samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Bearing in mind the longer preparation period prior to actual EMU membership required in this alternative, it would actually take longer until Sweden could fully participate in all co-operation and decision-making forums in Euroland than would a gradual transition process. The advantage with this scenario is that there does not need to arise any uncertainty among the general public with regard to the position of the euro during the transition period, in that the euro could be used everywhere right from the start. We must therefore consider carefully what form a Swedish transition scenario should take, even if the discussions have generally favoured a gradual process. Here, Finland's experiences could certainly be of great value to us in the Swedish preparation work. Conclusions Regardless of whether or not Sweden chooses to take the same path as Finland and join the EMU, it is important to maintain a high level of ambition with regard to keeping our public finances in good condition, maintaining price stability and creating the right conditions for a good growth in productivity. This creates freedom of action, regardless of whether or not we join the union. There are both advantages and disadvantages in remaining outside. However, the question will not be determined merely by economic arguments, it is more a case of political arguments. It is important to remember this. BIS Review 9/2002  5

Daily trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) went from two million shares a day in the early 1960s to twelve million by the end of the decade. Meanwhile, stock trades continued to be settled by the physical delivery of engraved stock certificates between brokerage firms. As trading volumes soared, the post-trading industry could not keep up with the paper blizzard. By 1968, the NYSE was forced to close every Wednesday for six months to catch up with the paperwork. It then reduced its official operating hours for a further six months to enable its 4 member brokerage firms to keep pace with the trading volumes. Technology subsequently caught up. A second example is “Black Monday” when, on 19 October 1987, stock markets crashed all over the world. That day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by over 22%. One factor that increased the severity of this market crash was the difficulty people faced in obtaining reliable information. The record trading volumes on Black Monday – three times the daily average – overwhelmed many systems. As the Brady Report put it: “On the NYSE, for example, trade executions were reported more than an hour late, which … caused confusion among traders. Investors did not know whether limit orders had been executed or whether 5 new limits needed to be set.” In the years since 1987, both trading and post-trade technology have come a long way. Today, trading algorithms buy and sell hundreds of thousands of times in a single second, leading to increased trading volumes.
This has naturally put us, along with other central banks and supervisors on alert for further signs of strain and the attendant risks of dysfunction. UK financial assets saw significant repricing since the start of this week, particularly affecting long-dated UK government debt. Were dysfunction in this market to continue or worsen, there would be a material risk to UK financial stability. This would lead to an unwarranted tightening of financing conditions and a reduction of the flow of credit to the real economy. On 28 September, yesterday, the Bank’s Financial Policy Committee, which I’m a member of, noted the risks to UK financial stability from dysfunction in the gilt market. It recommended that action be taken and welcomed the Bank’s plans for temporary and targeted purchases in the gilt market on financial stability grounds at an urgent pace. These operations have started, with the first one carried out yesterday afternoon. These purchases will be strictly time limited until 14 October. They are intended to tackle a specific problem in the long-dated government bond market. The purchases will be unwound in a smooth and orderly fashion once risks to market functioning are judged to have subsided. The Bank’s MI function has informed these actions by providing the Bank’s policy committees with detailed, real-time information on market functionality and tradeability.

