samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Lars Nyberg: The Baltic region in the shadow of the financial crisis Speech by Mr Lars Nyberg, Deputy Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at Intervalor and Baltic Property Trust, Stockholm, 9 September 2009. *  *  *  The global financial crisis has now been with us for over two years. It began in the summer of 2007 with anxiety about all the complicated credit instruments that had been issued using subprime US mortgages as collateral. However, the most acute phase of the crisis began almost exactly a year ago when the investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection. This was followed by such a rapid and extensive decline in liquidity in the international banking system that it led to a global financial crisis that also hit Sweden. The financial crisis accelerated and reinforced the economic downturn that had already begun. As a result, production around the world has fallen to an extent that we have not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The countries in the Baltic region, which are the subject of today's discussion, have also suffered. The Baltic states, that is Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, have been hit hardest by the crisis. As a couple of the Swedish banks dominate the Baltic banking system, this has had consequences here in Sweden too. Today, I intend to speak about how we at the Riksbank view the economic development of, and financial stability in, the Baltic region.

There were large savings deficits in both the private and public sectors and a high level of indebtedness in the private sector. The loans also gave rise to a growing currency crisis. In addition, increasing cost pressures gradually undermined the competitiveness of the three countries. When the global financial crisis broke out, economic growth in the Baltic states had already begun to decline. Declining growth and the large current account deficits led investors to begin reappraising the value of eastern European and central European assets. Capital inflows dried up, which made it more difficult to fund many projects and further reinforced the downturn in economic activity. The credit rating agencies downgraded the Baltic states, one after the other, which further aggrevated the shortage of capital. The lack of capital thus helped to reinforce the downturn in the same way that the surplus of capital once reinforced the dramatic upturn. There are some signs that the real economy in this part of the Baltic region has now begun to stabilise, but unfortunately the recovery may be a long, slow process. This is partly because external demand is still weak as a result of the global recession. Above all, however, it is because domestic demand is low due to the fact that the Baltic states are now carrying out so-called internal devaluations. This means that wages and other costs have been substantially reduced to restore competiveness and to counteract the serious weakening of public finances.
Perhaps the best-known example of cellular automata came several years later: Conway's “Game of Life” (Conway (1970)). In 1949, the emerging technique of Monte Carlo analysis was beginning to gain traction. A symposium organised and sponsored by the RAND Corporation – a spin-off of the US War Department – was the springboard for developing some of the first military applications of ABMs. What had once been simple board-and-dice based war games switched to computational ABMs during the 1960s, borrowing heavily on von Neumann’s cellular automata (Woodcock et al (1988)). These models have since been used to provide insights in a range of real-world military operations, past and present. They have been used to understand the dynamics of past battles, such as the operation of German U-boat battles (Champagne (2003)), Hill et al (2004)). And they have been used, typically secretly, to plan  3  See Metropolis and Ulam (1949). Metropolis reports that he came up with the name, but it was inspired by Ulam's uncle asking for money by claiming he “just had to go to Monte Carlo''. By 1949, they had written a paper together outlining the potential uses of this method including a chain-reaction with particles as Monte Carlo agents. 12  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  12  military strategies for current conflicts, with organisations such as the US Naval Research Laboratory and the US Air Force investing in ABM technology (Manheimer et al (1997)).

And, most striking of all, flows of information across agents and borders are occurring on an altogether different scale than at any time in the past. All of these trends increase the importance of taking seriously interactions between agents when modelling an economy’s dynamics. These benefits can perhaps best be illustrated by drawing out some of the key behavioural differences between ABM and mainstream macro-models. These differences should not be exaggerated: in practice, ABMs lie along a spectrum with micro-founded DSGE models at one end and statistical models at the other. But nor should they be overlooked. (a) Emergent Behaviour  In standard macro-models, system dynamics are fully defined by the distribution of shocks to the economy and the behavioural parameters determining how they ripple through the system. There is a classic Frisch/Slutsky impulse-propagation mechanism determining the economy’s fortunes. If the distribution of shocks and the parameters of the model are known and fixed, the dynamics of this system are well-defined and predictable. Complex systems, of which ABM are one example, do not in general have these properties. The Frisch/Slutsky decomposition is very unlikely to be stable, if it exists at all. The reason is that a complex system’s dynamics do not derive principally from disturbances arising outside the system but from interactions within the system. Dynamics are endogenously, not exogenously, driven. These feedback effects within the system may either amplify or dampen cycles.
Eva Srejber: A reunited Europe – the roles played by Sweden and the Riksbank Speech by Ms Eva Srejber, Second Deputy Governor of Sveriges Riksbank, to the Baltik Financial Network, Stockholm, 13 February 2002. *  *  *  Thank you for inviting me here to speak of and discuss this important subject with such a knowledgeable public. The enlargement will change Europe and Sweden and will also affect the Riksbank. For those of us in western Europe, this is an important opportunity to regain the right geographical, economic and historical perspectives. We talk about "eastern Europe", despite the fact that Prague and Ljubljana lie west of Stockholm, we forget that Riga and Tallinn are actually closer to Stockholm than Gothenburg. We often still have a mental curtain where the iron curtain once prevailed. Now this division will soon be at an end. A hundred million Europeans, who lived under a totalitarian Communist dictatorship for half a century, can now finally return to a single European community. The political dimension is undoubtedly the most important. The new community confirms democracy and thereby guarantees peace and stability throughout Europe, which will in turn provide a good foundation for growth and development. Today I intend to say a few words about an important facet of the EU enlargement, namely the economic consequences, which will affect the work of the Riksbank more directly.

