend to be less well off, and to pay the heaviest price. The happy medium is a monetary policy framework with a credible commitment to low, stable, predictable inflation over the medium term, as in the UK’s tried and tested arrangements. These give monetary policy the space to respond to shocks, while avoiding the distortionary effects of volatile inflation.

As I understand, the Citigroup MGS Index will potentially be part of their global bond index, an inclusion that would indeed contribute to increasing the significance of the MGS market in the global bond markets. The Citigroup's global bond index, previously known as the Salomon World Bond Index, has been one of the most referenced benchmark market index by the international investment community. It would promote Malaysia in the investors' investment horizon, whether as a long-term benchmark holding in their portfolio or as a tactical investment in seeking market out-performance. When this becomes a reality, the Citigroup Global Bond Index will be the first benchmark that has Malaysia as a component. The index could also serve to facilitate enhanced trading or liquidity in the market, with the commitment to make market or provide prices for the bonds comprised within the index. Besides enhancing the trading volume and related business prospects, it would also spur competition among dealers and the growth of derivative products. Increased market activity and continuous availability of prices in a benchmark government debt market would, in turn, enable other markets; namely private debt securities and asset backed securities to be appropriately priced relative to the degree of risks, and for such securities to be further developed. The Dow Jones-RHB Islamic Equity Index heralds another milestone in the growing Islamic financial markets.
Miguel Fernández Ordóñez: Spanish financial institutions in the face of the new competitive scenario Opening address by Mr Miguel Fernández Ordóñez, Governor of the Bank of Spain, of the XVI Financial Sector Meeting “Spanish financial institutions in the face of the new competitive scenario”, ABC-Deloitte Forum, Madrid, 21 April 2009. *  *  *  Thank you very much for inviting me to participate in this meeting which will address a subject –Spanish institutions in the face of the new competitive scenario – of the utmost importance at the current juncture. The highly exceptional difficulties besetting the global financial system and economy require decisive action from all of us who, in one way or another, have responsibilities in these matters. The public authorities of different countries, including those in Spain, are taking measures which in many cases are unprecedented. But their efforts cannot and should not be restricted to this area: the managers of financial institutions must reorganise and adapt their business models to the new competitive environment, actively seeking out levers permitting this process of change. I will devote the bulk of my address to this issue, not without briefly describing the situation of the Spanish banking system as a whole set against the international outlook. The external environment remains hugely complex.

First, the notable increase in risk premia, in a very sharp pendulum swing, has surely over-corrected the abnormally low levels reached in summer 2007, so these levels will foreseeably not be regained when conditions in the international financial markets return to normal. Second, the persistent difficulties in obtaining funding on the wholesale markets, which are also unlikely to regain the rate of expansion seen in the past, have led to notably heightened competition for new deposits, particularly time deposits, the cost of which is higher than that of other alternative sources of  BIS Review 52/2009  3  funding. Lastly, it should be recalled that in a setting of low interest rates, the cost of bank deposits has a floor, and this also contributes to the narrowing of margins. For these reasons, the net interest margin will foreseeably come under downward pressure in an environment in which it is not, and will not conceivably be, offset by increases in the volume of activity. Fees and commissions fell slightly in absolute terms. Firstly, analysis of the various components of fee and commission income shows that those directly related to more traditional banking activity have, in line with their lower rate of expansion, grown more moderately. Secondly, Spanish deposit institutions have been marketing non-bank financial products and securities services to their customers, which has generated significant fees and commissions. However, the data for December 2008 reflect a fall in fee and commission income from business of this type.
Our policy response was conditioned by the concerns of financial stability, assuming that interest rate cuts would speed up deposit withdrawals from the banking system. Bank of Albania took bold and decisive steps to control these problems and restore the credibility in banking system. As the effects of the fiscal stimulus began to phase out and  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  confidence was restored in the banking system, we reduced our policy rate to its historic low in order to provide further stimulus for the economy. More importantly, our supervision of the banking system has been enhanced by establishing a thoroughly new Department of Financial Stability and by bringing financial stability issues in the decision-making process of monetary policy. As a result, the set of tools available to the Bank of Albania has extended to include several macro-prudential measures, which aim to address simultaneously both economic growth and financial stability concerns. I believe that similar steps have been taken by most central banks around the world. Willingly or not, the objective of financial stability is now seen as the central duty of our institutions. It does not matter whether the legal mandate of the central bank is amended to include this new objective or not. What matters is that financial stability is a prerequisite to overall macroeconomic stability and monetary stability.

