samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The need to form as up-to-date and reliable a picture of the current state of the economy as possible means that the MPC makes extensive use of business surveys alongside the official data. That includes not only the quarterly Industrial Trends survey and its monthly sibling, but also the other, more recent, CBI surveys, such as those covering the distributive trades and service sectors. The various surveys carried out by other organisations, such as the Chartered Institute of Purchasing Supply and the British Chambers of Commerce, are also valuable sources of information for us. Moreover, we have our own network of 12 regional agencies, whose role is to collect intelligence as to what is happening on the ground. Collectively, our regional Agents have about 8000 business contacts and they represent an important additional source of timely information for us. The uses of the survey data are varied. First, different indicators more often than not seem to tell different stories and we need to figure out which is the right one. For instance, at the current juncture, there is a marked discrepancy between the official data on the volume of retail spending, which points to considerable robustness this year – including whopping growth of 3.6% in May alone, though that was fully reversed in today’s release for June – and the Distributive Trades survey, which suggests significant weakness (see Chart 2).

Your Excellency, Honourable Ministers in order to insulate the financial system from external influences like the financial turmoil currently being experienced in some Western countries, the Bank has been working on a macro prudential approach to supervision of the financial system. Macro prudential analysis looks at the health of the underlying financial institutions in the system and performs stress tests and scenario analysis to help determine the system's sensitivity to economic shocks. This analysis also looks at macroeconomic data including GDP growth rates, inflation, interest rates, balance of payments, exchange rates, asset prices and the correlation of markets within the system. Distinguished guests, I am advised that Access Bank comes with a bouquet of banking products and excellent services, aimed at enhancing the quality of lives of Zambians and the economy in general. I urge management to remain committed to ethical standards and see themselves as a Zambian bank because you are indeed a Zambian bank now. Based on our inquiries, the Bank has a strong heritage and history of performance that will positively contribute to the health of the financial sector in Zambia. Your Excellency, Honourable Ministers, It is also exciting that the bank we are commissioning today is coming to Zambia in the context of pan-Africanism. This is an African bank investing in another African country, a demonstration of South to South cooperation. It is such investments that will accelerate the pace of the much needed economic integration in Africa.
One possibility is that a bank which has purchased credit protection via a credit derivative may have an incentive to put an ailing company into liquidation in order to obtain a payment from its counterparty rather than participate in a restructuring, the results of which are uncertain. For many banks, such an approach would be incompatible with building banking relationships, but the recent debate as to whether restructuring, rather than failure, constitutes a credit event for the purposes of a credit derivative contract shows the matter is highly topical. At the very least, active markets in credit derivatives and secondary loans might make it more difficult to identify and organise creditors in order to negotiate any debt workout. 2  BIS Review 67/2001  These are, as I have noted, awkward issues. But I am encouraged to see that the INSOL Lenders Group has attempted to address some of them in the course of drawing up its Statement of Principles for a Global Approach to Multi-Creditor Workouts. I am also encouraged that discussions on the Principles involved not only the largest global banks, but also a range of other finance providers, including insurance companies, institutional investors, hedge funds and secondary market debt providers.

