samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
But it is really for the governments to see whether these assumptions remain likely. Any debt restructuring is always very costly in terms of confidence. It is really something that you want to only use as a last resort instrument and do so in the friendliest possible way with lenders. We could wonder whether  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  the repayment schedule is appropriate, but this is really a matter for negotiations between the lenders and the borrowers. Given that debt levels are above 170 per cent GDP, isn’t debt restructuring inevitable? C.N. It very much depends on the assumptions on Greek growth in the future, which in turn will be dependent on the pace of Greek reforms and the growth in the euro area as a whole. Is it even possible for the ECB to decide on further monetary policy easing with a possible bond purchase programme just a few days before the Greek election? C.N. Nothing has been decided yet at the ECB but we will have to take these uncertainties into account. But the Greek bond market is extremely small and so the question maybe difficult in theory but in practice it doesn’t really apply. Just to make it clear, the negotiations with Greece won’t block the ECB, will they? C.N. No, they won’t. The problem of Greece is rather minor compared to the question of whether or not and when to step in with action on further market segments in our unconventional monetary policy.

It is the most significant step since towards a united Europe and is exactly in the spirit of how the founding fathers of Europe wanted the EU to evolve since the introduction of the euro. The role of the Governor of the BdF like that of the President of the Bundesbank will increasingly be that of an important player on the European field, and much less at the national level. In Germany, we tend to believe that the role of national central banks is shrinking. C.N. At the Banque de France, some of my colleagues thought that one day the ECB could replace us. I told them that it would not happen as we are in a federal system with a relatively small centre. Within the Governing Council we take common decisions but most of the work is done by the national central banks. But from now on we will have to work differently, for example, instead of looking for the best payment system for France, we must look for the best payment system for the euro area as a whole. In this respect, our best partner has mostly been the Bundesbank. But the relationship seems to have become more distant? BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  C.N. No, certainly not. The Bundesbank remains our number one partner. We may start with different approaches on some of the issues in the Governing Council but in the vast majority of cases we have the same responses.
François Villeroy de Galhau: The role of monetary policy Speech by Mr François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Bank of France, at the Global Interdependence Center – Central Banking Series “Inflation expectations, implications and policy response in a new paradigm for commodities”, Session I “Central bankers outlook”, Paris, 21 March 2016. *  *  *  Since the financial crisis, central banks have been tested on several levels: their ability to keep the transmission channels of monetary policy active; their ability to deliver on price stability; their ability to support the economy. Central banks in many jurisdictions have done a lot to reach their objectives. And their role has largely been hailed as positive in exiting the crisis. But faced with inflation remaining below the target, commodity markets going persistently through bear territory and growth momentum losing steam, central banks’ action is now called into question: how effective is monetary policy and how effective can it be in the future? Aren’t central banks running out of ammo? Monetary policy faces challenges, that is true; but these challenges can be mitigated. Central banks have proven that they were ready to do their part; but my conviction is that they cannot remain the only game in town. Let me focus my remarks today on the case of the euro area. Jeffrey [Lacker, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond] will certainly give you more insight into the US situation.

This is to ensure that existing and future talent is fully utilised, and skill-related underemployment is kept at bay. The question is then how can Malaysia mould its social protection system to better protect and empower its workers and citizens? We can consider this through the lens of the 4Cs: Coverage, Consolidation, Conditionalities, and Comprehensiveness. On coverage, social protection must be deepened and extended towards the growing segments of informal and self-employed workers. Meanwhile, currently fragmented and overlapping programmes should be consolidated and rationalised, so as to channel funds to meet new needs of society, for instance better retirement aid. We can also impose conditionalities for various programmes to boost incentives and improve targeting capacity. Finally, there is a need for comprehensive active labour market policies to cater to the looming possibility of labour re-deployment under the fourth industrial revolution. Maintaining planetary health for sustainable economic growth This brings me to our third point. In our quest to transition to a high-income economy, we must do so without losing sight of the goal of prospering, thriving and living sustainably. Since last year, we have had to deal with a negative global shock in the form of Covid-19. The pandemic has taken a heavy health and economic toll, with profound effects on poverty. At the same time, displacement and disruptions due to climate-related events such as storms, flooding and droughts have persisted and intensified.
Since mid-2007 decisions have become more difficult and the task more stressful, but the overriding objective of achieving the CPI inflation target and maintaining confidence in this target has remained the right guide for policy. A significant part of an MPC member’s work is explaining policy to various audiences, or accompanying the Banks’ regional Agents on visits and discussions with business and other contacts. I am sure that the work of the Bank’s twelve Agents based around the UK, and the willingness of MPC members to be seen out and about, both contribute to the credibility of the MPC. They also serve the valuable purpose of giving us high-quality and up-to-date feedback on business trends. While these visits enable business audiences to question and debate policy, perhaps another aspect of accountability has been a little less satisfactory. Once a quarter, several members of the MPC accompany the Governor to an appearance before the Treasury Committee. The purpose of the sessions is to hold us to account for our individual votes. However, despite some recent improvement, it remains the case that the vast majority of questions from the MPs tend to be directed at the Governor. My view is that it would be better in future to ensure that each MPC member attending, including the external members, has the opportunity to explain their recent votes and to comment on the key policy issues. As I leave the MPC, the challenges remain considerable.

