samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The agreement for a minimum corporate tax rate for multinational enterprises, spurred by the G20 with the OECD’s invaluable support and ratified by more than 130 countries that account for more the 90% of world GDP, is a good example of the benefits that international cooperation can generate in the digital era. Furthermore, supply issues, which have led to shortages and strains on prices during both the pandemic and now the war in Ukraine, strengthen the case for boosting international cooperation. In its latest World Economic Outlook, the International Monetary Fund concluded that these supply issues should not lead us to lessen our economic openness. On the contrary, its analyses point to the international diversification of imports and improved substitutability of the sources of inputs from different countries to boost value chains’ resilience. Signing new bilateral and multilateral trade agreements and strengthening pre-existing ones, which would afford greater certainty to trade relations while reducing their cost, would also help attain this goal. To conclude, I believe that, by sharing experiences and outlooks, fora such as this one help gain a deeper understanding of the challenges that we, the economic and monetary authorities, must face. I hope that you are able to benefit fully from the discussions held over the coming days and wish you a pleasant stay in Seville. 2

Recent crisis indicated that we all sail in the same waters and we may resist the waves, only if we confront these  2  BIS Review 30/2009  challenges together. Export is a generator of foreign currency flows needed so much for the currency stability, which is related to all other balances, financial system’s stability also included. Under these conditions, we should be aware that a joint action, of national importance, deeply patriotic for the values and future of the country is needed. Make the market more lively, more competitive and more innovative. Now the financial infrastructure is complete and it is up to you to use it more efficiently. It is the time to try to seek other balances in terms of foreign currency flows into the economy. Remittances have been important for a long time. They were the largest foreign currency serum in the economy. However, we should be aware that other indicators, such as exports and foreign direct investments will be prior items in the total foreign currency flows in the future. This should be realised by everyone and based on this ground, let us work together for the future. Dear participants, International initiatives are in the process. The Berlin meeting was extremely important in this regard. There was broadly discussed and converged into the idea that there is room for more coordinated actions, and protectionism is not the answer to the crisis. The London meeting will make new steps in this regard.
Ásgeir Jónsson: Speech – 62nd Annual Meeting of the Central Bank of Iceland Speech by Mr Ásgeir Jónsson, Governor of the Central Bank of Iceland, at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Central Bank of Iceland, Reykjavík, 30 March 2023. *** "When a traveller gets lost in the fog or a storm and loses his sense of direction, it is said that he starts going around in circles and eventually feels as though water flows upstream. In our economic and labour market affairs, we Icelanders are utterly lost, and the circles we navigate are growing smaller and smaller. Similarly, our sense of real value has become distorted, so that it seems to us that the line graph illustrating the nation's prosperity is aiming upwards when it is actually pointing downwards." These words are taken from Morgunblaðið's Reykjavík Letter editorial on Sunday 19 August 1979. I am quite certain that the author was poet and editor Matthías Johannessen, and I have never found a more accurate description of Iceland's economic situation that summer. The old adage that poets see more clearly than others still holds. Yes, in summer 1979, annual inflation had soared to a new high of more than 60%. And yes, it had happened in spite of innumerable economic policy actions, emergency acts of law, and other responses that were supposed to drop a net over inflation - which nevertheless kept on climbing. Price instability begat political instability. Governments came and went. Wage agreements and currency devaluations played leapfrog, fanning the flames of inflation.

