samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The central banks that target inflation can be said to have three main approaches. •  One alternative is to assume that the exchange rate will be unchanged during the forecast period, quite simply to adopt a cut-off rate. This, however, raises a number of problems. As exchange rates are liable to shift rather rapidly and the assumed rate is of considerable importance for the forecast rate of inflation, this approach may entail sudden changes in the assessment of inflation and thereby in the repo rate. Another problem is the risk of being trapped in a game situation with the market. So there are sound reasons for not resorting to a more short-term pattern of reactions. Sooner or later, other central banks have generally come to the same conclusion. •  Another alternative is to base an exchange rate forecast on market pricing or other assessments of market expectations. This approach, which is used by a number of central banks, reduces but does not eliminate the risks associated with rapid fluctuations and speculation. Another problem here is that the picture of expectations is liable to vary with how they are measured. On the other hand, this approach has the advantage of presumably being most credible in the eyes of market players; it is, after all, based on their assessments! •  The Riksbank has chosen a third alternative, which is to make an independent assessment. Here the initial position - the cut-off rate - is naturally one important component and so are the market’s expectations.

To promote regional connectivity on a sustained basis, it is vital that we strive to strengthen all these key aspects by joining forces of both the government and the private sector. Let me now address each of them one by one. The first and most fundamental is the physical infrastructure connectivity, for instance, through transportation channels, power lines and digital channels. The work to connect physical infrastructure will always be a work in progress. The past two decades have seen the fruits of various projects to close “missing links” in road, rail, waterway, and energy networks in the GMS. 19 permanent border crossing points have been established to connect Thailand with Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia. Energy connection within the subregion has been strengthened. Thailand, for example, bought 314 million USD worth of electricity from Laos each year, increasing about 8 times over the past ten years. A frequency of flights within the GMS, especially by low-cost airlines, has also risen markedly. Nevertheless, we still need to do a lot more to be better connected with each other. Many roads remain not fully operationalized or underutilized. Road transportation in the GMS is not seamless as it should be. In some routes, large trucks carrying containers still have to offload their goods to smaller vehicles to navigate the roads. Also, cross-border procedures remain obstacles to easy access of goods and people. Apart from building new infrastructure, it is therefore equally important to ensure that the existing ones are fully utilized to their potentials.
16  Gráfico 13 Mundo: Proyecciones contenidas en los últimos IPoM  Precios efectivos y proyecciones (1) (2) (índice; dólares el barril; dólares la libra) Series3 IPoM Sep.22 IPoM Jun.22  (variación anual, porcentaje)  Mar.21 Mar.22  6  Jun.21 Jun.22  Sep.21 Sep.22  Dic.21  5 3  5  1  4  16  17  18 19 20 Petróleo IPoM Jun.22  21  22 23 24 IPoM Sep.22  16  17  18 19 20 Índice FAO IPoM Sep.22  21  22 23 24 IPoM Jun.22  16  17  21  22  125  3  75  02  02 25  2  160  1  120  0  80  22  23  18  19  20  23  24  (1) Para el petróleo es el precio promedio entre el barril WTI y Brent. Para alimentos es el índice FAO. (2) Precio/índice efectivo corresponde al promedio de cada año. Líneas punteadas corresponden a las proyecciones 2022-2024 contenidas en cada IPoM. Fuentes: Banco Central de Chile, Bloomberg y FAO. Fuente: Banco Central de Chile.

