samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
To-date, we have not seen an increase in retrenchments in the financial services or FinTech sectors. Going into the second half, there could potentially be some net job loss, but this is not likely to be large. It is encouraging that some major financial institutions have committed not to shed any workers due to the COVID-19 crisis. For the year as a whole, MAS expects the financial services sector to still be a net creator of jobs, albeit much lower than in previous years. We are particularly pleased that the financial services sector is on track to meeting both the value-added and employment targets set by the 5-year Industry Transformation Map (ITM) for 2016–2020. If the financial sector stays above 0% growth in the second half of this year, it will achieve the ITM target of 4.3% annual growth in value-added [6] over 2016–2020. The four-year average growth rate of value-added in financial services for 2016–2019 is already 4.8% per annum. Likewise, unless there are large-scale job losses in the second half, the financial services and FinTech sectors will comfortably meet the ITM target of 4,000 jobs per annum. The four-year average net job growth in financial services and FinTech for 2016–2019 is already 4,900 per year. 10 / 15  BIS central bankers' speeches  Let me now talk about MAS’ three priorities for developing Singapore as a leading global financial centre amid the COVID-19 crisis: skills, technology, sustainability.

The legislation also provides for a mandated co-sharing of rental obligations between the government, landlords, and tenants. MAS’ RESPONSE TO THE COVID-19 ECONOMIC CRISIS MAS has responded to the COVID-19 economic crisis in six broad areas: Ensuring monetary stability; Ensuring financial stability; Providing credit and insurance reliefs for individuals and SMEs; Providing regulatory reliefs for financial institutions; Ensuring operational resilience of financial institutions; and Positioning the financial sector to emerge stronger. MONETARY STABILITY  MAS has focused on ensuring monetary stability through accommodative monetary policy and judicious money market operations. MAS eased monetary policy in April this year by setting the policy band for the nominal effective exchange rate on a 0% appreciation path, starting from the prevailing lower level of the exchange rate. The lower starting level of the exchange rate is consistent with the downward shift in inflation and economic activity. Keeping the exchange rate on a stable path going forward helps to underpin confidence amid the COVID-19 crisis. The aim of monetary policy during this crisis is to prevent a broadening of disinflationary pressures that would be destabilising for the economy. MAS does not seek to enhance export competitiveness through a weaker exchange rate. Such a policy will be especially futile in the current circumstances, where the sharp decline in global demand and supply-side frictions will offset any relative price advantages from a weaker exchange rate. Through its money market operations, MAS has ensured the smooth functioning of the short-term funding markets in Singapore.
“Sudden stops” were observed in the funds flowing towards the euro area countries more adversely affected by the sovereign crisis, with changes in the bank deposits in  4  See for instance Cassola, N., A. Durré and C. Holthausen (2011): “Monetary Policy Operations: experiences during the crisis and lessons learnt”, Proceedings of the Sixth ECB Central Banking Conference “Approaches to monetary policy revisited – lessons from the crisis”. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  stressed and non-stressed countries. These developments were eventually mirrored in the Target balances of the Eurosystem The large differences in financing conditions across countries translated into a very high fragmentation of credit growth across the national dimension. The ability of banks in some countries to deleverage is heavily complicated by the adverse market conditions. Not only do banks in the affected countries often need to deleverage more than others, but also their portfolios consist of less liquid assets (such as domestic sovereign bonds) and they face, ceteris paribus, higher funding costs than their peers in other euro area countries. Often they are even completely cut off from traditional private sources of funding. With the deepening of the sovereign debt crisis, the Eurosystem undertook additional measures, with a particular view to mitigating the increased heterogeneities in the euro area financial conditions. In 2010, the Securities Markets Programme was launched, aimed at certain important segments of the financial market that were dysfunctional, but vital for the transmission of monetary policy signals.

