samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
On discussing this transaction, the bank authorities of the National Bank expressed their concern that it was now even more obvious that the National Bank’s profit transfer was reaching a level that cannot be maintained in the long term. The Governing Board shares the bank authorities’ concern that a later return to the “normal level”, which will only amount to approximately Sfr 1 billion, is likely to create considerable political difficulties. From today’s vantage point, it cannot be ruled out, moreover, that as a result of the additional distribution on the income-yielding free assets the National Bank’s provisions will be reduced more rapidly than had been assumed when the main agreement on the National Bank’s profit distribution was concluded in April 2002. At 2.9% a year, the income forecast on which this agreement was based is rather optimistic given the low yield level on the financial markets for some time to come. It may therefore well be that a downward adjustment will become necessary as early as 2007, when, in terms of the agreement, the level of distribution will be reconsidered. In any case, the National Bank does not consider an annual profit distribution of Sfr 3 billion from 2007 onward as by any means a certainty. We think it is important to draw attention to these risks well in time. We also explained them to the Head of the Federal Department of Finance and asked him to advise the responsible persons of the cantons of our misgivings.

capable of both encouraging innovation, protecting adequately customers and maintaining the stability of our financial system. The upheavals experienced by the crypto ecosystem and the confidence crisis that has developed from the fallout clearly show from our financial stability authority stand point that the implementation of such confidence prone regulatory framework is urgently needed. Europe has led the way in this field, defining a new regulatory framework, known as MICA (Markets in Crypto Assets regulation). It is important that its implementation takes place as swiftly as possible, within a broader, international effort, building on the high-level recommendations developed by the FSB. 2/ Beyond supporting the development and adoption of a confidence prone regulatory framework we can also, as a central bank, play a positive operational role in revisiting the central bank money services we provide with the objective of adapting them to the digital age and the possible associated development of tokenised finance. This is the reason why in 2020, the Banque de France launched a large-scale experimentation program on wholesale CBDC with a number of market participants. This program has allowed us to understand better how DLTs work and the benefits that are likely to emerge for financial markets. Our main motivation is to extend the existing trust in our settlement infrastructure and assets to transactions carried out on DLTs. Their settlement in central bank money appears essential to guarantee the players in these markets against the counterparty risks inherent with other, private tokenised settlement assets.
The effects depend, of course, on how the interest rate develops in the long term. What is clear, however, is that the interest rate risk on our balance sheet has increased substantially. The interest rate risk will also be reflected in major fluctuations in the Riksbank’s profit and its dividends to the government. This is due to the practice of market valuation of the assets on the Riksbank’s balance sheet. 15 I mentioned earlier that the forecast for the dividend-qualifying income for 2015 and 2016 has been transformed from a loss of SEK 14 billion into a profit of SEK 13 billion over the last year or so. A major part of this improvement can be explained by the increase in the market value of the bond portfolio due to interest rates being lower than expected. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows how interest rate changes now have a considerable impact on the Riksbank’s profits. The bond portfolio has a market value of just under SEK 300 billion and an average maturity of five years. The value of the bonds then increases by about SEK 15 billion if interest rates suddenly fall by one  15 The Riksbank’s dividend-qualifying profit is calculated as the Riksbank’s profit adjusted for changes in the price  of gold and in exchange rates. Changed market prices of Swedish bond holdings hence have an immediate effect on the dividend-qualifying profit. 8 [12]  percentage point on all maturities.

