samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
I will today refer to two which I consider to be amongst the most important ones. The first one relates to business model and structural weaknesses. Despite the low profitability being a wider structural European issue, the cost to income ratio of the Cyprus Banking Sector, which amounts to 76 percent as at June 2022 is significantly higher than the respective EU average of 63 percent, signalling serious cost inefficiencies relative to peers. Investment in technology is key in the efforts to unlock efficiency and bridge this gap by addressing chronic issues that dent profitability such as cost inefficiencies, limited avenues of income generation, competitive pressure from entities operating outside the traditional banking spectrum and changing customer demands and needs. The second one relates to the risks of climate change. The ongoing effort to reduce the dependence from Russian energy may increase the transition risks and as such banks shall enhance and adapt their climate risk mitigation strategies. The fact that some of the banks have started making tangible steps on this regard is a positive development, but they are still early on the learning curve. They must act more aggressively and more decisively to meet our expectations of incorporating climate-related and environmental risks into their overall risk management frameworks. Conclusion Let me now briefly summarise the main points of my remarks and conclude: The adverse geopolitical developments led to a significant and persistent increase in inflation, associated with output loss and elevated economic uncertainty.

Pablo Hernández de Cos: Graduation Ceremony - Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros Speech by Mr Pablo Hernández de Cos, Governor of the Bank of Spain and Chairman of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, at the Class 2020/2021 graduation ceremony, Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros (CEMFI), 1 July 2021. * * * Good afternoon class of 2021. Good afternoon dear colleagues and friends. It is a pleasure for me to participate in this graduation ceremony together with Juan José Fernández Muñoz, Coordinator of Studies and Programs of Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo, Samuel Bentolila, Director of the Master’s Programme, and Rafael Repullo, Director of CEMFI. I would especially like to thank Juan José Fernández Muñoz for being here today. The partnership with Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo, dating back to 2006, has been instrumental in improving our ability to attract excellent students and the quality of our graduate programme, and I am very grateful for this. The Master’s programme of the class graduating today was severely disrupted by the COVID19 pandemic. In early March 2020, just before the end of the second term of the programme, all teaching activities were moved online. During the summer of 2020 CEMFI made all the necessary investments and established a set of safety protocols to be able to go back to onsite teaching. These efforts paid off handsomely. Most courses this year were taught on-site, with a minimal incidence of COVID-19 and, fortunately, no serious cases at all.
Iceland’s sovereign credit rating soared during the years before the crisis, and Icelandic banks’ credit ratings followed in its wake. In fact, perhaps they rose higher than was warranted and was good for us. In spite of the ensuing nosedive, we managed to keep the sovereign rating on the bottom rung of investment grade, apart from two years in Fitch Ratings’ speculative category after the first Icesave referendum. Keeping Iceland’s ratings in the investment-grade category cost an incredible amount of effort, and other countries that have gone on an IMF programme in recent years have seen their ratings from Moody’s and S&P fall to speculative grade. Some of them have managed to rise up faster than Iceland has, however. Studying the rating agencies’ reports shows which factors will be most important in order to improve Iceland’s sovereign rating and thereby pave the way for the banks to follow suit. Among them are continued reduction of public debt levels and sound, focused economic policy that provides stability throughout the ongoing upswing. The liberalisation of the capital controls is an extremely important factor, but it could work both ways. Successful moves towards liberalisation without jeopardising stability will have a positive effect, but disturbance of economic and financial stability will do the opposite. My assessment of this, and of conversations with the rating agencies, is that it is probably not realistic to expect an improvement in our sovereign rating in the very near term.