Finally I will highlight the expected benefits associated with moving towards a strong banking and financial union in the euro area. Banking sector’s deleveraging From a policy perspective it is useful to think about banks’ deleveraging as arising from two possible sources: demand factors and supply factors. Although somewhat artificial, this distinction may be instructive in guiding the appropriate policy response. Typical demand factors are the lack of profitable opportunities for investment or the presence of deleveraging forces arising in other sectors of the economy. Supply factors are related to banks’ insufficient balance sheet capacity to hold assets. This can arise from capital shortfalls or funding strains – or both. Banks can address capital shortfalls and funding strains by adjusting the asset and/or liability side of the balance sheet. Asset shedding is the most far-reaching solution. If balance sheet pressures arise from funding strains, banks may decide to sell the most liquid assets and non-core assets that can be liquidated in a short space of time. On the other hand, if deleveraging pressures are mainly related to capital positions, banks have an incentive to shed more capital-intensive assets to induce the largest reduction in risk-weighted assets. Abrupt adjustments of the asset side of the balance sheet can lead to a credit crunch, if they are made by many banks simultaneously.
b) The euro is an “all-risks insurance” for all Member States This view appears to be the opposite of the preceding one; in fact it stems from an equally false perception: attributing excessive evils or benefits to the euro. A currency is an essential nominal value; but this alone does not determine the real performance of the economy. In the first part of the 2000s, once it had acquired the collective gain of the euro, France and Italy, like many 3/6  BIS central bankers' speeches  Southern European countries, wrongly believed that it was possible to let up on competitiveness efforts, which are nonetheless an ongoing imperative – “there is no free lunch”. Today we are suffering the consequences: we have lower economic growth and employment than some of our neighbours, such as Germany and Spain, which succeeded in carrying out the reforms necessary for enterprise (corporate sector), employment, education and expenditure reduction (public sector). Contrary to what some say, our lag in growth is not due to excessive fiscal discipline. The government debt to GDP ratio has more than doubled in Italy since 1980, and it has risen fivefold in France. When my generation was 18 years old, debt stood at 20% of GDP in France. For your generation today, it verges on 100% of GDP in France and in Italy stands at over 130%. We have failed when it comes to intergenerational solidarity and sustainable development.

That means that with very little spare capacity in the economy, even the unusually weak actual growth of around 1¾% over the forecast horizon – which you can see here in the MPC’s projection for GDP from the latest Inflation Report (Slide 7) – is still sufficient to generate excess demand. There are of course significant risks in both directions to the outlook for productivity. To the downside, there are at least two reasons to think that productivity won’t pick up to its pre-crisis rate. The first is that after such a long period of weak productivity growth it is reasonable to argue that we are in a new paradigm of lower productivity growth, and that is reinforced by the global nature of the weakness. The second is that that the dampening effect of Brexit on productivity growth – both through the effect of uncertainty on business investment in the short run and through the need to anticipate and respond to post-Brexit trading relationships – is likely to continue for some time. To the upside, productivity, although volatile, has tended to grow by around 2% on average for many decades, if not centuries. Productivity could ultimately pick up by more than expected globally and if there is a global upswing in trade and investment that benefits the United Kingdom. Additionally, if there is clarity around the transition and future trading arrangements post-Brexit, this could continue to reduce uncertainty, support business investment and lead to a stronger-than-expected pickup in productivity growth.
Their job is to ensure that markets operate in a fair,  BIS Review 57/2002  1  transparent, and efficient manner, and that participants comply with the rules of the game. Governments must not rely on outdated notions as to what constitutes risk and effective risk management. Official supervision must evolve in line with the way financial institutions manage their activities, which is increasingly across business lines rather than across legal entities. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which I chair, has developed principles for sound and effective banking supervision and continues to add to its guidance on minimum and advanced supervisory practices. Its proposed revisions to the Basel Capital Accord call for these principles to be applied to all internationally active banks within a more dynamic, risk-based, and process-oriented framework. The revisions are intended to align regulatory capital requirements more closely with underlying risks and to provide banks and their supervisors with a range of options for the assessment of capital adequacy. The third line of defense against financial instability is effective market discipline, an increasingly important ally of policymakers in a global marketplace. What do I mean by market discipline? In my view, market participants, when armed with timely, and meaningful, and accurate information about a firm's performance, can, by their investment and credit decisions, encourage managers and boards of directors to manage their risks soundly. Equally important, market participants can penalize firms that do not manage their risks soundly.