Pelan Induk tersebut menggariskan beberapa inisiatif penting yang bertujuan meningkatkan kuasa pengguna, di samping meningkatkan kefahaman mereka tentang hak, dan tanggungjawab kewangan masing-masing. Ianya juga akan membolehkan pengguna membuat keputusan yang bijak, demi kesejahteraan mereka. Usaha meningkatkan tahap celik kewangan di kalangan pengguna sentiasa diberi keutamaan oleh Bank Negara Malaysia. Sejak tahun 1996, beberapa inisiatif telah diperkenalkan untuk meningkatkan tahap celik kewangan, dan memupuk kemahiran pengurusan kewangan yang baik di kalangan pelbagai kumpulan sasar. Kesukaran pengguna mendapat akses kepada maklumat sering menyebabkan pengguna tidak mendapat maklumat yang secukupnya bagi membolehkan mereka membuat keputusan yang bijak. Pada tahun 2003, Bank Negara Malaysia dengan kerjasama institusi kewangan, telah melancarkan satu rancangan 10 tahun Program Pendidikan Pengguna yang melibatkan sektor perbankan dan insurans. Program tersebut bertujuan meningkatkan akses kepada maklumat oleh pengguna serta meningkatkan kesedaran pengguna tentang hak dan tanggungjawab mereka. Ianya juga bertujuan untuk memperdalamkan pengetahuan pengguna tentang konsep dan operasi perbankan Islam serta produk dan perkhidmatan takaful yang ditawarkan oleh institusi kewangan. Dalam hal ini, lamanlaman web InfoPerbankan dan InfoInsurans telah memainkan peranan penting dalam meningkatkan kesedaran pengguna. Sehingga kini, laman web tersebut telah mendapat sambutan yang menggalakkan dengan jumlah pelawat mencecah 17.6 juta. Di samping itu, lebih 4.2 juta naskhah buku penerangan kecil telah diedarkan kepada pengguna. Peningkatan maklum balas yang kami terima daripada pengguna mencerminkan tahap kesedaran pengguna. Ladies and gentlemen, In addition to the focus on financial literacy and awareness among consumers, considerable efforts have also been made to strengthen the consumer protection infrastructure.
Investment was still able to reach record levels because the additional capital could be borrowed from investors abroad who willingly placed their money in U.S. securities in the expectation that the good times would continue. That explains why the U.S. current account has been able to run up a gigantic deficit, currently equivalent to almost 5 per cent of GDP, at the same time as the dollar has appreciated strongly. Even with rapidly rising productivity, the rate of economic growth became incompatible with long-term stability. In order to dampen activity, the Federal Reserve started to apply the brakes in summer 1999, raising the instrumental rate in a series of steps, totalling 1.75 percentage points, to 6.5 per cent. The setbacks were not long in coming. Last year the value of the Nasdaq exchange was virtually halved. Profit warnings have been pouring in, firms are shedding labour, banks have tightened their lending, consumer confidence is weakening and unemployment is tending to rise. Manufacturing output has virtually stopped growing. In the course of a month the Federal Reserve has lowered the interest rate 1 percentage point to 5.5 per cent and market agents are counting on further cuts this spring. We now have to consider what is actually happening. Is this just a temporary correction after a period of undue optimism that has led, for example, to surplus investment and will now be followed by a fairly mild and gradual slowdown?

Helping to develop deep and liquid euro markets is arguably the main contribution that we in the UK can make to the success of the euro from the 'outside'. And in this sense, the UK has been making a positive and constructive contribution. Deep and liquid euro markets have become well established in London. They have replaced the previous, more segmented, markets in the old national currencies (like the Deutsche mark and the French franc). As a result, the European Union has begun to achieve one of its objectives in introducing a single currency in place of the old national currencies. The City is pioneering the changes in the euro markets The volatility in the euro exchange rate has diverted attention from the structural changes taking place in the euro markets. Yet these changes are of fundamental importance. They will affect all businesses using the euro - Japanese businesses as much as UK and euro area businesses. I would like briefly to mention five of these structural changes. It is of course important to recognise, as I do so, that while the euro has been the catalyst for these changes it is not the only cause. But in each case, the City of London has been playing a leading role as a centre of innovation and excellence. The first change is the growth of euro issuance - particularly in the private sector, as the financing needs of euro-area governments are limited by fiscal discipline and special influences, such as the proceeds of mobile phone auctions.