Relevant EU directives would also need to be taken into account. All this strengthens my view that although synergies should be realised through consistency in the approaches to corporate and financial sector workouts, we need to recognise that banks (and insurance companies) are different. I have noted that, in corporate insolvencies, countries may differ in the extent to which their legal and statutory arrangements favour the debtor or the creditor. But they will also differ in the extent to which their insolvency laws embody a universal or territorial approach to cross-border insolvencies. Exactly the same distinction is relevant in an international financial insolvency. In the ”single-entity” approach, a bank with branches in several jurisdictions will be wound up according to universal principles, so that creditors and depositors worldwide are entitled to an equal claim on the bank’s worldwide assets. By contrast, a ”separate-entity” (or ”ring-fencing”) approach to liquidating an LCFI proceeds according to territorial principles, so that creditors and depositors of an individual bank branch in a particular jurisdiction take precedence in the distribution of all the LCFI’s assets within that jurisdiction, before the local liquidator is authorised to turn over any excess assets to the home country liquidator. This implies that, in both corporate sector and financial sector insolvencies, banking supervisors and insolvency practitioners will be subject to varying legal responsibilities that may make the co-ordination problem more difficult. I would argue that initiatives such as those of the ILG and UNCITRAL are more consistent with the spirit of a universal approach.
And in the US, there is a divergence between weaker soft data like the ISM manufacturing survey index and still rising hard data on industrial production. Hence, restoring confidence should be the priority and it is the responsibility of political leaders: the best antidote to the current slowdown is to reduce geopolitical risks, more than changing economic policies. The French economy has been slowing down but less than in some other European countries, due to increasing purchasing power and resilient domestic demand. In 2019, French growth is expected to be higher than that of Germany and close to the euro area average. Beyond internal demand, the second pillar of European resilience should be the extension of domestic reforms. I would like here to take the example of the Portuguese recovery since 2014, after a severe crisis and courageous adjustment efforts: GDP is now growing at 2.1% in 2018. Ambitious reforms have improved cost competitiveness, boosted export performance and led to a sharp fall in the employment rate, which has more than halved since 2013. This clearly demonstrates that, in Europe, reforms do have a positive impact. 2. Our monetary policy is able to combine clarity and flexibility. Let me turn to the consequences for our monetary policy: to deal with uncertainty, we have to combine clarity and flexibility, as we did in our December’s chained guidance. I will come back to this. In the present context, we should favour state-dependent analysis over time-dependent variables.

Now some people may argue that “offshore” markets in national or regional currencies complicate the conduct of national or regional monetary policy, with the implication that national or regional currencies should somehow be confined to their national or regional space. I must confess that this view seems to ignore the fact that it has in practice over the past twenty or thirty years proved perfectly possible for monetary policy to be conducted successfully despite the existence of the euro-markets. And I do not see how one could realistically expect to contain the use of a major currency, which the euro will certainly be, within territorial borders in any event. But as I have made clear, the UK’s interest -- “in” or “out” -- lies unambiguously in doing all that we can to ensure that the single currency succeeds. And in this context we would, of course, co-operate with the ECB in any way we could, to avoid potential disturbance to European monetary policy, were it shown to exist. Mr Chairman, London does not hold its pre-eminent position as Europe’s major financial centre as of right. We must continue to earn it. If we are to take advantage -- “in” or “out” -- of the opportunity that the euro will bring, then we must be technically well prepared. We will be. There is increasing evidence that financial institutions in the UK are now taking the steps necessary to ensure that they are ready for the introduction of the euro, whether or not the UK joins EMU.
These measures recognize that to avert or contain future financial crises, we need a financial system that can withstand large negative shocks. First, market participants must not have incentives to take excessive risks. Instead, incentives should reward actions that support economic growth and financial stability. And financial firms must set aside enough capital and liquidity so that when things go wrong they can absorb losses with their own resources. Finally, if these buffers prove inadequate and a financial firm veers toward failure, the official  BIS Review 141/2010  5  sector needs the tools to wind them down in an orderly manner without having to make the terrible choice between a chaotic failure that harms the whole economy and a taxpayerfunded rescue. Conclusion I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you about how my job at the New York Fed ties in with your lives and work here in Upstate New York. The links are many, including   How the Fed’s dual mandate for full employment and stable prices guides our actions and affects your lives;    How we rely on understanding economic conditions in Upstate New York as input when we formulate our policies; and    How our efforts to restore financial stability have provided a more solid foundation for lending to households and businesses – including small businesses.

