samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Although the bonds were successful, the concept of indexed bonds was set aside until the 20th century. Finland introduced indexed bonds in 1945, Sweden in 1952, Iceland and Israel in 1955. Since then, indexed bonds have usually appeared in countries experiencing very high rates of inflation, such as Brazil in 19642, Chile (1966), Colombia (1967), Argentina (1972) or even the UK in 1975, with the issuance of so-called “granny bonds”, i.e. non-marketable indexed-linked savings retirement certificates. Later on, in 1981, the UK issued a marketable instrument - the index-linked giltin a context of rapidly increasing prices. In all of these cases, the issuance of inflation-indexed debt instruments by the government was aimed at developing long-term capital markets and improving the credibility of anti-inflationary policies. As regards this last point, such a rationale is, however, ambiguous as it can also be argued that debt indexation can fuel the inflationary process by spreading inflation-linking to other contracts, such as wage contracts for instance. Given this historical background, it might appear paradoxical that, since 1980, indexed bonds have largely been issued by industrialised countries, characterised both by low inflation rates and price stability - oriented monetary policies: Australia (1985), Canada (1991), Sweden (1994), New Zealand (1995), The United States (1997), France (1998 and 2001) and recently Italy and Greece (2003). The rationale behind the issuance of these indexed bonds was mainly to reduce the cost of debt and to develop complete financial markets.

If a situation arises whereby Norges Bank is not able to return the krone to its initial range without such consequences, the Bank will inform the government authorities that measures other than those available to the Bank are required. This may involve recommendations concerning fiscal measures that make it possible to return the krone exchange rate to its initial range and to stabilise it. In the event of pronounced and prolonged shifts in the economy, fiscal policy and wage determination must contribute to restoring balance in the economy. However, if fundamental and permanent changes have taken place in the framework conditions for the Norwegian economy, it may also be appropriate to change the guidelines for monetary policy. According to the Maastricht treaty, the main objective of the ECB is the maintenance of price stability. The ECB has defined price stability as inflation of 2% or lower. BIS Review 92/2000  4  Inflation in Norway cannot remain higher than inflation in the euro area year after year without any consequences for the exchange rate between the Norwegian krone and the euro. If price and cost inflation remains higher than the rate of increase aimed at by the ECB over a long period, the krone will depreciate against the euro sooner or later. Even if instruments are oriented with a view to stability in the krone exchange rate against the euro, cyclical differences will result in inflation differentials between Norway and euro area countries. Business cycles have been desynchronised over the last 15 years.
Zeti Akhtar Aziz: The changing landscape of financial regulation – implications for Islamic finance Speech by Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz, Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia, at the 7th Independence Federal Savings Bank (IFSB) summit on Global Financial Architecture, Manama, 4 May 2010. *  *  *  It is my pleasure to be here on the occasion of the 7th IFSB Summit on Global Financial Architecture: Challenges for Islamic finance. I am honoured to be invited to speak on the ongoing regulatory and supervisory reforms being undertaken following the recent international financial crisis, focusing on its implications for Islamic finance particularly in the context of strengthening the financial stability of the Islamic financial system. It was exactly 10 years ago in a speech here in Bahrain when I reflected on then the remarkable achievements of Islamic banking and highlighted that while the amount of funds managed in the Islamic financial system was only a fraction of the total assets of the international financial system, it represented that portion of financial activities that was truly supported by underlying productive capacity that generated growth of economies across continents, and that, it was this form of financial activities that we should encourage, as opposed to the financial flows that were destabilising and destructive.