I believe that the tax deductions for interest paid should be reviewed, and that a broad political agreement would be desirable. Measures should also be taken to increase the construction of housing. In the long run, it would be desirable to have housing construction that develops apace with demand, to avoid creating further imbalances. Let me now conclude with a look ahead to the next monetary policy meeting. The situation ahead of the monetary policy decision on 3 September Some time has now passed since the monetary policy decision in July, and I intend to briefly discuss what has happened over the summer and how I see the situation ahead of our next monetary policy meeting on 3 September. If we begin abroad, we can conclude that developments in Russia and Ukraine have had some negative effects on confidence among households and companies, particularly in Europe. The GDP outcome for the euro area with regard to the second quarter was also a little weaker than we had been expecting in July, although it is difficult to know exactly how much of this relates to developments in Russia and Ukraine. The signs of a slowdown in  11  See ”Sweden – 2014 Article IV Consultation Concluding Statement of the Mission”, June 2014, IMF. 12  See “Macroeconomic imbalances Sweden 2014”, Occasional papers 186, March 2014, European Commission.
Requiring higher prudential requirements for a ring-fenced bank and structurally separating it from wholesale and investment banking activities helps ensure that retail lending can be sustained despite external shocks. At the same time, this approach preserves the free flow of capital provided by wholesale banking activities across borders. Efficient resilience is why we are building robust markets supported by the necessary hard and soft infrastructure. This is how we reinforce the City’s genius which is based on its fundamental belief in the power of markets. We have comprehensively reformed how we provide liquidity. Our new approach can be described in four words: we’re open for business. The Bank now provides liquidity against a wider range of collateral, to a 9  wider range of counterparties, for longer terms, at lower fees than ever before. Collateral totalling over £ is prepositioned, ready for use if needed including in times of actual or prospective stress – as was the case around the Referendum last year. Moreover, we stand ready to provide liquidity in a wide range of foreign currencies if required. Efficient resilience is why we are committed to world class supervision of UK-based globally systemic financial market infrastructure. The UK has been at the forefront of implementing recovery and resolution regimes for CCPs, well ahead of final international guidance. The Bank pioneered global colleges for CCPs. And we have introduced ‘pre-funding’ into our systemically important retail payments schemes, Bacs and FPS, to eliminate settlement risk.

Over the past decade, UK average real earnings th  have fallen for the first time since the middle of the 19 century. Trust in the financial system has plummeted. 3  Over the past decade, the UK and its key G20 partners have been fixing these fault lines and creating a system that is safer, simpler and fairer. The system is safer because banks are now much more resilient, with capital requirements for the largest global banks that are ten times higher than before the crisis and a new leverage ratio that guards against risks that may seem low but prove not. The financial system is simpler. As banks have become less complex and more focused, they are lending more to households and businesses and less to each other. A series of measures are eliminating toxic and fragile forms of shadow banking while reinforcing the best of resilient market-based finance. And more durable market infrastructure is simplifying the previously complex – and dangerous – web of exposures in derivative markets. The financial system is fairer because of reforms that are ending the era of “too big to fail” banks and addressing the root causes of a torrent of misconduct. The benefits of these painstaking efforts are beginning to be realised. The global financial system is moving from fragility to resilience. The too-big-to-fail public subsidy enjoyed by private systemic banks has fallen by 90% in the UK. Credit is now growing in all major economies.
But it is interesting that there has not been more interest from investment institutions with ostensibly long holding periods, which are largely unlevered and are not exposed to liquidity risk from borrowing short and lending long. What we commonly hear from contacts is that investment managers do not want to be caught out if asset prices fall further before they recover. But no one can seriously believe that they can spot the bottom of the market, and short-term horizons should not weigh heavily in longer-term investment institutions. All of which suggests that there may be structural impediments. Those could include some combination of the reasonable difficulty that some asset managers experience in assessing the quality of securitised assets; and mandates and accounting policies that may have the effect of shortening asset managers’ time horizons. The challenge for your own industry seems to have been slightly different. The managers of some money funds around the world, although I am sure not all of your members, joined in the “search for yield” by going down the credit spectrum and increasing maturity mismatch during the boom in credit markets. As those funds have moved back towards home base, shortening the maturity and increasing the liquidity of their assets, one effect has been a reduction in the net supply of term funding into the international banking system. That has been one of many contributors to the liquidity strains evident in money markets.

