samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
  The dispersion of real GDP growth rates across euro area countries is comparable with the equivalent dispersion across U.S. states. For instance, the difference between the fastest and slowest-growing U.S. states is not of a markedly different order of magnitude as that between euro area countries.   Overall employment in the euro area increased by 14 million during the first twelve years, compared with a rise of about 8 million in the United States.   And the overall yearly public finance deficit in the euro area is presently about half that in the United States or in Japan. The IMF projects indeed the euro area’s fiscal deficit to reach 4.4% of GDP this year, against 10.8% of GDP in the U.S. and 10.0% in Japan. The euro’s international status is the outcome of market forces. But one of the particular characteristics of the euro’s international role is to be markedly regional and strongest in economies with close geographical and institutional links to the euro area. The euro’s international role also displays a high degree of stability. And the available factual evidence suggests that it has remained broadly unchanged since the outbreak of the global financial crisis, in particular. For instance, the euro accounted in 2010 for about one-quarter of disclosed foreign exchange reserves globally (against around 60% for the US dollar and 4% for the yen). It also accounted for about one-quarter of the stock of international debt securities and for roughly 20% of foreign exchange turnover.

At its next meeting, it is also time for the MPC to discuss the strategy for beginning to sell the gilts held in our Asset Purchase Facility portfolio. We will publish, alongside the Monetary Policy Report, more detail on how we will do this, to allow financial market participants to make the necessary preparations. This will ensure we have the option to commence a sales programme shortly after a confirmatory vote by the MPC, which could be as early as at our September meeting. Based on analysis conducted in conjunction with colleagues at the DMO, we are currently looking at a total reduction in the stock of gilts held by the APF, which covers both sales and gilt redemptions, of something in the region of £ in the first year. Our Market Intelligence suggests that’s broadly in line with what market participants are expecting. Let me end by going back to the plea that I be more cheerful. Lord Mayor, let me tell you about one thing that has made me most proud as Governor this year. Recently, the Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine, asked me if we had any spare armoured vehicles. He wanted to use them to support cash distribution around Ukraine. It so happened that we have stopped using our own transportation to move bank notes around this country, and our fleet of three vehicles was due to be taken out of service. Our staff immediately set about getting them ready, drove them to the Polish-Ukrainian border and handed them over.
However, independence does not mean isolation, which is why it is important for a dialogue between the central bank and the democratically elected institutions, as well as directly with the public at large, to be maintained. There is a third insight, which is related to the second. For independence to contribute to achieving a desired inflation target, it needs to be accompanied by a limited and clearly http://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2017/html/sp170330.en.html[03.04.2017 15:53:14]  Central bank independence revisited  defined mandate for the central bank. As I will explain in a greater detail when talking about accountability, a clear and limited mandate is necessary for the parliament and the public to be able to monitor and evaluate the performance of the central bank. But, apart from that, a clear and limited mandate also reflects the insight, dating back to Tinbergen[5] , that institutions must not be overburdened with multiple goals without having the appropriate instruments to achieve them. These economic insights contributed to the rationale for providing the ECB with a high level of independence, in view of the primary objective assigned to the ECB of maintaining price stability. This rationale has also been recognised by the CJEU, according to which this independence is not an end in itself but serves to shield the decision-making process of the ECB from short-term political pressures in order to enable it effectively to pursue the aim of price stability.

