samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Meanwhile, during 2016, Sri Lanka entered into a three year  Sri Lanka's external trade performance  Extended Fund Facility (EFF) of SDR 1.1  was modest during 2016, although some  billion (approximately US dollars 1.5  improvement was observed towards the  billion) with the IMF to strengthen the  latter part of the year. Earnings from  external position of the country and to  exports declined by 2.6 per cent during  support the government’s broad  the first ten months of 2016, while the  economic reform agenda. Reflecting  expenditure on imports increased  these developments, the level of gross  marginally by 0.2 per cent. As a result,  official reserves is estimated to be  the cumulative deficit in the trade  around US dollars 6.0 billion by end 2016.  account increased by 3.7 per cent to US  Moreover, despite considerable  dollars 7.2 billion during the first ten  depreciation pressure on the rupee  months of 2016. Supporting the external  during some months, the rupee  sector, earnings from tourism is  remained relatively stable in 2016  estimated to have increased to around  compared to the previous year. It has  US dollars 3.0 billion during the first  Central Bank of Sri Lanka – ROAD MAP 2017  9  depreciated by 3.8 per cent during the  During 2016, several policy measures  year.

Central Bank of Sri Lanka – ROAD MAP 2017  At the same time, we will continue to actively engage in liquidity management operations in the money market to guide  14  the short-term interest rates within the  economic analyses for the purpose of  desired path. formulating effective policies, while  In order to ensure the effective implementation of monetary policy, we  improving the transparency of monetary policy and policy communication. expect to introduce certain measures  At the same time, in the process of  with regard to OMOs, such as  making more informed policy decisions,  introducing fixed rate and variable rate  we look forward to enhancing statistical  auctions, and fine tuning auctions after  inputs by introducing new indices on  examining their need and feasibility in  property prices as well as modifying  line with other country experiences and  wage indices, while improving the  market needs. We will evaluate  coverage of existing surveys to better  alternative instruments to strengthen  track developments in the private  OMOs. sector. Reflecting these measures, inflation is  The Central Bank will continue to  expected to remain at mid-single digit  communicate policy decisions among  levels in the medium-term.
9  See February 2018 Inflation Report, Section 3, Supply and the limits to growth for a fuller description of the MPC’s assessment of the UK’s potential growth rate. 10 For example, there has been a marked fall in the share of part-time workers who would like to be in full time employment and ‘net additional desired hours’ are now below zero (i.e. people reporting they want to work more hours are outweighed by the quantity of hours that people report they’d like to work less). 11 BCC and CBI surveys are at around their long-run averages, the same range they have been since 2015. Measures of churn – quit rates and job–to-job flows – have risen from their post-crisis lows to levels at around or a little below their pre-crisis levels, at around the levels they have been for the past couple of years.

24502 Blinder, Alan (1998) ‘Central banking in theory and practice’ The Lionel Robbins lectures Carney, Mark (2018) ‘Guidance, Contingencies and Brexit’ speech given at the Society of Professional Economists, London Cunliffe, Jon (2016) ‘The UK economy post crisis: a series of unfortunate events?’ speech given at London South Bank University Cunliffe, Jon (2017) ‘The Phillips curve: lower, flatter or in hiding?’ speech given at the Oxford Economics Society Haldane, Andy (2017) ‘Work, wages and monetary policy’ speech given at the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford McCafferty, Ian (2018) ‘Changing times, changing norms’ OMFIF City Lecture Tenreyro, Silvana (2018) ‘The fall in productivity growth: causes and implications’ speech given at Queen Mary University of London Tenreyro, S and Thwaites, G (2016) ‘Pushing on a string: US monetary policy is less powerful in recessions’ American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 8(4): 43-74  14  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  14
By the time Malta was about to join the EU, the economy was emerging from a period of stagnation, with a widening output gap, a slow pace of productivity growth and a large current account deficit. In addition, while the Government planned to reduce the budget deficit from almost 10% of GDP in 2003 to below 3% by 2006, an adjustment of that  1  Regional economic integration: the options for Malta, speech delivered at the Annual Dinner of the Malta Institute of Financial Services on 7 November 2002. BIS Review 60/2009  1  magnitude clearly presented considerable risks, not least because some fiscal tightening was already under way. The unemployment rate, for example, was edging upwards, partly in response to the ongoing restructuring process and the further liberalization of markets ahead of EU accession. In these circumstances it soon became evident that the advantages of the single market needed to be complemented by those of monetary union. The Central Bank of Malta was an early advocate of this objective, particularly because of the greater stability and policy credibility that it promised. From the Bank’s perspective a key advantage was the elimination of the risks inherent in managing a small, vulnerable currency. The irrevocable fixing of the exchange rate and the macroeconomic policy discipline of EMU, moreover, promised to offer a congenial environment for implementing the structural changes necessary for a lasting improvement in the country’s international competitiveness. This belief was shared by the Government and the rest is history.

