samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Good progress is being made. The share of BAME and female staff below senior management in the Bank currently stands at 19% and 46%, respectively, compared to targets of 20% and 50%. At senior management, BAME and female representation is 5% and 31%, compared to targets of 13% and 35%.14 A wide array of initiatives are underway to ensure the Bank meets these targets. Other central banks have also made a further push towards improving their staff diversity, although few publish pay gaps. The ECB’s Executive Board introduced gender targets in 2013 in order to double the share of women in management by 2019. As of the end of 2018, 29% of management positions were held by women compared with a target of 35% for the end of 2019. For the most senior management roles the share was 22% against a target of 28% for the end of 2019. The ECB announced additional measures last  14  Carney (2019a) discusses diversity and inclusion in the Bank. Carney (2019b) notes that the Bank’s gender pay gap is lower than for most companies in the financial sector. 33  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  33  year. The Fed announced a Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan for 2016-19, aimed at fostering diversity in the organisation. In order to foster transparency and accountability, they report the composition of their employees by diversity statistics annually. Looking beyond central banks, the analysis presented here suggests some clear directions of travel.

25  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  25  Chart 21: Ethnicity pay gap Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition time series  Per cent  15 10 5 0 ‐5  Unaccounted for  Accounted for  ‐10  Ethnicity pay gap  ‐15 1997  1999  2001  2003  2005  2007  2009  2011  2013  2015  2017  2019  Source: ONS Labour Force Survey and Bank of England calculations. Note: A positive ethnicity pay gap in this chart indicates that ethnic minorities earn less than their white counterparts, whereas a negative ethnicity pay gap indicates that ethnic minorities earn more than their white counterparts. The decomposition also helps explain the otherwise puzzling finding of a larger ethnicity pay gap in London than elsewhere in the UK. That larger gap appears largely to reflect compositional effects. Once these are accounted for, the unexplained ethnicity pay gap in London, at 13 percentage points, is similar to the sample average, at just under 10 percentage points, and is about as persistent. An alternative, and more flexible, way of exploring the determinants of pay gaps is by using regression techniques. In our baseline regressions, we use the approach of Goldin (2014) to estimate gender and ethnicity pay gaps. Given the rich set of controls in our dataset, this offers robust estimates of conditional gender and ethnicity pay gaps. It also provides useful insights into the factors, individual and job-specific, most important for driving headline pay gaps.
It is as if their judgements were expected to be consistently instinctive rather than objectively based upon their individual, open-minded, assessment - reached after careful analysis - of the most recent information available at the particular time. As a result serious economic commentary seems - perhaps temporarily - to have ceded some ground to ornithomancy - which, as of course you know, is the ancient practice of divining the future by observing the behaviour of birds - especially their flight patterns! This I suspect contributed to the surprise reaction to last week’s further rise in interest rates - which proved once again that “Hell hath no fury like a wrong-footed financial commentator”! It should not have been such a great shock. In the Inflation Report which we published a month ago we set out the analysis as I have described it to you this evening, and we drew attention to the fact that the outlook for monetary policy remained finely balanced - as it has clearly been for some months. We drew attention also to the major uncertainties surrounding the central inflation projection. These uncertainties included both the level of the exchange rate and developments in the labour market. It was - as we explained in our press notice last Thursday - the subsequent “news” essentially on these fronts, and particularly the sharp acceleration in private sector earnings growth, that caused the Committee to conclude that the necessary slowdown in domestic demand growth had become more pressing.

The interest rate decision showed simply that what were always fine judgements changed with the facts - as I can assure you they will in future, in either direction. BIS Review 55/1998
3 In addition, agreements were entered into between central banks so that liquidity in different currencies could be provided across borders. Many banks were particularly in need of US dollar funding. After the failure of Lehman Brothers, the financial system became fully dependent on central bank funding. The situation required new instruments. Central banks supplied liquidity at longer maturities than normal and eased the collateral requirements for central bank loans. Many countries introduced government-guaranteed credit lines and swap lines for lending liquid securities – primarily government securities – against less liquid securities. In a number of countries, central banks have purchased both public and private bonds with longer maturities directly in the market. Private bonds have primarily been purchased with a view to improving liquidity and reducing bond premiums. The Government Bond Fund was also established for that purpose. Government bond purchases can influence long-term government bond yields and indirectly the interest rate on mortgage and corporate bonds and asset prices. Moreover, the Bank of England notes that the purchases increase the money supply, which can contribute to underpinning inflation expectations. It has not been relevant for Norges Bank to buy government bonds in the market. But we have also been highly active. As mentioned, we reduced the key policy rate from 15 September last year. We supplied substantial liquidity to the banks and eased the collateral requirements for loans. We entered into a credit agreement with the Federal Reserve and supplied US dollar liquidity to Norwegian banks.