There have also been notable achievements in the area of talent development with the proliferation of programmes and certifications which have focussed on Islamic finance offered by several major institutions of higher learning, professional entities, training agencies and industry groups around the world. More recently, platforms for greater engagement among practitioners, scholars and regulators have further added to international collaboration in Islamic finance. And finally, the evolution of Islamic finance in this decade has been marked by its international dimension in which it is becoming an increasingly important part of the global financial landscape. The development of Islamic finance in emerging economies also reflects the changing global pattern of financial and economic integration. This is taking place with the strengthening of financial and economic linkages between Asia and the Middle East and the increased activity of Islamic finance beyond the traditional Muslim countries including the more established financial centres. Cross-border transactions are growing as more issuers  BIS Review 64/2010  1  consider Islamic finance as an attractive alternative means for raising capital, whilst investors are also increasingly considering it as a new asset class in their investment universe. This internationalisation and sustained global expansion of Islamic finance has taken place despite the more challenging environment presented by the global financial crisis, demonstrating the resilience of Islamic finance as a stable form of financial intermediation. Global financial regulatory reforms Ladies and gentlemen, Much has been said and written about the causes of the global financial crisis.
Time is  2  BIS Review 148/2008  ripe for the state budget to involve the participation of private entrepreneurs in strategic investment projects through joint financing programmes. The banking system plays a vital role. Banking loan has played a key role in Albania’s economic development. It has been a source of profit in your business and it has to remain so in the future as well. In my recent communications with my counterparts and in the various meetings with senior officials of foreign banks’ main headquarters I have truthfully presented our country’s economic situation and I have required from them to keep their interest in the Albanian economy unchanged. I avail myself of this opportunity to address to the Albanian entrepreneurship. You have to keep being active and focused on formulating and implementing your future business plans. This would be the only way for you to remain well-capitalized, lucrative and credible to the banking system. In the current economic conditions, private entrepreneurship should be a supporter and promoter in the formulation of domestic strategies at home, in the region and broader, and in their implementation process. All conditions are in place for the Albanian business to go beyond the official regional borders, hence, becoming a factor in ensuring a stable regional activity. This also means a real integration into the targeted standards. Concluding, I would like to highlight that the small countries like Albania, should be optimistic, flexible and adaptive to challenges.

Only in this way, they may find themselves able to sail into the international waters. Thank you. BIS Review 148/2008  3
If each country were to go its own way, the market for the relevant financial instruments would become too fragmented. The ECB welcomes current proposals which foresee the introduction of non-preferred senior debt instruments and a general depositor preference rule. This would further facilitate bail-ins. The second question is: what happens if the Single Resolution Fund runs out of money? What if there’s a major crisis, and the € billion is not enough to cover the losses? Well, in such a situation we would need a common European backstop for the SRF. And we need it quickly, and in any case before 2023, which is when the SRF will reach its target volume. European leaders committed to this when setting up the SRF, and they should stick to their commitment. The backstop could take the form of a direct credit line from the European Stability Mechanism to the SRF. The important thing is that it can provide both solvency and liquidity support. And now to the third and final question: has public support for failing banks really become a thing of the past? “Almost” is the answer to this question. And the rules are now such that any public support for a bank in fact triggers a “failing or likely to fail” decision. There are a few exceptions, however. One of these is known as precautionary recapitalisation. It allows governments to recapitalise banks using public funds. But the scope for this kind of state aid is very narrow.

The ECB must thus exercise its powers based on the national transpositions; and these vary from country to country. This creates uncertainty and inconsistency. What we thus need is a harmonised legal basis from which we can apply early intervention measures. Now, let’s go one step further. Imagine our bank gets into more serious trouble. In this scenario, there is one tool that helps to create a bit of breathing space for the bank and the authorities to sort things out – a moratorium. A moratorium allows the authorities to suspend all the activities of a bank for a short period of time. In a sense, it freezes time. A moratorium helps to manage a crisis in an orderly manner. It gives the bank and its shareholders time to find a solution. This is particularly useful during a sudden liquidity crisis. However, there is a practical problem. Moratoriums are not part of the European toolbox. In some countries they do exist; in others, they don’t. And in any case, they are not harmonised. We need harmonised, short-term moratoriums in all euro area countries. If, for instance, a cross-border bank gets into trouble, the supervisor in that bank’s home country can impose a moratorium. But what if the bank has a subsidiary in a country where only a court could impose a moratorium? What if the bank has a subsidiary in a country where a moratorium cannot be imposed at all? This is a serious stumbling block for crisis management at European level.
When inflation in Sweden is expected to be below target, the Riksbank conducts expansionary monetary policy. The aim is to push inflation up towards the target. At the same time, output and employment will also rise. But expansionary monetary policy also has other consequences. For example, rising asset prices lead to more uneven wealth distribution. In Sweden, however, this effect is mitigated by the fact that a comparatively large share of the wealth is  7  OECD (2019), Table 9.1, see also OECD (2020). 8 Ylva Hasselberg and I have written about this, see Hasselberg and Ohlsson (2016). 5 [6]  in collective pension funds. In many countries, there are no such funds. This hidden wealth is an aspect to consider when discussing the distributional effects of expansionary monetary policy. References Hasselberg, Y. and Ohlsson, H. (2016), “Collective wealth formation: Conflict and compromise in Sweden, 1950-2000”, in Hudson, P. and Tribe, K., ed., The contradictions of capital in the twenty-first century: The Piketty Opportunity, Agenda Publishing, pp. 109-130. Nilsson, C., Söderberg, J. and Vredin, A. (2014), “The significance of collective pension saving for the Swedish financial system”, Economic Commentaries 2014 (3), Sveriges Riksbank. OECD (2019), Pensions at a glance 2019: OECD and G20 Indicators, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/b6d3dcfc-en. OECD (2020), Pension Markets in Focus 2020, http://www.oecd.org/finance/pensionmarketsinfocus.htm. Ohlsson, H., Roine, J and Waldenström, D. (2020), “Inherited wealth over the path of development: Sweden, 1810–2016”, Journal of the European Economic Association 18 (3), pp. 1123-1157.