Nevertheless, the advent of indexation was a political watershed in the fight against inflation, as it prevented the transfer of wealth from savers to debtors. In an indexationbased system, no one profits on runaway inflation: everyone loses in the end. Actually, Ólafur's Law made it politically possible to grapple with inflation and bring it down to single digits by the beginning of the 1990s. But it was a long, drawn-out process, and the story of that battle is too long to recount here. Honoured guests: Before I continue, I think it appropriate to state clearly that I do not think Iceland is lost in a highland fog at the moment. No, visibility is good in all directions. We should also bear in mind that Iceland's inflation is in line with that found in other Western countries, and even somewhat lower. We are no longer outliers as we were in the 1970s. In fact, we are in many ways well positioned in international context. Nevertheless, I would like to mention the circumstances that brought about the vicious cycle - Iceland's stumbling about in the economic blizzard of the 1970s - so that we do not get lost again. There were three main reasons for that episode of runaway inflation. 1) The Central Bank did not have the independence to bring its policy instruments to bear on inflation. Instead, interest rates were determined on political premises and were kept unchanged even though inflation was rising. 2) The State's finances were unsustainable.
The result is that, when surveyed, most seem to prefer working at home to working in the office. There are some important caveats in saying all that. These benefits are clearly not evenly spread, even for those who can work from home. In general, they have been felt less by workers than by their managers; less by women than by men; less by Black people than by White or Asian people; and less by people working in sectors worst-affected by the Covid crisis – for example, retail and hospitality. In this respect, these results echo other findings about the highly uneven economic effects of the Covid crisis.18 Despite these important qualifications, I was pleasantly surprised by the survey findings. If home-working has led to longer working hours for many people, you might have expected that to have dented well-being, not to have raised it. The WorkL survey also points to rising levels of workplace anxiety since Covid, understandably so, which would also be expected to harm happiness. Yet happiness at work seems, despite all that, to have risen. What is going on? Weighing against these effects appear to be at least two key factors: commuting and empowerment. In well-being studies, commuting ranks just after death and divorce in the unhappiness stakes. A study by Chatterjee and Clarke (2017) showed that an additional 20 minute commute reduced people’s well-being as much as a 19% pay cut. On that basis, home-working would be expected to have boosted well-being, with 17 18  RSA (2020). Blundell et al (2020).

Some of the potential costs of home-working, including the loss of social engagement, are only now being felt and may grow with time, in ways which affect both our well-being and productivity at work. In what follows, I will try to navigate through some of these issues, drawing on evidence where possible. There are both positives and negatives from the shift in working practices that has taken place this year and the balance of these is likely itself to shift over time. If you’ll forgive the indulgence, I’ll try and weave in some of my own work experiences to add some personal colour. The Changing World of Work Even before the Covid crisis struck, there was evidence of a secular shift towards more flexible forms of working. Analysis of working trends by the Association of Professional Staffing Companies in 2019 found  1  Engaging Business (2020). 2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  2  that, over the past two decades, the number of people working ‘flexible hours’ has increased five-fold, from less than 10% to more than half the workforce.2 As with many other things, the Covid crisis brought about an overnight transformation and acceleration of those trends. ONS data suggests that, prior to the pandemic, around 5% of people worked from home as their main location.
That said, private sector actors do not need to wait for public authorities to do everything before starting to think about consolidation strategies. Lastly, we also need to ensure that institutions are treated equally under international regulations. If we are to reach an agreement, two conditions must be met. The transposition of Basel III must be reasonable and take into account the application of the “output floor” at  Page 4 of 5  the highest level of consolidation. Above all, the transposition must be fair and applied to the letter in all jurisdictions, including in the United States. Let me be clear about one thing, however: the solution to our banking challenges is not deregulation but rather innovation; not a step backwards – towards the financial crisis – but a leap forwards. III. We need to remain fully mobilised with regard to two deadly risks: ALM/CTF and cyber-security  The fight against money laundering and terrorist financing (ALM/CTF) calls for unwavering commitment. The 23 inspections carried out by the ACPR revealed major failings in supervised entities’ compliance with their AML/CTF and asset-freezing obligations. In 2018, the Sanctions Committee imposed nine sanctions, one of which amounted to EUR 50 million. In parallel with the Financial Action Task Force’s assessment of France in 2020, the ACPR will be closely involved in the implementation of a robust and renewed AML/CTF system at the European level.

