samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
This requires all actors – both at national and European level – to play their parts in line with their respective mandates as laid down in the EU Treaties. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  No monetary stimulus, indeed no fiscal stimulus, can be successful unless accompanied by the right structural policies – policies that foster potential growth and instil confidence. I would like to illustrate this argument by focusing on investment, which will also be discussed at the informal ECOFIN this weekend. Investment has been one of the great casualties of this crisis. The downturn in business investment in the euro area since 2008 has been much more severe than in earlier business cycles. From peak to trough, business investment decreased by around 20%, against 15% in the 1992 recession. The level of business investment in the euro area has only slightly improved since 2008, whereas in the US it is above its pre-crisis level. We will not see a sustainable recovery unless this changes. A decisive rise in investment is essential to bring inflation closer to where we would want to see it, to stimulate the economy, and to bring down unemployment. So what can we policy-makers do to revive investment? My main message today is that only if structural, fiscal and monetary policies go hand in hand will the euro area see investment return. Let me focus in particular on the decisive contribution which structural policies can make.

Strict laws govern such transactions;  3  BIS Review 53/2000  for instance, bank directors are jointly and severally liable to indemnify the bank for losses arising from unsecured loans to related companies. But problems will manifest themselves only in times of stress, as the Japanese and Korean experiences have shown. For the future, we need to restructure the banks’ participation in non-financial activities before potential vulnerabilities become actual problems. We have the luxury of acting now while the banks are sound; we must not delay or put off changes which are essential for their long-term wellbeing. The banking environment in Singapore will only become more open and competitive, and less forgiving of weaknesses or under-performance. Banks must concentrate on their core competencies and build strong and institutionalised management structures to compete in a globalised industry. Ultimately, their improved performance will benefit all depositors and shareholders, and strengthen the financial system as a whole. New structure The Government has therefore decided to require the local banking groups to segregate their financial and non-financial activities, and unwind the cross-shareholdings between the two. This will mean changes to their present corporate structures. These measures will apply to all local banks - OCBC, UOB and OUB, as well as DBS and KTB. There will be four key elements in the separation between the financial and non-financial entities: ownership, cross-shareholding, management, and name-sharing.
Chart 6: Change in firm-level productivity dispersion since 2001 Services (indexed)  Manufacturing (indexed) Index, 0=2001  Denmark Finland France Italy Japan Norway New Zealand UK  2001  2003  2005  Index, 0=2001  0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2  2007  2009  2011  2013  0.7  Denmark Finland France Italy Japan Norway New Zealand UK  0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2  0.1  0.1  0.0  0.0  -0.1  -0.1  -0.2 2015  2001  2003  2005  Year  2007  2009  2011  2013  -0.2 2015  Year  Sources: OECD and Berlingieri, Blanchenay and Criscuolo (2017); ONS Research Database and Bank calculations. Notes: Chart show log difference between 90th and 10th percentiles indexed to zero in 2001. UK data only available from 2002, so UK base year = 2002. 30  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  30  Chart 7: UK, Germany and France firm-level productivity (data for 2013) Percentage of firms 12 Expected value of productivity in country  UK  10  Germany 8 France 6  4  2  0 -220 -200 -180 -160 -140 -120 -100 -80 -60 -40 -20  0  20  40  60  80  100 120 140 160 180 200  Productivity (difference from expected value as a percentage of peer group median)  Sources: McKinsey and Orbis (2013). Notes: Data kindly provided by McKinsey Global Institute.