For small businesses, a key barrier was a lack of trust in non-bank channels. For migrant workers, going to a formal business premise and submitting to a customer due diligence process was intimidating and discouraged some workers from approaching formal remittance channels. This insight allowed us to focus on new ways of allowing workers to conduct remittance without physically visiting an office, such as through mobile channels. Another solution that proved to be very effective was bringing MSB services to the workplace. As a group and in their own familiar surroundings, we found that workers were more comfortable in dealing with formal MSB companies face-to-face. I am also pleased to inform that as previously announced, the Bank has finalised guidance that will allow money service business companies to conduct e-KYC for on boarding customers. This in turn will facilitate an end-to-end electronic process for performing remittance transactions below specified limits without a customer having to physically visit an MSB office. For small businesses, our outreach programs were opportunities we could use to explain the regulatory framework for MSB companies and avenues for redress, thereby increasing confidence in the use of formal channels. Had we focused only increasing or providing information on access points, we would not have achieved the results that we did. Second, small ideas can make a big difference. As I alluded to earlier, language barriers presented considerable challenges in getting our messages across to migrant communities. To overcome this, the industry identified Greenback “ambassadors”, who were individuals from countries of the migrant communities.
Money unlocks the specialism of labour in the pin factory and “the great increase in the quantity of work that 2  results.” And only money can solve the coincidence of wants between the butcher, the brewer, the baker and the student on a Friday evening. 3  1  ‘Stabilising an unstable economy’ Hyman Minsky, 1986 This is the quote as abbreviated on the £ The full quote is “this great increase in the quantity of work which, in consequence of the division of labour, the same number of people are capable of performing”, Book 1, Chapter 1, Smith, A., (1776) ‘An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations’. 3 “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”. Book 1, Chapter 2, ibid. 2  2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  2  Many of you probably don’t see Adam Smith notes too often. Not just because you’re impoverished students. Or because you live in Scotland where you’re more likely to encounter Sir Walter Scott or Nan 4  Shepherd on a banknote when you do have cash. But because you use electronic forms of money such as debit cards and mobile phones for your everyday purchases and go online for your larger ones. A number of you may hold other forms of electronic money – crypto or virtual currencies such as Bitcoin, Ether or Scotcoin.

31  PSR indirect access market review, https://www.psr.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/PDF/MR1512-indirect-access-market-reviewinterim-report.pdf 14  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  14  Finally, at the wholesale payments end, we’ve already explored whether the core of the new RTGS system could run on distributed ledger to discover that the technology is not yet sufficiently mature or reliable to run a system that settles the equivalent of a third of the UK’s annual GDP each day and requires 5-sigma performance. Nonetheless, the Bank believes that distributed ledger technology could over time significantly improve the accuracy, efficiency and security of processes across payments, clearing and settlement. Securities settlement in particular is ripe for innovation. Transactions that take nanoseconds to execute, currently take days to settle along a chain involving many intermediaries. At stake, are the tens of billions of pounds of capital that are tied up while settlement completes. 32  The best in the private sector are working  hard unlocking this value. That’s why the Bank is building the new RTGS so that new forms of securities settlement that meet our standards of resilience (including those using distributed ledger) will be able to plug in directly. Ultimately this combination of new technology and direct access to RTGS could be applied to other assets such as helping make the payment, registration and Stamp Duty processes involved in house purchases quicker and more efficient.
SPEECH DATE:  13/04/2018  SPEAKER:  Martin Flodén  VENUE:  Swedish House of Finance  SVERIGES RIKSBANK SE-103 37 Stockholm (Brunkebergstorg 11) Tel +46 8 787 00 00 Fax +46 8 21 05 31 registratorn@riksbank.se www.riksbank.se  The Riksbank's balance sheet: How large should it be in the future? * Prior to the financial crisis, the Riksbank had a balance sheet of about SEK 200 billion. It now amounts to SEK 870 billion. The balance sheet has thus risen from 6 per cent to 20 per cent of GDP (see figure 1). This recent growth in the balance sheet is an experience we share with many other central banks. It is primarily a result of central banks having complemented low interest rate policy with asset purchases in order to make monetary policy even more expansionary. This expansionary monetary policy has had an impact and helped strengthen the economy as well as push up inflation to levels that are compatible with the inflation target. In Sweden, we are therefore approaching a situation where the monetary policy expansion can start to be tapered and the interest rate and balance sheet can start to be normalised. But what will monetary policy actually look like in a future “normal situation”? This is currently a subject of intense discussion among many central banks and other agents. Analyses by the Riksbank and others indicate that average interest rates in the future will be lower than what was deemed normal in the decades before the financial crisis.

