samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
But if the economics literature is right about the greater impact of new technology on the distribution of income, at least in the US, how many would say we should tax computer investment? The distribution of the benefits: I want to end this section with something else the early economists would recognise – that, whatever it has done to widen the distribution of income, free trade with labour-rich countries can have significantly progressive effects on prices. In their early writings on international trade the classical economists reserved particular hostility for the Corn Laws. Introduced after the Napoleonic Wars, in the midst of an economic downturn, these measures imposed heavy restrictions and tariffs on agricultural imports. The result was a much higher price of food, benefiting agricultural landowners  14  and penalising the less well-off, for whom food was the major part of  their consumption. Their eventual repeal in 1846, a landmark in Britain’s move towards (and support for) free trade in the second half of the century, owed much to the intellectual arguments of the classical economists. But it also came about because of what those restrictions meant for the poor. 11  See for example Acemoglu (1998) and Behar (2013). There are some obvious historical exceptions to this support. In 1779, there was a spate of “anti-machinery” riots. In one of them, Richard Arkwright’s new mill in Birkacre, in Lancashire, was destroyed. Thirty years later the “Luddites”, formed mainly of textile workers, also sought to destroy labour-replacing weaving machinery.

Denis Beau: From open banking to open finance Speech by Mr Denis Beau, First Deputy Governor of the Bank of France, at the France Payments Forum “The Europe of banking and financial services” – Paris Europlace – France Innovation, Paris, 24 March 2022. * * * Technological innovations, changes in demand, the arrival of new players: the changes underway in the financial sector are providing a strong impetus to relax the conditions of access to the market, in order to foster competition and thus encourage the development of new, more efficient and less costly services. In Europe, in the field of payments, this relaxation has already occurred. The EMD, the PSD1 and finally the PSD2 directives have all resulted in the emergence of more agile players, particularly in terms of data exploitation. The pressure to open up data now extends to insurance and savings: after open banking, we now speak of open finance. This pressure calls for further adapting the regulatory framework. But what should our guiding principles be? In the payments sector, the main objective of the directives I mentioned was to reconcile openness and security. While this challenge remains relevant for the transition from open banking to open finance, with digitalisation and the development of the platform economy, we have seen two other challenges emerge: reconciling innovation and integration on the one hand and competition and sovereignty on the other.
For the moment, we are only at a preliminary stage, contemplating which tools a macro-prudential policy could be based on, and how these tools could be used. As regards supervision, this crisis has shown the merits of having the banking supervisor close to the central bank. The point is not to claim there is an optimal supervisory structure that fits any country’s circumstances. Rather, it is to note that a system such as the one we have in France has proved very useful in allowing for an in-depth knowledge of the banking sector and the various financial institutions. It also allowed for very swift and timely exchanges of information, and, as a result, allowed us at the central bank to quickly pass sensitive judgments, not least on the usefulness of injecting liquidity. Let me conclude by stressing what may seem obvious. We are going through very challenging times, in some respect even unprecedented times. In this context, policy making is also about confidence building and financial education. Thank you very much Ladies and Gentlemen. 4  BIS Review 9/2009

And back then, everyone agreed that the revised rulebook needed to be a global one. The crisis clearly demonstrated that banking is a global business, so the rules that govern it should also be global. Today, however, it is much less clear whether everyone still subscribes to the idea of a global rulebook. And this worries me. It worries me because it shows that people are starting to forget the lessons we learned from the crisis. That’s why we need to finalise the global rulebook, Basel III, as quickly as possible. But that is just the first step. The second step is to implement and apply the rules in a broadly consistent manner at regional and national level. And this is a challenge – sometimes we see quite a different interpretation of the standards when it comes to implementing and applying them at national level. You won’t be surprised that I will focus on the euro area. The euro area countries have become closely intertwined. For many years now they have shared a single market and a single currency. Since the crisis, they have even begun to build a banking union, which includes a single supervisor. But when it comes to regulation, we still see differences between countries. It is true, of course, that we have a single rulebook in Europe. As one might expect for a union, 1/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  we had to come further than other countries. However, parts of that rulebook come in the form of EU directives.
Mugur Isărescu: The future of central banking Address by Mr Mugur Isărescu, Governor of the National Bank of Romania, during the plenary session “The future of central banking”, 8th World Policy Conference, Montreux, 20 November 2015. *  *  *  Parts of this address have been presented by Governor Mugur Isărescu during the plenary session “The future of central banking”, which also featured as speakers: •  Jean-Claude Trichet – former President of the European Central Bank  •  Jacob Frenkel – Chairman of JPMorgan Chase International, former Governor of the Bank of Israel  •  Marek Belka – President of the National Bank of Poland  Ladies and gentlemen, It is a great honour to address the audience during this symposium on the future of central banking, although I must confess from the very beginning that the topic itself is not easy to tackle. We all know that economists seldom reach a consensus when analysing the past. It is all the more difficult for them to agree on the future, especially when we refer to central bankers, who are known to be among the most cautious economists... Personally, I think I have enough reasons to be wary of any predictions of what is in store for us, particularly over the medium and long term. I started my career as an economist in a research institute back in August 1971, when the Bretton Woods System was just collapsing.

