samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Meanwhile, during 2016, Sri Lanka entered into a three year  Sri Lanka's external trade performance  Extended Fund Facility (EFF) of SDR 1.1  was modest during 2016, although some  billion (approximately US dollars 1.5  improvement was observed towards the  billion) with the IMF to strengthen the  latter part of the year. Earnings from  external position of the country and to  exports declined by 2.6 per cent during  support the government’s broad  the first ten months of 2016, while the  economic reform agenda. Reflecting  expenditure on imports increased  these developments, the level of gross  marginally by 0.2 per cent. As a result,  official reserves is estimated to be  the cumulative deficit in the trade  around US dollars 6.0 billion by end 2016.  account increased by 3.7 per cent to US  Moreover, despite considerable  dollars 7.2 billion during the first ten  depreciation pressure on the rupee  months of 2016. Supporting the external  during some months, the rupee  sector, earnings from tourism is  remained relatively stable in 2016  estimated to have increased to around  compared to the previous year. It has  US dollars 3.0 billion during the first  Central Bank of Sri Lanka – ROAD MAP 2017  9  depreciated by 3.8 per cent during the  During 2016, several policy measures  year.

Today, there are a few areas I would like to focus on: First, I will very briefly recap our Op Res policy, including our expectations of firms and the links to other key policy areas such as outsourcing and Critical Third Parties (CTPs); Second, I will share with you some initial assessments of firms’ progress based on our supervisory work on UK banks and building societies so far; and Finally, I will cover what is coming up next in our Op Res roadmap; this includes our expectations around what firms should be doing, and the supervisory steps the PRA will be taking. 1. The PRA’s operational resilience policy 1/6  BIS central bankers' speeches  Starting with the first of those points, I will provide a short recap of our expectations of firms in the Op Res policy. I will keep this brief as I am aware that many of you will already be very familiar with our expectations. In particular, there are three particular policy expectations that I will draw out. i) Important Business Services The first is the requirement for firms to identify their IBS. Here we expect firms to take a holistic approach and consider all parts of their business in order to identify the full suite of services they offer, and then which of those should be deemed “important”. The definition of “importance” should be based on a service being provided to an external end user and having the potential to threaten regulatory objectives in the event of a disruption.
The comparison of the pre-Covid decade outside London with the decade that preceded it, is I think a helpful illustration of the impact, when supply elasticity is low, on inter and perhaps intra generational equity that can result from a highly active market in which prices consistently grow faster than incomes. As I highlighted at the outset of this speech, over the past year the UK housing market has returned to prefinancial crisis levels of activity and rates of price growth. Public and banking sector support has played a huge part in this. Furlough schemes and interest payment holidays have limited distressed sales through the Covid crisis, which would otherwise have pushed down on house prices. In addition, a combination of pent up demand from the initial lockdown in which the UK housing market was closed and the substantial tax incentive provided by the stamp duty holiday - which was announced in July 13  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  13  and which will be tapered out over the course of this year – has fuelled the strength in demand for housing. After an initial tightening, credit conditions have dropped back broadly to pre-Covid levels. One would expect the market to cool down when public support to the economy in general and the housing market in particular is withdrawn over the course of the year, as is currently planned.

But Chart 6 also shows a gap opening up between expected mortgage demand and the mortgage lending we’ve actually seen since, shown in the purple line. This reflects factors including constraints on the availability of credit, and potentially an increase in uncertainty and risk aversion in the wake of the crisis. Alongside the increase in spreads immediately post-crisis, a similar pattern appears in non-price credit terms, which usually move over time in line with price terms as is shown in Chart 7. This includes the availability of higher loan to value mortgages, which can represent one of the largest credit constraints on first time buyers, particularly in high cost areas12. Access to credit was also affected from 2014 by the introduction of the FPC’s housing measures, which constrained the flow of high loan-to-income (LTI) mortgages and set the level of the stressed interest rate  12  Increased competition in the mortgage market may have played a role in this 10  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  10  affordability test applied to new borrowers13. These were set by the FPC to constrain the future growth of household indebtedness in aggregate and to limit the number of highly indebted households, given the evidence that high levels of household indebtedness had amplified the depth and duration of the post-GFC recession14. It is unclear what impact these regulatory constraints on credit may have played in house price formation.
Fritz Zurbrügg: Challenges posed by the growth in the SNB’s foreign exchange reserves Speech by Mr Fritz Zurbrügg, Member of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, at the Money Market Event, Geneva, 8 November 2012. *  *  *  I would like to thank Pierre Monnin for his support in the preparation of this presentation. I am also indebted to Erich Gmür, Marco Huwiler, Peter Kuster and Sandro Streit for their insightful comments. Ladies and Gentlemen, It is my pleasure to welcome you here today at our traditional Money Market Event, which takes place every year here in Geneva. This occasion is particularly important for me, as it is the first time that I have the opportunity to meet you in such a setting. Since our previous Money Market Event last November, the situation on financial markets has continued to be a cause for concern to the Swiss National Bank (SNB). To mention but a few of the main factors: financial market uncertainty is still high, the global economic outlook has worsened considerably, and the situation on bond markets in peripheral Europe is still highly uncertain. Against this background, central banks have adopted a number of measures to address the challenges they face. These measures have increased the size of their balance sheets significantly. In Switzerland, the SNB has seen its foreign exchange reserves grow substantially. Managing these reserves is currently a major challenge, and has become the subject of much scrutiny by both the media and SNB watchers.

