samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Furthermore, these institutions played a very important role in resolving the crisis, since they were able to take over other institutions in a weaker position. It is not surprising, therefore, that the international presence of Spanish banks has increased since the crisis, in contrast to that of the banks of most European countries, which have tended to reduce their international operations. Over the last decade, Spanish banks have increased their international exposure by 45%, while the banks of countries such as Germany, France and Italy have reduced theirs by 38%, 16% and 15%, respectively. 5/17  On the other hand, the effort to adjust business in Spain has been highly significant. Specifically, over the last 10 years, the total assets of business in Spain have been reduced by 20% and employment in the industry by 32%. Also, the number of institutions has fallen by 34%, with a decrease in the number of domestic banks1 from 122 at the beginning of the crisis to 61 in 2018. As a result, concentration has increased significantly. Most of the mergers and takeovers have given rise to healthier banks, with significant cost savings. 1  Grupos consolidados y entidades sin grupo, de propiedad nacional. 6/17  One effect of this consolidation process has been the disappearance of 43% of the bank branches existing in Spain.

Textbook flexible inflation targeting The textbook account of a flexible inflation targeting regime explains that when interest rates are set to bringing inflation back to the target, consideration is also given to the effects on the real economy; an appropriate balance between inflation and real variability is sought, which implies that an immediate reversal to the target is not an end in itself. Textbook accounts of flexible inflation targeting typically give the following answer to the question of how asset prices should be factored into the monetary policy decision: monetary policy should respond to changes in asset prices to the extent that they affect the inflation and growth forecasts. Thus, there is no independent role for e.g. rapidly rising house prices. Their effect on the monetary policy decision should come only through their effect on the inflation and growth forecasts. This recommendation, and the assumptions on which it is based, is something I will comment more on, below. Leaning against the wind Another view often put forward is that a central bank can bring about better outcomes for inflation and output by reacting to rapidly rising asset prices, over and above their implications for inflation and growth.
The first is the measurement and evaluation of financial education and its effectiveness. Strengthening measurement and evaluation is a key pillar of FEN’s strategies to increase the impact of initiatives implemented by FEN and its members. This would enable FEN members to design more effective and tailored financial education programmes, that also optimises resources, to achieve sustainable behavioural change. By strengthening the focus on outcomes and impact, we can reinforce effective practices and support the continuous improvement of programmes. With this in view, FEN is committed to develop and execute an annual measurement and evaluation process for financial education programmes that support the National Strategy for Financial Literacy – to be implemented from 2022. 2/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  The second area of focus today is on opportunities to make better use of data and behavioural insights to advance smarter financial education. A key challenge that we face today is the misalignment between information and resources made available to financial consumers, and the way in which they consume, process and act on such information. Behavioural insights can help us close this gap to make better use of the tools at our disposal to bring about positive change. Advances in technology are also opening up new opportunities to leverage on behavioural insights to achieve more effective financial education interventions. The ability to gain much deeper and richer insights into consumer behaviour are now possible, and could completely change the way we think about and deliver financial education interventions.

This is necessarily work-in-progress, as it will take several years of learning and adaptation by MAS, financial institutions, and market participants. But achieving this is an important part of ensuring that Singapore remains a resilient, competitive, and dynamic financial centre. Thank you very much. My colleagues and I will be pleased to take any questions that you may have. BIS Review 33/2003  3
We all know that stable conditions make it easier to arrive at wise economic decisions. When wages and prices chase each other in an unpredictable way, and both interest rates and the exchange rate fluctuate widely as a result of this, with a certain amount of luck or smartness it is sometimes possible to do good business. But most people surely realise that this is not the best setting for either long-term investment or for those who have to live on an earned income or a pension. The head of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, has formulated his view of what monetary policy’s objective should be in roughly these words: inflation should be so low that economic agents do not have to worry about it. Limited room for employment policy Why, then, are there those who still argue that higher inflation would be a good thing? I believe this is mainly because they perceive a conflict between price stability and low unemployment. This perception in turn has its roots in a short-run, cyclical perspective. When economic activity is rising or falling on account of transitory demand fluctuations around a long-term trend, this negative relationship does exist. Rising demand for goods and services generates increased demand for labour and lower unemployment; this tends to be accompanied by rising wages and higher inflation. The opposite also applies. But this does not mean that higher inflation results in permanently higher employment and lastingly lower unemployment.

