samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
We need to learn the lessons on accounting and valuations. We need to learn the lessons on regulation and supervision. We need to learn the lessons on macroeconomic management and the interplay between the macroeconomy and the financial sector. I am still optimistic on all of these points. There is a major international effort under way to reform regulation and supervision, also regarding cross-border banking. In the wake of the Special Investigation Commission report that I mentioned earlier, I hope that Icelanders now turn to the task of facing head-on where they went wrong on top of all the international failures. And finally, I note with pleasure that the pension funds are going to draw their own lessons on where they might have done better; for instance, by being more critical going forward, as indeed we all must be. In closing, let me welcome you to Iceland and wish you an enjoyable stay and fruitful deliberations during your convention. We need to learn from our different countries’ experiences and seek out the common challenges that we face. In spite of the financial crisis, the world will remain full of interconnections and spillovers, as we can see from the spread of cash and ash across borders. Thank you very much. BIS Review 63/2010  5

The Chancellor decided last May that he would no longer exercise his powers to set short-term interest rates. Anticipating the Bank of England Bill, he set an inflation target and delegated the technical implementation of monetary policy to achieve that target to a new Monetary Policy Committee established within the Bank. BIS Review 18/1998  -3-  The Monetary Policy Committee has been operating independently in setting interest rates ever since. This position is formalised under the Bill. With respect to monetary policy the Bill defines the Bank’s objective as the maintenance of price stability, and, subject to that, as supporting the Government’s economic policy, including its objectives for growth and employment. The Chancellor will tell the Bank each year what precisely we are to understand by “price stability” - he will, in other words - set a specific inflation target. He has in fact initially set a target of 2½% for underlying inflation, and although the Bill provides for him to set the target each year, the expectation is that the target is for the medium to longer term. That is the political decision. The task of achieving that target - the technical implementation of monetary policy - is then delegated to the Bank of England. The Government will no longer have the power to issue directions to the Bank in the field of monetary policy (except, in the terms of the Bill, in “extreme economic circumstances”). Instead, the Bill will formally establish the Monetary Policy Committee.
They need to be funded by liabilities and may have capital requirements to hold against them – they therefore compete directly with other, less liquid assets on the balance sheet such as loans to the real economy. So holding more liquid assets will usually squeeze out less liquid lending. And assets which are liquid in normal times (i.e. can be easily sold or lent against cash), may become sharply less liquid in a financial crisis. These concerns give one reason why a central bank is usually willing to supply extra liquidity to the banking system in a crisis. The particular forms of liquidity requirement being introduced by CRDIV are the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) and the Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSFR). The LCR has been agreed and will be implemented on 1 October 2015 in the EU. It basically requires banks to hold liquid assets to cover one month of projected outflows, assuming that markets are closed to the raising of new funding. As you might expect, a lot of international  5  See IAIS website for more details. 6  See EIOPA website for more details. BIS central bankers’ speeches  7  negotiating time was taken up with deciding what to count as liquid assets! The liquidity requirements will be increased over time until the full requirement is in operation on by January 2019 at the latest.

This balance is critical to deliver the welfare benefits of financial innovation and avoid stalling the development of digital finance with the risk of leaving someone behind. I look forward to the presentations and discussions by the participants at the conference that I am sure will provide interesting reflections on the abovementioned challenges casting light on the fast changing financial innovation landscape, especially in the payments area. I wish all of you an enjoyable and rewarding conference in Ohrid, our charming city, protected by UNESCO for its natural and cultural heritage. Thank you! 1 The Pulse of Fintech 2018: Biannual global analysis of investment in fintech, 2019,  KPMG,  assets.kpmg/content/dam/kpmg/xx/pdf/2019/02/the-pulse-of-fintech-2018.pdf 2 The future of banking is open: How to seize the Open Banking opportunity, 2018, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP,  retailbankinginnovation.fintecnet.com/uploads/2/4/3/8/24384857/the_future_of_banking_is_open.pdf  4/4  BIS central bankers' speeches
The sea and what the sea gives us has been part of the economic base for everyone who has settled along the Norwegian coast. Lighthouses, seamarks and lifeboats have made the lives of seafarers safer, but they have also helped to improve the prosperity of those who live near the coast. The first lifeboats, such as the RS 14 Stavanger, did not stay in port and wait for the alarm to sound. The lifeboats accompanied the fishing fleet out to sea, ready to respond in the event of a storm. Sometimes it was a question of life or death and lifeboat crews rescued people in danger of drowning, while at others the lifeboats were just needed to tow in a group of boats to calmer waters where they could be safe until the storm blew over. Because of the lifeboats, fishermen were able to stay out at sea longer, boosting their earnings and their ability to provide for their families. It is almost a year and a half since we launched the first two denominations in the new banknote series. The new 100-krone and 200-krone banknotes seem to have been well-received, and their production and distribution and the exchange of old banknotes have been on schedule. I am confident that the launch of the next two denominations will proceed just as smoothly. As I have touched upon, the main purpose of the banknote project is to have banknotes that are even more secure than previous banknote series.

