samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Some of the impact may be alleviated through a judicious mix of government spending and revenue options so as to reduce the depth and duration of the slowdown. For example, an increased recourse to EU cohesion and solidarity funds may help alleviate the structural adjustment necessary and make the economy of the programme countries more competitive at the same time. Given the extent of the downturn is some member states, this option is likely to require a strengthening of the EU budget which in turn needs to be financed. However, not all member states are in a stressed environment, and it may be possible to consider other financing options, especially where bond interest rates in some member states are rather low, even below the inflation rate. EU level solidarity and cohesion assistance may prove a crucial catalyst to the required structural changes. One has to also keep in mind that governments are increasingly accountable not only to their parliaments and electorates, but also to investors in the financial markets, and pressure from the financial markets becomes more acute when a country is in financial distress.4 In addition, financial markets take a very comprehensive view in their scrutiny of the sustainability of a country’s finances. Even compliance with the Maastricht criteria may not be enough as there could be other imbalances that would undermine market confidence. For example, in the case of Ireland prior to the financial crisis, the country was doing well according to the Maastricht criteria.

Still, further steps could be taken to improve productivity levels and increase the employment rate. Also, as I argued recently, COLA increases should not be superimposed on wage increases agreed in collective agreements, but should form part of the negotiation process, so as to ensure that firms are able to match all wage increases with productivity increases. Faster productivity growth depends on many factors, including investment, the infrastructure, the quality of the human resources and  BIS central bankers’ speeches  7  hence the quality of the educational system and its ability to meet the skills requirements of a growing economy. Measures that increase the employment rate could include further policies that incentivise a higher female participation rate, as well as measures that facilitate more flexible work conditions, including part-time employment. A further requirement for economic growth is the smooth functioning of the financial system. Particularly during these turbulent times, continued economic growth depends also on the uninterrupted supply of credit by the financial sector to firms and households, and to that end the stability of the financial system is essential. It is important to note that although its rate of growth has declined, bank credit has continued to increase in Malta, unlike the situation across the euro area, where widespread deleveraging by financial institutions has led to a contraction in the volume of credit, as shown in Chart 7.
The 20-year SGS has extended the benchmark yield curve as a price discovery mechanism and liquid hedging instrument for the broader Singapore debt market. The corporate debt market has also seen good growth. As at the end of last year, outstanding corporate debt securities were up 14% from a year earlier. This represents an increase of more than 6 times in size since 1996 to $ billion. Another encouraging development has been an increase in the diversity of issuers. We have seen more real-estate borrowers and foreign issuers tapping the SGD bond market. Almost one-fourth of SGD-denominated bond issuance, or $ billion, was made up by foreign entity issuers. We have issuers from the US, Europe and more recently from Korea, Latin America and the Middle East. In line with the growing sophistication of the investor base, the asset securitization market in Singapore has also taken off. For 2006, ABS issuance amounted to more than $ billion. There is also an influx of more structured products into our market such as convertibles and synthetic Collateralized Debt Obligations. Turning to wealth management, Assets Under Management (AUM) has continued to grow strongly. 2005 was the fifth consecutive year of double-digit growth for Singapore, with AUM increasing 26%. This trend has continued in 2006, evidenced by the expanding wealth management community in Singapore. This underscores Singapore’s emergence as a wealth management center. Singapore is strategically placed to capitalize on the significant wealth building up in Asia.