This reflected the intuition that the downward pressure on firms’ margins from higher oil or import prices would tend to result in downward pressure on real wages as firms sought to restore margins. The NAIRU captures the shift in unemployment required for workers to accept this real wage adjustment. These alterations in the main estimates of the output gap were pragmatic responses by the MPC to changes taking place in the economy. It is not appropriate to ask which of these proved in some sense “better” given that the different measures were reflecting the MPC’s judgements about different economic events. In any case, the sequence of oil price fluctuations and the depreciation of sterling in 2007–08 have had short-term impacts on inflation which have tended to make it more difficult to judge the trend underlying this greater volatility. However, earlier in the MPC’s life there is some indication that the committee tended to overestimate inflationary pressure. Up to the end of 2003, the MPC produced fan charts around projections for RPIX inflation. During this period of relative inflation stability, those projections were broadly clustered around the outturns, and indeed inflation was generally quite close to target. However, outturns of RPIX, excluding the (misleadingly-named) housing depreciation component of the index, would have tend to be below the projections (Chart 1 shows the opening up of the gap between RPIX and RPI excluding housing costs). The MPC does not pretend to any ability to project house prices, although there are some broad assumptions underlying the central projection.
When the national insurance scheme was introduced in 1967, a fund was established to provide for an expected reduction in private saving. However, pensions were still included in the central government budget at an early stage and financed by current tax revenues. Transfers to the National Insurance Fund were soon discontinued. Nevertheless, confidence in the pension system has actually remained intact, reflected in a low level of household saving, primarily through home investment. Perhaps there is some element of miscalculation here. A fall in value may occur if many homeowners free up housing capital to cushion old age. It was only when transfers to the Petroleum Fund were introduced in 1996 that funds were accumulated that could also be used to cover future pension payments. The Fund, which has later changed its name to the Government Pension Fund – Global, has grown to well over NOK 2000 billion. Its rapid growth was neither expected nor planned and was due to the abrupt improvement in government finances during the economic upturn in the 1990s. After the turn of the millennium, the rise in oil prices also provided a boost. The size of the Fund is now equivalent to approximately one year’s GDP and may double in the next five to ten years. Total public expenditure is equivalent to less than half of total GDP.