The FOMC has said that it will keep short term interest rates at exceptionally low levels for an extended period of time. The Fed also retains large amounts of mortgage-backed bonds acquired in order to support the housing market and help bring down mortgage and other long-term interest rates to the historically low rates in place today. The FOMC and the Chairman have stated their commitment to take further actions to bring interest rates down further should economic conditions warrant. In a recent speech, I said that both the current levels of unemployment and inflation and the timeframe over which they are likely to return to levels consistent with our mandate are unacceptable. I said that I thought further Fed action was likely to be warranted unless the economic outlook were to evolve in a way that made me more confident we would see better outcomes for both employment and inflation before too long. Turning to regulatory policy, the biggest lesson of the financial crisis is that severe financial disruptions can inflict very large and persistent costs on people’s lives and jobs. Over the past year, with Fed leadership and support, important new regulatory initiatives have been advanced to create a global financial system where the players cannot slide back into the risky “business as usual” that created this crisis. These include the recent agreement with international bank regulators (sometimes called “Basel III”) to impose stricter standards for globally active banks and the considerable regulatory changes embodied in the Dodd-Frank Act.
Political initiatives to reduce regulatory inconsistencies would substantially support the supervisory convergence efforts. At the same time, there is a political objective to enhance the dynamism and competitiveness of the EU economy – the so-called “Lisbon” objective – and an efficient, integrated financial market is an important part of achieving it. The fact is that if we are to reap the full benefits of European integration, and meet the political objectives set in Lisbon, we need to find ways to ensure that the banking industry can operate with maximum efficiency and also that supervision is not unduly burdensome and promotes a level EU playing field. But we need to do this while also ensuring that depositors are adequately protected and that financial stability is preserved. In summary, the challenge is how to ensure both minimum gaps and minimum overlaps in supervision. Much progress has already been made in the banking context, but it is necessary to go further. BIS Review 84/2005  1  What should be the guiding principles for a European approach to dealing with these challenges? There are a range of views on how EU banking regulation and supervisory structures should face up to the challenges of the 21st century. What’s more, these opinions are not static, which makes for a complex situation. Among the most ambitious perspectives are those which advocate a single EU banking or financial services supervisory authority.

4 Provisions had already increased by € billion between June 2019 and June 2020. 5 As a result of its merger with Bankia, in March 2021 CaixaBank recorded positive extraordinary results of € million € million in negative goodwill less € million in extraordinary expenses). 5  increase in profit in the first quarter was essentially explained by a significant reduction in provisioning, which stood at pre-pandemic levels. Fourth, the unfavourable profitability performance in 2020 did not translate into a worsening of the sector’s solvency. Quite the contrary: capital ratios increased. The reasons for this are: i) the aforementioned negative extraordinary factors on profitability affected balance sheet items that have no bearing on prudential solvency (for instance, goodwill); and ii) the authorities implemented various measures to shore up institutions’ CET1 ratio, most notably the European Union’s regulatory reform (“quick fix”) and, again, the public guarantee programme and the recommendation against paying dividends. Despite their heterogeneous initial solvency positions, banks performed favourably across the board in 2020. Moreover, as at December 2020, accounting capital and reserves constituted the main components of Spanish banks’ prudential capital, while deductions for goodwill lost relevance as compared with previous years owing to a significant share of this having been amortised. More recently, in 2021 Q1, Spanish banks’ solvency ratios held stable relative to December 2020. Short and medium-term risks In my view, this positive sector performance must not obscure some of the short, medium and long-term risks that still exist.
Denis Beau: What will shape the future of crypto-assets? Opening address by Mr Denis Beau, First Deputy Governor of the Bank of France, at the Banque de France webinar, 15 June 2021. * * * Good morning Ladies and Gentlemen, Crypto-assets is a stimulating topic for a Central Banker and one that cannot leave him indifferent! It should be remembered that, historically, crypto-assets have been designed to be issued in a decentralised manner, with the ambition to replace legal currencies: the very denial of the Central Banker’s functions. Clearly, the initial objective was not achieved. So far, crypto-assets have proven to be much less efficient than our traditional currencies, for different reasons, starting with price volatility, transaction costs and delays, which make them difficult to use as a means of payment, not to mention the risks they expose their users and service providers. However, we cannot ignore the potential for innovation of crypto-assets and their underlying technology, the technique of distributed ledgers or blockchain. Already in 2017, with the Madre project, the Banque de France was one of the first central banks in the world to use this blockchain technology for an interbank use case. At the rate of innovation, it is a long history, but since then we have been closely monitoring the development of this vibrant blockchain and crypto-assets ecosystem, the opportunities it creates and the risks it carries.

