samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The agreement committed signatories to keep the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 degrees centigrade over pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit this increase to 1.5 degrees centigrade. To meet this target, net carbon emissions need to fall to zero by around the middle of this century. Six years after the Paris Agreement came into force, 1.5 degrees centigrade is the minimum rise in temperatures expected by the scientific community. However, we are not making progress at the desired speed. News coming from COP27 this week attest to this. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres said it clearly: "We are in the fight of our lives. And we are losing.” There is no need to emphasise that Malta as a Mediterranean island would be deeply affected. These are facts we have to come to terms with. While the primary responsibilities for tackling climate change rests on governments and legislators, central banks are called to play their part. The questions which many ask is why should Central Banks be involved? Is not their mandate merely price stability? Let us just examine the effects that climate change would have on the economy, with some sectors more directly exposed than others. For example, 2  agriculture and livestock will have to withstand more severe repercussions than services or manufacturing. The rising of global temperatures could render vast regions unsuitable for land cultivation, straining access to food and prompting mass migration.

Savings instruments that attract customers are even being provided, at least in Sweden, by food chains and petrol companies. In the case of loans, a growing proportion of credits is being arranged in the securities markets. Then there is more uncertainty about the social security system’s future ability to generate adequate pensions. The demographic trends are also entailing changes in saving behaviour; a growing proportion of people in the industrialised world are approaching retirement and are more prone to save than to borrow. BIS Review 81/1998  -2Cross-border investment is rising. People in Sweden, for example, are placing their longterm savings to a growing extent in assets issued abroad. At the same time, non-residents are increasing their holdings of Swedish financial assets. Furthermore, technological advances are making it possible to supply traditional banking services without the aid of a large branch network. This in turn makes new banking establishments less costly than before and a bank with just a few branches or a business concept based on telephony or the Internet can gain a competitive advantage in certain segments of the market. Products are also becoming more sophisticated and their construction and production are increasingly dependent on specialist knowhow that may become available outside the banks. The speed of these processes varies from country to country. The structure of bank earnings is already changing, with a growing share from a range of commissions compared with the traditional income from net interest.
2.4  External sector  Zambia’s external position continues to show remarkable improvements as reflected in the build up of gross international reserves to 3.6 months of import cover in 2007 from 0.9 months of import cover in 2001. Preliminary assessment is that Zambia’s surplus trade balance rose to US $ million compared to the deficit of US $ million in 2001. Similarly, the current account deficit as a percentage of GDP reduced to 4.4% in 2007 from 19.1% in 2001. This outturn was mainly attributed to high receipts from increased copper exports following increased production and record high prices on the international market due to strong demand mainly from China. Coupled with this, between 2000 and 2007, nontraditional export earnings rose by 260% from $ 255.7 million in 2000 to $ 920.7 million in 2007 with commodities such as sugar, copper wire and tobacco, coupled with receipts from tourism making notable contributions. In addition, the attainment of the enhanced HIPC completion point in April 2005 and Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI) in 2006 provided for cancellation of (IMF, IDA and ADB) debt resulting in a reduction in debt stock to about US $ billion in 2007 from the end-2001 debt stock of US $ billion. The debt relief and increased budget support from cooperating partners also helped strengthen the external position. The foreign exchange market is liberalised, therefore the Kwacha is determined by demand and supply conditions in the market.

Thus far developments in the US have not resulted in a corresponding turnaround in Europe. Share prices in Europe have been relatively stable so far this year, and European economies are still showing solid growth. The effects on the Norwegian economy There are no signs of unrest among economic agents in Norway. Households and enterprises still expect growth in future income. If oil prices fall, the situation may be different. The chart shows the probability of various oil prices ahead. The curve is based on prices in the options market for contracts maturing in December. The vertical axis shows that market participants have priced in a 10 per cent probability that oil prices will be below USD 18 per barrel in December 2001 and a 10 per cent probability that oil prices will be higher than USD 35.5 per barrel in December this year. This would suggest considerable uncertainty. 6  BIS Review 19/2001  The chart shows that high oil prices and petroleum production are generating large current account and budget surpluses, with an attendant increase in Norway's disposable income. The current account surplus came to about 14 per cent of GDP last year, which is one of the highest surpluses recorded in an OECD country in the post-war period. In addition, government budget surpluses have increased sharply and reached 14 1/2 per cent of GDP. The Government Petroleum Fund shall serve as a buffer against short-term fluctuations in oil revenues.
Secondly, when inflationary problems loomed in the past, inflation expectations – amongst businesses, households and in financial markets – increased, both signalling and bringing about the incipient rise in inflation. Today, we appear to enjoy well-anchored inflation expectations, which will affect price-setting behaviour in the ways I have touched on. Indeed, modern economic models of various kinds – inside and outside the Bank – tend to assume policy credibility, anchoring mediumterm expectations. If that were so, the medium-term outlook for inflation would be assured. In fact, credibility is not something that can just be assumed. It has to be achieved, and continually reachieved, by policymakers – through our actions, and reasoned explanations of them. For that reason alone, policy inevitably remains a judgmental process – not one mechanically tied to a particular model, but one that draws on a wide range of inputs, including the insights of our business contacts. Learning is, accordingly, inherent in our mission. Over the next few years, if the economy escapes being buffeted by shocks, we will learn quite a lot. In the meantime, notwithstanding the uncertainties, we have to make judgments and explain them.

