samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Indeed, estimates from both the International Monetary Fund and various investment banks suggest that the current value of Thai baht is consistent with the underlying fundamentals. To promote a deeper foreign exchange market and foster more balanced capital flows, the Bank of Thailand also launched a Capital Account Liberalization Master Plan, which entailed liberalization of Thai investment abroad and a streamline of foreign exchange regulations. There are also continuing efforts to enhance the private sectors’ adaptability and foreign exchange risk management. These initiatives should provide an extra layer of cushion to shield businesses against short-term market volatility. They are not, however, a substitute for structural improvement in productivity, which in the long run holds the key to success for the export industry. Given that the global environment is still subject to uncertainty, capital flows may continue to be volatile, and risks to financial stability warrant close monitoring, it is more important than ever that monetary policy strikes the right balance between providing support to sustain growth momentum while ensuring long-term financial stability. In the judgment of MPC, the current stance of monetary policy remains accommodative, with the real policy rate still in negative territory. As the balance of risks shifts between the need to support growth and the duty to safeguard financial and price stability, monetary policy stance will have to be adjusted accordingly. The Bank of Thailand stands ready to employ the right mix of policy tools under its purview to attain these goals.

The second key challenge is on the external front as the global environment remains uncertain. The lingering euro debt crisis and fragile US recovery continue to weigh on global growth. Policymakers are still grappling with deep-rooted long-term problems, and policy response has been met with mixed success. The recent improvement in market sentiments is a welcomed relief and some tail-risk events may have been averted. Nonetheless, a full recovery is not yet in sight, which adds to uncertainty. Given this backdrop, it is important that the Bank of Thailand remains alert, and retains sufficient policy space to act if and when necessary. The third key challenge is that of a recent surge of capital inflows, whose causes are both domestic and global in their origin. On the one hand, the relatively robust growth momentum in Thailand has been a “pull” factor, attracting portfolio inflows from those seeking to benefit from better economic prospects. At the same time, the low interest rate environment and subdued growth in major economies have helped “push” investors to search for higher risk-adjusted returns elsewhere, particularly in emerging economies including Thailand. The exchange rates of these recipient economies have appreciated as a result, leading to concerns in some quarters about the prospect of growth momentum. In Thailand, some have called on the MPC to lower the policy interest rate to ease the pressure on the baht. A few have gone further to question the suitability of inflation targeting regime for Thailand.
It includes the local and regional government projections, so it allows the fiscal policy analysis for the coming year to be completed. This Budget Plan is crucial, not only because these regional and local governments are now together responsible for more than 40% of overall general government expenditure, but also because their initiatives are essential for implementing fiscal consolidation. In fact, the regional governments will have to bear almost half of the reduction of the government deficit envisaged for 2015 and 2016 (which amounts to 3 pp of GDP in cumulative terms for general government overall), by moderating their deficits by 1 pp of GDP in 2015 and by 0.4 pp in 2016. In any event, it should be taken into account that the early submission of the Budget Plan for 2016 means that it does not include information on the essential outlines of the regional and local government budgets, which makes it difficult to evaluate. Allow me to underline the importance and also the complexity of preparing this document in an environment as decentralised as that existing in Spain. Its content should permit an analysis of the compatibility of the fiscal targets set and the budgets of the different levels of government; this entails significant challenges in terms of accounting and aggregation.