 Low and stable inflation  Cannot affect employment and production  in the long term…  …except through providing conditions for  a good and sustainable economic development. 8  BIS Review 22/2008  In retrospect…  Not as easy as one might think  Monetary policy must be based on  forecasts  Much will happen between the forecast and the final outcome Uncertain data?  Monetary policy considerations?  Unpredictable events?  Poor forecasting?   What demands can one make?  On average, not poorer accuracy  Consistency between different  variables  The driving forces should be explainable  BIS Review 22/2008  9  Other reasons for deviations  Normally we try to reach the target  within 2 years  May deviate deliberately  Considerations for the real economy  Must be communicated clearly  So how did it turn out? CPI and CPI-forecasts Annual percentage change 3.5  3.5 CPI  3.0  3.0  Forecasts  2.5  2.5  2.0  2.0  1.5  1.5  1.0  1.0  0.5  0.5  0.0  0.0  -0.5  -0.5 03  04  05  06  07  Sources: Statistics Sweden and the Riksbank  10  BIS Review 22/2008
Similarly, Malaysia’s exports have been recording double digit growth since the start of 2021 and the order books of our exporters remain healthy. These positive developments will continue to provide support for growth in 2023. 4. Second, the labour market has also shown strength. Wages in both the manufacturing and services sectors have been increasing since the start of the year, at around 5% and 7%, respectively. Unemployment is now less than 4% and income prospects remain positive. 5. Third, in spite of global inflationary pressures, inflation remains well anchored. Headline inflation has averaged 3.1% year-to-date. It is largely supply-driven, but we have also seen stronger demand with the reopening of the economy. That said, we project that inflation will peak in the third quarter this year. In addition, the extent of upward pressures to inflation will remain partly contained by existing price controls and the prevailing spare capacity in the economy. 6. No doubt, the outlook next year will be more challenging due to a confluence of factors – rising geopolitical tensions and conflict, global inflationary pressures and extremely volatile financial markets. All these will lead to slower growth next year. And all this at a time just as when we thought that the pandemic was in the rear-view mirror. Ladies and gentlemen, 7. While acknowledging the challenging external environment, there is reason to be optimistic. Let me emphasise that the Malaysian economy is not in a crisis. The fundamentals of our economy and financial system are strong.

Malaysia then embarked on policies to transform the economy towards becoming manufacturing based. Government agencies courted global firms to set up shop in Malaysia. This 1972 photograph from Penang speaks volumes of those days, and how far we have come since then. A night of heavy rain meant that cars would get stuck in the mud. The car you see in this picture belonged to Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel back then. Intel – along with eight other leading E&E companies – had visited Penang to take up the Government’s invitation to plant roots on Malaysian soil. Fast forward to today, Malaysia has established itself as a bustling hub for Malaysia’s E&E manufacturing industry, playing an important role in the global supply chain. The policies and reforms from those years ago proved far-sighted and well-sequenced – leaving Malaysia transformed for the better. This is what we need to do again, in the aftermath of the pandemic – to put in place reforms that reimagine and completely transform the economy. 24. This ability to rise above challenges also enabled us to quickly bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic. In large part, this is a testament to the strength, resilience and agility of the Malaysian economy. Where we are today is not by luck or an accident. 25. And so, as we look towards the challenges ahead, we must continue to build on and fortify the strong foundation of the economy and once again, transform our economy as we did in the past.
In order to eliminate likely negative outcomes, the Central Bank will hold repo auctions with maturities up to 91 days and purchase government securities to prevent funding being concentrated on oneweek maturities. Moreover, depending on the permanence of the liquidity shortage, the effectiveness of long-term repo and government securities purchasing transactions, the TRYdenominated required reserve ratios may be reduced to a limited extent. In the case of an excessive increase in the liquidity surplus in the market due to favorable international market conditions, in order to enhance the effectiveness and flexibility of monetary policy and liquidity management strategy, primarily, Central Bank liquidity bills with maturities up to 91 days and sales of government securities previously purchased from the market will be actively utilized. When deemed necessary, New Turkish Lira deposit buying auctions with standard maturities of 1, 2 and 4 weeks and reverse repo auctions with maturities up to 91 days will also be used actively. Additionally, TRY-denominated required reserve ratios may also be increased. Information on auctions of liquidity bills or government securities purchase/sales will be announced on Reuters’ “CBTL” page at 10:00 a.m. one working day prior to the auction. These auctions will be held at 11:00 a.m. with the value date of the following working day, and the results will be announced no later than at 11:30 a.m. on Reuters’ “CBTM” page.

