samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
A clear parliamentary majority supports the Government long-term strategy for the use of petroleum revenues. At the same time, the Government stresses, with the support of the Storting, that fiscal policy must also be used to stabilise economic developments. The annual budget resolutions will provide an indication of the emphasis placed on this consideration. BIS Review 74/2001  1  The Government was also of the view that there was a need for a clearer anchoring of monetary policy to underpin economic stability. Norges Bank was thus given an operational monetary policy target, which means that the Bank is to use instruments to maintain low and stable inflation. The inflation target is set at 2½ per cent. The inflation target is linked to the annual rate of increase in consumer prices. The monetary policy regulation explicitly refers to factors that the Bank shall in general not take into account, such as the direct effects on consumer prices resulting from changes in interest rates, taxes and excise duties. The regulation further stipulates that Norges Bank shall regularly publish the assessments that form the basis for the implementation of monetary policy. Report no. 29 2001 "Guidelines for economic policy" also states: "Consumer price inflation is expected to remain within an interval of +/-1 percentage point around the target " This must not be misconstrued to mean that the inflation target is an interval. Norges Bank aims at an inflation rate of 2½ per cent two years ahead.

Internationally, a number of empirical studies have been conducted on the effectiveness of exchange market interventions. The studies of interventions in the 1990s find that they were more effective than 5 studies conducted in the 1980s. This may be due to shifts in monetary policy regimes and greater emphasis on transparency. It is probably easier to win credibility when market participants know that interventions are anchored in stabilisation policy considerations rather than a short-term exchange rate objective. However, this presupposes market confidence in the ability of economic policy in general and monetary policy in particular to deliver nominal stability. It is first and foremost the signal effects of interventions that have been found to be effective and particularly when interventions are made publicly known and justified by the central bank. 4  Lars E. O. Svensson. ”Independent Review of the Operation of Monetary Policy: Report to the Minister of Finance”, February 2001. 5  L. Sarno and M.P. Taylor. ”Official Intervention in the Foreign Exchange Market: Is it Effective, and if so, How does it Work”, Discussion Paper No. 2690, February 2001, Center for Economic Policy Research. BIS Review 74/2001  7  For Norges Bank, it may be appropriate in special situations to intervene to a limited extent to stabilise inflation, should the krone move to a level that we do not consider reasonable on the basis of fundamentals, and if this could contribute to stabilising inflation. However, Norges Bank will not act in a way that prompts unilateral bets against the krone.
With some investors reaching for yield, there are reports that it has become an increasingly popular way to generate some income. Consistent with that, insurance premiums have fallen. Implied volatility is a measure of that. It captures the level of market volatility in future at which the options being sold would be expected to break even. Lower implied volatility equates to lower insurance premiums for a given excess. Across markets, implied volatility has recently been squeezed to near all-time lows. So far, so esoteric. However, two possible knock-on effects make this worth exploring further. First, to some degree betting on low volatility could become self-fulfilling. Dealers who buy the options that are being sold by investors have an exposure to market moves. That exposure gets bigger as market prices move close to option strike prices. When an option is close to being ‘in the money’ small moves in market prices have a big effect on its value. This ‘dynamic hedging’ means dealers trying to hedge their positions need to buy more of the underlying asset as prices fall, and sell more as they rise. They can add a stabilising influence to markets. As a result, the decision to sell cheap insurance can appear vindicated: betting on low volatility begets low volatility. 11  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  11  Second, measures of actual and implied volatility are often used as an indicator of risk to inform investment decisions.

Compared to the Asian financial crisis twelve years ago, the dynamic of macroeconomic adjustment in this crisis also looks similar, although the trigger point this time is more bankled than currency-led. The real surprise, however, was in the timing, the scale, and the intensity of how the problem quickly deteriorated into a major global turbulence. According to the IMF, compared with the previous crises, the cost of the current crisis in terms of financial losses could be as high as 10 percent of US GDP. This implies a very substantial welfare loss. Is this the time of upheaval? My answer is both yes and no. The “No” part refers to the fact that, despite the magnitude of the current crisis, aggressive policy response and the willingness to do more by Governments have successfully contained the fallout to the extent that collapse of the global financial system has been avoided. Financial markets, to an appreciable extent, are stabilizing, risk appetite is returning, and signs of improvement in the real economy are beginning to emerge on a world-wide basis. Although it is still early days, they do point to the beginning of stabilization which is an important first step for economic recovery to take hold. The “Yes” part of my answer comes from what I see as a major challenge in the ideas and policies on how best to manage the global economy going forward in this era of globalized finance.
However, such growth strategies should perforce provide economic opportunities for the poor to earn income and participate in the development efforts of their respective nations as responsible citizens. This growth strategy, known as inclusive growth, would enable a country to universalise the availability of income earning opportunities to all citizens alike. There are certain prerequisites which have to be satisfied for a country to gain the best results out of such pro-poor growth policies 6 . Since the main asset which the poor possess is  4  In fact, the expected socio-economic explosion occurred during 1988-92 in the form of an ultra-leftist youth insurrection in the southern parts of Sri Lanka. See, Report of the Presidential Commission on Youth, 1990. 5  The World Development Report 1990 on Poverty reports that the achievements by some countries in this respect have been dramatic: Indonesia within a generation reduced poverty from 60% to 20% in 1970s and 1980s, p 1. 6  Pro-poor growth implies faster growth of income of the lower income categories so that it would not only help the low income people to cross the poverty line but also would bring about a narrowing of income distribution as well. See, World Bank, Economic Growth in the 1990s (2005), p 121. 2  BIS Review 22/2008  their own labour, it is these labour services which they could transform into income earning opportunities.

