samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
4  See, for example, de Bandt and Hartmann (1998), “What is systemic risk today?”, in Risk Measurement and Systemic Risk, Proceedings of the Second Joint Central Bank Research Conference, hosted by the Bank of Japan, Tokyo, 1997. 5  In this regard some of the ECB outputs (partly in collaboration with academics and researchers from other central banks and international organisations) include: Fell and Schinasi, (2005), “Assessing Financial Stability: Exploring the Boundaries of Analysis”, National Institute Economic Review, Vol. 192, No. 1; de Bandt and Hartmann (2000), “Systemic risk: A survey”, ECB Working Paper, No 35, November; Hartmann, Straetmans and de Vries (2004), “Asset market linkages in crisis periods”, Review of Economics and Statistics, 86(1); Hartmann, Straetmans and de Vries (2005), “Banking system risk: A cross-Atlantic perspective”, NBER Working Paper, No. 11698, October; Cappiello, Engle and Sheppard (2006), “Asymmetric dynamics in the correlation of global equity and bond returns”, Journal of Financial Econometrics, 4(4); Gropp, Lo Duca and Vesala (2009), “Cross-border bank contagion in Europe”, in Shin and Gropp (eds. ), Banking Integration, Bank Stability, and Regulation, special issue of the International Journal Central Banking, 5(1); Iyer and Peydró-Alcalde (forthcoming), “Interbank contagion at work: Evidence from a natural experiment”, Review of Financial Studies. 6  Group of Ten, (2001), “Report on Consolidation in the Financial Sector”, Basel. BIS Review 115/2009  3  Following de Bandt, Hartmann and Peydró-Alcalde (forthcoming), we can distinguish three broad and interrelated ways in which systemic risk can materialise.

Do you think that the measures adopted last week by the Eurogroup are enough to deal with the severity of the problem, or should the finance ministers have gone further? With coronabonds, for example, or similar solutions. The agreement made was a commitment that goes in the right direction. It’s important to remember that. To reach a compromise, everyone has to give way a little and to believe in it. The agreement is a sign of political commitment. As for other possible measures, such as coronabonds, the ECB has always been in favour of the existence of a fiscal instrument at European level that can complement monetary policy. It is just that this is a political decision. We are in favour of it, we think it would be a good thing for the euro area, but we will see what happens. The European Council meets on 23 April. We consider it to be a useful instrument, but it is not up to the ECB. It’s for the European governments to decide. 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  And what do you expect will happen? Do you think that it’s possible to reach a political agreement to take this step towards coronabonds or is it just a dream? I couldn’t possibly say what will happen. All I can say is that the current situation is difficult and that the commitment made by the Eurogroup was positive, but let’s see. The possibility of a recovery fund being set up is a good idea.
Luis M Linde: Overview of the Spanish economy against the background of the euro crisis Testimony by Mr Luis M Linde, Governor of the Bank of Spain, before the Parliamentary Budget Committee in connection with the draft State Budget for 2014, Madrid, 4 October 2013. *  *  *  My first appearance as Governor of the Banco de España before this Committee was last year, amid a very difficult situation for the Spanish economy and a serious euro crisis. Since then, fortunately, the situation has improved and the most serious uncertainties surrounding the future of the common currency have been dispelled. Allow me to begin by stressing the importance that strengthening the Economic and Monetary Union and Spain's participation in it has for our economy and for the well-being of Spanish society. The difficulties we are facing should not mask the benefits the Spanish economy has reaped from its participation in the European project and in its most significant institution in terms of integration, namely monetary union. It is worth citing some figures. In the 1986–1990 period, Spanish per capita GDP stood at 78% of the average of the countries then comprising the European Union. In the 2007–2012 period, despite the severity of the crisis in Spain, the percentage figure relative to the same group of countries, which are the richest in the Union, was at 93%.

