samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Indeed, climate risks are making an increasingly strong impact on the economy, through the direct consequences of climate change (causing more natural disasters), through more stringent regulation across the globe, and via changes in the energy mix. With plentiful energy resources available, energy costs were barely a factor in our national economic policy throughout the 20th century. We must realise that energy transition is likely to be a challenge for us. Furthermore, the nature of our economy is defined by a large number of so-called brown companies. We should keep pace with the trends, considering that corporate environmental performance is set to become a key factor driving investor and creditor decisions, as if we fail to address this problem in due time, we risk losing our competitive advantages and could be consigned to a global economic backwater. This is not the status our nation deserves. Energy transition is a great challenge for the economy. Given the need to find financial resources for this transition, the role of the financial sector is clear. Financial institutions are meant to act as financial agents supporting green, and most importantly, transformation projects. This is a multifaceted issue to resolve to make progress. First, we need to develop approaches to analyse climate and transition risks and procedures for financial institutions to take them into account. Second, non-financial companies should disclose reliable information regarding ESG risks. Such disclosures are needed for banks, investors or rating agencies to have reliable information, which is essentially a prerequisite for sustained investment.

Third, we need a mature market for green instruments. We need standards for their placement, and we must strike a balance between climate (ESG) risks and standard financial risks. It would be unthinkable for funding to go to a financially unstable company based on the green status it claims. By the same token, a brown company that boasts strong financial performance today should realise that it could only land funding on the best terms tomorrow if it works to enhance its sustainability record. There are plans to publish a report by the end of this year on how climate risks should be considered by financial institutions, and the Bank of Russia’s approaches to their regulation. The regulation will need to be aligned with that fundamental transition. Thereafter, in the middle of next year, market participants are due to receive our recommendations as to how they should move ahead. I have to admit that there are many more items on the priority list beyond the issues I have highlighted. Yet, the latter issues are of first-order priority, and we should not miss the right moment to introduce appropriate regulation. This is where we count on senators’ support. We have received many questions and responded to them in writing, and I am now are ready to answer your questions, too. 5/5  BIS central bankers' speeches
See Lipsey, R and Lancaster, K (1956), “The general theory of the second best”, Review of Economic Studies, 24(1). 8  Arrow, K and Debreu, (1954), “Existence of an equilibrium for a competitive economy”, Econometrica, 22 (3). 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Then they can trade contracts and insure each other against risks they are unwilling to bear. A moment of introspection reveals the absurdity of these assumptions as a description of the actual world. More often than not, even describing the universe of possible outcomes is beyond the means of the mere mortal, let alone ascribing subjective probabilities to those outcomes. That is genuine uncertainty, as opposed to risk, a distinction made by Frank Knight in the 1920s. 9 And it means that market outcomes reflect individual choices made under a pretence of knowledge. The swings in sentiment that result – pessimism one moment, exuberance the next – don’t reflect nature’s odds, but our own assessments of them, inevitably distorted by Keynesian “animal spirits”. 10 In the end, belief in the second lie that “markets always clear” meant that policymakers didn’t play their proper roles in moderating those tendencies in pursuit of the collective good. Lie III: “Markets are moral” Despite these shortcomings, well-managed markets can be powerful drivers of prosperity. By financing firms to hire, invest and expand, they drive growth. By opening up cross-border trade and investment they create new opportunities for businesses and savers.