Banks with CDO exposure have already made full provisioning and recognized losses in line with IAS 39, and presently all sub-prime related CDOs have been unwound. Thai banks also have very low exposure to investment banks like Lehman Brothers and have no investment in US GSE securities. In all, total exposure of Thai banks to foreign investment is about 1.2 percent of total assets, about half of which are sovereign assets. Having said this, we are very mindful of the risk from second round effect of slowdown in global growth and domestic growth, which can affect credit, market, as well as liquidity risk. To handle this, the Bank of Thailand has been holding dialogue with top managements of banks to discuss financial stability outlook, and have conducted stress-test to ensure that banks are alert to these risks and are able to manage them to ensure adequate capital and liquidity. We will continue to hold candid and two-ways dialogues with all the banks operating here to ensure that we can manage these challenges and dynamics of the global turmoil. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to conclude with some lessons learned so far to increase our immune system going forward. First, growth must be based on strong macroeconomic foundation, with prudent fiscal and monetary policy, flexible policy options, and strong external positions.
It is not necessarily a case of assuming that one has succeeded in capturing all possible sequences of events in a balanced manner and then choosing the repo-rate path that provides the smallest deviations from the inflation target and a long-term sustainable development of employment during the forecast period. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  As my colleague Stephen Poloz at the Bank of Canada recently pointed out, the shaping of monetary policy is more a question of risk management than a precise feat of engineering. 3 If one takes the uncertainty seriously, and I think we have to do that, my assessment is that one should put particular emphasis on the really serious negative scenarios that we have the capacity to influence with monetary policy. One such risk that we have tried to take into account is that in a situation where macroprudential policy measures cannot manage all of the risks linked to household indebtedness, a low repo rate over a long period of time could aggravate and increase the probability of a domestic crisis caused by household indebtedness. Another risk that requires particular consideration is that a low inflation rate over a long period of time could make inflation expectations lose their connection to the inflation target. When I entered a reservation against the monetary policy decision in July this year, all of us Executive Board members agreed that the repo rate needed to be cut for inflation to rise. The difference concerned how much it should be cut.

This strategy of relaxing monetary policy once a bubble bursts certainly makes the creation of bubbles more likely. But while the mop-up strategy worked in some earlier episodes, it failed miserably during the biggest collapse in decades. I will return to this point below. In summary, financial fragility played a crucial role in explaining the origin and magnitude of the crisis. But financial fragility was related to poor regulation more than monetary policy. Having said this, it can be still argued that the original sin in this case was a “relaxation” (loosening) of their financial stability responsibilities by some central banks and the inability of the existing supervisory bodies to adequately monitor aggregate financial stability. 2  BIS Review 76/2010  The objectives of central banks Given the magnitude of the financial crisis we faced, there is always a discussion on whether the objectives of central banks were the right ones or if they should be changed. As I mentioned before, the financial crisis was mainly related to a poor implementation of a key task of central banking. Nevertheless, it will be useful for the ensuing discussion of the challenges of implementation of central bank tasks to evaluate first their current objectives. Should the objective of price stability be changed? Broadly speaking the answer is no. For a start, central banks need to retain a clear mandate for price stability. Inflation is costly and should be avoided, and this has to be done by the monetary authority.
The exact specification of the shocks in the illustrations can differ somewhat from one Report to another, but the shifts in the interest rate, and the corresponding scenarios for inflation and the output gap give an indication of how the Bank responds. The shifts are specified such that, if shocks of the same type and size should occur, the alternative interest rate path is the Bank’s best estimate of how the interest rate would be set in such a situation. In addition to presenting policy reactions to new developments, the Monetary Policy Report includes an account of the disturbances that have lead to a change in the interest rate  2  BIS Review 132/2008  forecast from the previous Report. For example, we see from Chart 3 that our interest rate forecast was revised upwards in Monetary Policy Report 2/08 published in June. The shocks contributing to this revision are illustrated in Chart 4. The black line is the difference between the current interest rate path and the path in the previous Report. The “interest rate account” is a technical model-based illustration of how the change in the interest rate forecast from the previous Report can be decomposed by different exogenous shocks to the model. The illustration shows how changes in the assessment of international and domestic economic variables as well as changes in shock processes have affected the interest rate path, and is based on our core forecasting model.

Sylvester Eijffinger and Petra Geraats 5 have constructed an index that combines the above five dimensions of transparency into a single metric, and they used it for comparing transparency for nine of the major central banks. Negriz Dincer and Barry Eichengreen 6 have extended this work and applied Eijffinger and Geraats’ index to 100 countries. Measured by this index, they found that in 2005 the three most transparent central banks were the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Riksbank and the Bank of England. Norges Bank was ranked as number 15. The reason why Norges Bank was ranked number 15 and not among the most transparent central banks is, according to Dincer and Eichengreen, the following: 7 1. Norges Bank’s monetary policy models were not public,  2.  the Bank does not publish quarterly economic forecasts, and  3.  we do not publish minutes and voting records from the monetary policy meetings of the Executive Board. As regards the publication of models, Dincer and Eichengreen’s claim is not correct, as we do publish our models (and we did so also in 2005). The lesson I have drawn from this is that central banks should have well designed webpages so that all relevant information is easy to find. Regarding the second reason – that we do not provide forecasts on a quarterly basis – I think this point is overemphasized. We used to publish Monetary Policy Reports (then called Inflation Reports) four times a year until 2001.
Why did we decide to inject further monetary stimulus into the economy? And how likely is it to be effective? We started quantitative easing in March 2009 in the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, as the UK economy was undergoing its deepest post-war contraction. Bank Rate was almost as low as it could go and further stimulus was necessary to put a floor under demand and get the economy growing again. All told we bought £ billion of gilts during that initial phase of quantitative easing. Quantitative easing essentially involves trading one liability of the state – gilts – for another – monetary claims on the Bank of England. We aim to buy mainly from non-bank private financial institutions, such as pension funds and insurance companies, not from the  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  banks, as is sometimes erroneously claimed 1. When we buy a gilt, we simply credit the bank account of the seller with an appropriate sum. If the seller were indifferent between holding the gilt and holding the associated bank deposit, that is where things would stop. But because deposits tend to yield less than gilts and assets such as corporate bonds and equities, the seller is likely to want to buy some other asset instead. The consequence is upward pressure on the prices of a whole range of assets, including corporate bonds and equities. That increases the availability, and reduces the cost, of finance to corporates.

