samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
According to a recent article in The New York Times, the poor forecasting record of economists was a principal reason for such cutbacks. A re-examination of the results of a survey conducted by the author found another possible explanation for corporate disenchantment with their economists. It appears that many business economists have not furnished information that can be employed in business planning.”3 Neither the story of the young economist nor Casson’s findings should de-motivate those of you who think of venturing into business after university. There are two conclusions to be drawn. The first is: the professional quality of the business economist is important. But professional quality alone is not sufficient. Quality may easily be drowned in a flood of bad management following from an overcomplex organisation. This leads to a second conclusion: every young economist confronted with bad management has a choice. Albert O. Hirschman distinguishes two possibilities of reaction besides ‘loyalty’, i.e. keeping mum, namely ‘exit’ or ‘voice’.4 In my story the young economist decided to exit the corporation. This was fine because he made his way elsewhere. Had he chosen ‘voice’, i.e. had he stayed with the company and fought for its improvement he would have had a good chance of succeeding within the organisation instead of outside of it. Indeed, not a few of our young economist’s colleagues who stayed with this or similar companies and helped to drive them forward were duly rewarded. Today some of them are even on the companies’ boards. 5.

I must stress here that France has a specific advantage: its population is expected to keep on growing fast for some decades thanks to a relatively high fertility rate and a dynamic migration policy; while our German neighbours for instance are on a decreasing trend. Overall, based on European Commission projection trends, we estimate that the expected decline of 1.5% in the working age population in the European Union between 2010 and 2020 could take 1 percentage point off its potential output. But there are ways to offset this evolution. A rise in the participation rates of the young, seniors and women is one of them. Pension and labour market reforms implemented in Europe are certainly a step in the right direction and should be further pursued. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  Provided that the necessary reforms are implemented and that some changes in working habits are made, we expect that the euro area will be able to cope reasonably well with the expected fall in the population and working age population over the long run, notably in terms of the potential growth rate. Nevertheless, ensuring that public spending dynamics remain sustainable in the face of population ageing will continue to be a challenge, given the current debt situation in Europe. 2. Impact on savings and investment  How are savings likely to evolve, both in terms of levels and structure?
This development is rather unfortunate given the change in cycle facing the Spanish economy, as it may ultimately have an adverse effect on firms’ hiring decisions, accentuating the employment adjustment in a setting of macroeconomic uncertainty. But it is also inappropriate from the standpoint of its impact on inflation, at a time when this variable, as  2  BIS Review 44/2008  you know, is deteriorating sharply. In recent months, the growth rate of the consumer price index has exceeded 4.5%. Undeniably, the rising course of inflation, driven by the substantial increases in oil and agricultural commodity prices on international markets, is a phenomenon common to most economies. But in Spain these pressures are compounding a situation in which upward biases in cost and price formation persist, accentuating the risk of the deterioration in inflation spreading to the rest of the economy. With a view to the immediate future, the macroeconomic projections recently published by the Banco de España suggest national demand will continue to lose steam, in both its consumption and capital investment components. This is expected, however, to be partly offset by the improved contribution of the net external balance. In this setting, GDP growth is projected to stand at around 2.4% in 2008. As to the inflation outlook, the private consumption deflator will foreseeably increase to an average rate of 3.6%, albeit on a slowing path during the year. On numerous occasions the Banco de España has indicated that the Spanish economy has undergone far-reaching changes in recent years.

