samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
History is important In a study1 published by the LSE’s Financial Markets Group last year, Rosa Maria Lastra concludes that central banks are not “natural products” but products of history. She emphasises the special relationships whereby central banks have been consciously awarded privileges by governments, and have been expected to provide certain services and functions in return. This may seem a dubious process, like selling monopolies. But central banking, she kindly says, is not an “evil”: that comes as a relief to some of us. Though a product of history, and a creature favoured by the state, a central bank may serve useful economic goals in the pursuit of stable money and sound banking. While most of their functions could be fulfilled by a different public or private institution, central banks are today typically seen as convenient instruments for the conduct of both monetary policy and banking supervision. I agree with Dr Lastra’s conclusions. Moreover, central banks’ differing historical origins influence not only the tasks they carry out today, but also the way in which they think and operate. The Bank of England was established to lend money to the government; and though the Maastricht Treaty now prohibits any buying of British government debt by the Bank of England in the primary market, the Bank still manages government funding operations in an essentially agency capacity (and the present Governor first came to public prominence in this area!).

But these banks have been hit by a series of powerful shocks. (i) Monetary policy The first is the shift from centralised control of the economy to a market-based system. Instead of directing money to meet enterprises’ deficits - a job which required a large branch network and hordes of bureaucrats - the aim is to influence the behaviour of the economy by using indirect instruments of monetary policy to guide interest rates and the exchange rate, and to conduct the prudential supervision of the new commercial banks. But many of the bureaucrats find it difficult to work out which bits of information they need and how often, and prefer instead to demand a substantial volume of data without prioritisation. Some of the staff of eastern European central banks, used to passing on raw data which can be checked against enterprises’ targets, find it difficult to analyse information with the aim of learning something about the behaviour of markets, consumers or firms. The simple questions, “Why are we doing this?”, “What does this mean?” can be too hard to ask. New goals, however well-enshrined in the constitution and law, do not change culture overnight. BIS Review 33/1997  -5-  The second culture shock has been the move from a monobank to a two-tier banking system. The old system had two separate monetary circuits - one for cash (used mainly by individuals) and the other in transfers between bank accounts (used by enterprises).
In order to ensure that the national strategy is rapidly implemented, we rely on the Operational Committee, which I chair, and which is responsible for management and coordination. Our roadmap for 2017 is clear: during the first half of the year, operational objectives will be defined and available resources will be identified; and during the second half, a robust and effective assessment methodology will be developed. We are already actively working on introducing specific mechanisms for people in financial difficulty and students. To help those experiencing financial difficulties, we are working closely with social service providers to produce practical educational materials covering seven concrete subjects: budgeting, relationships with banks, credit, bank payment incidents, banking inclusion, overindebtedness and complaints. From June 2017, these materials will be made available to social workers and associations so that they can be used with people in financial difficulty. By the end of the year, the Banque de France's teams have planned to hold nearly 900 meetings to present in detail these educational materials, as well as the "mes questions d'argent" portal, to 14,000 social service providers. For students, in December 2016 the Ministry of Education set up a group of experts in which the Banque de France and the French Institute for Public Financial Education actively participate.

The Labuan IBFC's competitiveness will be further enhanced through a revision of the pricing structure pertaining to incorporation and maintenance fee charges. There will be an annual reviews and prices will be revised in response to competitive market developments. The Labuan IBFC will also leverage on the national strategy of the Malaysian Islamic Financial Centre by promoting Syariah-compliant trusts and foundation. These products will complement Islamic financial products and services already available in Kuala Lumpur. Efforts will also be taken to further develop Labuan's captive insurance business which has enjoyed commendable growth over the years. Conclusion Ladies and Gentlemen, The establishment of Labuan as an international offshore financial centre in 1990 was indeed a bold step in its time. We are now seeing the payoffs from this initiative. With the transformation of Labuan as an International Business and Financial Centre, our ambition will be taken further. The new name signals that Labuan is ready to take on the much broader and larger role. The new name also represents a commitment. A commitment for the future. To demonstrate this commitment, the Government and the regulators have put in place the supportive and enabling environment to promote a more connected and more cost effective environment. Continued initiatives will also be taken to remove any impediments and obstacles to a more efficient delivery system and to advance forward the Labuan IBFC. 2  BIS Review 10/2008  The responsibility for ensuring the ambitions of the Labuan IBFC to be realised, is however, a shared responsibility.
The most uncertain risks for general insurers tend to be in the policies they have written and therefore on the liability side of the balance sheet, not the asset side. On the other hand, life insurers tend to be more exposed to market (including credit spread) risk on their assets. And although they are less likely than a bank to have a liquidity mismatch, the risk management challenge for an insurer is to try to match the maturity between assets and liabilities (and hence manage their rate of return). That is particularly necessary for life insurers whose liabilities tend to extend well into the future i.e. tens of years for many products. From 1 January 2016 a new European-wide capital standard will come into force under the Solvency II directive. Solvency II is largely maximum harmonising and should establish a more level playing field between European insurers. In part it embodies some of the basic principles of the UK’s ICAS regime, being based on holding sufficient capital to meet an event of such severity that might happen only once in every 200 years. In other aspects it is different, most noticeably in that the UK has a “gone concern” regime – i.e. under ICAS firms hold sufficient capital to run off their liabilities. Solvency II is to be a “going concern” regime – firms have to hold an additional risk margin to allow their business to be transferred to a surviving entity.