In such a case, a review of that regulatory policy may be necessary. There is no one-size-fits-all supervisory answer. It simply means that as regulators, we need to keep abreast with technological developments. Only then, can we exercise thoughtful judgment. The fact that many financial regulators including the MAS have allowed regulatory sandboxes to be set up highlights a preparedness to allow innovative financial models to first be tested within defined parameters. Harnessing technology to strengthen supervision 21 There is a growing area of technology use that will be directly relevant to financial supervision – Regulatory Technology (or RegTech). This is the use of advanced technology systems and algorithms to enhance risk management and regulatory compliance. 22 Many financial institutions have embraced RegTech, such as: Predictive analytics being used in stress testing; Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning-powered systems to identify money laundering risks; and Cognitive computing and behavioural algorithms to detect suspicious trading and possible misconduct. 23 On the supervisor’s end, the MAS is developing our own ‘SupTech’ to improve and sharpen our surveillance and analytical capabilities. Since about a year ago, we have set up a dedicated unit for SupTech within our Data Analytics Group. 24 The aim is to make greater use of technology and “smart tools” to guide our financial surveillance and supervision functions. To do so, building the infrastructure for our data analytics projects is important. We are putting in place an MAS Private Cloud. This will serve as the foundation to provide computing power to all data analytics projects in MAS.

Both the force and speed of action has increased substantially. But all of this concerns how one can avoid crises, not how they should be managed once they occur. Nor did the Larosière group discuss, other than marginally, crisis management or winding up insolvent banks. However, the European Commission’s newly-published proposal does deal with this, and so do new UK and US legislation that have arisen since the crisis. This is, of course, an important step in the right direction. Greater clarity with regard to how banks should be wound up will to a great extent affect both how the supervision is designed and how the banks act. As I said, it is wise to begin at the other end.11 …but difficult with cross-border agreements However, the focus in the legislation, naturally enough in the UK and US legislation, but also the European proposal, is on how to manage national banks in distress. The cross-border problems are avoided to a great extent, even in the Commission’s report. The fact that an integrated financial system in Europe also requires methods to resolve cross-border crises remains to be discussed. And of course this is connected to what I mentioned earlier, namely that it is much too sensitive an issue to discuss how the costs should be divided. 10  The supervisory heads do not have the right to vote in the ESRB. A 2/3 majority is required for recommendations and decisions on publishing warnings and recommendations.
In the monetary sphere, that takes the form of purchases from the private sector of longer-term public and private securities, financed by issuing claims on the central bank. As we saw in Charts 1 and 2, both the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve have made substantial large-scale asset purchases, worth about 15% of GDP in each case. The aim of such purchases is to drive down the yields on these and similar assets by increasing their scarcity, so boosting demand. Commonly referred to as “quantitative easing”, the moniker is somewhat misleading as it focuses attention on the associated reserve expansion, rather than the change in the portfolio composition of the central bank and private sector. But do they work? Under Ricardian equivalence the answer would be No, as the associated transfer of risks from private sector balance sheets onto the public sector’s is matched by offsetting movements in future taxes (Gauti Eggertson and Woodford, 2003). Be that as it may, event studies by Joe Gagnon and others (2010) for the United States, and Mike Joyce and others (2010) for the United Kingdom suggest that long-term bond rates in each jurisdiction fell by around 100 basis points as a result of the purchase programmes, though the ultimate impact on aggregate demand is harder to judge. From this I draw my fourth lesson: central banks do not run out of ammunition when policy rates reach their zero lower bound.

