samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The Law “On the Banks in the Republic of Albania” enables the European Union member states banks and all foreign banks to provide banking services to Albania, through their branches or subsidiaries, without making any distinction in the licensing terms for their branches and subsidiaries and for Albanian banks. Furthermore, in line with the SAA provisions, the adopted law requires their treatment as Albanian banks in every aspect, once they are granted the licence to carry out banking business and financial activity. The new law provides for clearer rules on management of risk the banks may be faced with while carrying out their activity, in order to guarantee and strengthen the protection of depositors and investors and to maintain banking system stability. Given the current conditions of rapid credit growth in the banking system, the new law treats fully the other types of risks as well, other than that of credit risk, with which banks may be faced, and the permitted exposures of the latter ones when faced with such risks. The law requires for the first time, inter alia, the establishment and maintaining by the Bank of Albania of the loans register. Under the conditions of a rapid credit growth, the purpose of establishing such a register is to assist banks in making well-informed decisions when extending loans to their clients, as well as to strengthen the Bank of Albania’s supervision on the Albanian banking system.

On August 2006 the ownership transfer of 11.25 percent of the ProCredit Bank’s stake, from EBRD to ProCredit Holding AG (existing shareholder) was approved. On October 2006, the 71.97 percent transfer of the stake of Emporiki Bank S.A. of Greece to Credit Agricol S.A., France shareholder was approved. This transfer influenced also the indirect participation of Credit Agricol S.A. to the Emporiki Bank of Albania’s equity, to the same extent. During 2006, the banks’ network was extended also by 62 new branches and agencies, in the whole territory of Albania and abroad, having the highest share in Tirana, with the establishment of 30 new branches and agencies. Also, the opening of two branches outside the territory of Albania was approved and the opening of two other new branches is under the process of approval. 10. New activities of the Bank of Albania  Payment system From the regulatory and operational point of view, the payment system in Albania has already created the physiognomy of a modern system. The number of transactions processed during 2006 has increased by 13 percent, compared to 2005. In the meantime the value of transactions has increased by 21 percent during 2006, amounting to ALL 2,664.43 billion. Compared to 2005, the daily average number of payments (in both systems) has increased from 312, to 352 or 40 more transactions per day. In 2006, a new bank was added to the payment system, leading the number of participants to 17 banks. On March 2006 the e-payment settlement by VISA cards started.
Names like Kvitová, Navrátilová, Lendl, Čech and Rosický won’t be completely unknown to many of you. This in itself is an achievement for a country of just 10.5 million. But that’s not all. I tried to jot down a couple of things I hope you will not necessarily know. The Czech Republic has the highest consumption of beer per head in the world, at roughly 160 litres per capita. That may not come as a surprise, but what you also might not know is that we have the highest consumption of pork per head as well, our only close competitor in this regard being China. According to some European statistics, we also have the highest number of garden pools per head in the whole of Europe. There is a garden pool per every 50 inhabitants here, while in wealthier Germany the figure is just one per 103 inhabitants. If you don’t believe this, just take a look out of your window as you take off from Prague Airport on your way home. So this is about lifestyle: good beer, heavy food and bathing. Actually, many Czechs would say that this is the very definition of how to relax and be cool about the world and life. But this would also be a rather simplistic caricature. So let’s go further. Ours is a country with a long and entrenched tradition of industrial production and manufacturing.

