samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The price of copper rose to US  BIS Review 72/2006  1  $ per metric tons in December 2005 from US $ per metric tons in December 2004. The price of copper has since increased sharply and by May 2006 it had risen to over US $ per metric ton; 2. Increased non-traditional export earnings, from US $ million in 2003 to US $ million in 2005;  3. Improved economic confidence following the attainment of the enhanced Highly Indebted Poor Countries(HIPC) Initiative Completion Point in April 2005, which resulted in reduced external debt service and obligations; and  4. Increased foreign direct and portfolio investments, reflecting increased market confidence in the economy, occasioned by the greatly improved prospects for the copper sector, the cancellation of the bulk of Zambia’s external debt, and anticipated continued commitment to implementation of prudent fiscal and monetary policies. Mr. Chairman, from this, it is clear that the current strengthening of the Kwacha has been caused mostly by changes in economic fundamentals. I recognise the concerns by some of our exporters of non-traditional commodities that they are losing external competitiveness. I wish to point out that not all has been lost as a result of the appreciation of the Kwacha. Some non-traditional exporters have benefited through, among other things, the reduction in the cost of capital goods and imported raw materials. In addition, may I mention the fact that the exchange rate alone does not determine external competitiveness of exports.

Given abundance of water resources in the country, as earlier alluded to, the potential for development of hydro-power for both domestic and exports is quite high. Current estimates show that the country’s hydropower resource potential stands at 6,000 mega watts (MW) while the installed capacity is somewhere around 1,715.5 MW. These estimates are a testimony to the great potential this sector has. I am aware of several investment plans that ZESCO has put in place and which are aimed at exploiting this potential. Ladies and Gentlemen, the opportunities identified above do not just happen. Zambians must make a conscious effort to exploit the opportunities identified. We must not view Government efforts of promoting investments opportunities as meant for foreigners only. To facilitate long-term planning for the productive sector, the Bank of Zambia will continue with measures that would achieve and maintain low and stable inflation and interest rates as well as a relatively stable exchange rate. This would provide a foundation for value addition in industries such as agro-processing, manufacturing, construction, and tourism, which is key to sustainable development. It is imperative that as a country, we move from being raw materials producers only to value addition in a stable macroeconomic environment. Apart from appropriate monetary policy and prudent fiscal policy, the stability in the foreign exchange market is important in achieving low and stable inflation. The objective of the Bank in this respect would be to achieve a non-volatile but competitive exchange rate.
For this to function in practice it is necessary that all actors are willing to share relevant information so that the ESRB can perform its tasks properly. However, sharing information, although simple in theory, often turns out to be difficult in practice. Secondly, the risk assessments and recommendations need to be well-understood and accepted. This will require efficient communication. The issuance of warnings and recommendations is one way to communicate, either in public or in private. So far, there have been press conferences after the General Board’s meetings. Under the ESRB regulations, the ESRB is also required to publish an annual report. This report will be presented by the chair of the ESRB to the European Parliament and the Council in an annual hearing. But there is a clear need to further develop the ESRB communication. This is important, not only to legitimise the work of the ESRB but also to increase public awareness of systemic risk and macro-prudential policy. The ESRB could make a substantial contribution to promoting discussions in this field, both nationally and at the international level. Thirdly, Member States must be willing to accept warnings and recommendations from the ESRB. This may perhaps be the most difficult objective to achieve. Accepting warnings and recommendations may be difficult to accept when there is a political cost. It is therefore vital that the ESRB proves its independence and that it can express its views even when politically inconvenient.