A remarkable growth in trade However, in one area the figures show clearly how great the changeover has been: trade. Many who have not had the opportunity to study the former planned economies in central and eastern Europe believe that they, for historical reasons, are fairly closed and that their trade is relatively Russiaoriented. In actual fact, the candidate countries are among Europe's most open economies, with a larger percentage of trade in their GDP, and a larger percentage of this trade with EU countries, than many EU countries have themselves. The EU's trade with the 10 candidate countries is increasing more rapidly than that with any other geographical area in the world. During the period 1995-2000, i.e. in just five years, this trade has doubled. The percentage of intermediate goods (components) for western companies is growing, as is the percentage of goods with a high technology content. There are numerous examples of how eastern European companies are specialising to adapt to sophisticated co-operation with western European companies. Hungary is now competing with Ireland to attract the assembly of computers and cars, Estonia is a large sub-contractor to both Swedish clothing firms and to Ericsson, Nokia and their suppliers. st  Eastern Europe may be Europe's major opportunity at the beginning of the 21 century, after having trailed behind the USA in terms of growth at the end of the 1990s.
Many economists have long attempted to estimate this gain by looking at the extent to which fixed and relatively floating exchange rates affect trade and they have found a very small difference. However, a single currency is not the same as a fixed exchange rate. The practical and psychological differences are probably considerable. Professor Andrew K. Rose at Berkeley in the USA has, together with other economists, instead compared trade within monetary unions with the trade between countries without a monetary union, where he has made adjustments for such facts as monetary unions often share the same language, culture and regulatory framework. When Rose recently presented such a study for Sweden, his opinion was that the EMU could over the course of a few decades increase trade and integration by as much as 30-50 per cent. Rose himself admits that the figures are uncertain and other economists believe in much smaller trade gains. However, even the more cautious calculations indicate that the monetary union could provide considerable gains. For instance, Professor Torsten Persson estimates, using an alternative calculation of Rose's material, that the gains of a monetary union are only about one-fifth of what Rose claims. This would still involve a clear trade gain if the reasoning is applied to Sweden. Hopefully, the new debate stimulated by Rose's articles will lead to new insights in this very important field. What about the disadvantages? After all, giving up one's own currency also involves giving up a certain amount of one’s autonomy.

Some of the salient features of the Act, as can be read in the Consultative Paper prepared for this workshop are:   provisions to strengthen the legal basis, ownership and structure of Bank of Zambia as a modern central bank, as well as its primary objective;    provisions relating to adequate power and independence;    provisions relating to all aspects of the relationship between the Bank and Government structures;    institutional arrangements of the Bank including the appointment of governors, directors and auditors, internal budgets, reporting requirements, preservation of confidentiality and handling of possible offences;    adequate mechanisms for good governance and security of tenure for Governors;    measures to better manage and application of monetary policies, including the role of lender-of-last-resort, interest rate policies, exchange rate policies and Bank of Zambia’s involvement in money and foreign exchange markets;    creation of a Monetary Policy Committee; and    accountability to Government, Parliament and the Public. By tabling this draft Act before you the Stakeholders, the Bank of Zambia wants to maximise its consultative process by taking into account your views on this layman’s draft. We encourage constructive debate and assure you that your views will be taken into account before the draft is transmitted to our parent ministry, the Ministry of Finance and National Planning. The Ministry is responsible for initiating the legislative process that shall see this layman’s draft transformed into a Bill and tabled before Parliament for debate.
You have in this city and this region a combination of excellent cultural opportunities – both in music and in the visual arts – and a cosmopolitan milieu which is very cultivated. FOCUS: You come from Paris. Is Frankfurt not too provincial? Trichet: You will not be surprised if I tell you that Paris is unique! FOCUS: And Frankfurt? Trichet: When I arrived, I found I had underestimated three things. First, the range of cultural opportunities in the area. There are five opera houses within just 45 minutes of my flat: in Wiesbaden, Mainz, Darmstadt and Frankfurt. There are very few places in the world that can compete in this respect – perhaps New York, London and Paris. Second, the quality of what’s on offer is very high indeed. I was very impressed, for example, by the sculptures in the Messerschmidt exhibition at the Liebieghaus or the Picasso theatre sets exhibited at the Schirn. I hope that I will find time over the next few weeks to see the much-praised Botticelli exhibition at the Städel. Third, as I have said, people here are impressively cultivated, as I saw for myself when the ECB launched its own Cultural Days. FOCUS: What are the highlights of your work as a central bank president so far? Trichet: When Economic and Monetary Union began, many were sceptical about whether it would be successful or even possible.

