samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
I strongly believe that Europe’s economic weight rests on a tripod with no equivalent elsewhere in the world: our single market, our single currency and our shared social and environmental model. These are three assets, constituting our common identity, that we should build on. First, we in Europe share, thanks to our founding fathers and to Jacques Delorsi, a large single market. It removes most internal borders and regulatory obstacles to the free movement of goods, capital, services, and people in the European Union. It was no coincidence that access to the single market lay at the heart of the Brexit debate. Second, thanks to Helmut Kohl, François Mitterrand and many others, we have built a new and solid currency: the euro is a unique success, which is recognised worldwide and supported by a clear majority of euro area citizens (75%ii). Third, our common social model combines a lower level of inequality with a higher level of public services – let’s call it soziale Marktwirtschaft in German, and pay tribute to social democracy as well as to Christian Democrats. This model is more and more environmental,  Page 2 sur 14 and in this respect, Europe is clearly ahead. The world in this 21 st century, starting with its youth across the different continents, needs our European values. But do we have the power to project these values? Power is, in physics, the multiplication of weight by speed: we collectively have the former, but we lack the latter.

2  BIS Review 25/2006  We thus endeavour to attain the inflation target within a two-year time perspective, under normal circumstances. In certain cases, however, we may need to have even greater flexibility than the twoyear perspective allows. If the economy were to suffer very large supply shocks, for instance, in the form of structural changes that have a major effect on inflation, or if extreme situations such as war or natural disasters occur, the process of bringing inflation back to the target may need to take even longer to avoid excessive strain on the real economy. In this type of situation it would be even more important that there was confidence in the inflation target. However, flexibility must not be allowed to undermine the nominal anchor. If confidence were to fail, we would be forced to act more strongly and would not have the same possibility to consider the real economy. Thus, the objective of monetary policy is to maintain price stability. However, it is possible to give consideration to the development of the real economy. This does not mean having a target for growth or employment. Instead, this type of consideration is made possible by the way in which we have chosen to formulate the principles for attaining the inflation target. However, it assumes that there is sufficient confidence in the inflation-targeting policy.
Rapid developments in technology gradually lead to higher productivity and increase our welfare, but they are also a source of concern for many people. Will my job still exist in the future, or will it be done by a robot or an algorithm? How can my company compete in these days of rapid technological advances? * I would like to thank Erik Frohm for helping prepare this speech, Elizabeth Nilsson for translating and Meredith  Beechey-Österholm, Charlotta Edler, Rebecka Hallerby, Jesper Hansson, Åsa Olli Segendorf, Marianne Sterner and Ulf Söderström for valuable comments. 1 Refers to Statistics Sweden's figures on private individuals’ access to and use of IT. 82% of all Swedes in the age range 16-85 years had access to the internet via a mobile phone in 2018. http://www.statistikdatabasen.scb.se/pxweb/sv/ssd/START__LE__LE0108__LE0108D/LE0108T14/?rxid=8f4a0041-1be9-4ed3-b6fb182251a2b5cd 2 https://www.zmescience.com/research/technology/smartphone-power-compared-to-apollo-432/  1 [12]  My speech today will not provide all the answers. Instead, I intend to discuss my thoughts on how digitalisation can affect various parts of the economy and what role it plays for monetary policy. Can the Riksbank attain its target of 2 per cent even in a world of digitalisation? Is it still desirable to aim for this target? My reply to both of these questions is yes, but I will return to that later. Focus on digitalisation – where are we now? What is digitalisation and how does it differ from the concepts of automation and technological advances?