The main point I want to make here is that, even though there are international agreements arising out of the alphabet soup of committees, most of these initiatives require detailed interpretation, rule-making and implementation by the PRA, even after transposition into EU or UK law. Since the PRA was created in April 2013 (to 30 September 2015), I count that the PRA has issued 70 consultation papers, 82 supervisory statements or updates thereof and 44 policy statements setting out final rules. The UK financial regulatory system is not solely about the PRA of course. Those firms that are authorised and supervised by the PRA are the banks, building societies, credit unions and major investment firms. Those firms are also regulated by the FCA for conduct matters. The remaining firms and persons within the regulatory perimeter of the financial system are then solo regulated by the FCA for prudential matters as well as conduct. The PRA and FCA arrangement is an example of the modern “twin peaks” model for financial regulation, pioneered in Australia in 1998, which separates out the prudential regulator – which covers the larger, more systemic firms – from the conduct regulator. That gives the latter a very long tail of small firms and financial advisors within its net. For comparison, the PRA authorises 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  some 1,700 firms and groups and has a budget for some 1,200 staff, plus support services from the wider Bank of England. The FCA regulates over 73,000 firms and employs over 3,000 staff.
Much has been done; however, looking at the bull’s-eye scorecard, I would argue, if anything, the FOMC has been less aggressive than the policy loss function calls for. And to me, in the current circumstances, accountability and optimal policy mean we should be maintaining a large degree of accommodation for some time. Policies that would instead place us on a slow glide path toward our targets undermine the credibility of our claim that we will do our job and meet mandated policy goals in a timely fashion. Timid policies would also increase the risk of progress being stymied along the way by adverse shocks that might hit before policy gaps are closed. The surest and quickest way to reach our objectives is to be aggressive. This means, too, that we must be willing to overshoot our targets in a manageable fashion. Such risks are optimal if the outcome of our policy actions implies smaller average deviations from our targets over the medium term. We should be willing to undertake such policies and clearly communicate our willingness to do so. References Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2013, “What are the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchases?,”(external) Current FAQs, December 19. Federal Open Market Committee, 2014a, press release(external), March 19. Federal Open Market Committee, 2014b, Transcript(external-pdf) of Janet Yellen press conference, March 19. Federal Open Market Committee, 2014c, “Statement on longer-run goals and monetary policy strategy,”(external-pdf) as amended January 28.

Today, low-inflation policies seem to enjoy high credibility in most countries, which is indicated in part by the fact that the rise in the oil price at least so far has had small effects on inflation expectations. The risk of an oil price rise spreading to wages and other prices in the economy is therefore also likely to be low. Furthermore, in the case of Sweden it should be added that inflation is rising from a low level and that agreements in the labour market have been settled for 2005 and 2006, further reducing the risk of contagion effects via the jobs market. To sum up: the fact that the increase in the oil price is partly a demand-driven phenomenon, that the dependency on oil has decreased and that inflation-targeting regimes enjoy high credibility suggests that the higher oil price should mainly be reflected in a temporary, limited rise in inflation and that the effects on the real economy should be fairly small. If this is correct, the general economic and inflationary developments are more significant for monetary policy than developments in the oil price. This brings me to a discussion of the broad outlook for the Swedish economy in the years ahead. Economic activity in Sweden Despite the Riksbank’s relatively optimistic outlook for the Swedish economy compared with other forecasters, we have gradually revised up our forecasts in the past year.
A regulatory framework that remains to be finalised With regard to banking regulation, the Commission presented its proposal at the end of October 2021 for the transposition into EU law of the international agreement of December 2017, which is a decisive step towards the finalisation of Basel III. The ACPR supports this proposal which takes full account of Europe’s specificities and allows sufficient time – until 2032 – to adapt to the new features of supervision. But I want to be very clear on this: the exemptions regarding housing loans or unrated businesses must absolutely remain temporary. Any temptation to make them more permanent would call into question our commitment, the international credibility of France and Europe. In response to certain surprising but recurrent claims from the banking industry, let  Page 5 of 8 me just re-state the obvious: in the past ten years, the regulatory framework has done nothing to hinder the sound, and even very broad, financing of the French economy; on the contrary, it has strengthened the resilience of the financial system, as became abundantly clear during the Covid crisis. We must not deviate or drag our feet: France and Europe have everything to gain from a stable and balanced Basel III; we shall strive to maintain this level international regulatory playing field, including in investment banking which is important for European sovereignty.