By end 2008, savings in the stabilization fund (FRR) , totaled DA 4113 billion ( equivalent to $ billion);  •  domestically financing the economy’s large investments, in the context of excess saving rates over investment rates;  •  developing the bond segment of the financial market, with access limited to domestic investors;  •  Advancing the restructuring of the banking sector following failure and bankruptcy of small private banks which resulted in withdrawing their licences over 2003-2006 while compensating depositors through the Deposits Guarantee Fund. The strengthened macroeconomic stability, as evidenced by subdued inflation (4.4 % in 2008 despite the surge in world commodity prices) and a real exchange rate of the Dinar near its equilibrium level, as well as important foreign exchange reserves $ billion, by end 2008) and low external debt, have constituted sound safeguards against the inherent shocks of the current international financial crisis. In addition, indirect monetary policy instruments (deposit auctions, marginal deposit facility, …) have been successfully used to limit the impact of structural excess liquidity on inflation. Although the direct contagion impact of the international financial crisis on the Algerian banking system is limited, in view of its small exposure to international financial markets, increased attention is directed to further strengthening and preserving its soundness. In this regard, the required minimum capital for banks and financial institutions have recently been substantially increased to strengthen their resilience and increase their lending capacity.
Let me first touch upon some of the ongoing reforms and give you a better picture of what we could expect to benefit from them. Among various initiatives to upgrade legal infrastructure in Thailand, steps have been taken to put in place more efficient and more business-friendly laws and regulations. The new Licensing Facilitation Act will help streamline bureaucratic processes in obtaining a business license, registration and approval. The Business Security Act will help improve SMEs’ access to bank loans by allowing more  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  types of assets to be used as collaterals. The new Payment System Act will unify all related laws governing the payment system and lift its standards to international best practices. In addition, the law to reform the governance structure of state-owned enterprises is underway. The success of this reform will not only improve the performance and transparency of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), but also unlock the potential of our country’s strategic assets, create a more level playing field between SOEs and private businesses, and strengthen the country’s overall competitiveness. I believe that these developments have a great potential to improve administrative efficiency and make doing business in Thailand easier. The legal reform will be here to stay regardless of which political party comes into power after the next election. Moreover, with the introduction of changes in the Board of Investment’s criteria for investment privileges, the government has geared up its effort in promoting high value added industries.

So we must continue to nurture our ability to act together – which has again proven effective over the past year: we have managed to reduce our dependence on Russian pipeline gas by roughly 80%, and gas prices have now fallen back to levels below those seen before the invasion. In my remarks today, I will start by discussing current market developments and then proceed to outline our assessment of the euro area economy, before explaining our latest monetary policy decisions. I welcome the swift action and the decisions taken by the Swiss authorities. These actions were instrumental for restoring orderly market conditions and ensuring financial stability. We are monitoring market developments closely and stand ready to respond as necessary to preserve price stability and financial stability in the euro area. The euro area banking sector is resilient, with strong capital and liquidity positions. In any case, the ECB's policy toolkit is fully equipped to provide liquidity support to the euro area financial system if needed and to preserve the smooth transmission of monetary policy. Outlook for the euro area economy and the ECB's monetary policy  1/3  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  Let me now turn to the outlook for the euro area economy and monetary policy. Euro area activity stagnated in the fourth quarter of 2022, according to Eurostat's latest release. The outcome was slightly better than we had expected in December. However, private domestic demand fell sharply.