samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
On the basis of this figure, the scale of the recession in Spain appears to have been in line with global trends. However, taking into consideration the magnitude of the decline in domestic spending (8% over the same period), the intensity of job destruction (over 2 million jobs lost since employment was at a peak) and the rise in the numbers unemployed (over 4.5 million at the start of this year), it is clear there are singular factors involved in the contraction in Spain. These mirror the major imbalances built up during the expansionary phase – in particular, the excessive concentration of resources in the real estate sector and  2  BIS Review 86/2010  high private-sector debt – and the persistence of serious structural deficiencies in the functioning of the labour market. This series of factors has prompted a reduction in household spending, driven by the slowdown in income and the losses in wealth accumulated since the start of the crisis, and furthered by the deterioration in confidence and in expectations of future income, the tightening of lending standards and households’ perception of the need to restore health to their financial position. That explains the rapid increase in the household saving rate, which reached an alltime high in 2009 of close to 19%. The fall-off in household spending compounded the contraction in external demand and the highly adverse conditions for business investment, namely high uncertainty, a rise in the cost and availability of financing, and falling profits.

But openness is not only a requirement in itself but also a necessary condition for monetary policy to work. It does not work unless the Riksbank and the objective of our activities are supported and legitimated by the people. And this requires that we are open and clear. It should be easy to critically examine how monetary policy is conducted and how well we live up to our principles. Most people probably agree that the Riksbank’s openness has contributed to a good monetary policy debate in recent years. Openness and clarity contribute to monetary policy functioning better But it is not only democratic reasons that have led to the Riksbank and most other central banks becoming more open and clear. Another important reason is that we have quite simply regarded it as a means of more easily achieving our objective and of making monetary policy more efficient. There are three main aspects I would like to emphasise in this context: •  Firstly, it will be easier to communicate that the interest rate decisions made are really aimed at achieving low and stable inflation. This provides greater credibility and helps to anchor expectations around the target. It was an important reason why the Riksbank began to publish its inflation forecasts and other material on which decisions are based early on in the new inflation-targeting system.
Jean-Claude Trichet: ECB press conference – introductory statement Introductory statement by Mr Jean-Claude Trichet, President of the European Central Bank, and Mr Vítor Constâncio, Vice-President of the European Central Bank, Frankfurt am Main, 8 September 2011. *  *  *  Ladies and gentlemen, the Vice-President and I are very pleased to welcome you to our press conference. We will report on the outcome of today’s meeting of the Governing Council, which was also attended by Commissioner Rehn. Based on its regular economic and monetary analyses, the Governing Council decided to keep the key ECB interest rates unchanged. Inflation has remained elevated and is likely to stay above 2% over the months ahead before declining next year. At the same time, the underlying pace of monetary expansion continues to be moderate, while monetary liquidity remains ample. As expected, the pace of economic growth in the euro area decelerated in the second quarter, following strong growth in the first quarter. Looking ahead, we expect the euro area economy to grow moderately, subject to particularly high uncertainty and intensified downside risks. At the same time, short-term interest rates are low. While our monetary policy stance remains accommodative, some financing conditions have tightened. It remains essential for monetary policy to focus on its mandate of maintaining price stability over the medium term, thereby ensuring that recent price developments do not give rise to broad-based inflationary pressures. A very thorough analysis of all incoming data and developments over the period ahead is warranted.

Helping students, couples, retirees, to go about their financial decisions carefully and not just taking life as it comes, can really help improve your quality of life, not just for ourselves, but for our families and loved ones. 22. I encourage everyone who is here, to spend a little bit of time going through the exhibitions, which has been very well put together. So once again, thank you to everyone who has been a partner of MoneySENSE in helping Singaporeans, and let’s do more in future to help everyone have the basic lifeskills of financial management. Thank you very much. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches
•  We need to substantially simplify and consolidate the regulatory framework, to reduce the opportunity for regulatory arbitrage, not just in the mortgage market, but more broadly. •  We need to make the financial infrastructure more robust, particularly in the derivatives and repo markets, so that the system can better withstand the effects of default by a major participant. •  We need to redesign the set of liquidity facilities that we maintain in normal times, and in extremis, in the United States and across other major central banks. And these changes will have to come with a stronger set of incentives and requirements for the management of liquidity risk by financial institutions with access to central bank liquidity. •  And we need to make sure that the Federal Reserve has the mix of authority and responsibility to respond with adequate speed and force to the prospects of systemic threats to financial stability. Conclusion We look forward to working with the Congress and the Executive Branch to put in place a system of financial sector oversight and crisis management that works well in the context of a 21st-century financial system.

