samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
This fact alone suggests that something will have to give eventually, and this raises the interesting question of how these imbalances have persisted on a path that seems unsustainable with so little evidence of rising risk premia. Part of the answer seems to lie in the fact that these capital inflows into the United States, however, are not solely the result of the decisions of private actors, but reflect official intervention by countries with exchange rate regimes tied to the dollar, including those in Asia and the major oil exporters. Research at the Federal Reserve and outside suggests the scale of foreign official accumulation of U.S. assets has put downward pressure on U.S. interest rates, with estimates of the effect ranging from small to quite significant. If this is right, the apparent reduction in real rates is less likely to signal concern over expectations of future growth and future returns on investment, and is more likely to signal the special consequences of these exchange rate arrangements and their effects on private behavior, as well as the increase in international capital mobility. What then can we say about the implications of the pattern of imbalances we see today? 2  BIS Review 3/2006  The trajectory of the U.S. current account deficit has led most observers to conclude the U.S. external imbalance is unsustainably large and will have to come down over time.

In addition to career talks and workshops, we will launch a virtual resource centre in the next few months, so that university students and graduates can conveniently find out the various job types, career paths and job opportunities available in the banking industry through this “one stop directory”. Conclusion 24. Ladies and gentlemen, let me finish by emphasising that, as with any other industry, the success of our financial sector depends on a solid foundation based on the expertise of people working in it. Those expertise needs to be guided by a proper mindset, and they have to possess a deep pool of skillsets that evolve over time to cope with developmental challenges. The HKMA, together with the industry, have invested a lot of efforts over the past few years to cultivating both a proper mindset and essential skillsets for our talent pool. I hope my update today will offer the audience a glimpse of hope that we do have a solid foundation for our financial industry’s future development. And hopefully what I said would also set the stage for fruitful discussions in the several panels later in the day. 25. Thank you very much. And I wish today’s Conference a great success.
But the commitment to our objective also implies alertness to future risks and a readiness to respond to them should the medium-term outlook continue to deteriorate significantly. In this case as well, the ECB will adopt all the monetary policy actions that are necessary and proportionate to achieve its objective. We are not short of instruments to deliver on our mandate. 1 See Draghi, M. (2018), “The outlook for the euro area economy”, speech at the Frankfurt European Banking  Congress, Frankfurt am Main, 16 November. 2 Three-month-on-three-month percentage changes; CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis. 3 See De Bondt, G. and Hahn, E. (2014), “Introducing the Euro Area-wide Leading Indicator (ALI): Real-Time  Signals of Turning Points in the Growth Cycle from 2007 to 2011”, Journal of Forecasting, 33:47–68. 4 See Anderson G. and Y. Liu (2012), “On the Road to Recovery, Soft Patches Turn Up Often”, The Regional  Economist, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, pp. 12–13. 5 Leverage is calculated by dividing total liabilities net of shares and other equity by total assets. 6 Consolidated gross debt is defined as the sum of total loans granted to NFCs net of intra-sectoral lending, debt  securities issued and pension liabilities. 7 See Botelho, V. and Dias da Silva, A. (2019), “Employment growth and GDP in the euro area”, Box 3 in Economic  Bulletin, Issue 2, ECB.

During the four euro area business cycle expansions since 1970, there have been 50 soft patches – defined as a two-quarter growth slowdown – and only 4 recessions.4 In fact, the euro area faced an analogous situation in 2016, when the economy also went through a soft patch triggered by a contraction in world trade. At that time, the strength of the domestic economy was able to shield the recovery from external uncertainties. The key question is whether, with monetary policy continuing to support the expansion, domestic 1/6  BIS central bankers' speeches  demand will remain as resilient today. The demand component typically affected most by a weaker global environment is investment. ECB internal analysis shows that the more exposed euro area listed firms are to foreign markets, the more sensitive they are to uncertainty when making their investment decisions. And there are some signs that external demand may be affecting investment via manufacturing value chains within the euro area. In particular, both extra and intra-euro area trade slowed steeply last year, whereas in 2016 intraeuro area trade was robust to the external slowdown. Such a recoupling of intra- and extra-euro area trade growth in a downward direction has not occurred since the start of the global financial crisis. Intra-euro area exports of intermediate and capital goods were hit particularly hard, with capital goods exports registering their strongest contraction since the sovereign debt crisis. A further rise in global uncertainty could therefore lead to a deceleration in trade and investment.
François Villeroy de Galhau: Banking risks, regulations and supervision Introductory speech by Mr François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Bank of France and Chairman of the Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de resolution (ACPR), at the ACPR conference, Paris, Friday 16 June 2017. * * * Ladies and Gentlemen, I am delighted to welcome you to this new conference organised by the Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de résolution (ACPR). The three issues that will be discussed this morning – banking risks, regulation and supervision – are all essential and are naturally highly interdependent. To introduce this conference, I would particularly like to focus on the issue of regulations and their impact on the financing of the economy and growth. As you know, this is the subject we chose to address this year in the Banque de France’s Financial Stability Review, which will partly serve as a framework for your discussions this morning. Ten years after the beginning of the financial crisis and eight years after the G20 summits in London and Pittsburgh that forged a global action plan, it is time to take stock. We brought together 14 remarkable and complementary views for the Financial Stability Review from public authorities, academics and industry representatives. What emerges is, to my mind, both an achievement and a challenge. * * * I. Firstly, an achievement: the banking and financial system is substantially more resilient today than it was ten years ago.

