samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Strict laws govern such transactions;  3  BIS Review 53/2000  for instance, bank directors are jointly and severally liable to indemnify the bank for losses arising from unsecured loans to related companies. But problems will manifest themselves only in times of stress, as the Japanese and Korean experiences have shown. For the future, we need to restructure the banks’ participation in non-financial activities before potential vulnerabilities become actual problems. We have the luxury of acting now while the banks are sound; we must not delay or put off changes which are essential for their long-term wellbeing. The banking environment in Singapore will only become more open and competitive, and less forgiving of weaknesses or under-performance. Banks must concentrate on their core competencies and build strong and institutionalised management structures to compete in a globalised industry. Ultimately, their improved performance will benefit all depositors and shareholders, and strengthen the financial system as a whole. New structure The Government has therefore decided to require the local banking groups to segregate their financial and non-financial activities, and unwind the cross-shareholdings between the two. This will mean changes to their present corporate structures. These measures will apply to all local banks - OCBC, UOB and OUB, as well as DBS and KTB. There will be four key elements in the separation between the financial and non-financial entities: ownership, cross-shareholding, management, and name-sharing.

MAS recognises that the insurance funds are different in nature from the equity of the company or the group because they belong to the policyholders and not the shareholders. Therefore in principle investments using the insurance fund should be treated separately from the investments of the company and the group. Nevertheless the insurance fund should also be used only for portfolio investments, and not for the purpose of controlling other companies in the group, especially nonfinancial companies, whether by itself or together with other investments by the group. Currently, some banking groups have used these insurance funds as the vehicle for owning and controlling their investee companies. For example, the bank itself may own only 5% of an investee company, but the insurance fund of the insurance company may own another 15%, giving a total stake of 20%. This is not satisfactory, because it presents the same problems of contagion, non-transparency and dilution of management focus as the bank itself investing directly in these companies. BIS Review 53/2000  6  MAS will study the appropriate investment limits of insurance funds for both bank-related and independent insurers. The limits set should protect the interests of policyholders through adequate diversification, and ensure that the investments do not amount to controlling stakes. These measures will be developed in consultation with the industry, and are expected to be finalised by the end of the year.
And because now is the time to strengthen our economic instruments in order to deal with a future European recession, the day it comes. Otherwise monetary policy may be overburdened. My second wish concerns our country. The French economy is in much better shape, but there are still major drags on growth. At around 1.9%, we are above our potential growth rate, which means that we are coming up against more structural limiters. There are at least two indications of this: a persistent negative growth differential vis-à-vis the euro area of around half a percentage point, and a current account deficit and hence a lack of competitiveness. In order to increase the speed of the French economy, we need to boost the power of the engine: reforms, including those underway, are therefore necessary. And, beyond bureaucratic barriers or corporate interests, the greatest priority is to reform vocational training and apprenticeships: we cannot remain in a situation where we have almost 3 million unemployed, of whom 600,000 are young people, and companies cannot recruit the skills they need. I hear this everywhere from the entrepreneurs who participate in the advisory boards of the Banque de France, from Besançon to Châteauroux last week. According to INSEE, hiring difficulties have been the main obstacle to corporate activity. My third wish is for financing. Often, the Governor of the Banque de France encourages banks to lend more; this is not the case at present! Bank lending in France is very buoyant.