The Stavanger was built not far from here, at Tollerodden in Larvik, and is an excellent example of the many wooden boats designed by shipbuilder legend Colin Archer. It was recently decided to return the Stavanger to Tollerodden, where it will be one of the main attractions at a planned Colin Archer Centre. The sailing performance of Colin Archer’s lifeboats was superior to that of the boats constructed by his competitors at that time, and they are beautifully designed. If you would like to see what a real Colin Archer lifeboat looks like, I recommend a trip down to the jetty once the official part of the programme here at Noatun is over to see the RS 1 Colin Archer, which, thanks to the dedicated efforts of enthusiasts, is still in magnificent condition. Moored next to it is the RS 135 Kaptein E. Nygård, which is stationed here in Horten on a daily basis and which is also open to visitors. Personally, I am no stranger to the sea. I have spent my summer holidays in Hvaler every summer since the mid-1960s, and I have thoroughly enjoyed sailing through the archipelago, admittedly at low speed. I always have sea charts and a GPS chart plotter on board and I am quite sure this is why I have not needed any assistance from the Norwegian Society for Sea Rescue so far. However, I greatly respect the Society’s work and what it means for the many people who sail along our magnificent coast.
Again, the role of the Government must be re-emphasized, primarily in packaging suitable tax advantages which can be offered in order to incentivise even the population outside the formal sector of employment to promote higher contributions. Some pension markets remain underdeveloped or at least underutilised in part due to tax disincentives. As such, the design and implementation of an appropriate tax framework incorporating preferential tax treatment could facilitate the promotion of long-term savings. The problems experienced in recent years by public funded pension systems highlighted the importance of complementary or supplementary forms of private savings initiatives. The emergence of institutional investors in particular, primarily as risk transfer conduits and as collectors of savings has shifted focus from publicly funded pensions systems to private savings schemes. This is the fourth and last initiative I will attempt to raise. In order to reduce the cost of providing for the social security of the ageing population, developed countries have encouraged the development of private pension schemes through tax incentives. In some developed countries, employees are given higher personal tax relief for contributions to approved pension schemes. While some countries have made private pensions mandatory, others continue to grapple with ways to promote participation in private pension systems in order for households to meet adequate retirement income needs. As such, measures need to be taken to incentivise private pension schemes.

The full-time employment model does not adequately address the profound changes in employment patterns, which economies are now experiencing, such as the increasing number of women in the workforce. Then again, most pension schemes are also designed for workers with full and uninterrupted careers. This does not reflect the experience of women, as we see more and more today, who may leave their jobs to become full time housewives or homemaker. Breakdown of marriage institutions, which is now not uncommon, and the fact that women typically outlive their husbands, place women at greater risk of being in poverty in old age unless pension schemes are adapted to meet their needs. Pension schemes must also take into account the changing work patterns in economies, which in the recent decade had seen an increase in part-time workers, the self-employed and temporary workers. 2  BIS Review 137/2007  The third challenge is in instilling public awareness on planning for retirement, particularly on having an appropriate level of retirement income to support retirees' healthcare and longterm care. A recent survey conducted in Malaysia revealed that more than 80% of Malaysians are either indifferent or not worried whether or not they have enough money for retirement. Only 34% are consciously saving regularly for retirement and an alarming 60% do not know exactly how much they need during retirement.
Second, I think we saw pre-crisis a tendency for what I, probably too loosely, call the political-economy to be pro-cyclical and thus approve of excessive light-touch supervision. This was a problem I think on both sides of the Atlantic. The public interest in financial stability was lost amidst an enthusiasm for the persistence of growth and easy credit. In 1979, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Arthur Burns, gave a lecture entitled “The Anguish of Central Banking”. It was about monetary policy, and how there had been a build-up of ideas which had accommodated inflation. Historians have suggested that Burns himself was not innocent in this respect, but the point is that there was a role for broad ideas which enabled the accommodation of pernicious inflation. It was dressed up as enthusiasm for growth and societal change which was ultimately unsustainable. We saw similar traits before the financial crisis, with the consequence that supervision was supressed. The whole thrust of the post-crisis changes in my view is to make supervision less pro-cyclical – not to aim off in the good times, but also not over-compensate the other way in the bad times. A third thought in this respect is that we underestimated the importance of system-wide risks and macro-prudential policy. Supervision – and particularly large complex firm supervision cannot be remote from macro-prudential policy. To be honest, while I think we have made some progress breaking down the barriers, we still have a long way to go to integrate micro and macro prudential approaches.