Chart 8: Proportion of part-time workers  Percentage of total employed 30 25 20 15 10 1985  1988  1991  1994  1997  2000  2003  Source: ONS and Bank calculations  BIS Review 16/2005  11  Chart 9: Real household disposable income growth and terms of trade  Percentage change on a year earlier 8.0  1990 = 100 112  Real household income growth  6.0 108  4.0 2.0  104  0.0 100  -2.0  Terms of trade  -4.0  96  -6.0 -8.0 1990  92 1992  1994  1996  1998  2000  2002  2004  Chart 10: Margins on personal loans to households  Per cent 10.0 8.0 6.0 4.0 2.0 0.0 1993  1995  1997  1999  2001  2003  Source: Bank calculat ions.
Zeti Akhtar Aziz: South East Asia – potential and perspectives in the New Asia Luncheon address by Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz, Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia, at the 2010 Institute of International Finance (IIF) Annual Membership Meeting, Washington DC, 8 October 2010. *  *  *  Generating growth and a long lasting recovery is the primary priority for the global economy in this aftermath of the recent crisis. The massive life support that was provided to avert a deep recession was to be temporary – to provide the opportunity to address the weakness in the system and to rebuild the capacity for a self-sustaining recovery. Recent indications are that this prospect has not been realised. The emerging world has however performed well with the potential to generate such a sustained recovery. These developments have drawn significant interest to the Asian emerging economies and on their changing role in the global economy and in the international financial system. It is my honour and great pleasure to speak at this 2010 Institute of International Finance Annual Membership Meeting. My remarks today will focus on the challenges in managing such a sustained recovery with specific focus on the potential for emerging Asia to rise to these challenges in this new global economic and financial environment. The final part of my remarks will be on the changes taking place in the international financial environment from the perspective of emerging Asia.

Perhaps the most important factor that has for several decades sustained the economic success of the emerging Asian economies is its economic flexibility to adjust to the changing conditions in the global environment. This economic flexibility is supported by the high degree of labour and capital mobility within the national economies and the significant investment accorded to education and to infrastructure development. The region has also adopted a pragmatic approach to policy that is not constrained by rigid ideology. In this more recent decade, institutional development, extensive financial reforms, and the adoption of new business models have been an important part of this transformation process. Several of the economies in emerging Asia’s have transformed their production capacity in the manufacturing and services sector to meet the changing demands of the global economy  BIS Review 131/2010  1  and the growing consumer market in Asia. Given the different stages of development and endowment of natural resources in the region, the emerging economies in Asia have also leveraged on their respective distinct comparative advantages. This has resulted in intraregional division of labour and specialisation, and the capacity to undertake the entire spectrum of the supply chain for a wide range of products and services. Part of the economic restructuring has also involved the greater emphasis on domestic demand as an important source of growth. This has involved significant increases in domestic private consumption and investment activities.
Fritz Zurbrügg: Monetary policy and financial markets – is a return to normal on the horizon? Speech by Mr Fritz Zurbrügg, Member of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, at the Money Market Event, Geneva, 21 November 2013. *  *  *  The speaker would like to thank Bettina Simioni for her valuable support in preparing this speech. I am also indebted to Marco Huwiler, Rita Kobel and Peter Kuster for their insightful comments. Ladies and gentlemen Welcome to the Money Market Event of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) in Geneva. It is a great pleasure for me to be able to address you here today for the second time. I am particularly delighted because I am able to talk to you today with a good deal more confidence than I could a year ago. The situation on the European financial markets has calmed perceptibly, and it is more than a year since the SNB has had to intervene in the foreign exchange market to defend the minimum exchange rate of CHF 1.20 against the euro. But let us turn the clock back to 2012 for a moment. At that time, a great many market participants feared that the euro area would collapse. The upward pressure on the Swiss franc was immense. As a result, our willingness to defend the minimum exchange rate with all our resources was put to a severe test. In 2012, we purchased foreign currency for a value of almost CHF 190 billion.