I wish you all a great webinar. 3/3  BIS central bankers' speeches
Overly high inflation would have disastrous consequences for the economy – as German history shows. Excessively low inflation would have exposed us to deflation, a mortal danger as we know from the 1930s. In practice, price stability was defined by the Council of Governors as from 2003 as an inflation rate of close to, but below, 2% over the medium-term. This definition has not changed and is now widely shared by all the central banks in developed countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom. Up to recent years, the stability of prices in the euro area was remarkable. However, as from 2013, inflation dropped to well below the 2% mark. Our mandate required us to respond so as to bring inflation back to healthier levels for our economies. b) What is the situation today? Inflation is gradually recovering in the euro area, as we had announced: we have gone from a fall of 0.2% in April 2016 to a rise of 1.1% in last December. This is partly due to the rebound in energy prices but is also the result of our monetary policy: it 1/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  has enabled us to ward off the risk of deflation which was still a threat in 2015. Now in contrast, some seem to fear a resurgence of inflation; this is very exaggerated. We have not yet reached our 2% target and “core” inflation – excluding energy and food – is of only 0.9%.

1 Among other important tasks in coming years and decades, the government would need return from financial assets to provide for future pensioners. We can probably expect that productivity and real wages will continue to grow in parallel, and future pensioners would most likely want to take part in that welfare gain. This may imply that government expenditures will increase more than the overall growth in the economy, as the number of pensioners is growing fast and the demand for healthcare also will be higher. Although real wages increase, it will not be easy to raise the tax level. Thus, the government will need return from financial assets to finance the increased expenditure for pensioners. International capital markets have played a crucial role in allowing us to follow the strategy for extraction of petroleum. We drew heavily on borrowing opportunities abroad when the petroleum industry was being built up. We did the same in order to expand welfare schemes and to finance the countercyclical policy of the mid-1970s and the early 1990s. Over the last decade and a half, international capital markets have enabled us to convert national oil and gas resources into equities and bonds abroad in the Fund. The implementation of our investment strategy is dependent on free capital movements. I would like to remind the audience that only some twenty five to thirty years ago we had very rigorous capital restrictions ourselves.
Andres Sutt: Macroeconomic co-ordination and fiscal policy in the expanding Eurozone Statement by Mr Andres Sutt, Deputy Governor of Eesti Pank (Bank of Estonia), at the conference “thinking EUconomy - Wirtschaftspolitik europäisch denken”, Berlin, 3 May 2006. *  *  *  The enlargement of the European Union with the clear message that all countries without an opt-out clause will, in the future, be also members of the EMU, is a most welcome and forward-looking approach in view of an ongoing globalisation and integration processes in the world. Eventually, the adoption of the single currency by all Member States provides clear benefits for the Union as a whole. From the macroeconomic point of view it would support further economic integration and higher growth rates by fostering trade and investments. Therefore, euro area enlargement will provide tangible benefits for all European citizens over time. The main policy challenge for both the current and prospective euro area members is to ensure that the best use is made of the monetary stability provided by the framework of the European System of Central Banks (ESCB). From the perspective of the new Member States, the issue at stake is how to maintain the economic structure supportive for sustained growth and rapid real convergence. Strong fiscal stance is instrumental in this regard.

Today, the sukuk market has become an important avenue for international fund raising and investment activities with the sukuk becoming a truly global product, generating significant cross-border financial flows. The internationalization of Islamic finance is also evidenced by the growing presence of Islamic financial institutions that now operate beyond their own jurisdictions and the increased number of international foreign financial institutions that offer Islamic financial products and services. Indeed, increasingly, Islamic finance has become part of the growth strategies of a growing number of the global financial players. In addition, the traditionally domestic-focused Islamic financial institutions are now venturing abroad. These developments have resulted in the increased international participation in Islamic financial markets. New horizons are also fast emerging, as seen by the concrete efforts for legislative  BIS Review 140/2010  1  and regulatory changes in several non-traditional markets to facilitate the introduction of Islamic finance in these markets. The rapid internationalization in Islamic finance has also been underpinned by the massive flow of knowledge, ideas, technology and people across borders, a process which fosters a greater international understanding on the practices in Islamic finance. This is taking place through the strong international cooperation in the area of human capital development and the development of global ancillary service providers that specialize in Islamic finance. This has resulted in the proliferation of programmes and certifications that focus on Islamic finance around the world and the development of Islamic indices, information repositories, and the provision of professional consultancy services.