My expectation is that once the price reversals and short-run imbalances from the economy reopening have played out, inflation will come back down to about 2 percent next year. Although the U.S. economy is on a very favorable trajectory overall, we must remember that our economy does not exist in a vacuum. The speed of the recovery will also depend on the global picture. We are seeing a slower rollout of immunizations, emerging strains of the virus, and a more subdued rebound in other parts of the world. This international context is another reason why a complete U.S. recovery will take time to achieve. 2/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  The Fed’s Policy Response Given all of this information, it’s clear there is a big shift in the economy, and the outlook has improved. But let me emphasize that the data and conditions we are seeing now are not nearly enough for the FOMC to shift its monetary policy stance. For these reasons, the FOMC decided last week to keep strong monetary policy support for the economy in place. Specifically, the FOMC maintained the target range for the federal funds rate at zero to ¼ percent and made no changes to its program of asset purchases. In thinking about adjusting its stance in the future, the FOMC has defined conditions and measures that will inform its decision-making.
It is responsible for promoting effective competition, ensuring that relevant markets function well, and for the conduct regulation of all financial services firms including all those authorised and regulated by the PRA. This includes acting to prevent market abuse and ensuring that consumers get a fair deal from financial firms. The FCA also operates the prudential regulation of financial services firms not supervised by the PRA, such as asset managers and independent financial advisers. In consequence it regulates a much larger number of firms than the PRA – over 50,000. But the FCA and PRA have a joint MoU and co-operate closely on a range of matters, most especially for those firms which are regulated by both ie by the PRA for prudential matters and by the FCA for conduct. Policy co-ordination basics The theoretical conditions under which one can achieve a number of different economic policy objectives at the same time was long ago embedded in the Tinbergen counting rule 6, named after the great Dutch Nobel prize winning economist. A necessary condition is that  3  In addition to Mark Carney as Governor, the proposed internal members from May 2015 will be Andrew Bailey as Deputy Governor and CEO of the PRA; Nemat Shafik as Deputy Governor for Banking and Markets; Jon Cunliffe as Deputy Governor for Financial Stability; Paul Fisher as Deputy Head and Executive Director at the PRA. 4  As I speak the independent members are Sandy Boss, Iain Cornish, Charles Randall and Martin Wheatley as CEO of the FCA.

Tony Latter: Derivatives from a Central Bank perspective Speech by Mr Tony Latter, Deputy Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, at the Seminar Programme of the FOW Derivatives Expo, Hong Kong, 5 November 2001 *  *  *  Introduction Why may central banks be interested in derivatives? Although it is dangerous to generalise, and no two central banks may see them in precisely the same light, there are certain aspects of derivatives in which central banks, including the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, probably have a common interest. I should like to review some of these today. For present purposes one does not need to be too precise as to what is meant by derivatives, save to note that the focus here is only on financial derivatives, although these do of course share many of the same basic characteristics as commodity or other derivatives. The textbooks give various definitions of a financial derivative: for instance, that it is a contract the value of which depends on or derives from the value of some underlying financial asset or index; or that it is an instrument which does not constitute ownership but only a promise or option to convey ownership. At its widest, the definition could embrace all futures, forwards, swaps, options, warrants, convertibles, asset-backed securities and so on, and all combinations or variations of those.
Prior to entering ERM II, Bulgaria has to join the Banking Union, pay its share in the ESM, and let the ECB conduct a deep audit of its financial sector. In other words, it has to pay all the costs of Eurozone membership many years before it becomes a member – and without any assurance that it will be accepted to the club at all. Crucially, in line with the principle of “equal treatment”, in the future all countries wishing to enter ERM II are expected to follow these humiliating conditions. Well, in my eyes, that provision practically closes the door to euro membership for countries such as the Czech Republic: it is difficult to imagine how any government with a trace of honour left would choose for the country to go through such an ordeal. In sum, I would say that the pragmatic Anglo-Saxon approach of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” suits the Czech Republic and other Central European countries well on the point of independent monetary policy. In the case of the euro, it holds true here more than anywhere else that we are not rich enough to afford to repeat the potential mistakes of others. We make enough of our own. Thank you for your attention. 3/3  BIS central bankers' speeches

I have also pointed to a number of risks that could lead to a different development than the one we forecast in the Monetary Policy Update. We try to determine the probability of the risks on the basis of incoming statistics. This gives us a picture of what can be regarded as a main scenario and what can be regarded as an alternative scenario. How should a monetary policymaker weigh up new and often contradictory information about the economy that indicates different paths of development? I shall conclude with a few reflections on this. As an economic forecaster, one is confronted by a constant flow of new statistics that often point in different directions. Let me illustrate this by describing the circumstances of our most recent monetary policy decision in April. Statistics Sweden had scarcely published a GDP figure for the fourth quarter that was weaker than expected, when the National Institute of Economic Research published a very strong Economic Tendency Survey for March. Nor is it unusual for statistics to be revised in a way that changes history and throws new light on the initial situation in the economy. As I mentioned earlier, Statistics Sweden revised up the figures for the number of hours worked in connection with the publication of the GDP statistics for the fourth quarter of 2011. This revision entails lower productivity growth for 2010 and 2011 than was reported earlier, and thus a new outlook on the future productivity growth trend, which has significance for monetary policy.
At the same time, the monetary policy stance of the ECB, while fully oriented towards the price stability objective, does influence the exchange rate. From a theoretical viewpoint, one can argue that the member countries of the euro area have chosen to go beyond a fixed exchange rate by adopting a single currency. The adoption of the euro implies the irreversible abolition of national currencies and, hence, of national exchange rates themselves. This choice involves a trade-off. On one hand, a single currency, as we have seen, eliminates the volatility of exchange rates within the monetary union. The euro, as a freely-floating currency, helps protect the economies of its member countries from external shocks. The single currency also facilitates trade between them, deepening economic integration. However, the elimination of national currencies implies that market signals regarding domestic economic imbalances are lost, allowing such imbalances to build up. More importantly, the absence of national currencies also implies that a valuable tool for stabilising the economy in the short term in the face of asymmetric shocks is no longer available. The sovereign debt crisis in the euro area has brought home the implications, both positive and negative, of membership of a single currency area. It remains my firm opinion, however, that the gains outweigh the losses. It is also my firm opinion that greater efforts need to be made to reduce and eventually eliminate internal imbalances within the monetary union in order to protect its sustainability.