“The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled … lest we become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.”  BIS Review 60/2009  7
François Villeroy de Galhau: The future of the euro area - from the "impossible trinity” to the "growth triangle" Text of the 6th Annual Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa Lecture by Mr François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Bank of France, at the 6th Annual Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa Brussels Economic Forum 2017, Brussels, 1 June 2017. * * * ​I am grateful to Carine Bouthevillain, Bruno Cabrillac, Laure Carrel, Pavel Diev, Marine Dujardin, Pierre Jaillet, Eloïse Lecouturier, Céline Mistretta-Belna and Edouard Vidon for their assistance in preparing these remarks. Ladies and gentlemen, It is a pleasure to be here in Brussels and to speak in front of such a distinguished audience. For my generation of modest European architects – I was in Maastricht 25 years ago – Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa is one of those great – almost mythical – Italian figures who engaged in this “Kantian quest for European unity”1. So I am honoured to give a lecture named after him. He would certainly have been very pleased that the majority of French people clearly expressed their attachment to the euro on the occasion of the French presidential election. Giving fresh momentum to the European project is indeed one of the priorities of the new French President. And although I was invited several months ago, and although the Banque de France is fully independent of the government, I like to think that my presence here this morning is a sign that there is renewed interest for the voice of France in Europe.

To me, the solution is obviously for euro area countries to refuse the status quo and amend the “Euro framework” towards enhanced policy cooperation. Let me outline what I see as the possible way forward. 3. To boost European growth, this new trilemma has to be turned into a “growth triangle” We have to get Economic Union moving forward again, thanks to what I call the “growth triangle”. The peculiarity of this triangle is that it is not an incompatibility triangle but a compatibility triangle. This means that the three goals can and have to be pursued at the same time to deliver economic gains. These goals, or levers, are: national structural reforms; the Financing Union for Investment and Innovation; and a euro area policy-mix based on a better coordination of macroeconomic policies. They can be implemented quickly, as at least many of 4/8  BIS central bankers' speeches  them do not require changing the Treaties. As a central banker and steadfast European, this is what I believe is needed for a “better Europe”. But of course, the decision does not fall to us but to political leaders. Our responsibility as the Eurosystem is to deliver a monetary policy that is in line with the mandate entrusted to us, and to make proposals for improving the efficiency of other economic policies. The first point of my growth triangle is: national structural reforms. They are a prerequisite for each country to regain credibility in Europe and for unleashing our collective economic growth potential.
This thinking has been applied to the financial system showing that a priori identical shocks can have differing effects depending on where the shock hits. And, inspired by the literature on sand piles, Scheinkman and Woodford’s (1994) model of inventory dynamics shows how small shocks may cause aggregate fluctuations. 2  BIS Review 36/2010  different states of the system, depending on its history. 3 Many economic systems also exhibit forms of hysteresis or path dependence. For example, changing social attitudes towards personal bankruptcy, inflation or unemployment may affect equilibrium outcomes for those variables. 3. Policy responses to unpredictability  Predicting the precise timing and dynamics of instability in all of these settings is very difficult. It is, however, possible to identify a sand pile or forest as being prone to large scale instability and determine the factors that contribute to that instability. Analogously, many people, including at the Bank of England, did identify the vulnerabilities of the financial system before the crisis without actually being able to predict when or how the crisis would begin. Economists have been able to learn from other disciplines about how to cope with these types of instability. For example, insights from ecology and epidemiology have been applied to financial networks (for more discussion, see Haldane 2009), and economists have learned much from engineers about how to control dynamic systems. The key is for policymakers to focus on making the structure of the underlying system more robust to shocks.

