samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
However, the notion that the economy will grow more swiftly remains a forecast rather than a reality at this point. As is always the case, there is substantial uncertainty surrounding this forecast. Moreover, there is always the possibility of some unforeseen shock. Thus, we will continue to monitor U.S. and global economic conditions very carefully and will adjust our views on the likely path for growth, inflation and the unemployment rate accordingly. Regional economic conditions Let me turn now to the regional economy. A year has passed since Superstorm Sandy devastated the tri-state region. And even today, many of the hardest-hit places are still struggling to recover and rebuild from the storm. In fact, reminders of the storm’s damage remain visible in neighborhoods across Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, as well as along the coasts of Long Island and New Jersey. On a more encouraging note, however, the broader regional economy has proven to be remarkably resilient. After a brief dip following the storm, the regional economy quickly rebounded and has continued to add jobs at a reasonably good pace. Moreover, the region’s housing markets have continued to show steady improvement throughout the year. To help monitor the performance of the regional economy more generally, the New York Fed produces economic activity indexes for New York State, New York City and New Jersey. Based on these measures, New York City’s economy has continued to grow strongly throughout the year, and both New York State and New Jersey have seen some pickup in growth in recent months.

The situation was especially dire in the foreign exchange swap markets, and an acute global dollar shortage became a fact. Banks around the world had severe difficulties refinancing their foreign assets. It was against this backdrop that the Icelandic banks faced illiquidity. A number of other banks would probably have met the same fate if governments all over the globe had not made broad-based rescue efforts. The future will probably reveal just how close the global financial system was to complete collapse during those weeks. But the scope of governmental measures is unprecedented. They involved a dramatic increase in domestic liquidity facilities from central banks; new currency swap agreements between the US Federal Reserve Bank and other central banks, and expansion of existing swap agreements; direct lending to banks from various countries’ foreign exchange reserves; expanded deposit insurance schemes; government guarantees of deposits and wholesale financing; and capital injections. BIS Review 136/2009  1  Rescue efforts were also carried out in Iceland in connection with the banks’ failure. They were somewhat different in nature, however, as the Icelandic authorities did not, on their own, have the resources to rescue the banks, and international support was not forthcoming, even though it could be argued that the three banks concerned were systemically important because of the possibility of a domino effect throughout Northern Europe in the event of their collapse.
Credit registry established in 1998 that provides a loan–by-loan data appears to be very useful tool for financial stability and monetary policy purposes. The recent crisis has emphasized that despite the fact that there is a vast data on credit available, still more granular, frequent and flexible credit data is needed. Though this is mainly for the purpose of credit risk assessment and financial stability issues, to which I will refer later, the availability of loan-by-loan data and their characteristics allows for more profound monetary policy research. In particular, the individual loan-by-loan data can be utilized for instance, for exploring the risk-taking monetary policy channel, which has been on the margin of the research. Further, data from the credit registry allowed us to investigate where are the credit flows channeled – to what extent it supports the SME segment, which is a key segment in reviving the growth and boosting employment, to what extent it is channeled to non-tradable sector creating possible bubbles down the road. Of course, the banking system is only one sequence of the monetary policy transmission mechanism. The corporates and households are the other very important part, whose behavior affects the outcome of the undertaken monetary policy measures. As a first line of policymaking, we surely still rely on stylized macro models, where we strive to estimate or calibrate the average behavior of the economy, or the behavior of representative agents. Of course, the reality can be much more different and heterogeneity much more pronounced than envisaged.