Presentation of the 2021 Annual Report of the Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de résolution (ACPR) Press conference, 31 May 2022  Speech by François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Banque de France Chairman of the ACPR  Press contact: Mark Deen (mark.deen@banque-france.fr). Page 1 of 8 Ladies and Gentlemen, I am very pleased to welcome you to our presentation of the Annual Report of the Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de résolution (ACPR – Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority), in the company of Jean-Paul Faugère, Vice-Chairman of the ACPR, Dominique Laboureix, Secretary General of the ACPR, and Alain Ménéménis, President of the Sanctions Committee. Last year was marked by a vigorous recovery of our economy, during which our financial sector proved particularly robust (I). 2022 should now see substantial advances on the regulatory front (II). However, the war in Ukraine is posing new risks to the financial sector, calling for heightened vigilance (III). In all these situations, the women and men of the ACPR have worked tirelessly to ensure that the French financial system remains resilient under all circumstances, providing adequate financing to the economy. I would like to extend my warm thanks to them. ** I. The strength of the French financial sector is more than ever an asset for our economy I shall start with just a short word on the situation for insurers, which Jean-Paul Faugère will go into in greater depth.
To the extent size is a proxy for productivity, this is also as we would expect.18 During expansions, more productive firms hire more, and lose fewer, of their workers than less productive firms (Charts 14a and 14b). Other patterns in the data less obviously fit the facts, however. Despite jobs flows picking up, pay growth has until reasonably recently remained slow and low. Meanwhile, productivity growth has remained 18  For example, Bernard et al (2014) and Wales et al (2018). 13  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  13  stubbornly subdued despite a seven-year jobs recovery. So has the jobs ladder broken? Have its rungs been removed? To understand these developments, it is useful to break the decade down into phases. Charts 14a and 14b: Hire and quit rates by firm size Hire rate  Quit rate  7%  2.5%  1.0%  Small firms (< 50 workers) Medium firms (50-499 workers) Large firms (500+ workers)  0.9%  6%  2.0%  0.8% 5%  0.7%  4%  0.6%  1.5%  0.5% 3% 2% 1%  0.4% Small firms (< 50 workers) - LHS  0.3%  Medium firms (50-499 workers) - RHS  0.2%  Large firms (500+ workers) - RHS  0.1%  0%  1.0%  0.5%  0.0%  0.0%  Sources: ONS LFS and Bank of England calculations. Notes: Charts show four-quarter moving average of hire and quit rates.

