samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Even growth theory was sometimes based on demand analysis rather than on the growth of the factors of production and on technological progress. During this period, full employment was the top priority of Swedish economic policy, as is evident in every fiscal plan from the 1950s and 1960s. The idea was that full employment involved a small rate of frictional unemployment of around 2.5 per cent, even though the level was never stated explicitly in policy documents. That level was assumed to correspond to people that at the time of each measurement were in the process of changing jobs or in the process of leaving the education system to enter the labour market or similar. According to the prevalent view, higher unemployment could always be explained by insufficient demand. It was generally accepted among professional economists and the public that the government could fine-tune the economy with the aid of fiscal policy - expenditures, tax receipts and tax structures. It was a question of bridging the cyclical slumps. These ideas prevailed on both sides of the Atlantic, even though there was a school of sceptics both in Europe and the United States. BIS Review 65/2004  1  This policy was highly successful for a long time. For the greater part of the post-war period, unemployment in Sweden remained clearly below 4 per cent. On an annual basis it did not exceed 4 per cent at any time between 1950 and 1990. Why didn’t the successes last?

Zeti Akhtar Aziz: Towards world-class banking - efficient, effective and resilient banking system Keynote address by Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz, Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia, at the Malaysian Banking Summit 2004, Kuala Lumpur, 14 May 2004. *  *  *  Bismillahirrahmanirrahim The turn of the century has seen a significant transformation of our banking sector. The changes have been driven by the new emerging economic opportunities, changing customer requirements, new technology, the more competitive environment and changes in the regulatory and supervisory framework. This period has also seen significant progress achieved in the strengthening of the domestic banking system. The strengthening of the banking sector has been driven by the restructuring, re-engineering, rationalisation and consolidation that has been undertaken during this period. Indeed, this progress has been achieved against a background of a challenging global financial and economic environment. As we strive for high performance benchmarked against international standards, we must not lose sight of the context of the financial and economic environment in which we operate. Central to this is a common vision of developing a world class banking system that is best able to serve the nation and thus contribute to economic growth in an environment of financial stability. The expectations are thus for the banking system to be able to provide the intermediation function that is effective, efficient, resilient, and that supports sustainable economic growth. Ladies and Gentlemen, It is indeed my pleasure to be invited again to this year’s Malaysian Banking Summit.
If you want to bag a mallard, you don’t aim where the bird is at present, you aim ahead of its flight pattern. To me, the flight pattern of the economy is clearly toward increasing employment and inflation that is approaching our 2-percent target. Thus, I was encouraged by the wording we negotiated at the last FOMC meeting. I was pleased that we dropped the reference to “significant” in describing the remaining labormarket slack and that wording was included indicating we might well move to raise rates BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  sooner than thus far assumed, should the economy proceed along the trajectory I think we are on. To me, this neutered the adjective “considerable” in stating the time frame under which we might act. This is why this particular hawk voted “yes” in support of the statement we released on Wednesday. Now to the exit... Of course, I am concerned with what will happen to all the liquidity that remains in the system in the aftermath of our QE programs. The depository institutions we transact with have put back to the 12 Federal Reserve Banks some $ trillion in excess reserves. “Excess” means they cannot find better uses for that money than earning the 25 basis points (25/100ths of one percent per annum) we pay them until they can find creditworthy borrowers to lend to at significant multiples of that amount.

With the mission of promoting stability of international financial architecture and monetary system, he has organized roughly 100 seminars around the world facilitating dialogue among high-ranking officials, academics and market participants. I had the pleasure of attending some of his seminars and can only compliment to his expertise and passion to do great work at any time. Marc, it is a true pleasure and privilege working with you. I hope that we will be able to do this again. Please, the floor is all yours. Thank you! 2/2  BIS central bankers' speeches
... “that the bubble has reached such a size partly due to the fact that the dot-com bubble burst with very little footprint on global GDP”...that as late as April, 2007 the IMF noted that “global economic risks have declined, the overall U.S. economy is holding up well”; that “many quantitative firms whose number crunching sought to expose profitable market trading principles were successful so long as risk aversion moved incrementally (which it did much of the time)”; that “the risk management paradigm nonetheless, harbored a fatal flaw” i.e. that “in the growing state of high euphoria, risk managers, the Federal Reserve, and other regulators failed to fully comprehend the underlying size, length, and impact of the negative tail of the distribution of risk outcomes that was about to be revealed as the post-Lehman” that “for decades, with little, to no data, most analysts, in my experience, had conjectured a far more limited tail risk” and that “this is arguably the major source of the critical risk management system failures”. “In despair, says Greenspan, an inordinately large part of investment management subcontracted to the ‘safe harbor’ risk designations of the credit rating agencies.” But the  2  BIS Review 90/2010  analysts of the credit rating agencies proved no more adept and no more proficient at anticipating the onset of crisis than the investment community at large.

