samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
It is well understood among all the members of the FOMC that allowing inflation to gain a foothold is a losing game with large costs and few, if any, benefits. In this regard, some have argued that Fed officials might be reluctant to raise short-term rates because such increases would squeeze the net interest margin on the Fed’s System Open Market Account (SOMA) portfolio. Although it is true that a rise in short-term interest rates would reduce the Fed’s net income from the extraordinary high levels seen in 2009 and 2010, 4 this will not play a significant role in the Fed’s monetary policy deliberations. Fed policy is driven by the objectives set out in the dual mandate, and the net income earned by the Fed is the consequence of the policy choices that advance those objectives. The Federal Reserve’s net income statement does not drive or constrain our policy actions. In short, we act as a central bank, not an investment manager. It is also worth pointing out in passing that a failure to raise short-term interest rates at the appropriate moment based on our dual mandate objectives would also be a losing strategy with respect to net income. Inflation would climb, bond yields would rise and the Fed would ultimately be forced to raise short-term rates more aggressively, or to sell more assets at lower prices to regain control of inflation. This would almost certainly result in larger reductions in net income than a timelier exit from the current stance of monetary policy.

Recent evidence shows that the large amount of slack in the economy has contributed to disinflation over the past couple of years. This can be seen in the steady decline in core inflation between mid-2008 and the end of 2010. As shown in Chart 18, core PCE inflation in December had risen at just 0.7 percent on a year-over-year basis, down from 2.5 percent in mid-2008. Slack in our economy is still very large, and this will continue to be a factor that acts to dampen price pressures. Nevertheless, there are several reasons why we need to be careful about inflation even in an environment of ample spare capacity. First, commodity prices have been rising rapidly (Chart 19). This has already increased headline inflation relative to core inflation, and the commodity price changes that have already taken place will almost certainly continue to push the headline rate on year-over-year basis higher over the next few months. Second, some of this pressure could feed into core inflation. Third, medium-term inflation expectations have recently risen back to levels consistent with our dual mandate objectives (Chart 20). If medium-term inflation expectations were to move significantly higher from here on a  1  However, growth alone will not resolve the longer-term problem of the disparity between promises made to state and local workers in terms of their public employee pension and health benefits and the resources set aside to pay for those benefits.
I can see, unfortunately, a couple of reasons why inflation may remain higher than we have hoped and why the price increases might continue to spread. Firstly, only half of the increase in the inflation rate could be explained by temporary effects. Many prices have risen more than expected. This is probably due to resource utilisation in the economy being relatively high as demand was sufficiently high to enable implementation of price increases. The fact that competition is weak in certain sectors probably reinforces this, which facilitates passing on the costs to the consumers. A further sign is that the increase in employment has been good. There has been an adjustment downwards in working hours rather than in the number of jobs. The division on the labour market, with increases in employment in sectors less exposed to competition has meant that wages have risen more than expected. Thanks to expansive fiscal and monetary policy,  BIS Review 13/2002  5  unemployment is expected to rise only marginally. As economic activity appears to be increasing during 2002, it is difficult to imagine that the pressure on the labour market will decline significantly. Secondly, my personal opinion is that it is possible that inflation expectations, reflected as an acceptance of price rises, may have increased. I believe that the temporary price rises that have occurred have clouded our view and it has been possible to undertake more price rises under cover of these.

