samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Kristina Persson: The property market and the current economic situation Speech by Ms Kristina Persson, Deputy Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, Uppsala, 11 October 2005. *  *  *  Introduction Thank you for inviting me to take part in this early breakfast meeting. As you presumably know already, the issue of house prices has recently been on the agenda for discussions by the Riksbank’s Executive Board. So I thought I would begin by presenting my view of the role that indebtedness and house prices play in general for our monetary policy. Then I shall discuss whether there is a risk that the strong growth in lending and the rapid price increases in the housing market may accentuate a cyclical slowdown in the future. In conclusion I shall talk about the current economic situation in general in the run-up to our interest-rate decision next Wednesday. We are by no means the only central bank in the world that is discussing house prices. For a number of years now the rapid increase in house prices and the strong growth in credit to households have been on the agenda of monetary policy decision-makers in many countries. While the growth of lending has recently slackened in many countries, the level of household indebtedness is generally high. In Sweden the ratio of debt to disposable income is currently over 125 per cent, which is close to the levels that were reached in the early 1990s.

Among other things, the reports have presented assessments of whether the banks’ credit risk exposures, for instance to households in Sweden, could threaten financial stability. The assessments of inflation normally presuppose that no major problems will arise in the financial system ― credit supply, payment mediation and risk sharing are assumed to function normally. If financial stability were to be threatened, that would of course have to be taken into account when deciding on monetary policy. Our assessments  Households are not a direct threat to financial stability In the latest Financial Stability Report, published in June, the Riksbank stated that the risk of households incurring large loan losses for Swedish banks is very small. So the rapid growth we have seen in lending to households does not constitute a threat to financial stability. Although indebtedness has increased markedly in the past decade, low interest rates have lightened the burden of servicing debt. In aggregated terms, interest expenditure adds up to little more than 3 per cent of household income, which can be compared with over 10 per cent in the early 1990s. The debt-servicing burden of indebted households is low. Micro studies also show that indebted households in general have comfortable margins and would therefore cope with interest expenditure even with interest rates that are considerably higher than at present. Approximately 70 per cent of the loans have been obtained from mortgage institutions with the residential property as collateral.
And, in parallel, the various  4  flexibility mechanisms available to firms should be ensured, as their role is particularly useful for allowing potential structural adjustments derived from the crisis. Third, new measures should be taken in several areas, such as those relating to active labour market policies and to training for the unemployed and for temporarily furloughed workers. The aim of these measures would be to maintain their employability and smooth their reinsertion into sectors or firms with greater growth capacity. The suspension of face-to-face education risks prompting an adverse impact on students’ academic performance, particularly in lower-income households. Consequently, the education system requires mechanisms allowing students to acquire the necessary skills and qualifications, albeit in the absence of presence-based education. Likewise, there is a pressing need to review restructuring, insolvency and debt burden-relief processes for firms. Flexible and simplified administrative procedures must be set in place. Specifically, ailing debt-laden firms should have the capacity to move into a preventive framework enabling them to pursue their business activity while they are still viable. Fourth, a fiscal impulse should be added in the initial phases of the recovery, also giving support to the restructuring of our productive system. Here it would be advisable to prioritise the use of any future European recovery fund for specific investments that contract more at times of uncertainty and financial difficulty. Such is the case of investment in technological capital and in training.

