samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Naturally, one cannot ascribe all success to the changeover in stabilisation policy – the general economic developments have also been favourable. But there is no doubt that the new regime with an inflation target for monetary policy has given a steadiness and stability to economic policy that was lacking before. There have also been significant developments in the monetary policy framework during the ten years or so since we have practised inflation targeting. As deputy governor during the years 1994 to 1998, I was involved during the first years when the course was set and the work on building up competence and analysis tools for the bank’s main tasks, monetary policy and financial stability, began. Other important tasks we were facing at that time were improving communications and increasing transparency, both internally and externally. Since my return to the bank at the beginning of this year, I have been able to note that these processes have continued since 1998. In many ways the Riksbank of today is a different bank from the one I left. The most fundamental change is that the Riksbank has gained increased independence in relation to the Swedish parliament since 1999 and it is now managed by an Executive Board consisting of six persons who make all of the strategic decisions. The price stability target has also been stipulated in the law text since 1999. The Riksbank’s monetary policy strategy has been developed and modified.

Be assured that I am committed to supporting the implementation of the National Strategy on Financial Education through such campaigns. Ladies and Gentlemen The World Savings Day celebrations would not be successful without recognising individual and organizational contributions towards improving financial literacy in Zambia. In this regard, awards will be presented under nine categories namely: 1. Exceptional individual contribution to financial education, 2. Outstanding theme interpretation; 3. Exceptional leadership in financial literacy; 4. Champions award; 5. Most innovative financial education programme; 6. Outstanding financial literacy footprint; 7. Exceptional financial literacy media outreach; 8. Outstanding initiative by an educator; and 9. Best savings product of the year. I am delighted to grace this year's World Savings Day award presentation and wish the nominated participants all the best. In conclusion, I would like to thank the organisers and stakeholders under our partnership arrangement, in particular, the Bankers Association of Zambia, Securities and Exchange Commission, Pensions and Insurance Authority, Rural Finance Expansion Programme and DSIK for their continued support to the World Savings Day celebrations every year. THANK YOU  3/4  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  4/4  BIS - Central bankers' speeches
From this perspective, it is easy to understand how the Spanish economy was subjected to singular pressure. The deterioration in its public finances was evident not only because the budget deficit had climbed to an excessive level, but also because of the rapid increase in the public debt ratio, despite the fact that general government debt remained substantially lower than that in other European economies facing similar pressures. But there were also other factors amplifying the vulnerability of the Spanish economy in such exceptional circumstances. Firstly, the dysfunctionalities of our labour market, which heightened the impact of the shock on employment, giving rise to a surge in the unemployment rate that called into question the possibility of reversing the course of public spending in the absence of reforms that would enable a significant and lasting reduction in unemployment. As I stated before this Committee a year ago, the viability of any credible budgetary consolidation strategy would require the adoption of labour market reforms providing for far-reaching change in employment behavioural patterns. At the same time, the Spanish economy’s high reliance on external funding made it particularly sensitive to any loss of confidence blocking access to such financial resources, in particular access for credit institutions, which channel the bulk of these resources to households and firms. All these factors contributed to the contagiousness of the sovereign debt crisis and to the serious external funding difficulties experienced from May to July.

In many ways, Asia has maximised its comparative advantage with international trade as a major source of growth over several decades. Economies were transformed from being driven by the traditional commodity based sector, to one that was driven by the manufacturing sector that produced goods for the increasingly affluent domestic markets and for the export market. This strategy and economic transformation in Asia has also been facilitated by the steady inflow of foreign direct investment into the region. Given the region's competitively-priced factors of production, combined with pro-business economic policies, global producers relocated their production bases to Asia. In terms of robustness, this model has survived several global slowdowns. Even in the face of the 1997-1998 Asian Financial Crisis, the affected countries recovered rapidly and resumed strong growth. The fundamental strength of the Asian economies has also been its economic flexibility to adjust to changing conditions. The challenge before us now is whether Asia, going forward, will rise to the new challenges that is being presented by the rapidly changing global environment in the aftermath of the current global economic and financial crisis. BIS Review 129/2009  1  While Asian financial systems have shown a high degree of resilience during this global financial crisis, most Asian economies have been markedly affected by the economic spillover effects of the crisis. By the second half of 2008, what was a “localised” financial crisis had spread to the rest of the world.
Our ambition will then be to make it clear that we have done so. By raising and lowering the steering interest rate - the repo rate - the Riksbank attempts to influence inflation. As it is so difficult to steer inflation in the short term, the Riksbank makes an assessment of developments for the coming 1-2 years. This is the period of time usually assumed necessary for an interest rate adjustment to work its way through the economy and have a full impact on the rate of price increase, i.e. inflation. The Riksbank uses a simple rule-of-thumb when shaping its monetary policy. If the total picture of inflation shows that it is expected to be above or below the target level, the steering interest rate is adjusted accordingly. There are four main factors in the analysis of future inflation that stand out as central to the shaping of monetary policy: the development of total resource utilisation, international price trends, the exchange rate and the general public’s inflation expectations. Inflationary pressure varies according to the demand situation and to changes in resource utilisation. The stronger the upturn in demand in relation to potential production, the greater the risk that prices and wages will rise rapidly and vice versa. This is why we who work in central banks around the world  BIS Review 12/2003  1  must analyse the picture of economic activity as a whole, despite the fact that inflation is our target variable.