The decline, as a percentage of GDP, in government consumption, social transfers and the interest burden is particularly noteworthy. As a result of the interplay between these fiscal targets and the macroeconomic setting described above, the budgetary policy stance can be described as practically neutral, if the estimations of the change in the primary structural balance included in the 2016 Budget Plan are taken into consideration. Clearly, if any of the risks to growth I mentioned earlier were to materialise, or financing costs were to increase, it would be more difficult to meet the government deficit commitments, and this must continue to be the main aim of Spanish budgetary policy. The enhanced credibility of Spanish economic policy in recent years is a result of the achievements in the area of fiscal consolidation; to maintain this credibility we need to continue and complete the process of correcting the fiscal imbalances. Conclusions The Spanish economy has made visible progress in the correction of the external imbalance, the deleveraging of households and firms, the redressing of fiscal balances towards levels more compatible with the sustainability of public finances and the restructuring and consolidation of the banking sector. Unemployment has also begun to decrease significantly. The reforms undertaken within Spain, along with the headway made in furthering economic and monetary union and the ECB’s highly expansionary monetary policy, have proven key to restoring confidence. However, the legacy of the crisis, eight years after its onset, is still burdensome as shown by the high levels of unemployment and foreign debt.
Many have taken significant losses that have drained their capital; and, at the same time, the financial condition of many potential borrowers is worse than before the recession. 5 Were that situation to change and bank lending to accelerate, the Federal Reserve could drain the excess reserves from the banking system. We have a variety of tools. We could sell some of our long-term assets, thereby increasing longer-term interest rates. We now pay interest on reserves, and that rate could be increased to discourage bank lending. The size of our balance sheet, the composition of the balance sheet, and our short-term interest rate target are all instruments that we have available to reach our destination of full employment with stable prices. Fundamentally, decisions about shrinking our balance sheet – like decisions to tighten interest rates – should be conditional on economic conditions. Some analysts warn of rapid inflation arising from the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet; but these forecasts have not been borne out. In fact, despite the buildup in excess reserves, the inflation rate has been falling – and I expect this trend to continue over the near term. The experience in both Japan and the United States is that after a banking crisis, excess reserves have not been inflationary in the short term. Of course, once the banks have recapitalized and economic resources are more fully utilized, we would not want to have a large stock of excess reserves.

The economy is currently beginning to recover from what many are calling the Great Recession. While real GDP began to increase in the third quarter of last year, growth so far has been insufficient to improve conditions much in the labor markets. This unfortunate reality can be seen in Figure 1, which shows the employment-to-population ratio over the past 30 years with the shading representing recessions. The decline of about five percentage points in the employment-to-population ratio in this recession is striking, as many workers have either become unemployed or dropped out of the work force. While it is not uncommon for the employment-to-population ratio to decline in a recession, Figure 2 shows how dramatic the decline has been in this recession, compared with previous ones. 2 The loss of jobs has been particularly acute in construction and manufacturing. The severity of the job losses in these male-dominated industries is one of the reasons that males in some age groups have experienced such a significant decline in their employment-to-population ratio, as shown in Figure 3. For example, the March unemployment rates for males between the ages of 20 and 24 was 18.4 per cent, more than 5 percentage points higher than for females in the same age group.
The corresponding figures for Italy and Belgium are even more alarming. One way to reduce the dependency burden and increase the labour force is to try to get  4  BIS Review 51/2004  people that are unemployed, sick or in early retirement back to work. Historically, however, the most reliable way to steadily boost the labour force has been immigration, as has been the case in the United States, for example. Experiences and studies also show that people with the most advanced qualifications and best training most often have the greatest incentive to move, partly because the wage differential is bigger and partly because they find linguistic and cultural barriers easier to overcome. So to consolidate the welfare in the old countries, an increase inflow of highly qualified labour from the new member states would be desirable. The question is whether this is not correspondingly a disadvantage to the new member states. They have a somewhat different demographic situation, their dependency burden is lower today, but will later rise sharply and in several countries exceed Italy’s or Sweden's in 20-30 years. There is also a risk that it would be the best-qualified labour that would emigrate first. Meetings in a broader circle Having considered these prospects, I would like to provide an insight into how the enlargement changes the functioning of the EU. The Riksbank participates in a large number of EU committees.

The discussion has not dealt with entry to the EU, for which the key issues have already been settled, but the next step: the euro. Nine of the ten new member states have announced their intention to introduce the euro as quickly as possible. For some of them the changeover would be entirely undramatic and opportune. For example, Estonia and Lithuania have long had currency boards anchored to the euro, whereby the currency is only issued against a certain statutorily established quantity of euro - in practice a kind of “shadow euro”. The currency boards anchored to the euro are considered to have contributed to falling inflation and a stable investment climate. Their economies have been highly flexible in terms of wages and prices and their government finances have been in order, and they have thereby been able to manage situations where developments in the Baltic countries have deviated from those in the euro area. The fact that they now also have the opportunity to introduce the euro is expected to provide further advantages for trade and price comparisons. But for some of the other new member states a hurried transition to the euro could give rise to problems. To qualify for participation in the eurozone the countries must meet the convergence criteria which lay down various requirements for inflation, interest rates, the exchange rate and government finances. The Baltic States are very close to meeting these criteria today, or have already fulfilled them. But the largest new member states have bigger difficulties.
Securities such as ABS and RMBS, which have always been accepted by the Eurosystem, are now accepted by all other major central banks;  -  an extension of the list of eligible counterparties, in particular in the United States, where investment banks now have access to the Fed’s lending facility;  -  a greater degree of coordination between central banks: this not only includes joint statements aimed at reassuring the markets about the provision of liquidity when the need arises, but also the signing of swap agreements between central banks. This facility enables any European bank which needs US dollars to pursue its activities to secure this funding from the ECB or the SNB. 3)  Were central banks right to take these steps? The fast spillover of the US subprime crisis to other market segments, and subsequently to other countries through the seizing up of the commercial paper market and the major strains on money and interbank markets, called for rapid central bank intervention. This not only included providing liquidity to the market as a whole but also, in some countries, granting emergency liquidity assistance to systemic institutions. These interventions have raised a number of questions: did not central banks, by adapting their operational framework to fit the circumstances, increase moral hazard? Did they not unduly save institutions that did not deserve to be saved, in particular those which had taken  2  BIS Review 78/2008  excessive risks?