In response to the changing landscape following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the HKMA expanded its efforts to protect and educate consumers, and this change resulted in the creation in April 2010 of our Banking Conduct Department. I will focus first on our work to strengthen consumer protection before going on to saying something about our work on consumer education. HKMA & consumer protection In terms of consumer protection, first, the HKMA has introduced new requirements on banks and issued guidelines on the selling of investment products. These include (a) requiring audio-recording the customer risk profile assessment and sales process to provide audit trails for reviews by banks and the regulators; (b) implementing a pre-investment cooling-off period in the sale of unlisted structured products to less sophisticated customers (such as the elderly or first-time buyer); and (c) requiring banks to carry out continuous reviews of product risk and inform investors of any upward changes to the risk ratings of the products they have purchased. These requirements were in addition to existing measures introduced by the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) on the supervision of securities companies’ selling activities. Second, the HKMA is active in monitoring banks’ compliance with these and other regulatory requirements through thematic on-site examinations. Banks are expected to have control processes and procedures in place to ensure adherence to the conduct regulations. In addition, to monitor compliance levels among banking staff, the HKMA conducts mystery shopping trips. Third, the HKMA has strengthened consumer protection by working with partners.
Ladies and Gentlemen, another important safeguard relates to the requirement for financial institutions to have in place certain board committees such as the Audit, Risk Management and Loans Review Committees. This is intended to ensure independence, transparency and accountability to board oversight over management actions. All companies should strive to ensure that such safeguards are put in place for the effective oversight of management. Finally, allow me to congratulate the Institute of Directors for continually trying to improve professionalism and ethics in our corporate entities. This is commendable. I also wish to acknowledge the mutual cooperation that has always existed between the Bank of Zambia and the Institute of Directors. You will recall that the Institute of Directors conducted a number of seminars on core principles of corporate governance under the first phase of the Financial Sector Development Plan (FSDP). Similarly, it is our expectation that we will continue to work together under the second phase of the FSDP in the area of developing and introducing an ethics and corporate governance code for the financial sector. I Thank You For Your Attention  4  BIS central bankers’ speeches

But we also learned to pay more attention to the structural, supply-side capacity of the economy and in particular to the role of reform - and deregulation, subject to appropriate safeguards, of goods, capital and labour markets, as the means of increasing the economy’s flexibility and the underlying rate of growth that can be sustained. We learned finally that these twin approaches - of macroeconomic stability and supply-side reform reinforce each other. It is these understandings that lie at the heart of our present economic policy framework. On the macroeconomic side, the Government has enacted legislation which requires it to set out transparent rules for fiscal policy. For the current Parliament it has chosen to adopt two specific rules. First, over the economic cycle, Government borrowing will be restricted to borrowing for investment, and not to fund current spending; and Secondly, net public debt as a proportion of GDP will be kept at a prudent and stable level over the economic cycle. These rules taken together are designed to ensure financial stability in the medium-term, but also allow for automatic stabilisation in response to fluctuations in output growth in the short-term. On the monetary side, the Government has set a low, symmetrical target for underlying retail price inflation as the objective of monetary policy; and it has devolved technical responsibility for setting short-term interest rates to achieve that objective - on average over time - to the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England.
CEO Sandy Weill of Citigroup, the largest US bank before the crisis, said in July 2012 that repealing this act had contributed more than any other factor to the financial crisis. See also the article, “Roosevelt’s lessons for President Obama” by Marc Flandreau (2012), in The Global Journal (http://theglobaljournal.net/article/view/770/), where the author discusses historical perspectives on New Deal policies in the 1930s. 9  For decades, a number of policies have been implemented in a large number of countries, including Norway, to support home ownership. In Fault Lines (2010), Raghuram Rajan describes US housing market policies. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Big banks can easily give rise to big ideas about the importance of a country. But the financial crisis showed that big banks above all give rise to a political headache and a massive bill for taxpayers. Banks that are so large that they can undermine the entire financial system cannot easily be allowed to fail.10 The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision seeks to ensure that different countries operate on a level playing field. While this is a good thing, the result was often compromise whereby the country with the weakest regulations set the standard. One must also recognise that the new rules introduced in the 1980s did not take into account banks’ ability and creativity in terms of circumventing these rules. Rules intended to mitigate the risk of financial instability actually encouraged banks to take on ever more risk. What do economists do when regulations do not work?

