samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
After two years of market stress and decline in economic activities, we can now cautiously look forward to a return to growth. Looking back, the last two years have also been an important testing time for Thailand as the impact from the global financial crisis has been large and quite unprecedented. As it turns out, the economy has been able to weather the impact of the global crisis quite adequately. This is to say, while the decline in output was unavoidable, economic and financial stability was maintained, the banking sector remained resilient, and the economy was able to adjust to the impact of the turmoil in an orderly manner, with output growth now recovering. In my view, these things were of no accidents. Instead, they manifest a number of inherent qualities embedded in the Thai economic system that have contributed to the relative resilience of the economy. Such qualities include: first, a strong and resilient banking sector resulted from good risk management practices by financial institutions and careful supervision by financial regulators at home; second, a disciplined conduct of macroeconomic policy that emphasizes prudent fiscal and monetary frameworks with a clear focus on maintaining growth with price and financial stabilities; and third, the promotion of economic flexibility as a mechanism for the economy and the private sector to adjust to macroeconomic shocks. To me, these qualities are of no accidents.

Ladies and Gentlemen, To conclude, I wish to remind you that the present situation calls for the need to greater international cooperation, which requires concerted efforts by international organizations, regional cooperation and national governments, in combating the global financial crisis. Regional cooperation must be coherent with national policy and work hand-in-hand with international cooperation. The impact of crisis today and the effect of the unwinding of measures taken would not be a zero-sum game, and all players could potentially lose. Thus, going forward, finding the right balance and creating ties between these three, namely international, regional and national interests, will be an important task for national authorities. Thank you. BIS Review 163/2008  3
The bubbles in the equity markets burst. Many years of high investment led to excess capacity in some industries, and unemployment increased. The terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 put a new damper on economic activity. From the summer of 2002 to the spring of 2003, a highly extraordinary accumulation of negative events in the global community - accounting scandals, fear of terror, war and disease - put a brake on growth. US interest rates, which were sharply reduced at the beginning of the downturn, have subsequently been reduced further. Interest rates have also remained low in the euro area. Key rates are now historically very low for several of our most important trading partners. Long-term interest rates are also very low. The economic situation in Norway remained firmer for a long period, and wage growth was surprisingly high in 2002. There was less scope for low interest rates than among our trading partners. As a result, the interest rate differential against other countries widened. This had an impact on krone exchange rate developments. In addition, special circumstances in the global economy led to a stronger krone than might have been expected from the higher interest rate differential alone. Themes in foreign exchange markets shift. In periods, investor focus on stock returns feeds through to exchange rate movements. During periods of political and economic unrest, investors may choose individual currencies as a safe haven. In the autumn of 2002, the Norwegian krone was probably also perceived as a safe haven.

Simon Topping: Improving the management of risk through implementation of Basel II Speech by Mr Simon Topping, Executive Director, Banking Policy, Hong Kong Monetary Authority, at the ACIHK The Financial Markets Association Basel II Seminar, Hong Kong, 27 September 2005. *  *  *  Only a few years ago it might have seemed a bit strange to invite a regulator to speak on the subject of risk management. After all, a regulator was supposed to have the same relationship to risk as the preacher did to sin: he was against it. Historically, regulation and risk management were opposites. Regulation was supposed to be all about stopping banks from taking risks. Risk management, by contrast, was concerned with how you take on risk and how you manage it. Regulation has been criticised, rightly in my view, for taking insufficient account of modern risk management techniques such as credit risk and operational risk modelling, stress-testing, and portfolio management. Thankfully we are beginning to move away from the days when regulators were perceived as regarding taking any sort of risk as "a bad thing." Regulators care, above all, that the banking system should be sound and stable. One of the most important factors in a sound banking system is that banks should be profitable; and regulators recognise that without risks there is no chance of banks making money. What matters are not the risks that banks take, but how good they are at identifying, monitoring and controlling them.
Only last November, the Monetary Policy Committee concluded that it was very unlikely that business confidence would bounce back as it did in 1998. But the quarterly survey of the British Chambers of Commerce, published last Thursday, showed that manufacturing confidence had returned to levels last seen in 2000, and there were further  BIS Review 26/2002  1  improvements in the services sector. And the CBI survey, published this morning, showed the highest level of business optimism for eight years. So the recent news has been encouraging. It is still too soon though to be confident that recovery is entrenched. The sharp inventory run down of last year appears to have come to an end, but investment has not yet picked up, either in the UK or the US. And consumption, which has remained strong, may well decelerate. So, as the G7 Ministers and Governors noted in their communiqué on Saturday, downside risks to the world economy remain. These risks, and the current account imbalances I referred to before, mean that we need to be prepared for the possibility of large changes in exchange rates, although no one can predict the magnitude or timing of those changes. The second price I want to consider is the oil price. Yesterday the spot price of Brent crude closed at $ a barrel, up 34% from the level at the time of the Bank's February Inflation Report. Volatility of oil prices has been a feature of the past few years.