Could our road system cope with trucks hauling containers all over the territory? And is this what we want for Hong Kong? 5. In fact, Hong Kong’s position as an intermediate trading hub for Mainland China’s external trade has become more prominent over the past decades. In 1979, our trade intermediation activities (including logistics industry) accounted for about 15% of GDP and rose to 20% in 1990. Since China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2001, direct competition from the Mainland has increased, but the pie has also grown much bigger. The total trade volume of the Mainland surged from $ billion in 2001 to $ trillion in 2013. And, while the percentage of trade being directly processed in Hong Kong has been trending downwards (from 30% to 10%) during the same period, the value of goods has risen  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  sharply from $ billion to more than $ billion. Taking into account the fastgrowing offshore trade, the total value of trade in goods handled by Hong Kong would jump from some $ billion to $ billion during the same period. This shows that the trade creation effect is much greater than the diversion effect. Hong Kong’s trade intermediation activities (including logistics industry) amounted to $ billion in 2012, accounting for 25% of our GDP and employing 770,000 workers (21% of the total workforce).
However, if energy resources and gold are excluded from the equation, raw material prices in dollar terms are at a similar level to the beginning of 2004. While the price of oil receded from its high-water mark in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to back within the region of USD 60 a barrel, the gold price is trading at a 24-year high of over USD 500 an ounce. A number of factors have contributed to this increase in price. The physical demand for gold has intensified significantly, rising by about 40% this year alone in India, which is the largest market. Increased demand at the central banks of emerging countries and in oil-producing countries is also being reported. Moreover, the currently low real interest rates push down the opportunity costs of interestfree investments, such as gold. Given, too, that the gold market is largely illiquid, even small shifts in demand can trigger serious price effects. In view of the fact that implicit inflation expectations are still firmly anchored – according to inflation-protected bonds and surveys – inflation fears can hardly be considered to be the main driver behind this gold price increase. SNB’s performance Taking into consideration the development of the gold price, the SNB yielded an average annual return of just below 1% on its assets between 1980 and 2005 (end of September). While interest-  BIS Review 86/2005  1  bearing assets posted a higher average yield during this period, the SNB had to settle for overall losses in gold.

François Villeroy de Galhau: The future of the finance industry between austerity and innovation Speech by Mr François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Bank of France, at the Süddeutsche Zeitung Finance Day 2017, Frankfurt am Main, 22 March 2017. * * * I am grateful to Marine Dujardin and Banque de France and ACPR staff for their assistance in preparing these remarks. It is a great pleasure to be with you today and I’d like to thank you sincerely for inviting me. I am here in Frankfurt as a committed European and as a friend of Germany; and not just because I travel here at least once a fortnight for the meetings of the ECB Governing Council! On a more personal level, I am French but my roots are in Saarland. My family has lived there since the end of the 18th century and its porcelain manufacturing company Villeroy & Boch is part of the German “Mittelstand”. But today, to discuss the future of the finance industry, I’m going to be talking in my capacity as a member of the Governing Council and President of the French supervisory authority (the ACPR, which I’m sure some of you know). First I would first to say a few words on the Eurosystem’s monetary policy and our latest decisions. Then I’ll share with you my thoughts on how to respond to the current challenges facing the finance industry.
The room for its policies directed towards micro and small business, household finance, rural sector finance is even wider. Thousands of micro and small enterprises, thousands of families have no access to financial services and products whatsoever, and most of those who do, cannot borrow under the existing borrowing costs and required collaterals. Some has already noticed: "one micro-financing loan could change the future of a family, few could change the future of a local community and thousands of such credits could make an enormous contribution to the development of the overall economy". This Fund will make its contribution to this purpose, since it offers long-term source of financing and because it is aimed at target groups the access of which to the financial injection is most difficult. Let us encourage them by noticing that they have wide opportunities to help them accomplish their mission. And, profit and development for the region. 2  BIS Review 25/2007