Thomas Jordan: Does the Swiss National Bank need equity? Summary of a speech by Mr Thomas Jordan, Vice-Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, to the Statistisch-Volkswirtschaftliche Gesellschaft, Basel, 28 September 2011. *  *  *  The complete speech can be found in German on the Swiss National Bank’s website (www.snb.ch). The Swiss National Bank (SNB) had to report heavy losses for 2010 and the first half of 2011 due to the strength of the Swiss franc – or, more precisely, due to valuation changes on its foreign currency reserves. Consequently, it suffered a substantial reduction in its equity. Understandably in such a situation, concerns began to be voiced in public. Questions often posed in this context include: Might the SNB lose its capacity to act as a result of a negative equity level? And, if its equity were negative, would the SNB have to be recapitalised, or might it even have to go into administration? The short answer to these questions is “No”, because the SNB cannot be compared with commercial banks or other private enterprises. For one thing, a central bank cannot become illiquid. This means that a central bank’s capacity to act is not constrained if its equity turns negative. Moreover, unlike other enterprises, it is not forced to implement recovery measures or go into administration. For another, central banks enjoy a funding advantage over private companies, owing to their banknote-issuing privilege. Moreover, they generate surplus income over the long term.
Meanwhile, in Europe, which is heavily dependent on Russia for energy, rising prices of oil and natural gas are the biggest concern. And in the Middle East, there are fears of a wheat shortage, given the region's reliance on wheat from Russia and Ukraine. The one bright spot regarding inflation is that longer-run inflation expectations remain well anchored. This anchoring is seen in both market-based measures of expected inflation and in surveys of households and economists. For example, the New York Fed's Survey of Consumer Expectations has fielded special survey questions on fiveyear-ahead inflation expectations since 2019, and these expectations have hardly budged since the start of the pandemic.2 In addition, the pass-through of inflation surprises to revisions in three-year-ahead inflation expectations is about half as large as it was before 2020. 3 That is, medium-term inflation expectations in this survey are less responsive to inflation shocks than they were before the pandemic. Economic Outlook Faced with rising inflation but otherwise strong economies, the Federal Reserve and other central banks have been moving away from the extraordinarily accommodative stances they took in early 2020. Last year, many emerging market central banks raised their policy rates. In December, the Bank of England followed suit, followed by the Bank of Canada this March. Closer to home, the FOMC decided a little over two weeks ago to raise the target range for the federal funds rate by a quarter of a percentage point.

Conversely, if we delay the shift until it is too late, this would have implications on future market efficiency and financial stability at the industry-level, and higher risks at the individual-firm level. 24 To this end, MAS will work closely with the industry to prepare ourselves early, and to prepare ourselves well for this transition. If we get this right, we will reap the benefits of deeper, more transparent and efficient SGD interest rate markets in the new SORA-centered interest rate landscape. 25 Thank you, and I look forward to a fruitful discussion today. 1 The Association of Banks in Singapore. 2 This refers to the SGD Singapore Interbank Offered Rates (SIBOR) and the SGD Swap Offer Rate (SOR). 3 This refers to the USD Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR), Sterling Overnight Index Average (SONIA),  Euro Short-Term Rates (ESTER), Swiss Average Rate Overnight (SARON), and Tokyo Overnight Average Rate (TONA). 4 “Further statement from the RFRWG on the impact of Coronavirus on the timeline for firms’ LIBOR transition  plans”, April 2020. 5 “ARRC recommended best practices for completing the transition from LIBOR”, 19 August 2020. 6 “SIBOR Reform and the Future Landscape for SGD Interest Rate Benchmarks”, 29 July 2020. 7 The SORA Index is a daily data series representing the returns from earning compounded interest each day at  the daily SORA rate. 8 This includes retail, commercial and syndicated loans, bonds, floating rate notes and other types of securities.
And last, but not least, the leverage ratio could also play an additional role in mitigating bank’s and supervisor’s model risk and measurement error, providing a backstop to riskbased capital measures. Indeed, it could also play a role by itself by constraining leverage in the banking system. But a really crucial challenge is good calibration. Furthermore, there are difficult questions to be addressed regarding impact assessments: What is the meaning of “significant” when referring to the increase of the capital requirements? What is the best approach to capture outlier banks which are making savings through the use of aggressive modelling techniques? Is the impact going to be measured by categories of banks with similar profiles and business models? In this sense, in order to ensure that the analysis is based on the best quality data, the engagement of the industry is crucial, both through sharing its views by responding to consultation processes, and also by contributing with the best quality data to the quantitative impact study being conducted by the Basel Committee. To conclude, it is essential that the final design of the whole framework is consistent and that any potential interactions between different measures are properly evaluated. To conclude, I will say that it will be possible to design a framework that keeps the incentives for sound risk management and that eliminates unwarranted differences in risk weighted assets among banks, while avoiding any significant increase in the capital requirements for the global banking system. Thank you very much for your attention.

