samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The systematic work of our distinguished archaeologists and of the dedicated central bank employees over the years has helped in materialising the efforts for presenting the history of the Albanian currency, from the axes of the Hoard of Torovica, to the first coins struck in Dyrrhachium, to those in circulation throughout various historic periods, up to modern days. Through over 30 exhibits and 5 educational rooms in the Museum, we show interactively the ancient history of our currency. The permanent exhibition in the lower floor displays collections from monetary systems that have existed in our territories over the past two thousand years. They are part of the numismatic collection of the Bank of Albania and the Albanian Institute of Archaeology. We have selected and studied them meticulously in a close and long process of cooperation with archaeologists, numismatists, historians and ethnologists in Albania. I take this opportunity to thank them for their valuable contribution. Our Museum, however, is not just a money museum. It is also the museum of the central bank, which considers financial education as an essential objective. The public needs to be informed in order to be able to make judicious and sound financial decisions, which, in turn, contribute to financial stability. That is why we have dedicated the upper floor of the Museum to financial information and education. Through a number of activities, educational publications, lectures, films, and applications, irrespective of their age, visitors learn about financial products and system.

Caleb M Fundanga: Bank of Zambia’s Information Dissemination Programme Speech by Dr Caleb M Fundanga, Governor of the Bank of Zambia, on the launch of the Bank of Zambia Information Dissemination Programme, Lusaka, 28 May 2007. *  *  *  Governor, kindly give brief introductory remarks On behalf of the Bank of Zambia Board, management and staff, and indeed on my own behalf, I wish to sincerely thank the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation (ZNBC) for this opportunity to launch the Bank of Zambia Information Dissemination Programme. This programme is part of our comprehensive strategy to inform the general public and all our stakeholders on the role of Bank of Zambia in the economy. What is the primary role of the Bank of Zambia? Just to remind the listeners, the Bank of Zambia’s primary role is to formulate and implement monetary and supervisory policies that will ensure price and financial system stability. Our vision, in this regard, is to become a World Class central bank. What is your general assessment of the recent performance of the Zambian economy? In the past few years, the Zambian economy has performed relatively well, recording positive real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, with inflation and interest rates coming down. Specifically, what have been the developments in output? During the period 2001-2005, growth in real GDP averaged 5.0% per annum. More recently, in 2006, it is estimated that the economy grew by close to 6%, marking the eighth consecutive year of positive real growth in output.
As such, there is a great need for policy coordination among them to ensure an orderly supply of global liquidity. In the worst-case scenario, the multi-polar system could be more unstable especially during crisis periods. This is because the reserve currencies are close substitutes among themselves. As such, deterioration in the financial position of one reserve-issuing country could lead to severe capital flight, causing volatility in both exchange rates and asset prices. At this point, it is difficult to foresee if the management of global liquidity in the multi-polar system would be easier or more difficult than the current system. 8. As the multi-polar system is not immune from capital flow volatility, I would like to make a brief comment on recent IMF framework on capital flow management measures. While we support the work of the IMF in conducting empirical study on country experiences in managing surges of capital inflows, we do not support any rules-based approach in dealing with capital flow issues. Policymakers should be able to respond to such challenge in a pragmatic rather than rules-based manner. 9. Let me finish my talk with some comment on the SDR. In theory, there are many good reasons to enhance the role of SDR as one of its distinct advantages is the possibility of managing global liquidity without affecting the value of currencies in the basket. In addition, the basket also has the diversification advantage as the system will be less exposed to shocks in any of its constituent economies.