Miguel Fernández Ordóñez: Situation of the Spanish economy and financial sector Speech by Mr Miguel Fernández Ordóñez, Governor of the Bank of Spain, at the XV Financial Sector Meeting “The way forward for the Spanish banking business model”, Madrid, 15 April 2008. *  *  *  I shall be focusing today on the Spanish economy which, naturally enough, has been affected by the changes in the international environment prompted by the further slowdown in the US economy, the rising course of oil prices and the prolongation of the bout of financial turbulence. To this end, I shall begin with a brief reference to the situation in the United States and in Europe, focusing thereafter on the macroeconomic outlook for Spain in an attempt to define its degree of exposure to the international financial turbulence. Finally, I shall offer some economic policy considerations. It is in the United States that the deterioration in macroeconomic conditions has been most marked. The effects of the sharp adjustment in the US real estate sector have been amplified by the consequences of the instability in international financial markets, severely affecting business and household confidence. The outlook of most analysts for 2008 points to a strong deceleration in the first two quarters of the year, and even to a recession at some point along the line, although any more medium-term projection is shrouded in considerable uncertainty. In the euro area, some of the risks to continued economic dynamism progressively materialised during 2007.
This allows the value-added of each sector to be measured more or less directly. For example, gross output of a second-hand car dealer can be calculated as the cash value of all cars sold. The value added of that dealer would then be estimated by subtracting its intermediate consumption (the value of cars bought) from gross output. This is also the case for some of the services provided by the financial sector. 1 For example, investment banks charge explicit fees when they advise clients on a merger or acquisition. Fees or commissions are also levied on underwriting the issuance of securities and for the market-making activities undertaken for clients. But such direct charges account for only part of the financial system’s total revenues. Finance – and commercial banking in particular – relies heavily on interest flows as a means of payment for the services they provide. Banks charge an interest rate margin to capture these intermediation services. To measure the value of financial services embedded in interest rate margins, the concept of FISIM – Financial Intermediation Services Indirectly Measured – has been developed internationally. The concept itself was introduced in the 1993 update of the United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA). The SNA recognises that financial intermediaries  1  For further details refer to, for example, Akritidis L (2007). BIS Review 95/2010  3  provide services to consumers, businesses, governments and the rest of the world for which explicit charges are not made.

  Second, because banks are in the risk business it should be no surprise that the run-up to crisis was hallmarked by imaginative ways of manufacturing this commodity, with a view to boosting returns to labour and capital. Risk illusion is no accident; it is there by design. It is in bank managers’ interest to make mirages seem like miracles. Regulatory measures are being put in place to block off last time’s risk strategies, including through re-calibrated leverage and capital ratios. But risk migrates to where regulation is weakest, so there are natural limits to what regulatory strategies can reasonably achieve. At the height of a boom, both regulators and the regulated are prone to believe in miracles. That is why the debate about potential structural reform of finance is important – to lessen the burden on regulation and reverse its descent into ever-greater intrusiveness and complexity. At the same time, regulators need also to be mindful of risk migrating outside the perimeter of regulation, where it will almost certainly not be measured.   Third, finance is anything but monolithic. But understanding of these different business lines is complicated by the absence of reliable data on many of these activities. There are several open questions about the some of these activities, not least those for which returns appear to be high. This includes questions about the risks they embody and about the competitive structure of the markets in which they are traded.
Now, a few years ago the way we’d have investigated this would have been to get an analyst from our Policy Directorate to enter the mighty forest of UK financial regulation and hunt down any and all thresholds for our examination. However, last year – quietly and without great fanfare – our team started to turn this forest into a dataset better suited for textual analysis. I like to call this a machine-readable Rulebook but this upsets the experts in the PRA, so instead you should think of it as us having chopped up all of the rules into bite-sized elements and put each of those into a cell in a giant database. Our team is now publishing the code used for this effort, and a Staff Working Paper with early research findings from the data. One great benefit of this is that rather than tasking an unfortunate analyst with the Herculean endeavour of mapping all the thresholds, we are able to use a PRA robot to do the job instead.3 The PRA competition robot has returned from its daunting mission with interesting findings. First, there are 53 thresholds for deposit-takers, spread across all the main policy areas but with a concentration in capital (17), reporting (11) and remuneration (8).4 Second, 13 unique metrics are used to set thresholds. The most common, unsurprisingly, is simply assets – 26 of the 53. But even within these asset-based ones 16 different values are used to set the actual threshold.