Norges Bank, like other central banks in Europe, provided dollar liquidity to banks in periods. Banks’ access to funding at all but the shortest horizons has been very limited during the crisis. A key problem was that banks were heavily reliant on international market funding. When that source of funding seized up the Norwegian authorities had to intervene. Several instruments have been deployed. Loans have been offered at longer maturities than earlier, in some cases up to 2 and 3 years. The arrangement where banks and bank-owned mortgage companies can swap covered bonds (OMF) for government securities was introduced to facilitate banks’ access to medium-term and long-term funding, but also to ease money market conditions so that money market premiums could be reduced. In the mid-1980s Norwegian banks also relied heavily on foreign funding. In spring 1986 – following a sharp fall in oil prices – confidence in the Norwegian economy weakened and liquidity flowed out of the country, as was the case last autumn. Norges Bank had to purchase NOK and sell foreign exchange to maintain a fixed krone exchange rate. The krone liquidity that flowed into the foreign exchange market flowed back into Norges Bank as loans to the banks to avoid a liquidity crisis and a surge in money market rates. Bank lending continued to grow in 1986 and 1987, and in retrospect it might almost seem as though the central bank through its lending operations had played an active part in financing the credit boom.
Chairperson: The Bank of Zambia, in conjunction with the Bank Negara Malaysia (the Central Bank of Malaysia) is pleased and greatly honoured to co-host this pilot Financial Inclusion Advisers Conference. We have no doubt that this Conference will provide the necessary impetus to advance the frontiers of financial services provision to our people in the region. Ladies and Gentlemen: The genesis for this important forum goes back to the Langkawi International Dialogue, in 2007 at which the Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia proposed this initiative. The purpose was to bring together practitioners and regulators of microfinance to learn from each other on how to deepen and broaden financial services provision. The proposal was concretized at the Global Southern Africa International Dialogue under the CPTM SMART Partnership Movement, held here in Lusaka, in August 2008 following an agreement between the Bank of Zambia and Bank Negara Malaysia to conduct the first Financial Inclusion Advisers Programme in Zambia. Distinguished Guests and Participants: As you may know, the debate on financial inclusion has been going on for some time now. A common understanding arising from this debate is that financial exclusion has negative economic and social effects on society. For instance, lack of access to financial services tends to restrict the economic opportunities open to the poor and makes them vulnerable to adverse events. The absence of savings products in particular makes it difficult to build up capital.

BIS Review 46/2009  1  This Conference is therefore, aimed at enhancing financial inclusion by equipping practitioners and regulators with tools to promote financial literacy and to expand the provision of financial services. Chairperson: Allow me to give some highlights of the status of financial inclusion in Zambia. Like in many other developing countries, the financial sector in Zambia still faces a number of challenges. The joint IMF/World Bank, Financial Sector Assessment Programme (FSAP) Report of 2002, highlighted a number of these, including limited access to financial services by the rural and peri-urban population and doubtful sustainability of financial services in Zambia. In light of these findings, and in recognition of the strategic importance of the development of the financial sector in contributing to sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction, the Government of the Republic of Zambia developed and launched the Financial Sector Development Plan (FSDP) in 2004. The FSDP is a comprehensive five year strategy to build and strengthen the financial sector infrastructure to enable it to support economic diversification and sustainable growth. Under the FSDP, two important studies, namely, the FinScope™ Surveys of 2005 and 2007, on the demand for and supply of financial services in Zambia have been undertaken. These studies have augmented the earlier findings of the FSAP with respect to the key developmental challenges for the financial sector in Zambia.
Andrew G Haldane: The race to zero Speech by Mr Andrew G Haldane, Executive Director, Financial Stability, of the Bank of England, at the International Economic Association Sixteenth World Congress, Beijing, 8 July 2011. * * * 1. Introduction  Stock prices can go down as well as up. Never in financial history has this adage been more apt than on 6 May 2010. Then, the so-called “Flash Crash” sent shocks waves through global equity markets. The Dow Jones experienced its largest ever intraday point fall, losing $ trillion of market value in the space of half an hour. History is full of such fat-tailed falls in stocks. Was this just another to add to the list, perhaps compressed into a smaller time window? No. This one was different. For a time, equity prices of some of the world’s biggest companies were in freefall. They appeared to be in a race to zero. Peak to trough, Accenture shares fell by over 99%, from $ to $ At precisely the same time, shares in Sotheby’s rose three thousand-fold, from $ to $ These tails were not just fatter and faster. They wagged up as well as down. The Flash Crash left market participants, regulators and academics agog. More than one year on, they remain agog. There has been no shortage of potential explanations. These are as varied as they are many: from fat fingers to fat tails; from block trades to blocked lines; from high-speed traders to low-level abuse.