But what Lorie and I wanted to highlight was that, while Covid itself may have been truly exceptional, the financial market propagation mechanisms that turned that shock into a nascent systemic liquidity crisis reflected more structural trends: an increasing reliance by the real economy on core capital markets rather than banks; constraints on market intermediation capacity; and a range of unresolved vulnerabilities in non-bank firms that played an ever-growing role in those markets. In short, even if nothing as awful as Covid ever happened again, market dysfunction at a scale capable of threatening systemic stability could recur – and in all likelihood, would do so. And central banks needed to be ready to play their part. Our working group did not seek to provide a single definitive ‘playbook’ for such events – the range of potential shocks, and different national market and institutional structures, made that impossible. But it did set out a framework of principles and possible tool choices. [2] And that framework proved invaluable at the Bank of England when, late last year, vulnerabilities in Liability Driven Investment (LDI) funds amplified the impact of an abrupt change in fiscal stance into a selfreinforcing spiral in government bond prices. Long maturity nominal gilt yields rose by 130 basis points in a matter of days – three times the size of any comparable historical move – and we were  Page 3  required to intervene to safeguard financial stability.
Of course, by its very nature clearing is an activity that generates major economies of scale, and thus encourages concentration. But greater competition is absolutely necessary to stimulate financial innovation. Fortunately, LCH SA will centralise repo transactions at the beginning of 2019. More generally, we would like to see the development in Paris of an enhanced and extended clearing services offering in the area of interest rate derivatives. More broadly, Brexit represents an opportunity for Europe to effectively transform its own savings, in order to enhance its ability to finance the real economy: what I call the Financing Union for Investment and Innovation. This involves better steering the euro area’s abundant savings to absorb shocks within the euro area more effectively and to meet investment and innovation needs in fields such as digital technology, energy transition and the equity financing of SMEs. In practice, the creation of a true Financing Union requires the acceleration of the Capital Markets Union and the completion of the Banking Union. The second pillar on the resolution of failing banks is more important still than a possible common deposit guarantee scheme. And it is essential to remove barriers for pan-European banks. This was the policy agenda of the FrancoGerman declaration in Meseberg in June 2018: but I insist on the urgent need to make it a reality today.

Irrespective of the uncertainties currently surrounding the timing and pace of policy normalisation in the euro area, it will eventually gain momentum and the impact on the emerging EU economies, to which I will come back later, should not be underestimated. It is debatable if the forthcoming normalisation process involves going back to the pre-crisis normal or rather moving forward to a “new normal”, characterised by lower interest rates and possibly by larger central bank balance sheets. What is certain is that future policy actions of central banks in CEE countries will definitely depend on the way monetary policy normalisation unfolds in Europe. What happened in the emerging economies that are part of the US dollar sphere of influence following the FED’s policy normalisation is quite relevant. Higher interest rates in the developed world would trigger a capital flight away from emerging economies, thus generating depreciation pressures. The response of policymakers in emerging economies will depend on the specific strengths and weaknesses. Where adequate policy buffers are in place and investor confidence is elevated, market mechanisms, countercyclical macroeconomic and prudential policies may be relied upon to tackle a slowdown in capital inflows. Where there is less room for manoeuvre, tightening monetary and fiscal policies may be required to lower financing needs and attract additional inflows. Where foreign reserves are adequate, they may be used to moderate or smoothen exchange rate depreciation.
Instead, if you pay attention to the incoming economic news and listen to our assessment about how the outlook is evolving, then I think you will be able to judge for yourself when liftoff is likely. What also matters for financial asset prices is the likely post-lift-off trajectory of short-term rates over the medium- to longer-term. In fact, this should be more important than the particular month in which the normalization process starts. On this score, I think it is hard to be precise about the expected path of short-term rates. That is because it depends on two important factors: (1) how the economic outlook evolves, which depends, in part, on how loose or tight monetary policy actually is at a given level of short-term rates, and (2) how financial conditions broadly react to changes in the level of short-term rates. My own view is that the upward trajectory of short-term rates is likely to be relatively shallow. This reflects several factors. First, the lack of strong forward momentum in the economy despite the low level of short-term interest rates suggests that U.S. monetary policy is not as accommodative as one might think. In particular, the lack of strong momentum suggests that the real equilibrium federal funds rate today is considerably lower than the 2 percent rate assumed in the standard Taylor Rule formulation.