Parliament has enacted legislation to ensure there will be no doubt about the separation of retail activity in the major UK banking groups at the point of failure. The PRA now has the task of implementing that legislation to complete the work of making ring-fenced banks separable ex ante. Similar developments in the restructuring space are underway in other jurisdictions. The splitting off of domestic retail banks in Swiss G-SIBs and the requirement for large foreign banks in the United States to form Intermediary Holding Companies (IHCs) are examples. Another aspect being explored in resolution plans is the scope for orderly, solvent wind-down of trading books in investment banks in recovery or resolution. This goes to the general principle that it is important for us as resolution authorities to understand the options  7  6  Financial Stability Board (2015) ‘Guiding principles on the temporary funding needed to support the orderly resolution of a global systemically important bank (“G-SIB”)’. BIS central bankers’ speeches  we have to restructure critical functions if we need to in resolution. I can imagine that in time via planning in CMGs we will see more convergence in approaches in this area across jurisdictions. In conclusion, much has been done to achieve what is necessary to make G-SIB resolution work. TLAC is symptomatic of the distance travelled and represents a true game-changer.
Actually, the figure for the last moving quarter, February to April 2017 (25.9%) is a perfect match to the 2010-2017 average and significantly lower than the average from 1986 (27%) and of periods of economic crises (figure 6). Thus, the increase in self-employment has cushioned the decay of the labor market’s impact on the wage mass. The reduction of inflation has also helped, leading the wage mass to grow a little above the forecast, returning to a range between 2.5% and 3% annually. However, as detailed in the FS Report of the first half 2017, the evolution of the labor market may be influencing the repayment behavior of households, which has seen some deterioration recently. All in all, we foresee that total, private and public, consumption will grow around 2.5% this year and 3% next year. 3  Another determinant of consumption, such as credit cost, shows that cuts to the monetary policy rate (MPR) have been passing through to the interest rates. Beyond specific fluctuations due to composition effects, interest rates on consumer, commercial and mortgage loans are in low levels (figure 7). Despite some marginal improvement, credit growth remains tight, with supply-side and demand-side constraints combined. The former matter more for consumer and mortgage loans, in particular because of the higher risk associated to the labor market and the increase in some delinquency indicators, plus the effects of regulatory changes in the real-estate market.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the 2005 FinScope Survey conducted under the Financial Sector Development Plan (FSDP) confirmed that levels of access to financial services in Zambia are extremely low. Only one third of Zambia’s adult population was reported to have had access to a financial service or product. Further, fewer than 15% of adult Zambians were reported to have access to commercial banks. The Survey further indicated that only 11.6% of women are banked compared to 17.5% of banked men whilst 82% of women have never had a bank account compared to 73% for men. A follow on update survey was undertaken in 2009 and the results are expected to be launched during the second quarter of 2010. However, preliminary analysis indicates that the levels of access still remain low. This is no doubt an indication that more needs to be done to increase access to financial services. On its part, the Bank of Zambia has incorporated the promotion of financial inclusion as one of its strategic objectives for the 2008–2011 Strategic Plan. We believe that increased extension of financial services to ordinary citizens and small business enterprises will play a vital role in poverty reduction and economic growth. Further, by maintaining low inflation and promoting a safe and stable financial system, the Bank ensures that people’s incomes are safeguarded and prices of goods and services are stable.
Indeed, if prices are slow to adjust fully, there might even be a positive output gap, on this basis, for a time. The degree to which this is important hinges on how flexible firms’ prices are. The Bank’s recent survey on firms’ pricing practices indicated that, while price changes have become more frequent for many firms over the past decade, for some sectors and smaller firms a substantial minority will take more than six months to adjust prices, and therefore output, after a cost shock. 11 This suggests that the downward effect on supply might have been quite strong recently, following the oil price increases and fall in the exchange rate. It is very unlikely that this would be sufficient to alter the conclusion that presently the output gap is significantly negative, but it might affect interpretation of the effect of the output gap over the recent past, and judgements about how quickly the gap could be closed. And at the present conjuncture other considerations are also relevant. The key shock firms are facing is to the availability and cost of credit. Unlike a one-off shock to commodity prices, this will not have affected all firms at the same time, as the impact will be felt when a firm seeks to expand, or to replace investment. So the impact on supply capacity may build up over a longer period.

