samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Aurelian exchanged good money for bad, and ordered the destruction of accounts drawn up in the devalued currency. In the long run the operation restored the value of money. But in the short run it caused hardship. Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, observed that “a temporary grievance of such a nature can scarcely excite and support a serious civil war”. Unfortunately, taking a different and more Keynesian view that in the long run we are all dead, the population at the time rose in insurrection. Many of them found that they were dead in the short run as well, with seven thousand soldiers and countless civilians perishing during the suppression of the uprising. So let us consider the costs of wealth redistributions arising from unanticipated deflation. Such redistributions can lower aggregate demand. Why? Since it is difficult either to borrow or insure against uncertain future employment and earnings opportunities, current assets act as a buffer stock to make it possible to smooth consumption in the face of shocks to future prospects. When net worth is small it is risky to run down the buffer stock even further, and so the marginal propensity to spend out of wealth is much higher for households with low net worth than for families whose assets comfortably exceed their liabilities. If significant numbers of debtors have little net worth - recent firsttime house-buyers with high debt-to-value ratios are a prime example - then an unanticipated deflation could cause a sharp fall in aggregate consumption spending.

6  BIS Review 68/2002  Chart 4 Cross-country relationship between level and variability of inflation  Note: Mean inflation is the total increase in the quarterly consumer price index, expressed as a four-quarter growth rate, over the indicated horizon ending in 1999 Q4. The variability of inflation is the coefficient of variation (standard deviation divided by the mean) of the gross inflation rate (ie 1 + growth rate) over the indicated horizon ending in 1999 Q4. Each panel covers the all the countries for which a consumer price index was available over the indicated horizon. The largest sample size is 144 (for the 5-year horizon), the smallest sample is 85 (for the 25-year horizon). Source: IMF International Financial Statistics, data item 64, and Bank of England calculations. BIS Review 68/2002  7  Chart 5 Inflation and relative price variability in the UK  Note: Inflation is the total increase in monthly RPIX over the period indicated, expressed as a 12-month growth rate. Relative price variability is the cross-sectional standard deviation of the monthly increases of 80 sub-components of the RPIX in each month. Data ends August 2002. Source: Bank of England calculations based on ONS data. So inflation makes it more difficult for firms and households to work out whether the prices of the products they buy and sell have changed relative to other goods, or whether there has been a change in the overall price level. Such confusion can lead firms to produce, at least temporarily, the wrong level of output.
13.12.2019  Welcome address Conference “Financial integration and inclusive development: A view from the Mediterranean Countries”/Banco de España e Instituto del Mediterráneo (IEMed) Pablo Hernández de Cos Governor  Good morning ladies and gentlemen, It is a great pleasure for me to welcome you all to this Conference on Financial integration and inclusive development: A view from the Mediterranean Countries, hosted by Banco de España and jointly organised with the European Institute of the Mediterranean (IEMed) and the support of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Let me start by thanking our colleagues from the European Institute of the Mediterranean and from the OECD for their cooperation in organising this Conference. The European Institute of the Mediterranean (IEMed), created in 1989 with the participation of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, the Government of the Autonomous Community of Cataluña, and the Barcelona City Council, incorporates a broad representation of civil society and is a leading institution in the analysis of Euro-Mediterranean relations. In accordance with the principles of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership's Barcelona Process, and with the objectives of the Union for the Mediterranean, the aim of the IEMed is to contribute to mutual understanding, exchange and cooperation between the different Mediterranean countries. And Banco de España is delighted to collaborate to this objective in the field of economic and financial relationships. Our second partner today, the OECD, is playing an invaluable role in the international arena to shape policies that are decisively contributing to the well-being for all.