Thirdly, the crisis made it apparent that the framework for the resolution of failing banks was grossly inadequate. Although steps have been taken to address this question in several countries, a lot of issues remain to be solved, particularly relating to cross-border failures. But this is not for today’s discussion. The EU’s financial trilemma The core of the challenge facing the EU is conceptually quite simple. In Europe, we have built a framework based on the logically inconsistent idea of having one single market controlled by 27 sovereign nations. From a financial stability point of view, this is definitely no recipe for success. On the contrary, it is a source of coordination problems and conflicts of interest among the EU countries. This challenge has been described by Professor Dirk Schoenmaker as the “financial trilemma of Europe”. We have three goals – financial stability, integration, and national sovereignty – but only two of these can be reached. Figure 1  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  Until the financial crisis, the combination of financial integration and national sovereignty seemed to work well in the EU (Figure 1). Financial crises were not considered to be likely and financial stability came far down on the political agenda. In connection with the financial crisis, however, policy makers have been forced to realise that increased financial stability has to come at the cost of either financial integration or national sovereignty. In principle, there are two options.
More recently, the Swiss franc exchange rate to the euro was about 10% above what it had been shortly before the discontinuation of the minimum exchange rate. Our willingness to intervene in the foreign exchange market as necessary was – and remains – an important element in countering the excessive strength of the Swiss franc and the associated negative impact on both the economy and price stability in Switzerland. How are our foreign currency purchases and the Swiss franc exchange rate related to the expansion of the SNB balance sheet? I will explain this using the financial account and current account. The current account covers, first and foremost, goods and services trade with other countries and cross-border income flows. For half a century, the Swiss current account has regularly shown a surplus. 1 There are two main reasons for this structural surplus. First, Switzerland is a net exporter; it produces more goods and services than are demanded in the domestic market. Second, the Swiss hold substantial assets abroad, upon which they earn interest and dividend income. Earnings from foreign trade as well as interest and dividend income from foreign assets are generated abroad and are usually reinvested abroad. These investments are recorded under capital exports by the private sector in the financial account and are shown as red bars in slide 2. Until 2007, private sector capital exports made up almost the entire financial account. 1  2  Jordan, Thomas. 2013.

The European Central Bank, meanwhile, indicated towards the end of the year that further extensive monetary policy easing measures would be necessary in the euro area. Against this background, the US dollar began to appreciate and the euro came under strong downward pressure. Because of the minimum exchange rate, the Swiss franc also depreciated against the US dollar. This caused pressure on the minimum exchange rate against the euro to rise very substantially and made increasingly large interventions necessary. Instead of broad-based Swiss franc strength, we were faced – to an ever greater degree – with pronounced euro weakness. In this fundamentally changed environment, the minimum exchange rate was no longer sustainable. Had the SNB attempted to maintain the minimum exchange rate, it would have lost control of its balance sheet and, with it, monetary conditions in Switzerland, because of the increasing magnitude of the interventions. Consequently, on 15 January 2015, the SNB discontinued the minimum exchange rate. To cushion the upward pressure, the SNB simultaneously lowered the interest rate on sight deposits to –0.75%. It also stressed that it was willing to intervene in the foreign exchange market as necessary. These were no empty words, as can be seen from our foreign currency purchases, which amounted to more than CHF 86 billion last year. A large portion of these occurred during the period immediately before and after the discontinuation of the minimum exchange rate. The Swiss franc initially shot up after the discontinuation, but then stabilised. Since May 2015, it has weakened again slightly.
A fall would seem reasonable since expectations concerning future inflation in our economy and the world economy have become far more stable, thus reducing the inflation risk premium. 9 But it seems unlikely that this is the whole explanation. Two theories are often invoked to explain the low real interest rates in recent years: The saving glut theory and the liquidity glut theory. The saving glut theory posits that some countries for various reasons have very high propensities to save 10 and lack sufficient domestic investment opportunities. Current account surpluses, particularly in Asian countries and oil-exporting countries, have increased the world’s total savings, thereby exerting downward pressure on long-term interest rates to bring capital markets back into balance. 11 In this case, low real interest rates globally can be understood as a natural response to the preferences of welfare-maximising economic agents. For a given country, these interest rates might seem uncomfortably low, but monetary policy-makers’ scope for influencing this is limited. Alternatively, or additionally, low long-term real interest rates can be seen as a consequence of excessive liquidity creation. Central banks may have fuelled the markets with low shortterm rates and very generous supplies of liquidity to prop up growth or to keep inflation from falling below target. But financial intermediaries also create liquidity. 12 As financial markets in  8  Kenneth S. Rogoff (2006): ”Impact of globalisation on monetary policy”, A symposium sponsored by Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Karolina Ekholm: Dealing with cross-border banking without rolling back financial integration Speech by Ms Karolina Ekholm, Deputy Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at the Bank of Greece, Athens, 11 June 2010. *  *  *  It is an honour for me to have been invited here to the Bank of Greece. Little did I know when I originally planned this visit that Greece would be the country on everyone’s lips by the time I got here, given that it is now at the centre of a fiscal crisis in the European Union. Considering that Sweden is one of the European countries that has previously carried out fiscal consolidation of the same order of magnitude as Greece is planning for the next few years, I might have chosen to talk about fiscal consolidation today. But it appears that there is no lack of good advice from the outside world on this topic. I will therefore talk instead about another issue that the financial crisis has revealed to be of some urgency – how to deal with problems arising from cross-border banking. The global financial crisis and the bailout and failure of several cross-border institutions have raised serious concerns regarding the regulation and supervision of such institutions and crisis management regarding institutions in distress. Possible policy responses to the problems arising from cross-border banking include various ways of limiting banks’ abilities to expand abroad. However, such responses would also reduce the potentially positive effects arising from financial integration.
As President of the ECB’s Governing Council, I would say again, I have no position of the Governing Council, but I think it's flattering for the Governing Council that we are called to reflect on that, by both parliament and perhaps the high-level group that has been set up by the Commission and where you have a number of eminent personalities. We will see. A little bit of philosophy again. We cannot afford to put in the future the concept of the market economy at risk as we did. I have known myself a world where you had an east and a west, a north and a south. In this matrix, we were only one square out of four where you could say they are in favour of market economies. The others were devising other ideas, which failed, and it's very good that they failed. However, the trust which was put in the resilience of the market economy is at stake now. I think we were, again, quite lucid on this. I have permanently with me the first page of the Financial Times warning of it, it was January 2007, in Davos, where I was providing the sentiment of my colleagues, as it has arisen from the governors’ meeting in Basel on the fact that market participants had to prepare for a significant correction because risks were underassessed and underestimated in global finance. But the fragility, not only of global finance but of the global economy itself, is something that we should reflect on.