Robust growth now would also potentially have the benefit of reducing the likely erosion of the economy’s supply capacity – the more quickly growth is resumed, the less skills will be eroded and the capital stock effectively run down. The longer-term outlook for growth is therefore improved. This is indeed a powerful reason for continuing to focus on the two-year horizon, and one which seems to trump the considerations around the lags in the policy process and worries about inflation expectations. But it is not the only relevant longer-term consideration. I argued earlier that in the period running up to the financial crisis, it might have been beneficial if policy had taken more explicit account of how it was contributing to imbalances in the economy. And there may be risks in the present circumstances in driving growth up quickly in the UK, if the global economy, and particularly our major trading partner, the EU, experiences a somewhat sluggish recovery. Slow growth elsewhere would make it more difficult for the UK to achieve an improvement in the external balance. The UK’s external sector has so far perhaps had a rather disappointing response to the depreciation of sterling. Manufacturing output in the UK has not, so far, performed any better in the early stages of recovery than has the US, Germany or France. Recent surveys do suggest that export orders are improving (for example, the February 2010 CIPS/Markit survey of manufacturing suggested that export orders grew at their fastest pace since the survey began in 1996).
Low levels of production in Iraq have contributed to holding up oil prices. Strikes and production problems in Venezuela and Nigeria have also played a role. These developments may keep oil prices high until growth in the global economy returns to normal. The oil industry will then have come through this period of sluggish growth in the global economy since 2000 without a fall in revenues. This has, in isolation, curbed the effects of the international downturn on Norway. However, the situation, as a whole and with regard to oil prices, is still highly uncertain. Weak external developments have in particular had negative spillover effects on the Norwegian economy through the appreciation of the krone, the fall in equity prices last year and lower demand for Norwegian exports. The krone exchange rate is the price of our currency measured in terms of a foreign currency. Developments in other countries are just as important for the krone as developments in the Norwegian economy. The krone has been strong. As a result, prices for imported goods have fallen. This has contributed to low inflation despite strong wage growth over a period of several years. Our analyses indicate that the most important reason for the appreciation of the krone from May 2000 to the end of 2002 was the positive and widening interest rate differential. Combined with the interest rate differential, the fall in equity prices and reduced fluctuations, or volatility, in foreign exchange markets contributed to the appreciation of the krone last year.

Lars Nyberg: Towards a new European supervisory structure Speech by Mr Lars Nyberg, Deputy Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at SIFMA's annual meeting, New York, 27 October 2009. *  *  *  Ladies and gentlemen Let me start by saying that I consider it a great honour to have been invited to speak to you today. We work in different parts of the world, but I think that the crisis that we are now struggling to get out of has shown, for good and bad, that the financial system has brought us closer together than ever before. Over the course of last year, there is one sentence that has really burnt into my brain. It was delivered by Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, who has a great talent for one-liners. He concluded on one occasion, somewhat disillusioned after having dealt with the failure of a number of cross-border institutions, that “global banks are international in life but national in death”. And indeed he is right. We have banks and other financial institutions that work all across the globe. But when they get into trouble the instruments for safeguarding financial stability essentially remain fragmented along national borders. This geographical mismatch is something that the regulators will have to deal with, one way or the other. And to put it bluntly, from a policy perspective it basically boils down to a choice between two paths.
We have a fintech industry which 2  employs over 60,000 people. This success is not limited to London; centres of excellence exist across the country including Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh and Cambridge (where Sir Dave Ramsden is today chairing a fintech roundtable). Innovation is not the preserve of those in the fintech sector; the banking industry as a whole is making system-wide changes to improve how it serves the people of the UK. The Bank is also no stranger to innovation and in my previous role as Chief Cashier I oversaw the introduction of the new cleaner, safer and stronger five pound and ten pound notes. We decided not to build the renewed RTGS on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), wanting to first see greater proof of resilience and scalability. However, we are keen to facilitate the use of new technologies and we are working to deliver a service that has the capability to interact with DLT systems should demand emerge. The Bank has recently concluded a Proof of Concept (PoC) with a number of fintech firms on this topic. The purpose of this PoC was to (a) understand how RTGS could be capable of supporting settlement in systems operating on innovative payment technologies. (b) To understand the limitations that such systems might need to navigate.

Market capitalisation of domestic bond markets more than doubled over the past nine years - from an average of 20% of combined GDP in 1995 to 47% in 2003. During the same period, the combined share of bond markets in total financing grew from 11% to 19%. Bond markets are, therefore, a growth industry. Quite apart from the considerable initiatives by the private sector, bond market development has been a particular target of initiatives by governments and multilateral agencies. There are good reasons for this. My intention in this short address is to set out briefly these reasons - to put the case for an Asian bond market - and then to examine some of the work that is in progress in this field, particularly from the point of view of the central banks. The need for an Asian bond market The underdeveloped state of the Asian bond market - compared with the bond markets in the industrialised economies - has been well documented in recent years. Despite the impressive growth of the size of the Asian bond market that I have just mentioned, it still lags behind the developed economies in terms of breadth and depth. For example, the market capitalisation of the domestic bond market in the US, the UK and Japan is equivalent to over 150% of the GDP compared with just 47% in ex-Japan Asia. Activity in the secondary market is also relatively low.