samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
In last year’s exceptional environment, however, short-term interest rates, in the face of speculative attacks, rose at times to around double those for the US dollar. These spreads have virtually disappeared in recent months, testifying to the failure of those attacks to undermine the longer-term credibility of our exchange rate system. Combined with cuts in US interest rates last autumn, nominal interest rates in Hong Kong now stand at or below pre-crisis levels. Of course, real interest rates remain high, as prices have come down along with the sharp downturn in economic activity. But I believe that this process of price adjustment, although painful in the short run, demonstrates the flexibility needed to restore our competitiveness in the region, setting the stage for renewed growth in the period ahead. Indeed, asset markets are already responding to signs that the worst of the downturn may be behind us, both here in Hong Kong and in the region as a whole. Regarding the volume of financial activity in Hong Kong, domestic bank lending declined toward the end of last year, as corporate loan demand fell and banks reassessed risk factors. Yet growth in bank deposits and the money supply recovered at the same time, perhaps reflecting a rise in household savings in a period of uncertainty. Rising deposits and weak loan growth has left the banks well equipped to meet an expansion in loan demand during the recovery phase of the cycle, and market conditions overall seem now more conducive to corporate fund-raising.

Hence, in the second half of the year, when the buildup of government reserves ground to a halt, a considerable part of export revenue, if unspent to reduce external debt, ultimately settled in bank accounts as extra foreign currency liquidity. Incidentally, this is why the response of the foreign exchange rate to the purchase suspension decision was fairly muted. The market essentially continued to expect their resumption and accumulated assets. Next year, our baseline scenario provides for a return to the 2017–2018 situation, with a significant amount of oil revenues being used to rebuild international reserves and the private sector’s capital outflow declining. Importantly, in this logic we do not foresee a strong response of either the current balance or the foreign currency exchange to resumed purchases. To conclude, let me reiterate that the Bank of Russia will explore the need for further upgrades to the key rate, taking into account inflation and economic developments against the forecast, as well as the risks of external conditions and the response of financial markets. In the current context it is crucial that our approach remains conservative as we assess risks and conduct monetary policy. Inflation stays close to 4%. More so, it has never climbed above this figure since the second half of 2017. Although the rise in inflation early next year is set to be driven by transient factors, considering the need to limit their negative effects and ensure a speedy return of inflation to 4%, it is critical that the response of monetary policy is well-timed.
It's up to us to shape that destiny.” “Justement ici à Aix on comprend l’appel qui fait de l’Europe aujourd’hui notre destin commun. Il nous appartient de donner forme à ce destin.” A “common destiny”: the words of the man with whom General de Gaulle achieved reconciliation after so many conflicts. These words apply even more to the countries belonging to the euro area. In the ECB and in the Eurosystem we are fully convinced that, with our fellow citizens, 320 million of them, we share a destiny in common – wir teilen dasselbe Schicksal – nous partageons un destin en commun. I thank you for your attention. BIS Review 69/2008  3