By transferring risks to those most willing to bear them, they help households and businesses insure against the unexpected. But if left unattended, markets can be prone to excess and abuse. That is particularly so in financial markets, where means and ends too easily become conflated. Value becomes abstract and relative. And the pull of the crowd can overwhelm the integrity of the individual. Lie three is that “markets are moral” – that financial capital can take for granted the social capital necessary for markets to fulfil their promise. Consider the example of fixed income, currencies and commodities markets, which historically have relied heavily on informal codes and understandings. That informality was well suited to an earlier age. But as markets innovated and grew, it proved wanting. Markets need to retain the consent of society – a social licence – to be allowed to operate, innovate and grow. Repeated episodes of misconduct (such as the Libor and FX scandals) have called that social licence into question. To restore it, we need to rebuild fair and effective markets. 9  Knight, F (1921), Risk, uncertainty and profit, Signalman Publishing. 10  In Keynes (1936), Chapter 12, he wrote: “Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation, whether moral or hedonistic or economic.
Looking ahead, the level of RMB deposits may rise or fall from time to time. This is only natural as RMB financing and investment activities take place, and as RMB funds flow in and out of the system. It is what one would expect from the growing interaction between the onshore and offshore market. Similarly, the pricing of RMB funds, indicated by the offshore RMB interest rates, will also adjust in response to the fund flows, thereby restoring the balance in the supply and demand of RMB funds. So, is the RMB liquidity pool in Hong Kong big enough? I would respond that since the scope of RMB business has already expanded from merely deposit-taking to a much wider range of banking and financial activities, the amount of RMB customer deposit is only a partial measure of RMB liquidity or the overall state of play of RMB business in Hong Kong. What is more important is how efficient the pool of RMB is moving around the system. That is, whether we are seeing the channelling of RMB savings to investments, through bank lending, bond issuance and other activities. After all, financial business is about the circulation of money, rather than everyone holding a stagnant pool of money. The second question that I am often asked is whether the wider use of RMB and the development of offshore RMB business are still on a rising trajectory.

Eddie Yue: Hong Kong – challenges and opportunities ahead Speech by Mr Eddie Yue, Deputy Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, at the Hong Kong Institute of Bankers Annual Conference 2012 “The year of transformation – heading into a new era”, Hong Kong, 13 September 2012. *  *  *  Financial Secretary, Patrick, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, Good morning. It’s my great pleasure to be here at the fourth Annual Conference of the Hong Kong Institute of Bankers. The conference title behind me talks of “Heading into a New Era”. That’s a grand and ambitious statement. But, I believe, a fair one. The opportunities ahead for the banking sector are vast, particularly in terms of the offshore renminbi (RMB) market and asset management services. Today I’d like to discuss with you the reasons for my optimism. In doing so, I will detour slightly through some of the policy, regulatory and organisational priorities I think we will all need to work on. To start out, though, I should first acknowledge that, as with any journey, the travelling may not always be smooth. There is likely to be some occasional turbulence. I’m referring, of course, to the external economic challenges. So let me start there. The challenges It has now been five years since the start of the global financial crisis. Yet low growth and high volatility remain key features of the global economy. So much so that some commentators have asked whether these represent “the new normal”.
Broad money grew more than twice as rapidly in the first fifteen years of inflation targeting (when there was no QE) than in the decade or so after the financial crisis (when there was lots). And average inflation, in both periods, was close to 2%. This definitely does not mean that these indicators are somehow intrinsically unhelpful or misleading. Apart from anything else – and this is a more general point, relevant for other variables too – the act of targeting inflation is likely to reduce its correlation with just about every leading indicator (those things, at least, to which policy has a chance to react, given the lags involved). There might be several indicators that would have told you something about future inflation had monetary policy failed to react to them. But because in practice policy does just that, using and then offsetting that information, what’s left will inevitably be less well correlated[17] with inflation. In the case of broad money, and at least with the benefit of hindsight, it’s not that difficult to explain  Page 29  “what’s left” in these historical data. For a long period of time, right the way through from the early 1980s to the financial crisis over a quarter of a century later, household wealth rose (relative to income) and, because banks increasingly paid interest on their deposits, it became increasingly attractive to hold financial assets in that form.

Chart 4: MPC over-predicted demand coming out of the pandemic  Sources: ONS, Bank of England and Bank calculations.The money-based forecast is based on an error correction model of consumption estimated over 1992-2019 that includes separate terms for liquid assets and illiquid assets in both the longterm relationship and short-term dynamics. It is based on a consumption function set out in Aron et al (2011)  . Nor does the pattern of price rises, over the past couple of years, fit the story. A pure, moneydriven inflation affects all prices equally. What we've actually seen are huge shifts in relative prices – first the jumps in those of non-energy traded goods in 2021 and then, in 2022, the enormous  Page 7  rises in the costs of imported food and energy. The important point here is that, however you measure it – whether in terms of prices (interest rates) or quantities (monetary aggregates) – monetary policy operates with a lag. During that interval, and at least until policy can react to them, there are lots of things – “shocks and disturbances” (as the MPC’s remit puts it) that can affect inflation. In this case it’s clear what those have been: the hits to the supply of non-energy goods during the pandemic, to those of energy and food during the war, and the resulting rise in their global prices. Thanks to the significant hit to real incomes they involved, these shocks have also had sizeable second-round effects on domestic wages and prices.
They each account for 7 to 8 per cent of Swedish exports. However, their importance has declined over time. Statistics from Statistics Sweden for the first half of 2011 show that Swedish exports to China, India and Russia are together now as large as exports to the United States. If Brazil is included in this group of countries then exports to the so-called BRIC countries exceed exports to the United States and also those to the United Kingdom. The rate of increase in trade with the BRIC countries has been high recently. While exports to the BRIC countries have increased by 150 per cent since 2002, exports to the United States have fallen by 17 per cent in the same period.2 This change in the relative significance of different export markets at the macro level is confirmed by micro data. In the company interviews conducted by the Riksbank, the Swedish export companies report that sales are falling in parts of Europe compared with China and Brazil.3 Increased intra-regional trade in Asia The increased importance of the BRIC countries to Swedish exports is a natural consequence of the fact that these countries now constitute a larger part of the global economy. The extent to which the slowdown in Europe and the United States spreads to the emerging economies in the United States and Europe will be a major factor in determining the course of development in the period ahead.

