samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
We are also monitoring consumers' needs regarding access to funds, including stimulus payments, through traditional deposit accounts, as well as for individuals without a traditional banking relationship who utilize pre-paid cards. Conclusions Taken together, these steps demonstrate the Fed's strong commitment to help the U.S. banking system support the U.S. economy and protect consumers during the COVID-19 pandemic. We are aware, however, that many low- and moderate-income and minority communities remain severely impacted. The regional partnership between the New York Fed and socially responsible providers of capital continues to inform our understanding of the needs for access to credit for these critical small businesses. We will continue to work with you to ensure that the financial system acts as a source of strength to support all segments of the U.S. economy. Thank you. 1Agencies issue revised interagency statement on loan modifications by financial institutions working with customers affected by the coronavirus 2Federal Reserve provides additional information to financial institutions on how its supervisory approach is adjusting in light of the coronavirus 3Agencies announce changes to the community bank leverage ratio 4The Fed has also taken action to support the provision of credit by larger institutions.

Although the debt market has, over the past 15 years, become a significant channel of financial intermediation, sizing it against GDP it is still a lot smaller than the banking and equity markets, and by quite a wide margin. Furthermore, retail interest, increasing as it may have been, is still lacking by the standards of the developed markets in the US, Europe and Japan. And the further promotion of retail interest, specifically in Exchange Fund Notes, is the focus of attention of our gathering today. As you may be aware, over the past year or so, we made various experimental attempts to attract retail investors to the primary issues of Exchange Fund Notes. On the basis of the experience gained, and subject to three refinements to be introduced to the arrangements, we have decided to continue offering Exchange Fund Notes to retail investors. The first refinement is the introduction of greater flexibility in the selection of specific issues of Exchange Fund Notes to be offered to retail investors in the primary market. Instead of indiscriminately opening up all the 2-year and 3-year Exchange Fund paper for subscription by retail investors, we intend to take account of market conditions and consult our Distributors in deciding on the timing and tenor for issues with a retail feature. Initially, one issue will be selected for non-competitive bids from retail investors in each quarter. The number of issues per quarter may be increased subsequently, subject to market response.
Around 300 000 persons shared a USD 400 million payout from the Russian government – a little over USD 1 000 3/7  BIS central bankers' speeches  for each recipient. In the meantime, many years of high inflation had reduced the real value of the original debt to a fraction.3 History is replete with examples of sovereigns that have reduced the real value of their debt by printing money to inflate it away. Debt is ordinarily a fixed nominal amount. As long as debt is in the country’s own currency, sovereigns can reduce their real debt burden by inflating prices. Holders of that debt then find that its value is falling sharply in real terms, even if the nominal debt remains in the books. Inflation may thus be a de facto tax on creditors. Public debt becomes a bigger problem for countries with debt in a foreign currency. A classic example is Argentina’s US dollar debt, which domestic inflation could not reduce. Greece experienced similar problems when its nominal GDP fell following the financial crisis. Greece and Argentina had to undergo painful adjustments to be able to manage debt that had become excessive – to the detriment of their citizens. Debt incurred by firms can effectively be restructured, at least for those that are organised as limited liability companies. In a bankruptcy, the firm’s debts are settled by liquidating the company’s assets. If there are insufficient assets in the bankruptcy estate to satisfy the creditor’s claim, the creditor must absorb the loss.