18 So when measured in clock time, prices changes will have thinner middles and fatter tails, just like a cauliflower, a coastline, or a cosmos. 19 Subsequent studies have shown that this clock time / volume time distinction helps explain equity price dynamics, especially at times of market stress. For example, Easley et al (2011) show that the distribution of price changes during the Flash Crash was highly non-normal in clock time, with fat tails and persistence. But in volume time, normal service – indeed, nearnormality – resumed. This fractal lens can be used to explain why market liquidity can evaporate in situations of market stress, amplifying small events across time, assets and markets. Fractal geometry tells us that what might start off as a snowflake has the potential to snowball. (a)  Behaviour of high frequency traders  HFT has had three key effects on markets. First, it has meant ever-larger volumes of trading have been compressed into ever-smaller chunks of time. Second, it has meant strategic behaviour among traders is occurring at ever-higher frequencies. Third, it is not just that the speed of strategic interaction has changed but also its nature. Yesterday, interaction was human-to-human. Today, it is machine-to-machine, algorithm-to-algorithm. For algorithms with the lifespan of a ladybird, this makes for rapid evolutionary adaptation. Cramming ever-larger volumes of strategic, adaptive trading into ever-smaller time intervals would, following Mandelbrot, tend to increase abnormalities in prices when measured in clock time. It will make for fatter, more persistent tails at ever-higher frequencies.
It is therefore understandable that when the reversal of capital inflows came, it caused the damaging financial turmoil that we have seen in a number of Asian economies. 10. Financial liberalization encourages greater financial intermediation, domestically and internationally, and this obviously is beneficial to economic growth and development. But clearly the risks arising from this worthy process must be identified and managed properly before the long term beneficial effects could be realized. The risks are, nevertheless, not well appreciated, simple as they may be, particularly with the benefit of hindsight. 11. There is, as always, credit risk. Yet it is such a common feature that undue exuberance on the part of investors would push price to earning ratios well beyond fundamentals. Bankers also fail to assess the impact of interest rate hikes on the value of collateral or on cash flows. The result is therefore the usual over exposure of investors and lenders to asset losses. Then there is maturity risk. To say that it is risky to finance illiquid non-tradables, such as property, with short term capital inflows is, I suppose, teaching grandmothers to suck eggs, particularly in this company, but this again has been a common feature underlying financial shocks, not just in Asia but also in other parts of the world. The same with currency risk. Many borrowers, in both the private and public sectors, were keen to borrow foreign currency funds to finance investments that do not generate sufficient foreign exchange to repay the debt. Such debts were also unhedged.