More specifically, it is a question of finding the interest rate that will minimise the squared forecast deviations during the forecast period between actual inflation and the inflation target and between actual and normal resource utilisation, where the latter deviation is weighted by λ – a bit of a tongue-twister to put into words. But it can be illustrated relatively conveniently with the aid of a figure. The figure measures the variation in inflation along the horizontal axel and the variation in the real economy along the vertical axel. The variations are measured using the mean squared gap, that is, the average squared deviation across the forecast horizon. Such mean squared gaps can be calculated for various possible interest rate paths and one can then compare different interest rate paths by marking the mean squared gap in the figure. The closer to origo, or the further south-west in the figure, the smaller the two mean squared gaps are, and the better success the accompanying interest rate path has in stabilising inflation and the real economy.2 We say that inflation targeting, or the interest rate path, is effective if it is not possible to reduce one of the mean squared gaps without the other gap increasing in size at the same time. Theoretically, we could imagine there is a very large number of effective points. These points form a “front” as illustrated in the figure.
So, the answer to the question whether central banks have too prominent a role in the new regulatory framework is once again “no”. Given our recent experience, it would be negligent not to address systemic risk directly in order to prevent system-wide crises in the future, and  9  Crockett (2000). BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  because addressing these risks involves a set of tools and competences that naturally belong to the domain of central banks, their prominent role in this task is a direct consequence. It is also important to bear in mind that the expanded efforts to prevent future crises will, if they succeed, reduce the need for extensive crisis management in the future. Conclusion History is a great teacher. And central banks must learn from its critical episodes. The recent crisis is such an episode and is thus an exceptional learning opportunity. Central banks were active in managing the crisis with both conventional and unconventional tools. Their efforts played a major role in preventing the collapse of the financial system in the early days of the crisis, and have contributed to mitigating the economic damage of the aftermath. These actions were only possible because central banks, including the SNB, were able to act flexibly in exceptional circumstances – a flexibility which the gold initiative would severely constrain.

First, the central banks’ objective of financial stability has emerged in the course of the historical evolution of their legal mandates and responsibilities. Second, the application of macroprudential tools to safeguard financial stability requires, as a pre-condition, knowledge of the financial cycle. Third, our conference programme is organized so as to discuss this critical topic in a conceptual sequencing: starting from the global view, elaborating on the euro area, and then turning to the financial cycle in non-euro area 2/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  Europe. I believe our speakers and discussants will provide both theoretical insights and first-hand policy experiences, from global and regional perspectives, for all of us to benefit from a frank exchange of ideas and relevant practices today. Thank you very much once again for joining us and participating in this conference, and I wish you a very pleasant and productive stay in Sofia. More information about the event you can find here. 1 See F Capie, C Goodhart and N Schnadt, “The development of central banking”, in F Capie, S Fischer, C  Goodhart and N Schnadt, (eds), The future of central banking: the tercentenary symposium of the Bank of England, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p 6. 3/3  BIS central bankers' speeches
However, even once the Fed normalizes the size of its balance sheet and securities portfolio, the composition of its securities portfolio will not yet be “normal.” The projections I mentioned earlier—which assume ongoing implementation of the FOMC’s capped portfolio reduction strategy—estimate that the domestic 3 / 13  BIS central bankers' speeches  securities portfolio could contain more than $ trillion in agency MBS at the time the balance sheet reaches a normalized size, even though the FOMC has indicated a preference to hold primarily Treasury securities in the longer run. Meanwhile, the maturity profile of the Treasury portfolio at that time is projected to be more skewed towards longer-term holdings than it was before the crisis, when the Fed held one-third of its portfolio in Treasury bills, and about twothirds of its holdings matured in less than three years.16  A role for asset purchases at the zero lower bound As they digest the experience of the past decade, policymakers, academics, and market participants are engaged in an active dialogue on appropriate monetary policy strategies and the role of unconventional policy tools in future zero lower bound episodes.17 Amid widespread concerns of a secular decline in nominal interest rates, this is not just a theoretical discourse. The median of FOMC participants’ projections for the longer-run value of the nominal federal funds rate is currently 2¾ percent, leaving little room to ease the stance of policy through changes in overnight rates.

