samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
This is partly due to globalisation, not least financial globalisation. It affects the scope of countries and thereby of central banks to conduct their own economic policy based on national prerequisites. Sweden is a small, open economy with a large financial sector. The room for manoeuvre in economic policy regarding both monetary policy and financial stability is, in my opinion, much less than it was for, say, 15–20 years ago. According to the textbooks, with a floating exchange rate, we should be able to conduct an independent monetary policy. And we can, but to what extent? Today’s low inflation is, for example, very much a global phenomenon. Stability in the financial system is also affected by financial globalisation. As a consequence of the ever-stronger links between different countries’ financial systems, regulatory frameworks are also increasingly often formulated outside national borders. The strengthening of global financial regulatory frameworks is, of course, also a result of the financial crisis which broke out in 2008 – and the after-effects of which the global economy is still struggling with. I would, however, like to stress that in Sweden we coped relatively well with the financial crisis and its aftermath. We had robust frameworks and the power to act, as regards both fiscal policy and monetary policy. We also had enough flexibility to be able to cope with the Swedish banking system’s need for liquidity and assist other countries in our vicinity in order to help stabilise the financial system. Economic development in Sweden has been favourable in many ways.

With more than 2,500 Indian companies, 2,300 Chinese companies, and 2,000 Australian and New Zealand companies in Singapore, corporates have made Singapore their location of choice to tap into this growth. However, Singapore’s value transcends our physical proximity to the fastest growing regions of the world. Indeed, Daiwa’s extensive commitments and new activities in Singapore is the best testament of our successful efforts to create the best possible business environment. It highlights recognition of our stable and trusted environment, supported by reliable infrastructure, highly educated workforce and consistent and transparent government policies. To further enlarge the market, Singapore has forged important linkages to the rest of the world. We have built up a network of Free Trade Agreements with many of our key trading partners such as Japan, the US, India and Korea. Discussions are ongoing with the Gulf region and China for greater market access for Singapore-based entities. A Connectivity Agreement between Singapore and Vietnam will amongst others, deepen collaboration in financial services, and promises greater opportunities for businesses from both countries. Conclusion On this note, I would like to convey my heartiest congratulations to Daiwa Securities Group on your 35th anniversary in Singapore. The future of the region continues to shine bright and I encourage all to leverage on Singapore to tap into the region’s growth. I wish everyone a wonderful evening ahead. Thank you. 2  BIS Review 72/2007
As a result, the intermediation was taken up instead by financial systems in the advanced economies which, as we know, led to risktaking and a major asset price bubble. In closing, I want to end my remark by making a few observations on the direction of global finance going forward. As a matter of fact, the current crisis is also a crisis of globalized finance, considering the damage that has been done to the global banks and financial markets. Lessons learnt from this crisis will definitely bring about important changes in the global financial landscape, as well as in the regulatory approach to bank regulation and supervision. On this, key trends we can expect to see in the emerging financial landscape will include, on the demand side, consumers becoming more risk averse and having preference for local institutions and for simplicity of transactions and instruments, while demanding greater accountability and transparency. On the banking side, business models of banks will become more conservative, relying less on wholesale funding and on the use of leverage, while giving greater importance to risk management and higher liquidity buffer. And on the regulatory front, more emphasis will definitely be on public surveillance and the use of macroprudential oversight, with focus on system-wide stability, closer supervision of the systemically important financial institutions including non-banks, and establishing an international procedure for an orderly unwinding of a troubled systemically important global player.