But experiments conducted by both private firms and central banks must still prove that DLT can offer more benefits than existing technologies. Indeed, the potential advantages of DLT can also be obtained in other ways. Fast payment systems – such as the Eurosystem’s TIPS – prove that 24/7 instant payments do not require DLT. And questions about who can access central bank money for wholesale transactions, or which types of assets should be settled against central bank money, are unrelated to the technology used. Furthermore, automated and conditional payments can also be initiated through application programming interfaces (APIs). [7] Notably, there are initiatives that seek to improve wholesale transactions using conventional technologies. For example, interlinking existing systems could improve the efficiency of cross-currency transactions. [8] Where similar objectives could be achieved both with and without DLT, the costs and merits of each option should be compared before moving in either direction. And we need to consider the potential drawbacks of DLT. For example, the consensus mechanisms that some DLT networks use to validate transactions are inefficient, both from an environmental point of view – as they require large amounts of energy – and in terms of transaction speed and scalability. These concerns are most evident for permissionless[9] DLTs, such as bitcoin. Some permissioned DLTs are less energy-intensive but may still compare unfavourably to centralised infrastructures. Importantly, the governance of major DLT technologies and  networks is dominated by actors who are either unknown or based outside Europe, which raises concerns about strategic autonomy.
We should consider giving authorities a greater ability to provide direction on the use of liquidity management policies by fund managers. This applies both to exceptional circumstances – where authorities currently only have the option to suspend redemptions, which may be detrimental for investors searching for liquidity – and also to normal times to limit the build-up of vulnerabilities in the first place. Second, regulatory shortcomings regarding the use of leverage need to be further addressed. In particular, we need to make sure that authorities can make effective use of their existing ability to limit leverage for alternative investment funds where, so far, a major impediment has been the lack of clarity on how it should be applied in practice. And, third, the crisis has shown that the current regime for MMFs may be inadequate in certain aspects and that regulatory reform in this area could be needed to mitigate liquidity mismatches and reduce the risk of suspensions during periods of stress. This includes a review of the liquidity requirements for MMFs and their portfolio composition, especially for LVNAV funds given their vulnerability to liquidity shocks. Conclusion https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2020/html/ecb.sp201119_1~4a1ff0daf9.en.html  5/7  20/11/2020  COVID-19 and the liquidity crisis of non-banks: lessons for the future  All in all, and with this I would like to conclude, the market turmoil earlier this year suggests that structural fault lines in the non-bank financial sector continue to persist.

More than 30 Mainland and multinational conglomerates have told us that they are actively considering establishing or expanding their CTC operations in Hong Kong. These include many household names in energy, electricity generation and power grids, infrastructure operators, consumer goods and financiers. This is exciting news for Hong Kong’s treasury sector and its practitioners. We should expect increased treasury activities taking place here, bigger demand for a wide array of financial products, and importantly more promising career prospects for the treasury practitioners including our younger, aspiring professionals. If we succeed in attracting big corporates to use Hong Kong for their CTC functions, which I am confident that they will, it should also make it easier to convince them to locate their regional headquarters’ management activities in Hong Kong too. 7. Ladies and gentlemen, IFC is a brutally competitive business because moneys are highly mobile, and asset owners and managers will only congregate in places which provide the best services. For Hong Kong to maintain its competitive edge, we must take a two pronged approach. On the one hand, we must continue to strive to improve and excel in the underlying product, i.e. to be able to deliver the safest and most efficient services in banking and finance. On the other hand, we must continue to promote and market Hong Kong as the most sought after brand in financial services.
13 The Policy Normalization Principles and Plans indicates that all FOMC participants but one agreed that they did  not anticipate selling agency mortgage-backed securities as part of the normalization process, although limited sales might be warranted in the longer run to reduce or eliminate residual holdings, and that the timing and pace of any sales would be communicated to the public in advance. Portfolio projections released in July 2017 do not include sales of any type over the forecast horizon. 14 Statement Regarding Reinvestment in Treasury Securities and Agency Mortgage-Backed Securities, September  20, 2017. 15 See, for example, Sack, The SOMA Portfolio at $ Trillion, July 20, 2011, and Bernanke, The Economic  Outlook and Monetary Policy, August 27, 2010. 16 14 / 15  BIS central bankers' speeches  16 See Bonis, Ihrig and Wei, Projected Evolution of the SOMA Portfolio and the 10-year Treasury Term Premium  Effect, September 27, 2017. 17 Kandrac, The Costs of Quantitative Easing: Liquidity and Market Functioning Effects of Federal Reserve MBS  Purchases (2014). 18 The Treasury Borrowing Advisory Council considered this topic in its third-quarter 2017 meeting, including the  potential impact of changes in central bank policy abroad. See the August 1, 2017, presentation by TBAC to the U.S. Treasury. 19 In addition to these topics, we are following closely the potential for the decline in the balance sheet to affect  other aspects of the structure of financial markets or the banking industry.