François Villeroy de Galhau: New Year wishes to the Paris financial centre New Year wishes to the Paris financial centre by Mr François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Bank of France, Paris, 18 January 2018. * * * I would like to thank all of you for coming, like each year, to our Golden Gallery. I am pleased to welcome you, together with Denis Beau, Deputy Governor since July and first Deputy Governor since yesterday. I also commend Anne Le Lorier, who unfortunately left us on 5 January but who has contributed so much to the Banque de France over the past six years: this evening is an occasion to thank her. And I am delighted to announce the appointment of Sylvie Goulard, who will be taking over from her. As of next Monday, she will bring to the Banque de France all her competence and independence. I would like to start by extending to you our warmest wishes for 2018, for you and your loved ones, as well as for all of your staff, hoping that 2018 will be an excellent year; an excellent year, not only for each of you, but also for Europe and our country. But before presenting my collective wishes for this new year, I would like to return to 2017 and three positive elements that marked it. 1.
But we could be sinning by omission, by passiveness. Contrary to a longstanding approach whereby central backs only dialogued with financial specialists, we must now direct our communication at all economic agents,  Page 7 sur 10 including the general public. A better-informed society across categories allows for a better understanding of monetary objectives, and hence a greater efficiency of monetary policy. Tailored and active communication is now a centrepiece of central banks’ actions. In 2021, the “Banque de France listens” initiative included 17 events, with an audience of 300,000. This year, the Banque de France organised its annual National Monetary Policy Forum, reaching an on-line audience of 500,000. It adds up to sustained efforts on financial education: in 2021, almost 40,000 young people benefitted from our actions, and we are stepping up again in 2022. III. Does the international dimension of monetary trust still exist? Whether or not the international dimension of monetary trust can still inspire us is a key question for the IMF, which has sought to embody it since 1944. It has become a painful question, with the ongoing destructive Russian war in Ukraine adding to the other illnesses of multilateralism in the last six years, from Brexit to populism and (poorly-disguised) protectionism. Let us acknowledge it frankly: the G20 is today not in good shape, whereas it had been key to great progress over the last twenty years. And sanctions against Russia divide it.

Against this backdrop, I will refer to Max Weber’s distinction between ethics of conviction –  Page 5 sur 10 a driver for a broad mandate but also to a risk of overpromising what central banks can actually deliver – and ethics of responsibility – a driver for realism and a more focused mandate. The Eurosystem’s answer to that question consists of a clearly hierarchical mandate, with one primary objective, price stability; if fulfilled, we can and must contribute to its secondary objectives of economic growth, social cohesion or the environment. In addition to preventing potentially conflicting objectives, achieving price stability is like killing two birds with one stone: monetary policy can mitigate income inequality by affecting the movements in and out of unemployment through its effects on the business cycle.iii And let me clarify that the Eurosystem’s strong commitment to fight climate change is motivated first and foremost by its profound implications for price stability, through impacts on the economy and the financial system. In other words, we are acting in the very name of our existing mandate. Inflation has accelerated significantly over the past year, reaching 9.1% in the euro area in August and 8.3% in the United States. Monetary normalisation is consequently fully warranted in the euro area among others. It’s too early to tell the final interest rates. But the neutral rate R* helps us to give some light on the first part of the journey.
We could afford to accommodate these upside pressures on inflation last year when there were worries that a broader deflationary trend could emerge and the recession was threatening to deepen further. But the serious downside risks to the economic outlook we saw then have since receded. The UK economy has actually bounced back more strongly than in previous recoveries, supported by both domestic and overseas demand. 11  According to data from the Council for Mortgage Lenders, both house repossessions and arrears peaked in the recent recession at lower levels than in the early 1990s, and the numbers have been falling since early 2009. BIS Review 158/2010  9  These upside pressures on inflation from import prices and VAT have been one reason that inflation has not fallen back in the way we expected in the aftermath of recession. The other significant factor is that spare capacity has not exerted as much downside pressure on cost and price increases as expected. That is partly because the margin of spare capacity appears to be less than we have seen in previous economic cycles. In the labour market, this is the flip-side of the resilience of employment and a lower level of unemployment relative to the early stages of previous recoveries. But survey evidence also suggests that there is limited spare capacity within firms to take up the slack as demand recovers.

BIS Review 21/2005  1  In order to make the basic policies in economy more harmonized and effective, I would emphasize that the banking system and the other financial institutions of the country should be more effective, open and supervised. In the final analysis, it is very important to create a real financial market, where all actors know the rules of game and obey them fairly, as it came out in the presentations of Mr. Niedermayer, Mr. Danielson, Mr. Pencapligil and Mr. Bunda. In conclusion, I would underline that the challenges ahead of us, on our way to development and integration, become easier when a spirit of cooperation exists not only within the country but also in the regional framework and broader. Thanking you for your participation in this Conference, I declare it closed. 2  BIS Review 21/2005
As we explained at the time of the forward guidance announcement, a rise in the yields on long term bonds is consistent with our commitment to price stability and supporting the recovery. Market interest rates at terms of 2–5 years have also risen recently. The date at which the markets expect the first increase in Bank Rate has moved in from the end of 2015 to mid2015. One possible explanation is that markets think that unemployment will come down to 7% more quickly than we do. Since the aim of our policy is to secure recovery as quickly as possible, that would be welcome. But policy is built not on hope, but on expectation. And we estimate there is only a 1 in 3 chance of unemployment coming down that quickly (Chart 1).4 Furthermore, thinking unemployment will come down faster than we expect isn’t enough to believe interest rates will rise soon. As I said earlier, the 7% threshold is a staging post to assess the economy. Nobody should assume that it is a trigger for raising rates. Another possible explanation is that the increase in shorter-term yields, like the move in long yields, reflects changing expectations of US monetary policy. But the US recovery is much further advanced than that in the UK.

