samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
But there has been increasing recognition, too, that the private sector has its role to play, alongside governments, and it was to encourage and promote the engagement of private sector firms with disadvantaged, excluded, sectors of our society, through charitable and community involvement, that the Heart of the City campaign was launched, very successfully under Andrew Buxton's leadership, last year. I'm encouraged, too, by the evidence of clear community of interest between the financial authorities and the private sector in its commercial activity. Their co-operation enabled the system to cope remarkably well with the potential dislocation following the 11th September attacks - and I congratulate the Federal Reserve in particular and all of you who played a part in that achievement. The same co-operation is contributing now to the international financial war against terrorism, and to the strengthening of our disaster contingency plans. It contributed, too, to the flawless introduction of Euro notes and coin into the Eurozone - so well managed by the ECB and in which many of you, again, played your part. Another example is the intensive consultation and co-operation on the development of the Basel 2 regime for banking supervision. I'm encouraged finally by the continuing sense of community among financial professionals here in London. This was movingly evident in their spontaneous demonstration of solidarity with their counterparts in New York following 11th September.

Banks are of course already used to dealing with at least some of the issues that crop up in an electronic banking environment, and so have built up experience and expertise to deal with these. However, I do believe that the internet, because of its low cost, global reach and versatility raises the stakes for the banks – both in terms of the opportunities it presents as well as the risks. Strategic risk In talking about these risks, let me start at the top – with the issue of strategic risk. In other words, will the bank get it right? Will it make the right choices when it comes to investing in e-banking or will it waste money by going down a technological blind alley? Should it attempt to take the lead in new technology ahead of its competitors, or should it be a follower and adopt a “wait and see” approach? The latter may be the safer course of action for smaller banks, though it does create the risk of being left behind. The advantages of e-banking, and internet banking in particular, are quite clear – the ability, for example, to disseminate information widely and instantaneously at low cost and to cross-sell products in a much more effective way. But there are also strategic threats. The cheapness and global reach of the internet opens up the threat of increased competition from new entrants who will no longer need a branch network to operate effectively in any given market.
The adjustments are our response to a challenge that all central banks with a significant level of currency reserves will probably have to face, sooner or later. The challenge is to safeguard the protective function of currency reserves while simultaneously making use of their earnings potential. In simple terms, what is needed is first, to structure the reserves in a way that ensures their availability when overcoming any kind of monetary crisis, and second, to invest them in a way that ensures they will generate the highest possible returns. Returns must be generated, if only for the simple reason that earnings are needed to finance the necessary growth in currency reserves. Furthermore, we owe it to the public to manage our currency reserves in a professional manner. The protective function of our currency reserves is fundamental. It is a direct corollary of the SNB mandate, in which monetary policy takes precedence over investment policy at all times. However, without questioning the primacy of monetary policy, there was still some leeway for greater management efficiency, particularly in the area of foreign exchange reserves. We have now exhausted a large portion of this room for manoeuvre. The first development that allowed us to take these steps was the 1997 revision of the National Bank Act. When the new Act came into force in 2004 the final statutory barriers with regard to permissible investment instruments were entirely removed. However, in investment, as in all walks of life, the old adage applies: "There is no free lunch".

Jean-Pierre Roth: Heading for more sustained growth? Summary of an address by Mr Jean-Pierre Roth, Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Bank for International Settlements, at the General Meeting of the Swiss Italian Chamber of Commerce, Zurich, 20 June 2006. The complete speech can be found in French on the Swiss National Bank’s website (www.snb.ch). *  *  *  Lately, Switzerland has been experiencing an encouraging upturn in the economy on the back of growth in the international economy. This development is particularly welcome because it follows a number of years of economic listlessness which have prompted repeated criticism from international bodies, due to the lack of growth in the Swiss economy. However, Switzerland's medium and long-term growth problem has not disappeared. Faster economic growth is the only possible response to the challenges posed by an ageing population. Moreover, it is the sole antidote to Switzerland's continuing loss of ground with respect to the other members of the OECD. Reforms are needed to ensure that, in the future, we can achieve more with fewer resources. The ways and means of doing this are evident. The Federal Council's package of growth measures is a move in the right direction, and the current improvement in the economy gives Switzerland the opportunity to move ahead with the requisite reforms. BIS Review 59/2006  1
To meet the inflation target the MPC sets interest rates to keep nominal demand in line with supply at the target inflation rate. In that way it tries to maintain an overall balance in the economy. But sharp changes in either the exchange rate or the world economy - both of which we have seen over the past three years - mean that overall balance requires swings between external and domestic demand. The MPC can - and did - respond to external developments by changing interest rates so as to influence domestic demand to restore the overall balance. But in so doing the economic see-saw lurched with external demand falling and domestic demand rising. While the MPC can try to maintain stability in the economy as a whole it cannot prevent movements in the see-saw reflecting swings between external and domestic demand resulting from changes in the world economy. And lurches in this see-saw produce damage - as manufacturing and agricultural businesses know only too well, and as domestically-oriented businesses saw in the early 1990s. Of course, the UK is not alone in this experience. So can we learn from others? April is the month not just of showers; it is also the month of the Washington Spring meetings: the meetings of finance ministers and central bank governors from the one hundred and eighty-two member countries of the IMF and World Bank. Early tomorrow morning I shall leave Plymouth, rather as the Pilgrim Fathers, to travel to the New World to take part in those meetings.

