samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
This is possible thanks to the communicator he keeps wearing, which is equipped with a video camera. One of their common passions is building a wooden boat in which they hope to go to the lake. They spend most of their time working on details and learning the wood processing technology by chatting through their communicators with other amateur boat builders from England, Canada and China, among other countries. Sailing is one of Global’s favourite sports, but not the only one he does. Global takes care of his health, which is under constant surveillance of an e-doctor. Global rarely falls ill, because he takes preventive measures displayed on his communicator in accordance with his preferences twice a month. Today, he got a text message reminding him that two months had elapsed since he last took his blood pressure. He confirms his willingness to be re-examined, and his watch takes his blood pressure and sends the result to the communicator, which automatically transmits the data to his edoctor. Everything is OK, but Global does not even notice this, because he is already engrossed in working on another issue – reducing the costs of building a city that 25 years ago was referred to as the knowledge city or intelligent city. It is simply a city that is comfortable for its citizens, a city where beauty and functionality go hand in hand, where life is easier and architecture fosters social life, a city where innovations are born and a city that attracts visitors.

Bandid Nijathaworn: Update on the Thai economy Luncheon address by Mr Bandid Nijathaworn, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Thailand, at the Rotary Club of Bangkok South (RCBS), Bangkok, 20 November 2009. *  *  *  Good afternoon, First, let me thank the Rotary Club of Bangkok South (RCBS) for the invitation, and especially I want to thank Peter Williams for a very warm introduction. It is an honor to be speaking to you today, and my topic this afternoon is updating on the Thai economy. As you are all aware, this year has been an exceptionally challenging year economically, not just for Thailand but also for most other economies. This year the global financial crisis, which has been with us since August 2007, continues to impart negative impact on economic activities, employment, and access to financing worldwide. The good news is that things are looking up. There are better news coming from the advanced economies, suggesting that economic situations are improving and financial markets are stabilizing. In Asia and the Pacific, signs of recovery are also strong and lead those in the rest of the world. On the homefront, recent economic data for Thailand are also more positive and indicate that the economy is slowly returning to growth after a sharp contraction we saw late last year and in the first quarter of this year.
It was the first of the three big supply disturbances of the last year or so. Let me start by putting it into context. UK GDP recovered quite rapidly from the precipitous drop of the initial Covid period, but it did not soar away. That’s very different to the pattern of the US economy for instance. Put another way, in the UK we have had two years with very little growth overall. Page 4  The story of the recovery from Covid in terms of inflation had a global dimension. In many advanced economies, the pattern of demand shifted from services to goods, most notably in the US. These goods are much more traded than services, and this put pressure on global supply chains. That pressure was further affected by issues in China with the so-called zero Covid policy, and the impact this had on traded goods prices. The third disturbance has been caused by the actions of Russia in the build up to and subsequent illegal invasion of Ukraine. This is now the largest shock – concentrated in energy and some food prices. It is hitting the least well off hardest because they, necessarily, spend more of their income on essentials, notably food and energy. Recently some of the most outrageous nonsense I have ever heard has been spouted by the Russians, namely that the current global economic problems are caused by sanctions against Russia, not by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This is utter rubbish.

I have been involved in attending or speechwriting for this dinner for 25 years, and I well remember in the early days that the speeches of Lord Mayors featured each year a plea to get Crossrail agreed, started, finished. Well finally, Lord Mayor, you can notch that one up. Now, “getting stuff done” is not a lead in to a speech on reforming Solvency 2. I can hear the murmur of relief going round. Instead I am going to talk about the economy and monetary policy. I think I just heard someone say, can we have Solvency 2 for light relief please. Fair point, but no. A member of the public sent me an email recently, in which she said that she appreciated what I am doing, but can I please, please, please be more cheerful. I should say that I do seek earnestly to avoid the role of Private Frazer in Dad’s Army – we are not doomed, far from it. But we are in difficult times. From the perspective of monetary policy, these times are the largest challenge to the monetary policy regime of inflation targeting that we have seen in the quarter century since the MPC was created in 1997. That emphatically does not mean the regime has failed. Far from it. The regime was set up for times exactly like these. The regime, founded on central bank independence, is now more important than ever. The worth of any regime is tested in the difficult, not the nice, times.
So even the conventional IS curve says the result would be stronger demand. But let’s  Page 14  suppose the “drop” is financed by a tax on other, non-monetary assets, leaving household wealth in aggregate (the “W” term) unchanged. Because people’s financial positions differ, partly by age – older people have positive net financial wealth, those who’ve just bought a house have negative “W” – this pair of transactions redistributes resources, away from long-term savers and towards borrowers. And if the latter group is “credit constrained” – if they’d like to spend and borrow more at the prevailing level of interest rates but, perhaps for want of collateral, cannot do so – then this transfer should boost demand. Net payers of the tax will cut back on their spending by less than the increase in demand from beneficiaries of the policy. Even when offset by an equal and opposite tax, and even for given interest rates, this addition of liquid assets would add to demand and inflation. To me this sounds perfectly plausible. Indeed the MPC has often argued that these constraints can matter for the transmission of more standard changes in interest rates. If borrowers are (on average) more credit constrained than savers, and therefore more sensitive to changes in cash flow, equal declines in debt interest costs on the one hand, and deposit receipts on the other, will on balance be expansionary. Nor is this the only way in which a “helicopter drop” might matter.