Bandid Nijathaworn: Where is global finance heading? Speech by Dr Bandid Nijathaworn, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Thailand, at the Conference entitled, “Where is Global Finance Heading? The Stake of Emerging Economies in the International Financial System”, organised by Central Bank of Peru and Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee, Cusco, Peru, July 13-14, 2009. *  *  *  Thank you Chair First, let me thank the Central Bank of Peru and Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee for the invitation. It is an honour to be speaking to you today. The topic of this first session is “Time of upheaval: Where global finance is heading?”. This is definitely an important question given the current crisis is now almost two years old and is still evolving. Judging from the implications that the crisis has had so far on the world economy and financial markets, this is truly the first crisis of globalization. The crisis shows that financial upheaval can happen in any country, regardless of whether it is large or small, emerging or developed, and once happens, it can impart huge externalities on the rest of the world given the globalized nature of the world’s trade and payment systems. But more importantly, the crisis points to the weakness in the configuration of policies and financial regulation in the period leading up to the crisis that led to excessive risk-taking in the intermediation of global savings and investment across economies.
Independent forecasts would avoid having unreliable deficit figures before elections, only to “discover” the real state of accounts after the vote – such as has been the case in Portugal, France, Germany, and Hungary and most spectacularly in Hungary and Greece. Happily, there have been some improvements in some member states since the Pact was reformed in March 2005. If they had a similar role to the Congressional Budget Office in the US, the bodies would ensure a reliable and unbiased “reality check” in times of fiscal profligacy. At best, the advisory bodies would create a continuous national dialogue with warnings and recommendations to politicians that would boost transparency and put long-term fiscal goals at the heart of the debate – a reinforced version of the process that has helped Denmark, Finland and Sweden to improve fiscal soundness. The experience of central banks is that transparency and goals help form expectations and behaviour, enlisting the public in the struggle for macroeconomic soundness. After a while, the discipline that initially seemed practically unattainable becomes almost natural. 6  BIS Review 88/2006

These, among many other incidents, are growing evidence that climate change results in more frequent extreme weather events bringing destructive consequences along with them. While causing great upheaval, the pandemic and climate crisis provide an impetus for us to reset and reprioritise resources to re-steer our economies and financial systems to be more sustainable and inclusive. Islamic finance (IF) has large potential in this space. The concept of vicegerency on earth in the Quran, which asserts mankind’s responsibility to take on ownership over preservation of wealth and resources on earth, as well as the universal values of maqasid shariah resonates well with the principles of sustainability. As such, it is not surprising that Islamic financial institutions have stepped up to meet this challenge, evidenced through the Value-based Intermediation (VBI) initiative and practices by Islamic banks and takaful operators. Consequently, as sustainability becomes a global movement, IFIs are in a position and opportunity to take stewardship and influence financial developments, both within the financial groups, sector, and the wider community. Action-oriented leadership is key and to this, I would like to highlight three attributes that would complement the role of leaders assigned to this arduous task. Firstly, leaders must have the drive to cultivate a sustainability-focused culture within the organisation. For this, leaders must set that tone from the top and more importantly, walk the talk. A clear message that needs to resonate throughout the organisation is that the transition to sustainability is a transformational journey that will deliver long-term, sustainable outcomes.
As observed earlier, credit volume has gone from around 150% to around 170% of GDP in the past few years. This is the result of an average growth of credit of nearly 4%, while nominal GDP growth has averaged slightly above 1% over the same period. For this movement to be fully reversed, credit growth would have to significantly undershoot nominal GDP growth. The critical question is: could such a reversal happen smoothly, or in other words, is a soft landing possible? International experience (Figure 3) suggests this is a significant challenge. Credit-to-GDP ratios often fall in the wake of a severe crash, with pronounced falls in property prices and large increases in credit default rates; but this is exactly what we aim to avoid. While the diagnosis cannot be totally certain until history has run its course, the lessons from the analysis are, in my mind, crystal clear. The large increase in leverage, presumably of a  10  Reinhart, C. and Rogoff, K. (2009)  11  According to SNB survey data, about 20% of new mortgages are granted for investments with a loan-to-value ratio above 80%, and 25% of newly originated mortgages are granted to lever existing mortgages. Moreover, in the case of 40% of new mortgages the imputed costs would exceed one-third of gross income at a mortgage interest rate of 5%.