It incorporated key aspects of flexible inflation targeting, a monetary policy framework that had gained wide acceptance around the world. This framework served us well, but the need for change was clear. In the past eight years, basic facts that shaped the original framework have fundamentally changed. First and foremost is the dramatic decline in the neutral interest rate, that is, the short-term interest expected to prevail when the economy is operating at its full potential and inflation is at its longer-run target. Since January 2012, FOMC participants’ median estimate of the neutral nominal rate has fallen by 1-3/4 percentage points, from 4.25 percent to 2.5 percent. A similar decline is seen in private sector forecasts and bond yields.2 This secular decline in interest rates is not limited to the United States—we’re seeing it across the globe—and it reflects longer-run trends in demographics, productivity, and other factors that are unlikely to reverse anytime soon.3 Lower neutral interest rates constrain the ability of monetary policy to offset negative shocks to the economy. This effect has been seen most clearly in the behavior of inflation. Over the past decade, inflation in the United States has been below our 2 percent longer-run target most of the time, and measures of inflation expectations have drifted down. These declines in trend inflation and inflation expectations can create a pernicious feedback loop of reduced policy space and even lower inflation expectations.
Third, it is necessary to implement the legislative program, which is not a matter of readiness with draft legal acts, but rather a matter of parliamentary procedures for discussion and adoption of the prepared legal acts. Next, in fourth place, are the tasks related to technical and logistical preparation. The banking sector has made relatively good progress and continues to work actively and systematically on this issue. The fifth group of tasks is related to the communication campaign, which must be launched without further delay and which will be an important factor in reaching both the messages and the answer to the specific questions to businesses and people. The success of the overall euro accession process will depend crucially on our ability to achieve political, institutional and fiscal consolidation. Thank you for your attention! 5/5  BIS - Central bankers' speeches

Considering this historical evidence for the euro area, even if gas prices have returned to levels close to those at the start of the war in Ukraine, the upward effects of gas prices on core inflation could still be significant in the short term. However, if the significant reduction in gas prices continues, it should be expected to gradually begin to trigger reverse transmission effects. Consequently, at the current 3  The remaining 30% is the part that the mo del canno t identify as a demand o r supply co mpo nent. It is an unexplained co mpo nent that sho uld not be given an interpretatio n under the appro ach used. 4  Bo rrallo , F., L. Cuadro -Sáez and J. J. Pérez (2022). “Rising food co mmodity prices and their pass-thro ugh to euro area co nsumer prices”, Analytical Articles, Economic Bulletin 3/2022, Banco de España. 5  Ló pez, L., S. Párraga and D. Santabárbara (2022). “The pass-thro ugh of higher natural gas prices to inflation in the euro area and in Spain”, Bo x 4, “Quarterly repo rt o n the Spanish eco no my”, Economic Bulletin 3/2022, Banco de España. 3  juncture, we could well be at some sort of crossroads, where the lagged effects of the past increases in commodity prices would still be present, but diminishing, and the first effects of the most recent decreases would be emerging and on the rise.
She then pivoted to a role in sustainability, advising clients on developing their sustainability strategies and carbon credit verification projects, a role that drew on her audit skills and new knowledge acquired from completing a master’s degree in Environmental Management. Edris is now Head of ESG Research at Maitri Asset Management overseeing the firm’s ESG investment framework. MAS, Workforce Singapore (WSG) and the Institute of Banking & Finance (IBF) have been working together to support more systematically such mid-career transitions to the financial sector. One key initiative is the Technology in Finance Immersion Programme (TFIP), which has seen promising results. 90% of the 2019 cohort who were from non-tech jobs completed the programme and have taken on good tech jobs in financial institutions. Another 530 are going through the programme from the 2020 and 2021 runs. I am pleased to say that IBF is launching the fourth run of this programme this year, with close to 700 training places – which is double the number offered last year. IBF and WSG will also launch a new Wealth Management Accelerator Programme (WMAP, pronounced as “We-MAP”). WMAP targets mid-career professionals with a passion for customer relationship management and an interest in pursuing a career in wealth management. The three-month programme will include structured and on-the-job training to provide participants with the skills to be licensed and hired into relationship management roles. Seven major retail banks are participating in this inaugural programme, to fill close to 200 job roles.