A final word on central counterparties (CCP): I would like to acknowledge the valuable proposals recently made by the European Commission to insist that those CCPs whose activities are “super-systemic” for the EU market establish themselves in the European Union. They are a step in the right direction and represent the only viable mechanism to guarantee that European authorities and national central banks in particular, can control and manage the risks that CCPs are likely to pose to the financial stability of the European Union. Once the provisions on the resolution of CCPs have been finalised, the compensation framework within the EU will have been improved considerably. 2/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  * * * Let me conclude with a general remark that concerns the economy: we need a system to assess, ex post, the economic effects of the reforms. France fully supports the work of the FSB to develop a structured analytical framework, which Germany has rightly included in its priorities for its G20 presidency. Europe, and Germany and France in particular, now has a special duty to protect financial regulation – a regulation that is sensitive to risk, balanced in its treatment of banks and nonbanks and binds the entire international community. Generally, that is what we’ve been doing well since 2009, and it is what continues to inspire us. Thank you for your attention and I wish you an excellent conference. 3/3  BIS central bankers' speeches
And we have, of course, tried to assess the impact of the dramatic stock market decline from the peaks in 2000 on macroeconomic conditions and financial stability. In this regard, it mattered that, partly linked to the introduction of the euro, the outstanding amount of shares substantially increased in the euro area. For non-financial corporations in the euro area, the annual net issuance of shares increased from 1.7% of GDP in 1995 to 7.3% of GDP in 2000. At the same time, during the late 1990s, the distribution of shares across the euro area population broadened significantly, implying that more households invested in shares in the late 1990s than before. Corrected for valuation effects, the amount of household’s holdings of shares and mutual fund shares increased between 1995 and 2003 by 78%. Against this background, stock prices have become more relevant to economic conditions in the euro area in recent years. And indeed, when stock prices started to fall, we could see that this had a notable dampening effect on the euro area economy in the period 2001-2003. What role do asset prices play in the ECB’s monetary policy? After this description of the current situation, the crucial question is: how do asset price developments enter into the assessment of the outlook for price stability and how they influence the policy-formulation of the ECB. Recently, much attention has been devoted to the question of which monetary policy strategies are optimal in an environment of strong asset price fluctuations.