In case of remote payments, such as Internet payments, an additional requirement has been introduced for the so-called dynamic linking. It requires linking each transaction to a specific amount and a particular payee by sending one-time code messages by the payment service providers. The forthcoming review of the PSD 2 will provide a comprehensive assessment of the strong customer authentication impact on the level of payment fraud. New requirements are considered in order to reduce ‘social engineering’ and ‘phishing’ types of fraud, including a requirement to 1/2  BIS central bankers' speeches  match the payee’s name in the payment order with that of the account holder. Special emphasis will be placed on the prevention of instant payment fraud. Electronic identification and certificatebased solutions are explored as means of strong customer authentication. Recently, a special focus has been placed on re-defining and strengthening the oversight of the wider payment ecosystem. Specific steps in this aspect have been taken by the ECB with the draft of a single Eurosystem oversight framework for electronic payment instruments, schemes and arrangements (PISA framework), published last year. PISA framework aims to cover not only the traditional payment schemes and instruments (e.g. payment cards), but also innovative instruments, such as digital payment tokens backed by assets (e.g. stablecoins). Last September the European Commission published a Proposal for a Regulation on Markets in Crypto-assets (MiCA), which is currently under discussion.
Nobody could tell, at the outset, to what extent the introduction of the single currency would affect the functioning of the single market of goods and services, or the very nature of financial markets or price and wage-setting behaviour across the euro area. Indeed, times of institutional change are arguably times in which private expectations may fail to converge on a focal point. The widely-held assumption has been that the statistical patterns emerging from an aggregation of pre-EMU data may not reveal much about the structure of the new economic entity, and any inference drawn on its basis may - in extreme cases - even be misleading. This is all the more likely when we consider the fact that, as far as monetary and financial convergence in the future euro area was concerned, it was based upon a concept of “benchmarking”, namely convergence towards the best performers, which suggests that aggregation of the EMS data might be even less predictive. Such a situation has called for a cautious interpretation of model results and, even more importantly, for a broad information basis in order to cross-check the interpretation of various pieces of information. This implies a need for detailed and high-quality statistics for the euro area. The construction of a comprehensive statistical support has confronted the ECB with a number of practical issues, to which I now turn. Statistics for the euro area: achievements and outlook Over the past ten years, major progress has been achieved in developing statistics for the euro area.

Having such a system in place may lead over time to major progress in both the structural analysis of the euro area and the assessment of the current economic situation. Fully integrated sectoral accounts provide the ideal framework for analysing the structure of the economy and its changes over time as well as the propagation of shocks through the system. This helps to gain further insights into the monetary policy transmission mechanism and the relative importance of the various transmission channels. At the same time, monitoring a wide range of key indicators in a single macroeconomic accounting framework provides a coherent picture of the current economic situation. This is particularly important in the context of the ECB’s monetary policy strategy, which takes into account a broad range of indicators. Integrated financial and non-financial sector accounts provide a framework for analysing the link between the financial and the real economy - an issue notoriously difficult to analyse on the basis of the currently available analytical framework. An integrated system of quarterly sector accounts would also provide a powerful information basis for forecasting, allowing what is nearly impossible today, namely the integration of monetary and financial variables in macro-econometric models. Of course, many of these uses will only be possible once an integrated system of sectoral accounts has been available for quite a number of years and with an appropriate timeliness. But being forward-looking and developing visions is of great importance in the field of statistics.
But in another sense one can say that this is not the case, if the Riksbank – as an independent central bank – says that the purchases are made for monetary policy purposes. Monetary financing does not entail the purchases themselves. Under certain circumstances, purchases of government bonds can be monetary financing, but under other circumstances they are not. This is what makes it difficult to define the concept. It is important to understand that the Riksbank's government bond purchases do not mean that the state's costs of issuing bonds disappear. If the Riksbank purchases some of the government bond stock, then part of the state’s debt will be financed by private agents and another part by the Riksbank with central bank reserves. The state costs of the private part of the debt is the yield on the government bonds. The cost for the part the Riksbank has purchased is different however, and not as obvious. The state’s interest payments on the government bonds purchases by the Riksbank fall to the Riksbank. But the Riksbank is a public authority whose income and expenditure is a part of the state's total budget constraint. The interest the state pays to the Riksbank in other words falls to the state itself, the net cost to the state is therefore zero. However, the Riksbank pays interest – that is, the policy rate – on the central bank reserves that have financed the government bond purchases.

The state’s cost for the part of the debt the Riksbank has purchased is thus the policy rate. Economists usually say that the Riksbank’s purchases of government bonds are actually a maturity transformation of the state’s debts from 51 Central bank reserves are electronic central bank money that the banks hold in their accounts with the Riksbank. Central bank reserves are the money the banks have in accounts with the Riksbank overnight, but also the money the banks have invested in Riksbank Certificates with a particular maturity. The total of these investments comprises the banking system’s so-called liquidity surplus towards the Riksbank, which can also be called the banking system’s reserves with the Riksbank or just central bank reserves. 52 See also Vlieghe (2020). 21 [35]  long-term to very short term, as central bank reserves are a state debt with a very short maturity. In other words, the state pays a very short-term interest on the government bonds the Riksbank purchases, and a more long-term interest on the government bonds that private agents hold. In the cases where people are concerned about monetary financing, it is almost always a fear that government bond purchases will lead to rapidly rising inflation, or so called hyperinflation, as was the case in Zimbabwe and Venezuela not so long ago. But the Riksbank's and many other central banks’ government bond purchases have not led to this type of situation. Why is this? One explanation could be that the size of the purchases is important.