Már Guðmundsson: Economic outlook, monetary policy, and credit ratings Speech by Mr Már Guðmundsson, Governor of the Central Bank of Iceland, at the Chamber of Commerce Monetary Policy Meeting, Reykjavik, 6 November 2014. *  *  *  Madame Chairman, honoured guests, The Iceland Chamber of Commerce has a long-standing tradition of holding a meeting like this one on economic developments and prospects and monetary policy. The meeting is held following the publication of the Central Bank’s autumn forecast and, in latter years, the Monetary Policy Committee’s interest rate decision. It often has an additional specific topic, and on this occasion, our hosts have expressed an interest in the outlook for credit ratings. I will touch on that towards the end of my talk today, but as I usually do, I will focus mainly on monetary policy and the current and future economic situation. The big picture regarding the economy is this: the recovery that began in Q2/2010 is now well enough advanced that the slack in the economy is almost fully absorbed. The domestic economy has seldom been as well balanced as it is now. There is internal equilibrium, in that inflation has been at or below target for nine months and output is close to capacity. And there is external equilibrium, in that we have had a sizeable current account surplus that covers net capital outflows with room to spare, as the Central Bank has bought foreign currency for a total of 95 b.kr., or 5% of GDP, so far this year.
After all, most businesses do not work with margins that can absorb such extreme exchange rate fluctuations, in terms of both speed and level. The Swiss economy is very open and dependent on exports. Every second Swiss franc is earned abroad. The massive overvaluation of our currency this summer carried with it the risk of a recession and of deflationary developments. This is why  14  It is worth noting that this long run average is a purely backward-looking statistical concept and not a forwardlooking or equilibrium concept. We use it throughout as a statistical yardstick. The SNB does not endorse a specific equilibrium exchange rate level as the notion of equilibrium is model-dependent and thus not uniquely defined. Every model we know of concludes, however, that at CHF 1.20 per euro, the Swiss franc remains high. 15  This is an approximation of the real effective exchange rate, assuming constant weights and inflation differentials. 6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  the SNB concluded that it had to act in order to protect the economy and safeguard price stability. On 3 August, the SNB announced that it would be aiming for a three-month Libor as close to zero as possible. This was to take immediate effect. It would also expand banks’ sight deposits from their then level of around CHF 30 billion to CHF 80 billion.

Regulatory cooperation in Asia These initiatives are being supplemented in Asia by regional cooperation on both a bilateral and multilateral basis. There have been a number of factors driving this. The aftermath of the Mexican crisis in January 1995, which saw speculative attacks on a number of Asian currencies, encouraged the view that there was a need for countries in the region to strengthen their defences in this area. We have thus seen the arrangement of an interlocking series of bilateral repo agreements using US Treasuries between Asian central banks, including the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. These agreements are intended to provide additional liquidity for exchange rate stability purposes. More generally, there has also perhaps been a feeling among the Asian countries that the existing arrangements for central bank cooperation were somewhat “euro-centric” and did not take adequate account of the growing importance of the Asian region where over 40% of the world’s foreign currency reserves are now held. This feeling has to some extent been addressed by the more participative approach now being adopted by the Basle Committee and the BIS. But there is nonetheless a view that greater regional cooperation among Asian central banks is both necessary and desirable. This has been summed up in the concept of an “Asian BIS”, though this is somewhat misleading as there are no immediate plans to move towards the BIS Review 55/1997  -4-  institutional structure which the name would imply.
in the case of block chains or distributed ledgers where the technology is still evolving. Sometimes, it means updating regulation to take account of new technologies and new risks e.g. in the case of cloud computing and robo-advisers, where we issued special guidelines. Sometimes, it means being specific about the risks we want to address and taking a targeted approach to regulation e.g. in the case of crypto assets where we focus on the crypto intermediaries for antimoney laundering purposes rather than the crypto assets. Sometimes, it means taking an activity-based approach to regulation, setting rules for specific activities rather than the entity as a whole e.g. in the case of the proposed Payment Services Bill, where licensees will be regulated according to the activities they conduct because different activities pose different risks. The trick is to identify the risks we are most concerned with and finding the most targeted way of regulating those risks so that the business has maximum latitude to innovate and grow. Now, there is one more approach in MAS’ tool kit and that is the “regulatory sandbox”. The regulatory sandbox facilitates live experimentation of innovative financial services and business models within pre-defined boundaries. MAS is probably the second jurisdiction in the world to introduce the regulatory sandbox and it is one of the most comprehensive ones around.