Singapore as a launchpad From the business point of view, a CECA is the ideal platform for both countries to broaden and deepen bilateral co-operation, and advance our shared interests. Singapore makes an excellent partner for Indian companies embarking on a strategy of regionalisation or globalisation. Because of our historical and cultural ties, Indians are very comfortable in Singapore’s social and corporate culture. Singapore is a good base for Indian companies to engage Southeast and East Asia. They can take full advantage of Singapore’s trade and business networks in these growth markets, in particular China. Singapore is also a major transportation, logistics and financial centre in Asia. We welcome Indian companies to make use of our international network of air, sea and telecommunications linkages, and tap the network and resources of 6,000 MNCs in Singapore. Already over 1,000 Indian companies are in Singapore. In the last 3 years alone, over 150 Indian companies have set up substantial presence. Several large companies that are globalising are using Singapore as a marketing and operations centre for their regional businesses. For start-ups, Singapore serves as an ideal incubator to prototype innovative ideas and technologies. This is a promising way of marrying India’s large talent pool with Singapore’s emphasis on such industries and with our framework of intellectual property protection. Numerous start-ups are now incubating in the Indian Centre and several have secured funding, penetrated markets and grown into mature companies. Building on these, a second centre is being planned with the Confederation of Indian Industry.
I am mindful here of the Financial Stability Board standard against mechanical reliance on ratings.7 “The goal of the FSB principles is to end mechanistic reliance on ratings provided by 7  http://www.fsb.org/work-of-the-fsb/policy-development/additional-policy-areas/reducing-reliance-on-credit-ratings/ 7  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  7  ECAIs by banks, institutional investors and other market participants by reducing the “hard wiring” of ECAI ratings in standards, laws and regulations and by providing incentives for firms to develop their own capacity for credit risk assessment and due diligence”  This standard does also say that  supervisors should closely check the adequacy of firms rating processes and guard against upward bias. That is what we seek to do. Turning to restructured equity release mortgages specifically, we developed our Effective Value Test (the ‘Test’) to help determine whether insurers appear to be taking an inappropriately large Matching Adjustment benefit. This followed very extensive engagement with industry and more widely, including discussion and consultation papers. We recently issued a follow-up consultation paper8 to provide greater clarity to insurers on, for example, how often they should calculate the Test and in what circumstances the PRA will update key parameters in the Test, such as the deferment rate. The consultation paper also proposes that firms would be asked to use the Test ‘in stress’ as a validation technique, to help provide assurance that their internal models are assessing appropriate capital requirements against risks from these assets.

Domestic banks are flush; they have on deposit at the 12 Federal Reserve banks some $ trillion in excess reserves, earning a mere 25 basis points – a quarter of 1 percent per annum – rather than earning significantly higher interest rates from making loans to operating businesses. These excess bank reserves are waiting on the sidelines to be lent to businesses. Nondepository financial firms – private equity funds and the like – have substantial amounts of investable cash at their disposal. U.S. corporations are sitting on an abundance of cash – some estimate excess working capital on publicly traded corporations’ books exceeds $ trillion – well above their working capital needs. Nonpublicly held businesses that are creditworthy have increasing access to bank credit at historically low nominal rates. I have said many times that through the initiatives we took to counter the crisis of 2008–09, and the dramatic extension of the balance sheet that ensued, the Fed has refilled the tanks needed to fuel economic expansion and domestic job creation.
A distinction needs to be made here between two steps. As I noted earlier, entry into ERM II requires a full peg to the euro, either before or on the day of entry. Let us assume the Maltese lira peg to the euro is increased from 70 per cent to 100 per cent before entry. The same principle that applied to past revisions to the exchange rate basket will apply on this occasion, too. When the currency basket was last updated, in August 2002, the value of the lira was derived on the basis of the old basket, which at the time was composed of currency portions representing the euro, with a 56.8 per cent weight, sterling with 21.6 per cent and the US dollar with 21.6 per cent. The revised weights - 70 per cent euro, 20 per cent sterling and 10 per cent US dollar - were used to derive the new currency portions and produced the same value for the Maltese lira as under the old basket. In the same way, the switch from a 70 per cent peg to a 100 per cent peg will not entail a change in the level of the lira/euro rate from that prevailing under the current exchange rate regime. I hope this will correct the impression some people have that the peg to the euro will automatically result in a change in the value of the lira beyond the normal day-to-day market movements currently observed.