François Villeroy de Galhau: The sustainability of European Monetary Union and institutional reform Speech by Mr François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Bank of France, at The ECB and Its Watchers XIX Conference, organised by the Institute for Monetary and Financial Stability, Frankfurt am Main, 14 March 2018. * * * Accompanying slides. Ladies and Gentlemen, In order to make the European Monetary Union sustainable in the medium term, we have to make it more resilient to future crises. The current economic cycle is admittedly in a very robust phase today, but this will come to an end at some point. If we do not want to overburden monetary policy during the next recession, we need to strengthen our Economic Union. These objectives should be, including here in Germany, two sides of the same coin. To ensure monetary policy does not remain “the only game in town”, we have to arm ourselves with stronger economic instruments at the European level. There is a serious risk, however, of missed opportunities as the present debate over the future of the euro area seems to be getting bogged down in neverending arguments such as on the European Deposit Insurance Scheme (EDIS) or sovereign debt restructuring. We should rather focus our efforts on the many other proposals that are more consensual. In my remarks today, I will elaborate on the three old clichés that are paralysing the debate and that we must put behind us to move forward in the euro area.
What I shall retain from that experience is that the key to the Fund’s results were its willingness and ability to react flexibly to the various circumstances, its readiness to recognize mistakes and change the course of action when necessary, and all this while sitting on a ticking time bomb. This flexibility bids well also for the future. The importance of adaptability in tackling future financial turmoil can never be sufficiently stressed. In a rapidly changing world, any silver bullet can soon lose its shine. No piece of advice is sure to preserve its value over time. What we must ensure, more than defining a set of measures written in stone, is preserving the capacity of the institution to quickly generate appropriate new responses to handle new situations. Financial support is the second aspect of the Fund’s role in crisis resolution. With the emergence of the new capital account crises, the need for Fund resources has sharply increased. The access limits to Fund resources that were conceived to tackle the more traditional “current account crises” became obsolete overnight. The decision-making process tilted completely from rules toward discretion. Multi-billion packages not only became common place; over the years, the burden of financing was increasingly put on the IMF. In many respects the situation became unsatisfactory. One can easily understand that setting strict limits to Fund financing may not be appropriate in capital account crises, as it may restrict the institution’s room for maneuver too severely.