But why should we care about these imbalances? After all, there is no reason why all countries in the world should be balanced at all times, as these imbalances simply reflect the need for funding current or future consumption and investment. However, excessive external imbalances may become a source of concernbecause the funding of deficit countries by surplus economies is subject to “sudden stops” and even reversals.1 Experience suggests that large imbalances are often a leading indicator of subsequent crises and sudden stops. As shown by Philip Lane in one of his numerous contributions to this topic,2 current account balances prior to the Great Financial Crisis exceeded levels consistent with underlying economic fundamentals and thus implied large and costly adjustments thereafter. These vulnerabilities are not confined to emerging market economies: large and persistent current account deficits may also precede financial crises in advanced economies,3 including in the euro area. I will structure the rest of my talk as follows. First I will talk about the determinants of the current account, focusing on the role of the exchange rate. In the second part I will say a few words about the composition of external funding (gross and net capital flows). Finally I will conclude with a discussion of available policy options that could address the persistence of current account imbalances, globally and within the euro area. * * *  1. The determinants of global imbalances, and their adjustment mechanisms The economic and social costs of correcting current account imbalances are potentially dramatic.
It will in particular change the relationships between the members of the financial community and between this community and the non-financial world  II. Regarding Big Data, central banks will have to switch from an observer status to a user or player position, which implies significant changes in performing part of their activities  III. Big Data raise regulatory issues that cannot be solved within a national context but require a global reflection from public authorities. I. Big data will have significant economic effects. Entry costs for carrying out financial  transactions have already been reduced and will be lowered further in the future. Customer knowledge, in particular regarding the conditions applied by financial institutions, will be enhanced and more generally information asymmetries between clients and providers of financial services will narrow. Big Data can be a powerful card to play by GAFAs or other native non-financial firms to develop new activities. The financial industry has therefore to adapt rapidly to face the data revolution and compete with the new entrants, while protecting privacy against increasing cyber risks in particular. All in all, competition will increase, which is beneficial to the economy. The flip side can be enhanced risks for financial stability, implying a new form of vigilance for central bankers in particular. I will elaborate a bit more on this later on. II. Terabytes of data are available and more will be coming soon. Central banks will  collect more and more granular data. This is a clear opportunity for better forecasting and even nowcasting.

1  “Economic and Financial Regulation in the Era of Big Data” Paris, 24 November 2017  Closing remarks by François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Banque de France  I am very pleased to close this Conference on “Economic and Financial Regulation in the Era of Big Data”. I was in London this morning and I therefore regret having missed your discussions on an issue which I consider of paramount importance. Let me thank warmly all speakers, in particular Benoit Coeuré, member of the Board of the ECB, who opened this Conference and Philip-Hans Franses, Professor at Eramus School of Economics, who I am told gave an outstanding lecture. Big Data indeed deserves a global view, from a number of angles. It was the objective of this Conference and I am grateful to all of you, presenters and participants, to have made this possible. In closing this Conference, I will not come back to the specificities of Big Data and its numerous usages. All presentations have given a fresh look on Big Data and I am sure that on such an excellent basis, discussions will continue beyond this one day Conference on issues which are of key importance for all of us. I would rather like to focus on the consequences of Big Data for the economy in general and for central banks in particular. I will develop this into three parts:  2 I. Big Data will have significant economic effects.
The common theme in all of this research is the importance of the public’s “narratives” in shaping their behaviour. That is true individually but especially collectively – hence “popular narratives” – with shifts in collective expectations helping account for the width and depth of macro-economic fluctuations. As well as contributing to this research, the Bank has begun using these “narrative” approaches itself to help understand behaviour. Let me give you a topical example. The Bank’s Agents around the UK have a wide network of company contacts who they visit regularly to discuss the economy. These visits are then written up. These write-ups enable a semantic search to be carried out to identify the key themes or narratives emerging in companies’ conversations. You will be unsurprised to hear that a key theme among companies over recent quarters has been uncertainty surrounding Brexit. 19  Shiller (2017). Baker, Bloom and Davis (2016), Bloom (2009) and Bloom, Bond and Van Reenen (2007). 21 For example, Tuckett (2011) and Tuckett and Nikolic (2017). 22 Bailey et al (2016). 23 Akerlof and Shiller (2009) and Shiller (2017). 20  9  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  9  Figure 1 plots a word cloud extracted from those company write-ups. The size of each word connotes the frequency of its use in relation to mentions of “uncertainty”. For a word that did not exist as recently as five years ago, it is striking how Brexit is now dominating companies’ conversations.