But the crisis has left an important legacy: •  Money and financial markets remain excessively segmented. The monetary transmission mechanism is severely impaired and credit conditions are still very different across countries and sectors. •  Deleveraging in the banking sector still acts as an impediment to recovery and growth. Bank credit remains flat in the euro area as a whole, and SMEs’ financing is a major concern, especially in stressed countries, where the percentage of financially constrained but viable borrowers is estimated at 25% vs 1% in “core” countries. We are very aware that balance sheet repair is a prerequisite for credit to resume and for monetary policy to be efficient. So, we are addressing the problem as a priority. 1. We are building a safer and more robust system of financial intermediation. A major step has been the creation of a banking union that, as you all know, will delink bank and sovereign risks and ensure a harmonised and tough financial supervision. It is easy to underestimate this achievement. The idea was adopted less than two years ago. The Single Supervisory Mechanism is now up and running. There is no example in contemporary European history when so much has been achieved in so little time. 2. We have launched a tough and comprehensive AQR and subsequent stress tests that should be completed by the end of this year.
It is harder and less rewarding for an academic to formulate distortions – of which the real world has plenty – than to use tidy competitive models to explain important stylized facts with a minimum of new ingredients. Scientific advances and models help us think about and interpret the world; they provide us a way to think about specific problems, but their scope is limited. We must avoid the temptation of thinking that a theoretical simplification is a full description of reality. But we must also avoid the other extreme, which totally dismisses what theory teaches because “reality is much more complex”. This is true, but it does not imply that all we have learned is just a theoretical exercise without practical use in reality. Models must be taken realistically, recognizing that they capture at most a small portion of reality. As for the future, the current crisis will certainly provide material for many research studies that will try to figure out what failed and how to avoid making the same mistakes again. Still, I think it will be difficult to develop simple, manageable models that can make substantive progress in having a complete description of reality. Some interesting efforts will most likely be made, but it will not be easy for them to become part of the heart of macroeconomics, since they will be necessarily complex.

José De Gregorio: Macroeconomics, economists and the crisis Speech by Mr José De Gregorio, Governor of the Central Bank of Chile, at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Chilean Economy (SECHI), Antofagasta, 4 September 2009. I thank Luis Felipe Céspedes, Eduardo Engel, Pablo García and Mariana García for valuable comments. *  *  *  This is certainly a great opportunity to speak about a subject that has triggered more than a few reflections in me recently, and that was probably best said by Queen Elizabeth’s famous question, made when she was visiting the London School of Economics last year: Why did nobody notice it? As someone who has dedicated his professional life to academic activities and policy making, the question is surely unsettling. The current global financial crisis and recession, whose depth is unprecedented in recent decades, has cast doubts about the work of macroeconomists, the usefulness of their theories, and their capacity to anticipate and deal with crises. These are the issues I will discuss today. Macroeconomics Over the past few decades, macroeconomic theory has evolved, on the one hand, as a discipline whose purpose is solving problems similar to engineering, and, on the other hand, whose purpose is to explain phenomena embodied in economic reality, similar to science (Mankiw, 2006). In fact, macroeconomics was created to solve the problems of the Great Depression. In its beginnings, it was devoted to building large models to evaluate macroeconomic policies in the tradition of engineering.
The existence of cross-border institutions makes crisis management more challenging, as it necessitates close cooperation between central banks, supervisory authorities and finance ministries in different countries. With one global financial market, one could wish there were one supervisory authority, one liquidity provider and one public treasury with a common script for handling crisis situations. We are far from this point. At the recent Davos World Economic Forum the head of the BIS, Malcolm Knight, stated that the “major challenge” for regulators was “the Balkanisation of regulation – fragmented across market segments, across national jurisdictions and yet we want to have a global financial system.” 3 A single financial market is one of the EU’s objectives. Against the background of growing integration, crisis management has been moved up on the agenda within the EU. Norway is participating in extensive discussions on this topic under the auspices of the EEA agreement and in separate talks with the other Nordic countries. As an example, the Nordic central banks have agreed on a Memorandum of Understanding on crisis management that provides guidelines for information sharing and gathering, coordination of decision-making and so on. The surprisingly wide dispersion of the subprime crisis has led to calls for an international overseer charged with keeping a complete account of the financial flows and pipelines that transfer contagion across borders in order to provide an early warning system to identify emerging crises.

