samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
As a result, this was reflected in stagnating investments and slowing down dynamics of the Albanian economy, both in the private and public sectors. Moreover, current business practices and policy orientations are imposing significant constrains in the efficiency of monetary policy transmission mechanism, and the ability of authorities to provide much needed stimulus to the economy. It is understandable that banks would have to be careful, prudent and responsible given the current situation with non-performing loans; however, they must also consider the fact that credit and financial intermediation is important for growth, which, in turn, can improve the ability of economic agents to repay their loans. This is especially true for particular sectors like agriculture and agro-business, which, so far, have not benefited from credit expansion, but have large untapped potential for growth. The era of an economic growth model, led mainly by the domestic consumption, is now gone. Banks, their European headquarters and their supervisory authorities should work together with authorities of host countries to develop a new long-term and sustainable economic growth model. This new model needs to be based on investments in productive sectors of the economy. Our products and services need to be competitive not only in the home market, but they should also offer comparative advantages in the regional and European Union markets. It is clear that cooperation is the only choice for the future.

Benoît Cœuré: Interview with Bloomberg TV Interview with Mr Benoît Cœuré, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, and Bloomberg TV, conducted by Ms Caroline Connan and broadcast on 9 July 2018. * * *  Donald Trump has pulled the trigger on tariffs on China; China is retaliating. Could that complicate the ECB’s task going forward? What’s really important for us to gauge is the impact on business confidence, which so far has been limited. We see this escalation process: we start with skirmishes and then skirmishes may turn into clashes and then, at some point, clashes may turn into a fully-fledged war. That would be very bad for business confidence. So far, the backdrop is very strong growth in the Eurozone, resilient growth in the Eurozone, meaning that what we’ve seen so far doesn’t have the potential to derail the recovery. Can the ECB just sit back and watch this trade war happening? We are never sitting back and watching; we have to understand what’s going on. So far we believe that growth is strong enough to withstand the shock. Have you already seen some companies holding back investments because of these protectionist policies risks? Yes, that may happen. We are not complacent on the possible risks. A fully-fledged trade war would be extremely bad for the world economy – starting with the United States, by the way. The first victim would be American jobs, American workers. We very much hope that this doesn’t happen.
Shares of individual regions in global trade % Total  1990  1995  2002  Developed countries  72  67  63  US  12  12  11  UE15  44  39  38  Developing countries  28  33  37  Asia  13  19  20  Source: IMF Direction of Trade Statistics  6  BIS 75 Annual Report, 2005. 7  th  Ciccarelli, Mojon “Global Inflation”, Central Bank of Chile Working Papers No 357, December 2005. BIS Review 32/2006  3  Global capital flows keep growing even more dynamically, whereby the share of the global FDI in the global GDP increased from 8% in 1989 to 22.1% in 2003, and foreign assets expressed as percentage of the GDP increased from 62.6% of the GDP to 186.1% of the GDP, respectively. As evidenced, the role of trade and financial links between enterprises in various countries has become more important over recent years. Previously, in response to growing fuel prices or costs of living, trade unions demanded wage increases, which triggered the so-called second-round effects and central banks had to increase interest rates to mitigate inflation. Nowadays, trade unions must take into account the fact that in the case of wage increases, production and services may be transferred to countries with lower manufacturing costs.

This global, common factor explains not only the change in the inflation trend (the increasing inflation between 1960 and 1980 and its subsequent decrease), but also inflation fluctuation over a business cycle. The research has also shown that, where domestic inflation deviates from the “global” inflation, it exhibits a “global-inflation-reverting” tendency. As a consequence, modelling and forecasting of domestic inflation may be improved significantly by taking into account the “global inflation”. The fast-progressing globalisation is closely related to offshoring and outsourcing, whose scope is also growing. Unfortunately there is not much hard data that would allow for assessment of the scale of the phenomenon. Offshoring analysis is available only for selected countries and covers only selected industries. However, the growing scale of the phenomenon is reflected by data on global trade in goods and services and on foreign direct investment. Over the past 15 years, the shares of individual regions in the global trade have changed significantly, whereby the decreasing share of the EU is accompanied by increasing shares of the developing countries, including the Asian countries. Globally, foreign trade expressed as percentage of the GDP increased from the average 19% of the GDP between 1980 and 1989 up to 25% between 2000 and 2004. Table 1.
I very much hope an acceptable solution can soon be found. It would be a great pity if this opportunity were missed, and without satisfactory accounting for financial instruments IASs are unlikely to be accepted in the US. The related subject of auditing also needs attention. We know that in recent years auditors have allowed their public interest role to be forgotten, in the US and elsewhere. There is a need for stronger oversight of the profession, nationally and internationally, with greater public interest involvement in the process. At present, regulations are in discussion with the International Federation of Accountants to explore ways in which that involvement might be structured, and the Financial Stability Forum is taking a close interest, following a debate at its March meeting. I am confident progress can be made, and that the profession appreciates the urgent need to rebuild confidence in its integrity. Ideally, too, we need a more diverse auditing industry. I am nervous about the lack of competition and choice resulting from the consolidation into four firms. We cannot afford any more mergers, or indeed failures, which is a vulnerability in itself. (ii)  Developing the role of the Financial Stability Forum  The Financial Stability Forum was developed from an original idea by Gordon Brown, which as I mentioned earlier was articulated in a report for the G7 Finance Ministers by Hans Tietmeyer.