But those strains have also been exacerbated by an unexpected breakdown in the technology for liquidity insurance provided by central banks. For well over a century, throughout industrialised world there has in effect been something akin to a Social Contract between the banking system and the authorities. The banking system is permitted to profit from undertaking leveraged maturity transformation in the course of intermediating the liquid savings of depositors into illiquid loans to households, firms and others. In doing so, commercial banks provide liquidity insurance, whether via demand deposits or committed lines of credit. They can do this because their deposit liabilities are  BIS Review 38/2008  3  money, which puts them at the heart of the payments system and is what makes them special; banks are at the heart of a monetary economy. In return, the authorities respond with a combination of prudential supervision, to contain the risks that banks run; deposit insurance, to protect savers; and liquidity insurance from the central bank. Smaller commercial banks can try to buy liquidity insurance from their larger brethren. Large banks cannot realistically do the same. But there is no cast iron guarantee that asset markets will remain liquid in all conditions. So since Bagehot’s day, central banks have stood ready to provide unlimited liquidity against good collateral at a rate that is higher than the normal market rate.
The same conclusion would be reached by looking at the measures required to achieve a balanced budget, which largely consist of reversing the decisions taken over the last ten years in respect of public sector wage rises, expenditure increases and the adoption of standard structural reforms which would bring Greece in line with other euro area countries. Just to give an example, if, over the last 10 years, Greek public sector wages had gone up at the same pace as inflation, and public employment had not increased, in 2010 the Greek budget deficit to GDP ratio would have been around 4 percentage points lower and the debt to GDP ratio about 30% lower.4 The key question is whether the Greek government and the Greek people are willing to implement these measures. The answer to this question largely depends on the alternative scenario, which is a default or restructuring of the public debt. A rational analysis comparing the economic, financial, social and political costs of implementing the needed adjustments, including privatisation, and the costs of a default/restructuring would conclude that the former costs are lower. A rational decision-maker would thus opt for the adjustment and, on that basis, Greece should be considered solvent and should be asked to service its debts. The second difference between debt workouts in the corporate and public sectors is that, unlike a company, a sovereign cannot be liquidated.

Under bankruptcy laws or out-of-court settlement guidelines, such as the London Rules, the Jakarta Initiatives or the Hong Kong Guidelines, when a corporate is facing financing difficulties, the responsibility is passed to the debtor and creditors to arrange debt settlements among themselves. Indebted companies can reorganise and restructure their operations to return to profitability. In turn, creditors agree to reschedule loans or accept the conversion of debt into equity. While the basic principles of private creditor participation in resolving the debtor’s dilemma are uncontroversial, the application of these principles to sovereign debt is much more complex. Debt workouts in the corporate and public sectors are quite different. First, assessing the solvency of a country is different from that of a company. The former requires not only an analysis of the cash flow, the balance sheet and the assets and liabilities but also an evaluation of the political will to implement the measures needed to ensure that the country remains solvent. The capacity to service debt requires both a willingness and an ability to implement policies that will generate the necessary resources. To quote the example of Greece: it has a gross debt of around € billion and marketable assets worth up to € billion, so the country is solvent to the extent that it is willing to sell off some of these assets.
We are ensuring that the next generation of RTGS service creates a world-leading payments landscape for the UK. We can also be a catalyst and a convener for broader developments. We have been working with the FinTech sector, a sector we previously had little to no interaction with. As the Bank’s Executive Director for Banking, Payments and Financial Resilience, Andrew Hauser, highlighted here in Cambridge late last year, our engagement in the FinTech sector has improved our familiarity with FinTech products, concepts and firms, and also given FinTech firms insights into the emerging questions and needs central banks might 8  have, as policymakers, regulators and operators. In recognition, the Bank won ‘Initiative of the Year’ last month from Central Banking, for the work we did with firms working on new and emerging financial technology. 9  Interacting with these innovative disrupters has reminded me that there are reasons to be optimistic about productivity growth in the longer-term, stretching beyond the horizon relevant for monetary policy. We are here in Cambridge, home to Silicon Fen. The city is home to around 1700 science and technology 10  companies, including over 200 biotech companies and a large array of science infrastructure. A survey by our Agents across the UK last year suggested that the biggest positive driver of investment intentions was the desire to achieve future efficiency gains. One feature of the drive for efficiency gains has been investment in automation, AI and robotics.