Despite this advantage, the Bank of Thailand is not complacent and we will continue to prepare our banking sector for future challenges. In this regard, a SWOT analysis of our current financial institutions system reveals that while there was overall improvement in efficiency and soundness, operating costs remained high and financial access gaps remained. Furthermore, there was still inadequate financial infrastructure to support risk management of financial institutions. Meanwhile, future challenges of the next five years would likely come from more intensified competition – not only among banks, but from capital market, both local and overseas. It would also come from more complex and varied needs for financial services, as a result of globalizations and aging population, the shift in resource allocation with greater role of domestic demand vis-à-vis external demand as engine of growth, and finally, capital inflows and external challenges from the global economic crisis. Taken together, these remaining areas of improvement and the need to tackle future challenges have led to the recent launch of the second phase of financial sector reform. This brings me to the second part of my talk: key strategies in the Financial Sector Master Plan Phase 2. When thinking about characteristics that our future financial system is envisioned to have, several keywords come to mind: efficiency, strength and resiliency, diversification, fairness and transparency.
3  Interested readers are referred to Moe, Solheim and Vale (2004), Norwegian Official Reports (1992), Wilse (1995), and Stortinget (1998). Steigum (2004) sets out the macroeconomic background and implications of the banking crisis. BIS Review 58/2003  1  During 1984 and 1985, the Norwegian banking system was deregulated. In this new environment, banks started to compete for market shares. We saw a huge increase in bank lending which, coupled with general optimism (oil!) and interest rates that were kept artificially low, created an economic boom. However, neither bank managers nor supervisors had much experience of banks operating in a competitive credit market, and did not pay sufficient attention to banks’ risk exposure. A sharp fall in prices for our main export commodities, oil and gas, and the need to consolidate the economy after the boom and bring down rampant inflation, led to a recession in the late 1980s. In short, deregulation, a lending boom, and an ensuing recession set the stage for increasing bank losses. The Norwegian banking crisis evolved in two stages: In the first stage from 1988 till 1990, several small and some medium banks failed. From 1990 - 1991, the crisis became systemic. The three largest commercial banks, accounting for half of the market for credit to the domestic non-financial sector, were in deep trouble. During the first stage of the crisis, the problems were mostly handled by the banks’ own guarantee funds.

Norges Bank had kept the key policy rate at 0.5 percent for a year, and there was a slightly higher probability that the key policy rate would be reduced further than that it would be increased in the near term. There were signs of some brightening, both internationally and in Norway, but considerable uncertainty prevailed. Chart: Global GDP growth The economic outlook changed through 2017. Global growth gradually gained a firm footing, and global growth projections were revised up. For several of Norway’s main trading partners, unemployment was lower towards the end of 2017 than before the financial crisis. Despite rising growth abroad and falling unemployment, wage growth remained moderate. In 2017, most of Norway’s trading partners were still experiencing below-target core inflation. Chart: International interest rates Policy rates in the US, UK and Canada were raised in 2017. In addition, the Federal Reserve started to cautiously reduce its balance sheet, while the European Central Bank (ECB) announced that it would reduce its asset purchases from 2018. Nevertheless, international interest rates remain low, and signals from central banks as well as market expectations indicate a very gradual rise in interest rates. Chart: Oil prices and the krone exchange rate Oil prices have risen over the past two years, which may reflect steady growth in global oil consumption. Oil prices have recently increased further owing to geopolitical tensions. The krone has appreciated somewhat in this period.
Paul Tucker: Macroprudential policy – building financial stability institutions Remarks by Mr Paul Tucker, Deputy Governor for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, at the 20th Annual Hyman P Minsky Conference, New York, 14 April 2011. *  *  *  These remarks do not necessarily represent the views of the Bank of England or the interim Financial Policy Committee. I am grateful for comments from Charles Bean, Alastair Clark, Roger Clews, Spencer Dale, Paul Fisher, Andy Haldane, Don Kohn and Hector Sants. Thank you very much for inviting me to join you this evening. Having spent much of my career thinking about or living through the issues studied by Hyman Minsky, it is a very great honour to be here. I am going to begin with the birth of the Federal Reserve. And then I am going to discuss the birth, a century later, of a new institutional framework for financial stability in the UK. It is almost a hundred years since the Federal Reserve was established, after successive waves of bank runs. Against the instincts and interests of the followers of President Andrew Jackson, America finally found itself with a central bank. Its purpose, cast in 1913, was “to furnish an elastic currency, to afford a means of rediscounting commercial paper, [and] to establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States”.