However, one interesting question is what effect the change in population structure will have on savings and on the securities markets in a few years time, when those of us born in the 1940s retire. We are a fairly large group from the baby boom years. The life cycle hypothesis assumes that we will sell large parts of our assets, which will lead to negative net savings. However, some studies indicate that pensioners may not consume their capital to the extent assumed. And of course, some people actually have something left to pass on to their descendants. One decisive factor for the future development of savings is how the pension system will function in practice and what responsibility the individual will have in the future for other parts of the traditional welfare system. Technological developments Another important driving force behind the securities markets is technological developments. These occur in several ways. Look, for example, at the current procedure for a securities transaction, from start to finish. The process from placing the order to buy or sell until the transaction is finally settled has become increasingly automated. I don’t just mean the actual trading, which has become increasingly electronic, but also the processes following on from this, namely clearing and settlement. Straight through processing, usually referred to as STP, is becoming more common. This involves the entire chain from placing the order to clearing and settlement being implemented without manual intervention. The increased automation has led to transaction costs falling.
Guerrieri, V., Lorenzoni, G., Straub, L. and Werning, I, 2020. ‘Macroeconomic implications of COVID-19: can negative supply shocks cause demand shortages?’. NBER working paper No. 26918. Krueger, D., Uhlig, H. and Xie, T., 2020. ‘Macroeconomic dynamics and reallocation in an epidemic: evaluating the “Swedish solution”’, NBER Working Paper No. 27047. Osotimehin, S., 2019. ‘Aggregate productivity and the allocation of resources over the business cycle’, Review of Economic Dynamics, Vol. 32, pp. 180-205. Samuelson, P. A. and Swamy, S., 1974. ‘Invariant Economic Index Numbers and Canonical Duality: Survey and Synthesis’. The American Economic Review, Vol. 64, pp. 566-593. Vlieghe, G., 2020. ‘Assessing the health of the economy’. Speech available at https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/speech/2020/assessing-the-health-of-the-economyspeech-by-gertjan-vlieghe.pdf. 17  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  17

3/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  We are publishing the first issue of the report today and are going to release it on a regular basis, eight times a year, prior to the quiet period. We hope that this material will be interesting and useful to a wide range of readers. 4/4  BIS central bankers' speeches
Charles L Evans: Monetary policy normalization – if not now, when? Speech by Mr Charles L Evans, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, at the BMO Harris and Lakeland College Economic Briefing, Plymouth, Wisconsin, 8 October 2014. *  *  *  Introduction I would like to thank Lakeland College for inviting me to speak this morning. It’s always refreshing to reach directly into the communities in our District to gain valuable personal insights into what is going on in the economy and pick up information that sometimes get missed in dry reports and statistics. Opportunities such as this also give me a chance to talk to you about the state of the economy, the progress we have seen in repairing the damage from the Great Recession, and how Federal Reserve policy fits into the picture. Of course, to gauge progress, we must measure economic performance. It’s natural for us at the Federal Reserve to do so against the objectives that Congress has set out for us – what are known as the Fed’s dual mandate. Namely, the Federal Reserve is charged with fostering financial conditions consistent with full employment and price stability. Needless to say, the past seven years have been very challenging and we have struggled to achieve both our employment and inflation objectives. To accomplish our goals, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) cut its traditional policy tool, the target federal funds rate, essentially to zero – what economists refer to as its zero lower bound, or ZLB.

In fact, now standing at 5.9 percent, the unemployment rate has fallen about 4 percentage points from its high – and a full percentage point over the last year. Other measures of labor market health also suggest significant improvements: Notably, layoff rates are low and job opening rates are back to their prerecession levels. But we still aren’t back to full labor market health. At 5.9 percent, the unemployment rate remains above what most people think of as its long-run neutral level. For example, according to the central tendency in the FOMC’s latest Summary of Economic Projections, 1 the estimate of the neutral unemployment rate is between 5-1/4 to 5-1/2 percent, with my own judgment at the bottom of this range. This leaves a significant gap between our goal and current conditions. Moreover, the labor force participation rate has dropped a good deal. Most of the decline in labor force participation since 2000 is due to demographic trends, such as baby boomers moving into retirement age, and long-running trends, such as reductions in male and teenage labor force participation. These trends are structural in nature, and monetary policy is not the appropriate policy tool to address them. Nonetheless, the labor force participation rate has fallen somewhat more than what would be expected given these structural trends. And it is  1  2  Federal Open Market Committee (2014). BIS central bankers’ speeches  also lower than what would be expected from its historical relationship with the unemployment rate.