Did they comply with the traditional principles expounded by Bagehot many years ago, i.e. lend to temporarily illiquid but solvent financial institutions, lend at penalty rates against sound collateral, and provide liquidity to any institution satisfying the aforementioned solvency and collateral criteria? These essential questions are, however, mainly academic. Today, they take on different dimensions. Indeed, all financial crises cause a downward spiral in asset prices, which before long transforms a temporarily illiquid institution into an insolvent institution, making Bagehot’s initial distinction difficult to apply. This situation is exacerbated in our developed financial systems by the joint application of new accounting standards requiring fair value measurement for financial assets and prudential arrangements that may prove partly procyclical. In this context, central banks have the clear duty of preventing the market from seizing up, with incalculable consequences for other financial players and more generally for the real economy. However, it should be borne in mind that the central banks’ criteria for accepting assets as collateral for their refinancing operations are particularly restrictive and penalising, and comply with the traditional principles that I have just mentioned. In particular, the value of these securities must be at least equal to the amount lent and the accrued interest, after applying a haircut to take account of a possible decline in their market value during the repo. 4)  Why have the central banks responded differently as regards their monetary policy stance?
George Rae, an Aberdonian who became a prominent banker during the 19th century, feared that “men of wealth and position would gradually sell out” such that unlimited liability was reduced to “a husk without its kernel” (Rae (1885)). 7 The tide was gradually turning. In 1849, only the five original joint-stock banks set up by state charter – the Bank of England, the Bank of Scotland, the Royal Bank of Scotland, the Bank of Ireland and the British Linen Bank – were statutorily permitted to operate with limited liability. By 1869, roughly a third of British banks had limited their shareholders’ liability. 8 But it was the failure of the City of Glasgow Bank in 1878 that precipitated a decisive shift away from unlimited liability. 9 Such a large proportion – 86% – of its shareholders were wiped out that a public relief fund was set up to support them. As The Economist reported at the time, “the share lists of most of our banks exhibit a very large – almost an incredible – number of spinsters and widows” (Button et al (2015)). The Companies Act 1879 introduced a different liability concept – reserve liability – under which a shareholder was liable to meet a bank’s debt up to a fixed multiple of their equity investment in the case of its failure. This was analogous to the double-liability system adopted for US bank shareholders at the time.

FINANCE AND HOUSING IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE: A DEMAND-SIDE APPROACH Liviu Voinea, Deputy Governor, National Bank of Romania Finance and Housing Panel, Bruegel Annual Meetings 2017  In 2015, ESRB published the Report on residential real estate and financial stability in EU. In November 2016, a detailed assessment of countries with high vulnerabilities followed.  AT, BE, DK, FI, LU, NL, SE, UK were identified as having medium term vulnerabilities on the Residential Real Estate (RRE) market. No CEE country was singled out.  The ESRB methodology is based on the concept of “stretch”, applied to households, collateral, and banks.  Household stretch refers to vulnerabilities related to borrowers’ indebtedness and ability to repay debt, as well as their capacity to maintain their consumption pattern. Main indicators: household debt % GDP, financial assets to debt, debt service to income.  Collateral stretch refers to vulnerabilities relating to the property market. Main indicators: residential price index, house price to income.  Banking stretch refers to vulnerabilities related to direct losses by banks and due to their RRE exposures. Main indicators: loans for house purchases, loans’ growth rate and trend.  The report finds that the structural features of the RRE markets can be grouped into demand-side, supply-side and institutional factors. The demand side factors include: household income, credit availability and interest rates, home ownership rates, demographic factors. On the supply side: residential investment, housing construction and construction costs. Institutional factors: housing taxes and subsidies, mortgage contract features, foreclosure and insolvency procedures.
However, visions can come true: take CLS, the Continued Linked Settlement system, which will go into operation in the near future. Central banks and the private sector must direct their joint efforts at 8 researching the feasibility of a collateral pool, as does the Payments Risk Committee in New York . A third challenge relates to in-house clearing and settlement mechanisms at global custodians. This commercial function has undergone a remarkable process of concentration in the last few years. Some of these service providers have become very significant for the stability of the system as we have seen after September 11 of last year. Independent of specific events the question arises whether regulatory control has kept up with this development everywhere. From an organisational point of view, it is problematic that custody activities lie in a grey area between banking supervision and system oversight. In some countries - such as Switzerland - where the tasks deriving from banking supervision and system oversight are performed by separate authorities, the regulatory framework risks being incomplete or at least suboptimal unless the two authorities succeed in establishing a strong cooperation link. This aspect seems all the more important as global custodians tend to become direct competitors to traditional financial market infrastructures. In view of these challenges, there is good reason to critically reassess rules and regulations related to securities clearing and settlement as well as to the way oversight responsibilities are implemented in practice. A predominantly national approach does not serve market needs any longer.

