samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Given that the debt ratio stood at 98.3% of GDP in 2017, the latest year for which data are available, this rule would require an average annual reduction of 1.5 pp of GDP over the next decade. 2.4  Government debt in the Draft Budget  According to the Draft Budget, the general government debt ratio will fall by 1.5 pp as a percentage of GDP, from 96.9% estimated in the Draft Budget for 2018 to 95.4% in 2019, continuing along the path of gradual decline observed since 2014 (see Chart 11). This is a result of the expected favourable development of nominal economic growth. However, if the upside risks to the government deficit referred to earlier were to materialise, the reduction in the debt ratio would be more moderate. BANCO DE ESPAÑA  12	 TESTIMONY BY THE GOVERNOR OF THE BANCO DE ESPAÑA BEFORE PARLIAMENT IN RELATION TO THE DRAFT STATE AND SOCIAL SECURITY BUDGET FOR 2019  FUE  3  Fiscal policy challenges  The accounts presented should also be assessed from a more general standpoint. Accordingly, before ending, I will now refer to some of the challenges facing Spanish public finances. First, it is essential that we move towards lower public debt levels (see Chart 12). The empirical evidence shows that maintaining a very high level of public debt over a prolonged period may have negative effects on economic growth.

I am sure that each of you will adequately deal with the money bit, but our collective minds and tools in financial studies that all of you have can do much to raise the understanding of the prospects and challenges for the financial system. 3 One decade ago, we had the global financial crisis (GFC). As Samuelson described it starkly: “what we know about the global financial crisis is that we do not know very much”. With the benefit of hindsight, vulnerabilities had indeed built up from: (a) Highly leveraged financial institutions; (b) Severe liquidity mismatches; (c) Fairly opaque over-the-counter derivatives markets that transmitted risks rapidly when liquidity suddenly dried up; as well as (d) Moral hazards associated with financial institutions that were deemed “too big to fail”. 4 Ten years on, a number of key regulatory reforms are being implemented in stages to address these vulnerabilities. 5 Take for example, the Basel III reforms after the GFC, a key work of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, of which I am a member of. Many of you may be familiar with its key elements to improve the quality and quantity of bank capital. The Basel III standards also seek to reduce excessive variability of banks’ risk-weighted assets. It has now incorporated macroprudential and liquidity risk elements. A new minimum leverage ratio is included. Global Systemically Important Banks are further subjected to even higher capital levels, more intense 1/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  supervision and resolution planning requirements.
In this respect, the exceptional stimulus measures announced by the ECB and the consequent easing of financial conditions in the currency area, the depreciation of the euro and the sharp drop in oil prices provide a favourable financial backdrop for the euro area and, in particular, for countries like Spain that have made a tremendous effort to correct their imbalances. The benefits of the adjustments made under adverse conditions may now be further bolstered by a favourable financial climate. It is important that the Spanish economy consolidate these gains and that it maintain the pace of reform and the improvements in competitiveness in a framework of stability. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3

As you know, Switzerland, like Israel, is a small open economy, and I emphasize both the words small and open. Indeed, we are widely open. Nearly half of our national income is generated abroad, and the European Union is by far our largest foreign partner. About two thirds of our exports head in that direction, and we are one of the best customers of the EU. We are also very small, meaning that although we have no significant impact on the rest of Europe, we are very exposed to foreign shocks, whether they are real or monetary in nature. Our activity is highly correlated with that of the eurozone. Under these conditions, would the SNB still be in a position to conduct an independent monetary policy? Would it be realistic to expect the SNB to follow a course that deviated from the one set by the European Central Bank, or would the SNB be forced to shadow the actions of the ECB? The question of an independent monetary policy is not just a matter of safeguarding the appeal and the prestige of our jobs as Swiss central bankers. The stakes are much higher. For one thing, even if Swiss activity and economic conditions more generally are highly correlated with events in Europe, the correlation is less than perfect. Our economy, although offering many similarities with those of Germany, France, and Italy, also has its specific features. Thus, Switzerland is very well endowed with physical and human capital.
It is determined by the calibration of, and interaction between, the whole array of instruments we have introduced: the level of policy rates, the pace of asset purchases, and our forward guidance on both. It is the combination of all these tools that sets a given stance. The different elements have complementary effects on preserving the very easy financing conditions that are necessary for generating sustainable inflation convergence. Our current interest rate policy and our forward guidance on the future path of rates affect the risk-free term structure of interest rates, which is the benchmark for the pricing of all other assets and interest rates. Our asset purchases complement these interest rate policies by directly compressing the term premium and other risk premia, both via portfolio rebalancing effects and by underlining the central bank’s commitment to keep interest rates at a low level – i.e. signalling effects. And since the Governing Council deems the current stance fully appropriate, it confirmed at its last meeting that net asset purchases will continue until the end of December 2017, or beyond, if necessary, and in any case until we see a sustained adjustment in the path of inflation consistent with our inflation aim. It also confirmed its expectation that key ECB interest rates will remain at present or lower levels for an extended period of time, and well past the horizon of our net asset 5/6  BIS central bankers' speeches  purchases.