We borrow today, because we are confident that the income will come tomorrow. How can debt be reduced? While the financial crisis in 2008 brought debt growth to a sudden halt in some countries, debt growth continues to outpace income growth for Norwegian households. This can hardly go on forever. If debt needs to be reduced, the question is how? Sovereign borrowers can levy taxes and thereby have a reliable source of revenue. Even so, being the creditor of a sovereign can be risky. In 1918, after the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks repudiated all debt issued by the previous regime. French investors, among them many small savers, held nearly half of the Russian national debt at the beginning of the First World War. They were among the first big losers of the Russian Revolution.2 In the inter-war period, these losses had consequences for French foreign policy. France became a fierce opponent of the Soviet regime. The losses on Tsarist bonds may have also contributed to France’s unwillingness to restructure German debt after the war. Germany’s debt burden contributed to the hyperinflation of the 1920s and the fall of the Weimar Republic. Now, on the evening of 9 April, 79 years after the German invasion of Norway, we can conclude that debt m have fateful consequences. After Boris Yeltsin raised the Russian flag in 1991, the French creditors returned. Old bond certificates were retrieved from drawers. A final settlement was agreed in 1996.
Going forward, I view that there is a need for international institution that oversees all finance-related conducts to ensure strict compliance of rule, implementation of ethical codes and avoid double standard across nations. Lastly, continuous and collective reforms are vital. Crisis is a recurring phenomenon and no lessons from previous crisis will ever fully prevent the next one. But through the process of reform after each crisis, the market grows and becomes more efficient. Crises provide a window or “political feasibility” to undertake needed structural changes that  3  International Labor Organization (ILO). BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  may be hard to sell to the public in normal circumstances, so one should not waste a good crisis. I am pleased to see numerous improvements in key areas of finance and supervision such as the use of macroprudential measures to complement traditional monetary policy tools. It is also more acceptable to require banks to provision in good times against losses in bad times, for after all most bad loans are made in good times. In addition to structural reforms, change in “mindset” is probably the most important. In order to keep up with the dynamic global environment, we may need to challenge and correct some of our old beliefs.

Two differences stand out between Asia and Europe. The first is policy flexibility. The devaluation of the exchange rate helped restore export competitiveness of the Asian economies. However, this freedom of flexibility might not be practical for Europe given its single currency setting and political complexities. The second is the supportive global economy, which provided the necessary market for Asia and allowed Asia to export our way out of the crisis. Global GDP registered a 4.7% growth in 2000 with advanced economies, the world’s largest consumer, growing at 4.1%. In contrast, the global setting of the current European sovereign debt crisis is not  1  BOT’s staff computation from CEIC data. 2  Malaysia’s policy mix started out with an initial fiscal and monetary tightening, a conventional IMF-like measure, followed by a reversed loosening of macroeconomic policies. The insufficiency of these policies to restore confidence led the country to resort to exchange and capital control which yielded positive result. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  as favorable. Global and advanced economies growth turned to a negative territory of 0.6% and 3.4% respectively in 2009. Emerging and developing economies, increasingly feeling the pinch of the global slowdown, witnessed the continued slowdown of their GDP growth from 8.7% in 2007 to just 2.8% in 2009. I believe that there may be other success factors for the European story. But, we have to bear in mind that some of the success factors are not without costs that remain to be addressed.
A pre-programmed allocation of losses would be akin to the old “Down To The Last Drop” rule that used to be employed by a Chicago clearing house, under which surviving clearing members ultimately had collectively to absorb all losses: mutualisation. (It was dropped because, as banks became futures-exchange clearing members, bank supervisors didn’t like the unlimited exposure of CMs who were banks. An example of unjoined-up thinking.) That’s the option around propping up the clearing house to keep it going. The other option is some kind of wind down of the Clearing House’s book. That involves a combination of closing out part of the book in the market, and doing something with any residue that can’t be dealt in the market. One obvious thing to do with the residue is to put it back, pro rata, to the surviving (and fit) clearing members. But that is also a variant of the DTTLD rule, but “in kind” rather than cash. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  Maybe I’ve got this wrong but, in summary, it seems to me that questions about orderly resolution of a failed CCP have to involve clarity around the extent to which surviving clearing members pick up the pieces. Summary The design, management and oversight of CCPs is something that we are going to come back to again and again in the years ahead.