The group we are most concerned with are the vulnerable customers. We are focussing on cases of mis-selling to vulnerable customers and on cases where the products were clearly inappropriate for them given their circumstances. We have required the FIs to give priority to these cases. They should not take an overly legalistic approach to mis-selling in dealing with these cases. For cases where there are sufficient indications that the product was mis-sold or that it was clearly inappropriate given the investor’s profile and circumstances, the FI should take responsibility. Several FIs have assured MAS that they will take full responsibility in such cases. We welcome this commitment and expect all FIs that have sold these products to take the same approach. They must do the right thing and ensure a quick and fair resolution for these customers. We have communicated this to their CEOs. Thank you, I will now take your questions. 2  BIS Review 126/2008
It therefore stands to lose money if there is a realised loss that is not absorbed by more junior creditors. Any such loss is later recouped by the Deposit Insurer via a levy on the surviving insured banks. It is important to underline that for banks funded by insured deposits, some of the costs of failure will fall on their peers. Over time, I suspect that that will increase pressure for a funded deposit-guarantee scheme with risk-based levies. That avoids defaulting banks getting off scott free, and has banks contributing to the deposit insurance system when times are good rather than only when under pressure. I realise that I am telling this conference of deposit insurance agency experts things you already know! I am doing so because they are highly relevant to where I am going on the development of resolution strategies for coping with the failure of the world’s largest and most complex banks, and how Deposit Insurance might fit into that endeavour. Resolution regimes for systemically important firms The objective is, of course, to get to a position where public money is never used to provide solvency support for a failing bank, however large or complex. To be clear, this is emphatically not just about preserving payments and transactions-deposit services.

It has become fairly common to say that such groups should be resolved on a regional basis, ie broken up. Maybe. But even if that is correct, “break it up” hardly amounts to resolution plan. What happens to the broken-up parts? Under a “breakup” strategy, a plan is needed for all of the parts, both distressed and undistressed. That can’t be a free for all. Indeed, it is worth underlining that, under the FSB Standard,3 it is the responsibility of the home authorities of the group to ensure that a group-wide resolution plan exists. There is no ducking that. It removes an ambiguity that has quietly haunted banking authorities for decades, including in the UK. Imagine an international commercial banking group whose operations in various jurisdictions are both big and complex. Good subsidiaries might be sold or floated off. But that won’t be possible for the bankrupt parts of the group. The realisation of the assets via a standard liquidation of those subsidiaries would be liable to destroy a lot of value, creating disorder that could spill over to other jurisdictions and possibly globally. Such subsidiaries need to be  3  4  FSB Standard Key Attribute 11.8. BIS central bankers’ speeches  resolved. That could be via bail-in of their bondholders and other creditors. But what happens if there are not enough bonds in issue to absorb all of the losses and recapitalise the operation? A way of cutting through that would be for each Deposit Insurer to be bailed in.
There are probably several reasons why they have not. As noted earlier, inertia has probably played a role – the survey results suggest that firms adjust their investment targets infrequently and change them slowly. So it is possible that the sharp decline in real interest rates since the global financial crisis may not yet be reflected in company hurdle rates. Uncertainty and risk aversion may also have played a role. In the survey, these were the predominant nonfinancial obstacles to investment (Chart 5). Of the third of firms who said they had invested too little over the 7  past five years, over 80% cited uncertainty as an obstacle. Other studies have also found that increased uncertainty can lead to weak investment. 8  Chart 5: Obstacles to investment over the past five years  (a)  % of businesses 90  Moderate Obstacle Major Obstacle  80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Internal funds  External funds  Uncertainty  Risk aversion  Cost of finance  Shorttermism  Skill Shortage  Low/slow returns Source: Bank of  England Finance and Investment Decisions survey. (a) Question 8: ‘If your business invested ‘too little’ over the past five years, what were the main obstacles to investing?’. (b) ‘Short-termism’ arises when companies value short-term returns above investment that typically yields returns once a long-term horizon.