Few knew who was exposed to losses, and banks, funds and financial establishments started to question counterparties’ financial situation, and held on to their money. This resulted in a surge in banks’ premia on short-term interbank rates. Moreover, banks had to bring back on their books loans from companies they had established, which further reduced their capacity and willingness to provide new loans. Several large foreign banks have received capital infusions from sovereign-wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia to bolster their financial strength. What began as isolated losses in a small segment of the US home mortgage market led to a confidence crisis, which spread to money and credit markets in many countries in autumn 2007. In the US, there is a risk that the losses will increase in other segments of the property market and on ordinary consumer and business credit. Many of the new financial instruments which were forged to diversify risk have proved to be non-viable. It is now difficult for many companies to raise new capital or procure long-term funding. There are also signs that prices and activity in property markets have reversed and are falling in many European countries. Around the turn of the year, doubts were raised as to the financial strength of some US banks. The new year was ushered in amid fears of a setback in the US and a sharp decline in global equity prices.
Some of the instruments (balance sheet policies) have even blurred the clear lines between the fiscal and monetary policy, and challenged the notion of central bank independence. Given the importance of the good statistics on monetary policy decision making, what does this new financial landscape imply for statistics? The crises usually tend to provide an impetus for reshaping of our thinking about the statistical concepts/frameworks of proper policymaking. Thus, the Great Depression shifted the focus to development of national accounts, growth of the euro-dollar markets during 1960 s and 1970s to the development of international banking statistics, and Asian financial crisis shifted the focus to strong linkages between the financial and external stability being conducive to development of data standards initiatives (GDDS, SDDS, and ROSCs). The emergence of the latest crises again  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  put the spotlight on the financial sector, revealing the devastating impact of lax regulation of the financial sector in the more advanced economies on the global economy and once again accentuated the need for tighter surveillance of financial stability. The cross-border linkages, internationalization and integration of the financial markets and institutions were underestimated, and so were their global economic consequences. This time it was the international dimension of the financial system that was emphasized and very importantly, the macro-financial linkages. Both of them do have major implications for the production of statistics and for the regular set of required data, needed for making informative decisions in monetary policy and in the micro and macro prudential area.

It is because the main objective of the monetary policy is to maintain price stability in the economy, which is considered to be the main prerequisite for acceleration of the economic activity and for accomplishing sustainable economic growth. Hence, the adequate measurement of inflation, which is an issue that has been interesting for the central banks for years, and which is even more important when inflation rates are low, is so challenging and crucial for the central banks, i.e. for the monetary policy decisions. Non-expert public listens to the information about the inflation indicators. It neither wants nor it is able to go into the numerous statistical problems when measuring inflation. However, it senses the possible discrepancies between the officially announced indicators and the real ones since that public confronts its nominal and real purchasing power on a daily basis. On the basis of that confrontation and daily market-based check-up of the official statistical information, confidence or lack of confidence in the authorized institutions is created, influencing positively or negatively the behavior of all market participants. The authorized institutions are responsible for making precise the differences between the nominal and the real aggregates, for selection of more precise statistical methods and techniques for measuring inflation, simultaneously as transparent and as understandable as possible for all market participants.
For instance, it is very high among people who do not have upper-secondary school approved grades, as well as among immigrants and young people. These groups comprise a relatively large share of job-seekers. Structural measures to enable these groups to gain a foothold in the labour market are a better recipe than expansionary monetary policy for bringing down unemployment. A further indication that long-run labour market developments are governed by factors other than monetary policy is that unemployment has varied substantially between the countries in the euro area, despite their common monetary policy. Trying to place the responsibility for employment with monetary policy and the central bank is thus, in my opinion, not very meaningful. It could even be counter-productive as the focus is moved from the places where the problems really can be dealt with – the labour market and the political sphere – to a place where they cannot. Sometimes one almost gets the impression that the actual purpose of trying to transfer responsibility for employment to the central bank is to avoid having to take the fairly unpleasant decisions that might be needed to create good conditions for employment. Of course, it would be much easier if the employment problem merely concerned cutting the policy rate to a low level and keeping it there. But it is not that simple.13 Has monetary policy been unclear? Let me now move on to the third type of criticism. It claims that monetary policy has been unclear and difficult to comprehend, particularly in recent years.