Lars Nyberg: Monetary policy and house prices Speech by Mr Lars Nyberg, Deputy Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at the Swedish Investment Fund Association, Stockholm, 19 May 2010. *  *  *  I would guess that all of us here have at least two things in common. One is that our professional life in recent years has largely revolved around dealing with the effects of a global financial crisis. The other is that we would rather not do it again. Most of you represent the investment fund branch or unit trust investors in one way or another. And a reasonable guess is that recent years have been turbulent for many of you. It is fairly natural that the Riksbank should have been in the eye of the storm during the crisis. Our main tasks are to safeguard financial stability and to keep inflation low and stable, at the same time as contributing to stabilising production and employment. Managing the effects of the crisis and carrying out our statutory tasks in the best possible way has required a number of creative and unusual solutions. And it is not all over yet. The financial markets have recently been shaken up once again. Now the problem is mainly due to Greece, but to some extent also other EU countries such as Spain and Portugal, having serious problems with their government finances. The Swedish banks are not directly exposed to the countries in southern Europe to any great extent.
A general assessment was that in the Swedish economy’s present cyclical phase, it is important that monetary policy does not remain expansionary for too long. Considering the time lag associated with monetary policy’s effects, a change to a less expansionary stance must be made in good time before resource utilisation becomes excessively high. The stated aim was that this would provide better conditions for more sustained increases in production and employment. Against this background, when the inflation report had been presented, the repo rate was increased in December by 25 basis points, from 4.10 to 4.35 per cent. In periods of financial unrest in international markets there is often a “flight to quality”; savers and investors experience uncertainty and rearrange their portfolios in favour of what are perceived as secure assets. In connection with the Mexican crisis in the spring of 1995, Sweden’s currency depreciated sharply and bond rates rose substantially; this amounted to a flight from Sweden. In view of the krona’s recent weakening tendency, it would be going too far to talk of a flight to Sweden but the fact remains that the situation differs from earlier occasions with international financial unrest. Even so, a correction of the present under-valuation of the krona would be a good thing. The conclusion from this is that the increased confidence which Swedish economic policy has earned in recent years must be nurtured continuously, not least to make us resilient to turbulent times.

In particular, downside risks to the achievement of our employment and inflation goals amid very low interest rates were compelling arguments for a relatively cautious and predictable approach to policy. This proved its worth: The U.S. economy continued to expand at a healthy pace even as the Fed raised rates numerous times. For those who follow the Fed closely, you’ve noticed that the FOMC has been slimming down its statements of late and using less forward guidance about the future path of policy. In this vein, the FOMC in its recent statement removed language indicating that monetary policy remains accommodative.3 Let me make clear, these more concise statements do not signify a shift in our monetary policy approach. Instead, they represent the natural evolution of the language describing the factors influencing our policy decisions in the context of the strength of the economic outlook and inflation being near our 2 percent longer-run goal. These changes in our communication of policy views are a sign that we are nearing the end of the process of normalizing monetary policy and are inching closer to conducting normal monetary policy. Arguably, it’s been a long time since monetary policy was normal, so it’s worth describing what “normal” looks like in some detail. At its most basic level, monetary policy-making will remain the same: The path of interest rates will continue to be guided strategically by our dual mandate objectives and shaped tactically by the data and their implications for the economic outlook.
hat said, there were some troubling properties associated with the growth of shadow banking. For instance, quite a few were sponsored by banks as a means to reduce the amount of capital to be held against risk exposures. When the crisis hit, in a number of cases those banks found they had to stand behind their offshoots for contractual or reputational reasons, so the separation was illusory and led to greater leverage in the system. Another issue was that the originate and distribute model of securitisation was often opaque and led to insufficient genuine risk transfer away from the banking system, in ways that became very problematic when the crisis hit. Shadow banks, also neglected the funding side of their balance sheets, so that they came to depend upon using their assets as security to obtain funding, often from banks. This is quite different from the traditional model of deposit funded banking where the assets (loans) are not used as security for raising funds. However, it must be said that in the run-up to the crisis, banks too came to depend overly on such secured funding. When the crisis hit, the value of the assets used as security for collateral fell, funding conditions tightened and in some instances were cut off. 2 These weaknesses meant that the counterbalancing behaviour of shadow banks vanished. Instead, they retracted just as banks did, but much more violently, which exacerbated the magnitude of the crisis.