As a result of the enhanced confidence in the domestic banking system, the share of assets to the GDP increased in 2006 to the peak level of 70 per cent, which is comparable to that of the Central and EastEuropean countries. The performance of commercial loan to private sector and to households is also satisfactory. Its growth rate has been constantly exceeding the expansion rate of banking assets. Over the last years, private loan has improved considerably; for 2005-2006 it recorded a cumulative growth of 175 per cent, which is the highest growth recorded in the region and the  BIS Review 102/2007  1  Central and East-European countries. Another characteristic in support of foreign crediting institutions is the free choice of currency, where almost 3/4 (three-fourth) of total loan was extended in foreign currency. Thus far we may say that credit supply is in prudent levels, since non-performing loans’ portfolio, though increased moderately to 3.1 per cent of gross loans in 2006, provides evidence for a limited exposure of the banking sector to non-settlement risk. However, despite the considerable improvement in the assets quality and the commercial banks’ financial performance, the growth of lending to the private sector and to households remains low as a share to the GDP – about 21.3 per cent in 2006, compared to 49 per cent in Central and East-European countries – providing evidence for other non-utilized banking services capacities in the Albanian economy.
Conclusion I’ll conclude with this: If the history of central banking teaches us one thing, it’s that “necessity is the mother of invention.” Severe crises demand innovative and decisive responses, and the Federal Reserve is striving to deliver just that. These are unprecedented times, and the pandemic presents truly unique challenges. However, the actions we have undertaken harken back to why the Federal Reserve was created in the first place. That is, to do what only a central bank can do: to keep credit flowing when fear and uncertainty take hold, and in that way to foster a strong economy with maximum employment and stable prices.1234567 1  More information about this financial crisis can be found in Donald P. Morgan and James Narron, The Final Crisis Chronicle: The Panic of 1907 and the Birth of the Fed, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Liberty Street Economics, November 18, 2016. 2  For a more detailed overview of the Federal Reserve’s responses to the pandemic-related disruptions in financial markets, see Michael Fleming, Asani Sarkar, and Peter Van Tassel, The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Fed’s Response, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Liberty Street Economics, April 15, 2020. 3  The impact of these strains on liquidity in the Treasury market is discussed in Michael Fleming and Francisco Ruela, Treasury Market Liquidity during the COVID-19 Crisis, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Liberty Street Economics, April 17, 2020.