Mr. Heikensten considers inflation and the interest rate in Sweden Speech given by the Deputy Governor of the Bank of Sweden, Mr. Lars Heikensten, at the Sweden Financial Forum, Örebro, on 15/10/97. What I have to say is based in the main on the Riksbank’s latest inflation report, which was published less than a month ago. In some respects, I shall be developing what we said there about the outlook for inflation, though our assessment of the situation is essentially unchanged. I shall begin, however, with some remarks about why monetary policy is constructed as it is, with the objective of safeguarding the value of money. 1. Monetary policy’s foundations Experience advocates a stable environment The reason why the Riksbank’s objective is to safeguard the value of money is basically simple: low, stable inflation contributes to a good environment for the growth of production and employment. Support for this view is readily found in the pattern of economic developments in different industrialised countries. In those countries where inflation has been allowed to accelerate, growth has normally been weaker and more erratic. We have seen this in Sweden. In the first two-to-three post-war decades Swedish economic policy was characterised by stable rules and inflation was low. Economic growth in those years was good and new jobs were created to a greater extent than in the past two decades, when inflation shot up and there was a series of devaluation cycles. There is really nothing odd about this.
It concludes that there is some concern that the deteriorating performance of sub-prime RMBS could affect the broader market for structured credit instruments, due to the fact that the concentration of sub-prime mortgage loans as collateral for collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) is very high. It cannot be ruled out that further poor performance of this type of collateral could trigger rating downgrades of CDO tranches themselves and lead to a reassessment of risk in other segments of structured credit markets. Financial market liquidity An overarching theme, pertaining to several sources of risk and vulnerability in the financial markets, is the abundant liquidity characterising global markets. Indeed, there appears to be a consensus among market participants that market liquidity has reached unprecedented levels. Financial market liquidity is a measure of the ability of market participants to undertake securities transactions without triggering large changes in their prices. The concept of financial market liquidity is distinct from the concept of monetary liquidity, but there can be links between the two. Although the measurement of market liquidity is rather complex, symptoms of the abundance of liquidity include high leverage, low yields, low market volatility, narrow credit spreads, and high market turnover. Overall, abundant liquidity seems to be intertwined with the “search for yield” which has been discussed in past issues of the FSR and it appears to be dependent on confidence remaining in the smooth functioning of the market.

Conference of the Haut Conseil des Finances Publiques Paris, 10 May 2022 The sustainability of French debt, between rising interest rates and European rules  Speech by François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Banque de France  Page 1 of 9 Ladies and Gentlemen, It is a pleasure to be with you today, and I thank the first President Pierre Moscovici for inviting a central banker to conclude this predominantly fiscal conference. I am especially aware of this privilege because monetary policy and its relationship with fiscal policy are often subject to two suspicions. Firstly, accommodative monetary policy is believed to be responsible for the rise in public debt. This is not true: the unconventional policies conducted over the past decade to support inflation (and activity), which was weak at the time, have merely had the effect of reducing the cost of debt. Several countries, not only Germany, have, on the contrary, taken advantage of this decade to bring down their debt. And unfortunately we have to acknowledge that in France, government spending was already systematically higher than revenues long before the low interest rates and government securities purchases. The second suspicion is that because of this high public debt, monetary policy is now unable to raise interest rates sufficiently to combat renewed inflation. This is also untrue: the independence of the European Central Bank and of each national central bank, starting with the Banque de France, is notably designed to prevent any risk of "fiscal domination".
Without prejudice to the primary objective of price stability, we have been and remain firmly committed to providing the possible monetary stimulus to bolster economic growth. Lastly, we are scrutinizing the options of supporting this goal with prudent regulatory measures to be adopted in full concordance with financial stability at home. 2  BIS Review 175/2010