BIS Review 22/2008  1  it was felt that, unless an effective strategy is adopted to alleviate poverty among those who could not get integrated to the market economy policies, the country was within sight of another socio-economic explosion similar to the one which it experienced in 1971 in the near future 4 . As a counter strategy, several poverty alleviation schemes were initiated by the government with focus on the poor. Along with these schemes, the Central Bank too entered the foray by implementing some pilot projects based on microfinance and support services so that it could develop microfinance techniques and systems for others to emulate. One such project, funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) was implemented by the Central Bank in four districts where the incidence of poverty was the highest under the title “Small Farmers and the Landless Credit Project (SFLCP) or Isuru Project. To supplement this project, another initiative was taken to introduce a Forward Sale Contract Scheme for agricultural produce to facilitate farmers to obtain a pre-agreed price for their major agricultural crops. This paper will cover the strategy, methodology and the techniques adopted in these initiatives so as to develop a sustainable socio-economic security system in Sri Lanka. The paper is organised into four parts. Part I will critically review some aspects of the current theoretical knowledge on socio-economic security systems from the point of view of costeffectiveness and sustainability.
Going forward, private pensions and health insurance will have an increasingly important role in supporting sustainable financing in the long term for retirement and healthcare. More Malaysians are already turning to the private insurance industry to finance their healthcare expenditure. As a result, the medical and health insurance business has grown significantly in the last five years, averaging at an annual growth rate of close to 30%. About 80% of this business is written by life and composite insurers, mainly as riders to life insurance policies. Similarly, a larger role for private pensions may be envisaged under the pension reform initiative. At the same time, there is also a growing awareness among Malaysians of individual responsibility in financial planning. Planning for retirement and healthcare needs are clearly among the most important of financial decisions, but sound financial planning also includes individuals protecting themselves and their dependents from financial vulnerabilities arising from death, disability or unemployment, providing for children’s education and as well as making sound investment choices. These developments present enormous opportunities for the life insurance industry, particularly given the large untapped market that still exists with less than 45% of the population having a life insurance or family takaful policy. By the same token, however, they place equally important responsibilities on  BIS Review 24/2007  1  insurers to make sure that the products sold are suitable, that insurers have assets which match their liabilities; and that customers are given enough information to enable them to make responsible decisions.

In the long run, the industry as a whole has a clear interest in informed, responsible and  2  BIS Review 24/2007  capable consumers. As past experience, whether in Malaysia or abroad, has invariably shown, the irresponsible and unfair treatment of consumers is damaging to the consumer, damaging to the firm, and damaging to the reputation of the industry. The Bank is encouraged by the high level of commitment shown by some insurers towards significantly improving their market conduct practices. Nevertheless, much more can be achieved across the industry to address overly aggressive sales practices that result in unsuitable products being sold to consumers. Bank Negara is investing significantly in raising the level of financial capability among consumers through initiatives under the Consumer Education Programme. Additional focus has been given to this task with the setting up of the Consumer and Market Conduct Department. But this is an extensive task, for which a significant improvement in the level of financial literacy among across a widereaching spectrum of consumers may only be seen in the next generation of consumers. It is, therefore, important now that insurers take their responsibility for the fair treatment of consumers seriously. In particular, we would like to see a far greater interest by the Board and senior management in improving selling practices, as well as the quality of disclosures and advice provided to consumers.
30 It is interesting to assess those proposals using the framework developed here. 29  European Commission (2010), CFTC-SEC (2011). 30  CFTC-SEC (2011). 12  BIS central bankers’ speeches  (i) Market-making guidelines: In principle, a commitment by market-makers to provide liquidity, whatever the state of the market, would go to the heart of potential price discontinuity problems. Market-making commitments would not forestall the arms race. But they would lessen the chances of liquidity droughts and associated fat tails and persistence in prices. They would, in effect, lower the impact of H. Perhaps for that reason, there have been proposals in both the US and Europe for such a set of market-making commitments. 31 The difficulty appears, first, in specifying these commitments in a precise enough fashion; and, relatedly and just as importantly, enforcing them. In a sense, even the market-makers offering their stub quotes on 6 May were fulfilling a market-making commitment, albeit a paper-thin one. If hard law commitments are too difficult to define or enforce, an alternative may be a set of soft law guidelines. A number of electronic broking platforms, notably in foreign exchange markets, have codes or rules of conduct – for example, around pricemaking and price-taking which control the extent to which any one firm can steal a technological march on others. If these codes were extended across trading platforms and assets, perhaps in time market-making behaviour might adapt. (ii) Circuit-breakers: Circuit-breakers already exist on US and Europe exchanges.