However, beyond the banking sector’s response, if society is to derive maximum benefit from digitalisation while minimising the costs of the transition, I believe that a comprehensive response is required from the public authorities. A response which surely transcends the financial sphere, to which the financial authorities can no doubt make an important contribution. That is why we are going to focus precisely on improving digital skills in the coming years using, for example, the Financial Education Plan launched jointly by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and 1/2  BIS central bankers' speeches  Digital Transformation, the CNMV and the Banco de España. Because we are fully aware that digital literacy is also part of our financial education. That is also why the Banco de España has long identified the economic and population differences in urban and rural areas (also in terms of access to general services and, more specifically, to banking services) as phenomena that warrant priority analytical attention. Such analysis must provide the basis for informed decision-making. Our most recent annual report, presented before Parliament last year, included a chapter dedicated to these issues. In the coming months we shall present the findings of several studies which examine in depth the phenomenon of financial exclusion in relation to digitalisation processes. Specifically, we are going to present a comparative study of access to cash in Spain and in other euro area countries, focusing particularly on the differences between rural and urban areas.
However, this favourable set of circumstances has co-existed until recently with numerous signs of over-abundant monetary and market liquidity: robust money and credit growth; high transaction volumes and small bid-ask spreads; low credit spreads and term premia; and reduced volatility across virtually every asset class. Those vulnerabilities have not gone unnoticed by central banks, as testified by past analyses in the ECB Financial Stability Review publication. Although market sentiment had proved extraordinarily resilient to events which in the past would have triggered sharp corrections (including the shift to less accommodative monetary policies in the major economies), the analyses identified the risk that the prolonged period of low rates might have created incentives for excessive risk taking and that a sudden tightening might leave, using Rajan’s words 6 , “a number of participants stranded on a limb of illiquidity”. In my view, all of this warns against excessive focus on a fixed, excessively short-term time horizon for inflation targets. The Eurosystem’s monetary policy strategy abstains from specifying a fixed time horizon for policy. Through its diversified approach, it also accords due importance to assessing medium- to long-term risks to price stability. It is therefore well equipped to deal with the perils of short-termism, the temptations of excessive fine-tuning and the risks of asymmetric responses during upswings and downturns.

The data gaps would complicate the assessment on key issues such as the sustainability of household indebtedness, whether we are creating the right type of jobs or whether our policies are providing long term or temporary employment. Second, there are significant gaps in terms of balance sheet data, especially for households and corporates. This deficiency in data complicates detection of vulnerabilities, build up of risks and propagation of shocks from one sector to another. I hope the discussion today would provide insights into dealing with some of these issues I earlier mentioned. At this conference, we will have the opportunity to examine areas which we can improve so that our statistics are credible, relevant and timely, would facilitate informed policy formulation and decision making by the authorities, and enable informed decision makings by economic agents such as investors, financial institutions and the general public at large. In the first three sessions today, our distinguished speakers and discussants will share insights and experiences in many areas; the adoption of statistical best practices in data management, ways to promote data sharing and communication of statistics, identification of statistical gaps and limitations faced by analysts or authorities in the usage of data. The session would also explore and provide possible resolution to challenges confronted by compilers and users of statistics.
Approximately 40 per cent of the credit institutions’ lending to the Swedish non-bank public consists of loans to Swedish households with their housing as collateral. If the household should for some reason experience difficulty in meeting interest and mortgage payments, this would affect the banks’ capacity to play their central role in the financial system. However, we believe that the probability of such a scenario is thankfully slight. I will return to this in a moment. The rise in house prices over the past ten years has been spectacular, seen from a historical perspective. Since 1996 house prices have increased by around 130 per cent (Figure 3), while the average price per square metre for a tenant-owned apartment has risen by around 250 per cent1. As house prices have soared, household indebtedness has also increased rapidly. This is not an exclusively Swedish phenomenon – throughout the developed world, with a few exceptions, the pattern is repeated – and compared with some countries developments in Sweden appear almost modest. One contributory factor to the relatively modest upturn in Sweden is that here we buy houses almost solely to live in. It is relatively common in many other countries, particularly Anglo-Saxon countries, that individuals buy housing to rent out. They buy extra housing in the same way one buys equity or other financial assets in the hope that they will increase in value.

Lars Nyberg: The Riksbank and the property market Speech by Mr Lars Nyberg, Deputy Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at a lunch meeting, arranged by Connect Skåne, Kristianstad, 6 November 2006. *  *  *  To begin with, I should like to thank you for the invitation to come here to Kristianstad to speak about developments in the property market. This is a subject that certainly engages people, not merely us economists but also people who are not usually interested in economics or what the Riksbank does. The main interest is probably due to a house purchase being the largest individual investment most of us make in our lives. The Riksbank’s interest in the property market is based on the two tasks we have been set by the Riksdag (the Swedish parliament). One is to ensure that inflation remains at two per cent a year, with a tolerated deviation interval of plus/minus one percentage point. The other task is to "promote a safe and efficient payment system”, as it says in the text of the law. We wish to avoid the type of catastrophe Sweden experienced during the bank crisis at the beginning of the 1990s and we usually call this safeguarding financial stability. As I shall discuss a little later, developments in the property market can be significant for both these tasks and this is the reason for our interest.
The growth projections for 2009 are not so different; actually the larger part of the correction was done after December 2008. In sum, since September a significant correction has been applied to the expected value for growth. In addition to a smaller forecast for future earnings, there has been an increase in related uncertainty (Figure 7). In the United States, in early 2008, the width of the distribution of growth projections for 2009 was 2 percentage points. In early 2009, the same width increased to 2.3 percentage points and, by May, with at least the data for the first quarter of the year available, the width was of 3.3 percentage points. In Chile, GDP projections taken from the Economic Expectations Survey depict a similar picture, that is, the level of uncertainty among those forecasting growth has been increasing, despite the fact that, as the year passes and new data are added, the projections should not only be better but also have a smaller degree of uncertainty. What began happening in September 2008 that changed so dramatically the economic scenario around the world, Chile included? As I said before, the simple observation of traditional transmission channels of an external crisis cannot explain the events. On one hand, financial conditions tightened significantly worldwide. The domestic financial system also suffered, although without any episodes that might compromise its solvency.