At the very top end of the market, there are now over a hundred Michelin starred restaurants compared with less than thirty in my youth. The past decade has seen a huge investment in both hotels and visitor attractions. Three of the top five fee paying visitor attractions in the UK are less than five years old, with the wonderful London Eye now comfortably outstripping that doughty old trouper, the Tower of London. London doesn’t have it all its own way of course - the ground breaking Eden Project now comes in at a well deserved number three. Tourism has become more than good business. From the Welsh Valleys to the East end of London, it is increasingly seen as a catalyst for economic regeneration. With the success of the Manchester Commonwealth games, and Liverpool’s ambitious plans for 2008 as European City of Culture, not to mention London’s Olympic bid, there’s no shortage of high profile events and projects to provide inspiration for the future. Your industry is still a major employer, of course. You must provide more jobs than the NHS and the Armed Forces put together. I’d be the last person to underrate the importance of entry level and seasonal jobs; but you need highly skilled people too. So it’s good news that thousands of people are already on tourism and hospitality related FE and work based courses. Your new Sector Skills Council will provide an even sharper focus on defining and meeting your industry’s training needs.
In this vein, the Committee’s second report discussed some of the term rate alternatives, and development of proposals for a term reference rate was recently added to its mandate. In this regard, I would also encourage market participants, academics, and other interested parties to contribute to the effort to develop a term reference rate. Another key area of focus—further motivated by Andrew’s warning—is the development of fallback contract language in the event that LIBOR ceases to be published. The absence of such language creates the potential for large-scale disorder in global financial markets should LIBOR go away. Put simply, this is an unacceptable risk. The International Swap Dealers Association (ISDA) has been working on this issue for the derivatives market and is expected to issue a consultative document soon that should prove instrumental in making further progress. The ARRC has also been coordinating a similar effort across cash products of all types. The goal is to achieve consensus on a consistent approach across markets whenever feasible. Looking Ahead As I have noted previously, LIBOR continues to have significant shortcomings despite strengthened governance in recent years, and uncertainty about its future will only grow over time. This uncertainty reflects the limited liquidity underlying LIBOR and the corresponding legal risks I discussed earlier. But, I am also skeptical about whether LIBOR can ever be adequately transaction-based. As Andrew highlighted, there is no guarantee that LIBOR will continue to exist beyond December 2021.

***  Honourable Chairman, Honourable Members of the Committee, At the end of my presentation, I would like to assure you that the Bank of Albania will continue to be committed to complying with our legal objectives, and to implement our institutional duties and commitments. The perspectives on country’s development remain positive, yet challenges lie ahead. Addressing them requires the attention and the commitment of all policy makers and regulatory agencies in the country. The economy, the financial system and the Albanian public, as well as our domestic and international partners will continue to find in the Bank of Albania a reliable, professional and transparent partner. Thank you for your attention! 8/8  BIS central bankers' speeches
Drawing on insights from a range of disciplines, natural as well as social sciences, can provide a different perspective on individual behaviour and system-wide dynamics. In Shackle’s own work he drew liberally on a range of economic schools of thought, from Keynesian to Austrian, as well as history, philosophy and psychology (Shackle (1949, 1979)). 2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  2  Third is the importance of radical uncertainty. Shackle saw uncertainty about the future as fundamental to human decision-making and, thus, to the functioning of social systems (Shackle (1972)). Human imagination was a crucial frame for social progress (Shackle (1979)). This meant social systems were inherently unpredictable in their behaviour. Latterly, the importance of radical uncertainty in making sense of social systems has gained new traction (Taleb (2014), King (2016)). I wish to explore whether there are insights and techniques from other disciplines which better capture these features of economic systems and which thus hold promise when moving the economics profession forward. These approaches would still be considered heterodox in much of the profession even though, in many other fields, they would be considered entirely standard. One of the potential failings of the economics profession, I will argue, is that it may have borrowed too little from other disciplines - a methodological mono-culture. In keeping with this spirit, the title of my lecture is itself borrowed.

At the time, these damped oscillations seemed to match well the damped harmonic motion of DSGE models. A good crop today foretold of an only slightly less good crop tomorrow. Third, most striking of all, every one of these forecasts was not just wrong but spectacularly so. Few forecasters foresaw even a slight downturn in GDP in 2008 and none foresaw a recession. Yet we witnessed not just a recession but the largest since the 1930s. The one-year-ahead forecast error in 2008 was 8 percentage points. The crop failed and the result was economic famine. While forecasting performance has improved in the period since, there has a continued string of serially correlated errors, with the speed of the recovery consistently over-estimated (Chart 2). The average forecast error one-year-ahead has been consistently negative, averaging 0.5 percentage points per year. The average error two years ahead has been over one percentage point per year. At root, these were failures of models, methodologies and mono-cultures. It has been argued that these models were not designed to explain such extreme events. To quote Robert Lucas once more: “The charge is that the [..] forecasting model failed to predict the events of September 2008. Yet the simulations were not presented as assurance that no crisis would occur, but as a forecast of what could be expected conditional on a crisis not occurring” (Lucas (2009)).
However, experience tells us that increased interest rates are seldom enough to break the trend. Optimism can be such that investors are glad to pay the extra interest costs or to accept a correspondingly lower return on assets, as they are convinced that prices will continue to rise. For example, in Sweden in 1989, the direct yield requirement on the commercial property market lay at around 4 per cent, while a risk-free five-year government bond had a return of up to 12 per cent. So the market preferred an unsecured property asset to a covered bond with a return of 8 per cent more! No monetary policy can defeat that kind of optimism. Furthermore, it could be the case that inflation is low despite the strong economic development. If this is the case, monetary policy may need to become more expansionary to attain the inflation target, which, in turn, may fuel financial imbalances. During the years preceding the current crisis, increasing globalisation resulted in a heavy dampening of import prices, which pushed inflation down and contributed to an expansionary monetary policy in many countries. Monetary policy thus fuelled the bubble, rather than counteracting it. If a crisis becomes really serious, as is the case with the present crisis, the conditions for conducting monetary policy become very difficult. The situation became exacerbated when rising risk premiums increased the interest rates affecting households and companies. Falling inflation and inflationary expectations led real interest rates to increase even more.

But when the crisis came, capital was insufficient, forcing a number of governments to contribute tax revenues to prevent a collapse of the financial system. At present, intensive work is underway in various international forums, above all in the Basel Committee, to develop new regulations covering the amount of capital a bank must hold in relation to its commitments. Capital adequacy requirements will be placed on liquidity risks, which previously lay outside such regulations, but this is only one of many areas in which capital requirements will be strengthened. New forms for equity are also being discussed, for example bond loans that, in the event of a crisis – but without requiring the bank to cancel payments – can automatically be converted into contingent capital. Another problem has been that the supervisory structure, which has generally been concentrated around the individual banks, missed the risks building up in the financial system as a whole. One example of this has been the tremendous growth of credit derivatives over the last decade, which, together with the emergence of complicated and hard-to-value structured products, have been given much of the blame for causing the crisis to develop in such a serious direction. An immediate example for us is the lending in euro in the Baltic countries, whose exchange rates are tied to the euro, but where the fiscal policy framework, at least in a couple of countries, has turned out to be weak. This problem is also being discussed intensively in many places around the world.
Zamani Abdul Ghani: Significant trends surrounding the takaful industry Opening address by Mr Zamani Abdul Ghani, Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia, at The 3rd International Convention on Takaful and Retakaful, Kuala Lumpur, 29 August 2007. *  *  *  Bismillahirrahmanirrahim, Distinguished Speakers, Ladies and Gentlemen. Assalamualaikum w.r.t. and Good Morning. I am indeed very pleased to be here this morning to welcome you to Kuala Lumpur . Alhamdulillah, we have among us today distinguished market players, regulators, scholars as well as participants from many parts of the world, including Brunei, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Bangladesh, Sudan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Kuwait, Egypt, UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, Turkey and many others. On behalf of Bank Negara Malaysia, I wish to congratulate the Islamic Banking and Finance Institute Malaysia (IBFIM) and the Malaysian Takaful Association (MTA) for their efforts in organizing, for the third consecutive year, this International Convention on Takaful and Retakaful. Let me at the outset reiterate the importance of this Convention as a source of collaboration for ideas, sharing of knowledge and exchange of experiences for the continuous development and improvement of the takaful and retakaful industry. In few days time, on 31st of August, Malaysia is celebrating the 50th National Day and therefore, the organization of this 3rd Convention on Takaful and Retakaful is indeed very special. The convention and independence celebration have similarities in their core values. Both cherish the spirit of alliance, tolerance and togetherness.

And house prices and consumer confidence do seem to be closely correlated. So house prices may be a leading indicator of sentiment about the economy and hence of consumption and domestic demand. But, just like equities, house prices also reflect changes in real interest rates. Since long-term real interest rates have fallen from over 3½% to below 3% over the past year, it is not surprising that house, and other asset, prices have risen. Precisely because housing is an asset, its price is more volatile than most goods and services in the retail price index. As such, it is important to look at house price levels as well as at their rates of change. Although house prices have been rising quite rapidly over the past couple of years, they returned to the peak reached in the late 1980s only at the end of last year, and exceeded it for the first time in the first quarter of this year. That, of course, followed the sharp fall in house prices in the early 1990s - house prices fell by over 10% between 1990 and the end of 1992. For most families, apart from future earnings and pensions, their wealth is dominated by one asset and one liability. The asset is their home and the liability is the mortgage on it. But the difference between these two is sensitive to the state of the economy. In a low inflation world, house prices are likely to rise and fall whereas the mortgage liability is fixed in money terms.
It shed off 1.3% value against the euro and depreciated by 1.9% vis-à-vis the rand ending the quarter at an average of € and  8  Lusaka, Livingstone, Mfuwe and Ndola. 9  South Luangwa, Mosi-oa-Tunya, Lower Zambezi, Kafue, North Luangwa, Blue Lagoon. BIS Review 148/2010  9  K677.45/ZAR, respectively. The rate of depreciation against the pound sterling was relatively lower at 0.6% with the Kwacha trading at £ With regard to the volume of foreign exchange transactions, a total of $ million was exchanged in the domestic interbank market. From the rest of the market, commercial banks purchased a net of $ million compared to net sales of $ million the previous quarter. Similarly banks made net purchases of € million Euros during the review period. Conversely, banks’ net sales of the South African rand amounted to ZAR729.3 million, higher than ZAR645.3 million recorded in the second quarter. Transactions involving the pound sterling followed a similar trend, with commercial banks recording net sales of ₤2.5 million depicting a reduction over the previous quarter’s net sales of ₤1.7 million. Balance of payments Preliminary data show that Zambia’s overall balance of payments (BoP) recorded a surplus of US $ million during the third quarter of 2010 compared to a deficit of US $ million in the previous quarter. This was driven by the improvement in the performance of both the current account and the capital and financial account balances.

8  BIS Review 148/2010  During the quarter under review, production of clear beer by the monitored company increased by 26.7% to 223,607 hectolitres from 176,515 hectolitres the previous quarter Further, this output was 45.9% higher than the 153,220 hectolitres produced in the corresponding quarter of 2009. Output of soft drinks by the monitored company rose by 1.8% to 127,244.0 hectolitres from 124,944.0 hectolitres produced in the previous quarter. Moreover, this output level was 38.3% higher than 91,968.0 hectolitres produced in the corresponding quarter of 2009. Production of milk by the monitored company during the quarter under review rose by 4.2% to 7,830,878 litres from 7,510,227 litres produced in the second quarter of this year. However, this output was 1.2% lower than 7,924,054.0 litres of milk produced during the corresponding quarter of 2009. Tourism During the quarter under review, international arrivals at the country’s four international airports 8 were 124,244 passengers compared with 105,163 passengers in the second quarter of 2010. This was 20.7% higher than 102,918 passengers recorded during the same quarter in 2009. Livingstone and Mfuwe international airports, which are the major tourist destinations, accounted for 21,272 passengers and 241 passengers compared with 18,180 passengers and 269 passengers in the previous quarter, respectively. During the third quarter of 2010, tourist entries into the country’s national parks 9 were 25,244 compared with 13,737 in the previous quarter. Nevertheless, this was lower than 26,720 in the corresponding quarter of 2009.
Figure 8 MPR and expectations (percent) 9  9  7  7  8  8 6  6 5  5  4  4  3  3  2  2  1  1  0  0 07  08  09  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  MPR  First half June 2014 FBS  June 2014 EES  June 2014 MP2014 Report Forward June MPForward Report  Source: Central Bank of Chile. BIS central bankers’ speeches  11  Figure 9 Real housing prices  (base index: 2008 = 100)  150  150  140  140  130  130  120  120  110  110  100  100  90  90  80  80 02  03  04  05  06  07  CBCh (*)  08  09  10  11  12  13  14  CChC  CBCh RM (*)  (*) Preliminary results. Source: Central Bank of Chile (CBCh) based on data from the Internal Revenue Service (SII) and the Chilean Chamber of Construction (CChC).

This is patently unfair, and scrapping such 21 5/7  BIS central bankers' speeches  policies would help increase economic mobility. 21I really don’t see how our best universities can continue to justify this practice. Yes, fund-raising might suffer slightly over time—but I suspect the impact would be very small. More importantly, do we really want to encourage what is essentially a “donate to admit” policy at our major universities? Such an approach only preserves the status quo and constrains economic mobility. The research shows that upward mobility differs substantially across colleges. Ivy League schools are good at producing top earners, but, as I noted, they accept very few lower-income students, so their impact on income mobility is small. Meanwhile, other schools with economically diverse student bodies produce few high earners, and their impact is likewise small. Then there are certain schools—some of which can be found in the CUNY and California state systems—that manage to produce a large number of high earners from economically diverse student bodies. Learning exactly how they do it and how it can be replicated strikes me as a first-order question for further study. While I am distressed by the high and increasing levels of inequality and diminished mobility that our economy has delivered over the last several decades, I remain optimistic about the future. There is more attention now to inequality and low intergenerational mobility than I can recall at any time during my professional life.