If not addressed, this pro-cyclicality could erode the solvency cushions that banks should be holding against the effects of economic downturns. Addressing this is one of the most important remaining challenges of Basel II and is particularly associated with the implementation of the more sophisticated approaches of the new capital framework. Despite reassuring noises from the Basel Committee, this is not going to be an easy problem to address. Few people, and definitely not banking supervisors, can foresee the peaks and troughs of economic cycles. But our inability to perfectly foretell the future should not be a pretext for inaction. An effective supervisory review process will be critical to create a counter-weight to the cyclical tendencies of the new capital framework, in order to prevent increased incidences of failures and financial instability. Managers of banks and bank directors have an even more important role to play. They have the primary responsibility for identifying and assessing various threats to solvency of their own bank, including the risks that are partially covered or not covered at all under Pillar 1 of the framework. They also need to be cognizant of the cyclicality arising from their quantitative tools and should have sufficient compensatory mechanisms against the cyclicality of regulatory capital requirements. These issues are referred to in Pillar 2 of Basel II. This is what we refer to as “Supervisory CAR”, to address risks not covered or not fully covered by the formulae in Pillar 1.
In the case of the euro area, characterised by a high degree of financial integration, ignoring this risk exposed us to major disruptions. This analysis echoes Maurice Obstfeld’s keynote address and I believe that our response to these risks is fully in line with his recommendations. Indeed, we have learned a great deal from the past five years and have made progress at an unprecedented pace. EMU is now firmly on the road to a banking union. To a large extent, this is the very institutional mechanism that was lacking in the first place. Our OMTs have limited the scale of financial fragmentation and have greatly reduced the risk that increasing spreads might end in sovereign defaults. But the euro area needs an institutional framework capable of preventing the recurrence of such crises, essentially by decoupling financial risk from sovereign risk. The banking union thus consists of three major pillars: a Single Supervisory Mechanism, a supranational resolution mechanism, and a unified system of deposit insurance. For now, the first pillar of the banking union is the most advanced, but the other two are also in the pipeline and need to be pursued. Let me now conclude. Euro area macroeconomic governance is now stronger than it was before the outbreak of the crisis since it has been put on a sounder institutional footing. Our institutional architecture is about to be completed, which will help to prevent the resurgence of a new sovereign debt crisis.

It is better to keep all options open – you never know what window of opportunity may arise at some point in time. After all, an emerging society – with niches still to be exploited and transformations to be implemented – provides more opportunities both for entrepreneurs and for top professionals when compared to a more developed society, which has already settled on a stable structure. It is precisely these opportunities, along with all guarantees implied by EU and NATO membership that make Romania an interesting place to work and live in, even sometime it may not appear to be so. I guess that the things you hear about Romania most often, covered in everyday news, sometimes show discouraging situations, yet many things are moving in the right direction. To better understand this, it helps to think of the Romanian society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Ion Luca Caragiale, who lived those times, tells us in his brilliant literary work that corruption, lack of meritocracy and a general disregard for rules were part of everyday life. Taking a step back from day-to-day reality (influenced by its mostly negative coverage in the media) and putting things into perspective, one realises that those times represented in fact one of the most successful periods in our country’s development. I believe that things are pretty much the same nowadays.
Emphasis on communication has also been boosted by central bankers becoming increasingly aware that effective communication facilitates the transmission of monetary policy decisions to the economy, thereby making their jobs easier. Nonetheless, the Eurosystem’s strategy has some differences when compared with the inflation targeting strategies. Let me focus my comments in this respect on two particular issues: the relevant horizon for policy and the role of macroeconomic forecasts in policymaking and in communication. The relevant horizon for policy Inflation targeting is often described as a framework where monetary policy responds to deviations between a conditional inflation forecast at a specific time horizon, typically of around two years, and the inflation objective. From a welfare perspective, however, focus on an ex-ante fixed horizon is problematic for a number of reasons. In particular, economic theory suggests that the relevant horizon for monetary policy depends in a significant way on the size and nature of shocks affecting the economy, as well as on the prevailing circumstances (i.e. the initial state of the economy). Moreover, taken at face value, this approach neglects the implications of policy for price stability at longer horizons. BIS Review 132/2007  3  In connection with this last point, a number of researchers (and notably research at the BIS 5 ) have been arguing quite convincingly that that short-term inflation control is not enough to prevent the emergence of imbalances, which may lead later on to costly episodes of macroeconomic instability.