Philipp Hildebrand: The global financial crisis – analysis and outlook Summary of a speech by Mr Philipp Hildebrand, Vice-Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, at the NZZ-Podium, Zurich, 5 February 2009. The complete speech can be found in German on the Swiss National Bank’s website (www.snb.ch). *  *  *  We are currently experiencing the most severe and most complex financial crisis in several decades. It has affected many people around the globe, and finger-pointing and casting blame happen all too easily. Yet only a careful investigation of the responsibilities is likely to point to ways in which our financial system, and ultimately our economy, can be made more resilient once this crisis has been overcome. Financial markets react to incentives, and these incentives were misplaced in the past. It is in our power to start lobbying for clearly defined and risk-limiting conditions. If the responsible authorities wish to enact more stringent regulation, we ought to give them our unconditional support. The National Bank is determined to employ all the means at its disposal to ward off an economic contraction. BIS Review 12/2009  1
Perhaps we have also made less than full allowance for the imbalances that remain even though the economy is developing well in the right direction. The Swedish economy still has unutilised resources and external debt is both high and above the level in many other countries. The major part of Sweden’s external debt accumulated in the Seventies and Eighties in connection with large and continuous current-account deficits. Such deficits need not be a problem if, for example, they stem from high investment. In those decades, however, they were mainly generated by unduly high consumption. As a result, a proportion of our gross domestic product has to be reserved today for servicing foreign debt. The economy’s capital stock and production capacity are not larger than they would have been without the debt burden. Neither can the current-account deficits and low saving be attributed to demographic factors. BIS Review 48/1999  6  Since the krona’s depreciation in 1992, the current account has shown sizeable surpluses. They reflect the combination of good export growth and a markedly subdued increase in domestic demand; the latter came in turn from a series of years with high interest rates and the extensive measures to consolidate government finances. The financial surpluses are reasonable in view of the large interest burden from high external debt and the circumstance that some way into the next century the economically active proportion of Sweden’s population will be shrinking.

It is worth emphasising that for no fewer than 12 years before the launch of the euro, six of the currencies which now make up the euro—and represent close to two thirds of the GDP of the euro area—had proven to be remarkably stable, not being subject to any realignment within the E.R.M. This high level of confidence is also supported by the homogeneous functioning of the Eurosystem: the European monetary team, composed of the ECB and the national central banks of the -nowst twelve euro area countries as we have welcome, on the 1 of January 2001, a new member, the Bank of Greece. All the components of the Eurosystem work constantly hand in hand. The Eurosystem is a single monetary team, with the ECB acting as a coach and the NCBs as the players on the field, with a single team spirit and this team spirit is one of the priceless assets of the euro area. c/ Third, the credibility of the Eurosystem rests, fundamentally, on its stability-oriented monetary policy strategy. I would like to allay the fears and doubts expressed by some observers as regards the clarity of our monetary policy strategy. The Maastricht Treaty has given us a mandate for maintaining price stability. We have decided to be as clear and as transparent as possible by announcing a clear definition of price stability, featuring a year-on-year increase in the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices for the euro area of below 2%.
It is intuitively hard to see why a central bank would prefer to stabilise the money supply, which does not directly affect public prosperity, rather than stabilising price movements and output more directly. If the relationship between the money supply and inflation is not exact and stable over time, the significance of the money supply should be demoted to that of one of several indicators in an inflation targeting strategy based on forecasts. While the money supply is an important indicator of inflationary pressure, it is not the only one. There may be grounds, on the other hand, for highlighting the significance of the money supply (or rather perhaps its mirror image of the loan stocks in bank balance-sheets) as a source of information about the financial system’s future stability. In the past, the build-up of a sizeable financial bubble has nearly always coincided with a major expansion of credit in the financial system. Sweden’s bank crisis about a decade ago is a case in point. Against this background, the money supply and credit flows should belong to the arsenal of indicators of both monetary and financial stability that a central bank ought to follow closely. Inflation and the output gap Yet another alternative way of conducting monetary policy is to set the interest rate as a function of the rate of price increases and some measure of the difference between actual and potential growth.