16 It is a tool of both access authorization and control. Taking a closer look at the development of public services in various parts of the world, one can get an impression that e-administration is well-present in everyday life, has been wellorganized, thoroughly analyzed, and in a conscious and consistent way improves the quality of public services in highly  10  IVR – Interactive Voice Response – a phone technology that provides the user with an ability to contact a database over the phone with tone dialing function. Thus, the user can obtain requested information from the database or enter relevant data to the database. 11  “Leasership In Customer Service: New Expectations, New Experiences”, op. cit., Ain Järv presentation entitled “e-Economy and e-Government in Estonia” held on January 5, 2006 at the National Bank of Poland. 12  The system was launched in mid 2005 for the customers of the second biggest mobile telephony operator in Finland – Elis. More information can be found at www.pstm.net/article/index.php?articleid=707  13  http://My.eCitizen.gov.sg. 14  “eGovernment In the Member States of the European Union”, IDABC, November 2005. 15  “RFID tracks fever cases in Singapore hospital”, www.pstm.net/article/index.php?articleid=788. 16  “You will not enter without Chip. ID under the Skin,” Gazeta Wyborcza, February 16, 2006. 4  BIS Review 23/2006  developed countries in Europe and North America, whereas in the developing countries of Asia, a higher growth momentum and courage in implementing innovative solutions can be observed.
We also see wages continuing to increase in the future. Now, you really asked me specifically the question of whether corporations and labour – and I'm using that term in a generic, comprehensive way – will find the terms under which they don't contribute to fuelling even more inflation that would call on us to take harder monetary policy measures. This is the assumption that we make. I think economically it is justifiable, it is rational, but of course humans are humans. It's going to be for the parties around the table to actually determine what they do going forward in terms of allocating profits and organising these social relationships. What they can be certain of in their discussion is that the European Central Bank will take all  8/10  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  necessary measures to return inflation to 2%. That, they can count on, and we are confident that we will get there so I hope it helps in their deliberation going forward. The persistency of inflation, as I said, has a lot to do with this unit labour cost that I have mentioned earlier on. This is really the strong – I don't want to use sticky component, because it is going to be persistent, and we know it. Numbers will continue to be high in the months to come, by the way, because we believe that services are going to continue to grow strongly. Labour-intensive services will. Contact-intensive services will continue to grow strongly.

If the uneven pace of economic recovery in the euro area is confirmed and if we see a risk of inflation being too low for too long, we can take action in June. We can act in various ways, depending on the situation. At present, however, it is too early to say what exactly we’re going to do. A lot depends on the forthcoming economic data and on our staff growth and inflation projections, which are to be released in June. Your room for manoeuvre is limited as interest rates are already very low: the key rate is only 0.25%. They are low but they can still go lower. Are negative interest rates in the euro area possible? Negative rates are one of the instruments available to us. They have been discussed extensively by the Governing Council. We are technically and legally prepared for such a possibility. And market participants are well aware that we are contemplating such a move. Wouldn’t negative rates discourage people from keeping their money in banks? This depends on how negative they would be. Indeed, rates that fall deep into negative territory could have an impact on depositors. But a deposit rate slightly below zero does not necessarily imply that depositors would be affected, while still providing incentives for banks to lend more. In recent years, the ECB has used a number of non-standard monetary policy tools. It has purchased bonds on the market, pumped hundreds of billions of euro into the market in the form of cheap loans for banks.
8 Kenneth Rogoff has agued that inflation becomes more responsive to domestic excess demand if price rigidities are reduced and the economy becomes more flexible as a result of increased competitive pressure induced by globalisation. The proposition that a measure of “global economic slack” rather than the domestic output gap is a more important determinant of domestic inflation pressure has been discussed extensively. This hypothesis, if valid, would imply that the slope of the short-term Phillips curve, which depicts the responsiveness of inflation to domestic excess demand, becomes flatter. 9 Thus, in a globalised world – so it has been argued – a much stronger monetary policy response would be required, other things being equal, to preserve price stability over the medium term in the presence of adverse shocks. But also in this regard there exists no robust empirical evidence or solid and convincing theoretical foundation to support the claim that a structural change has taken place. 10 Empirical estimates for the euro area do not show a significant change in the slope of the short-term Phillips curve. Furthermore, it would be misleading to interpret the recently observed low correlation between domestic output gaps and domestic inflation in some countries as a structural change in the short-term Phillips  6  See Kroszner (2007). 7  See Bean (2006a and 2006b). 8  See Rogoff (2004, 2006). 9  See Borio and Filardo (2007). 10  See Ihrig et al. (2007). BIS Review 9/2008  3  curves.

This has also served to reinforce the Government's objective to enhance the efficiency of the public delivery system. This collaboration has resulted in the acceptance of the use of cards including the ATM card, which also functions as a debit card, for over the counter services and the offering of payment services via Internet banking and the Internet-based Financial Process Exchange (FPX) payment system. Another initiative undertaken has been the review of the remittance and e-money regulatory framework to encourage the introduction of payment products that would cater for the unbanked and underserved communities such as migrant workers and consumers with low  2  BIS Review 69/2008  income and low financial literacy and who may have no alternative but to rely on informal payment service providers. There are now more than 20 new remittance and mobile payment products that have been launched. The Bank has already engaged the relevant stakeholders on the priority areas identified and welcomes any further industry efforts to address these issues. Given the significant pay-offs from the low cost technologies in accelerating the adoption of electronic payment, the mobile phone is identified as one of the delivery channels that should be leveraged on. Potential of mobile phones to make the transformation Bank Negara Malaysia sees tremendous promise in mobile telecommunication networks as an electronic payment channel since mobile phones are already in the hands of most Malaysians, with 88% of the Malaysian population subscribing to mobile phone services.
The high-inflation economy with recurring cost crises and high interest rates is a thing of the past. Inflation has instead been low and stable. GDP growth has on average been higher and also more stable than in the 1970s and 1980s. Real wage growth has also been considerably more favourable. Productivity growth has been surprisingly strong – stronger than in almost all of the other EU countries. Most people seem to be in agreement now that the potential growth in the economy has been increased. Employment has not developed as well, but the situation today is much better than it was in the mid1990s. It is also interesting to study inflation expectations. Although inflation has on average remained fairly close to 2 per cent, there have been both shorter and longer periods when inflation has deviated significantly from the target. The past few years are such an example. Inflation has been below target, which is largely due to productivity having developed much more strongly than we had expected. How has confidence in monetary policy been affected by the deviations we have experienced? Even though inflation expectations can be measured in different ways, I think that the overall picture is clear. From around 1996-97 expectations have been in line with the target a couple of years ahead. This is of course pleasing, and a much better development than many people expected when the new monetary policy regime was introduced in the early 1990s. However, the stabilization policy change in regime was not only about monetary policy.

Therefore, it was forecast that inflation would fall below 2% as 2011 progressed and then rise back to target by the end of 2013. As always, it was emphasised that the outlook was uncertain – which indeed proved to be the case. So where do we stand now, a year later? I think the big picture is this: economic recovery has materialised, while stability has proven more elusive. GDP growth this year will be slightly over 3%, which is above the forecasts from a year ago, largely due to changes in inventories and a smaller-than-forecasted contraction in public consumption. GDP growth is projected at 2½% annually for the next three years. I wouldn’t be surprised if it proves higher for 2011, once final figures are in a few years from now. The most recent Monetary Bulletin contains a discussion of forecasts and forecasting errors, which shows that final figures on investment and GDP growth tend to lie above the first figures. Employment has been increasing, and unemployment has fallen. It is cause for relief that the Directorate of Labour’s analysis indicates that most people leaving the unemployment register at present are going back to work. On the other hand, my concerns from last year concerning the low investment level and relatively weak export growth have not disappeared.