I think these goals are broadly shared by supervisors and banks alike, which suggests to me that the relationship between supervisors and banks does not always need to be adversarial. Indeed, a healthy dialogue helps this supervisory process to work well. For example, it is important that firms are proactive in revealing problems to their supervisors. And, individual institutions can certainly benefit from the horizontal perspective that supervisors bring to examinations. This perspective can highlight where the firm stands vis-à-vis best practices, or where there may be important vulnerabilities in its operations. Of course, there is an irreducible amount of tension built into this relationship, given that each party’s roles, interests, and responsibilities will not always coincide. Banks are naturally more sensitive to constraints on their profit opportunities or dividend policies and to the costs of regulation. They may also question how much protection is necessary—for example, how stringent the capital requirements or how severe stress testing assumptions should be. These are areas where I would expect perspectives to differ. Supervisors are principally focused on compliance with laws and regulations as well as issues of safety and soundness. They also bring to their work a perspective on financial stability that may not match the more narrow interests of the firm. For example, supervisors seek to address the externalities created by the failure of a systemically important firm by imposing higher capital and other requirements than the firm would likely select if left to its own devices.
At the same time, the ECB may apply more stringent measures than those envisaged at the national level, giving sufficient notice to the national designated authorities, which may raise objections for their consideration by the ECB. The design of the SSM’s governance arrangements was conditioned by the governance structure of the ECB, whose decision-making bodies are the Governing Council and the Executive Board, as set out in the TFEU and its Statute. With the two-fold aim of ensuring that the assumption of new supervisory competences by the ECB does not jeopardise its independence in the determination and implementation of monetary policy, and of allowing all national supervisors to participate in the ECB’s decision-making (given that prudential supervision is not the responsibility of central banks in all Member States and that national authorities are not represented in the Governing Council), the SSM Regulation established a new internal body, the Supervisory Board, responsible for planning and carrying out supervisory tasks. The Supervisory Board comprises a Chair (appointed for a non-renewable term of five years), a Vice-Chair (chosen from among the members of the ECB’s Executive Board), four ECB representatives and one representative from each national supervisor. It is currently made up of 27 members with voting rights: its Chair, its Vice-Chair,9 four ECB representatives and the representatives of the 21 NCAs of the participating Member States. In the case of Spain, the representative of the Banco de España, in its capacity as national supervisory authority, is the Deputy Governor.

- Separation of the supervisory function from the monetary policy function: officials shall respect the separation of the ECB’s specific tasks concerning policies relating to prudential supervision from its tasks relating to monetary policy, as well as other tasks. - Public appearances and public statements: officials shall carry out their duties and responsibilities as, and consider themselves in public appearances to be, representatives of a high-level ECB body. - Relations with interest groups: while maintaining the open, transparent and regular dialogue with representative associations and civil society required by the Treaty on European Union, officials shall at all times, and in particular in their interactions with interest groups, observe their independence and professional secrecy obligations, and the basic principles established in the Code of Conduct. - Declaration of Interests: officials shall on an annual basis submit to the Ethics Committee, for assessment and onward submission to the President, a signed Declaration of Interests which shall include information about the member’s previous occupational activity, private activities, official mandates and financial interests, as well as about the gainful occupational activity of their spouse or partner, that may raise conflict of interest concerns. - Conflicts of interest: officials shall avoid any situation which may raise conflict of interest concerns.
The passage of this Act is a win-win for small businesses as well as banks. The Bank of Thailand regulations on loan classification, provisioning requirement, and valuation guidelines have been issued to help banks adopt this new collateral regime. 4/5  BIS Central Banker's Speeches  Ultimately however, we would like to see Thailand moving from collateral-based lending towards cash-flow-based lending especially for small businesses with few or no eligible collaterals but otherwise viable prospects. In order to do so, we need to have sufficient data for credit risk enhancement and monitoring. In light of this objective, we are developing an industry-wide SME database from pooled bank data for banks to use for their planning and risk management. In addition, we are working with relevant parties to amend the Credit Bureau Act to expand its membership to players like Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lenders. These efforts would get along well with the government policy to expand the roles and coverage of Thai Credit Guarantee Corporation (TCG) to provide credit access for SMEs lacking collateral security. Ladies and Gentlemen. If we look beyond our domestic market, increasing regional integration brings numerous exciting business opportunities. Thailand’s strategic location at the heart of Mainland ASEAN along with close economic relations with our neighbors make us a natural candidate to become a regional connector of trade and financial services. We have offered many fronts to enhance such connectivity.