We will then be back to managing monetary policy through the more traditional tool of the overnight lending rate that anchors the yield curve. Enter forward guidance This is no small matter. Quantitative easing has made life easy not only for corporate treasurers and homeowners and consumers burdened by debt, but also for money market operators. It has run up the price of stocks and bonds mostly in straight-line fashion, and it has taken volatility out of the marketplace, allowing market operators and their clients to profit with little effort. The question of when and under what conditions the FOMC will begin to raise the base rate off the floor is understandably of intense interest. For example, every quarter, FOMC participants each provide forecasts of the year in which they presently think the target overnight rate will be raised, based on what they individually consider to be the proper conduct of monetary policy. This has given rise to what I consider a rabid focus on the economic projections, or “dots,” that accompany our FOMC statements on a quarterly basis. Monty Python could almost have written a sketch on the pundits’ preoccupation with the dots. 4 Truth be told, although many of us have econometric models and all of us have a phenomenal team of economists who help us develop our projections, these estimates are, in the end, largely guesswork. Especially the further out in time they go.
Low but gradually rising inflation Inflation in Sweden has been low for a long period of time and we devoted extra space to this fact in the July report.1 It is not so strange that inflation has been low, given the Swedish economy’s dependence on global economic activity. One of the main reasons is that prices of Swedish import goods have been low. This is largely due to global economic activity being weak and having affected global export prices, but the stronger Swedish krona has also  1  A more detailed analysis of the development of inflation is included in the article “The development of costs and inflation” in the Riksbank’s Monetary Policy Report published in July 2013. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  contributed. Another reason is that companies have not raised their prices to the same extent as their costs have increased. The low price mark-ups are partly due to demand being lower than normal and to the considerable uncertainty over international developments. In July we assessed that inflationary pressures would gradually increase over the coming years, as Sweden and other countries recover. This means that CPIF inflation is expected to reach 2 per cent in 2015. CPI inflation is expected to be higher than the target of 2 per cent at the end of the forecast period, which is due to mortgage rates rising when the repo rate starts to increase as the economy improves. Let me describe in more detail the factors expected to contribute to the upturn in inflation.

Continued low repo rate stimulates the Swedish economy We Executive Board members assessed that the repo rate needs to remain low to support economic activity and to ensure inflation rises towards the target. We therefore decided at the meeting in July to hold the repo rate unchanged at 1 per cent, and the repo-rate path shows a slow increase beginning during the second half of 2014. Monetary policy is thus very expansionary. However, the decision to hold the repo rate unchanged also gives consideration to the risks linked to Swedish households’ high debts. Personally, I consider the repo-rate decision to comprise a reasonable balance. The forecast showed that CPIF inflation will attain the target in around two years’ time. An even lower repo rate could have led to inflation attaining the target slightly earlier, but the decision is about stepping on the gas just enough. A lower repo rate would probably also lead to the risks linked to household debt increasing further, particularly bearing in mind that the situation for households was relatively favourable to start with. There could be a particularly difficult situation if households expect the low interest rate to persist. This could lead to both house prices and debts increasing further, which can have very negative consequences in the form of sharply rising unemployment and difficulties in attaining the inflation target further ahead. There are numerous discussions in Sweden and abroad with regard to how much consideration monetary policy should give to various types of financial imbalance, such as high household debt.
One measure in the UK is a decline in the banks’ (and building societies’) share in the assets of the whole financial sector (including securities firms, collective investment vehicles, and life assurance and pension funds’ investments etc) which has fallen fairly steadily over the past 10 years, from close to 70% to some 55%. I believe that in the US, where financial innovation has probably been even greater, comparable figures also show this decline, from around 45% in the mid-1970s to about one third now. In the UK, bank lending to the corporate sector has fallen, erratically, from some 27% of total corporate borrowing outstanding (including all forms of debt as well as equity issuance) in 1985 to less than 17%. This mainly reflects the increased access of larger corporate borrowers to the domestic and international capital markets for short and longer-term corporate paper, where they often have a better credit rating than banks. Smaller corporates, on the other hand, remain very heavily dependent upon bank finance - for well over half their overall needs. Meanwhile the banks’ share of net external finance of the personal sector has not changed much at all over the past decade, at around 80%. Trends in the liquidity of bank assets are difficult to assess because liquidity itself is so hard to judge simply from balance sheet categories. The advent of securitisation and the direct sale of loans ought to have helped.