I wish you an enjoyable and productive day, and give the floor to President Jean-Claude Trichet. BIS Review 28/2008  3
Parallel to this development, the upward trend in unemployment rates reversed. In the mentioned period, unemployment rates increased in annual terms while they decreased compared to the second quarter in seasonally adjusted terms (Figure 30). Indicators such as capacity utilization rates and per capita hours worked suggest that resource utilization remains low throughout the economy. Given that ample slack would continue to be an obstacle to investment and employment, recent signs of improvement in employment data is not expected to turn into a significant recovery, suggesting that unemployment is likely to remain elevated for an extended period of time. Therefore, unit labor costs and domestic demand would continue to support disinflation. Figure 30: Unemployment Rates (Seasonally Adjusted, Percent) 19 Nonfarm Unemployment Rate 17  Unemployment Rate  15 13 11  0709  0509  0309  0109  1108  0908  0708  0508  0308  0108  1107  0907  0707  0507  0307  0107  9  Source: TURKSTAT, CBRT. BIS Review 143/2009  13  As I have mentioned before, the tightness in credit conditions has been on an easing trend. Accordingly, developments in the credit market would begin to support domestic economic activity as of the fourth quarter of the year and the impact of monetary policy is expected to be more visible in the medium term. However, the rising domestic borrowing requirement of the government, ongoing problems in the global economy, and elevated levels of unemployment would continue restraining credit expansion.

Figure 9 Latin America (*) 2017 growth outlook  Headline inflation  (annual change, percent)  (annual change, percent)  5  5  11  11  4  4  9  9  3  3  7  7  2  2  5  5  1  1  3  3  0 mar.15 Mar.15  0  1  1  mar.16 Mar.16 Argentina  mar.17 Mar.17 Brazil Chile  14 Colombia  15  16 Mexico  17 Peru  (*) As per responses to Bloomberg survey. Source: Central Bank of Chile. 17  Table 2 International scenario 2015  2016 Mar'17 Report  Terms of trade Trading partners' GDP World GDP at PPP World GDP at market ex change rates United States China Eurozone Latin America (excl.
Strikingly, most of that increase in lending wasn’t to families or businesses, but to other parts of the financial system. To finance this, banks were borrowing large amounts themselves. And this was their Achilles’ heel. By the end of 2006, some banks had borrowed as much as £ for every pound provided by their own shareholders. So even a small piece of bad news about the value of its assets would wipe out much of a bank’s capital, and leave depositors scurrying for the door. What made the situation worse was that the fortunes of banks had become closely tied together through transactions in complex and obscure financial instruments. So it was difficult to know which banks were safe and which weren’t. The result was an increasingly fragile banking system. So how did banks find themselves in such a precarious position? Banks are a vital part of our economy. They run the payment system, allowing us to pay our bills and receive our wages. They finance businesses investing in new ventures and families buying a new home. Without a banking system our economy would grind to a halt. Because of that, markets correctly believed that no government could let a bank fail since that would cause immense disruption to the economy. This meant that large banks in particular benefited from an implicit taxpayer guarantee, enabling them to borrow cheaply to finance their lending. In good times, banks took the benefits for their employees and shareholders, while in bad times the taxpayer bore the costs.