I wish you fruitful discussions and I am looking forward to seeing what answers you might find to address the issues highlighted in the panels of this conference. As the focus of the conference is on economic growth and development in Romania and the wider South-East Europe region, allow me to elaborate on this topic. I will approach the subject from the perspective of a central banker. Let me start by saying that sustainable economic growth of both Romania and the region relies mainly on economic policy consistency. The global economic and financial crisis has proved yet again that there is no valid substitute for consistent economic policies. The correction of economic policy errors is, everywhere and always, painful and, while difficult to comprehend by the public at large, it is absolutely necessary. The case of Romania is highly illustrative in this respect. Large macroeconomic imbalances had been steadily accumulating during the boom years, as a result of sizeable foreign capital inflows and credit expansion, the impact of which was augmented by a pro-cyclical stance of fiscal policy, especially in the last two years before the onset of the crisis. As a result, Romania had large twin deficits at the start of the crisis, specifically a sizeable structural fiscal gap (around –8% of GDP in 2008) and a current account deficit in the double-digit area (between 2006 and 2008). After the crisis hit, Romania had no other choice but to undertake the necessary adjustments in order to eliminate these imbalances in an orderly manner.
Mr. George discusses the problems in Asia and considers the risks they pose to the global economy Speech by the Governor of the Bank of England, Mr. E.A.J. George, at the British-American Chamber of Commerce Lunch in London on 22/1/98. The role of the Chamber is to promote Anglo-American trade and investment, and you’re doing a pretty good job. Two way trade in goods and services is running at around $ billion in each direction, and has grown at an annual average rate of about 8% over the past five years. Over the same period the US has accounted for just over half of all inward direct investment into this country and close to a third of all UK outward direct investment. These examples suggest that our commercial relationships are in good shape. Economic developments in our two countries have provided a favourable backdrop to British-American commercial relationships. In the US Goldilocks continues to tiptoe through the tulips. Total output has been growing for seven years - at an average annual rate of around 2¼%. Unemployment has fallen from a peak of 7.4% to 4.7%; and consumer price inflation has averaged 3%. In this country output has been growing for the best part of six years - at an average annual rate of close to 3%. Unemployment on a comparable basis has fallen from a peak of 10.7% to below 7% and underlying consumer price inflation has averaged around 2¾%. If that’s not Goldilocks exactly, it is surely her younger sister!

This may become a problem for the euro area, if such differences become persistent and hamper the transmission of monetary policy and the smooth functioning of the currency union. The ECB can only make monetary policy for the euro area as a whole, without tailoring it to the needs of any particular country. This makes it vital that such divergences in national inflation and real interest rates are kept in check by national structural and fiscal policies. Government support measures that are taken to shield the economy from the impact of high and volatile energy prices must be temporary and well targeted so that they preserve the right incentives for consumers and energy producers, and do not overburden government finances. In setting monetary policy, central banks must not hesitate to fight high and persistent inflation. Keeping prices stable is the best contribution we can make to the economy, and doing so is essential if we want to see purchasing power recover and businesses regain the confidence to invest and create jobs. If we hesitate, we may later have to raise interest rates much higher, and keep them high for much longer, in order to get inflation down to its target of two per cent and to keep it there. With this I will conclude. Thank you for your attention, and I will be happy to answer any questions you might have. 7/8  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  1 ECB Economic Bulletin 7/2022 2 Bruegel: Does inflation hit the poor hardest everywhere?
In trade-weighted terms, the Swiss franc is currently almost unchanged from January. Structural changes in the foreign exchange and money markets As you will know, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) implements its monetary policy via the money and foreign exchange markets. Consequently, structural changes in these markets are particularly important to us. I would now like to talk briefly about the major changes and their significance for our work. On the foreign exchange market, we are seeing a substantial decline in turnover in the primary interbank market. Meanwhile, the size of the market as a whole has decreased only slightly. This means that the interbank market has lost market share. The primary interbank market covers trading via the electronic communication networks. Between 2010 and 2013, turnover through these networks fell by almost 40% overall. In chart 3 you can see an example of this decline in turnover for the EURCHF and USDCHF currency pairs. In 2013, this was already below the previous levels, and a further decline in turnover is becoming evident for the current year. This development is attributable, in essence, to three factors. First, there is an increasing tendency for large merchant banks to use internal clearing for customer transactions. This means that the need for hedging transactions on the interbank market has declined. Second, to an increasing extent, merchant banks are offering liquidity via other electronic distribution channels such as their own trading platforms or multibank platforms. This enables them to attract more business and to benefit from the additional internalisation.