In particular, there is evidence that the agency MBS market, due to the nature of its trading conventions, is prone to dislocation when market participants expect large transitions in central bank agency MBS flows.17 Such concerns can be self-fulfilling: if market participants are concerned that an abrupt shift in flow might be disruptive, they might, for example, withdraw from liquidity provision. An overly fast redemption flow of Treasuries could also create challenges in the government’s management of public debt auctions and result in communications challenges.18 A sustained portfolio runoff at an overly fast pace could also shrink the balance sheet so quickly that it impacts other aspects of monetary policy implementation. Rapid portfolio declines could have unforeseen impacts on overnight money markets, for example by creating significant shifts in dealers’ demand for overnight repo financing. We have seen such impacts in the past. During the Maturity Extension Program, the Federal Reserve sold substantial amounts of shorter-dated Treasuries. Some of these securities accumulated in dealers’ inventories, and secured financing rates rose a bit as dealers sought to finance these holdings. This sort of volatility did not, and would not now, pose a major problem to markets or policy implementation, but it is something worth avoiding if possible. Rapid portfolio runoff could also make it more likely that bank reserves become scarce unexpectedly or more quickly than policymakers had anticipated. Finally, overly fast portfolio runoff could introduce undesired noise into financial conditions.
Forecast refers to ages 15–74 Sources: Statistics Sweden and the Riksbank  BIS central bankers’ speeches  15  15. Unemployment gap Per cent 5  5  4  4  3  3  2  2  1  1  0  0  -1  -1  -2  -2  -3  -3  -4  -4 80  85  90  95  00  05  10  Note. Unemployment gap refers to the deviation between actual and long-term unemployment in Figure 14. Sources: Statistics Sweden and the Riksbank  16. Labour shortages Percentage of companies, seasonally-adjusted data 50  50 Labour shortages  45  Mean, 1996-2008  45  40  40  35  35  30  30  25  25  20  20  15  15  10  10  5  5 0  0 96  98  00  02  04  06  08  10  Source: National Institute of Economic Research  16  BIS central bankers’ speeches  17. Beveridge curve Per cent 0.6  0.5 2008  2011  Vacancy rate  0.4  2007 2001 2002  0.3  2006  2003 2004  2010  2005  0.2 2009  0.1  0.0 5.0  5.5  6.0  6.5  7.0 7.5 Unemployment  8.0  8.5  9.0  9.5  Note. Years indicate the first quarter of each year.