Bear Stearns and JPMorgan continued to negotiate changes to the merger agreement that would tighten the guarantee and provide the necessary certainty that the merger would be consummated. All the parties shared an overriding common interest: to move toward a successful merger and avoid the situation in which they found themselves on March 14. The extended Easter weekend saw intense sets of bilateral negotiations among the three parties. The deal, finally struck in the early morning hours on March 24, held benefits for all parties. That deal included a new, more precise guaranty from JPMorgan, which lifted the cloud of default risk that had been hanging over the transaction. Bear stockholders were to receive a higher share price. In addition to fixing the guaranty, JPMorgan gained assurance that its merger with Bear would take place. And the New York Fed obtained significant downside protection on the loan and a tighter guaranty on its exposure. The new Fed financing facility will be in place for a maximum of ten years, though it could be repaid earlier, at the discretion of the Fed. This is an important feature: the assets that are being pledged as collateral can be managed on a long-term basis so as to minimize the risks to the market and the risk of loss. They can be held or disposed of at any time over the next decade. A summary of Terms and Conditions is attached as Annex III.
It demolished any argument that disparities in credit processes and banking regulations across countries reflected differences in cultural and social norms, and that therefore harmonising regulations was misguided and futile. Everybody now acknowledges that the core principles of sound banking practices and banking regulation are universal. There should be due diligence in credit decisions. A banker should not lend unless he is highly confident that the loan will be repaid. The factors that affect the probability of default will differ across countries. But regardless of the country in which the bank operates, lending based on relationships or names without proper due diligence is simply unsound banking. More needs to be done to improve regulatory cooperation and harmonisation, to achieve the vision of "One Financial World". There are two elements of improvement. The first is a clearer distribution of responsibilities among regulators for prudential oversight of international financial institutions. The Basle Concordat lays out the allocation of responsibilities between parent and host supervisory authorities for banking institutions. But with the advent of the internet, and more generally globalised banking, it has become harder to pinpoint exactly where financial transactions are being carried out, and which supervisor has responsibility over them. In this environment, supervisors need to cooperate more closely with each other to ensure effective consolidated supervision of the institutions under their charge. The second element of improvement is the harmonisation of practices and standards across jurisdictions.

The General Court in Luxembourg held in its judgment in 20154 that it would be for the ECB to request the EU legislature to amend Article 22, should the ECB consider that having the power to regulate CCPs is necessary for the proper performance of its tasks under the Treaties. In particular, revising Article 22 is a necessary step for us to carry out the tasks foreseen under EMIR II. Considering the risks the ECB faces with regard to the implementation and transmission of its monetary policy, it is imperative that it be equipped with the necessary tools vis-à-vis CCPs, particularly in a crisis situation. I want to make clear that such measures would aim to address risks in a limited number of areas which are crucial for the implementation of the single monetary policy and the smooth operation of payment systems, which ultimately affect our primary objective of maintaining price stability as mandated by the Treaties. Areas of particular relevance from this perspective are liquidity arrangements, settlement processes, collateral, margins and interoperability arrangements. Let me add that such measures would only be triggered in the event of a clear threat to the conduct of our monetary policy, and would in no way encroach upon the prerogatives of CCP supervisors or the frameworks established by EU legislators. The ECB will act only within its competence, which is to formulate and implement the monetary policy of the euro area.
Agents have always been and will continue to be important agents, including agents of change in the insurance sector as they are uniquely positioned to read the pulse of customers. This change could involve the insurer-agent relationship and the balancing of customers’ interests. The time could be appropriate for general insurance agents to reorganise themselves into an industry 3/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  association that can effectively mobilise the power of collective action and enable the agents as a cohesive force to better serve customers’ interests. This will also put in place a foundation for the possibility of setting standards on conduct, education and self-regulation of individual agents. Cultivating a solid industry association is neither an easy nor a short-term task but the benefits are immense. The Bank remains optimistic that agents will continue to play a key role in Malaysia’s insurance industry, and will be crucial to take us to the next level. In all this, agents must not deviate from their raison d’etre, i.e. intermediating between the insurer and the customer. Ultimately, we all should recognize that it is the interests of the customers, which is at the heart of it. Jack Ma of Alibaba, aptly said it, “Customers should be number one.” The challenge presented upon you today, is to embrace the Digital Economy and not lose sight of this. On that note, let me once again thank PIAM for the opportunity to share some thoughts with you today and I wish you a productive convention ahead.

However, the recent reversal of past adverse supply shocks, if sustained, could spur confidence and support higher growth than currently expected. The continued resilience of the labour market, by bolstering household confidence and spending, could also lead to higher growth than anticipated. There are still significant upside risks to the inflation outlook. These include existing pipeline pressures that could send retail prices higher than expected in the near term. Moreover, Russia's war against Ukraine could again push up the costs of energy and food. A lasting rise in inflation expectations above our target, or higher than anticipated increases in wages or profit margins, could also drive inflation higher, including over the medium term. Recent negotiated wage agreements have added to the upside risks to inflation, especially if profit margins remain high. The downside risks include renewed financial market tensions, which could bring inflation down faster than projected. Weaker demand, due for example to a more marked slowing of bank lending or a stronger transmission of monetary policy, would also lead to lower price pressures than currently anticipated, especially over the medium term. Financial and monetary conditions The euro area banking sector has proved resilient in the face of the financial market tensions that arose ahead of our last meeting. Our policy rate increases are being transmitted strongly to risk-free interest rates and to the financing conditions for firms, households and banks. For firms and households, loan growth has weakened owing to higher borrowing rates, tighter credit supply conditions and lower demand.
The flipside is that market prices respond more to asset sales than they did, to draw in buyers in a short timeframe. 15  Post-crisis limits on bank leverage may be a driver of this. If so, then a generally lower level of market-making activity may be the price paid for greater resilience of systemic institutions and their critical activities. 16  The issue is not whether or not to row back on those regulatory standards, it’s to make sure the system adapts fully to corporate bond markets being generally less liquid and able to absorb asset sales. In that context, the second development is the growth in the share of corporate bonds held in open-ended mutual funds, particularly those offering the possibility of redemption at just one day’s notice. The share of corporate bonds held in open-ended funds in the UK and the Euro Area has increased by 70%, and in the United States by 150%. 17  The question here is whether structures with the shortest redemption notice periods could create a ‘first-redeemer advantage’ that encourages greater asset sales during market adjustments. Why might that be a possibility? Typically investors are offered the ‘net asset value’ (NAV) of the fund when they redeem. This is calculated on market prices for the assets held in the fund. But the market prices of some assets are based - implicitly - on their typical sale period rather than on the period the fund might need to sell them over.

(2015), suggest that the average cost of a financial crisis has been 73% of GDP, which translates to a cost of roughly £ 20,000 per capita if a financial crisis had taken place in 2016. 2 For example, Bunn and Rostom (2015) find that, during the financial crisis, highly indebted UK households, with loans four times larger than their income, reduced their consumption relative to income around three times more than UK households with loans between one or two times their income. 2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  2  So today I want to consider one of these next frontiers for macroprudential policy: market-based finance of companies. The nature of corporate finance has shifted decisively in the past decade. Since the crisis, nearly all net finance raised by private companies in the United Kingdom has been through the issuance of equity and bonds. Market-based finance has been the spare tyre to what was, after the crisis, a punctured banking system, unable to lend. The scale of businesses borrowing through issuing bonds is now on a par with their borrowing from UK banks. The shift in the balance of corporate finance should be a positive for stability. A more diverse system can be a safer system. The challenge for macroprudential policy is to ensure this source of finance develops sustainably and safely, so that its users can have confidence in the service they get from it, and the wider economy need not fear it. That challenge is not a distant one.
There are many indications that the significance of the emerging economies for Swedish exports will continue to increase in the period ahead. This is an example of an important gradual change that has taken place independently of the financial crisis and which will affect developments in the future. It could perhaps be said that the crisis has contributed towards shedding light upon the increased significance of the emerging economies, as these are now driving the recovery of the global economy. Interestingly enough, the composition of products in Sweden’s exports, which was a disadvantage for Sweden when the crisis erupted, has now been turned into an advantage. There is a natural explanation for this: just as purchases of goods of this type (large amounts of which are exported by Sweden) were easy to postpone, so are they also easy to resume. However, over the last year or so, the krona has appreciated considerably, reducing the impetus previously provided by the weakened exchange rate (see Slide 5). At the same time, exports are far from being the only part of the Swedish economy that has grown. Domestic demand in the form of consumption and investments has developed very  3  This was entirely in line with the Riksbank’s forecast from February, which also predicted GDP growth of 5.5 per cent for 2010. 4  The slide shows percentages of goods exports, which constitute about two-thirds of Sweden’s total exports. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  strongly.

All in all, the monetary policy stance suggests a gradual increase of the repo rate towards more normal levels (see Slide 12). This is a precondition for the balanced development of the Swedish economy. As I mentioned two days ago, housing prices and debts among households have increased heavily for a longer time. The rate of increase of household debts has far exceeded the rate of increase of incomes. If this development continues, imbalances may arise in the Swedish economy over the long term. Consequently, in this regards, the normalisation of the repo rate level may also contribute to promoting a stable economic development in the future. Even if the development of Sweden’s economy is favourable, it is naturally not risk-free. What risks can we see at present? Firstly, the krona may appreciate more than we had expected. The assessment we have made is that the krona, to a significant extent, already reflects the high growth rate of GDP and the strong state of public finances, for example. However, I would like to point out that forecasts of exchange rates are always associated with significant uncertainty. It cannot be ruled out that the favourable development of the Swedish economy has led many investors to reappraise their view of investing money in Sweden. So could an excessively strong exchange rate form a problem? Yes, it may form a “problem” in so far as demand for Swedish exports will decrease and inflation may not increase in line with expectations, as imported goods become cheaper.
It is something which we should continue to cherish and nurture, whether through facilitative economic policies or the educational system or whatever.

Over a period of time there may be marked shifts in relative income levels between different locations – hopefully as the living conditions of the poor advance more rapidly than those of the rich, although sadly there has been less evidence of that than one might have wished for – but there is no reason to expect the great cities of the world to sink out of sight. And if you add Hong Kong to that list, you will see the point I am trying to make. BIS Review 33/2001  1  I'm not sure whether anyone a quarter of a century ago accurately predicted how important a contribution the financial and business services sectors would now be making to the Hong Kong economy. Looking ahead, I am definitely reluctant myself to make any prediction about the mix of activity twenty-five years from now. Ask anyone involved in financial services what path for this particular sector in the years ahead would be best for Hong Kong and he would probably answer that continued expansion would of course be best. Ask the same question to a neutral economist and he would probably decline to commit himself, saying only that the optimal strategy would be to allow the forces of comparative advantage to play out. Whether that favours further development of the financial sector, or of something completely different, who can tell?
I say once a month, but we meet more frequently than that when needed, as we have done for example over the past few weeks. What are some of those threats as I speak here today? We are, of course, still working our way through the implications of the dreadful events in the United States last month. Uncertainty about the near-term outlook increased quite markedly following the attack, and this - together with the  BIS Review 83/2001  1  possibilities of supply-chain and market disruption, particularly in the US - contributed to some sharp adjustments in equity values. A number of sectors most closely affected by the terrorist attacks - in particular air travel and insurance - were badly hit. More recently, equities have rallied somewhat, suggesting that some of the earlier concerns may have been overdone. But the market is still clearly lower than it was at the start of September. These factors have potentially important implications for the inflationary outlook, and therefore for monetary policy. The Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee - in common with a number of other central banks around the world - reduced interest rates last month, citing in our press release the increased risks of a further slowdown in world growth. Interest rates were cut by a further quarter of a per cent following our meeting last week, and you will be able to read about our reasoning for this decision when the minutes are published on 17 October.

Having these in mind, I believe that Romania is in a good position to pursue disinflation by implementing such a framework. Most of the conditions required for a successful implementation of the inflation targeting framework in Romania have already been met: -  by year end 2004, inflation was brought down to single digit levels for the first time from 1990 onwards;  -  since 2004, the National Bank of Romania has benefited from full operational independence, as stipulated by Law No. 312 of June 28, 2004;  -  the success in disinflation over the recent years has strengthened the NBR’s credibility;  1  Frederic S. Mishkin, “What Should Central Banks Do?” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, vol. 82, #6 (November/December 2000): 1-13. BIS Review 28/2005  1  -  after five years of continuous development and adequate supervision, the financial sector can undoubtedly be considered sound and stable;  -  fiscal dominance is no longer an issue, witness the afore-mentioned legal independence of the National Bank, a relatively low public debt, as well as the increasingly consistent financial policies mix;  -  inflation targets have been set for the following years in cooperation with the government. The Pre-Accession Economic Programmes underline the commitment to attain these targets;  -  since 2002, an inflation report has been published on a half-yearly basis.