But despite the uncertainties surrounding DLT’s potential, we want to be prepared for a scenario where market players adopt DLT for wholesale payments and securities settlement. We must ensure that, in such a scenario, central bank money would still retain its role as the settlement asset for wholesale transactions. If, for example, market players start to use DLT for securities settlement but face difficulties using TARGET Services[10], they may turn to alternatives like commercial bank money or stablecoins. This would entail a number of risks, such as central bank money having a reduced role in settlement processes, as well as trading and liquidity becoming fragmented. The result would be payments and securities settlement becoming less safe and less efficient, which would undermine financial stability. The use of stablecoins would magnify these risks. As we have seen in recent months, stablecoins are prone to runs. In other words, they are stable in name only. And allowing them to be fully backed with central bank money would effectively outsource the provision of central bank money to private entities, endangering monetary sovereignty. [11] A shift away from central bank settlement systems would also imply that authorities would lose direct access to settlement data. This could slow the speed of intervention in the event of settlement bottlenecks and impair the analysis of financial stability. The Eurosystem is therefore exploring ways in which market participants who adopt DLT could interact with the TARGET Services to settle the euro cash leg of their transactions in central bank money.
It was a risk about which bank management, investors, regulators and supervisors were all myopic. The socalled Fundamental Review of Trading Book Capital Requirements is, as Adair said, a very important opportunity to correct this. 5  See the Bank’s paper: “The role of macroprudential policy: A discussion paper”, November 2009 and Tucker P M W (2009e), “The debate on financial system resilience: Macroprudential instruments” at the Barclays Annual Lecture in London. 6  Tucker P M W (2010), “Shadow Banking, Financing Markets and Financial Stability”, Speech at a BCG Partners Seminar. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  What that amounts to in practice is recognising that the degree of resilience of market liquidity matters a lot. I have been arguing that a market’s liquidity is unlikely to be resilient if demand is dominantly from leveraged investors and traders. They buy when prices are rising, but stop buying or even sell when the price stops going up, leaving prices without a firm underpinning – and often with prices perched on a precipice. That element of recent events is missing from Shleifer’s set up, but in the real world it is precisely what we might expect if one joins up his story about innovation induced by myopia with Hyun Shin’s earlier paper7 about the association of leverage and asset-prices fluctuations. If securities are fundamentally mispriced because of blindness to a type of risk and, further, are held dominantly by leveraged players, the adjustment when it comes will be all the greater.

Mojmír Hampl: Life outside the Eurozone Speech by Mr Mojmír Hampl, Vice Governor of the Czech National Bank, at the 5th A/symmetrie (Italian Association for the Study of Economic Asymmetries) conference "Euro, market, democracy", Montesilvano, Italy, 13 November 2016. * * * Ladies and gentlemen, Good morning. Many thanks to Alberto Bagnai for kindly inviting me to speak at this event today. And many thanks to you all, to this audience. It is my first time here and I must say I am really impressed that so many people are willing to invest their effort, money and whole weekend (literally two days) in actively listening to debates on many – sometimes rather abstract – macroeconomic topics. That is truly amazing and at the same time encouraging. Believe me, many people I know are unable to concentrate on presentations even during their working hours in the office, even though they are actually being paid to do so by their employer. So my applause goes to you and to Alberto for mobilising you. Great job. Ladies and gentlemen, The downside of my presentation today is that I am a part of the monetary establishment – of the disliked club of central bankers. That means a thumb down for me in your eyes. The upside – and what saves me today – is that I’m a policy-maker not in your monetary zone, in the Eurozone, but in the Czech monetary zone, where we pay with our own currency, the Czech crown.
Firstly, inflation has been low and stable. Measured in terms of the CPIF, it has been at 1.8 per cent since 1995, and volatility has been low. Inflation has been so low and stable that the inflation target has sometimes been questioned. However, the question leads to some circular reasoning and rather reflects the fact that the inflation target has worked well. One purpose of the target is precisely that inflation should be so low and stable that changes in it need not be taken into consideration when planning to consume or invest. However, when inflation has been so low for a long time that households and businesses do not have to think about it, it is easy to see this as a natural condition that has arisen ‘by itself’ rather than as a result of a consistent policy. Diagram 2. Historical CPIF Annual percentage change  Note. Inflation outcomes for the period before 2005 are calculated in accordance with the method used in real time during this period. The red broken line shows the average for the period 1981-1992 (7.4%) and 1995-July 2022 (1.8%). Sources: Statistics Sweden and the Riksbank. Secondly, real wages have developed positively. From the mid-1970s and about twenty years onwards, wages remained virtually still in real terms, that is, in terms of purchasing power. Although nominal wage increases were high, they were eaten up when inflation rose correspondingly. After 1995, however, we had a clear trend increase in real wages.