From 1995 onwards the average rate of inflation, measured with UND1X, has been fairly close to the 2 per cent target. This has been accompanied by higher GDP growth than before. A part of the higher growth is of course explained by there being plenty of unutilised resources after the crisis in the early 1990s. BIS Review 24/2002  5  Variations in inflation and GDP growth Thirteen industrialized countries  1995-00  6  6  5  5 St. dev. inflation  St. dev. inflation  1970-90  4 USA 3  Sweden  2 Germany  4 3 2  1  1  0  0 0  1  2  3  St. dev. GDP growth  4  Sweden  USA  Germany 0  1  2  3  4  St. dev.GDP growth Source: The Riksbank  It cannot be argued that inflation targeting countries would have done worse if they had followed the same strategy as Germany and Switzerland, or that those two countries would have done equally well if they had targeted inflation. It is also conceivable that similar results would have been achieved with other monetary strategies, such as the pragmatic procedure at the U.S. Federal Reserve or the fixed exchange rate regimes – amounting in practice to a delegation of monetary policy to the Deutsche Bundesbank – that were used at times in, for example, France, Italy and Denmark.
The subject of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), be it wholesale or general purpose, has been high on the agenda of the central banking community. Apart from being a new and trusted digital means of payment, CBDCs could potentially also foster competition and innovation in the payment sector. 7. Here at the HKMA, we have been exploring technologies for both wholesale and general 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  purpose CBDCs. At the wholesale level, we see great opportunities for CBDCs to enhance the efficiency of cross-border payments. Two years ago, we conducted a proof of concept with the Bank of Thailand to develop a DLT-based cross-border corridor network. Building on this fruitful collaboration and the experience gained, we are taking a further step to create more synergies with other central banks. 8. Under the auspices of the BISIH Hong Kong Centre, the HKMA, together with the Bank of Thailand, the Central Bank of United Arab Emirates, as well as the Digital Currency Institute of the People’s Bank of China, are embarking on a wholesale CBDC project called Multiple CBDC Bridge (m-CBDC Bridge). We aim to, through this m-CBDC Bridge, foster a collaborative environment for central banks and the private sector to further explore the potentials of DLT to improve the settlement and liquidity management efficiencies in crossborder payments. We are grateful for the participation from the private sector including two securities exchanges, banks, and multi-national corporates in the project.

As the existing procedures are usually based on dated legacy systems and manual processes, appropriate use of innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud platforms and APIs can surely help refine supervisory processes. 17. For example, our granular data reporting (GDR) which started in 2019 seeks to collect transactional level data from banks, instead of template based aggregate data in the past. This has enabled us to discover insights and trends in a timely manner and conduct advanced analyses through slicing and dicing the data collected. But this is only possible with very fundamental changes in the way we analyse the risks of banks, with new people, new organizational structure, new IT systems as well as continued experimentation by colleagues with different skills and expertise. 18. One thing we have learnt is that the prerequisite for such a digitalization journey is to have strong commitment by all colleagues from top to bottom, and for everyone to have the mindset for embracing changes. Although we are already seeing some concrete positive outcomes from our digitalization project, we are still at the early stage of this long journey. I would love to hear the experience of other central banks and regulators at this or other forum. Conclusion 19. I have highlighted just three areas, namely payment and CBDC, use of data, and digitalization of our own organization, as some of the key challenges many of us are facing. There are many more technological developments in the banking sector that we have to understand, regulate or promote.
Mr Chairman, it is pleasing to note that the SADC Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Forum will this year be hosting its 13th Annual conference in Livingstone, Zambia. Bank of Zambia, is therefore pleased to join other sister Central Banks who have previously hosted this Annual Conference. Distinguished Delegates, as you are all aware, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) plays a strategic role in the day to day operations in all our Central Banks. The rapid evolution of ICT, which is generally called the “ICT revolution”, has been exerting a profound impact on the world’s economies. As we all can acknowledge, technological innovation has brought about the speedy processing and transmission of information, resulting in substantial reduction in costs, wider networking, and globalization on an unprecedented scale and scope. Distinguished Delegates, the central banks within the SADC region have registered significant developments and advances in the areas of Payment Systems, Website development, and Banking Supervision Application, just to mention a few projects emanating from the SADC ICT Forum initiatives. These projects have been possible and successfully implemented largely due to the co-operation and collaboration that exists between the Central Banks in the region. The issues that will be discussed at this Conference are very important in the context of the realization of some of the key objectives of our central banks that can only be achieved through sound implementation of the ICT solutions. This Conference, therefore, offers all of us various opportunities to effectively contribute to positive developments of our central banks.