Historically, the most drastic processes of deleveraging, including the post-war episodes and the recent post-crisis episode in the US, have relied on both mechanisms. But the contribution of nominal growth has always been decisive for success. In the euro area, until recently, real growth and inflation were too low to foster macroeconomic deleveraging, so balance sheet repair had to take place through the more painful channel, conflicting with the objective of macroeconomic stabilisation. Rising nominal growth is now helping to reconcile those two goals. Nevertheless, further efforts are still needed to work through the legacies of the crisis, especially in parts of the euro area banking sector where nonperforming loans remain high. The third important feature of the recovery is its broadness across sectors and countries – which is to say, it has not only strengthened but become more homogenous across the euro area. This reflects above all the effectiveness of our measures in narrowing financing conditions across different economies. If one looks at the percentage of all sectors in all euro area countries that have positive growth, the figure stood above 80% at the end of last year – above its historical average of 73% and the level observed during the 2009–11 recovery. Similarly, the dispersion in growth rates across both sectors and countries has also narrowed significantly and both are now at their lowest level since 1997. The same story is visible for employment. In early 2014 the vast majority of euro area headcount growth was coming from Germany.
So MAS works with many financial institutions to develop programmes for their Singaporean professionals, for example, by enabling them to take up cross-functional roles, such as via finance associate management programs, or to take international postings for better exposure 1. Last year, we launched the Asian Financial Leaders Programme, aimed at equipping senior financial sector professionals who are on the path to leading financial institutions in a variety of sectors including banking, insurance, asset management, private equity etc, with the knowledge and capabilities to operate effectively across diverse business, regulatory and legal environments. 11. Third, retention of skilled and trained professionals in the industry. MAS has been working closely with financial institutions to ensure fair and equitable treatment for all employees. For example: •  We work with financial institutions to ensure HR policies are non-discriminatory, regardless of gender, race, or age  •  While we provide for specialist skills in areas of need, professionals will also need sufficient breadth of skills to be flexible and resilient in times of change. This means pre-emptively identifying the key jobs that are evolving, and developing structured training pathways. We must also identify new cross-functional competencies that are needed across different areas of finance, such as data analytics and digital banking. These initiatives will help to facilitate more seamless transitions within their organization. With these structured training pathways in place, professionals amongst us, particularly females who may need to take time out from work, can reskill and re-enter the workforce more seamlessly.

The third and last initiative we are working jointly with Shenzhen relates to talent development. You may recall that last year we launched the Fintech Career Accelerator Scheme and, since then, more than 70 Hong Kong students have been working on fintech projects in 12 banks and the HKMA. Building on the success of this scheme, and with the support of the Shenzhen OFDS, we have secured commitments from several high-tech firms in Shenzhen, including Ping An Technology, WeBank, Tencent and others, to offer summer intern positions for Hong Kong students to learn the latest technologies, not only in financial application but also in areas such as big data analytics or artificial intelligence. This people-to-people approach will deepen collaborative ties between Hong Kong and Mainland China in fintech development to our mutual benefit. 3/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  Enhanced research 15. Finally, I want to talk about enhanced research, which is one of the seven initiatives in the package helping Hong Kong to migrate to the new era of Smart Banking. Today we will publish our second whitepaper on DLT. You may recall that we released the first DLT whitepaper around this time last year, in which we explained how the technology works, outlined proof-of-concept projects and, more importantly, identified potential implementation challenges and issues.
The Government plans to satisfy the Maastricht criteria for fiscal performance by 2006, but this means that the short-term effects on GDP growth of this fiscal adjustment will continue to be felt at least until then. Sound public finances are also critical to the role played by the Central Bank of Malta in the economy. Through its monetary policy, the Bank remains committed to safeguarding the exchange rate peg against possible threats to the external reserves, whether they arise from changes in the international trading or financial environment, or from a lack of competitiveness, which adversely affects the balance of payments. 2  BIS Review 32/2005  This commitment has now taken on an added dimension with Malta’s participation in the ERM II. As you are no doubt aware, in order to retain the same stability and benefits of a fixed exchange rate regime enjoyed over the past three decades, we have decided to maintain the EUR/MTL rate unchanged during the ERM II phase at the central parity level of 0.429300. The Bank’s recommendation to the Government was, however, premised on the assumption that fiscal consolidation is assiduously pursued and that a steady pace of structural reform is maintained. This cursory review of the recent performance of the Maltese economy suggests that it was not sufficiently well prepared to exploit the opportunities that became available upon accession to the EU, so that the costs of adjustment are for the time being outweighing the positive effects.