Using today’s definition, one could say that we in a sense had a negative monetary base in Sweden. This illustrates that the currently used definition of “monetary base” is actually rather strange. The liquidity deficit has thereafter shifted to a surplus. The Riksbank is now draining the surplus liquidity by issuing certificates (and sometimes via finetuning transactions) with one-week maturity at an interest rate which we still call the repo rate. A better term would be the “certificate rate”. 8  See Yu (2016) and Chapter 1 in Walsh (2017) for summaries of studies based on US data. These studies usually investigate the immediate impact on asset prices when news of asset purchases is made public. It is more difficult to study whether the price effects are permanent and here the empirical support is therefore weaker. Altavilla et al. (2015) find that the ECB’s purchasing programme has pushed down interest rates across quite a broad spectrum of European assets, and particularly as regards government bonds in countries with high interest rates (such as Italy and Spain). De Rezende et al. (2015) find that the initial stages of the Riksbank’s purchasing programme contributed to rate falls in about the same way as purchasing programmes in other countries. 9  In a survey of central bank governors and leading researchers, a high percentage in both groups say that the purchasing of government bonds and/or other assets is a tool that should continue to be part of the central bank toolbox even after the crisis (Blinder et al., 2017).
The continuation of the rebalancing between savings and investment will be a decisive factor in this result. Deficits of similar magnitude are expected for 2024 and 2025. The projected evolution of the economy over the next three years underscores the need to resolve the imbalances accumulated in years past. Consumption has reached very high levels by historical standards, at the same time that national savings have fallen sharply and the current-account deficit has widened further. Regarding monetary policy, we believe that it will be necessary to maintain the MPR at 11.25 percent until the state of the macroeconomy indicates that the process of inflation convergence to the 3% target has been consolidated. According to the central scenario of this MP Report, this will take longer than we assumed in December. In order to consolidate the convergence of inflation, among other factors, consideration should be given to resolving the imbalances that have affected the economy in recent years, including a significant slowdown in consumption, the output gap moves toward negative values, and core inflation takes a clearly downward trend. The MPR corridor describes an area containing the most likely movements for the Monetary Policy Rate, which envelops the central scenario I have just described and the sensitivities around it. Its borders reflect sensitivity scenarios where the speed of the inflationary convergence process gives way to earlier or later adjustments of the rate with respect to the central scenario.