Moreover, the optimal monetary policy in these models looks rather like flexible inflation targeting: the central bank aims to offset completely shocks to aggregate demand, but accepts temporary movements in inflation in the face of shocks to supply so as to limit the volatility in output. Financial intermediaries are conspicuous by their absence in these models. That is not to say that mainstream macroeconomists and monetary policy makers ignored financial considerations altogether. It had been long understood that financial frictions could affect both the evolution of the economy and the monetary transmission mechanism. But these frictions typically served merely as modest amplification and propagation mechanisms, rather than a potential source of fundamental disturbance to the economy. One example is the “financial accelerator” arising from monitoring costs which give rise to a relationship between the external finance premium paid by a borrower and their financial health (see Ben Bernanke, 1983). The behaviour of intermediaries was thus seen as being of marginal relevance to the understanding of macroeconomic fluctuations. And many analyses ignored financial imperfections altogether, assuming that that the transfer of funds from savers to borrowers was both frictionless and efficient. To see why the behaviour of financial intermediaries is potentially so important, note that most financial crises have been characterised by two features. The first is an excessive expansion of credit during the prelude to a crisis, perhaps prompted in the first instance by some innovation4 or other beneficial economic development.
The subsequent path is somewhat uneven as the VAT cut is reversed next January, but the broad picture is for inflation to continue to run well below the target in the medium term, as the downward pressure from the substantial margin of spare capacity outweighs the waning impact on import and consumer prices of the lower level of sterling. So the Monetary Policy Committee will probably need to take further action to return inflation to the target in the medium term. That is a discussion we will no doubt have at future meetings. Before finishing, I want briefly to reflect on what this crisis means for the UK’s macroeconomic policy framework. For 16 years, the inflation targeting framework worked pretty well, delivering steady growth and low and stable inflation. In particular, the United Kingdom managed to come through the Asia/LTCM crisis of 1997-8 and the aftermath of the dot-com bust in 2001-3 relatively unscathed. But plainly it hasn’t prevented things coming unstuck now. What has gone wrong? This recession is rather different from its three large post-war predecessors, each of which was associated with policy actions to curtail an inflationary boom that had got out of hand. On this occasion, the boom was not in the market for goods and services, as the data on growth, unemployment and inflation bear witness. Rather it was associated with a debtdriven boom in asset prices, including property. But the bust has not been confined to asset markets and has instead infected the real economy of businesses and jobs.

In part, the problem stems from a failure of imagination. A number of bodies identified the vulnerabilities that were building up as a result of the accumulation of debt. Indeed, in 2006 our own Financial Stability Report highlighted many of the risks which have subsequently crystallised. And we debated these vulnerabilities at meetings of the Monetary Policy Committee on various occasions. But no-one really foresaw the virulence with which the crisis would unfold and the route it would take. But even if we had, would it have made sense to have tried to curtail the accumulation of debt by holding Bank Rate at a substantially higher level, particularly during the 2004-7 period? Aside from the fact that this would probably not have shielded us from a severe downturn – countries around the world that did not experience rapid credit expansion have still slowed sharply – it would just have implied markedly slower growth and higher unemployment at an earlier stage. Is that the price we want to pay to curtail excessive exuberance in the financial sector? My answer would be an unequivocal No. Instead, with two objectives – macroeconomic stability and systemic financial stability – we need to complement Bank Rate with another tool that is more directly focussed on the source of the problem. That tool is so-called macro-prudential regulation, under which banks and other systemically important financial institutions would be subject to balance sheet constraints that reflect the vulnerabilities to the economy that may be building.
• In recognition of such trends, the Singapore Exchange (“SGX”) has introduced a “comply or explain” regime for sustainability reporting in 2017, where listed companies are required to disclose and explain their sustainability practices. • ASEAN governments have also imposed regulatory drivers, to assist companies with identifying gaps and areas for improvements in their sustainability eworts [7] . For example, in the mining and minerals sectors, companies are subject to commonly-agreed-upon regional guidelines for assessing and reporting on the awected environment. 15 Đ Đ We are heartened that the WFE has taken the lead in advancing the sustainability agenda in two particular areas: • First, the integration of sustainability with commodity derivatives. The WFE has published a white paper that explores how commodity derivatives exchanges could create new mitigation or investment tools that respond to environmental challenges, and incorporate sustainability elements into existing contracts; Đ • Second, the adoption of sustainable practices and principles. The WFE has partnered the United Nations Sustainable Stock Exchanges to set out a  blueprint to support exchanges in embedding sustainability in their operations. 16 Đ Đ Overall, these eworts will drive wider discussions on sustainability as well as provide guidelines on how WFE members could adopt relevant sustainable practices and principles in their strategies for growth and operations.