I want, therefore, to conclude, if I may, with a quote from the post-‘87 crash Report of the Hong Kong Securities Review Committee, published in the summer of 1988, nearly a quarter of a century ago: “When everything else is stripped away, the most pressing issue is the management of risk. The focus of this is ......increasingly, the central clearing houses – indeed [their] prudent operation is perhaps the single most important objective for the market authorities and regulators.”2 It is time to catch up with that insight. Your new Post-Trade Fellowship will surely help us to do so. 2  Paragraph 3.21, Report of the Hong Kong Securities Review Committee, 1988. I should disclose that I was an Advisor to the SRC. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches
When the bonds matured, the Norwegian government wanted to make the repayment in banknotes that had lost much of their value. This implied a devaluation that could perhaps be compared to the devaluation under Henry VIII. The case finally came before the Supreme Court in 1962. In their voting, the Supreme Court gave weight to a law from 1923, which stated that the gold clause, i.e. repayment in gold money, did not apply when the obligation to redeem banknotes for gold had been suspended, which was permanently done in September 1931. In the explanation of their ruling, the Supreme Court also referred to “vital national interests”. It would cost Norwegian taxpayers far too much to repay the gold money that had been borrowed 60 years earlier. It would be far too pretentious of me to offer an opinion on the court ruling as such. What makes this case interesting in the light of today's topic is that in the Supreme Court's assessments of “vital national interests”, there is no discussion of what the nation's interests are in the short term versus the long term. However, it must be added that it is probably not easy for a court to review other government authorities’ assessments of this point. There is also the question of whether this falls within the court's purview. 5. Modern monetary policy – a promise both possible and right to keep  The theoretical breakthrough by Kydland and Prescott and the era of high inflation eventually had implications for practical policy.

14  Øksendal, Lars Fredrik (2008), “Monetary policy under the gold standard – examining the case of Norway, 1893-1914”, Working Paper 2008/14, Norges Bank. 15  See Bjerkholt, Olav and Jan F. Qvigstad (2007): “Introduction to Ragnar Frisch’s 1933 pamphlet Saving and Circulation Regulation”, in Revisita di Storia Economica, Banca d’Italia. 16  See Eitrheim Øyvind., Jan T. Klovland and Jan F. Qvigstad (Eds.) (2004), page 293: “Historical Monetary Statistics for Norway 1819-2003”, Occasional Papers No. 35, Norges Bank, Oslo. 17  However, they were more flexible in September 1931. It only took seven days for Norway to follow the UK’s lead in abandoning the gold standard. 18  There was a consensus on parity policy in the 1920s. See for example Hodne, Fritz and Ola Honningdal Grytten (2002), pages 111-112: Norsk økonomi i det 19. århundre (The Norwegian economy in the 19th century), Fagbokforlaget and Skånland, Hermod (1967) “Det norske kredittmarked siden 1900 (The Norwegian credit market since 1900) Samfunnsøkonomiske studier No. 19, Statistics Norway, Oslo. See also Mykland, Knut (ed.) Cappelens Norgeshistorie, Vol. 13 page 86. 19  For further discussion of parity policy and Norges Bank’s role, see Ecklund, Gunhild J. (2008), pages 46-51 and 67-71: “Creating a new role for an old Central Bank: The Bank of Norway 1945-1954”, Series of Dissertations 2/2008, BI Norwegian School of Management, Oslo. 20  This link to gold was not as strong as when the obligation to redeem in gold applied.
One variant of these arbitrage strategies exploits pricing differences between common securities quoted on competing trading platforms. For that reason, HFT firms tend to have their tentacles spread across multiple trading venues, arbitraging tiny differences in price (Chart 7). These strategies have grown up as a direct response to the fragmentation of trading infrastructures. In other words, HFT is at least in part the (possibly unplanned) progeny of regulators pursuing competitive ends. The ascent of HFT goes a long way towards explaining the rise in equity market turnover in the major equity markets and in particular the rise in number, and fall in the average size, of trades executed. Put differently, the trading behaviour of HFT has contributed to the downward fall in the average duration of stock holdings. HFT holding periods lie in a narrow time range. The upper bound is perhaps around one day. The lower bound is a perpetual downward motion machine, as computing capacity compresses the timeline for trading. A decade ago, execution times on some electronic trading platforms dipped decisively below the one second barrier. As recently as a few years ago, trade execution times reached “blink speed” – as fast as the blink of an eye. At the time that seemed eye-watering, at around 300–400 milli-seconds or less than a third of a second. But more recently the speed limit has shifted from milli-seconds to micro-seconds – millionths of a second. Several trading platforms now offer trade execution measured in micro-seconds (Table 1).

