samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Stablecoins and other new forms of private non-bank money might be the next big thing. Or they might be a flash in the pan. I don’t have a bet here – I am a central banker not a venture capitalist. My job, as a central banker and regulator – in all of this – is to ensure that financial innovations, including new forms of digital money, do not impair the Bank of England’s ability to maintain monetary and financial stability. This shouldn’t be confused with preserving the status quo. Financial stability is n’t about protecting incumbent banks or other existing firms from competition. Instead financial stability seeks to ensure that people and businesses can rely on essential financial services – like the ability to make a payment or the ability to get a loan – in bad times as well as good. A regulatory framework Earlier this week, the Bank of England published a Discussion Paper that examines the implications of stablecoins for its financial and monetary stability mandate. In it we present an illustrative scenario to examine the implications of the emergence of stablecoins and other new forms of digital money. The discussion paper models what would happen if a large number of households and businesses moved their deposits from banks and into a stablecoin or Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Contrary to some press headlines, even such a dramatic shift does not inherently constitute a financial stability risk as long as it happens in an orderly manner.

As I mentioned earlier, stablecoins may be innovative in the technology they use, but the fundamental questions they pose are not new. We as central bankers and regulators need to look at them as what they propose to be – a new form of private money. This means that we will hold them to standards similar to those applicable to existing private money. It doesn’t matter what type of technology you’re using or the legal form of the firm. If a firm is offering private money on a systemic scale then it should be regulated as such. Our core rules and requirements came through trial and error, often following financial crises. Our work on a regulatory regime for stablecoins builds on this learning process – rather than starting at square one and expecting different results. I recognise that the themes here sound curmudgeonly. But this is not an anti- innovation message: quite the opposite. Establishing a secure regulatory environment for new forms of digital money to operate within the UK will lay a foundation for sustainable innovation. As I said at the outset, if new forms of digital money can be made safe, they could potentially contribute to faster, cheaper and more efficient 4/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  payments with greater functionality. They could increase the resilience of payments. And they could even have long-term benefits for financial stability.
Switchers have consistently experienced higher rates of pay growth than stickers, as we would expect. But it is striking how this differential has widened as the labour market has tightened over recent years, with movers securing pay increases of 7-9%, while stickers’ pay growth has until recently flat-lined at 2-2½%. Chart 20: Switchers’ and stayers’ pay growth Per cent Stayers  12  Switchers  10 8 6 4 2  1998  2000  2002  2004  2006  2008  2010  2012  2014  2016  0 2018  Sources: ONS and Bank of England calculations. (c) Rungs on the Jobs Ladder The second dynamic at work is that even those climbing the ladder have tended to do so at a less rapid pace than in the past. Or, put differently, the rungs in the jobs ladder have been closer together. This, too, may have reflected workers’ unwillingness to move occupation, industry or geography at a time of increased income insecurity. The Resolution Foundation has recently looked at rates of movement between UK regions.20 They find that rates of geographic mobility – people taking a new job in a different region – has been lower since the crisis than in the preceding period. Their analysis finds that this reduction in mobility is driven by the young and, in particular, young graduates.

At present, it can take anything from three hours to three days to transfer money between two banks in Sweden. How long the payment takes depends on the time and day that it is initiated. A payment made on a Tuesday afternoon, for instance, will reach its destination around three hours later, while a payment made on a Friday afternoon will not go through until Monday morning. With interbank payments to a country outside of the EU it gets even more complicated. This type of payment currently takes 2-7 days to go through. They can be made more quickly, but this can be expensive. There is thus a major difference between what a consumer expects, given the technology available, and how the systems actually work and I believe that the two must converge soon. Within Sweden there are already instant payments available for individuals through the Swish mobile app. But this system cannot cover all Swedish payments. As the demand for instant payments will increase in the future, the systems must be adapted to manage them better. The Riksbank currently runs the central payment system for large-value payments between the Swedish banks and other major agents. The system has been constructed to manage large-value payments in a secure manner. Individuals’ payments are lumped together into larger amounts before they pass through the system. The Riksbank also has regular contact with all of the participants.
In other words, a bank could trade a currency derivative on an electronic platform in Singapore, clear the transaction through a central counter party in London and report it to a repository in the US. And the bank could be using different platforms, clearing houses and trade repositories for different types of derivatives. But if all three activities in the trade cycle could be vertically integrated into the same platform, with the trading linked to post-trade services, it would not only be more efficient for the bank, but also be more convenient for regulators to access transactional data from the same market infrastructure for market surveillance and monitoring financial stability. IV. Concluding remarks  22. I am genuinely excited by the opportunities that I see in Asia’s capital markets. An integrated capital market is not only bigger, but offers more choices for investors, more sources of financing for companies, and generally deeper liquidity and better pricing through competitive spreads. Over time, greater scale and greater integration within and across asset classes can create opportunities in new financial products, such as through securitisation. 23. Singapore is well positioned to offer integrated capital market solutions, given that many of the different parts of the value chain – trading, clearing, settlement, reporting – are already being offered in Singapore across the spectrum of asset classes including equities, bonds, foreign exchange and derivatives.