I do not wish to prescribe what you should talk about throughout this workshop, but I am hopeful that what I have mentioned above can form some discussion points in the deliberations of this workshop. It is also my desire that as you travel back to your respective countries, you would have learnt something you can implement to improve our respective financial systems. In conclusion, as financial markets become increasingly globalised, supervisory co-operation and harmonisation become increasingly important. Organisations such as MEFMI play an important role in developing capacity in the identified areas of macroeconomic and financial sector management. Ladies and gentlemen, Allow me to commend MEFMI which has been in the fore front of building sustainable capacity in financial supervision in the sub-region. It has shown the cause for fostering best practices, raising awareness and helping us to improve our processes especially in this area of financial stability in the region in general. Finally, I hope that you will find this workshop stimulating and that you will enjoy your stay in Zambia. With these remarks, I declare this workshop officially open. I Thank you. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches
It inspires confidence, even though it may lack precision - in fact what I think it means is that the authorities will not stand in the way of a strengthening of the dollar, rather than that they would necessarily resist a weakening. By contrast, different Japanese officials have over the past years made rather different pronouncements about where the yen should be and what they might or might not do to secure that. International sentiment towards the yen and investment in Japan appear to have been damaged by such apparent vacillation. BIS Review 23/2000  4  If these arguments are transposed to Euroland, they imply that the ECB must continue to develop its own identity and assert its own policies. Emerging uncertainties over whether an exchange rate policy is lurking somewhere in the background should be firmly resolved. Furthermore, national central bank governors and finance ministers should exercise extreme self-discipline in commenting publicly on monetary policy if their views in any way diverge from the official ECB line, notwithstanding the withdrawal symptoms from which they may suffer. The problem was nicely summed up by the caption beneath a photograph of G7 finance ministers in a recent edition of your German magazine, “Capital”. It noted that there was just one minister each to speak for the dollar, yen and pound, but three who debated with one another about the euro.

Euroland officials should perhaps consider how much a problem there is of substance and how much of perception, and address each as appropriate. Another factor that may contribute to scepticism over the euro concerns monetary policy. But there is not a lot that I would wish to say on the subject. You will appreciate that central bankers are not anyway the sort of people to make public assessments of one another! On the whole, I sense a feeling of some sympathy for the European Central Bank. In the technical sense it appears to have done most things right, in terms of keeping inflation under wraps and so preserving the internal purchasing power of the euro, but it has nevertheless had to preside over a substantial decline in the euro’s external value. Given that Euroland as a whole is a relatively closed economy, the decline of the euro may have caused more concern to outsiders than to insiders. It has certainly influenced international investor perceptions. My own observation, perhaps slightly cynical, of businessmen and investors is that they are less concerned about the technical content of monetary policy - provided that it is seen to be reasonably disciplined - than they are about the conviction with which it is delivered. Thus, the so-called “strong dollar” stance of the United States is clearly stated. It is not contradicted from anywhere within the administration.
Usage to date across these facilities has not been particularly high. But as I have explained more fully elsewhere, their impact has been large and sustained, and I continue to attribute much of the 3 2/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  facilities' initial success to the size, scope, and flexibility of these backstops.3 We've seen encouraging progress from these policy actions in recent months. As Chair Powell has noted, though, full recovery will take some time.4 Moreover, the timing for fully achieving our goals will depend on more than just our monetary and financial policies. Most important will be our public health authorities' success in containing the virus itself. And fiscal measures, which helped many smaller firms, the unemployed, and lower income households weather the initial stresses of the crisis, will continue to play a critical role in promoting sustained recovery. The Fed's Policy Response: How We Implement Also Matters I'd like to shift away from the Fed's policy actions and explain why their implementation can also make a difference in addressing the unequal impact of the pandemic. Recall that as we launched the facilities, the principles of transparency, governance, and accountability were at the forefront of our execution strategy. Why? The Fed, together with Treasury, has been entrusted to deploy large sums of public resources, and transparency is fundamental to our credibility. In practice, this requires clarity in the terms and conditions of the facilities, timely reporting on facility usage, and publication of vendor contracts, just to list a few aspects.