For instance, the 2019 UN Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)5 reminds us that human activity caused a catastrophic decline in Earth’s biodiversity (e.g. the current rate of extinction of species is between 100 and 1,000 times higher than the reference rate of the past million years). More recently the Dasgupta review6 in the UK states how severe the risks linked to biodiversity loss are and how complex the interactions between human actions and nature are. The scientific community actually tells us that these ecological risks are interconnected and should not be addressed in silo. For example, the concept of One Health developed by several international organisations suggests that human, animal and environmental health are interconnected and can only be addressed jointly. In its final declaration of the Global Health summit in Rome (May 21), President Mario Draghi stated:7 “The Rome Declaration rightly emphasises the importance of pursuing a One Health approach ‐ and here I’m coming to climate ‐, to preserve human, animal and environmental safety. This is the key priority of Italy’s G20 Presidency. The Scientific Expert Panel has stated how most infectious diseases are caused by pathogens that are derived from animals. Their emergence is largely driven by deforestation, wildlife exploitation, and other human activities. Effective environmental action can help to defend animal welfare and ultimately mitigate the risk of new health threats. When pursuing a common strategy to prevent future pandemics, we must uphold our commitment to limit environmental damage and tackle the climate crisis.
The exclusively crafted marble container also belongs to the baptistery, as part of its internal decoration, which, on its part, includes the famous mosaics with depictions of peacocks. Those were the peacocks that the artist Biljana Unkovska used when designing the layout of the modern Macedonian banknotes of ten Denars. Speaking of the ancient town of Stobi, besides the fact that it is really a constant inspiration for artistic creation, in the past it was a center with emphasized monetary production that took place more than 18 centuries ago. This exhibition is even more significant because of the generous support of the US Embassy in the Republic of Macedonia, which throughout the past years has enabled professional protection of these invaluable paintings, thanks to which they can now be publicly exhibited. The National Bank is honored by the given trust to host this exhibition, which I hope that over the next month will be an intriguing cultural event for the general public. I also hope that with  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  the support of the Ministry of Culture and of the other institutions of culture in Macedonia, also in the future we will have an opportunity to enrich the public life and the creative social pulse of the country’s cultural life.

The larger this unemployment gap, the weaker the upward pressures on pay growth, as A W Phillips had first postulated 60 years ago. In econometric wage equations, the unemployment gap is a (statistically and economically) significant determinant of pay (Table 1). A 1 percentage point unemployment gap drags on wage growth by around 0.8 percentage points. That means the 2 percentage point narrowing in the UK unemployment gap since 2012 would be expected to have raised wage growth by 1.6 percentage points, a significant tailwind. The NAIRU itself is unobservable. It is also moveable, depending on structural features of the labour market. This means the NAIRU needs to be estimated and these estimates are apt to shift over time. Over recent years, the Bank has revised down its estimate of the NAIRU in the UK, by just under a percentage point, to around 4 ¼%. These downwards surprises to the NAIRU (upwards revisions to the unemployment gap) help account for the persistent overshoot in the Bank’s wage forecasts. There are a variety of alternative, complementary measures of slack in the jobs market. For example, the number of hours a person works, relative to their desired hours, is also relevant to gauging the degree of spare capacity in the labour market. A number of research papers, theoretical and empirical, have found that such “under-employment” may also have a significant bearing on the setting of pay.
As a monetary, supervisory and regulatory authority of the banking sector, in recent years, the 1/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  Bank of Albania has focused on addressing challenges introduced by the crisis. Let me present a brief overview. First, due to aggregate demand slowdown and exchange rate depreciation, the financial situation of households and enterprises worsened; hence non-performing loans rose rapidly and credit supply contracted. Among other things, the rise in non-performing loans pointed to the need for comprehensive improvement of the legal and regulatory environment, especially with regard to the execution of collateral. Against this backdrop, in cooperation with other public agencies, the Bank of Albania compiled and implemented a detailed programme of measures, which addressed thoroughly the identified inadequacies. As a result, the level of non-performing loans dropped rapidly and credit supply improved. This action also created adequate conditions for its growth to gradually pick up the pace. Second, following the introduction of stricter regulatory requirements on banking activity in the European Union, foreign banks reduced their exposure to both regional economies and Albania. Known also as deleveraging, this effect showed that higher integration of the banking sector exposes us to monetary policies and regulatory requirements applied in home countries. In response, the Bank of Albania has worked towards aligning our domestic supervisory and regulatory framework with European Union standards. We have implemented, in this regard, a new macro-prudential strategy, after the model of the European System of Central Banks.