But dealing with the consequences of our “bad banking situation” is likely to be a long, slow process. Just as, if not more, important, in my view, is to look further to the future, to the economic possibilities for our grandchildren. To give them the prospect of economic stability, we must reform the three Rs of our financial system. We have an historic opportunity, and a duty, to do that. The day-to-day tasks of controlling inflation and curbing the excesses of the financial system will fall to the Bank of England. When, as it will, the economy returns to normal, our role will be to take away the punchbowl just as the next party is getting going. That won’t make us popular among bankers, politicians and even at times some of you, and it’s not supposed to. But it will, I hope, reflect the trust and confidence that the citizens of this country can place in the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. BIS central bankers’ speeches  5
The Governor gave precisely one speech a year - the annual Mansion House lecture (Chart 4). This tended not to be rich in content. Nor was it not ideally suited to enhancing wider public understanding, being delivered to an audience of around 300 City bankers and merchants, several glasses of wine into the evening. Body language can sometimes substitute for the spoken word. So it was at the Bank of England. In the 1920s, the Governor’s “eyebrows” famously became one of the Bank’s means of communicating. The eyebrows were, in a way, a primitive form of emoji: sterling crisis – sad face. Nonetheless, for even the most malleable-faced Governor, the “eyebrows” were an imperfect communications medium. Beginning in the 1960s, there was a sea-change in central bank communication practices. Speeches by the Governor and his deputies increased, by the 1960s averaging around five per year. They were matched by other communication innovations. December 1960 saw the first edition of the Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin. There was roughly a doubling in the number of speeches in each subsequent decade. In 1992, a formal target for inflation was announced in the UK, together with a regular schedule of monthly monetary policy meetings. In 1993, the Bank began publishing a quarterly Inflation Report, setting out its views on the economic outlook. In 1996, the Inflation Report gained a sister publication, the six-monthly Financial Stability Review.

A survey by the BBC in 2011 asked the public about the meaning of the words “inflation” and “GDP”, the two central concepts in modern-day macroeconomics. Only 16% of the general public could clearly define what was meant by inflation, while only 10% could do so for GDP. 44  For central banks, whose stock-in-trade is  inflation and GDP control, these fractions are disappointingly low. In 2013, Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales conducted a survey of economic experts and the general public on a set of economic policy questions. 45  Not only were there large differences between experts and the  public in their answers. Tellingly, these differences were largest in those areas where experts were most in agreement. Expert economic opinion increased the general public’s sense of scepticism. That gap between elites and the general public is, if anything, even larger when it comes to economic issues. Turning to central banks, it is a good news/bad news story. In surveys, around 60% of the general public believe the Bank of England has a good understanding of the economy. This is the good news. The bad news is that only around a quarter believe it explains its actions and decisions in terms they can understand. 46  On monetary policy, around half of the general public do not know who sets interest rates. Almost a half have either never heard of the MPC or think it is part of government. Let me give a specific policy example to illustrate this (lack of) understanding.
The same is true when the assets are people. The diversity benefits in moving from 2 to 4 people are large compared with the diversity benefits of going from 102 to 104 people. There are probably diminishing returns to diversity. The second factor important for the wisdom of crowds is deliberation. Complex decisions require an investment of time, a period of deliberation. This is needed to understand a complex problem, consider it from different angles, to test it with different solutions. Solving complex problems does not in general call for instinctive, “fast thinking” of the type described by Daniel Kahneman in his famous book, Thinking Fast and Slow. 30  It instead calls for “slow thinking”, for System 2 rather than System 1 thinking. Time is also important when harvesting the benefits of interactions within a diverse group. It takes time for groups to explore and test their ideas, winnowing out the winners and filtering out the losers. It takes time for people to change their minds. As with diversity, there are decreasing returns to deliberation time. Research suggests that spending as little as 1 hour on a complex problem can improve performance by 10%. 31  These  benefits are likely to be smaller when moving from 100 to 101 hours spent on the same problem. While diversity and deliberation are the cornerstones of the wisdom of crowds, it is clear that crowds are not always and everywhere wise.

What new infrastructure or architecture is needed for collecting and assimilating these views? And how do we ensure they balance diversity and deliberation so as to be representative of the general public’s views? These are deep questions, but they are not new ones. They have been debated by philosophers and political scientists for thousands of years. Alternative models of representative decision-making have been tried and tested throughout the course of history. This experience contains some useful lessons for central banks, and other public institutions, seeking to strengthen the infrastructure linking them to wider society. Let’s start at the very beginning. The birthplace of democracy is, for many, ancient Greece. Around 2,500 years ago, the city-state of Athens pioneered a particular form of representative decision-making when it came to judgements on some of the most complex, societally-significant, issues of the day. The centrepiece of this decision-making infrastructure was a public body – a Council of Five Hundred, or boule. The boule comprised individuals drawn from the general public by random selection (or sortition). They served for a year. The purpose of the boule was to debate key issues affecting public life and devise policy proposals. These were then taken to a public assembly for discussion, where a wider set of the general  39  Wagner and Vinaimont (2010). 16  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  16  public participated, often running into the thousands. For a small number of positions requiring specialist skills, public officials and experts were elected or appointed.