See  BIS Review 108/2009  decentralised and specialised. The focus was on customer needs supported by some of the first-ever market research on their tastes. In the end, it was Sloan and General Motors whose strategy was emulated around the world. In meeting the future needs of the real economy, perhaps there is a case for more “Sloans” and fewer “Fords” in banking. Perhaps there is a case for a strategic focus on the “local” as much as the “global”, for more micro-finance and less macro-finance. Perhaps it is time for relationship-banking to make a comeback. •  Strategy – diversity versus diversification  Customers require a basket of banking services. The provision of some of these services is important for the wider economy; they are a quasi-public good. For example, the provision of monetary services – basic banking – has a strong public good element. That is why depositor protection, in the form of deposit insurance, is stipulated by the state in many countries. Lending to households and companies can also be thought to contain a public good element. Other functions performed by banks may provide more limited social benefits, though their private benefit may be significant – for example, proprietary trading in complex instruments. If scale economies in banking are weak, banking services could probably be equally well provided by either a financial supermarket or a set of specialist banks. These different structures might not, however, be equivalent from a risk perspective.
The Riksbank, which is a centrallylocated and independent participant, can contribute by creating a forum where stakeholders can discuss and try to resolve problems on the market. This is why the Riksbank sent out an invitation to take part in a new retail payments council last week. The idea is to bring together public authorities and market participants from both the supply and demand sides of the market. The council will not make decisions, but will act as a discussion forum that will identify and analyse problems and shortcomings on the market and propose possible ways of counteracting and resolving them. The council can thus become a joint resource for all of the parties involved. Examples of questions that may be discussed include how to improve the situation for vulnerable groups, how to remove obstacles to competition or to improve statistics. The invitation was sent to central participants in the market and to public authorities. Preferably, the council members should represent groups of participants rather than an individual participant, that is, the banks should be represented by the Swedish Bankers’ Association rather than by an individual bank. We are aware that at present this excludes smaller participants who are competing with the banks and introducing innovative products on the market. But our aim is to broaden participation by having greater participation in the working groups that may operate under the council.

I believe we can all agree that it is easier to use banknotes and coins today than it was a couple of hundred years ago, and that it is easier, quicker and safer to use chips and PIN codes than paper slips for card payments. Cards are in turn preferable to cheques. What about the Swedish payments market? Does it give us payment services that are uniform, safe, efficient and accessible? The transformation of the Swedish retail payments market As the market changes rapidly through technological advances and through the establishment of new operators, it is important that the Riksbank follows and analyses the Swedish retail payments market. The results I am about to describe come from a telephone interview survey about households’ payment behaviour that the Riksbank regularly carries out. High accessibility and high level of confidence If we look at the most common payment services we use when we pay at points of sale, 96% of the respondents said that they had access to cash, and almost 99% said they had access to a bank or credit card. No respondent said that they had access to neither cash nor cards. Accessibility for cards and cash is thus very high and so is the general public’s confidence in them and this is reflected in the fact that both are used to a considerable extent. However, cards are being used increasingly often as a means of payment at the cost of cash.
Spencer Dale: Productivity and monetary policy Speech by Mr Spencer Dale, Executive Director, Monetary Policy, and Chief Economist of the Bank of England, at the South Tyneside Manufacturing Forum, London, 21 September 2011. *  *  *  Thank you for the invitation to speak to you this morning. It is a pleasure to be in the North East and to have the opportunity to speak to a forum of business leaders from the manufacturing sector. As our economy recovers and rebalances towards a more sustainable pattern of growth and demand, manufacturing and the export sector more generally will need to play an increasing role. So I’m really pleased to have the opportunity to speak to a group of companies at the forefront of this process. The topic of my talk today is one that is close to many of your hearts. Indeed, it concerns the life blood of the long-term success of each and every one of your companies. It is also central to the setting of monetary policy. Productivity As you know far better than I, strong, sustained productivity growth is vital for ensuring that your companies remain competitive in the global market place. Productivity is equally important for the long-term health and prosperity of our economy as a whole. To paraphrase one economist “productivity isn’t everything, but in the long-run it is almost everything”. (Krugman 1994). Productivity matters for monetary policy since it plays a crucial role in determining the supply capacity of our economy.