Relative to money spending, central bank money supply is at its highest levels in the 15-year history of the European Central Bank, the 100-year history of the US Federal Reserve, the 131-year history of the Bank of Japan and the 319-year history of the Bank of England. Accompanying these monetary policy changes has been a marked shift in regulatory philosophy. Since the crisis, financial regulation has become explicitly macro-prudential [Morris and Shin, 2008; Bank of England, 2011; Hanson et al, 2011]. This is an expression much-used, but generally little-understood. In a nutshell, it means that policymakers have begun using prudential means to meet macro-economic ends. Those macro-economic ends include tempering swings in credit and leverage – the classic credit cycle. The credit cycle is a long-established feature of the financial landscape [Aikman et al, 2014]. Chart 1 shows its pattern in the UK over the past 130 years or so. The credit cycle is every bit as regular as the business cycle. But it differs from the business cycle in two critical respects: its amplitude is at least twice as large and its duration at least twice as long. Both are important for the design of macro-prudential policy regimes. The larger amplitude of the credit cycle is one reason why credit booms have, more often than not historically, resulted in banking crises (Table 1). Because financial crises cause large and long-lived disruption to the economy, this suggests a strong empirical link between credit cycles and macroeconomic destabilisation.
Growth remains strong in 2018, with issuance of catastrophe bonds the most prevalent type of ILS, more than doubling compared to the same period last year. ILS rates have stabilised after having risen post these disasters, and subsequently dipping with the influx of capital. Catastrophe bond managers have continued to launch new ILS funds in response to strong demand from investors. Today, the ILS market has grown to the point where it now provides 15% of global catastrophe reinsurance capacity. 5 Let me highlight 2 key reasons why ILS has been growing over the years: a. First, it offers sponsors a viable alternative to enhance risk transfer programs. ILS provides diversification of the source of risk capital, multi-year coverage, and also competitive rates compared to traditional reinsurance. b. Second, there is strong demand from investors given ILS’ low correlation with other asset classes, and low volatility. To illustrate, the Swiss Re Global Cat Bond Index has an annual volatility under 3%1, much below the 15% and 5% for equities and corporate bonds respectively. In addition, catastrophe bonds also offer ILS investors a liquid investment option as they can be traded on the secondary markets. 6 The ILS market has continued to innovate in response to the growing and changing needs of sponsors and investors. This innovation is happening along different dimensions, namely in risk types, geography, and structures. a. On risk types and geography. i. ILS has now expanded its scope to cover other lines of business like operational risks and mortgage risks.

Unfortunately, this came at the cost of significant macroeconomic imbalances: at the start of the crisis, Romania had a sizeable structural fiscal gap (around –8 percent of GDP in 2008), a current account deficit in the double-digit area and high inflation readings. When the crisis hit, there was no other option but to make the necessary adjustments. They appear to have produced the expected results: with the current account deficit below 1 percent of GDP, a structural fiscal position in the vicinity of 1 percent of GDP, and an annual inflation rate currently at 1.2 percent, we can safely say macroeconomic equilibria have been restored. At the same time, the economy resumed its growth at rates that can be regarded as robust when compared with the European performance (around 3 percent in both 2013 and 2014 and an even better 4.3 percent in the first quarter of 2015). As a consequence, the output lost in the first two years of the crisis has been completely recovered. Public debt is currently below 40 percent of GDP and looks set to decrease over the medium-term, assuming fiscal consolidation gains are maintained and the economic growth stays at current levels. Positive developments also occurred in terms of the external debt, whose share in GDP decreased by more than 12 percentage points since 2012, mainly due to the cross-border deleveraging and the near complete repayment of the IMF loan.
Confidence indicators, net figures, seasonally-adjusted data 40  40  30  30  20  20  10  10  0  0  -10  -10  -20  -20 Househoulds  -30  -30  Total business sector  -40  -40 00  01  02  03  04  05  06  07  08  09  10  Source: National Institute of Economic Research  The recovery will take time But although growth will recover during the final two quarters of this year, we believe that GDP in Sweden will fall by more than 4 per cent in 2009. And it will take a long time before the economy is back at the same level as prior to the crisis. 2009 will be the first year since the 1940s in which GDP falls in the world as a whole. But, all in all, there are many indications that the growth rate abroad and in Sweden has bottomed out and will rise in the years ahead (Figure 2). Figure 2. GDP level, index 2007 Q4 = 100 110  110 USA  108  108 Euro area  106  106  Sweden  104  104  102  102  100  100  98  98  96  96  94  94  92  92 07  08  09  10  11  12  Sources: Bureau of Economic Analysis, Eurostat, Statistics Sweden and the Riksbank.