Cecilia Skingsley: A year of negative interest rates. Where do we stand now? Speech by Ms Cecilia Skingsley, Deputy Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at Danske Bank, Stockholm, 7 April 2016. *  *  *  Thank you to Christina Nyman, Ulf Söderström, Charlotta Edler, Marianne Sterner, Emil Brodin and Anders Vredin for useful comments and assistance. Thank you for inviting me here today. I intend to talk about three issues: Is it possible to conduct a national monetary policy in a complicated international environment? How has Swedish monetary policy been conducted in recent years? What considerations should govern our choice of future path? Is it possible to conduct a national monetary policy in a complicated international environment? I believe that most people will recognise the description of growth and the recovery following the global financial crisis as being a disappointment in most countries. In many cases the setbacks have been severe and prolonged, for instance, in southern Europe, while in other cases growth has been positive but low. Many central banks, wishing to live up to their price stability commitments, have implemented more far-reaching and long-term measures to stimulate monetary policy than have previously been imagined as possible. So how did we get to where we are now, with such low interest rates? In the long run, it is structural factors such as the conditions for growth and the willingness to save that determine the level of the real interest rate.
Solvency II one year in Speech given by David Rule, Executive Director of Insurance Supervision  Association of British Insurers, London 21 February 2017  1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  We are approaching the first round of annual results and disclosures under Solvency II. Today, I want to recap how Solvency II was designed to work for the UK insurance industry; to look back on our approach to implementation and experience of operating the Solvency II framework in the first year of its life; and to pick out a few areas where we now know that Solvency II needs improvement, in particular the impact the current design of the risk margin is having on UK annuity writers’ Solvency Capital Requirements (SCRs) and associated use of so-called Transitional Measures on Technical Provisions, which firms will be disclosing over the next few months. My focus will be life insurance, although I will touch on general insurance too along the way. First, some history. Prior to Solvency II, the UK regulatory regime for insurance had been designed by the Financial Services Authority in the early 2000s. One of its primary aims was to address the lessons from the near failure of Equitable Life in 2000. That company’s problems crystallised when it emerged it had insufficient funds to meet guaranteed rates on annuities. It lost a House of Lords court case brought by policyholders with these guarantees, leaving it with a liability of £ billion and forcing its closure to new 1  business.

But we think it is leading to a better market outcome than if we had interpreted Solvency II very narrowly and limited the Matching Adjustment to, for example, long-dated, fixed rate sterling bonds, such as gilts. That could have led to higher annuity rates for UK policyholders whereas, in fact, there is no clear evidence that the introduction of Solvency II has affected UK annuity rates  7  ‘Dealing with a market turning event in the general insurance sector’ - CP32/16, Prudential Regulation Authority. DIRECTIVE 2009/138/EC (Solvency II), Article 77b (1): Insurance and reinsurance undertakings may apply a matching adjustment […]where the following conditions are met: (a) the insurance or reinsurance undertaking has assigned a portfolio of assets, consisting of bonds and other assets with similar cash-flow characteristics, to cover the best estimate of the portfolio of insurance or reinsurance obligations […] (h) the cash flows of the assigned portfolio of assets are fixed […] 8  5  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  5  (see the Appendix). The overwhelming driver of sterling annuity rates over recent years has been the level of risk-free interest rates. I am well aware that some still see the Matching Adjustment as complex and too restrictive. As I have said earlier, we have sought to interpret the requirements as flexibly as we are able within the current legal requirements. We remain open to suggestions that fit within the current legal structure.