Five of us are drawn from the executive of the Bank, increasing to six when microprudential supervision of banks and insurers moves across in  5  Hyun Shin has set this out with great clarity. 6  See Tucker, Comments at Clare College, discussion of Lord Turner’s Lecture, “Reforming finance: are we being radical enough?”, Cambridge, February 2011. BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  2012/13. The two senior officials of the UK’s existing regulator, the Financial Services Authority, are members during the interim period. And once the legislation has passed, the chief executive of the planned new securities/consumer regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, will be a member, reflecting, as I have outlined, the vital role of market regulation in preserving stability. There are four external members, including from the USA Don Kohn, the former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. The Government expects the legislative process to be complete towards the end of 2012. In the meantime, during the interim, non-statutory phase of our existence, the Financial Policy Committee has two broad functions: “paving” and “shadowing”. We will pave the way for the statutory incarnation of the Committee by advising the government on the instruments and powers we could be given by Parliament. And, secondly, we will as far as possible shadow the role of the statutory FPC, which essentially means advising the FSA on where and how it should use its regulatory tools for system-wide ends. So what are those ends? They are consistent with my earlier overview of financial stability.
Similarly, in pricing TIPS, a trader with a nonconformist view faces costs in taking that view, so even if ultimately proven correct, the costs of establishing such a position may deter the nonconformist view’s from being reflected in market prices. Second, professional forecasters may be overly exposed to similar “world views,” sharing similar data, reports, and analyses. This may lead to an information aggregation bias of sorts, in which forecasters share the same information set, which is an aggregate of finer information, and which may result in the loss of some important information. The next charts describe the median four-quarter-ahead CPI forecast and the dispersion around that median for the Blue Chip survey and the U.S. Survey of Professional Forecasters. While there is significant overlap in the two sets of respondents, there is an important difference between the two surveys: respondents are anonymous in the U.S. Survey of Professional Forecasters, whereas they are identified by name in the Blue Chip survey. The asymmetric payoffs described earlier may therefore have more of an impact in the Blue Chip survey than in the U.S. Survey of Professional Forecasters, leading to less dispersion in the former than in the latter. Chart 9 shows that the median forecast is substantially the same across the two surveys. However, as seen in Chart 10, there is some evidence of lower heterogeneity among forecasters in the Blue Chip survey compared with the Survey of Professional Forecasters, especially in recent periods, which, in retrospect, were periods of high fundamental uncertainty in the economy.

We also report home price change expectations and price change expectations for various commodities. In our latest survey in May 2014, these expectations remained stable for the most part. Interestingly, medical care price change expectations have been gradually declining since December 2013, dropping from around 11 percent to 9.5 percent. The expected cost of a college education has also been dropping since the start of 2014. These results are shown in Charts 2 and 3. For the labor market, we report the median expected earnings growth over the next twelve months. This figure has been stable at around 2 percent over the sample period, with a small increase to 2.4 percent over the winter that has since been reversed, as seen in Chart 4. We also track workers’ perceived chances of losing their current job, of leaving their current job voluntarily, and of finding another job in three months should they lose their current one. Quits, layoffs, and the job-finding rate are important flow measures, and workers’ expectations about these events enable us to gauge households’ perceptions of future labor market conditions. As I will mention later, these expectations seem to be meaningfully related to job search behavior and other economic decisions by households.
And third, sharp and abrupt changes in exchange rates of late. Academic economists like to put labels on economic periods. And I have referred to some of these labels earlier in my speech: the “Great Depression” of the 1920s, the “Great Inflation” era of the 1970s and early 1980s, and the “Great Moderation” we have witnessed since then. It is my hope that the increased uncertainty we are facing is conjunctural and does not become structural, and that we are not entering an era which, later on, academic economists could label as the "Great Uncertainty”. I believe that central banks are both willing and able to prevent this from happening. Therefore, at this juncture it is particularly important that the Eurosystem remains focused on its fundamental mandate of maintaining price stability over the medium term. The Governing Council of the ECB has indicated in this respect that it is fully committed to acting in a firm and timely manner to ensure that any risks to price stability over the medium term do not materialise and that medium to longer-term inflation expectations in the euro area remain solidly anchored at levels consistent with price stability. Such anchoring is a prerequisite for monetary policy to make an ongoing contribution towards supporting sustained economic growth, well-functioning markets and job creation in the euro area. This is true now more than ever, when we are confronted with a panorama which is more uncertain than that which we have faced during recent years. Thank you for your attention.

For instance, shareholding is more widespread among Swedish households and many of the major "Swedish" multinationals – in which Swedes have invested a substantial part of their shareholdings – are very dependent, directly or indirectly, on developments in the USA. Developments in the Swedish economy in recent years have shown many similarities to developments in the USA. Rapidly rising share prices, a strong GDP growth driven by both investment and consumption and an increase in indebtedness is a description that fits both the Swedish and American economies in recent years. However, the increase in economic activity began later in Sweden and has not really had the same speed as that in the USA. Moreover, the rise in Sweden was preceded by a period where adjustments following the crisis at the beginning of the 1990s had forced down investment and consumption considerably and where both the household and corporate sectors had reduced their level of indebtedness. Saving in both of these sectors was therefore at a high level and indebtedness fairly low when growth in the Swedish economy picked up. Now that economic activity is slowing down, the private sector's indebtedness is not particularly high, from a historical perspective. Furthermore, the lower interest rates will mean that interest expenditure comprises a much smaller burden for borrowers now than previously. Although the surplus in saving in the private sector has declined gradually in recent years, it only became a slight deficit towards the end of last year.