In the rest of my time, I will describe the work that is being done on policy responses. First, I want to challenge the argument that the issue derives from the re-regulation of the capital and liquidity positions of banks that have in the past acted as market-makers, and  5  For more on this see the Bank of England Financial Stability Report, December 2014, “Box 4 – Drives of market liquidity” pages 54–56. BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  thus marginal investors. This argument has a number of strands: capital and funding costs for dealer inventories in banks and broker-dealers have increased; the cost of hedging with single name credit default swaps has risen, causing availability to drop; proprietary trading restrictions (e.g. the Volcker Rule in the US) limit market making (it is too hard to distinguish prop trading from market making); and increased trade transparency requirements restrict market liquidity. (Morgan Stanley/Oliver Wyman (2015)) If we look at the US as the prime example, the evidence indicates that the big run-up in inventories of fixed income securities held by the primary dealers occurred from around 2003-04 onwards, reached a peak in 2008, and has then settled back to around the 2002 level over the last two years, or so. Looked at in this light, the increase in inventory capacity in the dealer community was ephemeral, reflecting the underpricing of risk, a weak capital regime and the subsidy provided to the major banks by implicit government guarantees.
11  World at PPP World at market exchange rate  4.0 3.1  -0.6 -2.1  4.9 3.8  4.1 3.0  4.1 3.2  4.2 3.3  4.4 3.7  4.5 3.8  4.6 3.9  United States Eurozone Japan China Rest of Asia Latin America (excluding Chile)  2.3 2.0 1.4 10.4 4.9 3.6  -2.6 -4.1 -6.3 9.2 0.1 -2.0  2.9 1.7 4.0 10.3 7.7 6.4  3.0 1.3 0.8 8.9 4.5 4.2  2.7 1.7 -0.6 8.9 4.8 4.2  2.7 1.7 0.0 9.3 5.0 4.4  3.2 1.5 2.3 8.7 5.0 4.2  3.2 1.5 3.1 8.6 4.9 4.3  3.2 1.7 2.8 8.9 5.2 4.3  Commodity exporters Trading partners  2.9 3.5  -1.0 -0.3  2.9 5.9  2.6 4.4  2.7 4.3  2.7 4.6  3.0 4.6  3.0 4.7  3.2 4.9  (e) Estimate. (f) Forecast. Sources: Central Bank of Chile based on a sample of investment banks, Consensus Forecasts, the IMF . and statistics bureaus of respective countries.

For the regions, dots show the median of Bloomberg's survey to analysts on the expeted MPR for June 2011, September 2011, December 2011, March 2012 and June 2012. Chile uses June's EES for the rate expected for July 2011, November 2011, December 2011 and May 2012. (2) Includes the Eurozone, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. (3) Includes Brazil, China, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Mexico, Peru, Sources: Central Bank of Chile, central banks of respective countries, Bloomberg and the International Monetary Fund. BIS central bankers’ speeches  9  Figure 5 Real exchange rate (*) (index, 1986=100) 120  120  110  110  100  100  90  90  80  80  70  70 91  93  95  97  TCR  99  01  03  1991-2010 average  05  07  09  11  1996-2010 average  (*) Information at 14 June 2011. Source: Central Bank of Chile.
The impact of the depreciation of sterling on future inflation has increased the salience of such a trade-off for the MPC. As the Committee has made clear, there are limits to the extent to which above-target inflation can be tolerated. These limits depend inter alia on what is driving the inflation overshoot, on the impact on inflation expectations and on the scale of the output gap. The exchange rate shock has made it more difficult for policy to follow the natural rate. And finally, I have discussed the implications of a low natural rate and low real trend rate for central banks. But the implications of course go much wider than that. A secular period of very low underlying interest rates would pose many challenges. If, as I have suggested, the forces pushing down on interest rates might be less cyclical than we had thought and more secular, authorities with a longer policy horizon and with instruments more enduring in impact than monetary policy are best placed to address such challenges. A key and well recognised challenge in this respect is to raise the growth rate of productivity in advanced economies which will in turn raise the return on investment and hence the trend real rate of interest. Another might be to address the imbalance in the supply of savings and the demand for investment that appears to have pushed the trend real rate down.

This has been recognised in the view of most central banks in advanced economies who have made it clear that when policy rates go up they are likely to do so slowly and to levels materially below those we saw before the crisis. Second, while I believe central banks do have the tools to offset shocks to the real economy and to fulfil their mandates, these tools become increasingly more complex in their effects in a world in which the natural rate is low. I would briefly mention two aspects of this. Monetary policy at very low levels of the natural rate can have implications for the financial sector – both in the way the sector is able to transmit monetary policy and in broader impacts on the price of financial assets. 8  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  8  These effects can be managed. In August, the MPC specifically addressed the implications of its recent policy package on banks’ interest margins; it took action to prevent these jeopardising the transmission of its policy stimulus. And, to the extent that monetary policy at these levels has an undesirable impact on financial assets and indebtedness, the development of macroprudential policy is intended to address these directly and more generally to make the financial system more resilient to shocks. On a different note, one cannot ignore that monetary policy has a distributional impact. All sectors of the economy and all parts of society benefit from price stability and lower volatility in economic growth.
Mojmír Hampl: To be or not to be in the eurozone? An answer from Prague Speaking points by Mr Mojmír Hampl, Vice Governor of the Czech National Bank, at St. Antony's College, University of Oxford, Oxford, 21 May 2018. * * * Ladies and gentlemen, Good afternoon. First let me thank Dr Charles Enoch for his kind invitation to speak here today. It is really an honour for me. I was thinking for quite some time about what approach to take today. Should it be a totally rigorous, perfectly balanced and as-full-of-data-as-possible description of the macro and monetary realities of our country? Or should it be more the personal testimony of a policy maker co-responsible for the monetary zone called the Czech Republic for almost 12 years now? On the advice of my adviser I decided that the second option might be more appropriate. We should listen at least sometimes to our good advisers after all. So, the Czech Republic is a mid-sized European country of 10.5 million inhabitants. It entered the EU in 2004 and has no opt-out from euro adoption, so legally we are obliged to join and to make every effort to be there as soon as possible. Yet there is basically no major political power in our country pushing for euro adoption at the moment.