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.
We reason backward, “if the program were effective, this would not have happened.” I think this is natural and understandable for the enforcement community, but it is not necessarily good policy. To borrow an observation from Senator Ted Kennedy concerning the Federal sentencing guidelines, this creates “a risk that companies without substantial compliance programs will get a free ride, and those with strong programs will not receive the credit that they deserve.”3 Alternatively, if there were a reliable and acceptable measure of program effectiveness, this kind of backward reasoning would be replaced by reliance on the effective measure. Institutions could use the measure when making arguments for leniency, again assuming that the measure demonstrated that their programs were effective. It might, of course, show just the opposite. And there are other, perhaps even more important, benefits. If an industry and its regulators came to have great confidence in a particular effectiveness measure, this might provide a foundation for building a program that could be used to on-board risk. Put differently, a particular organization could have confidence that its ethics and compliance program would be protective because the program had been validated by a well-accepted measure of effectiveness. Some of the skeptics will say “you are dreaming”. When I hear them, I am reminded of the words of George Bernard Shaw, and specifically the reminder to dream things that never were and ask “why not”.4 4.

As creativity dissipates, so does the ability to connect related occurrences. In the next 20 years, we will need simultaneously to perform repeatable processes and to think innovatively. We will need to continue to build the routines and repeatable processes. Yet, we will also need to be sufficiently flexible to see around corners, to where new problems are  3  Remarks of the Honorable Edward M. Kennedy, U.S. Sentencing Commission, Symposium Proceedings: “Corporate Crime in America: Strengthening the ‘Good Citizen’ Corporation,” at 120 (1995). 4  George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah: In the Beginning, act 1, Selected Plays with Prefaces, vol. 2, at 7 (1949). 5  A survey sponsored by the Ethics Resource Center from 2011 “shows that employees in companies with effective, meaningful codes of conduct and programs... witness fewer incidents of misconduct, and are far more likely to report misconduct when observed.” Ethics Resource Center, supra note 2, at 2. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  emerging, and new risks to our franchises are developing. This is what it will take to be successful at the next level. 5. Attention at the top – developing protocols for escalation  I commend Fordham for focusing this symposium on compliance and governance. They are related and intertwined. The four items discussed all relate to compliance. My last item touches on governance. As I speak with chief ethics and compliance officers, a regular topic of conversation is conflict with the business leaders who own the risk.
Monetary policy  To summarise, at the monetary policy meeting in July we had a situation with rising inflation and inflation expectations together with growth coming to a standstill in Sweden and abroad. Such a situation brings central banks face to face with difficult decisions. Either they tighten monetary policy despite a slowdown in economic activity, or they accept a higher inflation rate. This was the choice we faced in July. Given the course of events outlined in the Monetary Policy Report, the Executive Board decided to raise the repo rate from 4.25 per cent to 4.50 per cent, and we assessed that a well-balanced monetary policy entailed raising the interest rate a couple more times over the year. Events since the previous meeting in April provided justification, in my opinion, for raising the interest rate and the interest rate path. The primary reasons were that inflation had increased and by more than we had previously expected, that inflation expectations had increased and were above the inflation target and that expectations of interest rates abroad had changed from falling to rising policy rates. We had revised our inflation forecast upwards for both this year and next year, despite the higher interest rates. However, this did not mean that I disregarded growth and employment. The Riksbank’s task is to ensure that inflation is low and stable. If we moreover can support growth and employment without neglecting the price stability target, we will do so.

Zeti Akhtar Aziz: Three trends and their post-crisis implications Speech by Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz, Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia, at the Inaugural Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) Global Lecture, Frankfurt, 1 March 2010. *  *  *  It is my great pleasure to be here in Frankfurt to participate in this inaugural OMFIF meeting, and to speak at this evening’s inaugural lecture at the Goethe University. These are significant times for policymakers and the financial industry. As we come out of the worst international financial crisis in decades, there still remain some unresolved issues that need to be addressed. The recovery has prompted focus on exit strategies and on the search for more permanent solutions that will put the financial system on a more solid foundation. These issues are however being considered during a period of exceptional conditions. Of concern, is that this might significantly influence the direction of the reform agenda with its medium and long term implications which could be counter to solutions that would lead us to a path of stability and sustainable growth. My remarks this evening will focus on three trends that are gaining significance in the global economy and the international financial system and their implications as we progress forward in this post crisis era.