The short answer to this question, which I will now illustrate, is, on the one hand, to be a useful player in the FinTech ecosystem and, on the other hand, to promote and implement a regulatory framework and appropriate supervisory practices that foster both innovation and the stability of our financial system. * 1/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  In order to be a useful player in the Fintech ecosystem, we have two objectives: facilitate and  experiment Facilitate, firstly. This is what we are doing via the implementation of specific support tools. For instance, under the aegis of a national start-up correspondent, who is also the French Tech correspondent, the Banque de France has just deployed a network of regional start-up correspondents in each of the 13 French Tech capitals. Their mission is to be the key point of reference for rating start-ups and providing them with support and guidance thanks to their knowledge of funding mechanisms and of the main players in the ecosystem. As regards the ACPR, I no longer need to present theFinTech Innovation Unit, which has already held hundreds of meetings with start-ups since its creation. Its purpose is to provide an easily accessible entry point for those with innovative projects, giving them some initial regulatory guidance to help them shape their projects and then refer them to the right correspondents for the necessary registrations or authorisations. Naturally, our facilitation efforts are not limited to bilateral contacts alone.
This intervention served to shore up savers’ confidence in the viability of the financial sector. Our enhanced credit support measures were taken to preserve the integrity of the transmission mechanism of monetary policy at a time when banks showed a tendency to withdraw in a disorderly way from their intermediation function. A functioning transmission mechanism is the pre-condition for the central bank to be able to accomplish its mandate of maintaining price stability in the medium term. The same policy intention underlies our Securities Markets Programme, which we started on 10 May this year. We intervene in euro area public and private debt securities markets in order to ensure depth and liquidity in those market segments which have proved dysfunctional. As government securities are the basis for pricing all private debt instruments, our action in the sovereign bond markets aims to create the orderly conditions necessary for lenders to provide a steady flow of credit to the private economy. Overall, through its enhanced credit support measures, the ECB has replaced ill-functioning segments of the financial market and acted as an “intermediary” between banks with a liquidity deficit and banks with a liquidity surplus. At the same time, and with a slightly longerterm perspective, the measures have contributed to a more stable situation in various segments of the financial markets during the crisis. For example, easier access to central  BIS Review 83/2010  3  bank refinancing meant that banks could refinance their money market activities more easily if needed.

The SNB therefore monitors the situation on these two markets continuously. An environment of low interest rates also brings fundamental monetary policy challenges. One of these arises from the fact that it is possible to hold money in the form of cash. I have shown that the SNB’s negative interest rate is an effective monetary policy tool. But how far can nominal interest rates actually fall? If the interest rate level declines further, at some point cash will become more attractive than sight deposits bearing negative interest. As the SNB has no intention of doing away with cash, this results in an effective lower bound for interest rates, which limits the scope for monetary policy action. This lower bound is below zero, because holding cash is expensive and risky. Thus, people are prepared to pay a certain amount to hold their money electronically. In Switzerland, the cost associated with the current  Page 7/16  negative interest rate is clearly lower than the cost of holding cash. Consequently, demand for cash has not yet risen substantially. So the effective lower bound for interest rates has not yet been reached, but we know that it exists. Another monetary policy challenge is the fact that the expansionary effects of low interest rates on consumption and investment can fade over time. As I have noted, following the introduction of negative interest, some banks increased their lending rates in order to offset falling interest margins.
M1 and M2 have shown strong growth. The significance of these growth rates is limited because the uncertainty linked to the crisis reinforced the general public’s preference for liquidity, and because interest rates are at extremely low levels. It is therefore useful to analyse the transmission of monetary stimuli through the lending channel as well. Mortgage loans provide a particularly good reflection of the effects of monetary policy. Why? Essentially, mortgage loans are used to finance real estate projects. But the yields on these investments, which are by their very nature long-term, are heavily dependent on the level of interest rates. This relationship has been confirmed once again: no sooner did we cut interest rates than the growth rate of mortgage loans began to increase more strongly. Having hit a low of 3.2% in November 2008, the growth rate then began to accelerate steadily, reaching 5.1% in October 2009. In the same month, other lending in Swiss francs declined at a rate of –0.3%, which is normal during a period of weak economic activity. All in all, lending to households and firms, both large and small, has continued to grow over the past few months, as the growth in mortgage lending has largely offset the drop in other lending. According to the latest SNB bank lending survey, the phase of tightening lending conditions could be coming to an end.