We learnt this lesson the hard way in the wake of the GFC, and that is why the Committee's membership – comprising both central banks and supervisory authorities – is crucial to ensure that we benefit from both the system-wide and institution-specific perspectives. Moreover, given the increasingly cross-sectoral nature of many of today's financial stability issues – such as digitalisation and climate – I believe that more cooperation across different sectors – for example, on accounting, competition, anti-money laundering, data privacy, and taxation, to name a few issues – is also vital. In many instances, we are all working on similar issues from a slightly different angle, and so we would surely all benefit from sharing notes and ensuring that there are no unintended gaps or overlaps. Let me end by noting that cooperation need not mean full harmonisation. While having a single, uniform "global rule book" may be theoretically appealing, the fact is that we live in a heterogeneous world, with structural and cyclical differences across banking systems and jurisdictions. Moreover, many of our central bank and supervisory authority members are accountable to their national legislatures, so it is crucial that global standard setting bodies are perceived to be legitimate and transparent. This is why the Basel Committee has an extensive outreach programme with a wide range of stakeholders that go beyond market participants, to include academics, public sector bodies, legislatures and civil society. Indeed, there needs to be an appropriate balance between globally-agreed decisions and national measures.
For each currency, there is a designated panel of contributing banks that each submit an estimate of its own borrowing costs for each maturity. For each panel, these estimates are aggregated to form LIBOR. The LIBOR rates are then used as a basis for financial contracts ranging from adjustable rate mortgages to interest rate swaps and futures. To make sure that the submitting banks have sufficient expertise in the funding trends in a particular currency, it is important that they be actively involved in that market. For this reason, the contributing banks are the large banks that have been active in the London market and the panel of submitting banks varies across currencies. The LIBOR reference rates were intended to capture on a daily basis borrowing costs along each currency-maturity combination based on the experience of the submitting banks. The actual process for fixing LIBOR each day is quite straightforward. Each morning the submitters from each contributing bank answer the following hypothetical question: “At what rate could you borrow funds, were you to do so by asking for and then accepting interbank offers at a reasonable market size just prior to 11 a.m.?” The transmitted submissions are ordered by rate for each currency and maturity pair. The ordered rates for U.S. dollar LIBOR, for example, are then trimmed by generally dropping the top and bottom 25 percent of submissions to remove any influence of outliers. The average of the remaining individual submissions is calculated and then posted.

Mr Gjedrem focuses on monetary policy challenges in Norway Article by Mr. Gjedrem, Governor of Norges Bank, the Norwegian central bank, published in the Norwegian daily Aftenposten on 3 May 1999. In Norway, fiscal policy has a prominent role in stabilising growth in production and employment. The Government Petroleum Fund shall serve as a buffer so that fluctuations in the government’s oil revenues do not influence the mainland economy, but only have an effect on capital exports. The local and centralised income settlements determine wage growth. Monetary policy instruments are oriented with a view to maintaining a stable krone exchange rate against European currencies. If the government budget stabilises the domestic economy, wage growth is kept on a par with the level in Europe, and fluctuations in oil revenues are absorbed by the Petroleum Fund, Norges Bank stands a good chance of ensuring exchange rate stability through monetary policy. However, this has not been the case since 1996. The government budget has not made a sufficient contribution to smoothing growth in domestic demand and production, wage growth has been substantially higher than in other countries, and oil revenues have fluctuated widely. Furthermore, it seems that the krone is easily exposed to the contagion effects of turbulence in international markets. The krone exchange rate has fluctuated in spite of Norges Bank’s active use of instruments. Developments in recent years indicate that Norges Bank cannot fine-tune movements in the krone exchange rate.
•  Third, money laundering can also affect currencies and interest rates as launderers reinvest their funds where their schemes are less likely to be detected rather than where rates of return are higher. Money laundering can also increase the threat of monetary instability due to the misallocation of resources. In this regard, money laundering may result in inexplicable changes in money demand and increased volatility of international capital flows, interest and exchange rates. The unpredictable nature of money laundering, coupled with the attendant loss of policy control, may make sound economic policy difficult to achieve. •  Fourth, money laundering could lead to economic distortion and instability. Since money launderers are not interested in profit generation from their investment but rather in protecting their proceeds, they will invest their funds in activities that are not necessarily economically beneficial to the country where the funds are located. Further, to the extent that money laundering and financial crime redirect funds from sound investments to low-quality investments that hide their proceeds, economic growth can suffer. In some countries for example, entire industries, such as construction and hotels, have been financed not because of actual demand, but because of the short-term interests of money launderers. When these industries no longer suit the money launderers’ scheme of things, they abandon them, causing a collapse of these sectors and immense damage to economies. •  Fifth, money laundering could lead to loss of revenue. Money laundering makes tax collection efforts difficult, thus leading to decline in tax revenues.