The initiatives can also fit in with the broader agenda of ASEAN integration, to leverage on regional resources and promote regional economic integration simultaneously. Closing remarks Let me close my remark by thanking all of you once again for your invaluable contributions to the Thai economy. The Bank of Thailand will continue our work of ensuring a stable financial and economic environment, so that businesses can continue to thrive and individuals can enjoy better standards of living on a sustainable basis. I hope that Thailand will continue to be a destination of choice for your investment, and a country of shared opportunity and prosperity for us all. Thank you  4  BIS central bankers’ speeches
Luis de Guindos: Building the EU’s capital markets - what remains to be done Speech by Mr Luis de Guindos, Vice-President of the European Central Bank, at the Association for Financial Markets in Europe Conference, Supervision and Integration Opportunities for European Banking and Capital Markets, Frankfurt am Main, 23 May 2019. * * * It is a pleasure to be here today to share my thoughts on the future of capital markets union (CMU). CMU is undoubtedly a key project for the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME), but it is also important for the European Central Bank (ECB). The primary objective of CMU is to foster deep and diversified capital markets that provide a wide source of financing options to European companies and citizens and act as an engine for investment, innovation and growth. Vibrant EU equity markets and truly diversified cross-border debt markets would complement traditional bank lending by fostering risk-taking and investment.1 Indeed, capital markets can, for instance, provide different forms of funding sources that are better tailored to firms’ needs along their stage of development. A well-functioning CMU would also complement the banking union by providing channels to mobilise the large existing pool of savings towards financing the economy. It could help facing tomorrow’s challenges, such as climate change and digital innovation.

Let me take a few examples: steps have been taken in harmonising elements of insolvency frameworks, such as ‘early restructuring’ and ‘second chance’. But these do not cover the conditions for opening insolvency proceedings nor the ranking of claims. As such, they are not enough to facilitate cross-border investment. Similarly, more should be done to remove overlaps in cross-border withholding taxes and reduce home bias in investment strategies. In my view, we need a single rulebook in a wide range of areas also covering consumer protection, anti-money laundering, or accounting rules for a successful CMU. Another reason for a limited “CMU effect” is that some of the agreed initiatives were only recently implemented. Take the securitisation package, for example. Important technical regulatory acts are still pending which prevent the new framework from being applied in full and are a source of uncertainty for those who would like to use it. It is therefore too early to assess the success of this measure. More importantly however, some proposals will not deliver their full potential. In the case of the pan-European personal pension product, the recent agreement gave birth to a rather complex product for which key elements are left to the discretion of Member States. Lack of ambition in the cross-border portability of the instrument may limit its capacity to facilitate labour mobility and the mobilisation of savings across borders in the absence of geographical diversification requirement for investments.
Evidently, traditional banking has a series of tried and tested protocols that help fend off or allow for a prompt response to situations of fraud, which are well-suited to the current needs of these population segments. In any event, it is an inescapable fact that, going forward, digital customers will continue to grow in importance. And so too is the emergence of new competitors, known as BigTech and FinTech. Allow me to turn to these now. It is widely known that these new players generally do not try to offer a full range of financial services. Instead they harness the possibilities that new technologies afford to target very specific niches, while steering clear of other activities, such as the business of taking deposits, which entail more stringent regulatory and supervisory requirements. As the report indicates, this can prompt a disintegration of the value chain. We have shifted from a situation in which many users interacted exclusively with a single financial institution to one in which, for example, a user can have an account at a bank, order payments through another provider’s interface and use a third party’s payment instrument. This situation could potentially lead to some banks losing touch with customers, one of the main strengths of their business model, and being relegated to performing back-office tasks that generate scant value. This is detrimental for the bank in two ways: first, the relationship with the customer is weakened and becomes less stable.

Second, visibility over the customer is reduced, which hampers the proper estimation and control of risks. In conclusion, digital transformation is not only a driver of cost reduction, it is also critical to mounting a defence against these new competitors. 2/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  The aim is to increase customer loyalty, either by creating tailored products that better cater to their needs, or by developing collaborative solutions between institutions, of which Bizum, the well-known instant payment system, is a prime example. In this defensive context, the sector must be able to harness its traditional strengths. We must not forget that banks have customers’ trust, providing services to practically the entire population in Spain. In fact, the COVID-19 crisis has served to remind us of the importance of banking, which has been central to the structuring of the public support measures. As regards the new customer interaction channels, the report focuses on the growing use of mobile devices to take out products and to perform transaction enquiries. Naturally enough, the focus is on the importance of apps as a response to the changing preferences of digital users, particularly the younger segment. Having an attractive interface and making applications easy to use is no doubt important. But in my view there is an even more critical aspect: the use of customer data. Let’s not forget, customer data constitute the commodity upon which the Fourth Industrial Revolution rests.