Until fairly recently, it took at least two generations to double the standard of living, but in China, for instance, the standard of living is now being doubled every ten years. The average length of life in developing countries amounted to 65 years at the beginning of the 21st century, compared with just under 40 years in 1950. Even in Africa south of the Sahara the average length of life increased from 35 to 50 years before the spread of HIV/AIDS caused some decline. The ability to read has also increased dramatically since 1950,  BIS Review 60/2004  3  from 40 per cent to just over 70 per cent of the population. The corresponding figures for Africa south of the Sahara were from 17 per cent to 56 per cent, which is more than trebled. Another positive effect of increased wealth is that more people are expressing demands for democracy and human rights. According to Freedom House, the percentage of countries with some form of democratic government rose from 28 per cent in 1974 to 65 per cent in 2003. Another important aspect that should be highlighted is the environment. Studies show that higher growth initially leads to some deterioration in the environment, but that this phase is soon followed by clear improvements when increasingly wealthy countries can afford to safeguard their natural resources and invest in environmentally-friendly technology and production. The turning point appears to be when GDP per capita reaches approximately USD 5,000 a year.
One of the most infamous is the 1998 study based on just 12 children published in the Lancet claiming there was a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Uptake of the MMR vaccine subsequently dropped to under 80% nationally, and mumps reached epidemic levels in Britain in 2005. It later transpired that the lead author of the article had failed to disclose his role as a paid adviser in a lawsuit claiming MMR had harmed children. He was struck off, later studies have failed to establish a credible link between vaccines and autism, and the Lancet has fully retracted the article. if policymakers had systematically overambitious goals for economic activity they would succeed only in generating extra inflation. A seminal paper by Rogoff (1985) first suggested that delegating monetary policy to an independent central bank can overcome the inflation bias problem, delivering lower inflation and output variability. 9 See Cukierman, Webb and Neyapti (See “Measuring the Independence of Central Banks and Its Effect on Policy Outcomes”, The World Bank Economic Review, 1992) and Crowe and Meade (See “The Evolution of Central Bank Governance around the World”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2007). I define central banks with an index score greater than 0.4 on the Cukierman, Webb and Neyapti (1992) index as having a ‘moderate’ degree of independence.