Indeed, growth rates of money and credit which are persistently in excess of those needed to sustain non-inflationary economic growth may, under certain circumstances, provide early information on emerging, and potentially destabilising, asset price bubbles. In this respect, they act as a permanent admonition for vigilance in the face of unusual movements in asset prices. 6  BIS Review 66/2004  From what I have said, it has become clear that it is important to monitor asset prices and to try to avoid the emergence of unsustainable, pronounced movements in asset prices which may subsequently lead to sharp recessions. Obviously, there cannot be a mechanical link between asset prices and monetary policy instruments. Central banks, however, should take asset price movements into account, especially if large swings in asset prices imply long-term risks to financial and economic stability. Concluding remarks As you can see, there are a number of key concepts which I have emphasised in my speech today: “strong vigilance”; “careful monitoring and analysis”; “medium-term orientation”; “prompt reaction”. These are central elements of our approach to monetary policy-making, both at the current juncture and in connection with the specific topic of asset price developments that I discussed in the second part of my address. We live in a world of considerable uncertainty, not just in terms of economic shocks - which by definition are impossible to predict - but also in terms of our knowledge of how the economy functions, how economic agents form expectations and react to events and changing conditions.
Figure 2: Bank of England QE programmes and selected policy interventions since 2009  Taken from the IEO’s report on its evaluation of QE. Figure 3: Bank of England balance sheet as a % of GDP  Source: Bank of England, available here. Dotted line extends series to end-2021, assuming completion of current asset purchase programme. All figures shown as a % of lagged GDP except 2021 figure which uses 2019 GDP to avoid distortions from the temporary Covid-related falls in 2020. 7  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  7  The headline numbers involved in those five interventions detailed in Figure 2 have been very large: in total once the current programme comes to an end the Bank will have purchased £ of government bonds and £ of corporate bonds – that is roughly 40% of annual (pre-Covid) UK GDP. Once that programme is complete the Bank’s balance sheet, which already stands at around 40% of GDP, will be approaching £ or 50% of GDP in size – an unprecedented figure in the Bank’s 327 year history (Figure 3). The robust operationalisation of those QE purchases has been crucial to the Bank’s mission over the past twelve years.

Peter’s review of “What’s the Use of Economics”, the book of proceedings from a conference organised and edited by Diana Coyle, another former student who gave the second of these lectures, held at the Bank of England nearly a decade ago, is Peter at his kaleidoscopic best and as relevant now as when he wrote it. 2  For me as an undergraduate student in the early 1980s it was incredibly stimulating to be learning from Peter about Keynes’, Hicks’ and Leijonhufvud’s contributions to disequilibrium economics, all framed by Peter’s  own quantity rationing exposition of multiple equilibria. It was even more exciting to be taught by someone who was writing about the real-world economic problems of unemployment and how policy could help to achieve a better equilibrium – Peter penned a comprehensive overview article with Derek Morris in the second edition of OxRep in 19853 which is still a very good read today.4  It should therefore come as no surprise that one of the many other topics that Peter turned his prodigious mind to was QE and monetary policy.
Yet, to date, central banks have scarcely touched the surface of the complexities this issue raises. This needs to change if the potentially transformative benefits of CBDC are to be unlocked.32  Within the next year or so, the UK will reach a decision on CBDC. It will be pivotal. An earlier pivotal moment was the Bank Charter Act of 1844, conferring on the Bank monopoly rights over paper money. At that point, central banking came of age in the setting monetary and financial stability policy. Tomorrow’s decisions on CDBC rival the 1844 Act in their significance for central banks over the medium term. And that is why a deeper consideration of monetary and financial stability implications is paramount today. Communications and Engagement At the point I joined the Bank, central banks lived by a mantra of “monetary mystique”. This was more than just cultural. Secrecy was seen as one of the essential tools in central banks’ armoury.33 Opacity imparted power, secrecy conferred influence. And the Bank of England was seen as the grand-master of these Delphic arts. These were well-exemplified by the utterances of its most famous former Governor, Montagu Norman, whose “never apologise, never explain” and “I don’t have reasons, I have instincts” have gone down in the annals of central bank folklore. 31  See Kiley and Roberts (2017) and Coenen, Montes-Galdon and Smets (2020). See https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/2021/april/bank-of-england-statement-on-central-bank-digital-currency . 33 Goodfriend (1986).

32  18  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  18  For much of the first few hundred years of the Bank’s history, its public communication largely took the form of an annual speech by the Governor of the day to the bankers and merchants of the City of London at the Lord Major’s Mansion House Banquet, literally a stone’s throw from the Bank. The public audience for this singular act of public communication was about as diverse a set of white, male, middle-aged, slightly-pissed financiers as it is possible to assemble. Body language can sometimes substitute for the spoken word. So it was at the Bank of England in the 1920s, when the Governor’s “eyebrows” famously became one of the Bank’s means of externally communicating. The Governor’s eyebrows were, in a way, a primitive form of emoji: sterling crisis – sad face, bad pre-MPC presentation – very sad face. Nonetheless, for even the most malleable-faced Governor, the eyebrows were an imperfect communications medium. Beginning in the 1960s, a sea-change began in central bank communication practices, at first slowly. Speeches by the Governor and other officials increased, by the 1960s averaging around five per year. They were matched by other communication innovations. December 1960 saw the first edition of the Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, which is still going strong. There was roughly a doubling in the number of speeches by Bank officials in each subsequent decade.
This reasoning even led some governments to adopt policies with a bias to promote manufacturing in the belief that this would be the route to more rapid overall growth, although this seemed to ignore the demand side – that the public would become saturated with goods and increasingly desire to consume services. I don't know whether any of the protagonists of that school of thought are still alive today. If they are, and even if they could still identify some services where productivity has not advanced very much (hairdressers and taxis are among the usually quoted examples), they would be astonished at the productivity growth which has been apparent in banking and certain other service sectors around the world in recent years, as a result of the forces of globalised competition and the opportunities presented by technological advances. It is clear, therefore, that banking and other financial services not only provide essential support to development but also make their own contribution to national income. I am often asked questions such as what is the long-term growth prospect for this sector or how will the mix of activities within the sector evolve. The simple and honest answer is that I don't know. Plainly, there are limits to the likely domestic demand for these services. But that demand may be supplemented if overseas customers are attracted to use our local services, or, of course, diminished if local customers choose to satisfy some of their needs from overseas.