Qualitative survey balances can be adjusted to match the mean and variance of an estimated productivity gap from which inference about productivity may be drawn. See Charts 3.7 and 3.8 in the August 2011 Inflation Report. 9  Potential productivity is constructed using the BCC surveys of capacity utilisation and productivity data from the ONS for the manufacturing sector and private services excluding finance sector. The BCC survey asks firms whether they are operating at or below full capacity. Since the survey measures are qualitative, they have been mean and variance adjusted over the period 1989 to 2006 to infer a measure of the gap between actual and potential productivity. The trends shown in charts 5 and 6 are chosen such that the shortfall between actual and potential productivity maps closely to the mean-and-variance-adjusted survey measures of spare capacity. 10  The annual flow of business investment prior to the recession averaged around 7% of the UK capital stock. A 20% reduction in business investment for 5 years would result in the capital stock being only around 2% lower (assuming plausible assumptions for the rate of depreciation). 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  It is possible that this simple arithmetic underestimates the impact of the falls in investment spending, particularly if the falls were concentrated in highly-productive forms of investment. Perhaps because in the face of the deep recession companies were less willing to undertake riskier, high-return investment projects, and the constraints on UK banks made them less willing to finance them.
And fourth, since 2014 the ECB has been implementing a quantitative easing programme entailing the large-scale purchase of private and public assets which, in its first two years of application, will reach an amount equivalent to 17% of total euro area GDP. At present the purchase of assets under this programme covers nearly the whole range of marketable securities eligible as collateral in Eurosystem operations: secured bonds issued by banks; securitisations whose underlying assets are loans to the non-financial private sector; public debt of the central and regional governments; supranational agencies and institutions; and, more recently, non-bank corporate bonds. Since April this year the ECB has been purchasing € billion per month of these securities and the total amount of the portfolio built up for monetary policy purposes now exceeds € trillion. I think it pertinent to add three additional comments on the measures set in train by the ECB: The first is that they are no different from those adopted by other large central banks. Thus, for example, the key policy rate is now also negative in countries like Japan, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland. Also, asset purchase programmes and the strengthening of liquidity provision are instruments shared with other G7 central banks, while the publication of forward guidance also forms part of the Federal Reserve’s toolkit. The second comment relates to potential undesirable side effects which these non-standard policies may have on financial stability, such as the overvaluation of certain assets or downward pressure on banking sector profitability.

Caleb M Fundanga: Local bond market developments in Zambia Speech by Dr Caleb M Fundanga, Governor of the Bank of Zambia, on the occasion of the Listing of the Development Bank of Zambia Bond, Lusaka Stock Exchange, Lusaka, 4 April 2007. *  *  *  • The General Manager – Lusaka Stock Exchange • The Chairman, DBZ Board of Directors • The Chairman, Standard Chartered • The Secretary – Securities and Exchange Commission • Mr Ade Adebajo, Director, Standard Chartered Africa Debt Capital Markets • Member of the DBZ Board • All Senior Government Officials Present • Acting Managing Director, DBZ • Managing Director – Zambia State Insurance Corporation • Chief Executive Officer – Stock Brokers (Z) Limited • Representative of DBSA • Distinguished invited guests; and • Ladies and Gentleman Today marks another important milestone in financial sector development indicative of the coming of age of the Zambian financial system in general and local bond market in particular. The issue of the K68.620 billion senior unsecured floating rate note under the Development Bank of Zambia (DBZ) K150 billion Medium Term Note Programme and listing of the note on the Lusaka Stock Exchange (LuSE) is a landmark transaction for two key reasons. The first is that this is the first time in the history of the local bond market that a local currency medium term note programme has been established. The second is that this transaction marks the largest single issue ever offered to Zambian fixedincome institutional investors.
Bank collapses in the USA and Switzerland The bank collapses in the United States and Switzerland in March created uncertainty in the global financial markets. To understand these developments, it is important to analyse the underlying problems. They are largely well known. However, there are also a number of new elements that may exacerbate the wellknown problems and that need to be analysed further. We want to avoid problems in the banking sector in one area spreading to other parts of the financial system or to other countries. At the same time, it must be possible to wind down banks with serious problems in an orderly manner. It is important to learn from crises. What we have now seen means that I think we will have to change some regulations. The financial regulatory framework is governed to a very large extent by global standards, so that is where the analysis must begin. Any future agreements reached at global level will also clearly affect the rules in the EU and thus in Sweden. Let me first focus on the more familiar problems and then return to what I see as new ones. In a sense, you can probably talk about the financial sector before and  2 See, for example, the discussion in Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (2022). 4 [30]  after the Silicon Valley Bank crash. I think it can be a watershed in the way we think about the design of some financial regulation.