In a globalized world, it is even more imperative for the Fund to focus on promoting stability as a global public commodity. We have enough experience to know how costly it can be if things go wrong. Saying that Switzerland treasures a stable international environment is in many respects an understatement. Given the openness of our economy and the fact that we host an important financial centre, international financial stability for us has all the connotations of a vital national interest. To put things into the right perspective, allow me to mention a few figures that show how interconnected our economic well-being is with global developments. In 2003, Swiss exports of goods and services amounted to 44 percent of GDP. The GDP contribution of our heavily internationally oriented financial sector reached 10 percent. This figure rises to 14 percent if we also include the insurance sector. Swiss banks occupy a leading international position, particularly in the area of wealth management. The value of total assets managed in domestic banks as at the end of 2003 amounted to $ 2.7 trillion. According to various estimates, this corresponds to about one-third of the world’s total private wealth managed abroad. Last, but not least, the banking and the insurance sectors combined employ approximately 185,000 people, the equivalent of 6 percent of total Swiss employment, whereas the fiscal contribution of the banking sector alone amounts to about 13 percent of total tax revenues.
Joseph Yam: Central bank authority, accountability, transparency and effectiveness Closing remarks by Mr Joseph Yam, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, at the BIS Meeting of the Central Bank Governance Network, Hong Kong, 18-19 November 2004. *  *  *  Braver people than myself have, earlier this morning, attempted to distil the multiple discussions that have taken place over the last day and a half. And they have all had the advantage of actually having attended the discussions. I shall not attempt to imitate them - though I should add that I have been keeping myself closely informed of your deliberations through the enjoyable discussions I have had with many of you in the margins. By all accounts, this has been an extremely fruitful meeting. Let me instead try to capture some of the themes and preoccupations which have figured prominently in discussions about central bank governance, and which will, I have no doubt, provide the impetus for further discussions within this network. These discussions tend to revolve around four interlocking and overlapping areas of concern: 1.  the sources of authority for central banks;  2.  the process of accountability within central banks, and, beyond them, to the larger body politic;  3.  the role and challenges of transparency; and  4.  the methods for achieving effectiveness in our operations through proper organisation and planning.

The issue of authority for central banks begins, in all cases, with the law, and includes the obvious questions of what kind of law is suitable for a particular central bank; how you change a law that is no longer suitable; and what is the optimal timing and strategy for changing the law. But, as your discussions have stressed, there is more to this than the mere word of the law. An interesting aspect of the sharing of experience here has been the extent to which central banks have worked with - and sometimes around - laws that have become inadequate to the needs of modern central banking. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, in the case of the HKMA it has been a question of working without the law, since Hong Kong has no formal central bank law, and we rely on just a few lines of a single statute for our authority. A further point that has been made strongly is the need to base the legitimacy, the credibility of a central bank on something more than just statutes and regulations. This brings into play the question of accountability, through both formal and informal channels. I know that a great deal of your discussion has focused on the role, composition and responsibilities of the board. More broadly, there has been equal emphasis on how we account to the wider public.
Before I give you my answer to this question, let me briefly touch upon the question of the risks of introducing the digital euro and the potential downsides of its deployment. RISKS First, and this is something central bankers are concerned with the most - the potential of the digital euro for disintermediation. The story goes like this: if we deprive banks of their funding sources in the form of deposits and people then move those deposits with us instead, aren't we going to destabilise the system, suppress credit activity and eventually cause the decline of the economic activity? The ECB and the central banks first identified this risk in 2020, and now we believe there is a solution to it. With the right design of the digital euro that places a limit on the amount of digital euro per holder, we can successfully mitigate that risk and not allow the digital euro to become a source of instability. Another risk is a potential for market distortion that lies in the introduction of the digital euro when a public institution enters the private market, disrupts it and even competes with both current and future market participants. Why do that when we already have an innovative and well-functioning payment system in the EU? And isn't it that the markets always do things better and more efficiently driven by the invisible hand, with the regulators' task being only to level the playing field by providing an adequate legal framework?

[4] If the trend continues, it could eventually entirely disappear. Since cash is the only source of public, risk-free money available to everyone, we see the need to adapt to people's preferences by offering a public version of money in this growing digital sphere. While doing this, we do not want to replace cash but to complement it with a widely usable, inclusive, free-for-basic use and convenient form of money. The other important reason for embarking on this digital journey is related to something we call "strategic autonomy". As I mentioned at the beginning, current geopolitical tensions show us how fragile our world is. Dependence on external sources and external suppliers for the basic needs of our population brings risks, and we must ensure these risks do not materialize, particularly in times of crisis. It is our duty to support the smooth functioning of the payment system or, to put it more bluntly - to ensure payment services continuity in unexpected scenarios. And this is precisely where the digital euro fits in. Built on its own infrastructure and further developed in cooperation with domestic payment service providers, we must ensure this option will work when all others fail regardless of the cause of the disruption, be it a cyberattack, technical glitch or something else. We must ensure the digital euro is there when you need it the most. PRIVACY Now let's mention privacy. This is very important for us, and I want to emphasize this aspect.