In the 2/5  BIS Central Banker's Speeches  former, we aim to provide an accommodative and stable macroeconomic and financial environment, so that the ongoing recovery is supported by ample liquidity and not interrupted by excessive volatility. In the latter role of development, we aim to put in place more efficient financial infrastructure in order to facilitate business activities and thereby enhancing their competitiveness. Let me elaborate on each role one by one. Recent experiences have demonstrated to us just how volatile the financial environment could be – both in terms of risks to economic growth and the policy responses that follow. Unfortunately, the journey ahead is paved with similar challenges, if not greater – financial stability risks and economic rebalance in China, the growing monetary policy divergence, the lower-for-longer interest rate policy and perhaps a more widespread use of unconventional measures by central banks of Advanced Economies. As a small open economy, we must therefore ensure that there is sufficient policy room to mitigate the potential adverse impacts or events that could unfold in the future. In this context, the Monetary Policy Committee’s  decision to maintain the policy interest rate should be viewed as a preference to preserve the limited policy space for rainy days ahead. The Monetary Policy Committee expected headline inflation to return to the target band later this year, while core inflation has stayed positive at around 0.8% since the beginning of this year.
In any event, you need to be rather confident that the potential tensions are indeed likely to be minor, or at least short-lived, because, if they do turn out to be serious, then you could be stuck either with a weak Euro - and more rather than less inflation, higher rather than lower interest rates over the medium-term, and exchange rate instability against outside currencies - or, if the European central bank is allowed to do its job in accordance with its statutes, you could be stuck with persistent stagnation and unemployment across the economically weaker parts of the Euro-area. It’s not enough, it seems to me, to shrug one’s shoulders and say “well, that’s what happens now anyway within individual countries”; at least within individual countries there are alternative adjustment mechanisms, in the form of labour mobility and fiscal redistribution, to moderate the tensions, which will be much less effective within the Euro-area. The architects of the Maastricht Treaty clearly knew all about the Beast, and they evidently shared my scepticism about it turning naturally into Prince Charming. The famous convergence criteria are there precisely in order to reduce the risks of tensions emerging after the start of the Euro. One can argue about how far they do in fact reduce the risks. But it would be a reckless gamble to charge ahead if even those criteria were not met - sustainably, and in substance rather than just in form. So there needs to be a serious debate.

Let me note, in passing, that those problems unfortunately were not specific to the Euro area. Public debt jumped by around 30% of GDP in UK and in US. Structural deficits in those countries stand at similar or higher levels than those in most parts of the Euro area. Overall, the crisis has put into light major deficiencies in the implementation of fiscal discipline and, more generally, in the economic governance of the Euro area. It is indeed demanding to operate a single currency with multiple fiscal and structural national policies. Given the insufficient of market discipline, the founders of the Euro had seen the problem and put in place the Growth and Stability Pact. The principles were sound. The framework was adequate. The implementation has been extremely weak. Bluntly speaking, peer pressure failed to ensure consistent and rigorous respect of the principles which had been agreed upon. It was, and remains necessary to make a “quantum leap” in economic governance. What did we do ? The governments are now trying to address those deficiencies. Significant progress has been made over the past year. At the national level, all Member States have embarked upon credible public finance consolidation plans that are already bearing fruit. At the EU level, a new framework has been agreed upon. The first pillar is a strengthening of the SGP with a much stronger preventive arm. Surveillance over budgetary policies has been reinforced with a more effective prevention/correction of excessive deficits.
Today I will talk about the surveys of households and market participants we conduct: the Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE), the Survey of Primary Dealers (SPD), and the Survey of Market Participants (SMP). These surveys highlight the innovative and cutting-edge research conducted at the New York Fed and represent the culmination of the Bank’s decade-long investment in the collection of better policy-relevant expectations data. As I will now explain, much of this investment has been directed toward introducing probabilistic survey questions, but we have also learned other important lessons about question design and survey mode, particularly regarding the measurement of inflation expectations which I will also discuss. In some cases such as results of the SPD and SMP the underlying probabilistic nature of survey questions is immediately apparent, in the case of the SCE as I will describe the underlying probabilistic question is not so apparent for many of the results. 4  Data on subjective expectations can also be used to improve the efficiency of model parameter estimates, refine posterior estimates of agents’ unobserved types, and help researchers estimate latent variables in macroeconomic models. 5  Of course it is also possible that survey respondents have beliefs that do not satisfy these conditions. I will discuss some evidence on this. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Why use probabilistic survey questions? A key feature of the New York Fed surveys is their focus on collecting rich quantitative data on subjective expectations.