But as a general rule banks should not be prevailed upon against their better judgement to be providers of economic aid or social services, whether domestically or internationally, unless there is the political consensus that taxpayers are willing to fund them in that role. The internet Turning now to the internet, I believe that this has some relevance to the overall theme of this symposium, not so much because of questions about the availability of banking services to those who need them, but rather because of possible implications for the location and structure of banking activity. Let me begin by observing that, ever since the telecommunications and IT revolutions began substantially to impact on banking – and that, depending on how exactly one defines the terms, was at least two or three decades ago – some commentators have been forecasting the imminent demise of financial centres as such. The argument is that all the humdrum work will be carried out in computer centres and call centres in low wage countries, while the high value adding executives can locate where they wish – depending on their preferences for recreation, culture, climate and so on – and tele-conference one another when necessary. The former – the migration of routine operations to lowcost places – has happened to a degree, but the latter has not. Even if colleagues within a bank can sometimes substitute a conference call for a meeting, their customers have been less eager.
Annual accounts A few quick words on MAS’ financial statements. The Authority’s total assets grew 18.6 per cent during the year ended 31 March 2003 to $ billion. About 11 per cent or $ billion is due to the transfer of the Currency Fund from BCCS. All other assets and liabilities of BCCS as at 30  2  BIS Review 33/2003  September 2002 were similarly transferred to the MAS and have been incorporated into our financial statements. The net assets of the Currency Fund at the end of the financial year provided 112 per cent asset backing for the currency in circulation of $ billion. MAS’ profit after provisions for the financial year ended 31 March 2003 declined by 2.8 per cent to $ million as our investments continued to be affected by the low global interest rate environment and volatile financial markets. Conclusion In closing, let me restate MAS’s priorities going forward. Supporting economic growth while maintaining domestic price stability will remain the key focus of monetary policy. In the financial sector, we will continue to partner with industry players to build on our successes in key growth areas like asset management, the debt market, and treasury business, while looking out for new niche areas and opportunities. We will continue to refine our regulatory and supervisory framework as we progressively shift the emphasis from a rule-based regime to a risk-based and disclosure-based approach.

The Singapore dollar has been included as one of eight settlement currencies in the Continuous Linked Settlement (CLS) system - a global initiative aimed at eliminating foreign exchange settlement risk arising from time zone differences. Going forward, the outlook for the other segments of the financial sector has improved. The stock market has rebounded with daily transactions nearly tripling in Q2, compared to Q1. With the expected pick-up in domestic and regional economic activity in H2 2003, we are also likely to see further improvement in commercial banking. The financial sector is expected to post a small positive growth this year, following the 4.8 per cent contraction in 2002. BIS Review 33/2003  1  Enhancing supervisory framework for sound financial sector On the supervisory and regulatory front, MAS continued its efforts to move away from a prescriptive, rule-based approach to a more flexible, risk-based approach. This entailed strengthening risk-based and disclosure-based regulatory frameworks, enhancing corporate governance standards to foster better risk management on the part of institutions, and empowering consumers to make better informed investment decisions. Let me touch on key initiatives in each of these areas. An important step towards a disclosure-based regime was the full implementation last year of the Securities and Futures Act and Financial Advisers Act. MAS will continue to refine the regulatory framework for capital markets, taking into account industry feedback. In the area of risk-based supervision, we implemented last year the new Liquidity Supervision Framework for banks.