After an earthquake, demand for earthquake insurance at first increases and then declines, while the probability of the next large earthquake may grow over time. 7 So-called “Depression babies” seem to take less financial risk than other generations. 8 Such an effect may explain why the fear of financial crises declines over time as memories of the last crisis fade. (ii)  Decisions under uncertainty have been shown to be sensitive to the way questions are presented. People understand probabilities better if they are expressed in terms of natural frequencies (1 in 10,000) rather than percentages (0.01%). This is one symptom of a wider confusion over probabilistic concepts. Research by Gerd Gigerenzer and others shows that doctors, for example, are often misled by information presented in the form of probabilities rather than sample frequencies. The statement that a diagnostic test has a 5% probability of a false positive is misinterpreted more often than the statement that 5 patients out of every hundred taking the test will show a false positive. 9 And this is compounded by the fact that many forecasts are not of the kind where reference back to a sample frequency is informative. Forecasts made today of the weather or the inflation rate at some date in the future are unique; they are not the outcomes of a repeated experiment. Decisions about saving for future pension provision, for example, are difficult to make the subject of experimentation, although we can learn from the experience of others.
Had there been one, the Northern Rock recovery plan should have challenged the management and the Board on how its business model could adapt to and survive the closure of its key funding markets, given the sheer scale of its dependence on securitisation. Likewise, how could it have handled a serious stress when it had pursued a business model of aggressively taking market share by squeezing its net interest margin and accepting more borrower default risk? And then moving further into the guts of the bank, how would it deal with stress to a funding model where the bank was excessively dependent on cash deposits from the securitisation master trust but with a hard rating agency trigger linking that funding to the position of the bank, thus creating a severe amplification of any stress? Finally on Northern Rock, how would the bank deal with a funding stress when it was having to encumber such a high proportion of its good quality assets in order to over-collateralise its securitisation master trust? A very good example of the need for resolution plans is the case of Lehmans in Europe. Two questions are relevant here: what should the resolution plan have contained; and what changes to its organisation and operations might have made the massive task of dealing with Lehmans more straightforward? You will, I hope, appreciate that I can only scratch the surface of the Lehmans case in the time available so I apologise for the laundry list approach.

This situation will not last much longer, certainly not in the UK, because the authorities are very keen to see real implementation of RRPs, alongside the continuing international work on them. One thing is for sure – you will hear a lot more about Recovery and Resolution Plans. Thank you. BIS Review 156/2009  3
Mario Draghi: ECB press conference - introductory statement Introductory statement by Mr Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank, and Mr Vítor Constâncio, Vice-President of the European Central Bank, Frankfurt am Main, 21 July 2016. *  *  *  Ladies and gentlemen, the Vice-President and I are very pleased to welcome you to our press conference. We will now report on the outcome of today’s meeting of the Governing Council, which was also attended by the Commission Vice-President, Mr Dombrovskis. Based on our regular economic and monetary analyses, we decided to keep the key ECB interest rates unchanged. We continue to expect them to remain at present or lower levels for an extended period of time, and well past the horizon of our net asset purchases. Regarding non-standard monetary policy measures, we confirm that the monthly asset purchases of € billion are intended to run until the end of March 2017, or beyond, if necessary, and in any case until the Governing Council sees a sustained adjustment in the path of inflation consistent with its inflation aim. Today we discussed developments since our last monetary policy meeting in early June. Following the UK referendum on EU membership, our assessment is that euro area financial markets have weathered the spike in uncertainty and volatility with encouraging resilience. The announced readiness of central banks to provide liquidity, if needed, and our accommodative monetary policy measures, as well as a robust regulatory and supervisory framework, have all helped to keep market stress contained.

I would suggest that unless you were on another planet, no consumer with access to a television, radio or the Internet could have escaped hearing their president, senators and their congressperson telling them the sky was falling. With the leadership of the nation – Republicans and Democrats alike – and every talking head in the media making clear hour after hour, day after day in the run-up to Aug. 2 that a financial disaster was lurking around the corner, it does not take much imagination to envision consumers deciding to forego or delay some discretionary expenditure they had planned. Instead, they might well be inclined to hunker down to weather the perfect storm they were being warned was rapidly approaching. Watching the drama as it unfolded, I could imagine consumers turning to each other in millions of households, saying: “Honey, we need to cancel that trip we were planning and that gizmo or service we wanted to buy. We better save more and spend less.” Small wonder that, following the somewhat encouraging retail activity reported in July, the Michigan survey measure of consumer sentiment released just recently had a distinctly sour tone. Importantly, from a business operator’s perspective, nothing was clarified, except that there will be undefined change in taxes, spending and subsidies and other fiscal incentives or disincentives. The message was simply that some combination of revenue enhancement and spending growth cutbacks will take place. The particulars are left to one’s imagination and the outcome of deliberations among 12 members of the Legislature.
But the challenges are necessary ones, as I see it. Basel II was made necessary and inevitable by the evolution of the banking sector following the introduction of Basel I, particularly the growth of internationally active banks and improvements in their risk management practices. Global trends and banking sector developments A number of factors over the last two decades have resulted in bigger, more international and more diversified banking institutions. Many banking institutions have seized the opportunities presented by liberalisation and globalisation to expand beyond their home bases and traditional lines of business. At the same time, rapid technological advances, particularly in computing, allowed for the streamlining of operational processes and made possible the effective management of large international financial conglomerates by reducing some of the inefficiencies of scale. Many, though certainly not all, of the banking institutions that expanded in this way have been quite successful. They have benefited from economies of scale. Furthermore, the broader product range and presence in multiple economic zones have helped to smooth product and economic cycles. Advancements in risk management But, expansion has brought with it significant risk management challenges. The growing size of these institutions, their spread across geographic boundaries, and their diversity of products and customers, have made it necessary for decision-making to be decentralized, at least to some extent, in order to be responsive to the needs of customers.