It is not yet possible to state with certainty that financial institutions could fund themselves without the support of capital controls and the declaration of a blanket deposit guarantee. In this context, it is critical to enhance the functioning of the financial markets, which are important for trading, funding, and risk diversification – particularly the foreign exchange and equity markets. It is also essential that financial institutions and other entities re-establish their access to foreign credit markets. A further task is to formulate policy regarding the nature, size, and international relations of the Icelandic financial system. It is no less important to formulate policy concerning the tools and institutional structure for financial stability: the financial crisis has taught us that assessing systemic risk is key, as are sound arrangements for the application of tools to mitigate it. The final crossroads is faced by economic policy, as a result of the changes I have described. In short, it can be said that the tasks at hand are shifting from the achievement of stability to promoting growth, and from crisis management to longer-term development. In terms of monetary policy, this can be seen in the Monetary Policy Committee’s shift of its bias from monetary easing to neutral. This does not mean that interest rates cannot be lowered further, but it does mean that because inflation appears to have hit bottom, economic recovery has begun, and the effective policy rate is closer to equilibrium than before, it is not as clear what direction upcoming interest rate decisions will take.
3  https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/future-finance Transforming data collection from the UK financial sector - Discussion Paper (bankofengland.co.uk) 5 Transforming data collection from the UK financial sector: a plan for 2021 and beyond | Bank of England 4  4  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  4  These common standards can improve all aspects of the data collection process: how firms first find the data we are asking for; how they merge and consolidate data sets from different internal sources; how they submit and we receive data; and how they and we can compare data points that have been provided to us. But, just as in the middle ages commonly adopted measurement standards had benefits far beyond cathedral building, so common data standards are about much more than just improved reporting. Standards are a key part of the soft infrastructure of the digital age. They make it easier to source, move and compare data. They can make a whole range of activities easier: better financial reporting, cheaper payments, and more accurate credit scoring so customers get the financial products that suit their needs. They can boost transparency and help customers choose between competing products in a more informed way. They can support newer innovations like artificial intelligence and machine learning methods. In short, they bring benefits throughout the financial sector. The example of the Legal Entity Identifier  Of course the development of common standards and identifiers, and a role for authorities in helping develop those standards, is far from new.

On the other hand, policies are possibly more short-term oriented and large policy errors more likely. Investors may therefore demand a higher risk premium. In direct democracies, the speed of reform is typically slower. Grid-locks are possible through referenda and therefore more common. On the other hand, political stability in direct democracies tends to be higher and economic policies typically have a more long-term orientation. As policy changes take more time to be introduced, the risk of large policy errors tends to be smaller. Over the long-term, investors appear to be willing to pay a premium for higher stability. Beyond differing parliamentary systems, our two countries’ political structures are organized along different principles. Whereas the political process in the United Kingdom can be broadly characterized as top down, Switzerland’s federalist structure implies a bottom-up political process with a great deal of political autonomy for our nearly 3000 communes and 26 cantons. It is interesting to note that there are at least some tentative signs of converging trends: In the United Kingdom, Tony Blair’s government has initiated constitutional reforms by establishing the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly in 1998 and by advancing the Regional Assemblies in England. In Switzerland, a number of centralization proposals are debated such as directly enhancing the power of the federal government or alternatively, merging a number of cantons with the aim of ending up with larger and fewer regional authorities.
These plans should identify actionable options that the firm can take in response to financial weakness that will restore the confidence of the firm’s counterparties in the firm without the need for extraordinary official sector support. Firms must also have disciplined processes that analyze the root causes of their problems and identify longer-term strategies that will need to be employed as other recovery options to restore capital and liquidity are being executed. And firms must support the viability of their contingency and recovery plans by implementing the internal governance necessary to develop, test, update and implement them credibly. There is also more work that we, as supervisors, can do to reduce the probability of failure and to incent firm managers to act well before resolution becomes necessary. We need to do more to create incentives to force banks to act sooner to steer away from impending icebergs – cut capital distributions earlier, raise new capital faster, restructure businesses sooner, and restructure senior management and boards of directors more radically when the firm is not performing well. For example, one approach might be to implement a long-term debt requirement in a way that enhances market discipline. Another reform would be to reduce the incentives of large, complex firms to rely on shortterm wholesale funding to finance longer-term, illiquid assets. Among other benefits, reducing a firm’s susceptibility to sudden runs associated with short-term wholesale funding will lengthen the “runway” for management to implement the strategic actions that would restore the firm to health.

Encik Abdul Rasheed Ghaffour: Optimal balance of paper and digital, cash and cashless; and next page for physical currency Welcoming address by Mr Encik Abdul Rasheed Ghaffour, Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia (Bank Negara Malaysia), at the Currency Conference 2017, Kuala Lumpur, 15 May 2017. * * * Mr Richard Haycock, Chairman, Currency Research, Fellow central bankers, Distinguished participants. A very good morning and a warm Selamat Datang to Malaysia. Paper lives on A lot has changed in the past 10 years. In May 2007, there was no such thing as a smartphone. Tablets did not exist, and the human race had not discovered the fast-expanding universe of mobile apps. Back then, we read the news by leafing through the pages of a large newspaper. We listened to music with CDs, and bought or rented DVDs to watch movies. Today, most of these are streamed through internet devices. When e-book sales increased by over 1,000% in the two years leading up to 2010, many questioned the future of the printed book. The bankruptcy of Borders in the United States the following year solidified these fears. Similarly, there has been much hype about the end of cash. This has been sparked by the rising use of e-payments and the recent proliferation of digital currencies in an increasingly virtual world. However, just as physical books continue to enjoy increasing sales, we have seen cash in circulation rise in many countries, quicker than their GDP growth for some.