Yet in spite of being the oldest, Matero has not seen any growth in modern infrastructure, let alone banking facilities. For this reason therefore, as Governor of the Central bank, it gives me tremendous pleasure to see a reputable, privately owned commercial bank taking the bold step of bringing banking services, of international standards, to the doorsteps of a community like Matero. In this regard, the opening of the Stanbic Branch today has given me enormous optimism and re-assurance that banking facilities can, indeed, be extended to ‘financially excluded’ communities, like Matero. Ladies and Gentlemen Developments, like the one we are witnessing today, must not be taken for granted nor taken lightly. I am reliably informed that this has come about as a result of the policy reforms, undertaken by the Standard Bank Group, which have culminated in Stanbic Bank Zambia being conferred with the status of a ‘Universal Bank’. By assuming this status, Stanbic Bank Zambia has been given the authority to offer banking services to all the segments of the market. For obvious reasons, this move is not only uplifting to the technological advancement and capability of the Matero community through the provision of modern banking services like the AutoBank, but also goes a long way in assisting the Bank of Zambia, as a monetary authority, to have a firm control over the implementation of monetary policy.
IFFO has organised 12 workshops and events in collaboration with top experts in the field such as the International Finance Corporation and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency under the World Bank Group, Harvard Kennedy School, and key industry associations on risk mitigation and 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  capacity building. Two high level roundtables for debt and equity investors were held in March 2017 to discuss innovative ways of making projects more bankable and investible. A reference term sheet for infrastructure investments was also developed in the equity roundtable, listing out various factors to be considered in equity investment in infrastructure projects. The next high level roundtables will be held later this month. We also held a high level roundtable two months ago with 10 major Mainland China enterprises which have extensive investments in EMEs. The theme of that roundtable was the pivotal role that Hong Kong could play in facilitating the financing and management of infrastructure investments in the region. Separately, the HKMA is exploring the opportunity of co-investment in infrastructure projects with some like-minded investors. This is still work in progress and we hope we can say more on this later on. 5. Apart from the work of IFFO, I would like to say a few words on what the Hong Kong Mortgage Corporation (HKMC), which is fully owned by the HKMA, is doing in promoting infrastructure financing. The HKMC’s key mandate, as many of you are aware, is to develop commercially viable financial products that would facilitate market developments.

While there are still widespread skepticism and even resentment to the label of financial derivatives or financial engineering, I think it is important for us to be able to differentiate between those structured finance products that are linked to and supportive of the real economy from those that have no useful links to the real economy. Clearly ordinary mortgage-backed securities with proper underwriting standards, not the kind of sub-prime mortgages in the US, are one of this kind of useful financial derivatives. Infrastructure loan backed securities can be another kind of useful structured finance because, if properly organised, they can bring about a win-win outcome for the investors, the recipient countries, the intermediaries and the capital markets. As I said earlier, infrastructure investments are one of the most difficult kind of asset class and to create a structured finance for these investments is not going to be an easy or short process, but as the Chinese saying “千里之行，始於足下” goes, no matter how long the journey is going to take, one has to make a start somehow. So here we are, the HKMC is going to take the first step in pursuing the securitisation of infrastructure loans in order to facilitate a more efficient flow of capital into infrastructure investments. 9. I note that in the afternoon there will be a session focusing on the prospects of structured finance in infrastructure investments. This is highly relevant and timely and I look forward to hearing the perspectives and insights from the experts on this subject.
It models the entire distribution of gross capital inflows to emerging market economies (EMs) based on a set of covariates, and focuses on the dynamics of the left tail of those conditional distributions, which is taken to be the relevant measure of capital flows-at-risk. In the baseline specification, the distribution of capital flows is estimated conditional on proxies for “push” and “pull” factors. For this purpose, the framework makes use of in-house financial conditions indices (FCIs), which measure co-movement in a series of financial indicators at the country level. 34 The global average of these indices is considered to be a summary measure of “push” factors, and the residual obtained from regressing country indices on this global FCI to be a country-specific summary measure of “pull” factors. For different horizons (h) and quantiles (φ) of the distribution, a panel regression of capital flows is performed on a constant, and the proxies for push and pull factors:35 KF@R i,t+h,φ = αt+h,φ + βt+h,φ 𝑃𝑢𝑠ℎt + γt+h,φ 𝑃𝑢𝑙𝑙i,t+h,φ + εi,t+h,φ  (1)  This specification allows capital flows-at-risk to be estimated, which is measured as the 5th percentile of the distribution in the baseline case. This specification is estimated on quarterly gross-inflows from non-residents to a set of 13 EMs over the period 1996-2018.36 The specification is estimated separately for FDI, banking and portfolio flows, and a split of portfolio flows into those intermediated via investment funds and those which are not.