This will equip supervisors to deal with the future evolution of Basel II in a constructive and coordinated way. I also foresee greater transparency surrounding the risks faced by banks, and in how banks are measuring and controlling them. In the future, I expect banking supervisors to place greater emphasis on the techniques of securities regulators by requiring more information to be disclosed to the markets and the public. We will likely place even greater reliance on market processes and corporate governance to ensure that banks are soundly managed and well capitalised. Sound precepts of risk management and prudential supervision While there will inevitably be ongoing challenges to the vision of capital adequacy embodied in the new framework, particularly to its more technical aspects, I have no doubt that the sound precepts of risk management and prudential supervision that underpin the new framework will be an enduring feature of future versions regulatory capital requirements for banks. Alas, the requirements and modeling of certain types of risks may get excruciatingly complex. Indeed, for some of us, they have already reached that point. But in selecting and imposing such requirements, supervisors will be practical, and will look to the best risk management practices of banks and other financial institutions as the basis for setting risk sensitive capital requirements. And as supervisors become confident that the risk management processes of an institution are appropriate to match its risk appetite and operations, minimum capital requirements will edge downward.
BIS Review 36/2010  7  depositors would ask themselves why it had been used: if they attached even a small probability to the possibility that the bank was in trouble, it would be rational for them to withdraw their deposits – triggering a run on the bank. Anticipating this reaction, there is a risk that banks would choose not to use the facilities. Further, some market participants might use the information that the facilities were being used to spread malicious rumours in the hope of profiting from the market reaction. Such rumour-spreading would be privately beneficial for the rumour-spreaders, but socially harmful. That is why when designing its discount window lending facilities, the Bank decided only to disclose average usage over a quarter, and then only with a lag. 17 Communication of forecasts is not easy. Probabilities are hard to understand. Yet a forecast is not a number but an estimated probability distribution. 18 And we cannot assume that people obtain information in a neutral form. Indeed for most people information is conveyed to them via the media which may filter out or reinterpret information. This leads to an incentive problem. Instead of simply reporting the information about future prospects made available in the forecasts, there is an incentive to summarise the prospects in a single number or to describe one part of the probability distribution in a way that makes for a good story. That suggests there is merit in trying to communicate directly to the public.

Monetary policy easing and substantial liquidity provision to the banking sector have so far not been sufficient. Moreover, the impetus from emerging economies has waned. Sluggish investment is the main drag on growth in Europe. Elevated uncertainty surrounding economic developments, high corporate debt and tight bank credit standards are holding back the willingness and ability to invest. The result is a self-reinforcing mechanism that is difficult to unravel. BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  With policy rates near zero, the central banks of major advanced countries have employed unconventional measures to stimulate activity and combat the risk of deflation. Large-scale securities purchases, including government bonds, have been made. The bonds are recorded in central banks’ balance sheets. The US and the UK were among the first countries to launch asset purchasing programmes in the wake of the financial crisis. Until recently, the European Central Bank (ECB) had largely used a different channel, namely supplying large loans to the banking system on favourable terms. Three weeks ago, the ECB decided to take it a step further and will soon start purchasing government bonds on a large scale. Government bond buying drives up prices and pushes down yields. The purchases may also push up equity prices and prices of riskier assets. The aim of these central bank operations is to stimulate lending and investment via lower long-term interest rates. There is evidence to suggest that the measures have contributed to softening the downturn and boosting production in the UK and the US.