So we also have to take a close interest in developments in overseas and international financial markets. The international bond market is of course a key example. We try to analyse the information in market prices and other data. But the real understanding of the latest developments comes from talking to market participants. Credit risk transfer markets This is particularly important when it comes to financial innovation. In recent years, instruments and markets for the transfer of credit risk have been a particular focus of change. New ways have been found to securitise cashflows which could not previously be traded, to unbundle the credit risk from loans and bonds, and to re-bundle credit exposures in different ways to create securities with different pay-offs. BIS Review 15/2001  1  The distinction between a loan and a bond is becoming increasingly blurred. Individual loans are sold into the secondary loan market, although some companies remain reluctant to see their debt traded in this way. And portfolios of loans and other cash flows, ranging from mortgage payments to recording royalties, are sold to special purpose vehicles for securitisation into tranches with different risk characteristics and maturities, from AAA to junk, and from commercial paper to long-term bonds. Portfolios of bonds are also repackaged, sliced and diced in a similar way to create collateralised bond obligations. The new area of growth at present, however, is not in these sales of assets to remove them from the balance sheet.
Given the unequal starting position, however, the distribution of monetary gains for both income and net wealth is heavily skewed, with a quarter centred in London and the South-East. Charts 20 and 21 look separately at the effects of lower interest rates and QE, respectively, on the income distribution. Although part of the same strategy, these two instruments clearly operate through different channels and have different distributional effects. The effects of QE are predictably slanted towards financial wealth effects, while the effects of Bank Rate operate more through net interest income and house price channels. This analysis suggests that, with few exceptions, the impact of looser monetary policy on different cohorts of society has been positive and significant in income and wealth terms. Another way of making this point is to  28  Though a notable feature of the UK’s recovery has been that, notwithstanding the positive effects of monetary policy, the real income of younger people has fallen further and recovered more slowly than older age groups (Haldane (2016)). 10  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  10  ask what fraction of households are likely to have been made worse off from the loosening of UK monetary policy. Taking income and wealth effects together, only 4% of households were made £ or more worse 29  off. At the same time, this analysis has made clear that there are often large differences in the nature and scale of impact across cohorts.

You may be surprised to hear that we started a form of this exercise immediately after the tequila crisis in early 1995, well before the continuation of that crisis, now best described as the crisis of international finance, hit this region. While we were able to put together domestic contingency measures, some of which in the event had to be invoked, consideration of issues, involving as it did cooperation at the international and regional levels, took time. In any case, I must confess that none of us involved in this work, in Hong Kong and in the regional forums, were able to appreciate, let alone predict, when and how the crisis would hit us and how severe it would be. There was a lack of urgency and an abundance of scepticism about regional monetary cooperation. We have since pushed much harder in the international and regional forums, to the extent, I fear, that we might have become a little too noisy for the comfort of those who are, for one reason or another, in favour of maintaining the status quo in the international financial architecture. Indeed, of great concern to us is the inadequacy of the international financial architecture to cope with and harness the explosion of international finance. The size and volatility of global capital flows have grown tremendously relative to the global economy. Global output has grown by 26% between 1990 and 1997, before the financial crisis hit us. Global trade in goods has grown faster by 64%.
But much more importantly, our dual mandate does not state that we should do what is necessary to promote full employment and price stability only at times when we are virtually certain that in doing so we will make a profit. It directs us to promote full employment and price stability at all times. Profits and losses in any given year are much less important than getting the U.S. economy back to the highest level of employment consistent with price stability. BIS Review 127/2010  7  In making our assessments about next steps, we need to be a bit humble about our capacity to forecast how market participants would respond to our actions. We do not control their behavior nor have much historical experience that we can draw on to easily assess how they are likely to behave. Even viewpoints that turned out to be incorrect could persist for a long time and generate adverse consequences. It is not enough for us to be right in theory. We also have to be convincing in practice and in explaining why concerns we think are misplaced are indeed unwarranted. As Chairman Bernanke indicated at Jackson Hole, the FOMC’s decision with respect to providing additional accommodation will be made by weighing the costs against the benefits. This is a dynamic process, which depends on the evolution of the economic outlook and our own ability to learn how to become more effective in improving the cost/benefit trade-offs.