Expressions like “stress-testing”, “black-swan”, “animal-spirits” and even “sovereign debt” have become the new buzzwords in the financial industry. Risk managers have been reminded of model risk; portfolio managers have discovered the true face of risks; market participants have started to think about the compound effects of risks, the dynamics of crises and the impact of systemic risks arising from macroeconomic shocks, contagion effects and “hidden imbalances”; academic and practitioners have further analysed market failures, particularly based on behavioural and institutional aspects; and a certain degree of scepticism has spread, leading to some people wondering whether there is a genuinely risk-free asset and what are the real benefits of diversification. It seems clear that the “risk reassessment” process in the wake of the financial and economic crisis has been rather extensive and, perhaps, even excessive. For instance, market reactions to recent rumours about the financial soundness of institutions and sovereigns have been in some cases “off-the-charts”. Likewise, markets that had traditionally enjoyed lively trading activity and relatively good liquidity conditions completely dried-out. The shift in attitude that we have experienced in recent years relates not only to the ability of market participants to take risks, but also to their willingness to take them. In general, the crisis has eroded the capital position of the financial industry, forcing some institutions to embark on a process of deleveraging and risk downsizing that, in absence of an orderly  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  mechanism, may bring global capital markets further down.
In case of Estonia, our earlier policy choices have resulted in an environment characterized by the openness of the economy - export and import reaching 179-180% of the GDP, by a stable fixedexchange-rate, by a long tradition of balanced fiscal stance and rapid integration with the European markets - all of them features favourable to a relatively rapid real convergence. We could even say that the convergence that presently takes place in our real economy takes place in a de facto EMU environment. 2  BIS Review 42/2003  According to an analysis recently conducted by the ECB, the correlation of manufacturing industries' business cycles between Estonia and the five larger EMU member countries is even higher than that for some of the present member countries, the correlation of overall economic cycles is slightly lower but that is due to the more rapid economic growth in Estonia compared to the euro area. But there is one more important aspect I would like to stress in this context - and that is the crucial role of the financial system in real convergence under a currency board based fixed exchange rate regime. It is fair to say that Estonian banking system is presently strong, well capitalized and liquid. The banks' forced reliance on their own capital and liquidity has had a direct impact on the market structure. Strategic foreign ownership - mostly by Scandinavian financial groups - has provided Estonian banks with both strong capitalization and transfer of international best practices.

There are some very good arguments for that. II. Economy  The best argument lies in the Estonian economy. Regardless of the lingering global uncertainties, economic growth in Estonia has been strong - 5.8% in 2002. That means a growth figure approximately 4% higher than that of the euro area. It could even be said that during the last two years Estonian economy has had to face something akin to a positive external shock as the EU membership became more and more of a certainty and the risk margins correspondingly lower. And there was also a parallel negative economic shock - the continuing weakness of external markets. All that has meant certain advantages - for instance, lower interest rates and significant inflows of foreign direct investment, but there are also certain risks involved. Estonia's high economic growth of the last year and a half is mainly based on high domestic demand. High domestic demand, a continuously strong inflow of foreign investments and a lower than expected export growth have resulted in a significantly high current account deficit - an estimated 14% or more of the GDP by end-2003. Of course, it could be argued that the present external imbalance is, to a certain extent, 'an attendant phenomenon of success'. FDI inflows having been strong through the entire transition period, reinvested earnings and dividend payments have become increasingly important among the factors determining the current account balance in Estonia.