This stocktake was especially important in light of the unusual times the UK finds itself in and the 6 7  Ramsden (2017) Haldane (2017) 4  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  4  importance of supply-side developments for the economic outlook. We didn’t change our assessment of underlying productivity, but we have revised down our assessment of spare capacity within firms, which has implications for actual productivity growth in the short term. Productivity growth is the key determinant of the economy's potential growth rate, the rate at which the economy can grow without generating inflation pressures, in other words its speed limit. The most recent data show signs of productivity growth rising in the second half of 2017. But quarterly growth has been volatile of late and we’ll have to wait and see whether the pickup is sustained in the near-term. The MPC’s best collective judgement is that productivity growth will settle at just over 1% over the next three years. That is a pickup from the pace since 2010, but it is still around half the pre-crisis rate. But in terms of the economy’s potential growth rate, these hints of somewhat higher productivity growth need to be balanced by the prospect that workforce growth will slow somewhat, due to lower inward migration and demographic effects. Overall, it’s the MPC’s view that the economy’s speed limit is likely to be around 1½%.
While this dichotomy did not appear problematic before the crisis – indeed, the presence of national regulation was often viewed favourably as a component of a more flexible regulatory and supervisory framework in Europe, which could be more easily adapted to countryspecific conditions – it led to important deficiencies that were first laid bare by the crisis. •  The lack of a robust regulatory and supervisory framework led to the failure to identify and control an unbalanced and unsustainable expansion of credit in some countries, during a period characterised by low interest rates, abundant liquidity and easy access to credit. •  A framework fundamentally based on the national perspective was also not conducive to identifying cross-country interdependencies and the potential for spillovers, which therefore went unaddressed. •  When the crisis erupted and the vulnerabilities materialised, the framework also revealed the lack of adequate crisis management mechanisms. National supervision proved to be a major obstacle towards a more efficient management of the crisis, leading to a serious setback in the process of financial integration. Monetary policy in the crisis In this environment of financial refragmentation of euro area financial markets, central banks had to step in. If risks to financial stability hamper the proper transmission of monetary policy, monetary policy may be rendered ineffective, thereby impeding the ability of central banks to safeguard price stability.

To overcome the damaging fragmentation, Europe needs to advance its institutional framework towards – among other things – a true banking union with single supervisory and resolution mechanisms. The set-up of euro area wide supervision under the auspices of the ECB is a prerequisite for breaking the vicious circle of sovereign and banking risks. Moreover, it will reinforce financial integration, mitigate macroeconomic imbalances, and – last but not least – unburden monetary policy. BIS central bankers’ speeches  7
Caleb M Fundanga: Important building stones for successful organisations in Zambia Remarks by Dr Caleb M Fundanga, Governor of the Bank of Zambia, on the occasion of the opening of Investrust Bank PLC 2007 Management Strategic Planning Session, Mfuwe, 11 April 2007. *  *  *  • The Managing Director • Heads of Departments • Members of the Investrust Bank Plc Management Team First of all, I wish to take this opportunity to say congratulations on your 10th anniversary attained on 19th September, 2006. Considering that the Bank opened its doors at a very difficult time when confidence in locally owned banks was at its lowest, reaching 10 years is no mean achievement. The Bank of Zambia is proud to be associated with your achievements and can assure you of our full support now and the future. It was only on 30th March 2007 that Bank of China also celebrated 10 years of operations in Zambia. It is a great privilege and honour for me to officiate at this wonderful and history making occasion in your bank. History making in the sense that you have gathered in this conference to chart a path for your Financial Institution to ensure its sustained growth. Decisions you will make in this gathering are critical to all your stake holders. The public is keenly following your growth and performance. Allow me to remind you of the following issues which I believe are important building stones for successful organizations. 1.

Süreyya Serdengeçti: Recent developments in the Turkish economy Speech by Süreyya Serdengeçti, Governor of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, made at the 69th Shareholders' Ordinary General Meeting of the Central Bank, Ankara, 24 April 2001. *  *  *  Dear Shareholders, Distinguished Guests and Valuable Press Members; th  I would first like to welcome you to the 69 Shareholders’ Ordinary General Meeting of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey. As you know, the year 2000 differed widely from the previous years for the Central Bank of Turkey and for the Turkish economy as well. The Disinflation Program, which had been initiated in December 1999, was the most important element that shaped the economic developments in 2000. In the medium-term, the program had aimed to bring down inflation to single digits in three years, to reduce real interest rates to reasonable levels, to increase the growth potential of the economy, and to provide a more efficient resource allocation in the economy. The main pillars of the Program were; tight fiscal policy focusing on improving the primary surplus; speeding up the structural reforms and privatization efforts; an incomes policy geared to targeted inflation; and a pre-announced exchange rate basket. The specifics of the program and extensive analyses of economic developments of last year have been elaborated in our 2000 Annual Report.