Norman T L Chan: Hong Kong’s role in China’s reform and opening Speech by Mr Norman T L Chan, Chief Executive of Hong Kong Monetary Authority, at the 4th Annual China Bankers Forum 2010: “Global banking – restructuring and reform”, Shanghai, 17 September 2010. *  *  *  I am very pleased to be invited to attend the Annual China Bankers Forum 2010 today. The concepts of economic globalisation and financial globalisation have been around for decades. Yet, without the reform and opening up of China in the last 30 years and the rapid development of China’s economy which forms a major part of the global economy, globalisation would merely be a concept without important implications. Nowadays, the scale of the economy of China has exceeded $ trillion and China has surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy. However, when the reform and opening up policies were initiated in 1979, how many of us could ever forecast that China would be able to develop from a poor country to its current state? In 1979, the GDP of China was $ billion, with per-capita income of $ many of the daily consumables were in significant shortage and had to be allocated by the rationing system. At present, per-capita income of China is $ which is 14 times the level in 1979; and per-capita income in large cities, such as Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing, even reaches as high as $ China can now be regarded as having entered a “moderately affluent” stage.
In the absence of pressure on internal and external stability, monetary policy has become more accommodative. The Monetary Policy Committee cut its policy interest rate in total by 175 basis points since the beginning of this year. The aim is to stimulate domestic demand to offset moderating export growth in light of the slower US economy and baht appreciation. Nevertheless, exports would still remain an important driver of growth for next year. And, the latest economic forecast projects the Thai economic growth to lie between 4.5-6.0 per cent in 2008, while core inflation is expected to stay comfortably around 1.0-2.0 percent. Ladies and Gentlemen, Now allow me to turn to the second part of my talk. This relates to strengthening the Thai economy’s resiliency going forward. While the global economy is expected to record a higher growth rate in 2008 than in 2007, notwithstanding the slower US expansion, the risks on financial stability have not declined. Even though the latest US monetary policy easing could have a far-reaching impact insofar as it impacts the prospects of the global economic growth, I fear that the US policy has not helped much in terms of lessening financial volatilities that may likely mount as the global imbalance unwinds, and with it the impending correction of the US dollar. Ironically, during this adjustment period, small open emerging markets, Thailand included, have to manage the swings that will occur in their capital accounts.

Together with the Ministry of Manpower, we are running a series of townhalls and dialogues with different industry groups within the financial sector to explain the framework and address questions. Any financial institution that has even the slightest concern as to how the new employment pass framework will affect its expansion plans here, should get in touch with MAS. Welcoming global talent is not a choice, it is a necessity. The financial sector is growing rapidly and creating more jobs than our small local workforce can meet. Our labour market is tightening, with unfilled vacancies and rising wages. If we do not remain open to global talent, our financial sector will lose its competitiveness and growth will be sub-par. Let me conclude. The future of financial services in Singapore is shining bright. Despite all the challenges facing the global economy, Asia remains the most dynamic region of growth in the world. This bodes well for the growth of our financial centre. Technology is transforming financial services. Singapore’s strong edge in technology positions the financial sector well for the future. Sustainability is emerging as an increasingly important area of focus. Singapore’s financial sector can play a key role in facilitating Asia’s transition towards a lowcarbon future. People and talent will be the key factors that will determine how far our financial centre seizes these opportunities. We must be relentless in our efforts to grow the Singaporean Core, continually upskilling our local talent pipeline to take on the exciting new jobs of the future.
4  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  4  considerably more changes that reduced rather than increased capital requirements. We do put a lot of weight on accountability of senior executives (re-enforced through our new Senior Insurance Managers Regime), risk and actuarial functions and good governance within firms. But without strong supervisory oversight of models, firms might relax assumptions, follow their competitors in adopting more aggressive approaches and interpret new data in a favourable light. Model complexity gives ample opportunities to do this. The reality is that firms have strong incentives to reduce capital requirements in order to report higher coverage ratios, increase return on regulatory capital and ultimately pay higher dividends. That is why we have put in place a framework to monitor the possibility that firms’ model estimates of capital will drift lower over time. I am aware that our model change process can sometimes leave a firm in the anomalous position of needing to change a model – for example, following a sudden change in circumstances such as a loss event or acquisition – but without having approval for the change. Firms can help in this by giving us timely and well presented information. Where we can change things in the PRA to speed the process, then we will do so. For example, our recent consultation on market turning events highlighted the importance of timely decision making in those types of circumstances. 7  Capital requirements are only one side of the equation.