Michael Gondwe: Islamic commerce and finance Opening remarks by Dr Michael Gondwe, Governor of the Bank of Zambia, at the workshop on “Islamic commerce and finance”, Lusaka, 24 March 2013. *  *  *  The Guest Speakers, Mufti Shafiq Jakhura and Maulana Bilal Jakhura; Distinguished invited guests; Participants; Ladies and gentlemen; On behalf of the Bank of Zambia and indeed on my own behalf, I would like to extend a very warm welcome to you all to this important workshop on Islamic Commerce and Finance. To our Guest Speakers, Mufti Shafiq Jakhura and Maulana Bilal Jakhura, I wish to extend a special welcome to you to Zambia and in particular to Lusaka. Ladies and gentlemen, the Bank of Zambia is honoured and delighted to be invited to give a keynote address at this workshop. This Workshop on Islamic Commerce and Finance could not have come at a more opportune time than now, when the Bank of Zambia has embraced financial inclusion on its policy agenda as a way of increasing access to appropriate financial products and services to all segments of society in Zambia. Ladies and gentlemen, Islamic commerce and finance have expanded significantly in the last few decades globally both in terms of size and the number of players. For Instance, Islamic finance is currently practiced in more than 50 countries worldwide. In many countries, Islamic finance co-exists with conventional finance and is not limited to Muslim countries.
It is therefore no surprise that the lack of innovation and the scant accumulation of technological capital of Spanish firms is a determining factor in explaining why Spanish firms are less productive than their European counterparts. This technological capital gap between Spain and its European partners is at least partly due to structural characteristics which limit firms’ innovative capacity, such as the lack of available human capital referred to above, or a productive structure skewed towards sectors with a low technological content. Another basic determinant requiring special attention and which poses major challenges in the current context of technological change, is the access to finance – whether public or private – for business projects with a high innovative content. Financing of innovation In general, the growth of firms is conditioned by the availability of external finance to undertake new investment projects. But external finance also plays a particularly vital role in the success of the innovative projects of small new firms whose characteristics make it more difficult for them to obtain funds.9 These greater difficulties have their origin in information asymmetries between firms and financiers and in the comparatively higher inherent risk than that for established companies, all the more so when the returns will only be received in the long term. These characteristics contrast with the preferences of capital market financiers, who tend to seek more shortterm returns and have a certain aversion to risk.10 Evidently these asymmetries apply to any investment project.

This figure is still far from the medium-term structural budgetary balance, convergence to which is required by the so-called “preventive arm” of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) applicable in Spain since July. It is therefore a priority to make headway in cleaning up the public finances so as to reduce this source of vulnerability of the economy and to be able to make full use of national fiscal policy as an effective macroeconomic stabilisation instrument in the event of a sharper economic slowdown in the future. In addition, this improvement in the budgetary situation must be compatible with other challenges which the public finances will have to face in coming years, including most notably the consequences of population ageing, which I will discuss later. A third and final area of vulnerability of the economy to which I would like to refer is the external debt. Despite the correction achieved to date in the form of current-account surpluses, much work still remains to be done, as shown by the negative net international 9/18  investment position and the gross debt, which stood, respectively, at around 80% and 170% of GDP in the second quarter of 2019. To continue correcting these two magnitudes, the external surpluses will have to be sustained over time, which in turn will require further headway in the gains in competitiveness achieved in the last few years.
Macroprudential for the whole economy  To put that action in context, let me start with a very high level sketch of what in my view we mean by financial stability. Financial stability in essence is ensuring that the financial system and the real economy are able to absorb the ups and downs of the financial cycle. And, by extension, that the financial cycle does not amplify the troughs of the business or economic cycle or more generally disrupt the economy. We care about the ups, the peaks of the financial cycle because higher peaks are likely to result in higher falls and so, require higher resilience. By financial cycle I mean essentially the build-up and contraction of credit or leverage in the economy and in the financial system. The rise and fall of asset prices – both financial and physical assets – does of course matter. But it matters much more when assets are financed by credit.4 The term ‘financial cycle’ implies some smooth predictable sine wave. Life, I am afraid, is not like that. Financial cycles do not follow nice patterns: they are only ‘cycles’ in the sense that we can observe periods of credit growth followed by periods of contraction. The growth of credit in an economy tends to build up and accelerate over time and then contract as optimism about the future income streams and asset values waxes and wanes. And there are mechanisms, such as collateral values, endogenous to the creation of credit that reinforce both the upswing and the downswing.

Ladies and gentlemen, The economic crisis, which occurred in 1997, caused the Bank of Thailand to review its role and task as the central bank of the country. This review pointed to a number of weaknesses in the Bank of Thailand's work in the past. As a result, the Bank has embarked on a comprehensive restructuring and modernisation programme aimed at improving the works of the Bank of Thailand to best serve the roles and responsibilities as a central bank. The strategy focused on 4 aspects, namely organisational structure and work process, human resource management, decision marking process, and database and information technology. The Bank of Thailand started the restructuring programme at the beginning of 1999 with the revamping of the management levels. Emphasis was placed on shorter lines of command, which facilitate fast and effective problem solving. The organisation is divided into five main business groups; namely, monetary stability, financial institution stability, corporate support services, financial institution rehabilitation and strategic capabilities. Objectives, roles, and responsibilities of each group are clearly stipulated. In 1999, the modernisation programme put the main emphasis on improving the work process.