The use of internet and online shopping have increased in Sweden and are at a high level compared with other European countries. We now have access to more information than before and can compare prices of various products and various sellers very quickly. Previously, if you wanted to buy a new pair of shoes you had to go into several shops to compare prices. First you needed to have an idea of where to find a specific model of shoe, say a pair of Converse all-stars in size 39, and then you needed to travel round to find the best price. Now you can quite simply visit a price comparison site online and enter the name of the model and get price information, stocks status and suggested sales points that are online. This has reduced the search costs enormously.21  Companies’ pricing At the same time, e-commerce is changing the playing field for many trading companies and changing their pricing. Why should customers pay more for something in a shop when they can buy it cheaper online? 19 Heyman et al (2016). 20 Sveriges Riksbank (2018c). 21  The Swedish Competition Authority commissioned researchers Niklas Rudholm and Charlie Lindgren to analyse how price transparency through price comparison sites affects prices and price spread between companies. They used information from the comparison site Prisjakt to compare how prices of games differ between various online traders. They saw that the development of prices for a particular product was highly correlated among the largest companies.
CPIEFE services  14  (*) As from January 2014, the new idexes with annual base 2013=100 are used, so they are not strictly comparable with earlier figures. Sources: Central Bank of Chile and National Statistics Institute (INE). Figure 4 Evolution of China's 2014 GDP growth forecast  (percent)  9.0  9.0  8.8  8.8  8.6  8.6  8.4  8.4  8.2  8.2  8.0  8.0  7.8  7.8  7.6  7.6  7.4  7.4  7.2  7.2 13  Mar. May  Jul. Sep.  Nov.  14  Mar. 2010-2014 growth Sources: Consensus Forecasts and Bloomberg. 8  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Figure 5  Cumulative revision to 2014 growth forecast for Latin America (1)  (percentage points) 0  0  -1  -1  -2  -2  -3  -3  -4  -4 Colombia  Peru  Mexico  Chile  Latin Brazil America (2)  Argentina Venezuela  (1) Between January 2013 and March 2014. (2) Countries weighted at PPP by share of each economy according to WEO (IMF). Sources: Central Bank of Chile based on Consensus Forecasts and IMF.

Dimitar Radev: Positive trends in the banking sector are expected to continue in 2019, however with possible increased challenges Publication by Mr Dimitar Radev, Governor of the Bulgarian National Bank, in the Quarterly Bulletin of the Association of Banks in Bulgaria, issue 56, January 2019. * * * In 2018 the banking sector continued to maintain high level of capital adequacy and liquidity, also generating historically high annual profit. Deposits in the banking system increased, lending grew, and the share of nonperforming loans dropped. We expect these positive dynamics in the sector to continue altogether through 2019. Loan portfolios are a primary source of operating income for the banks in Bulgaria, but credit growth is by definition associated with assumption of new risk. At this stage of credit expansion, banks should continue making adequate efforts to manage the credit risk accumulating on their balance sheets. Large part of the central bank’s recent activities, in our capacity as a regulator and supervisor of the banking system, is focused on the risk associated with bank lending. The BNB Governing Council decided to activate the countercyclical capital buffer from this year. In December 2018, the National Assembly passed new legislative amendments, proposed by the BNB, which provide us with an additional macro-prudential toolbox of measures regarding bank lending. It includes for example BNB’s new powers to require enforcement of limiting the loan-to-value ratio or the debt-to-borrower’s income ratio.
Allow me to express my sincere gratitude to Mr Benoît Cœuré, Executive Board member of the ECB and Mr. Tao Zhang, Deputy Managing Director at the IMF, for honoring us with their presence today. 1/2  BIS central bankers' speeches  It is a pleasure to have Mr. Luiz Awazu Pereira da Silva, Deputy General Manager at BIS and Governor Gudmundsson to address the audience. I would also like to express my appreciation to all other distinguished panelists in the today’s sessions – deputy governors, representatives from international organizations, global banks and investors and other honorable speakers for contributing to the event. It is an honor to have Mr. Dragan Tevdovski, Minister of Finance of the Republic of Macedonia and Mr. Vladislav Goranov, Minister of Finance of the Republic of Bulgaria to give their reflections on SEE region perspectives. I look forward to your discussions and wish all the delegates an enjoyable and rewarding conference day. I thank you all for coming, particularly given that many of you had to travel long distances to come to Skopje. I hope that all of you will enjoy the agenda and find the conference productive and worthwhile. In closing, I would like to thank all of those who have worked very hard to make this event happen. My most sincere thanks and appreciation goes to our co-organizer Marc Uzan, Executive Director of The Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee. Marc’s work is wellrecognized among the global economic community.