30 For example see Baranova, Y; Coen, J; Lowe, P; Noss, J; and Silvestri, L (2017), Simulating stress across the financial system: the resilience of corporate bond markets and the role of investment funds, BoE FS Paper No. 42, July. 29  21  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  21  pooled resources, achieving the same level of insurance for a much lower cost.31 This would imply a tripling in the IMF’s resources over the next decade, enough to maintain their current share of global external liabilities. 32 The design of the GFSN is also important. Positive steps have been made in recent years by introducing precautionary liquidity facilities so countries can borrow to prevent crises, as well as mitigate their impact. This should also reduce stigma of drawing on the facilities. But so far, only a few countries have taken them up. It is important to do everything we can to normalise use of these precautionary facilities. 33 Conclusion In the deceptively simpler time of the pre-crisis world order, “keeping your house in order” was a handy prescription of the G7 to EMEs. When countries were hit by volatile capital flows, they were admonished that there were “no innocent bystanders” and that only by doubling down on the Washington Consensus reforms could they be free to enjoy the benefits of sustainable cross-border investment. The experience of successive crises and shocks – confirmed by the Bank of England’s analysis – suggests that advice was once worthy but is increasingly incomplete.
3  Because Swiss GDP statistics do not fully take into account the improvement of the terms of trade regularly realized by the tradable sector, the growth differential between Switzerland and other advanced economies is overstated but remains significant nevertheless. See e.g., Term-of-Trade Changes and Real GDP: Evidence from Switzerland, Ulrich Kohli, SNB Quarterly Bulletin, June 2002. BIS Review 24/2004  3  Monetary policy and EMU Accession to a monetary union transfers the power over monetary policy from the national to the union level. There are costs and benefits to such an abdication of monetary sovereignty. Nominal interest rates are equalized throughout a monetary union and the nominal exchange rate is no longer available as a tool for alleviating the impact of asymmetric shocks. Necessary economic adjustments between different countries of a monetary union must therefore occur through various price and factor movements. As I have already suggested, imposing real wage adjustments in particular can be politically costly. In the case of both the UK and Switzerland, these potential costs of EMU membership are mitigated by virtue of flexible labor markets in both countries. In the case of Switzerland, EMU accession would also lead to the loss of an interest rate bonus our country has traditionally enjoyed. At least partly, this bonus is rooted in the credibility of the Swiss National Bank, acquired over a long period of independent and successful monetary policy (Chart 2).

They will add twenty-five percent to Europe’s population, twenty-three percent to Europe’s land mass and nine percent to European GDP on a purchasing power parity basis. Average GDP per capita in Europe will therefore decline by thirteen percent to a level slightly above sixty percent of that of the United States. Fifteen years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the new member states are keen to compete on the internal market. The adjustment process will entail important challenges to both newcomers and old-timers. On balance, I remain confident that in the longer term, the growth contribution to the European Union will be a positive one. In a world of rapid change and integration, countries with a long history of open economies and societies are well positioned to reap economic and social benefits. Both of our countries doubtlessly fit into that category. Note that in a recent global survey, Switzerland was voted the third most open country in the world. The challenge will be to maintain our ability to adapt to changing external conditions. On the important issue of domestic structural reform, Switzerland would be misguided to consider EMU membership as a strategy for curing domestic problems. Instead, we have much to learn from our friends across the English Channel on how to reform a domestic economy on the basis of domestic needs. Thank you.