Let’s make the most of these strengths in the context of Brexit: without resting on our laurels – the supervisor will always remain vigilant and all of our institutions are aware of the scale of the challenges – but rather by drawing on our collective intelligence. Page 5 of 5  i  Source: Financial disclosures from BNPP, SG, GCA, GBPCE, GCM and LBP. According to the EBA, the ROE of French banks (a broad sample) is 6.60 %. ii ECB, Mario Draghi’s introductory statement to the press conference on 10 April 2019. iii Study by Thomson Reuters.
Over the last four years, our experience has been very different: inflation has been better behaved, and growth much steadier. There are several reasons for that, including major changes to the energy intensity and flexibility of the UK economy. But one important difference has been monetary policy. Unlike in the 1970s, the MPC’s focus has very clearly been on controlling inflation. Today, higher energy prices are an important influence on interest rate decisions. That is because they have an immediate impact on inflation, which has the potential to fuel inflationary expectations. And they may also affect the balance between overall demand and supply, though it is hard to judge the timing and size of this effect. Soaring oil prices were an important reason why some members of the MPC, including myself, were reluctant to cut interest rates when the economy slowed in 2005. The policy dilemma Today, in 2007, global developments – in financial and oil markets – are posing downside risks to output as well as upside risks to inflation. That’s a very difficult combination. So how well placed is the UK economy to weather these headwinds? As far as output goes, we start from a strong position. The latest official figures show annual growth still above its average rate, as it has been for more than a year, reflecting robust domestic spending by households and businesses as well as a buoyant world economy. But in the last month, the businesses surveys have started to weaken – a few quite sharply.

Commercial banks’ nominal interest rates •  Consistent with the trend in yield rates on Government securities, all commercial banks’ nominal interest rates declined. The weighted average lending base rate (WALBR) and the average lending rate (ALR) declined to 33.7% and 41.3% in February 2004 from 36.2% and 43.9% in January 2003, respectively. The average savings rate for amounts above K100,000 and the 30-day deposit rate for amounts of over K20 million dropped to 7.0% and 11.5% from 7.2% and 15.1% in January 2004, respectively. Real interest rates •  All real interest rates declined due to the decrease in the rate of inflation and the fall in nominal interest rates. The real WATBR fell by 3.9 percentage points to negative 2.2% in February from 1.7% in January 2004. The real Weighted Average Treasury bill Rate (WALBR) declined by 1.9 percentage points to 16.9% from 18.8%. Similarly, the real 30-day deposit rate for amounts above K20 million fell by 3.0 percentage points to negative 5.3%. However, the real ASR for amounts exceeding K100,000 increased by 0.4 percentage points to negative 9.8%. Foreign exchange market •  During the review period, the Kwacha remained relatively stable. It gained 0.2 percent against the US dollar to an average of K4,763.99 per US dollar in February. However, the Kwacha weakened against other major traded currencies, depreciating by 2.7 percent against the pound sterling to an average of K8,879.12 per British pound and 1.7 percent against the South African rand to an average of K706.87 per rand.
The best place to start is the objectives given by Parliament to the PRA, namely the safety and soundness of firms that we supervise, the protection of insurance policyholders and our secondary objective in respect of competition, best described as requiring us to act in respect of the implications for competition of our own actions and inactions but only to the extent that we are not undermining our primary objectives. At the heart of what we do in the PRA is risk assessment. Understanding how firms take and manage risk, the controls they have and the quality of risk management, is at the heart of the job of a prudential supervisor. That’s what we do every day, and the standards of this work have been raised extensively since the crisis, which was very necessary. I never tire of saying that the PRA is a judgement-based supervisor, by which I mean the application of judgement against a framework of rules and regulation. As Mark Carney said recently in the context of the European Union, from which the largest part of our framework of rules and regulations comes: - “Ensuring the Bank of England has the instruments necessary to achieve its financial stability objective will depend on the EU continuing to have regulations of the highest standards, which strike the appropriate balance between harmonisation and flexibility, and which accommodate necessary national responsibilities, including for supervision”. Narrow rules-based approaches to regulation create inflexibility and can be easy to arbitrage.