Caleb M Fundanga: Relations between the Embassy of France and the Bank of Zambia Speech by Dr Caleb M Fundanga, Governor of the Bank of Zambia, at the signing ceremony of the memorandum of understanding between the Embassy of France and the Bank of Zambia, Lusaka, 18 January 2005. * • • • •  *  *  Your Excellency, the Ambassador Members of the Press Distinguished Invited Guests Ladies and Gentlemen  It gives me great pleasure to welcome you all to the signing ceremony of the memorandum of understanding (MoU), governing the conduct of French lessons, between the Embassy of France and the Bank of Zambia. For some time now, our two institutions have been collaborating closely on the details of this MoU to ensure that it captures the mutual interests and aspirations of our two institutions. Although it has taken a bit of time to complete due to circumstances beyond our control, it is pleasing to note that we are now able to conclude it. Your Excellency Let me begin by stating the reason for our existence as a central bank. Our Mission Statement is to, I quote: “formulate and implement monetary and supervisory policies that ensure price and financial system stability” End of quote. In order for us to achieve this Mission Statement successfully, we need competent and skilled staff who are able to communicate effectively with a wide range of clientele at international, regional and national fora where the bank’s and, indeed, the nation’s interests are advanced.
The EU’s emission trading system (ETS) is the world’s largest carbon market. Its “cap and trade” scheme provides a mechanism for both reducing the total amount of emissions in a cost-efficient way and ensuring that pollution is priced adequately. A recent study shows that the ETS saved more than one billion tons of CO2 between 2008 and 2016, a 3.8% reduction in total EU-wide emissions. [5] And only this week, carbon prices hit their highest level in more than a decade, despite the sharp contraction in aggregate demand and energy consumption, possibly reflecting the anticipation of tighter climate policies under the European Green Deal (see figure 2). Figure 2 EU ETS price (in euro per ton CO2 emissions)  Source: Bloomberg. Last observation: 15 July 2020. Notes: Energy Broker pricing on Bloomberg updates on a near realtime basis. Updates only occur when there is activity in the market, so there may not be updates to every contract every day. There is no reason for complacency, however. Currently, the ETS only covers economic sectors that together account for less than half of total carbon emissions in the EU, whereas the remaining sectors are subject to a patchwork of non-harmonised measures across the European Union. A global solution is out of reach. Moreover, carbon pricing is not a sufficient condition to manage the transition towards a more sustainable economy. Fostering green investment and innovation This brings me to the second pillar.

Years of subdued inflationary pressure and weak demand have already exhausted the conventional policy space across the industrialised world. And although central banks have successfully relaxed the constraints of the zero lower bound, the risks to financial stability and other side effects emerging from a protracted and intense usage of non-standard measures are likely to rise. For these reasons, central banks cannot just stand on the sidelines when it comes to climate change. And the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us that monetary and fiscal policies are most effective when they complement each other. This will also be true in the fight against climate change. I see three major avenues through which the ECB, and central banks more generally, can contribute. The first is through our involvement in defining rules and standards, and in promoting research for a better understanding of the implications of climate change for financial markets and monetary policy. [11] The ECB is a member of the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) and has contributed actively to the development of the EU taxonomy of sustainable economic activities. These activities are at the same time instrumental for promoting capital markets union. The second way in which the ECB can contribute is by ensuring that we ourselves are an environmentally mindful and responsible investor. We are doing this already for our pension fund investments and are now exploring options for other non-monetary policy portfolios.
In the UK, where the annual increase in house prices amounted to approximately 4 per cent the second quarter this year, the ratio of debt to disposable income is around 150 per cent. In Sweden, house prices have more than doubled in the past decade, with a par-ticularly strong increase in metropolitan regions. Part of the explanation is that household incomes have also risen rapidly in this period. It is reasonable to assume that house prices follow income in the long run. What gives some cause for concern is that house prices and household debt have both been rising very much faster than income and have continued to do so this year. At the end of the second quarter this year, house prices had risen by more than 7 per cent and house-hold debt by over 10 per cent compared with a year ago. Since 1995, house prices and debt have both risen over 40 per cent more than income. The pertinent issues have mainly been whether there are “bubbles” in the housing market in the sense that house prices have deviated markedly from what can be motivated by underlying factors such as disposable income and interest rate costs, and whether households have taken on too much debt in relation to their future ability to pay. Another question that has come up in recent years in Sweden, as well as in England and elsewhere, is why the strong credit growth and rising house prices have not been accompanied by increased consumption.

Provided households’ borrowing decisions have a rational basis and accordingly include realistic assumptions about future interest expenditure, there is nothing to suggest that higher interest rates will have drastic consequences. This applies to the effects of increased interest expenditure on house prices as well as on consumption. Still, one cannot disregard the risk that some households have been over-optimistic about their future incomes and the future level of interest rates. More than 70 per cent of new lending is currently arranged at a variable interest rate. Moreover, the present level of interest rates is considerably below what the financial markets assume it will be in time. So the households that choose to stick to a variable rate must count on considerably increased interest expenditure further ahead, if interest rates develop in line with market expectations. Furthermore, during the past year the credit spread between a risk-free government bond and a housing bond has been virtually nil. All in all, mortgage institu-tions have therefore been able to offer very low rates even for fixed-interest loans. The combination of high house prices and low interest rates has meant that many households have acquired very large liabilities. In that interest rates have been pushed down by a large variety of partly temporary factors, it is not inconceivable that their level will double. That may entail a heavy burden for many households and one cannot be sure they realised this when they decided to borrow so much.