90  80  80  70  70  60  60  50  50  40  40  30  30  20  20  10  10  0  0  Jan.06  Jul.06  Jan.07  Jul.07  Jan.08  Jul.08  Jan.09  (*) Corresponds to volatility index VIX. Source: Bloomberg. BIS Review 76/2009  9  Figure 5 Projected world growth (annual change, percent) Subprime crisis erupts  4.0 3.5  2 1 0  2.5  -1  2.0 1.5  Lehmann, AIG, etc. 3  Lehmann, AIG, etc. 3.0  Bear Stearns goes bankrupt  4  Bear Sterns goes bankrupt  -2 07  May Sep. 08  May Sep. 09  -3  May  08  (a) Projections for 2008  Apr. Jul. Oct.  09  Apr. (b) Projections for 2009  Source: Consensus Forecasts. Figure 6 Projected growth for Chile (annual change, percent) 6  Subprime crisis erupts  5  Bear Sterns goes bankrupt  Bear Stearns goes bankrupt  6 5  Lehmann, AIG, etc. Lehmann, AIG, etc. 4  4  3  3  2 1  2  0  1  -1 07  May  Sep.  08  May  Sep.  (a) Growth projectoins for 2008  08  Apr. Jul. Oct.  09  Apr. (a) Growth projectoins for 2009  Source: Economic Expectations Survey, Central Bank of Chile.
I shall look first at the immediate and palliative responses, and then focus more on the longer term preventive measures, since the most effective solutions lie not in short-term fixes, but in building healthy domestic and international systems that minimize the possibility of future turmoil. Immediate and palliative responses are often necessary to cope with a shock to the system, particularly when the scale and nature of the shock are beyond expectations, even by the most pessimistic, as is the case with the financial turmoil of the past 18 months. These responses include, first, rescue packages mounted either independently by individual economies, if they have the necessary resources, such as Japan, or through the assistance of international financial institutions, such as the IMF, involving the provision of external financial resources. These packages are having some effect, and in some countries - Thailand, for example - have already helped stimulate recovery. It is vital that individual economies get themselves back on their feet if they are to move on and meet the challenges of and derive the benefits from continued global economic growth and development. The IMF and other international financial institutions have an important role to play in this, in mobilising international financial resources, from both the official and private sectors, to assist those who have stumbled and fallen, very much as victims of the internationalisation of financial markets.

There are two important ingredients: Our explicit inflation objective is 2 percent, and this is to be achieved over the long run. As recently as 2005, many FOMC participants preferred to describe a range of inflation outcomes as being consistent with our inflation mandate instead of stating it as a single number.3 Our current statement narrows our objective to 2 percent. It also sees this as an average that we aim to achieve over the long run, in recognition of the obvious realism that inflation may deviate from this goal from time to time owing to economic challenges, conflicts in achieving the dual mandate objectives and difficulties in the policy transmission channels. The statement also notes that maximum employment is largely determined by nonmonetary factors, which are difficult to measure and may change over time. Hence, we cannot and do not specify a fixed, time-invariant goal for it. But FOMC participants can provide their current assessments of goal variables related to the achievement of maximum employment. We do so using the central tendency of FOMC participants’ projections for the rate that unemployment would converge to in the absence of further shocks to the economy. As of January 2012, this rate is 5-1/4 to 6 percent. The statement also indicates that policy will seek to mitigate deviations in inflation and unemployment from these longer-run goals, and addresses the weighting of relevant costs and benefits when trying to close these gaps.