5/7  BIS central bankers' speeches  Trade has been facing a combination of structural and cyclical headwinds since the global financial crisis: The global merchandise trade-to-income ratio has stagnated since 2010. China’s imports of intermediate goods is growing at below 10%, compared to more than 20% in the early 2000s, creating a drag along supply chains across Asia. This is partly cyclical, reflecting slower growth in China. But it is also structural – reflecting a reconfiguration of supply chains and China’s increasing insourcing of intermediate inputs. As if these cyclical and structural headwinds are not enough, we are now facing the uncertain prospect of policy measures against free trade, especially in the US. There is talk of: rejecting TPP and re-negotiating or even repealing NAFTA and other FTAs; imposing a border tax adjustment that would in effect impose the corporate tax rate on imports; and labelling major trade partners as currency manipulators and imposing hefty tariffs on them. Some of these actions may well attract retaliatory measures, leading to trade conflicts with disastrous consequences for the global economy. In all likelihood, it may not be that bad. The contours of the incoming US Administration’s trade policies are highly uncertain. There remains within various arms of the US establishment a strong belief in the benefits of an open global trading system and the risks of punitive trade restrictions. But there could be some limited anti-trade measures such as targeted tariffs on selected products or industries.
All of this points at more favorable current-account balances in the medium term. Anyway, for the purposes of assessing this risk we also need to review the evolution of the deficit measured at trend prices. In this sense, news is pointing in the right direction, because the estimate for this year went from 5.7% of GDP last March, to 4.9% in this Report. We estimate that in 2014 it will continue to recede to 4.6% of GDP. The international economy is undergoing a normalization process that influences the Chilean economy. This means a lower external impulse, with more balanced world growth between developed and emerging economies, terms of trade approaching their long-term level and global financial conditions more in line with historic patterns. A smaller boost from foreign investment is also to be expected – especially in mining –, which will take pressure off the current-account deficit and the use of internal resources. Monetary policy is well equipped, if so required, to back this adjustment process. The Board follows closely the evolution of the external and domestic macroeconomic scenario and its implications on inflation, and reaffirms its commitment to conduct monetary policy so that projected inflation stands at 3% over the policy horizon. I would like to end by sharing with you some final thoughts. Final thoughts We have been 19 months with the same monetary policy interest rate. And as with the exchange rate, during this time we have received the most diverse recommendations and suggestions from the market.

While recognizing that overreactions can occur in the short term in either direction that could warrant such an intervention, we need to be aware that it entails carry costs for the Central Bank and affects the overall economy. Focusing on keeping inflation near the target and preserving the flexibility of the exchange rate in times of bonanza allows the peso to accommodate conditions like the present ones and adjust more efficiently to the new situation. We also know that exchange rate flexibility plays a critical role in preventing currency mismatches, which have taken such a great toll elsewhere in the region and in Chile in the past. Overall, the appreciation of the peso that we saw a few months back was milder than that of other currencies, so now the depreciation has not been as sharp either. Domestically, monetary policy has continued to face many short-term challenges. The sound economic slowdown we were expecting has been gradually occurring. On the expenditure side, however, consumption continues to be very strong, boosted by labor market conditions. Actually, the latest indicators confirm the strength of the labor market. The information we have reviewed for this Report suggests that this component of domestic demand will moderate in the coming quarters, but we must not overlook the risk of a slower than expected adjustment of consumption, affecting the use of domestic resources and the deficit of the current account of the balance of payments.
For example, the number of company bankruptcies and loan losses in the banks is usually higher when economic activity is low and vice versa. There is also a fundamental relationship between our fields of activity. The Riksbank’s most important tool in conducting monetary policy is the repo rate. One can say that we try to influence economic activity and inflation by steering the price of credit, that is,  BIS Review 119/2008  1  interest rates. But to be able to do this, the payment system and our interest rate steering system must function. Financial stability is therefore actually a necessary condition for being able to conduct monetary policy efficiently. With regard to financial stability, the Riksbank makes regular updated assessments. I shall soon return to our views on current developments. But before I do so, I would like to say a few words about what the task of safeguarding financial stability actually entails. Most people are probably aware that we have an inflation target for monetary policy. But what do we mean by financial stability? What do we mean by financial stability? Financial stability is not so easy to define. In the Sveriges Riksbank Act the Riksbank’s task that we commonly refer to as safeguarding financial stability is formulated as “to promote a safe and efficient payment system”. Put simply, this concerns working in different ways to ensure that he financial system is stable and functions smoothly. This is important for many reasons.

In conclusion, as we embark on financial reforms, we have to be forward looking, to ensure that we do not just have a resilient global financial system, but also one that can support sustainable economic growth. We need better regulations, better appreciation of the macro-financial linkages, and firmer supervision. Globally coordinated efforts and strong cross border cooperation in some areas, as well as local efforts that are context-specific are both needed to achieve the desired regulatory outcomes. 29. Singapore is honoured to host the 16th ICBS on our common supervisory journey. I wish you a meaningful and fruitful discussion, as well as a pleasant and memorable stay here in Singapore. Thank you. 4  BIS Review 121/2010