Even in Japan, where ownership of large corporations is not in the hands of families, long-term corporate relationships and cross-shareholdings have dictated business. This was how entrepreneurship evolved in East Asian societies, and among the overseas Chinese in South East Asia. Many of these family firms were hugely successful, driven by the business acumen and entrepreneurial drive of the founding patriarchs, and supported by a web of networks, or guanxi. But the world has changed. Family relationships may be an adequate basis for running a medium sized company, but not for an MNC employing tens of thousands of people. To be world-class, companies need to be led by the best man for the job, and this person is not likely to come from the same family, generation after generation. And business based on relationships rather than hard-headed commercial calculations is prone to abuse and under-performance, as was shown in the Asian crisis. It will not be easy for the families to relinquish control. The instinct to hand an heirloom down the generations is still strong. There are also real practical difficulties. If the families sell out, who will the buyers be? Who will take charge of the companies? Most Asian countries lack a group of institutional shareholders who can exert market discipline and defend minority shareholder interests, like the  3  Straits Times, 26 January 2000. BIS Review 76/2000  4  mutual and pension funds in the US.
As I just said, the basic considerations in monetary policy are inflation in a medium-term perspective and a reasonable degree of stability in the real economy. In recent years a common topic in the discussion of inflation and monetary policy has been the concept of transitory effects. A sudden and unforeseen increase (or decrease) in the general price level on account of some type of shock leads to inflation being temporarily higher (or lower) in the following twelve months. That shocks of this type should influence monetary policy is not self-evident. On the one hand, reacting to transitory shocks that do no mirror changes in resource utilisation or inflation expectations would be liable to result in demand being affected by instrumental rate adjustments in ways that contribute to future, more permanent deviations from the inflation target. On  6  BIS Review 24/2002  the other hand, future deviations from the inflation target can also occur if one disregards the fact that supply shocks may mirror more or less transitory changes in productivity or that temporary price effects may have consequences for other prices and influence inflation expectations. Determining whether or not monetary policy ought to respond to a change in the rate of price increases calls for detailed analyses of the underlying causes. This is another circumstance that illustrates the disadvantages of a strategy that only considers current price tendencies and is likely to lead to appreciable fluctuations in the development of prices as well as demand.

An important issue is, of course, the size of the forecasting errors it is reasonable to expect. Some colleagues at the Riksbank studied this about a year ago by evaluating 52,000 forecasts which 250 institutions around the world had presented over a period of almost a decade. They concluded that the errors in forecasting inflation were somewhere between a half and one percentage point, depending slightly on the country in question. The historical errors in the Riksbank’s forecasts have been of approximately this magnitude except in three periods. The first was 1996–97, when large interest rate cuts, for example, lowered CPI inflation via house mortgage expenditure. The second was in the late 1990s, when the deregulation of electricity and telecom markets, for example, led to a relatively large one-off downward shift in the price level and temporarily lowered inflation. The third is the past year, when the greater part of the increase in inflation has had to do with various supply shocks, for instance on prices for electricity, meat, fruit and vegetables last spring. The background to these price disturbances is a poor water supply for hydroelectric power on account of low precipitation, livestock diseases and poor harvests on  BIS Review 24/2002  7  account of unusually cold weather in Europe. As I mentioned, shocks of this type are liable to raise the price level and lead to a transitory increase in the rate of inflation.
Lastly, the third objective of financial authorities must be to achieve a new balance between regulations and market discipline The first generation of prudential rules - chiefly a raft of prudential ratios with the Cooke ratio as its symbol - was devised at the end of the 1980s under the aegis of the Basel Committee, the IOSCO and the IAIS. As financial activities evolved, these quantitative standards were gradually supplemented with a more qualitative approach based on risk management and market discipline. I would like to emphasise that far from being at odds, these two approaches are complementary and inseparable. Financial participants must be encouraged to take more responsibility in mutual surveillance in order to encourage market discipline. This means that they must adopt more transparent procedures. However, regulators and supervisors still have an essential role to play in ensuring the stability of financial systems which is necessary to the common good. •  Maintaining a balance between market discipline and regulations should lead to a more flexible approach whereby prudential standards are adapted to the individual situations of financial institutions. This is the purpose of the revision of the solvency ratio currently underway in Basel, in particular via the second and third pillars. •  In addition, the mechanisms for safeguarding the soundness of financial systems should be adapted to the changing features of these systems.