The average deposit rate on households and corporate deposits for the region equals 1.4% and 0.9% in 2016, compared to around 5% and 4%, respectively in 2007.5 The correction is in line with the policy rate and lending rates adjustment, and reflects the natural response of the banks for preserving their profitability at acceptable levels. Yet, it seems that deposit interest rates in some of the countries in the region, in the members of the Euro Area in particular, are approaching the lower bounds. Albeit saving alternatives for the private sector in the region are limited, further drop in deposit rates might act as a constraint for further deposit growth. The falling opportunity costs can increase the propensity to hold cash or short-term funds in the banking system, thus eroding the quality of the financing sources and banks’ ability to provide more credit. Still, given that recent bank profitability indicators point to a gradual improvement in profitability, profitability concern will probably weigh less on the deposit interest rates. Nevertheless, in few of the countries (Croatia, Hungary, and Bosnia) profitability indicators are still worrisome. In addition, further decline of the ECB rates, for some of the countries might also pose challenges in this regard. 5  Interest rate data for Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia available since 2011, or 2012. Hence the 2007 figures do not include these countries, and Albania as well, for which sector by sector data is not available.
Caleb M Fundanga: Local bond market developments in Zambia Speech by Dr Caleb M Fundanga, Governor of the Bank of Zambia, on the occasion of the Listing of the Development Bank of Zambia Bond, Lusaka Stock Exchange, Lusaka, 4 April 2007. *  *  *  • The General Manager – Lusaka Stock Exchange • The Chairman, DBZ Board of Directors • The Chairman, Standard Chartered • The Secretary – Securities and Exchange Commission • Mr Ade Adebajo, Director, Standard Chartered Africa Debt Capital Markets • Member of the DBZ Board • All Senior Government Officials Present • Acting Managing Director, DBZ • Managing Director – Zambia State Insurance Corporation • Chief Executive Officer – Stock Brokers (Z) Limited • Representative of DBSA • Distinguished invited guests; and • Ladies and Gentleman Today marks another important milestone in financial sector development indicative of the coming of age of the Zambian financial system in general and local bond market in particular. The issue of the K68.620 billion senior unsecured floating rate note under the Development Bank of Zambia (DBZ) K150 billion Medium Term Note Programme and listing of the note on the Lusaka Stock Exchange (LuSE) is a landmark transaction for two key reasons. The first is that this is the first time in the history of the local bond market that a local currency medium term note programme has been established. The second is that this transaction marks the largest single issue ever offered to Zambian fixedincome institutional investors.

Let me share a few thoughts on some of the current issues which have a bearing on Asia’s growth and the global environment ahead. Rising global food prices The first, and perhaps most pressing issue that the world faces, is spiraling inflation. Global food prices have spiked in the recent months due to a confluence of factors. Demand has increased to feed a growing global population with a rapidly expanding middle class in the developing Asian countries. This demand is compounded by competing uses for food sources to generate biofuel and feed. Meanwhile, sources of supply have been hit by rising energy costs, increased competition for arable land, and the erratic weather. As a result, prices of many food commodities including wheat, corn, and rice, a staple for all Asians, have soared. The United Nations has declared the drastic increase in food prices “an unprecedented challenge of global proportions” and established a task force to tackle the food crisis. This is indeed a global issue and cannot be resolved overnight. Many of these factors are structural and will take time for the demand-supply equilibrium to be established. On the Asia Pacific front, the Asian Development Bank has recently announced $ million of immediate budgetary support to help countries that have been worst hit by rising food prices. With increasing food prices and high oil prices, mitigating the impact of strong inflationary pressures will remain a key priority for many Asian governments.
The Bank’s forecasts at the time were conditioned on the declining futures curves for energy prices for the first six months of the forecast but were assumed flat thereafter. On that basis the MPC concluded that “while the risks around energy prices are judged to be to the downside those towards wage growth are judged to be skewed to the upside”. Fast forward a year and the November 2022 MPR forecast shows just how much has changed for the worse (Table 2). Inflation is now expected to peak at 10.9% in 2022Q4, over three times higher than was forecast only a year ago, before falling sharply from the middle of 2023, to well below target by 2024Q4. With the economy already likely to be in a recession which is forecast to be prolonged, GDP growth is negative in the year to 2023Q4 and 2024Q4, to 7.5 per cent below what was forecast a year ago3. Despite much weaker growth, unemployment looks likely to be lower in 2022Q4 than was forecast a year ago and wage growth is forecast to be much higher, 5 ¾% compared with 1 ¼%. As the recession is forecast to deepen, unemployment rises sharply throughout the forecast period, a significant degree of spare capacity opens up and wage growth falls back. 2  This was the average outside forecast included in the November 2021 MPR.