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.
However, as mentioned, real GDP may behave more positively in the short term than in the Stability Programme. As regards the budget, the path projected for the overall general government deficit is in line with the requirements of the Stability and Growth Pact: declining from 3.1% of GDP in 2017, to 2.2% in 2018 and 1.3% of GDP in 2019. In 2020 a budget deficit of 0.5% of GDP is projected. This path of reduction of Spain’s budget deficit needs to be achieved if the excessive deficit situation (a deficit of more than 3% of GDP) is to end in 2018. Public debt, according to the Stability Programme, is expected to fall gradually, to reach 92.5% of GDP in 2020. In the current environment of high economic growth and low general government financing costs, the budget consolidation required to achieve the deficit targets for the period 20172020 (as measured by the change in the primary structural balance) is relatively small. The Stability Programme includes the stability objectives for 2017 – for each sub-heading of public expenditure – that were approved by Parliament in December last year and extends them to 2020; then, budget balance is projected for all levels of general government, except the Social Security system, which would still record a deficit of 0.5% of GDP. Central government, which currently has the largest deficit, will be responsible for making the bulk of the projected adjustment.

As a result, the performance of revenue and the impact on spending of the plans announced for public-sector employment will need to be monitored over the next few years, so that, in the event of any deviation from the projections, action can be taken in time to avoid the risk of failure to achieve deficit commitments. The importance of budgetary consolidation Finally, it seems to me necessary to stress the importance of completing the budgetary consolidation process. The current environment of high growth and low interest rates is a very favourable one in which to reduce the structural budget deficit and public debt to levels more in line with those in the main euro area economies, and this opportunity should not be wasted. The cost of financing public debt (which still stands at 100% of GDP) would be reduced and there would be some scope for fiscal policy to respond to possible adverse scenarios. Moreover, consolidation is essential to address the challenge that an ageing population will pose for spending on health, dependency and, above all, pensions. In this respect, the magnitude of the adjustment needed to achieve sound public finances in Spain is still significant. Hence the need to comply with all the domestic and European budgetary framework requirements. Following their strengthening in recent years, this means not only that the budget deficit (defined in total and structural terms) and public debt must be progressively reduced, but also that the so-called spending rule must be observed.
In the current circumstances, economic policies have an important role to play by holding the euro area firmly on course to meet its macroeconomic stability objectives, which are those that make sustained growth possible and shore up the economy against shocks and outbreaks of insecurity and uncertainty. As mentioned above, the main task of monetary policy is to ensure euro area price stability in the medium term, and it is against this background that monetary conditions have gradually been normalised since December 2005. This process has been correcting the benign monetary conditions of the Spanish economy in recent years and promoting a more balanced growth pattern. The most valuable contribution fiscal policy can make is to ensure the commitment to budgetary stability. This commitment has been essential for establishing the conditions propitious to the recent long period of economic growth of the Spanish economy and it is particularly relevant to the macroeconomic setting I have described. 4  BIS Review 130/2007  The latest official forecasts for the general government account are for a surplus of 1.3% of GDP in 2007. This would amply meet the requirements of the Stability and Growth Pact and enable a further reduction of the public debt/GDP ratio. Moreover, it represents an improvement of 30 bp on the target set in the latest update of the Stability Programme. This improvement basically reflects a positive deviation of tax revenue with respect to budget, in a setting of higher-than-expected growth.

Therefore, a scenario of recovery in net exports such as that described requires Spanish firms to push ahead with the improvement in competitiveness made by them in response to the sharp ongoing adjustment in the structure of world trade due to the entry of new competitors. At the same time, the slower momentum of final demand should manifest itself in a certain slowdown in imports, curbing the leakage of spending out of Spain. However, as I indicated in September, it is precisely in the external economic environment where the main factors of risk to the macroeconomic scenario outlined above are to be found. If the recent bout of financial instability and of heightened international uncertainty were to significantly affect the buoyancy of Spain’s export markets, the capacity of external demand to contain the adverse impact of a slowdown in domestic spending would be diminished and, accordingly, the efforts required to improve competitiveness would be even greater. Domestically, the continued dynamism of employment and the gradual normalisation of the property market are fundamental for keeping income expectations and, consequently, agents’ spending plans on a mildly slowing course. In any event, the Spanish economy is witnessing a process in which construction investment is diminishing in importance as the engine of growth. Therefore, it is essential to have a sufficiently flexible mechanism of resource allocation to enable industrial activity and services to take over from construction, furthering the change in output composition that has been taking place in the last few quarters.