Inflation increased to a level that was tangibly higher than the inflation target, resource utilisation was higher than normal and there was a rapid expansion of credit. Despite this, the repo rate was lower than normal for most of the period leading up to the crisis. A more rapid increase of the repo rate would have been better. We did not foresee the financial crisis, but once it hit the Swedish economy with full force in September 2008 the Riksbank acted quickly and forcefully. This mainly concerned measures to preserve financial stability. However, the expansionary monetary policy conducted by the Riksbank also played an important role in reducing the severity of the downturn that followed in the wake of the financial crisis. Looking forward, I think that the repo rate should be raised at every meeting this year, considering the economic development we envisaged at the last monetary policy meeting. If inflation becomes higher than we had expected, it may be necessary to raise the repo rate to a normal level of around 4 per cent as soon as next year. The average for the repo rate over the last 10 years cannot be taken as a starting point for what the average repo rate should be in the longer term. However, at the same time, I am, of course, prepared to reassess my view of the direction of monetary policy if the external conditions should change significantly, as they did in September 2008. There are those who think that monetary policy is too tight.
Demand for construction, household products and infrastructure will be strong for many decades. There is ample opportunity for Asian savings to find Asian investments. BIS Review 28/2003  3

Towards this end, the legal practitioners should work together to create a network to foster its development. This might involve the setting up  4  BIS Review 102/2010  of a specific association of international groupings of Islamic finance legal practitioners working together towards harmonisation of practices at the international level. Thank you. BIS Review 102/2010  5
Ladies and gentlemen, as you are aware the Zambian economy has taken a turn for the better over the last few years. We are fortunate that the rise in copper prices has created a greater interest to invest in the mines. We have also witnessed increased investment in other areas such as agriculture, tourism, construction and manufacturing. This has culminated in a 25.6% increase in non-traditional exports to $ million by November 2007. This obviously gives a wider spread of lending opportunities for the banking sector. It is important to note that this growth in non-traditional exports is to a large extent associated with small and medium scale enterprises. The commitment by Barclays Bank Zambia to upscale their support to the SMEs is thus very welcome. This commitment has been exemplified by your decision to locate a branch in Chilenje. I am also happy that your commitment to the community has extended to the renovation of the Community Centre, a building which carries a strong historical background for this country. We encourage you to extend this further by helping with other requirements such as the drainage system in the locality, street lighting for specific areas and enhancing other communal facilities as part of the Keep Lusaka Clean campaign. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, it gives me great pleasure to declare the Barclays Bank Zambia Plc Chilenje Branch officially open. I thank you! 2  BIS Review 5/2008

Brexit was and remains bad news, above all for our British friends. But it brings for us an opportunity. The EU post-Brexit financial system will certainly be less concentrated than it is today and more active on the continent, based on Eurozone abundant savings. And, in this new environment, the Paris financial centre has obvious advantages, building on the very welcome measures announced by the Prime Minister to strengthen Paris’ attractiveness. To name a few, France has the most developed capital market in continental Europe, the largest asset management industry and is the leading private equity investor; French universities are renowned worldwide for the excellence of their finance teaching. Paris has everything it needs to be one of the best financial centres in the euro area: it depends on us, on all of us. You can rest assured that Banque de France and ACPR are strongly committed to fully playing their part in supporting the Paris ecosystem. i  G20 Leaders’ Declaration, Hamburg, 7/8 July 2017. Assets of “Other Financial Intermediaries” (OFIs); sample of 21 individual non-euro area jurisdictions and the euro area aggregate. Source: FSB, Global Shadow Banking Monitoring Report 2016, May 2017. iii See U.S. Department of the Treasury, “A Financial System That Creates Economic Opportunities”, June 2017. ii  3