In fact, studies within our Bank indicate that gradually more weight is attached to past inflation in forming expectations and as of mid-2006 inflation expectations have become more susceptible to variables like exchange rate and risk premium. According to the Central Bank, if this situation becomes permanent, the cost of fighting inflation will increase. Therefore, in an open letter to the Government in June 2008 the Central Bank proposed setting new targets for the medium term in order to control inflation expectations and to re-establish the reputation of the implemented regime. The Government accepted this proposal and the inflation targets for 2009 to 2011 were revised as 7.5, 6.5, and 5.5 percent, respectively. Hence, the inflation targets to be used as a reference by economic agents to form their expectations were set with the objective of containing inflation expectations and reducing the cost of the fight against inflation. Bearing in mind that altering inflation targets might lead to the deterioration in the inflation expectations in the short run, the Central Bank implemented the target revision along with monetary tightening. Thereby, the negative impact that might be created by the upward revision of targets has been contained. As a matter of fact, during the period of target revision, a slight deterioration was observed in the medium-term inflation expectations but with diminishing political uncertainties and monetary tightening, inflation expectations have been contained (Chart 3).
  Although credit availability is improving, the sharp tightening that occurred in 2008 and 2009 has not fully reversed (Figure 13).   Credit availability remains unusually tight for certain sectors such as housing and small business.   The exchange value of the dollar remains in the middle of a long-run channel showing a gentle decline (Figure 14). 11  Or, if we were wrong about spare capacity, inflation should be higher. 12  See Thomas Laubach and John Williams, “Measuring the Natural Rate of Interest,” Review of Economics and Statistics, November 2003, pp.1063-1070. The link to the updated estimates is: http://www.frbsf.org/economics/economists/jwilliams/Laubach_Williams_updated_estimates.xls. 13  Impairment to the transmission mechanism implies that the neutral rate that neither stimulates nor slows the economy will be lower than it would otherwise be. BIS central bankers’ speeches  7  Similarly, there is evidence that the linkage between financial conditions and economic activity is attenuated as well. The most obvious example of this is the housing sector. But the subdued overall rate of credit expansion for both households and the business sector is also noteworthy. This has occurred despite a monetary policy that would be judged on its face as one of the most stimulative in history. Finally, market expectations suggest that the equilibrium real rate of interest will remain depressed. To me, it is particularly noteworthy that the real forward interest rate expected 5 to 10 years in the future is currently only 0.3 percent.

Compared with Taylor 1993 it can achieve significantly greater stability in employment without sacrificing the medium-term inflation objective or significantly increasing the variability of inflation outcomes. Finally, the remaining parameter in the Taylor Rule is the neutral, real short-term interest rate. This is the interest rate adjusted for inflation that neither stimulates nor slows the economy. It is typically set at 2 percent. Although there is no reason why the neutral real rate cannot change over time, the 2 percent rate is typically plugged in without further attention. Whether this is appropriate is a critical question in today’s economic environment that I will return to a bit later. Let me now discuss the economic outlook, and examine some of the implications for monetary policy. In doing so I will look at results obtained by applying some variants of the Taylor Rule, and explain some of my concerns about using simple policy rules in a mechanical way for setting monetary policy. As I see it, the U.S. economy is continuing to slowly recover from the after-effects of the housing boom and bust and the financial crisis. But the recovery has been disappointing. Indeed, when we look back at economic forecasts made over the past three or four years it is notable that growth has systematically fallen short of both the Federal Reserve and private-sector forecasts.
Compliance with the objectives set requires rigorous budgetary implementation, to which all levels of government should contribute. The strengthening of the budgetary framework under the recent Budgetary Stability Law should assist in this connection. The law sets explicit ceilings on deficit and debt levels in line with demands at the European level, and it includes stricter reporting requirements and new coercive mechanisms to ensure compliance by all tiers of government with fiscal targets. The fiscal consolidation strategy should also take into account the medium and long-term considerations affecting public finances, in particular those associated with population ageing, namely spending on pensions and health care. Lastly, it should be said that the weakness of the labour market and of growth have been the main factors behind the limited progress in correcting the budget deficit in 2011. Without a recovery in employment and in growth, it will be costlier in the long run to pursue fiscal consolidation, so boosting structural reforms must be a priority. Among these, promoting so-called flexicurity to the full is vital, and should be complemented by a fresh liberalisation drive in the markets for goods and services that is conducive to competition, training in new technologies, innovation and the improvement of human capital. Another key economic policy priority should be to continue with the ongoing clean-up, recapitalisation and restructuring of the Spanish banking system.