An appreciation of the Swiss franc against the euro would run counter to the relaxation in monetary conditions brought about through the interest rate channel. This is why the SNB will continue to act decisively to prevent any excessive appreciation of the Swiss franc against the euro. An assessment of monetary conditions can be misleading if it is based on prices, which, like currently the libor, have reached a bound. For this reason, an assessment based on quantities – money and credit – is particularly important in the current circumstances. The monetary base has increased substantially since October 2008, when the financial crisis entered a new phase following the collapse of Lehman Brothers. We supplied the interbank market with sufficient liquidity to meet burgeoning demand in a climate of uncertainty, in order to prevent any increase in money market rates. Since then, precautionary base money demand has declined and we have reabsorbed liquidity accordingly. The monetary base has thus fallen by 28% compared to the peak recorded in April 2009. The level of sight deposits is, however, still almost ten times higher than before the crisis. There is thus a risk of excessive money creation once confidence is restored. Monetary conditions should not be judged in terms of banking sector liquidity, but rather on the basis of the liquidity available to households and firms – i.e. the monetary aggregates. M3 growth, which had been modest for a long time, has accelerated. In October, it reached an annual rate of 7.7%.
In the “Uster Memorial” document, an interest rate of 4% was considered to be appropriate; 1 well, as you know, Swiss interest rates have been considerably below this level for the past few years – so, in this respect, the SNB has fulfilled the requirements set out in Uster in 1830. A short journey through monetary history I would now like to take you on a short trip through Swiss monetary history. We will start our journey in the year 1830, and will make stop-offs at sixty-year intervals, i.e. in 1890 and 1950, before returning to the present day. Let us assume you wanted to buy a loaf of bread in the year of the Ustertag. What money would you have used to pay for it here in Uster? My question may appear simple, but the answer is anything but easy. That is because the year 1830 falls within the long multiple coinage – or multiple currency – period. In other  1  Carl Dändliker: Der Ustertag und die politische Bewegung der Dreissiger Jahre im Canton Zürich (nebst Abdruck des “Uster-Memorials” als Beilage). Zur 50-jährigen Erinnerung, Zurich 1881, p. 6 of enclosure. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  words, the currencies being used in the canton of Zurich in 1830 included guilders, batzen, shillings, thalers, hellers and angsters, just to name a few. 2 Over 300 different kinds of coins were in circulation in Switzerland, with thousands of different embossed images.

Large countries have been toughening restrictions on foreign acquisitions and flow of technologies. The US Committee on Foreign Investments objected to a record number of requests by overseas investors in 2017. The EU is planning to implement a screening framework for cross-border acquisitions. US tax reforms may potentially have adverse consequences for international trade and investment flows. The finance ministers of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK have written to the US, warning that some provisions of the US Tax Cuts and Jobs Act may contravene international trade agreements and tax treaties. For example, a 20% excise tax could be imposed on payments an American company makes for buying goods or services from its foreign subsidiary. We will do well not to get complacent about the return of “mama bear” because the underlying causes for populist anger and support for protectionism are deeply rooted. Income inequality in many advanced economies remains wide. According to research by McKinsey, two-thirds of households in the US and Western Europe have experienced stagnating or falling real income between 2005 and 2014. Trade and immigration are the obvious scapegoats for voters frustrated by the stagnation in living standards. The risk remains that some countries may erect trade and investment barriers and others may do so in retaliation. A protectionist spiral will almost certainly derail the growth momentum, not just for 2018 but beyond. “Baby Bear” - Financial Instability And finally, the “baby bear” of financial instability.