Our policy works much better and more efficiently when we are open and clear about our objectives and the reasons for our decisions. An important piece of the puzzle is that we now have a "direct” and clear inflation target. Although the fixed exchange rate was aimed "indirectly” at providing low and stable inflation, this was not really as clear. But with a fixed exchange rate monetary policy is also governed by external events, which has both advantages and disadvantages. Up to the beginning of the 1990s, the Riksbank was on the whole a closed and rather secretive institution, just like most other central banks at that time. Today the situation is the opposite. We are now considered one of the world’s most open central banks. The fact that an independent authority must provide opportunities for insight and evaluation is natural in our society. Another aspect that may be of importance is that the openness puts a little extra pressure on us to develop and do our job as well and as efficiently as possible. And I can note that our methods have changed substantially. Willingness to change and rapid development in our working methods The fact that a lot has happened since the mid-1970s when we sat and drew diagrams and forecasts by hand on graph paper is not surprising. But even during my period in office the last six years our methods of working have shown a rapid development.
In the baseline specification in Galí (2008), the slope is:  12  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  12  𝜅=  (1 − 𝜃)(1 − 𝛽𝜃) 1 − 𝛼 𝜑+𝛼 (𝜎 + ) 𝜃 1 − 𝛼 + 𝛼𝜖 1−𝛼  (6)  𝜃 is the degree of price stickiness, 𝛽 is the discount factor in household preferences, 𝛼 is the degree of decreasing returns to labour in production, 𝜑 is the inverse of the elasticity of labour supply with respect to real wages (holding marginal utility of consumption constant), and 𝜎 is the inverse of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption. Significantly, the elasticity of demand, 𝜖, and hence the mark-up, 𝜇, affect the slope of the Phillips curve. The higher the degree of market power and higher the mark-ups firms charge, the steeper the slope of the Phillips curve (or, equivalently, the smaller the sacrifice ratio). We can roughly gauge the scale of this effect by calibrating the model. Chart 16 looks at the relationship between the slope of the Phillips curve, 𝜅 and mark-ups, 𝜇, for a given parameterisation of the model. The relationship is, as we expect, a positive one. As a thought experiment, consider the scale of increase in mark-ups seen by the average firm globally since 1980, from around 1.1 to around 1.6. 23  Other things equal,  this would be expected on this calibration to have steepened the slope of the Phillips curve from just under 0.1 to around 0.2.

The depreciation of the RMB, alongside a pullback of foreign funds from the region, triggered downward pressures on the region’s currencies. Since the RMB move on 11 August, Emerging Asia currencies have depreciated by an average of 3.2% against the US Dollar, with some falling by as much as 7%. 2  While markets seem to have calmed somewhat, a sense of uncertainty prevails and the risk of renewed volatility remains. What is happening? Financial markets are essentially coming to terms with four significant “re-pricings”. •  First, the stock markets in China are adjusting downwards from unsustainably high levels. •  Second, the RMB has become de-coupled from the US Dollar and is moving towards a more market-determined exchange rate. •  Third, oil and commodity prices have eased considerably this year, marking the end of what some have called a “super-cycle”. 1  Emerging Asia economies refer to China, India, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. 2  Excluding the Hong Kong Dollar. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  •  Fourth, the effects of an impending interest rate hike in the US – the first after seven years of extremely easy monetary policy – are being priced in across Asian markets. These are not necessarily unwelcome developments. The correction in China’s stock market is not surprising given the stretched valuations that had developed over the preceding year.