Indeed, global custodians not only rely on a worldwide network of sub-custodians offering easy access to all markets, but they also develop in-house clearing and settlement procedures with very competitive costs. Without any doubt, financial market infrastructures are facing great challenges in terms of higher technical requirements, the necessity to achieve efficiency gains, and higher competitive stakes. I believe that market forces - rather than political pressure - should drive the consolidation process. The 4  4  The Giovannini Group (2001): Cross-Border Clearing and Settlement Arrangements in the European Union, Brussels. BIS Review 37/2002  many changes taking place also challenge oversight authorities. It is their task to analyse the systemic implications of what goes on particularly at the cross-border level, and to make sure that these changes will enhance, and not endanger, the soundness of the financial system. Let me address these issues in the concluding part. Implications for oversight authorities I begin by quoting Alexandre Lamfalussy, Chairman of the Committee of the Wise Men, which, more 5 than a year ago, published the famous report on securities regulation within the EU . Lamfalussy was 6 very clear when he asserted that “the current [securities] regulatory system is not working” . Indeed, unclear and sometimes even contradictory regulations or inconsistent implementation of regulations among countries impair the creation of a single capital market within the European Union.
There is plenty to work on and think about. Finally, let me take up one other question that Stan has posed: Do I think you need to be an economist to be the President at the New York Fed? I don’t think so. If you look at the past five Presidents – Volcker, Corrigan, McDonough, Geithner, and myself, some have been economists, some haven’t. Yet I think all my predecessors have been very effective. I think there are other attributes that are more important than being an economist: 1) An analytical orientation; 2) the ability to synthesize a broad range of material so as to understand the interactions of markets, financial institutions, and regulatory and macroeconomic policy; 3) open-mindedness and pragmatism – the world is complicated and ever changing; and 4) the ability to lead – that means identifying the key issues and motivating people to do their best work in order to develop new insights and approaches. Having an economics background probably helps, especially on the analytics side, but, in my view, is by no means necessary and certainly not sufficient. One point on which I am certain is that regardless of the background of the President, having a very strong research group is essential. Thanks for your kind attention. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches

So far we have only succeeded in the first phase. There are still two more phases in the fight against inflation: In the second phase, inflation needs to fall to below 10% in the second half of this year, in line with our forecast. And then, in the third phase, inflation needs to continue to fall to levels close to 2% next year, which will be the best news for the economy. More than before, the new Bank Board is monitoring and discussing money flows in the economy, and above all loans to households, firms and the government. We must look at money. We conduct monetary policy. The term is derived from the word "money", which we label as M1 and define as the quantity of money in the economy. We have added elements of monetarism to New Keynesian economics, the predominant school of thought at the CNB so far. For illustration, broad money (M3) has risen by 31% since January 2020 (pre-Covid). The price level has increased by 33% in the same period. In order to significantly slow inflation, money growth must also be slowed substantially. Our DSGE model created according to the New Keynesian theory ends with the threemonth PRIBOR interest rate (Michl, 2019b). On top of that, in our considerations, the Bank Board must discuss the evolution of longer client interest rates and take into account how the interest rate transmission mechanism works and how changes in shortterm rates will affect long-term rates.