Mr Chairman, I am informed that one of the notable projects being undertaken collaboratively is on ICT Governance implementation within the central banks using the Control Objectives for Information and related Technologies (COBIT) framework. BIS Review 42/2008  1  Ladies and Gentlemen, you will be delighted to learn that just last week a number of board members from central banks in Africa and across the world converged here in Livingstone to discuss the subject “Trends in Central Bank Governance”. Indeed good corporate governance is generally acknowledged as important in economic management and therefore, the role that ICT Governance plays, in this regard, can not be over emphasized. I am also informed that this conference will discuss some of the solutions available for implementing Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and the progress so far made in this regard. Indeed business continuity planning and management for ICT resources is critical to the operations of our Central Banks. The level of investment and dependence on ICT services is significant and few organizations could operate for long today without these resources. I therefore urge you to critically review this area that is equally important to the implementation of good corporate governance. Mr Chairman, allow me also to talk about financial inclusion or access to finance for all. Ladies and Gentlemen, as you are aware most of our rural areas are mostly unbanked due to infrastructural obstacles.
15%  2% 29%  1%  Denmark Germany Spain  7%  France  1%  Austria Sweden Norway 45% Source: The European Mortgage Federation  BIS Review 99/2000  2  The European market for housing bonds is currently dominated by three countries - Germany, Denmark and Sweden. Together, these countries account for around 89% of this market (Figure 4). Switzerland  0,7  Germany  Spain  Italy  Belgium  Netherlands  France  30 23,84 25 20 15 11,44 10 6,8 5 1,54 0,9 0,65 0,03 0 UK  Billion $  ABS/MBS securitisation transactions by country, 1997. Source: OECD  Competition for customers Although mortgages are a relatively straightforward and standardised financial product that should be well suited to sell abroad, international mortgage sales have been limited to date. One probable reason is that the mortgage market mainly targets private clients, which are hard to reach without using a local distribution network. In this respect, the Internet should be able to lead to greater transparency and competition, both by the credit issuers themselves supplying information and credit services over the Internet and by Internet-based brokerage sites finding the cheapest mortgages for borrowers. While Internet-based mortgage services are still a relatively new phenomenon, they are likely to increase competition on the mortgage market.

Since mortgages are a highly standardised product, the price, ie the rate of interest, will be a decisive factor in the competition for customers. As competition on the mortgage market increases, the cost of refinancing will become the decisive factor for mortgage institutions’ possibilities to pursue a profitable business. I will therefore devote the rest of this speech to the question of refinancing. The Swedish mortgage institutions´ balance sheets, 1999. 10%  2%  Stadshypotek + Handelsbanken Hypotek (33 %)  1% 33%  SPINTAB + Föreningsbanken Kredit (28 %) SBAB (13 %)  13%  Nordbanken Hypotek (13 %) Skandia Banken Bolån (1%) 13%  SEB-Bolån (10 %) Venantius (2 %) 28%  Swedish mortgage institutions´ shares of borrowing on the security market (money market instruments and bonds), 2000. 7% 3% 13%  35%  SPINTAB Stadshypotek SBAB NB Hypotek SEB Bolån  18%  Övriga 24%  Traditional mortgage financing Swedish mortgage institutions finance their operations mainly by issuing bonds and certificates. The entire balance sheet of the mortgage institution serves as security for borrowing, and consequently each loan is not directly linked to a specific amount of collateral. 5  BIS Review 99/2000  The advantage of the Swedish model is that borrowing can be undertaken without any fixed link to specific loans. This means that large loans can be put onto the market, which makes it easier to uphold regular trade and strong liquidity. This has been the case with the Swedish benchmark bonds.