Even if our economies are slowing down, no recession lies on the horizon. Some lessons so far for the euro area The crisis is clearly not over and all the consequences of accumulated financial imbalances have not unravelled yet. However, after more than seven months, I think it is already possible to take stock of what we have learnt so far. My concluding remarks will draw tentative lessons along three main lines. 1. As regards liquidity management first, it should be emphasized that close cooperation between central banks, and notably between the ECB and the Fed has been crucial for dampening the effects of the protracted confidence crisis that has frozen up international money markets. Our coordinated actions with the Fed and other major central banks, notably to provide euro area resident banks with US dollars under swap agreements with the Fed, have clearly demonstrated our determination to act collectively to restore normal liquidity conditions in the interbank markets. Enhancing swift and complete information exchanges between central banks, and also between central banks and supervisors is certainly a continuing priority. I have to say that the French model of bank supervision, where the supervisors are inside the central bank, has shown once more its advantages in the current context. 2. As regards monetary policy, I want to stress that even a flexible policy – as inspired by risk management considerations à la Miskin – can only be implemented if needed when inflation expectations remain appropriately anchored to the central bank’s objective.
Scope for major differences, despite a common strategy Even if there is agreement on the strategy for monetary policy, there is, of course, considerable scope for differences in assessments of where the interest rate should be in each situation. In the first place, the Executive Board can make different assessments of the most probable price tendency. As we know, economics is not an exact science and forecasts of prices and growth potential always rest on many assessments of an enormous mass of information and correlations. Models can never capture the complexity of the economy and how people’s economic decisions interact and must therefore always be regarded as one of many aids in assessments. The Riksbank uses a lot of different approaches and indicators to make assessments. The focus of the Riksbank’s analysis has been until now on the real economy and how it affects price trends. In many areas, we have come further than other central banks, while we have not come so far as regards the analysis of different financial aggregates and their linkage with inflation and real demand. An endeavour has certainly been made to take into account information provided by the development of the quantity of money and growth of credit. However, we have not for instance developed methods that can give guidance as to the level of indebtedness and the quantity of money that is compatible with the long-term sustainable growth of the economy on the basis of the inflation target.