A sharp pick-up in the rate of growth of the money supply in 1995 provided an early indication that demand growth was likely to accelerate. And money supply growth has remained strong throughout the whole of the past year. Faster growth of consumer spending became evident in the first half of 1996 and has been sustained. And from the middle of last year this began to feed through into output - which was initially held back, and is possibly still being affected by a run-down of stocks. Now the fact is that no-one can tell you with any great confidence just when the increase in demand is likely to begin to create economic imbalance and spill over into rising inflation. But we can be reasonably certain that money supply growth at around 9-10% a year, as we have seen it now since the beginning of last year, and growth in consumer spending at nearly 4% a year, as we have seen over the last year, cannot be sustained for long consistently with the Government’s inflation target in the medium term. And there are signs in the recently more rapid tightening of the labour market and in the gathering recovery in the housing market, for example, that demand may be strengthening. BIS Review 5/1997  -2-  That, essentially, is why the Bank has been arguing that we will need at some early stage a modest pre-emptive tightening of monetary policy.
Eighty years later, Chuck Prince, then-CEO of Citibank, captured the collective action problem thus: “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing” (Prince (2006)). As Prince’s quote attests, these incentives were a key driver of risk-taking behaviour in the run-up to the crisis. In the face of stiffening competition, banks were increasingly required to  2  There are other potential non-cyclical instruments of macro-prudential policy, including instruments to tackle systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs). 2  BIS Review 168/2010  keep pace with the returns on equity offered by their rivals – a case not so much of “keeping up with the Joneses” as “keeping up with the Goldmans”. To achieve these higher returns, it was individually rational for banks to increase their risk profiles. They did so in various ways including through higher leverage, marked to market gains on trading books and writing contracts with deep out-of-the-money option payoffs (Alessandri and Haldane (2009)). These strategies had the desired effect. They generated high and synchronous reported returns (Chart 1). But they did so at the expense of higher risk in aggregate – a case of a competitive coordination failure. Reported returns were, in this sense, risk illusory. As those risk illusions were shattered, all of the pre-crisis gains in banks’ reported returns were lost.

And very recently the Financial Services Committee decided to further investigate (1) how to manage supervision of cross-border banking groups, whether subsidiary or branch structure, and (2) arrangements for cross-border crisis management. 2  BIS Review 22/2004  So, which are the developments in cross-border banking that have necessitated further consideration of the existing rules, policies and structures? Which are the regulatory challenges indicated in the title of this speech? I think the convergence of regulations is a process that, although being long and slow, is already going in the right direction. Even though, as mentioned earlier, there are still way too many differences in implementation and actual practices. But when it comes to the genuine conflicts of interest between nationally motivated regulators and an integrated European financial market, we are just in the beginning of a major rethinking. The challenges regulators have to face At the heart of the matter lies the emergence of large foreign subsidiaries and branches. The presence of foreign subsidiaries and branches is not new. What is new is that they might make up a substantial part of your domestic financial system. Whereas the typical bank group might be described as “Big mama, small daughter”, the opposite may now be increasingly true in many cases, and in particular if seen in relation to the size of the home and host countries. This is already true in most of the acceding countries. To give an example, more than 90 percent of Czech banking assets are held by foreign owned banks.
In Spain the current account deficit improved by more than 7 percentage points over the same period. Most of the adjustment has been driven by a contraction in domestic demand. However, in Ireland, Spain and Portugal export performance has been very strong compared with the pre-crisis period. Portugal’s exports of goods and services grew on average by nearly 7% between 2010 and 2012, compared with 4.4% between 1999 and 2008. In particular, gains in markets outside the euro area have been large and there are early indications that the export specialisation of these countries has been shifting in a way that may support further structural export expansion.3 [Slide 4] We have seen a significant improvement in cost competitiveness as measured by unit labour costs (ULC). Between 2008 and 2012, in the three programme countries cumulated ULC growth was about 12 percentage points below the euro area average. Ireland saw by far the largest adjustment, with a cumulated ULC gain of 18 percentage points vis-à-vis the euro area. Greece, Portugal and Spain saw a ten-percentage-point ULC gain vis-à-vis the euro area average. As shown by Buti and Turrini (2012),4 this development was not fully associated with gains in productivity from lay-offs but rather, at least in part, with slower wage growth dynamics. In addition, such a decline in deficit countries seems to have occurred mostly in non-tradable sectors, which is consistent with internal rebalancing.