I am also grateful to Senior Deputy Governor Dr. Nandalal Weerasinghe, and the Deputy Governors, Mr. K D Ranasinghe, Mr. S R Attygalle and Mr. H A Karunaratne. Their support and contribution in terms of highly professional advice and excellent technical expertise helped me to effectively discharge the duties as the CEO of this iconic institution. I would also like to acknowledge the extraordinary service rendered by former Deputy Governor, Mr. C J P Siriwardana, who retired from the Bank service last year. I am also thankful to the members of the Monetary Policy Consultative Committee, Financial System Stability Consultative Committee as well as the Monetary Board Advisory Audit Committee for their valuable views and suggestions, which helped us immensely in better calibrating our policies and operations. 42  Last and most importantly, I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to the Assistant Governors, Senior Heads and Heads of Departments, particularly the Director of Economic Research and the Staff of the Economic Research Department for their effort in producing this policy document. It is my pleasure to acknowledge my colleagues in the Governor’s Secretariat who support me on a day-to-day basis. I would be lost without their assistance. In my view, the greatest asset of the Central Bank is its staff without whom we cannot deliver our tasks and achieve our objectives for the nation. I thank all Staff of the Central Bank who serve the nation with professionalism, technical excellence and integrity and more importantly with vigour and enthusiasm even amidst turbulences.
First was the so-called flash rally of October 2014; then, the repo market distress in September 2019; and third, the extraordinary dislocations at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020. General George Patton once said, “Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and unpredictable.” It’s a good piece of advice—and one that 1/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  should guide our work on Treasury market reform. The IAWG report I mentioned earlier reviews these events, so I won’t repeat them here. However, two lessons are clear. First, the unforeseeable and unpredictable will happen, and can result in significant stresses in the Treasury and related markets that may spread to broader financial conditions. Second, when disruptions have been sufficiently severe and persistent, the market has not been able to quickly self-correct without official-sector intervention. The severe disruptions to the Treasury and funding markets in March of last year illustrate these points. The incipient breakdown in market functioning quickly spread to other segments of the U.S. and global financial markets, risking a broad-based pullback in the availability of credit that is essential for our economy. The speed and extent of the market disruption necessitated immediate and dramatic action, the scale of which was truly unprecedented. At the New York Fed, we are used to talking in very large sums, but even for us, the figures were staggering.

(1999), “  Do efficient financial markets mitigate financial crises?”, speech before the 1999 Financial Markets Conference of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Sea Island, Georgia, 19 October. [4] The net asset value spread refers to the difference between the price at which exchange-traded fund shares trade and the net asset value of the underlying portfolio held by the fund per share. This may also suggest that exchange-traded fund prices provided more upto-date information, thereby supporting price discovery. See Financial Stability Board (2020),  Holistic Review of the March Market Turmoil, 17 November. [5] Duffie, D. (2020), “  Still the World’s Safe Haven? Redesigning the U.S. Treasury Market after the COVID-19 Crisis”, Hutchins Center Working Papers, No 62, June. [6] It is even conceivable that the market turmoil could have been worse without the more stringent regulatory requirements on dealers, which helped to ensure their resilience during the spring. [7] At the same time, higher cash holdings were associated with substantially weaker performance in 2018-19 compared with previous years, potentially reflecting the high costs of holding cash in a low interest rate environment. [8] Schrimpf, A. et al. (2020), “  Leverage and margin spirals in fixed income markets during the Covid-19 crisis”, BIS Bulletin, No 2, Bank for International Settlements, 2 April. [9] Vivar, L.M. et al. (2020), “  Burned by leverage? Flows and fragility in bond mutual funds”, Working Paper Series, No 2413, ECB, May. [10] Vassallo, D. et al.
Industry representatives had expressed the view that while many important advances had been achieved in the management and measurement of various risks arising from trading activities, neither the existing market risk capital rules nor Basel II went far enough in recognising them. We are now evaluating these views. Because the treatment of the trading book is of great interest to banks and to securities firms, we are collaborating with the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) to clarify the Basel II rules and to find risk-sensitive capital treatments for certain trading book exposures that are compatible with Basel II. Just last month, for example, the joint working groups completed a survey of trading book exposures in banks and securities firms, focusing on three main topics. The first concerns the criteria that firms use to determine whether an exposure qualifies for inclusion in the trading book versus the banking book. The second deals with the practices banks and securities firms use to value and measure the risk of trading positions. The third part sheds light on the treatment of counterparty credit risk issues  4  BIS Review 66/2004  related to repo-style transactions, securities financings and unsettled trades and credit derivatives. Our working groups are currently evaluating responses to the surveys and will draw on the surveys to help inform their discussions on clarifications and guidance that the Basel Committee can offer to banks and supervisors regarding the treatment of the trading book.