The key challenge for all of us is to be able to boil the complexity down to understand what are the key drivers – which judgements are likely to matter when bad things happen in the tail of the distribution of risks. This is a description of one of the hardest things in many walks of life – how to explain complex things in simple terms. In the Bank of England, it is a challenge we face regularly in terms of  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  explaining complex areas of public policy – it’s the same issue for our judgements on monetary policy. So, let me put forward a proposition for Boards. It is the job of the Executive to be able to explain in simple and transparent terms these complex matters to Non-Executives. In doing so, you should understand the uncertainty around judgements, in what circumstances they could be wrong, and how there can reasonably be different ways to measure things like liquidity. Non-Executives should not be left to find the answers for themselves, and they should not feel that they have to do so out of a lack of sufficient confidence in what they are being told. In other words, they should not be pointed towards the haystack with warm wishes for the search ahead. Let me give an illustration of this in a highly topical area for banks and insurers, internal risk models. What does a Board need to understand?
This is an example of how the increasing global integration has made the preparation of current accounts in line with international statistical methods more vulnerable to distortions. The second distortion is attributable to our low rate of inflation. The estimated extent of the distortion is depicted by the blue bar in chart 5. Inflation, and thus nominal interest rates, are traditionally higher in other countries than they are in Switzerland. This means that Switzerland generates a higher nominal income on its foreign financial assets than foreign countries do on their financial assets in Switzerland. Switzerland is thus continuously earning positive net investment income as, first, we have a substantial net international investment 6  Reinvested earnings from portfolio investments are not included in the current account, in line with IMF guidelines. Page 8/13  position and, second, interest rates are higher because inflation is higher in other countries. However – and this is a significant point – this rise in the current account balance because of the higher inflation or interest rate differential does not lead to an increase in Switzerland’s net international investment position in the long term. Due to higher inflation abroad, the franc tends to appreciate nominally, which in turn reduces Switzerland’s net international investment position. The relationship between interest rates, inflation rates and exchange rates is referred to as the theory of interest rate parity. The higher nominal rates in other countries inflate the Swiss current account balance.

Page 5/13  Chart 4 shows the development of these surpluses and deficits as a percentage of global GDP over the past 20 years. Positive values represent a current account surplus; negative values a current account deficit. I would like to highlight trends in a few selected economies. Looking first at the countries which have a current account deficit, we see that the US is among them. It is represented by the blue section of the bar. The pink section denotes all the other current account deficits in the world. In 2016, this group comprised 106 countries. Let’s turn now to the countries that have a current account surplus. These are China, shown in red, Germany in orange, and Japan in green. Switzerland is depicted with a very small, dark blue bar. All other current account surpluses are aggregated in the light blue bar. This bar comprised 42 countries in 2016. The chart illustrates three facts. First, due to the small size of our country, the Swiss surplus is relatively insignificant in the global picture of current account balances. Switzerland’s contribution to global current account balances is small and did not play a role in the growth of global current account balances before the financial crisis. Second, the size and evolution of global current account balances is defined by four major economies. China, Germany, Japan and the US today make up almost half of global current account balances. The remaining 150 or so countries together make up the other half.
These achievements are important and they were hard won. We mustn’t take them for granted. But nor can we live in the past. So what are today’s challenges? I see these in three main areas: assessing current economic developments; effective communication; and understanding the new trends that will shape the future. (i)  Assessing current developments  Broadly speaking, the task for the MPC is to control inflationary pressure by ensuring that the level of aggregate demand in the economy is more or less in line with aggregate supply. The first and most basic challenge comes in translating this deceptively simple idea in to practice. It is hard enough to estimate how fast demand is growing now from incomplete, preliminary or just plain puzzling information. It is harder still, and even more important, to look ahead over the two or three year horizon relevant to setting interest rates. But that’s only part of the story. The rate at which demand can be allowed to rise without leading to an upturn in inflation depends both on how much spare capacity there is in the economy now and on factors that determine the future growth in supply, such as productivity and labour availability. And finally, we need to consider what effect our own actions will have on longer-term interest rates and through them on the wider economy. Inflation targeting provides a credible framework within which these complicated issues can be properly considered.

There are, however, some institutional responses that will take place if the Bank is not able to return the exchange rate back to its initial range, as defined by the mandate, without contributing to inflation or a deflationary recession. I will come back to this issue later in my speech. 1  BIS Review 101/2000  The base drift problem If the inflation rate in Norway deviates from the inflation rate in the euro countries, the nominal exchange rate will need to adjust over time. However, some of you may object that stabilising the Norwegian inflation rate at the level aimed at by the euro countries may not be sufficient to stabilise the nominal exchange rate. The reason is that inflation in both Norway and the euro countries will be subject to stochastic shocks. This means that even if the expected inflation rates in Norway and the euro countries were the same, the actual inflation rates would deviate. Technically speaking, the relative price levels will be subject to base drift, and so will the nominal exchange rate. Professor Larry Ball has discussed this in a paper on Norwegian monetary policy. Keeping the relative price level constant would require that we target the price level and not the inflation rate. However, in the 1920s Norway experienced that a policy aimed at achieving a specific level for the purchasing power of money led to substantial macroeconomic instability.