Maintaining an exchange rate peg over such a long time span is hard, though changes to the composition of the currency basket allowed some flexibility. Throughout this period, the lira was only devalued once, in 1992, in the wake of the turbulence seen in Europe, which saw the pound sterling ejected from the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) and the devaluation of the Italian lira among others. Otherwise, the Bank’s determination to maintain the peg never wavered. We never blinked. The ability to maintain the peg may have been partly due to restrictions on trade and stringent controls on capital movements, at least in the early decades. By the mid-1990s, however, trade and financial market liberalisation meant that these factors became less and less important. Instead, major reforms in 1994 brought about fuller independence for the Central Bank and a gradual liberalisation of interest rates amid increasing recognition that, in the absence of capital controls, monetary policy had to be more actively oriented towards maintaining the peg. Throughout, the lira was buttressed by a healthy stock of external reserves. The Central Bank of Malta was legally bound to maintain reserves equivalent to at least 60% of the monetary base, but in 3  For a review of Malta’s monetary and exchange rate policy over the years, see Anton Caruana Galizia (1989) “Malta’s exchange rate policy since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system” in the Central Bank of Malta Quarterly Review, June 1989 and Aaron G Grech (2003) “The framework of monetary policy in Malta”.
Whether that has any implications for the medium term is less clear. The dispersion in demand and spare capacity is likely to narrow during the recovery phase. Over time, if some of these shifts in demand prove more persistent, the economy is likely to adapt to them and their effect on aggregate supply and costs to diminish. More generally, the rapid dynamics of the virus, combined with the vast scale of the furlough schemes (which act like extremely large automatic stabilisers for employment), make it more difficult than usual to infer what short-term gyrations in GDP mean for inflationary pressure further ahead. The lockdowns mean that, on a quarterly basis, GDP is likely to have fallen in the fourth quarter of 2020 and to do so again in 2021Q1. This will no doubt prompt headlines about a “double-dip recession”. But this is quite unlike any normal economic cycle. Its size, shape and speed are all highly unusual. As far as medium-term inflation is concerned, what matters more than these gyrations in output per se – very large though they are – are developments over time in the labour market. The rate of unemployment is the best single measure we have of economic slack. It also affects households’ confidence about their income and is therefore correlated with rates of saving.

In 1996, when the Board of Governors issued its proposed regulations concerning the applicability of Regulation E to stored-value cards, the Board of Governors explicitly requested that commenters to the proposed revisions indicate whether the commenters believed that part or all of Regulation E should apply to electronic “money” or “value” residing on a computer system or a personal-computer hard drive.12 Similarly, the FDIC, while holding public hearings on its General Counsel Opinion No. 8 on stored-value cards and Federal deposit insurance coverage,13 specifically requested additional commentary on Federal deposit insurance coverage and electronic value represented on computer systems or personal computers. I believe the message is clear: as bank supervisors, we are open to what the banking community has to say on this rapidly evolving market. New ideas and reasoned arguments are welcome. We must try not to restrain important new services developed by the banking industry but should remain vigilant as banking-type services are offered by nonbank institutions. A Payments Systems Overseer’s View From the perspective of a payments system overseer, I see much activity, but thus far, few genuinely revolutionary innovations with respect to banking and the Internet in the United States. Mainly, I see the application of faster, cheaper electronic processing of older, more established paper-based methods of transferring payments between parties. Credit card payments on the Internet are one example.
New Economy – New Finance A new economy requires a new finance. A new finance to serve the digital economy, a new finance to support the major transitions underway across the globe and a new finance to increase the sector’s resilience. A new finance with products that are more cost effective, better tailored, and more inclusive. The UK’s FinTech companies are creating this new finance. We have just heard from Charlotte Crosswell of Innovate Finance how the UK FinTech sector leads in talent, drive and investment. But you cannot do it all on your own. Your efforts will be even more effective if you have the right conditions in which to innovate and the level playing fields on which to compete. New Finance - New Bank That’s why a new finance demands a new Bank of England. 2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  2  In this spirit, last year at Mansion House, I announced that Huw van Steenis would lead a review of the future of the UK financial system, including recommendations for how the Bank should respond. In two months, Huw will publish his conclusions and the Bank will announce a number of concrete steps to create an environment for a more resilient, effective and efficient financial system. To preview our general approach I want to highlight some recent measures the Bank has been taking. The Bank’s strategy is to enable innovation and empower competition, while ensuring monetary and financial stability.