This compares with a 1.5 percent year-over-year rate for the PCE deflator and 1.4 percent rate for the core PCE deflator, which excludes food and energy prices. Low and falling inflation is a problem for several reasons. First, low and declining inflation makes it harder to accomplish needed balance sheet adjustments. That is because, all other things being equal, lower inflation means slower nominal income growth. Slower nominal income growth, in turn, means that less of the needed adjustment in household debt-toincome ratios will come from rising incomes. This puts more of the adjustment burden on paying down debt. 1  Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, Addendum: Addressing the Financing Needs of Small Businesses, Monetary Policy Report to Congress, July 21, 2010. 4  BIS Review 127/2010  Second, and even more importantly, low and falling inflation can cause inflation expectations to decline. This is important because inflation expectations are an important factor that influences actual future inflation. Moreover, when inflation expectations decline, the expected real cost of credit increases – a subject I will return to in a moment. So what could the Federal Reserve do? As I see it, there are two potentially complementary avenues. First, we could take steps to make our current highly accommodative stance of monetary policy more effective in stimulating economic activity by providing additional guidance about what we are trying to achieve today and in the future. Second, we could find ways to increase the amount of stimulus we currently provide via our balance sheet.
Field development projects that are now underway will be affected, although to a limited extent. In addition, some new projects may be postponed or cancelled. Lower demand for goods and services from the petroleum sector has spillover effects on the mainland economy, with a dampening effect on labour demand. The fact that activity in the petroleum sector is declining does not mean that the oil age is coming to an end. Nearly half of known oil and gas reserves on the Norwegian continental shelf have not yet been extracted. And large new discoveries have been made over the past few years. Nonetheless, the Norwegian economy must adapt to considerably lower demand from the oil sector. We will be more dependent on growth in other sectors to support growth in the economy. Another challenge is Norway’s high labour costs. The cost level in the business sector has increased sharply relative to our trading partners. To underpin a necessary transition towards non-oil industries, the cost level in Norway must again be brought more closely into line with that of our trading partners. A necessary adjustment of the cost level in Norway can occur by means of lower wage growth in Norway than in other countries or a depreciation of the krone exchange rate. In Norway, monetary policy is geared towards keeping inflation low and stable. The operational target of monetary policy is consumer price inflation of close to 2.5 percent over time. The inflation target provides the economy with a nominal anchor.

This has mainly been achieved by establishing the sovereign wealth fund and a fiscal rule imposing a constraint on oil revenue spending. The Norwegian parliament passed the Act relating to the fund in 1990. Under the Act, the net budget surplus, including oil revenues, is transferred to the fund, and invested in international markets. The policy guidelines were clarified in 2001 through the introduction of the fiscal rule. Under these guidelines, government spending of oil revenues – measured by the non-oil budget  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  deficit – is limited to the expected real return on the fund – estimated at 4 percent annually. The idea is to leave the capital in the fund untouched, saving it for future generations. The fiscal rule provided for a gradual phasing in of oil revenues. Over time, we would have to expect the real krone exchange rate to appreciate as a result. However, due to the fund mechanism and the fiscal rule, actual spending is decoupled from current petroleum revenues. This has curbed the appreciation of the krone and thus reduced fluctuations in the exchange rate. Compared to other resource-based economies, the real krone exchange rate has remained relatively stable, especially during the period of substantial increases in oil prices (cf. diagram). Let me elaborate on the transactions that actually take place. All revenues from the sale of oil and gas are originally in foreign currency.