It is an indication of how far we have come that the weaknesses and uncertainties which so preoccupied policymakers and market participants in 1997, 1998 and early 1999 have given way to concerns about overheating in some parts of the world. The acceleration in global growth has refocused attention on inflationary pressures and on sustaining the monetary stability that economic policymakers have strived so hard to achieve in recent years. Steps are also being taken nationally and internationally to improve the working of the financial system. Ensuring financial stability has indeed become an important task in the light of events in the past decade - years that saw financial problems in a number of European countries as well as in Mexico and Asia, the devaluation of the rouble and suspended payments in Russia, the collapse of the hedgefund Long Term Capital Management, considerable turbulence in western financial markets and financial unrest in Brazil. The crisis in the international financial system developed, to cite President Clinton, from being “just a few small glitches in the road” into “the worst financial crisis in fifty years”. Although the momentum of the world economy and the policy actions taken to date to ensure financial and monetary stability give grounds for optimism, there are still challenges ahead of us. In my talk tonight I will discuss a few of these challenges. Financial stability The transition to a more global financial system has certainly not been free from problems.
Over the past few quarters, the pace of economic growth has picked up and the broad consensus is that the U.S. economy will grow at about a 2 ½–3 percent annual rate over the next year.1 Will these forecasts once again turn out to be too optimistic? Subject to a few caveats that I discuss later, my view is that the likelihood of another disappointment has lessened. The consensus forecast seems like a reasonable expectation, in part, because several of the “headwinds” restraining U.S. economic activity in recent years have subsided. First, the housing sector is currently in much better balance. The overhang of housing associated with the housing boom has largely been absorbed, and a recovery in housing prices has significantly shrunk the proportion of borrowers that are underwater on their mortgages – that is, those households that have outstanding mortgage balances higher than the value of their homes. Also, measures of distress such as mortgage delinquencies and homes entering the foreclosure process have fallen. Second, consumers are in better financial shape. Households are carrying less debt, with total household liabilities roughly $ billion below their cyclical peak in 2008. Moreover, lower interest rates have facilitated significant mortgage debt refinancing, which has lowered the household debt service burdens. Depending on the particular measure used, household debt service burdens relative to income have fallen back to levels last seen in the 1980s and 1990s.

This will cause major oil exporters to run either smaller budget surpluses or bigger budget deficits. In the aggregate, the swing from oil producers to consumers is quite large. For example, a $ per barrel decline in global oil prices results in an income transfer of about $ billion per year from producers to consumers.2 This understates the total effect because it does not include any knock-on reductions in other energy prices – such as for natural gas – that, outside the U.S., often are linked to oil prices. Obviously, if the oil price declines were to both intensify and persist, this would have negative implications for oil and gas investment in the U.S. At a minimum, as cash flows fall, some producers will cut back on their drilling activity rather than plug the shortfall with outside financing. Nevertheless, there are several reasons why I don’t think this risk should be overstated, especially if oil prices stabilize around current levels. First, even after the large gains in recent years, oil and gas investment remains a small fraction of GDP. Second, domestic natural gas investment should be relatively unaffected because U.S. natural gas prices are largely insensitive to global energy price developments. This reflects the high costs associated with exporting natural gas and the fact that most of our oil production is used for transportation purposes. Thus, the ability to substitute lower cost natural gas for oil is limited. Third, extraction costs vary appreciably across the different major oil fields.
At the same time, the yield curve has steepened somewhat further, implying that the attractiveness of short-term instruments included in M3 continues to decline compared with more highly remunerated longer-term instruments outside M3. On the counterpart side, the annual growth rate of bank loans to the private sector continued to conceal differences in the magnitude of growth across sectors. The growth of loans to non-financial corporations stood at –0.2% in December, after –0.1% in the previous month, while the growth of loans to households strengthened to 3.0% in December, after 2.8% in November. Taking into account the effect of derecognition of loans from bank balance sheets and looking through short-term volatility, the latest data confirm a continued gradual strengthening in the annual growth of lending to the non-financial private sector. At the same time, the latest data point to the overall size of bank balance sheets having contracted again after expanding for most of 2010, mainly on account of a reduction in lending between banks. It is important that banks continue to expand the provision of credit to the private sector, in an environment of increasing demand. To address this challenge, where necessary, it is essential for banks to retain earnings, to turn to the market to strengthen further their capital bases or to take full advantage of government support measures for recapitalisation. To sum up, the current key ECB interest rates still remain appropriate. We therefore decided to leave them unchanged.