While regulators can act as the catalyst in prescribing interoperability standards and garnering industry efforts to facilitate infrastructure development and sharing of infrastructure costs, the industry must also play its role by adopting new standards quickly. In Malaysia, there is currently an industry initiative to migrate the ATM cards to the EMV standard with the objective to widen the acceptance of the ATM cards for retail payments. There is also an on-going project to establish the National Bill Payments Scheme (NBPS), a common bill payment platform where billers only need to connect to one bank in order to 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  receive payments from customers across all banks. All these efforts are intended to make epayments for the public seamless and reduce duplication of resources in infrastructure investment. 3. Strengthening transaction security  Let me now turn to the third focus area which is the importance of strengthening transaction security to minimise fraud and instil greater confidence in the use of e-payments. Fraud and risk management measures must not only be effective, it must also be proportionate to the level of risk. Otherwise, it may be too costly to implement or too cumbersome to use, and people might revert to using cash. Equally important is the presence of effective payment system rules so that all parties in the payment value chain are held accountable for ensuring a minimal standard of security and service level. It is of paramount importance to sustain consumers’ perception and confidence in the safety of payment instruments.
Our current account deficit is now running at a rate of above 6 percent of GDP, a level without precedent for a major economy. It matters because of the composition of the imbalance. Our trade deficit is now roughly the size of the current account deficit, and very large relative to our export base. And our net investment income balances are now likely to move into deficit. It matters because of the trajectory of the U.S. imbalance. On reasonable assumptions about its likely near term path, this deficit will produce a very large net deterioration in our net external liabilities relative to national income, with progressively larger net transfers of income to the rest of the world. This pattern should concern us because it is not simply the result of the savings and investment decisions of the private sector. The fact that we are using a substantial part of the savings we are borrowing from the rest of the world to finance an unsustainable level of public borrowing leaves us more vulnerable than if those savings were being used for productive private investment. Large structural fiscal deficits limit the size of the sustainable external imbalance for any country, even the United States, and they necessarily increase concern about the terms on which we are likely to finance the present imbalance. 1/3  It should concern us because of how the imbalance has been financed.

In the economies that became large net savers, the pattern differed across countries. In some countries, including much of emerging Asia and Japan, savings has been flat or fallen somewhat, while investment has fallen by more. In China and in the major oil exporters, investment spending is rising, but not by as much as savings is increasing. Europe’s net external position has not changed much over this period, and is in rough external balance overall, with substantial differences across the member states. The second feature of this dynamic has been an increase in the willingness of the rest of the world to invest its savings in the United States. In those parts of the world where savings are high, they have become more globally mobile. And a greater share of those savings found its way to the United States. This phenomenon is due in part to the perceived attractiveness of relative returns in the United States arising from the acceleration of productivity growth here, and in part due to the dynamics associated with exchange rate regimes linked in one way or another to the dollar. Together these forces have produced larger imbalances—deficits here and surpluses abroad—that have been sustained longer and financed more easily than conventional wisdom would have thought possible a decade or even five years ago. Why does this pattern of imbalances matter and why should it concern us? It matters because of the size of the U.S. imbalance.
The two exceptions are the Great Contraction of 2008–9 and the “phantom” slowdown after the 1997–8 Asia/LTCM crisis, when early vintages of the official data for output as well as business surveys pointed to a slowing in growth that was not subsequently borne out in mature vintages of the official data. And for both these episodes, 2 no forecaster came close to predicting the outcome. The generic point here – which holds true in fuller analyses over longer time periods – is that the big divergences, when they occur, are not between the central forecasts made by different bodies, but rather between those forecasts and the corresponding outturns. And that is as it should be: deviations of outturns from central (mean) forecasts should be unpredictable if those forecasters are using the information that is available to them efficiently. Why then, as the Queen famously asked at the London School of Economics in November 2008, did no-one see the Great Contraction coming? Some economic downturns are broadly predictable in nature. In particular, that is the case when they are deliberately policy-induced in order to squeeze inflation down, though even then it may still be difficult to get the magnitude and timing right, and there will always be other unexpected events that perturb the path of the economy. But downturns associated with financial or banking crises are rather different animals. Rapid growth in credit and asset prices can act as a warning sign of building vulnerabilities, but frequently appear to be validated by developments in underlying economic fundamentals.

From master masons to information architects: how standards can transform reporting (and bring benefits well beyond it) Speech given by Gareth Ramsay, Executive Director for Data and Analytics & Chief Data Officer  Webinar hosted by The EDM Council 14 April 2021  I am grateful to Aaron Shiret and Angus Moir for their assistance in writing these remarks, and to Nicola Bennett, Ben Broadbent, Victoria Cleland, Matt Corder, Michael Davey, Dayo Forster, Andrew Hauser, Russell Jackson, Richard Lewis, James Proudman, Vicky Purkiss, Laurie Roberts, Paul Robinson, Beju Shah, Martin Udy, Mark Walsh and Rebecca Whitwam for their helpful comments and assistance 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  Hello all – it’s a great pleasure to be speaking to you. I’d like to thank John Bottega and the EDM Council for virtually hosting us today. I want to begin by talking about cathedrals. The great cathedrals of Europe were built in the Middle Ages by teams of skilled stone masons. To get the dimensions of the building right, it is said that each team would use measures based around the body of the master mason: his foot, his stride, his arm, and so on. And so a local standard was born. Those standards were designed with one specific use in mind – the construction of that cathedral. And very useful they were, too. But they were closed systems – the foot and the yard used to build one cathedral were different from those used to build another.