Consider rule setting and reporting. At over 638,000 words, the PRA Rule Book is longer than War and Peace. It is also somewhat less interesting and infinitely more complex. We are currently using advanced analytics to understand the complexity and interconnectedness of the PRA rulebook, to identify ways to simplify our rules, and to make compliance with them easier for firms. And to explore ways to make reporting more efficient and effective, we are running a Digital Regulatory Reporting pilot, with the FCA, on machine readable reporting requirements that firms’ systems could interpret and ultimately automate regulatory data collection. These initiatives are goods in and of themselves, but they also create the potential to unlock the power of AI in order to improve the quality of our supervision. Conclusion  When Keynes marvelled at new possibilities, a decade of wealth creation would follow, but its gains gave rise to imbalances in incomes and in trade. When combined with the Economic Consequences of the Peace, disaster ensued. Today, new technologies, the new economy and the new finance have the potential to unlock more sustainable and inclusive growth. Consumers can have greater choice and better-targeted services; small and medium sized businesses can access new credit to grow; banks themselves can become more productive, and the financial system overall can become more resilient. Most fundamentally, unlike in Keynes’ time, the gains from new technologies will not be limited to men or captured by denizens of the City. 6  Proudman, J (2018) Cyborg Supervision. Available https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2018/james-proudman-cyborgsupervision.
To be more precise, the exchange rate can be used as a policy instrument when it is no longer possible to lower the interest rate because it is already zero. Unlike the policy rate, the exchange rate has no upper or lower limit, as Bennett McCallum pointed out early in the discussion of Japan's liquidity trap. 12 When the real economy and inflation can no longer be stimulated by cutting the policy rate, it is still possible to achieve the same stimulation by using the exchange rate as a policy instrument and depreciating the currency. This is the background to my proposal of a “Foolproof Way” for a small open economy to escape from a liquidity trap. 13 The Foolproof Way consists of the following three parts: 1. A price level target is introduced in the form of a path as I described earlier. In the event that unwelcome low inflation or deflation has already arisen, the price level target can be set correspondingly higher than the current price level. 2. An exchange rate target that is consistent with the price level target is announced and the exchange rate is pegged to this exchange rate target until the price level target is attained. If, for example, the price level is to be raised by 10 per cent, the exchange rate target is set so that the currency depreciates by 10 per cent. 3.

See Bernanke, Ben (2009), "The crisis and the policy response", speech at the Stamp Lecture, London School of Economics, 13 January, www.federalreserve.gov, for further discussion. (18) For a more detailed derivation and detailed discussion, see Svensson, Lars E.O., (2006), “Monetary Policy and Japan’s Liquidity Trap", working paper, www.princeton.edu/svensson. 8  BIS Review 19/2009  economy. Personally, I believe that the stimulation that the central bank can achieve in this way is very moderate, perhaps a few tens of basis points on the real interest rate in the best case. By influencing inflation expectations more directly, the real interest rate can be reduced by several percentage points. Monetary policy alternatives with a zero interest rate bound: concluding comments As both Japan and the United States now have a zero interest rate and several other countries are now cutting their interest rates close to zero, it is natural that monetary policy with a zero interest rate should be increasingly a subject for discussion and debate. The most recent Monetary Policy Report contains an article on monetary policy with a zero interest rate, and there is also an alternative scenario in Chapter 2 assuming weaker real economic development and a repo rate path that is at zero during part of the forecast period.