Obtaining and retaining the staff resources capable of dealing with Year 2000 issues will be another increasingly difficult problem. There is a limited pool of skilled technical staff to make needed changes, and demands on this pool are growing as the time draws closer. In the short run, the ability to add to this pool significantly through training is limited. Qualified outside consultants already are heavily committed and will become even more scarce over time. Obtaining equipment on which to conduct tests also often requires significant lead time. All of this suggests that controlling the cost of Year 2000 projects will be a problem for many institutions as resource prices are bid up. Already, we have seen many institutions increase their Year 2000 budgets several times, and by significant amounts, as they develop their detailed plans. Security also is likely to be of increasing concern as we move forward. As time pressures mount, there is a risk that shortcuts will be taken. The checking of credentials for new staff or outside contractors or consultants may be rushed and less rigorous. Date-dependent security applications may be turned off to facilitate testing. In an industry like ours, with so much interconnectivity, any compromise of security simply cannot be tolerated. BIS Review 87/1997  -3-  Every financial institution needs its own comprehensive project plan to address the Year 2000 problem. In the United States, bank supervisors have suggested an approach that includes a number of phases.
Location-based “push” marketing and mobile coupons are helping companies to attract new  1  BBC: World’s first “smartphone” turns 20, Aug 15, 2014 (http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28802053). BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  customers and encourage existing ones to spend more. And all sorts of creative “apps” are making the “matching” process between buyers and sellers much more fun and efficient. That is the beauty of the “online-to-offline”, or “O2O” value chain, an increasingly vital element of m-commerce. II. The HKMA’s policy objectives towards electronic payments  10. The benefits of m-commerce are not confined to individual companies. From a macro perspective, m-commerce and m-payment will, no doubt, help to enhance economic efficiency by cutting costs of businesses, make the payment process safer, facilitate price discovery of goods and services, and contribute directly to price stability and increased competition. 11. A study conducted by Moody’s Analytics last year estimated that the greater use of electronic payments added nearly $ trillion in global economic growth over a five-year span between 2008 and 2012. That growth in GDP was equivalent to creating 1.9 million jobs. 12. In view of the importance of electronic payment, the HKMA has carefully considered the approach that it should adopt in view of its dual role both as a regulator and a facilitator to promote a healthy development of electronic payments. 13. In short, we are adopting a three-pronged approach. i)  First, we have made it a priority to promote the further adoption of electronic payment means.

First, how do we ensure that we have legislative and supervisory frameworks in place to support development of safe private sector innovation that could respond to these challenges? Here, it is clear that we need to ensure that new ways to pay and new forms of electronic money are offer equivalent protections to existing ones. And second, what is the right role for central banks in provision of the money we use to transact? I’m looking forward to the discussion. 8  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  8
The consequences of this precautionary response were far from benign. The global glut of savings is believed by many to have sowed the seeds of the subsequent global financial crisis (Bernanke (2005), Wolf (2014)). That global financial crisis is the most damaging economic and financial event since at least the Great Depression. To put it in context, Chart 8 plots the distribution of annual GDP growth across four countries since 1870 and in the UK since 1700. It highlights outcomes around the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Both occupy a place in the left tail of the historical growth distribution. The precautionary responses to these crises have been similar, with the fall in US and UK government bond yields since the Great Recession mimicking that after the Great Depression (Chart 6)). As in the 1930s, the global financial crisis also appears to have caused the equity premium to rise (Chart 9). This time, perhaps it is not so puzzling. Pre-crisis, one of the causes of low global real rates was felt to be the insufficient supply of safe assets (Caballero and Farhi (2014)). Since the crisis, the deteriorating fiscal position of many countries has helped solve that problem. Since 2010, the US, UK, the euro-area and Japan have issued around $ trillion in government securities. Yet over the same period, global real interest rates have fallen further. The demand for safe assets has overwhelmed this additional supply.