It is, therefore, imperative for developers to adjust their product offerings and consider bringing their costs down. One of the ways would be to seriously explore leveraging on more advanced and cost-efficient construction technology, such as Industrialised Building System (IBS). As cost of construction remains one of the major determinants of house prices, increasing efficiency and lowering costs can lead to a more inclusive housing market. Beyond considerations for price points that reflect greater affordability for the buyer, developers also have the responsibility to build houses that cater to the modern needs of the public. Aspects of quality, sufficient amenities and safety must be considered as critical elements of modern living. Financial institutions also play an important role in the housing market through the provision of financing. The effective intermediation role of financial institutions is equally critical for a wellfunctioning housing market. In the provision of financing, financial institutions need to ensure that they lend responsibly to those who are deserving, capable and able to repay. Financial institutions need to protect the public interest by ensuring that buyers do not borrow beyond their means and fall into financial hardship. To this end, the financial institutions should also continue to provide effective and transformative financial services to ensure that society at large would benefit and thus, improve their quality of life. I take note that there are a few interesting sessions during this conference related to innovations in finance, including one on fintech.
For example, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand will in an extraordinary situation with a very sharp rise in asset prices consider extending the horizon for achieving the inflation target in order to dampen developments in asset prices. The purpose of this is to reduce the risk of a serious economic downturn at a later time. In Norway, we have flexible inflation targeting. We have chosen to incorporate assessments of financial stability in the interest rate decisions. This is primarily because developments in financial balances affect inflation and output over time. Through its work on financial stability, Norges Bank gathers information about the financial strength of the financial system and the financial position of households and the corporate sector. This information is useful in connection with monetary policy decisions. Integrating the objective of financial stability into monetary policy ensures that we are giving adequate attention to risks in the financial system. But it is important to remember that we have only one monetary policy instrument, the interest rate. Monetary policy should continue to focus on price stability. In the light of the experiences of different countries in the last 10-15 years, I am confident that flexible inflation targeting provides us with a sound framework for performing this task. 11 “Asset price ‘bubbles’ and monetary policy”. Remarks before the New York Chapter of the National Association of Business Economics, New York, 15 October. 12 Issing, Otmar (2003), “Monetary and Financial Stability: Is there a Trade-off?” Speech at the conference “Monetary stability, financial stability and the business cycle”.

In 1995 and 1996, however, the growth of real wages, which - if aggregated over all sectors - was faster than the increase in productivity, became one of the potential inflationary dangers. The nominal anchor of the fixed exchange rate played an important role in the relatively good Czech results in fighting inflation. Instead of repeated smaller devaluations as in Poland or Hungary, the Czech Republic used a combination of a large initial devaluation and a subsequently fixed nominal exchange rate. In 1990 - before the start of the full transformation programme - the currency was devalued by more than 50%. That subsequently enabled us to keep the nominal exchange rate stable for five years. After the introduction of a wider 7.5% fluctuation band in 1996, the exchange rate is within the band. Transformation involved so much fundamental change that its start inevitably led to an initial fall of output and GDP. However, part of the former higher output level was simply feeding the enormous waste which went on throughout the command economy. In 1993, GDP stagnated partly due to the split-up of Czechoslovakia. Economic growth was resumed in the Czech Republic in 1994 and continued in 1995 and 1996 as a fast growth period. Unemployment has been kept low during the whole transformation period, thanks mainly to the rapid emergence of new private firms, and a large shift of labour into the previously underdeveloped service sector.