The challenge will be deciding on the best option, not in finding a workable approach. Thank you for your attention. I am happy to take any questions. BIS Review 48/2009  5
Google and Facebook may be at the top of their industry now, but remember there were Yahoo, MySpace and Friendster. I am very sure somewhere in some garage, killer apps are being developed to rival current industry leaders. The fourth observation is that shifts in consumer needs and expectations will play a key part in the finance revolution. 91% of Malaysians today have a smartphone and 83% will look on the internet to research new products and services. Finance and business models will need to be redeveloped around changes in consumers’ lifestyles and expectations. For example mobile banking in its traditional sense does not work anymore in this country as smartphone penetration is quite high and the public is generally receptive to new ideas and innovations. The transformation of finance and technology will also usher in an era of increasingly educated, empowered and activist consumers, who will scout for the best prices and services. Globally, around a third of consumers would consider banking with a technology giant (e.g. Google, Amazon or Facebook), potentially due to perceived personalisation and better customer experience. The fifth observation is that technology could be the catalyst to propel finance as a great social equaliser of the future. Advancement in technology will enhance financial inclusion by addressing information asymmetry and reducing the cost of extending finance to previously underserved groups. This could grant access to around 2 billion people globally who remain unbanked today, enabling them to save, invest and uplift their livelihood.

A summary of the information gathered from these talks has been published in a quarterly report for some time now. We have redesigned this report to coincide with today’s monetary policy assessment. The aim of the new design is to allow readers to interpret the results of the talks at a glance. In addition, the text is supplemented by charts to enable comparisons over time. A structured approach, both with regard to conducting the surveys and to selecting the companies, forms the basis for the compilation of such time series. In redesigning the report, we also changed the title from ‘Business cycle trends’ to ‘Business cycle signals’. I am pleased to be able to present you with the delegates’ new ‘Business cycle signals’ report today. It will continue to be published as part of the SNB’s Quarterly Bulletin. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attention. It is now my pleasure to give the floor to Fritz Zurbrügg, who will present this year’s Financial Stability Report. Page 4/4
To achieve this, policymakers will need to acknowledge the risk and come up with the appropriate safeguards. First and foremost for emerging markets is the continued strengthening of the domestic financial sector as I have noted, which is the key pre-requisite for raising the ability of the financial system and the economy to manage risk. Next, regional financial mechanism will also need to be strengthened to provide additional safeguards in the context of market surveillance and coordination of crisis prevention and resolution efforts. One lesson we have learnt dearly from the current crisis, as well as from the Asian financial crisis, is that globalized finance can be a source of serious risk to global economic and financial stability. Policymakers at the global level must accept this fact and be prepared to respond to it in a forward-looking way. I probably have used up the allocated time. Again, I want to thank the Central Bank of Peru and Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee for the invitation. It has been a pleasure, and thank you for your attention. 4  BIS Review 92/2009

Disappointingly, Turandot's answer to the flickering flame was not "confidence" as I had thought it would be. Her rather chilling answer was BLOOD - which could no doubt flow if confidence were to fail. But you have to remember that I was watching the opera over a month ago. Perhaps today she would come up with a somewhat more positive answer. Turandot's third riddle was "What is the frost that burns…… and makes a king of the one it accepts as a slave?" Well for a time that stumped me completely! Not that it mattered much by then - I'd already failed the first two of Turandot's tests, so I knew I was for the chop anyway! But then I began to reflect on the implications of it all for our own economy here in the UK. And I even recalled that previous occasion on which I had dined with you here at the ACT dinner. At that time we'd had just 2½ years of growth with low inflation - after the 1990/91 recession. I told you that we were determined to maintain price stability as a necessary condition for sustainable growth of output and employment. You all hooted with laughter! Your President said it had been the best joke of the evening - even though you'd heard it many times before! Well we've now had 10 years of low inflation - with continuous, quarter-by-quarter, GDP growth, and the number of people in employment is at a near-all-time high.