This uncertainty can be seen, too, in how companies are reinvesting their earnings. The trend over the past 20 years has been for companies to invest more in passive assets such as cash, than active ones such as physical capital. But this trend has been accentuated since the crisis. Table 2 looks at the ratio of liquid assets to investment by the corporate sectors in the UK, US, France and Germany. These ratios have risen sharply since the crisis, on average by around 70 percentage points. Companies are not just saving more of their earnings. They are doing so in a more liquid form than previously. As among consumers, business confidence has risen in lockstep with profits. But this good news has been banked, not invested. Despite the sunshine, many companies are still engaged in roof-repair. Growth in the UK, the US and some other countries remains solid, if unspectacular. But caution increases the chances of world growth continuing systematically to underperform, as it has since the crisis. By generating an asymmetric response to good and bad news, it may also skew growth risks to the downside, again as we have seen. While emphasizing the downside, it is important not to forget the potential for upside risks. The upside risk that has generated most attention over recent weeks has been wage growth. At a headline level, this picked up to 2.7% for regular pay growth on an annual basis in April, from a low of 0.7% as recently as the summer of last year.
At the same time, resources and appropriations for the supervision and control of foreign workers’ wages and working conditions have been increased. As a result, foreign suppliers of services are losing much of their competitive edge in relation to Norwegian enterprises. The latest Directorate of Labour figures show that seasonally adjusted unemployment was 3.4 per cent in September. This is in line with the developments we envisaged in the June Inflation Report (2/05). Statistics Norway’s Labour Force Survey (LFS), however, presents a somewhat less favourable picture of unemployment. Registered unemployment is on the decline in all regions. It took some time before unemployment began to decline in Central Norway, but during the last half year it has fallen substantially. The industry structure in Trøndelag is very similar to that of the country as a whole. Nord-Trøndelag is the country’s third largest agricultural county and employment in the primary industries is high. Even though the industry structure in the Trøndelag counties is not significantly different from the rest of the country, this region is nonetheless struggling with relatively high unemployment, even in periods of solid economic growth. Statistics Norway recently published a study that showed that the mobility in the labour market was lower in this region than in the country as a whole.1 Companies have, for example, not been inclined to recruit recent graduates. This is an important challenge for the regional labour market authorities. Information from Norges Bank’s regional network is important for Norges Bank’s analysis of the Norwegian economy.

•  The central government budget – growth in public expenditure – influences the krone and the size of the internationally exposed business sector in the medium term. Government expenditure and revenues must be in balance in the long term. •  Wage formation, the structure of the economy and incentives determine how well and how efficiently we utilise our labour resources and other economic resources. There is also an interaction: •  In its budget resolutions, the government authorities will attach importance to the effects of the budget on the Norwegian economy and will therefore take account of interest rate effects. In this way, they avoid a situation where growth in public expenditure and the interest rate push the economy in different directions. •  With a known monetary policy response pattern, the parties to the centralised income settlements can take interest rate effects into account when wage increases are negotiated. •  Moreover, the parties to public sector negotiations can take into account that the higher pay increases are, the fewer people that can be paid over government budgets. The interaction here became clear when public sector employment fell after the expensive wage settlement in 2002. The value of the Petroleum Fund, measured as a percentage of GDP, will rise in the years ahead. On the other hand, Norway, like many other countries, is facing substantial fiscal challenges. The expected dependency ratio, i.e.
Compared with the 1990s recession, and despite a far greater collapse in demand, fewer businesses have failed and fewer people have lost their jobs and their homes. Now, at last, there are clear signs that the economy is on the mend. It is still early days and the MPC will be doing its utmost to ensure that recovery is not nipped in the bud. But when the time does come for us to start raising Bank Rate, we should celebrate that as a welcome sign that the economy is finally well on the road back to normality. Thank you! 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  UK Economic Prospects North East Chamber of Commerce Presidents Club Talk Rockcliffe Hall Hotel Charlie Bean, Deputy Governor Monetary Policy 10 March 2014  Chart 1: Household saving ratio  (a) Recessions are defined as at least two consecutive quarters of falling output (at constant market prices) estimated using the latest data. The recessions are assumed to have ended once output began to rise. (b) Percentage of household post-tax income.

For that reason, we had been expecting the early stages of the recovery to take place with relatively little new hiring. That is not what we have seen. Instead, employment has risen strongly – up almost 400 thousand in 2013 – accompanied by a correspondingly modest rise of less than 1% in productivity. All this makes a future rebound in productivity seem somewhat less likely than before. Even so, some acceleration in productivity still seems likely on the back of the recovery in business investment, while a tightening labour market should also encourage businesses to look for ways to use their labour more efficiently. Moreover, as the banking system continues to heal and risk aversion subsides, so we can expect to see some reallocation of resources towards potentially more productive businesses. And, even though we may not recover much of the ground lost since the onset of the recession, it seems reasonable to believe that we ought to be able to return to something approaching our pre-crisis average rate of productivity growth. But there is necessarily uncertainty as to exactly what will happen. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  The course of productivity is absolutely central to the durability of the recovery. Rapid productivity growth would sustain the recovery in investment and make possible a pickup in pay growth, in turn supporting consumer demand. But if the productivity revival were to fizzle rather than flourish, then so too would the recovery.