Currently, 48% of foreign exchange reserves are held in euro-denominated assets; however, the Asset Management unit also invests in other currencies, above all the US dollar, which accounts for 28% of assets under management, as well as the yen, the pound sterling and the Canadian dollar, which together account for 20%. The SNB also invests in other, minor currencies. It generally chooses major international currencies with a liquid market. Exchange rate risk is inherent in the SNB’s investment policy. It is important to note that the SNB cannot hedge against exchange rate risk without neutralising the impact of monetary policy, given that each hedging operation is, in effect, a purchase of Swiss francs against other currencies. Thus, the main tool in managing exchange rate risk is the most optimal diversification possible. Faced with the strong growth in foreign exchange reserves, the need for diversification has therefore taken on even greater significance. Since 2010, we have extended the list of investment currencies to include five new currencies. These are: the Australian and Singapore dollars, the Swedish krona, the Danish krone and the Korean won. As a general rule, the SNB is constantly assessing ways to improve the diversification of its investments. I would like to stress that we actively analyse and monitor new asset classes and different currencies in both advanced and developing economies, in order to reduce our risk concentration over time. Here are the foreign exchange reserves broken down by asset class (cf. slide 4).
That said, I wouldn’t conclude that we are not at risk of coordination failures. Let me share two reflections in this regard: 1. Our collective “doctrine” on monetary policy, in the G7 and G20, remains valid: that we central banks target domestic price stability and not exchange rates. But it implies as a counterpart an in-depth and confident dialogue, in Washington, Basel and elsewhere, on our intentions: there should be mutual predictability of policy making. We will achieve the closest to a cooperative solution if we avoid significant surprises between policy makers. As Jay Powell rightly said in 2019 in Paris “Pursuing our domestic mandates in this new world requires that we understand the anticipated effects of these interconnections and incorporate them into our policy decision making.”ix Lael Brainard reiterated this welcome statement no later than yesterday: “The combined effect of concurrent global tightening is larger than the sum of its parts. The Federal Reserve takes into account the spillovers of higher interest rates, a stronger dollar, and weaker demand from foreign economies into the United States, as well as in the reverse direction”. x  2. But there can be market misperceptions of policy intentions or overshooting, and exchange rates can become fundamentally misaligned. Under such circumstances, there were G7 interventions in the past. Several of them were 12  Page 13 sur 14  effective, which we shouldn’t forget.

But in order to be such, let me only remind they had to fulfil two conditions: (I) to result from a shared diagnosis about fair levels of exchange rates and possible misalignments - here the IMF traditionally played a strong role as a trustworthy and third party expert - and (II) to be coordinated in their implementation, or at least in their communication. Conclusion Let me wrap up: we are totally committed to our end objective – inflation back to 2%; we are more open about our path to meet this objective. But we should have an orderly use of our palette of instruments: first, interest rate hikes, with a rapid increase towards neutral and then a possibly more flexible pace; second, and at some later stage, balance sheet normalisation, with a more cautious start followed by a gradual amplification. Giving such partial predictability to markets is not being precommitted as with a precise and binding forward guidance; but it will help to align financial conditions with our target, and to avoid excessive volatility. And rest assured we will maintain two strong virtues for uncertain times: pragmatism – and data dependency – rather than pre-set ideology; international coordination – and in-depth dialogue – rather than fragmentation. Thank you for your attention.
3 Friedman (1968), ‘The role of monetary policy’. American Economic Review. 4 In their 2020 paper ‘The long-run effects of monetary policy’, Jorda, Singh and Taylor report results  suggesting that overtight monetary policy can have long-lived effects on output via lower investment and capital accumulation (so-called “hysteretic” effects). But I don’t think the authors would claim that easy monetary policy, and high inflation, would boost long-run output (the effect would be asymmetric). In his Nobel prize lecture Lucas (1995) suggests that, in some circumstances, when money is the only store of value, you might even expect the long-run Phillips curve to slope backwards, as the inflation “tax” reduces the return to saving. Bank of England  Page 10  Chart 5: In the long run, real things are unaffected by nominal shocks  The fact that the relative price of energy has gone up so steeply in Europe has a real cause: Russia’s curtailment of the supply of gas. The same goes for the steep rises in prices of non-energy goods that came before, during the course of 2021. Because it prompted a shift in consumer spending towards goods, while at the same time impairing their supply, the pandemic pushed up the relative prices of things like computers and cars. As we saw in the introduction the result of these shocks has been a steep rise in the price of what the UK consumes relative to what it produces. That inevitably depresses real incomes, regardless of the path of monetary policy and overall inflation.

It fell sharply during the first half of this year (relative to income) and is likely to have fallen further since then (the dot at the end of Chart 9 is an estimate of the position at the end of Q3, based on recent moves in asset prices). All this suggests that, if household spending has been unusually independent of income since the pandemic, that is less likely to be the case from now on. The correlation with income is likely to be re-established. And it therefore mattered quite a lot, for the MPC’s projections in August, that households were set to experience further steep rises in their energy bills. Given the path of wholesale gas prices implied by financial markets at the time, OFGEM’s price cap was set to rise (in the central forecast) by over 3% of household income by next spring. Households’ real disposable income was projected to decline by 2½%, with consumer spending down by over 1%. This reduced inflationary pressure in the medium term, helping to pull inflation below target towards the end of the three-year  Bank of England  Page 17  forecast period. (I say “helping” because other things mattered too, not least the further rise in Bank Rate, to a peak of around 3%, then priced into financial markets.) It therefore mattered too that the new government then launched its Energy Price Guarantee, forestalling the rise in energy bills.
Chart 18 plots the distribution of management skills from the survey in the UK, Germany and the United States. The UK distribution has a notably larger lower tail. The UK has around twice as many companies with a  36 37  For example, Davis and Haltiwanger (2014) and Bjelland et al (2011). Bloom and van Reenen (2007), Haldane (2017). 11  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  11  management score below 2 than in Germany and the US, consistent with the UK’s longer tail being sourced, at least in part, in weaker management skills. Recent research by Bank colleagues, Saleem Bahaj, Angus Foulis, and Gabor Pinter, suggests this tail may also be explained by skills in corporate board rooms. Using company account data, they are able to assess the degree of “connectivity” of board members to other companies. This connectivity proxies a company’s ability, through its board, to draw on the experience of other companies when learning about and adopting new practices, products and processes. Chart 19 and Table 2 plots this measure of board connectivity across UK companies. It exhibits the same “power-law” distribution as other measures of connectivity, with a small set of companies whose directors are hyper-connected and a large set of firms whose directors are loosely or unconnected. 38  As with Facebook  friends and Twitter followers, there is a very small “in-crowd” of well-connected companies and a large disconnected “out-crowd”.

Chart 16 illustrates this for one technology - computing. It shows the percentage of employees in a company using a computer on three dates (2002, 2008, 2015). The good news is that it shows a clear trend towards increased employee computer use over time. 35  European Commission (2018). 10  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  10  The distribution of computer use is, however, clearly twin-peaked. There is an upper tail of companies where more than 90% of staff use computers. By 2015, this had increased to a little under half of all companies. But there is also a large, if diminishing, tail of companies where employee use of computers is much more modest. For example, even by 2015 around 40% of companies had fewer than half of their employees using computers. And there were still 20% of companies where fewer than one in five employees used computers. This picture is patchier still for more advanced technologies. Chart 17 looks at the distribution of the proportion of employees in UK companies with access to a portable device with internet access on two dates (2011 and 2015). It, too, is twin-peaked. But the upper peak is now a very modest one, containing only around 10% of firms. And the lower peak, by contrast, is Himalayan. The fraction of companies where 50% or less of employees use portable devices is around 80%. Patterns of technological adoption and penetration among UK companies, then, tell a broadly consistent story.
But, more than this, we should explore the possibilities to give greater feed-back to reporting institutions, from which they can derive benefits. 5  Taking advantage of new technologies  The final element that I want to mention today is certainly not the least important. I believe that we should make full use of the possibilities offered by new technologies and tools to collect, transmit, manage and analyse the increasing amounts of data we are faced with. A standard like XBRL can and should play a central role in enhancing information flows. Its great advantage is that it allows for a more precise, reliable and rapid interface between the generators and users of information. But XBRL is not only a tool for transmission of data. Through the development of “taxonomies” or dictionaries of terms, it allows information to be generated and interpreted on a consistent basis. XBRL  4  BIS Review 47/2006  therefore means that financial information from entities can be understood and assimilated in other parts of the world in an accurate and timely manner. In the banking sector, XBRL could be a means of finding a common language for financial information needs. It could thereby facilitate supervisory co-operation and promote a level playing field. It is for these reasons that CEBS has decided to promote the use of XBRL in the two common reporting initiatives that I mentioned earlier in my intervention.

The Central Bank candidly expressed these concerns in its financial stability reports, most notably in the spring of 2001. At that time the IMF also issued its Financial Stability Assessment which questioned the strength of the financial system in Iceland in view of the tremendous imbalances in the economy and what was perceived to be an underlying weakness in the banking institutions. The IMF identified a potential risk of a rapid depreciation of the currency, which it felt could further weaken the banks and pose a threat to them. Early on in the upswing, amidst a rapid expansion of lending and external indebtedness of the banks, particularly their short-term foreign debt, the Central Bank imposed a liquidity requirement on the commercial banks. Its purpose was to stem the growth of foreign borrowing and to shift the weight of foreign indebtedness from the very short end of the maturity spectrum. Another prudential rule set by the Central Bank concerns the foreign exchange exposure of commercial banks. This sharply limits their scope for taking direct foreign exchange risk. Beyond these prudential regulations, the means which the Central Bank has to affect the practices of the banks are through public pressure, for example in its semi-annual financial stability reports or in other public or private statements. The Bank has used all these methods with varying degrees of success. In line with the traditional role of central banks, the Central Bank of Iceland can serve as a lender of last resort if a domestic bank experiences a liquidity shortfall.
Perhaps most important, the normal cyclical dynamic in which housing, consumer durable goods purchases and investment spending rebound in response to monetary easing is unlikely to be as powerful in this episode as during a typical economic recovery. The financial system is still in the middle of a prolonged adjustment process. Banks and other financial institutions are working their way through large credit losses and the securitization markets are recovering only slowly. This means that credit availability will be constrained for some time to come and this will serve to limit the pace of recovery. If the recovery does, in fact, turn out to be lackluster, the unemployment rate is likely to remain elevated and capacity utilization rates unusually low for some time to come. This suggests that inflation will be quiescent. For all these reasons, concern about “when” the Fed will exit from its current accommodative monetary policy stance is, in my view, very premature. In contrast, I think it is important to address today the issue of “how” the Fed can exit from the current stance of policy when the time comes, even if its numerous special facilities and purchase programs continue to keep the size of its balance sheet at an expanded level. Why do I believe it is so important to explain the issue of “how” having just argued that “when” is not yet a pressing issue?

The results achieved indicate that in this difficult macroeconomic environment the banking system has not only preserved its reliability, but has continued to perform its economic role of financial intermediary. Another positive trend is especially worth noting, prompted by this Forum. Banks are not focusing only on coping with current issues and obstacles. Regardless of the difficulties, banks are putting much thought and effort into developing and implementing new business solutions and products based on the opportunities offered by the information and communications technologies. New solutions are sought not only in the area of good management of risks and business processes, but also in developing new services and sales channels. I would not allow myself to give examples from the experience of one or another bank. The Forum will provide plenty of opportunities to find this out for yourselves. I will use as illustration of my words the payment infrastructure. The connectivity achieved by the operator of the main retail payment systems in this country in the past year, presently makes available to the Bulgarian banks the so-called SEPA connectivity to several thousand banks in the European Union. This, on its own part, provides new opportunities for providing reliable and high-quality services to ultimate customers. As part of my congratulatory address on the occasion of the opening of this Forum, I will allow myself to pose a question, namely the question of the connection between the information and communications technologies management and sales management, or to put it more broadly – marketing.