Gent Sejko: A brave new world? The future of banking in emerging Europe Welcome address by Mr Gent Sejko, Governor of the Bank of Albania, to the Annual Conference of the Bank of Albania 2019, Tirana, 10 October 2019. * * *  Your Excellency Mr President, Honourable Madam Minister and Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee, Dear representatives of the banking system, ladies and gentlemen, dear guests, It gives me great pleasure to welcome you on behalf of the Bank of Albania to our Annual Conference. This year the conference is co-organised again with the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), namely its Institute of Global Affairs – internationally renowned for its leading expertise across the social sciences. The Conference this year will seek to address the latest trends in the banking industry in Albania, in the region and the rest of the world, focusing on challenges and opportunities that lie ahead of us. Naturally, these issues are of great interest not only to actors in the banking market but also to central banks and other regulators of the financial market. As we share experiences and engage in open discussions, we will be able to identify far-reaching approaches that are best fitted to meet the challenges ahead. We have invited distinguished speakers and experts from renowned international institutions as well as other actors and regulators from Albania and the region. I am confident the conference will live up to its reputation.
This global, common factor explains not only the change in the inflation trend (the increasing inflation between 1960 and 1980 and its subsequent decrease), but also inflation fluctuation over a business cycle. The research has also shown that, where domestic inflation deviates from the “global” inflation, it exhibits a “global-inflation-reverting” tendency. As a consequence, modelling and forecasting of domestic inflation may be improved significantly by taking into account the “global inflation”. The fast-progressing globalisation is closely related to offshoring and outsourcing, whose scope is also growing. Unfortunately there is not much hard data that would allow for assessment of the scale of the phenomenon. Offshoring analysis is available only for selected countries and covers only selected industries. However, the growing scale of the phenomenon is reflected by data on global trade in goods and services and on foreign direct investment. Over the past 15 years, the shares of individual regions in the global trade have changed significantly, whereby the decreasing share of the EU is accompanied by increasing shares of the developing countries, including the Asian countries. Globally, foreign trade expressed as percentage of the GDP increased from the average 19% of the GDP between 1980 and 1989 up to 25% between 2000 and 2004. Table 1.

Enterprises are increasingly becoming price-takers, and thus even in a situation of rising costs of manufacturing, they are unable to lift prices and shift the growing costs onto the customer. Similar is true for wages, whose level is determined on the increasingly global labour market. Research on the manufacturing sector in EU Members States (for the years 1988 - 2000) has shown that the increase in the openness of that sector (growing import) caused a fall of prices by 2.3%, a growth in productivity by 11% and a drop in margins by 1.6%. Altogether, it may explain the inflation fall by 0.14% in annual terms over that period 11 . When looking at the price processes from the microeconomic perspective, vital structural changes can be observed, which bring about lower inflation. Table 3.
Lars Nyberg: How do conflicts of interest in universal banking emerge and what are the arguments for a separation of commercial and investment banking? Speech by Mr Lars Nyberg, Deputy Governor of Sveriges Riksbank, at a seminar organised by the Swedish Bankers’ Association, the Swedish Securities Dealers Association and Finansinspektionen (the Swedish financial supervisory authority), Stockholm, 26 August 2004. *  *  *  I would like to begin by thanking the Swedish Bankers’ Association, the Swedish Securities Dealers Association and Finansinspektionen (the Swedish financial supervisory authority) for taking the initiative to organise this seminar. Over the past year, in particular, we have seen the importance of open and thorough discussion of conflicts of interest in the financial sector. I hope that this seminar will contribute to an even deeper analysis of the problems we face. The present discussion has arisen in the wake of a number of international corporate scandals. It is perhaps sufficient to mention names such as Enron, WorldCom and Skandia to indicate how much trouble can be caused by conflicts of interest. In Sweden there are two conflicts of interest in particular that have received attention, although there are many other, possibly equally serious ones. The first is that many sellers of various financial services offered by banks and insurance companies have traditionally been presented as investment advisors rather than salespeople.

Helping students, couples, retirees, to go about their financial decisions carefully and not just taking life as it comes, can really help improve your quality of life, not just for ourselves, but for our families and loved ones. 22. I encourage everyone who is here, to spend a little bit of time going through the exhibitions, which has been very well put together. So once again, thank you to everyone who has been a partner of MoneySENSE in helping Singaporeans, and let’s do more in future to help everyone have the basic lifeskills of financial management. Thank you very much. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches