samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Mojmír Hampl: A digital currency useful for central banks? Speech by Mr Mojmír Hampl, Vice Governor of the Czech National Bank, at the 7th BBVA Seminar for Public Sector Investors and Issuers, Bilbao, 27 February 2018. * * * Ladies and gentlemen, Let me begin by thanking BBVA for their kind invitation to this event. It is a pleasure to speak in front of this knowledgeable and receptive audience, and it is a pleasure for me in particular to be in Bilbao for the first time in my life. Cryptocurrencies, digital currencies, and especially bitcoin have become almost household names over the last couple of months. What is especially interesting and curious for this place – as some of you might know – is that among the hundreds of cryptocurrencies introduced in the last couple of years is one called “bilur”, which means “chain” in Euskara, the Basque language. Bilur is unique for being the first cryptocurrency explicitly linked to the price of oil. By the way, the second part of the label “cryptocurrency”, namely the currency part, is a misnomer in my eyes. No existing cryptocurrency for the time being conforms to the three basic functions of money: a store of value, a unit of account, and a medium of exchange. One cannot store value in an asset that can get 30%–50% cheaper or more expensive in a matter of days.

Ravi Menon: Reforms in banking regulation – effects and outcomes Keynote address by Mr Ravi Menon, Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, at the Symposium on Asian Banking and Finance, San Francisco, 11 July 2016. *  *  *  Mr John Williams, President of the Federal Reserve Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Bank  of  San  Francisco  Let me, on behalf of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, express our appreciation to John and his colleagues at the San Francisco Fed. •  It has been a fruitful collaboration on this Symposium. •  We had a good meeting in Singapore last year, and my colleagues and I are very pleased to be here in San Francisco for this year’s Symposium. There has been no lack of excitement for global financial markets over the past year: •  the US Federal Reserve Bank’s deliberations whether to raise interest rates;  •  China’s transition to a more market-based exchange rate amidst a slowdown in economic growth; and more recently  •  the decision by UK voters to leave the European Union. But even as banking stocks have taken a pounding – forgive the pun – the global banking system has generally held up well. There are no doubt fragilities in some European banks, but as yet no disorderly failure or contagion. I think this has at least something to do with the regulatory reforms put in place since the financial crisis.
4  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  4  Quantitative Easing (QE) involved buying gilts in exchange for newly-created reserves, via a specially created account called the Asset Purchase Facility (APF) which carries an indemnity from the Treasury. 7  The goal was to reduce the yield on gilts, and so to reduce yields – and therefore borrowing costs – on other financial assets, which would in turn feed through to support the economy. This created a large additional quantity of central bank reserves – currently £ worth – matched by an equally large loan to the APF on our balance sheet. 8  Importantly, QE also changed the quantity of reserves from being determined by the quantity demanded by financial institutions to being determined by the quantity supplied by the Bank on behalf of the MPC. To accommodate this change, and to deal with the volatility of money market rates which had emerged as liquidity patterns changed, we also changed our framework for controlling interest rates. In 2009 the Bank moved from a corridor system, in which banks’ reserve balances were remunerated at Bank Rate up to a limited amount, to a floor system, in which we remunerate all balances, no matter how large, at Bank Rate. As well as QE, the MPC has used the Bank’s balance sheet to lend directly to banks, via the Term Funding 9  Scheme (TFS) in 2016.

Given its proven success at maintaining market rates in line with Bank Rate, as well as the benefits of operational continuity, the Bank is minded to keep using a variant of the current floor system for controlling market rates. And, as the quantity of reserves supplied falls towards the quantity demanded by market participants, we will stand ready to meet SMF participants’ demand for additional reserves through regular open market operations. In addition, there is a strong case for holding some longer maturity assets, such as gilts, to back the stable portion of demand for banknotes, and indeed we had already started to do this ahead of the financial crisis. 29  How large a quantity of reserves SMF participants will demand, and therefore how large our future balance sheet will be, is an open and difficult question. As well as changing our own monetary policy toolkit, the financial crisis has changed the behaviour of financial institutions, including in ways that are significant for the size of our balance sheet. In particular their demand for reserves and for liquid assets more generally, is much greater than it was before the crisis. That reflects a combination of tighter regulation which requires them to hold larger buffers of liquid assets, and more prudent management which means that banks have learnt the lessons of the crisis and the value of maintaining liquidity, as well as the fourfold increase in the number of SMF participants. This change was not caused by QE and the expansion of our balance sheet.
Nowadays, the Chancellor specifies the inflation target each year, in a letter to the Governor, but decisions about interest rates are taken by a Committee of nine independent experts who have strong incentives to keep inflation close to target. That is not just because a measurable target provides a clear focus for decisions, important as that is. The regime is intentionally highly transparent with a heavy emphasis on accountability to Parliament and the general public as well as the government of the day. Our individual votes are a matter of public record, and we regularly appear in front of the Treasury Committee to explain our decisions. Minutes of MPC meetings are published within a fortnight. And every three months, we publish an Inflation Report, with the MPC s views on the outlook for growth and inflation over the next three years. This is the subject of regular briefings to business audiences around the country as well as a high profile press conference fronted by the Governor. All this gives monetary policy watchers - in financial markets and in the country at large - plenty of information by which to judge how we are doing, as well as to form their own expectations of future inflation and growth. How successful have we been in establishing a credible policy regime? A key test is what people expect about inflation, and in particular how those expectations react to unexpected economic news. If the regime is credible, people should expect inflation to stay close to target.

Svein Gjedrem: The inflation target and the floating krone: the interplay between fiscal policy, the interest rate and competitiveness Address by Mr Svein Gjedrem, Governor of Norges Bank (Central Bank of Norway), to the Executive Board of the Federation of Norwegian Manufacturing Industries, Oslo, 20 March 2002. This speech is based on information provided in Norges Bank’s Inflation Report 1/2002, earlier speeches and the Governor’s Annual Address on 14 February 2002. Accompanying charts can be found on the Norges Bank’s website (www.norges-bank.no). *  *  *  Norway’s economic policy is based on the guidelines for fiscal and monetary policy. The guidelines for fiscal policy state that the use of petroleum revenues over the central government budget shall be equivalent to the expected real return on the Government Petroleum Fund. Monetary policy is oriented towards low and stable inflation. Historically, periods of high inflation have always been followed by a downturn. Low and stable inflation fosters stability and growth in the economy. Establishing guidelines for economic policy is not new. Both fiscal and monetary policy have been based on such rules throughout the post-war period, with the exception of the last half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s. Monetary policy has had a clear anchor since 1986. The inflation target provides an anchor for expectations concerning future inflation and interest rates. The inflation target is set at 2½ per cent.
With that in mind I’d like to take the opportunity today to look ahead, at the challenges and opportunities of what is waiting for us on the other side of the bridge –different, perhaps very different from the world we used to live in. Because we face a lot of uncertainty. Not only about the speed of recovery from recession. But about the extent and depth of permanent structural changes to the functioning of our economy brought about by adaptation to Covid-19 – and as I say, with a crucial role for the insurance industry to play in our economic recovery. I want to focus today not on the specific risks that this brings to the insurance sector – though those are real and large – but on the role of the insurance sector and its regulatory framework in supporting broader economic rebuilding in a changed landscape. Not on what the economy might do to insurers, but on what insurers can do for the economy. Of course managing your own risks and supporting the wider economy is not an either/or choice. A virtuous circle operates between the provision of financial services, and the strength of the economy, and hence the strength of the balance sheets of the providers of financial services themselves. In the case of insurance it seems likely that continued provision of new risk pooling and investment by insurers strengthens the economy and hence existing exposures on insurers’ own balance sheets.

But we will try wherever possible to be sympathetic to AIs’ concerns on compliance costs. Terrorist financing The most obvious thing we need to do is to incorporate into our guideline specific recommendations relating to terrorist financing. In particular, we need to make AIs aware of their responsibilities under the United Nations (Anti-Terrorism Measures) Ordinance that was enacted in July of this year and will begin to come into operation in the near future. The New Ordinance is intended to meet Hong Kong’s commitments under the FATF’s eight Special Recommendations on Terrorist Financing. To that end, it criminalises the financing of terrorism and associated money laundering and provides for the freezing of terrorist-related funds. It also imposes an obligation on AIs and other persons to report knowledge or suspicion that funds are linked to terrorism. We have already asked AIs to report to the JFIU suspicious transactions that may be related to terrorism. But the legal obligation to do so is now clear and unambiguous, as is the criminal offence of dealing in terrorist funds. AIs therefore need to ensure that they have the necessary measures in place to comply with the law. This is not an easy task. It is accepted that terrorist financing is difficult to detect even when AIs are provided with lists of terrorist suspects. The FATF published in April of this year a document called Guidance for Financial Institutions in Detecting Terrorist Financing that I would recommend you to look at.
As a result, the effect of tightening the monetary policy on the aggregate demand has been significantly contained due to lack of response from long-term interest rates. In the world of global financial markets nobody seems to be surprised by the fact that during the session of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC 19 ) of the American Federal Reserve, the eyes of the entire financial market are fixed on its Chairman. Why is that? Decisions made by the FOMC in Washington are equally as important for investors in New York as those in London, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai or even Warsaw. Not only do the FOMC decisions influence US economy, but also - via the financial markets channel - the entire global economy. An unexpected increase in interest rates in the USA may bring about a sudden outflow of capital from the emerging markets, and thus weaken the currencies of those countries and increase their bond yields. Some economists 20 make the point that an important aspect of the growing internationalisation of financial markets is increased discipline, which is extorted by investors on governments and central banks in individual countries. According to this hypothesis, the financial markets, through their continuous valuation of securities, duly reward good and punish bad economic policies. However, the empirical results do not provide hard evidence to support the thesis on fiscal policy discipline.

This global, common factor explains not only the change in the inflation trend (the increasing inflation between 1960 and 1980 and its subsequent decrease), but also inflation fluctuation over a business cycle. The research has also shown that, where domestic inflation deviates from the “global” inflation, it exhibits a “global-inflation-reverting” tendency. As a consequence, modelling and forecasting of domestic inflation may be improved significantly by taking into account the “global inflation”. The fast-progressing globalisation is closely related to offshoring and outsourcing, whose scope is also growing. Unfortunately there is not much hard data that would allow for assessment of the scale of the phenomenon. Offshoring analysis is available only for selected countries and covers only selected industries. However, the growing scale of the phenomenon is reflected by data on global trade in goods and services and on foreign direct investment. Over the past 15 years, the shares of individual regions in the global trade have changed significantly, whereby the decreasing share of the EU is accompanied by increasing shares of the developing countries, including the Asian countries. Globally, foreign trade expressed as percentage of the GDP increased from the average 19% of the GDP between 1980 and 1989 up to 25% between 2000 and 2004. Table 1.
It is important that these judgments are made by experts. But, also like monetary policy, the consequences of these expert judgments have potentially wide-ranging effects on society. So they should only take place within a clear public framework of delegated authority. This combination of expert discretion within public parameters is sometimes termed “constrained discretion”. The large scale LOLR interventions undertaken by the UK authorities during the financial crisis played a significant role in preventing a much deeper economic and financial collapse. But they also exposed a number of shortcomings in the Bank’s pre-crisis frameworks. Through the course of the crisis, and subsequently, that framework has been transformed through an extensive series of public reforms 1. In the rest of my remarks today I want to draw out from that work four particular lessons from the crisis that have helped the UK in its quest to plot a more effective course between “too little” and “too much”. Four lessons from the crisis in the United Kingdom The first lesson drawn by the UK authorities was that a key part of reducing the risk of conducting “too much” LOLR is having effective and coordinated macro- and microprudential supervisory and resolution regimes. Pre-crisis, the UK lacked a comprehensive micro-prudential liquidity regulation framework, and banking supervision did not focus enough on liquidity management. This meant that many banks took too much liquidity risk.

We have already seen a significant number of positive effects from these monetary policy decisions. Financial market conditions and the cost of external finance for the private economy have eased further, also following our previous monetary policy measures. In particular, borrowing conditions for firms and households have improved considerably. Moreover, money and credit dynamics have been firming. The substantial additional easing of our monetary policy stance supports and reinforces the emergence of more favourable developments for the euro area economy. In an environment of improving business and consumer sentiment, the transmission of our measures to the real economy will strengthen, contributing to a further improvement in the outlook for economic growth and a reduction in economic slack. Thereby, our measures will contribute to a sustained return of inflation towards a level below, but close to, 2% over the medium term and underpin the firm anchoring of medium to long-term inflation expectations. Let me now explain our assessment in greater detail, starting with the economic analysis. According to Eurostat’s flash estimate, real GDP in the euro area rose by 0.3%, quarter on quarter, in the last quarter of 2014, which was somewhat higher than previously expected. The latest economic data and, particularly, survey evidence available up to February point to some further improvements in economic activity at the beginning of this year. Looking ahead, we expect the economic recovery to broaden and strengthen gradually. The low level of the price of oil should continue to support households’ real disposable income and corporate profitability.
BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  Table 1 World growth (annual change, percent) Average 00-07  2010 (e)  2011 (f)  Dec.11 MP Report  2012 (f)  Jan.12 WEO  Dec.11 MP Report  2013 (f)  Jan.12 WEO  Dec.11 MP Report  Jan.12 WEO  World at PPP (1)  4.2  5.0  3.8  3.8  3.5  3.3  4.1  3.9  World at market exchange rate (2)  3.2  3.9  2.8  2.8  2.7  2.5  3.2  3.2  United States  2.6  3.0  1.7  1.8  1.8  1.8  2.2  2.2  Eurozone  2.2  1.9  1.6  1.6  -0.1  -0.5  1.0  0.8  Japan  1.7  4.4  -0.7  -0.9  2.0  1.7  1.6  1.6  China  10.5  10.4  9.1  9.2  8.2  8.2  8.5  8.8  Rest of Asia  5.1  7.8  4.5  4.9  4.4  5.0  4.8  5.0  Latin America (excl.

Rodrigo Vergara: The Central Bank of Chile and the external crisis Presentation by Mr Rodrigo Vergara, Governor of the Central Bank of Chile, at a special session held by the Honorable Senate to “analyze and evaluate the economic policy measures that have become indispensable to confront the severe symptoms of international recession and with the purpose of becoming familiar with the Contingency Plan announced by the Supreme Government”, Santiago de Chile, 31 January 2012. *  *  *  Mr. President of the Senate, Senator Guido Girardi, Honorable senators. Thank you for your invitation to discuss the international economic situation and the measures that can be adopted in our country to address an external crisis. These instances are important for communicating the vision of the Central Bank of Chile (CBC) on these issues. In the past several years, the advanced economies have gone through a severe crisis. The causes and consequences of the Great Recession of 2008–2009 have not yet been resolved and we are again enduring periods of external stress that put to the test the strength of our economy and its fundamentals. This forces us to carefully evaluate the current environment, its implications on the performance of our economy, and the measures we can implement if deemed necessary. During the past year, the biggest tensions have originated in the frail fiscal and financial conditions of some economies in the Eurozone. This situation has persisted for a long time and no definitive solution is foreseen in the near term.
Yves Mersch: Challenges for completing Europe’s economic and monetary union Speech by Mr Yves Mersch, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, at the MNI Connect event, Singapore, 13 October 2015. *  *  *  Over the past few months, Europe has faced two exceptional challenges. First, there was the new adjustment programme for Greece. And second, there has been the large influx of refugees, a challenge that is very far from the competences of the European Central Bank (ECB). Though very different in nature, these two events offer a common lesson for future challenges that we will collectively face: that Europe is strong only when it acts on the basis of solidarity and cooperation. I would like to talk about two further topics of importance today: first, the ECB’s assessment of recent economic developments and their implications for our monetary policy stance; and second, the necessity for completing Europe’s economic and monetary union. Over the summer, industrial production and other indicators of economic activity in the euro area have shown signs of resilience. Yet at the same time, the macroeconomic environment has become more challenging. The ECB’s latest macroeconomic projections indicate a weaker economic recovery and a slower increase in inflation rates than was expected earlier in the year. Inflation will remain close to zero in the very near term, before rising again towards the end of the year.

In the event that the downwards risks I have mentioned weaken the inflation outlook over the medium term more fundamentally than we currently project, we would not hesitate to act. Should more monetary policy impulse become necessary. The ECB is determined to use all available instruments to achieve its mandate over the medium term. As for potential risks to financial stability, we do not see them materialising at present but we will naturally be monitoring them closely. Over the past two years, national authorities across Europe have been active in developing and implementing macroprudential policy measures but their effectiveness still has to be tested. Before addressing my second topic, let me mention Greece again. The comprehensive agreement that has been reached involved a long and complication discussion. But if, as we all hope, the new programme is completely  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  implemented, it will put Greece in a strong position to grow again and to reap the full benefits of participating in our common currency. The negotiations over the summer once again confirmed that Europe’s institutional framework is not yet commensurate with the requirements of sharing a single currency. A more complete union is necessary. From the ECB’s perspective, two elements are of particular importance. First, despite the best efforts of everyone involved, the crisis has revealed the need for a political centre to economic and monetary union.