With interest rates close to zero, the SNB created additional Swiss franc liquidity through foreign exchange market interventions. This prevented the rise in the value of the Swiss franc from leading to what at the time would have been an undesirable tightening of monetary conditions. The foreign exchange reserves therefore surged from around CHF 50 billion at the end of 2008 to a good CHF 200 billion by the end of 2010. A direct consequence of our much larger balance sheet is the increase in the financial risks associated with our foreign exchange reserves. These risks have materialised in the last 12 months, and have led to significant losses for the SNB. They hold the potential for further losses. Just as the increase in our foreign exchange reserves was determined by the demands of monetary policy under the exceptional circumstances that prevailed in 2009 and 2010, monetary policy considerations will continue to dictate our actions in the future. This means, in particular, that selling our foreign exchange reserves (and buying Swiss francs) is not an option at the moment. Monetary policy also dictates that our currency risks not be hedged. In effect, hedging the exchange rate risk using derivatives would be equivalent to buying Swiss francs against foreign exchange for forward delivery. The effect of hedging on the market is thus comparable to the direct sale of foreign currency.
Jan F Qvigstad: On transparency Speech by Mr Jan F Qvigstad, Deputy Governor of Norges Bank (Central Bank of Norway), at Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi (The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters), Oslo, 10 November 2009. Ida Wolden Bache, Amund Holmsen, Marie Norum Lerbak and Øistein Røisland provided valuable assistance in preparing this speech  *  *  *  Introduction Norges Bank’s Executive Board has decided that the key policy rate now should be 1.5 per cent. If economic developments are broadly in line with projections, the appropriate key policy rate will be 2.75 per cent around the end of next year. If I had made this statement ten years ago, it would have constituted a breach of confidentiality. 1 Norges Bank considered this to be highly sensitive information. Had I been deputy chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board twenty years ago, I would not even have been entitled to reveal the latest interest rate decision. 2 Today, this sounds rather odd. Transparency is now taken for granted among central banks and in other areas of society. In London in 1780, the Bank of England was put to a test. In Parliament, Lord Gorden attempted to stop a bill to restore civil rights to Catholics. 3 He drew support from large numbers. Rioting led to the destruction of several public buildings. When an attack was launched against the Bank of England, the building was secured like a fortress and withstood the onslaught, hence the phrase “as safe as the Bank of England”.

On the other hand, such transparency may inhibit the actual discussion. Members may come to meetings with pre-drafted statements, impairing a constructive exchange of views. Researchers have compared tapes of the Fed’s FOMC meetings before and after it was decided that the minutes should be published. 31 The tapes show that the form of discussion changed. During the period following the decision to publish the minutes, there was a greater tendency for members to read prepared statements. Detailed minutes also entail a risk of moving the real discussion from the official meeting into closed rooms. In that case, a real increase in transparency has not been achieved. The US was aware of this risk and introduced legislation to prevent such informal meetings. They called this law the “Government in the Sunshine Act”, 32 where the name symbolises that important decisions should be taken in the public light. The law defines a meeting as a consultation between a quorum of committee members. Stretching it somewhat, this means that if some members are chatting in the corridor, they must stop talking about the interest rate and start talking about the weather if the group grows to a certain size. The notion that increased transparency can hamper a free exchange of views is not new. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 decided to veil the deliberations in secrecy. According to the Virginia delegate James Madison, who later became the fourth US president, secrecy was crucial for succeeding in the work on the US Constitution.