According to a recent report of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Saudi Arabia emerged as the largest recipient of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Arab world in 2006, attracting $ billion in FDI, an increase of 51 percent over 2005. The global rating agencies Standards & Poors and Fitch have also raised the sovereign credit ratings of the Kingdom to A+. Also, Saudi Arabia has been upgraded according to the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index from 38th place to 23rd place in 2007. The Government has encouraged the establishment and growth of value-added industries in areas where the Kingdom has competitive advantages, namely, cheaper energy, strategic locations and availability of raw materials. King Abdullah has recently launched four megaeconomic cities in Rabigh, Hail, Al-Madinah and Jazan, which are expected to draw almost  BIS Review 150/2007  1  SR 300 billion in investment and create more than a million jobs. It is worthy to note that these economic zones are located in the less developed cities and in areas away from the existing economically developed regions and are specifically selected to ensure that development and employment opportunities are spread around the Kingdom. An important indicator of progress made in diversifying the economy is provided by the trend in our non-oil exports. Such exports were insignificant in early eighties, but they have been rising sharply in recent years. Since 2000, they have risen continuously.
Fritz Zurbrügg: Current developments in the financial markets Introductory remarks by Mr Fritz Zurbrügg, Member of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, at the media news conference of the Swiss National Bank, Berne, 19 June 2014. *  *  *  I will begin today by looking at the situation on the financial markets. Then I will discuss structural changes on the foreign exchange and money markets which are of importance for the SNB. I will close with a few comments on the progress that has been made in reforming benchmark interest rates. Situation on financial markets The positive sentiment on financial markets overall has continued since the beginning of the year. On the one hand, investors have been encouraged by the fact that economic recovery has continued on both sides of the Atlantic, even if it has been hesitant, as well as by mainly positive business results. On the other, the general low-interest-rate environment, with the accompanying search for yield by investors, is likely to have been a major factor. Nevertheless, this positive sentiment was put to the test on a number of occasions – for instance, in January, when signs of economic weakening and political risk in a number of emerging economies gave rise to considerable uncertainty, and again in March, when the political conflict in Ukraine intensified. The gradual tapering of the US Federal Reserve bond purchase programme, however, was taken quite calmly by market participants.

Through it, among other things, we not only influence on the economic agents’ expectations and behavior, but ensure our transparency, as well, which is especially important because the central bank is an independent institution, and independence goes hand in hand with accountability. After all, transparency and accountability are the fundamental principles underlying our operations – they guarantee the preservation of the confidence and integrity of the National Bank. Moreover, the public confidence in us and in our capacity to deliver macroeconomic and financial stability is a sine qua non to our success. The communication of central banks is a dynamic category. Several decades ago, globally, central banks were closed institutions whose communication was extremely complex – clear and close only to certain groups that knew central banking well. As FED’s former Chairman Alan, Greenspan’s once said: “If I’ve made myself too clear, you must have misunderstood me”. But today, we, the central banks, operate in a world of openness and clarity and tend to be understandable in our public speaking. Particularly significant changes in communication have been evident in the last ten years since the beginning of the global economic and financial crisis. And not just through greater openness in communication, but also in the way central banks present themselves in their releases. This is not surprising, since we all, during the crisis, faced with high uncertainty, mistrust, and we started using instruments outside the conventional set of instruments. With regard to these changes, I would particularly emphasize the ECB’s example.