I strongly believe that Europe is in a unique position to lead the way in the cross-border implementation of Basel II and to make faster and more tangible progress than is currently possible on  BIS Review 66/2004  5  a wider international basis. We need to seize this opportunity with both hands, because it will not just benefit us in the EU but, I believe, also have a positive impact beyond our borders. We have two major advantages in this respect. Firstly, within the European Union, we have a set of single market legislation in the banking field, founded on harmonisation and mutual recognition. Furthermore, the division of supervisory responsibilities between our countries is embedded in this common legal framework and has been in place for some time. Secondly, from a practical perspective, we also now have the Committee of European Banking Supervisors - CEBS. This committee is directly charged with promoting convergence of supervisory practices and co-operation between supervisory authorities, and has a key role to play in the implementation of Basel II in Europe. For these reasons, I believe that we can - and must - be more ambitious and go further than others may be able to go in our efforts to ensure consistent implementation of Basel II and effective supervision on a cross-border basis. We should not only move faster, but also go deeper in our search for convergence.
Whilst in the United States, over the last twenty years, unemployment has declined significantly during the economic cycles as a result of a successful deflationary and stability policy introduced by the Federal Reserve, unemployment in Europe has increased further in the same period. Since the beginning of the year, the rate of unemployment has stabilised at around 10% in the euro area. Those Member States with more flexible employment markets and more restrained wage bargaining generally have much higher levels of employment than the average in the EU. It is still hoped that the current upturn will not be slowed down by excessive demands for higher wages and will be used to make decisive structural policy reforms. Flexibility in the employment and commodity markets would therefore appear to be urgently needed. As you know, at the summit in Cologne the European Council called for an Employment Pact to be created with the aim of achieving a sustained reduction in unemployment. The Pact underlines the need for the implementation of structural reforms in Europe. It is hoped that the Pact will achieve this objective. Together with the national fiscal policymakers, the unions and the European Commission, the Eurosystem will also take part in the macroeconomic dialogue. We shall use this dialogue to make it absolutely clear to the other parties that structural unemployment cannot be reduced without decisive reforms.

The fact that no central bank knows exactly how the economy functions and the effects of monetary policy also means that one normally proceeds cautiously in changing interest rates. Finally, a desirable interest rate path should also be determined with consideration to an assessment of different types of risks and the consequences for inflation and the real economy if they are realised. Some risks may be difficult to quantify and capture in our normal forecasts. In my opinion, they should nevertheless be included in the balance when shaping monetary policy. One recent example is the risks linked to a rapid increase in property prices and household indebtedness as a result of a longer period of expansionary monetary policy; a problem many central banks around the world have faced. Let me also, for the sake of clarity, point out that when we publish our own forecast for the repo rate it will indicate a smoother development in the repo rate than the policy that will be conducted. This is because interest rate decisions must in practice be taken in stages and at particular points in time. It is difficult to build this into the forecasting work. Changes to the Inflation Report Let me mention another new item, before I round off. Our inflation report will involve a change of name, to "Monetary Policy Report”. One reason for the name change and the most important change is that the reports will from now on contain not merely inflation forecasts, but also a monetary policy message.
It could be said that the Riksbank acted as an intermediary in the sense that the banking system was able to borrow at longer maturities in order to invest in a secure and liquid asset in the Riksbank. Image 7a: The Riksbank’s balance sheet 30 June 2008 (before Lehman Brothers) Assets Gold Currency reserve  26 Banknotes & coins 158 Fine tuning  108 0  Lending USD  0 Riksbank certificates  0  Lending SEK  4 Debt to Fed  0  Other  4 Equity  59  Other  25  TOTAL  10  Liabilities  192 TOTAL  192  BIS Review 41/2009  Image 7b: The Riksbank’s balance sheet 31 December 2008 (after Lehman Brothers) Assets Gold Currency reserve Lending USD Lending SEK Other  TOTAL  Liabilities 30 Banknotes & coins 200 Fine tuning  112 207  196 Riksbank certifikates  49  262 Debt to Fed  189  7 Equity  59  Other  84  700 TOTAL  700  If we compare the balance sheets at the end of June and the end of December 2008 – that is before and after Lehman Brothers applied for bankruptcy protection – we can see that lending in Swedish kronor increased by approximately SEK 260 billion. This is reflected on the liabilities side by the increase in the Riksbank's fine-tuning facility, where the banks deposit their surplus liquidity overnight, as well as the increase in Riksbank certificates with a maturity of one week.

May I also again urge governments to implement decisively the structural reform agenda, both within the area of fiscal expenditures and revenues and in labour and product markets. Such action is needed to enhance potential output growth over the medium term. At the same time, the prompt implementation of structural reforms would contribute towards strengthening confidence in the euro area and thereby support economic growth in the short term. We are now at your disposal for questions. 2  BIS Review 64/2002