They argue that successful decision-making under such uncertainty relies on collaborative processes, judgement, close attention to reliable data, and the use of narrative, rather than an overreliance on economic models. 1  Bank of England  Page 3  I want to frame my observations by going back twelve months. At that point the economy was recovering from the worst of the Covid pandemic and CPI inflation had started to rise. Market expectations showed a 50:50 chance that Bank rate would be increased from 0.1% to 0.25% at the upcoming December 2021 MPC meeting. Source: Bloomberg L.P., Tradeweb and Bank calculations Notes: Realised volatility is a 5-day moving average of the difference between the highest and lowest 2-year nominal UK government bond yield within a day. The MPC had recently published its November 2021 MPR, summarised in Table 1. The MPC forecast that GDP would continue to grow, though at a slowing rate, at 2.9% in the year to 2022Q4. CPI inflation would rise in the short term reaching a peak of 4.3% in 2021Q4, before falling back to 3.4% by 2022Q4 and be close to the 2 per cent target by  Bank of England  Page 4  2023Q4. Other forecasters were predicting a similar outlook for activity, although their average CPI inflation forecast for 2022Q4 was somewhat lower at 2.7%2 . In its November 2021 MPR, the MPC stressed that there was a high level of uncertainty around the outlook, including for energy prices.
For the fixed income market, such tools might include raising the haircuts charged to securities dealers on their repo financing; raising the haircuts that the securities dealers assess against the collateralized borrowings of their customers as part of their prime brokerage business, or raising initial margin requirements on OTC derivatives transactions. Macroprudential tools are undoubtedly difficult to use effectively in practice. For example, it is difficult to judge their impact. If, for example, loan-to-value ratios for single-family mortgages are lowered by 5 percentage points, how big an impact will this have on housing demand? There also is a risk that the rules or regulations will simply be circumvented. For example, investors might move to instruments or to off-shore regimes with less stringent margin and leverage restrictions. Thus, it is important that the authorities have the ability to apply the macroprudential tools broadly throughout the financial sector. 11 None of this is going to be easy. A lot more work will be required to develop a portfolio of tools that could be used, that would be effective and would not be subject to significant evasion or unintended consequences. In terms of the use of macroprudential tools, let me briefly take note of another issue that requires significant consideration – the issue of governance. Who controls all these tools? Who decides when the tools will be deployed and how extensively or intensively? Having a sufficient toolkit seems like a good idea. But lodging all this authority within a single entity or institution might not be practical or desirable.

Remarks Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) Renewal: Enabling the Next Generation of Payments Remarks by Victoria Cleland, Executive Director, Banking, Payments and Financial Resilience  Technology and Innovation Risk Conference 2018 25 September 2018  I would like to thank Richard Lewis and Cameron Penny for their contributions. 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  Opening  Good morning, it is a pleasure to join you today at the Technology and Innovation Risk Conference. I would like to update you on an exciting programme to renew our Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) service, where we are seeking to use the latest technology to help to reduce risks and increase innovation and competition in payments, and in the financial sector more broadly. RTGS is a key piece of national infrastructure but one which many people have not heard of. This morning I would like to demystify the acronym and take you through the work the Bank is undertaking to enhance this vital service and to innovate for the future. The RTGS service supports accounts for banks, building societies, financial market infrastructures, and most recently, non-bank payment service providers, and provides sterling settlement services for Bacs, CHAPS, Cheque & Credit, CREST, Faster Payments (FPS), LINK, Visa and cheque clearing. Most payments in the UK eventually pass through the RTGS service, and on average over £ of payments are settled through the system each day - roughly equivalent to the UK’s GDP every three days.
It is broader and also has positive aspects that are too often overlooked: lower financing costs; a lower cost of risk due to borrowers’ improved solvency. Furthermore, in September, we decided – and I had advocated this – to set up a mitigation mechanism, known as tiering, which exempts some of your excess reserves from the negative rate. Germany is the euro area country whose banks have the largest liquidity surplus: tiering will therefore first benefit German banks, for several hundred million euros. This is good news; it hasn’t been much talked about and this is why I am particularly keen to welcome it with you. I also note that a number of countries – such as Denmark, Sweden and even the Netherlands in the euro area – display negative interest rates, but significantly higher bank profitability ratios than those of euro area banks – an RoE of 9-11%, compared to 6% in the euro area. Negative rates are not the only problem. More structural problems must also be solved. This brings me to the digital challenge. The digital transition is an important strategy for reducing costs. Financial institutions can unleash productivity gains  Page 6 sur 7 by exploring even further the possibilities of automation and artificial intelligence. However, in the short term, IT investment costs are significant, while potential profitability gains can only be generated in the medium and long term. This challenge is even more complex for medium-sized banks, and those that do not have sufficient financial capacity.

The part of household consumption that takes place in Swedish markets exposed to competition has 6 increased during the 1990s – from 25 per cent in 1991 to 32 per cent in 1999. However, this level is still below the EU, where 46 per cent of consumption is in markets exposed to competition. A number of different markets have been opened up to competition over the past ten years and Sweden is in many aspects a model for other countries to follow. Examples of markets that have been exposed to competition are the electricity market, post and telecommunications, the capital and foreign exchange market and a large part of the transport sector. The main areas where competitive pressure in Sweden is tangibly lower than in the EU and prices are higher are the food and housing sectors (and the construction sector). Swedish food prices are just over 20 per cent higher than in the rest of the EU, 7 while housing is around 35 per cent more expensive. These areas of expenditure together comprise more than ¼ of the CPI basket and are also responsible for a large part of low income earners' total expenditure. The absence of competition in the greater part of the public sector, which constitutes approximately 30 per cent of the Swedish economy, entails both a risk of lower efficiency and that a significant part of the economy is not offered alternatives in the form of new business ventures with the growth and th flexibility that small companies can offer.