Bank Negara Malaysia has so far issued eight financial advisers licences which employ a total of 57 financial advisers’ representatives. I encourage you to follow their footsteps and embark on a new chapter in your professional careers, to make the most of the opportunities that you will have to create a lasting impact in promoting sound financial planning among Malaysians. I trust that the distinguished speakers will share their valuable insights and experiences to provide you better clarity on the opportunities as financial advisers. On that note ladies and gentlemen, I wish you a successful and productive seminar. We look forward to your contribution to the further growth and development of the financial services industry. Thank you. BIS Review 136/2008  3
Early in my tenure I visited Brooklyn P-TECH and met with a dedicated and focused group of young students learning IT skills for middle-skill jobs. This partnership between IBM Corporation, the New York City Department of Education, the City University of New York, and the NYC College of Technology, provides an instructive model. It takes kids from high school through an associate’s degree with corporate support and real-life experiences. And it’s working. Their first class of 91 students entered the program in September 2011 and 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  almost all have since earned their high school diplomas and about half have earned an associate’s degree in a STEM field. IBM has hired 23 graduates and continues to offer paid summer internships.1 In a few weeks, I will be visiting Per Scholas, a tuition-free workforce training program in the Bronx and in other parts of the country. It seeks to break the cycle of poverty by providing free technology career education, training, placement, and advancement services to people in underserved communities. Approximately 90% of Per Scholas trainees are people of color, with the large majority representing Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino individuals -- groups with historically low representation in IT and the financial services industry. This workforce program is unique in that it seeks to re-train adult workers for successful careers as technology professionals and works with employers in crafting unique training programs for their business.

In 2017, Per Scholas NY enrolled 502 students and 406 graduated, of which a substantial majority reported being placed with an employer with an average starting wage of more than $ an hour.2 Earlier this year, the New York Fed partnered with Per Scholas NY to support our own Diversity & Inclusion efforts focused on career paths in IT, cybersecurity, and data science in the financial services industry. I am proud to say that the New York Fed was recognized by Per Scholas as a Major Partner in its recent 2018 annual update report. I mention these two examples as they reflect the theme of today’s event and the book— workforce development is about investing in work, workers and systems leading to greater employment opportunities for all. Employer Engagement by Community Colleges in New York State Another important issue is the role of employer engagement with community colleges. By working directly with local employers, community colleges can more effectively prepare students for available jobs, and at the same time, help employers find and retain workers with the skills they need. In an effort to better understand the level and types of employer engagement activities taking place in our region, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently conducted a survey of all of the community colleges in New York State. Next Wednesday, we will be releasing a report that details our findings. Our report does show that employer engagement by community colleges in New York State has become the norm.
It is therefore reasonable to calculate the alternative forecasts for inflation and the real economy on the basis of expected deviations from the main scenario. The effects of expected deviations are somewhat greater than the effects of unexpected deviations. Figures 2.13–2.15 in the Monetary Policy Report are calculated using unexpected deviations. 6  The effects of anticipated and unanticipated deviations are calculated using the methods presented in Laséen and Svensson (2009) and Leeper and Zha (2003), respectively. BIS Review 22/2010  5  Figure 3 The effects of expected and unexpected deviations from the repo rate path of 0.25 percentage points over four quarters.

Repo rate  0,5  1-quarter inflation  0,5  0,5  0,0  0,0  0,0  0,0  -0,5  -0,5  -0,5  -0,5  0  4  8  12  16  0  20  Real repo rate  4  8  12  0,5  16  20  Real exchange rate  0,5  0,5  1,5  0,0  0,0  1,0  1,0  -0,5  -0,5  0,5  0,5  -1,0  -1,0  0,0  0,0  0  4  8  12  16  20  0  4  8  4-quarter inflation  12  1,5  16  20  GDP  0.5  0.5  0.4  0.0  0.0  0.2  0.2  -0.5  -0.5  0.0  0.0  0  4  8  12  16  20  Hours worked  0.4  0  4  8  12  0.4  16  20  0.4  Anticipated 0.2  Unanticipated  0.2  Note. All x-axes refer to quarters. 0.0  0.0 0  4  8  12  16  20  0.35 per cent of an estimated potential employment rate of, conservatively, 93 per cent of a labour force of approximately five million is equivalent to over 16 000 jobs. Calculating on the basis of 93 per cent thus entails assuming a rather high figure for long-term unemployment of 7 percent.