Germany gained unification in exchange for the euro. The southern countries (Italy, France and Spain) gained the stability of the German mark because they were unable to create such a currency at home. And those who were tied to the German mark long before the euro was created (Austria and the Netherlands) simply remained bound to Frankfurt after the Eurozone was established, only the Bundesbank building was replaced all of a sudden by the ECB building. There’s no basic euro story like this in the Czech Republic. Why should we try to create one artificially? Our story is one of maintaining monetary stability across regimes and governments and of keeping the koruna as the name of our currency continuously since the time of Emperor Franz Joseph (his monetary reform established a new currency – the crown, or koruna – throughout the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1892) regardless of totalitarianism and the horrors of the 20th century. Neither the Nazis, nor the Communists had any tendency to rename the currency and kept this old monarchist name despite otherwise changing basically everything, and for the worse. Our country – unlike the rest of the Central Europe – has never experienced hyperinflation in its modern history, and this monetary stability has always served the entrenched mentality of small Czech savers well. Domestic scepticism about the euro – that’s our authentic Czech story. 6.
Fiscal policy has also done its part, reducing spending from the high levels of last year. Clearly, the job is not finished and there are still difficult months ahead. Inflation remains very high, and its effects are being painfully felt by households. Lowering it is a task that we cannot afford to give up. Activity is already showing negative annual variation rates. Although this certainly keeps us alert, we should not lose sight of the fact that the figures we are seeing today are part of the adjustment process that the economy requires to resolve the imbalances generated by the overspending of 2021. It is not a drop in activity arising from an external shock, as we have experienced in the past. It is the adjustment we require for the economy to move towards sustainable levels, an indispensable prerequisite for lowering inflation. As I mentioned a few moments ago, today's high inflation is a problem whose origin lies in internal decisions, aggravated by a chain of external shocks. The economy's capacity to make an orderly adjustment at the lowest possible cost depends critically on the coherence of the decisions adopted by the different agents. It is essential not to abandon efforts. And certainly, it is even more important to contain additional impulses on demand that, far from contributing to the adjustment process, hinder it. This would add inflationary pressures, which, at this stage of the cycle, would impose even greater costs.

MONETARY POLICY REPORT PRESENTATION BEFORE THE FINANCE COMMISSION OF THE HONORABLE SENATE OF THE REPUBLIC  Rosanna Costa Governor Central Bank of Chile 7 December 2022  The December 2022 Monetary Policy Report can be found at http://www.bcentral.cl  Introduction Mr. President of the Honorable Senate’s Finance Commission, senator Juan Antonio Coloma; senators members of this Commission, ladies and gentlemen, One more time, I begin by thanking the Commission for inviting the Bank to present our views on recent macroeconomic developments, their outlook and implications for monetary policy. It is this view that is presented in detail in the December 2022 Monetary Policy Report that we released this morning. This background is also the rationale behind the Board's decision at yesterday's monetary policy meeting. This is my fourth Monetary Policy Report, and I would like to pause briefly to look back at my first few months as Governor of the Central Bank of Chile. During this period, the institution has been significantly renewed. In February, Luis Felipe Céspedes joined the Board, followed in May by Stephany Griffith-Jones, two professionals with outstanding careers in the economic field. We have lived through a very difficult year in terms of inflation. In the March Report presentation, I stated that inflation and its outlook continued to rise and that it would reach around 10% by the middle of this year and then decline to 5.6% by the end of 2022.