The third type of criticism is that monetary policy has recently been unclear and difficult to understand. Inflation targeting’s most important contribution But before I move on to the different types of criticism, I would like to dwell a little longer on the situation twenty years ago. When analysing the inflation-targeting regime, I believe that it is important to remind oneself of the situation when it was introduced. Why was there such strong support for defending the krona, even though it meant high interest rates in the middle of a recession? What were the problems policymakers were so anxious to resolve? As I have already mentioned, the recession in the early 1990s can be regarded as a setback following an excessive credit expansion, similar to the situation in many European countries today. The regulation of the Swedish credit market was phased out in the mid-1980s. Combined with a tax system that encouraged borrowing and an overly expansionary stabilisation policy, this contributed to creating a property market bubble. When the bubble burst in the early 1990s, it led to a banking crisis. As this coincided with an international economic downswing, the recession in Sweden was particularly severe. But there was also a deeper and more fundamental problem in the Swedish economy at that time. Sweden had been caught up in what might be termed a devaluation cycle since the early 1970s. Fixing the exchange rate is equal, at least in theory, to setting a target for domestic inflation.
It turned out to be "everybody's and nobody's" but de facto it belonged to those with the largest political power. In line with those principles of the system, credit plans directed the reserve money issuance, rather than it to be determined by economic fundamentals: economic growth, internal and external balances, supply and demand, real market values. Printing of money was also dictated by the debtors, which did not repay the credits, but issued bills of exchange which at the end were borne by the reserve money issuance, then the extremely soft budget constraints, direct lending to whole economic sectors, and even certain companies, from the reserve money issuance, at interest rates significantly below the inflation rate. Instead of the debtors, often their creditors went bankrupt, with the intention to preserve social rest, or to postpone social unrest. Therefore, the end of 1980s and the beginning of 1990s, followed by the development since then until present day, have been years of Schumpeter's destruction, positive destruction - regardless of our dissatisfaction with the slow pace of the reforms and jeopardized social security, which, I would agree, did not have to erode to such an extent, before the new solutions started to give better results.

In the Law, the National Bank of Macedonia was defined as an institution of the single monetary system of former Yugoslavia, with a status of a legal entity. Established as such, it was independently executing the projections of the credit policy for the Republic of Macedonia. However, the setting of the monetary, credit and foreign exchange policies was still within the competence of the National Bank of former Yugoslavia, but a growing number of the decisions of its bodies were adopted by a consensus of the representatives of the republics and provinces. Five years later, in 1977, the National Bank of Macedonia earned new competences: bank licensing, conducting international payment and credit operations. It was also given more rights and responsibilities with respect to maintaining banks' liquidity. These functions and competences remained almost the same in the following 15 years. The third period, period of complete monetary independence, followed by the constitution of the independent state - Republic of Macedonia, is definitely the most important period in the central banking from all aspects. This is a period of sweeping transformations, which constitute the NBRM as an institution with all explicit attributes of an independent central bank, hence as one of the key attributes of the statehood of the Republic of Macedonia.
Progress on climate related disclosures Third, in 2020, the quantity and quality of climate disclosures was in its infancy. We had recognised the need for it to move from the static to the strategic, for it to be forwardlooking and for it to be comparable across firms. Now, mandatory disclosures for large corporates under the TCFD are a reality in the UK, and are driving the right conversations around board tables. Here at the Bank we are soon to publish our fourth TCFD-aligned report, overcoming challenges with each new report. And internationally the ISSB is due to build on the work of the TCFD by publishing its first global standards on climate later this year – in a fraction of the time usually taken. I have very little doubt that in the future we will look back at the ISSB's work as a fundamental building block of comparable global green markets. The growth of green finance Fourth, we have seen and continue to see growth in the green finance market. The share of green finance in total finance has steadily increased, reflecting burgeoning investor demand and the financial system's ability to innovate.3 That poses new challenges, including greenwashing, and markets regulators like the FCA are responding accordingly. But it's not only green products we need to see growth in. More fundamentally, we need to see an increase in transition finance projects that help business deliver long-term emissions reductions – greening our future economy, not just investing in the currently green.

Denis Beau: The digitalisation of the financial sector - new challenges, new levers Closing speech by Mr Denis Beau, First Deputy Governor of the Bank of France, at the 4th Assises des Technologies Financières, 30 September 2021. * * * Ladies and gentlemen, I would first like to thank the President, Eric Woerth, for inviting me to close these 4th Assises des Technologies Financières, and to provide my insight, as a central banker and supervisor, into the challenges posed by the digitalisation of financial services. In the framework of our mission to safeguard monetary and financial stability, the main issue for the Banque de France is how we can facilitate and accompany the digitalisation of the financial sector, which is a source of efficiency gains, while at the same time preserving the stability of our monetary and financial system. In order to present the concrete responses we are trying to bring to this issue, I shall start by reminding you of the new challenges posed by digitalisation to the safety and efficiency of the financial sector, before describing the three main areas where we are working to  respond, in line with our mandate. I. The digitalisation of the financial sector poses new challenges  A) In terms of security, one of the main concerns raised by the current digital transformation of the financial system is IT or cyber-risk. The digital transformation considerably increases financial system participants’ surface area of exposure to cyber-threats, and hence their vulnerability to such risk.