It takes time before an increased use of resources has an effect on price and pay increases! In the same way as it takes time to adjust inflation expectations downwards, there is inertia in shifting them upwards. This would mean that even if demand and production are higher than what is sustainable in the long-term, that this is not marked in price development before the use of resources has come under great strain. In the second place deregulations and increased competition can lead to consumer prices being dampened as a result of excess profits being forced down in previously sheltered industries. Initially, increased competition will perhaps primarily lead to redistribution of real incomes. In the somewhat longer term, productivity will also be improved. However, it is uncertain how quickly and to what extent potential growth will increase as a result of increased competition. If monetary policy assessments are based on an overoptimistic view of growth prospects and developments in consumer prices do not give any signals about this, this can lead to considerable imbalances being built up. Sooner or later, however, inflation will accelerate. When the scope for reduced profit margins as a result of deregulations and increased competition begins to be exhausted and demand pressure finally begins to be expressed in rising prices, there is a risk that price increases will be large and come quickly. Expectations of future growth prospects can then be abruptly interrupted. The consequences can be that demand drops if companies and households are then too highly indebted.
Furthermore, a QR Code payment system is safe and reliable since it was developed on existing payment infrastructures of banks and payment service providers such as PromptPay or credit and debit card infrastructures, which are highly secure, compliant with international standard and subject to regular examination. The forth is facilitating further innovations. This open infrastructure will lead to further development of various financial innovations in the future. E-Payment will not only facilitate payment flows but also provide solid foundation for SME’s financial data collection. Data from retail electronic payments can be effectively used to support credit granting, which will provides more alternatives for SME financing. Financial Institutions in many countries have started to provide information based lending instead of traditional collateral based lending. These four important criteria of QR Code will lead to an expansion of QR Code payment services to all merchants in our daily life such as department stores, fresh markets, coffee shops, and convenient stores. QR Code payment services are accessible for all type of merchants, including brick and mortar stores and e-Commerce. Moreover, it can easily be rolled out to various locations such as business districts, tourist destinations, or rural areas. To promote standardized QR Code payment, BOT has allowed banks and payment service providers to propose their projects for consideration in the central bank’s  4  Regulatory Sandbox.

Asset prices, on the other hand, display much greater volatility, and the collapse of property prices has created problems for some homeowners and financial institutions, despite presenting opportunities for others. Plainly, stability is preferable to volatility. But the plunge in prices has much more to do with the earlier exuberance, plus structural influences, such as growing cross-border integration, than with the exchange rate. Although the current deflation may undoubtedly be painful to some, before we rush to argue that deflation could be avoided if only we had a floating exchange rate, let's pause to reflect on the Japanese experience. At times, Japan experienced deflation accompanied by upward pressure on the yen, which only served to exacerbate the deflation. It may not be appropriate to draw too close an  BIS Review 17/2002  7  analogy, given the contrasting economic circumstances between the two economies, but it is worth noting that, with a fixed exchange rate, deflation, if it continues, eventually restores any lost competitiveness and will then bottom out (assuming no significant continuing deflation overseas). In other words, in the Hong Kong context the peg in effect sets upper and lower bounds to the inflation rate relative to the rate in the United States. In sum, the peg has certainly not been the only contributor to deflation, and such contribution as it has made, has probably not been severe. The presence of deflation does not itself make a compelling case for altering the exchange rate regime.
The extent and scale of the actions taken in the euro area since the spring of 2014 to address the risks of too low inflation have been unprecedented, covering four strategic lines: negative remuneration in the deposit facility; communication policy and the use of forward guidance; several programs aimed at restoring the bank lending channel of monetary transmission; and the program of quantitative easing that entails large scale purchases of private and public assets. Since October 2014, the size of the Eurosystem’s balance sheet has increased by 50 % up to € with the implementation of the Extended Asset Purchase Program, whereas the deposit facility rate, which is a key money market reference in the current context of excess liquidity, has remained in negative territory, reaching its lowest record at –0.40 % in March. The ECB has not been alone in the use of unconventional monetary tools once interest rates reached its effective floor. The Federal Reserve engaged in successive rounds of quantitative easing through asset purchase programs. All in all, the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve increased from 870 billion in September 2008 to more than 4.4 trillion, holding now more than 30 percent of the stock of outstanding Mortgage Backed Securities and nearly 25 % of outstanding Treasuries. The Bank of England also embarked in quantitative easing through purchases of public sector assets, and holds now almost 25 % of the total outstanding UK public debt.

This could provide scope for macroeconomic policies to support growth by implementing structural reforms. All in all, the current situation of the world economy is characterized by a high degree of uncertainty. Downward risks are more evident in emerging economies insofar markets maintain doubts about the strength of the Chinese economy, the behaviour of commodity prices and the course of monetary policy in the US. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  Euro area: recent developments and challenges ahead In the euro area, the prolonged period of subdued economic activity has taken its toll on the welfare of our societies as well as on confidence and the capabilities to recover soon a higher growth rate. Some rough numbers may help to illustrate the dimension of the challenges ahead. According to the Spring-2016 Economic Forecast by the European Commission (EC), the level of employment will reach that recorded in 2008 only by next year, and a similar comparison could be made in terms of the real GDP per capita. Long-term forecasts have been revised downwards in recent years – being potential growth now most likely closer to 1 % rather than to 2 % –, on account not only of demographic factors, but also the legacies of the crisis.