Our experience tells us that financial reform takes time and determination, and the ability to bite the bullet and bear the short-term pain. It is also very much a continuous process, with financial innovation creating new circumstances and presenting new challenges all the time. 14. I believe that we have successfully achieved this, which is the important reason why we have stood out as an oasis of calm, at least relatively speaking, in the storm of financial turmoil that is currently sweeping through the region and beyond. Some say that we are sticking out like a sore thumb, referring particularly to our fixed exchange rate link with the US dollar. I can of course respond to that by pointing to how well our linked exchange rate system, a currency board system that functions on auto-pilot, has worked. I can point to the supervisory efforts which have put our banking system on a very sound footing, and to our advanced financial infrastructure which has helped tremendously to contain and manage risks of a systemic nature. But many of you are, I am sure, already sick of my talking all the time, and may even dismiss what I say as trumpeting. I do not blame you. I am well aware of the possibility that over ten years of direct involvement in monetary reform in Hong Kong may have introduced a degree of bias in my views on the subject, which I have tried consciously to avoid. 15.
Potential workers are not counted as unemployed unless they are actively looking for work, so this relatively high rate of unemployment, in part, reflects the relative strength in labor force participation, as the City’s residents remain engaged and looking for work. In contrast, at the national level, the picture is quite different – job growth has been slower and proportionately more people have dropped out of the labor force. Perhaps surprisingly, while historically a key driver of the local economy, the finance sector has not been a leader in terms of job growth recently. Instead, employment in New York City’s finance sector and the securities industry specifically, has been essentially flat over the past two years. The city’s job gains in this expansion have been broad-based across other sectors, indicating a healthy diversification within the economy. Conditions in Brooklyn Now let’s focus on Brooklyn. The borough’s economy has been particularly strong in recent years. Compared with the other boroughs, Brooklyn has seen generally stronger job growth, a stronger housing market, and stronger trends in wage and salary earnings. This strength is exemplified by the transformation of industrial neighborhoods – such as DUMBO, Red Hook, Greenpoint, East Williamsburg, Gowanus and Bushwick – into increasingly diversified residential and commercial neighborhoods; and the recent development of the Atlantic Yards and Brooklyn Navy Yard. This changing landscape has helped spur economic activity which has created many new jobs in the borough.

Norges Bank’s estimates, which are based on the assumption that interest rates in Norway will increase gradually,1 show that the rise in house prices will slow until 2008 and then stabilise. As the chart illustrates, there is considerable uncertainty associated with such estimates and we may also experience that prices fall. Household wealth In recent years, higher house prices have resulted in increased housing wealth. There is considerable uncertainty associated with estimates for housing wealth, but a conservative estimate indicates that housing wealth is 11 per cent higher than household financial assets and more than 40 per cent higher than household debt. Household gross financial assets have also increased more than debt in recent years (measured in NOK). This financial buffer reduces some of the concern related to debt growth. Nonetheless, developments in saving are uncertain. Credit market statistics may indicate that saving has declined considerably and is now fairly low after adjusting for the fact that owners are ploughing huge profits back into their companies as equity capital. The national accounts present a picture of higher saving. Total debt is unevenly distributed Developments in assets and debt are, naturally, unevenly distributed among different groups of households. Compared with the 1980s, the debt burden has increased in low- and middle-income households (deciles 1-6), often younger households in the start-up phase. This partly reflects changes in the tax system. Before the tax reform in 1992, extensive borrowing was very profitable for individuals with high income.
A classic example is the tulipmania in the Netherlands, which ended in 1636 with the collapse of the market for tulip options. From the tulip crisis it is also clear that derivative instruments are not a recent innovation in financial markets. The world also saw numerous financial crises in the nineteenth century. As for the present century, what first comes to mind is the crisis in the wake of the stock-market crash in New York in 1929, with effects that left their mark on the global economy in the 1930s. There are various explanations for the Great Depression but it clearly involved widespread financial turbulence and the failure of many banks. In Sweden, too, there were serious bank crises in the early 1920s and ’30s; on both occasions they were accompanied by a deep economic depression and serious deflation. The drop in output and the price level reached two-digit figures before the problems could be overcome. In recent years the pace of financial market development has been rapid. As a result of innovations in communications and information technology, with the new instruments and methods they provide for risk management, the financial system is now more extensive and globalised than ever before. The system channels savings more effectively to those activities in the global economy that need them most. The rapid pace of financial developments and their internationalisation are a logical consequence of arrangements for the production and international exchange of goods and services in the world economy.

The competent parties must endeavour to find solutions that combine the necessary market regulation and supervision with the advantages inherent in capital mobility. A completely regulated market reduces capital flows and generates large fluctuations in market prices, leading in turn to welfare losses. But neither is a market without any common rules and supervision an ideal remedy. Operations in financial markets need some degree of supervision but this must not paralyse the potential for developments that can contribute to higher prosperity in the global economy. BIS Review 23/1999  8