2 [6]  Figure 1 shows that funded collective pension wealth made up a very small share of total wealth up until the 1960s. With the advent of the National Swedish Pension Funds, the share began to rise and grew on a more or less trend basis up to the end of the millennium. In 2019, the share was 25 per cent. In other words, a quarter of total wealth in Sweden was in collective pension funds at that time.2 So what determines the individual Swedish person's share of funded collective pension wealth? Several factors are significant. The factor I would like to highlight here is labour income. Let me give a few examples: 2.5 per cent of labour income is transferred to the premium pension system up to an annual ceiling.3 The system is mandatory for all those that have labour income. For a person who starts to withdraw their premium pension and has never hit the ceiling, their premium pension wealth will depend on their labour income during their working life and on how the individual has chosen to invest their premium pension wealth. My point here is that we know that labour income is more evenly distributed than capital income. The conclusion will then be that premium pension wealth is more evenly distributed than other wealth. The pension agreement between the Swedish Employers’ Confederation (SAF) and the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) is an example of an agreement between parties that applies to privately employed blue-collar workers.
In an open economy, domestic demand changes can easily be satisfied through increased imports. As a consequence, domestic inflation may become less sensitive to the domestic output gap and more sensitive to global tensions on production capacities. 2  2  Notably put forward by Laurence Ball. BIS Review 103/2007  Finally, it is possible that (due to immigration and structural reforms) labour supply has become more elastic in many countries, and, as a consequence the cyclicality of wages (and prices) has been reduced. 3 Flatter Phillips curves may be a mixed blessing for Central Banks. In such circumstances, looking at actual and projected inflation may not be sufficient to detect incipient imbalances between supply and demand. In other words, inflation becomes less informative about the output gap. There is a risk, then, that imbalances are allowed to build up to a point where a stronger reaction may become necessary. To prevent that risk, Central Banks may want to look at information coming from a broader set of indicators, chosen because of their ability to detect, at an earlier stage, potential inflationary pressures. Obviously, monetary and credit aggregates for instance are good candidates for such a job. What role for money in monetary policy? As you may know, this is precisely what is done in the context of the Eurosystem’s two-pillar monetary policy strategy which assigns an important role to money. This structure is based on a particular premise and has one important implication.

This, in turn, has raised the level of employment compatible with price stability, or, put differently, lowered the inflation rate for any given level of employment. The effects of globalisation may also be felt more indirectly through increased competition, both on the products and labour markets. On the products market, globalisation has eliminated the least productive domestic firms (those that set the highest prices) and reduced the pricing power of remaining domestic firms. It may also have created the conditions for wage moderation by increasing the degree of competition on the labour market. Overall, these developments have made it easier for Central Banks to bring down inflation without real costs to the economy. But it is doubtful that we can count indefinitely on such "tailwinds". Inflation only partly depends upon imported prices. Many goods and most services are still produced domestically with little competition from abroad. Domestic factors thus remain crucial determinants of inflation rates. Globalisation lowers the relative price of tradables to non-tradables in an open economy. But the overall level and dynamics of prices ultimately remain determined by the monetary authorities provided they ensure that steady growth in overall nominal demand is maintained through an appropriate monetary policy. 1 In addition, it is possible that the effects of globalisation on inflation will be reversed in the future. Strong growth in big emerging economies is increasingly putting pressures on the price of oil, food and other commodities.
Tarisa Watanagase: What do regulators really want - Thailand’s perspective Speech by Dr Tarisa Watanagase, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Thailand, at the Retail Finance Asia-Pacific 2004, Bangkok, 18 March 2004. *  *  *  Good afternoon. I thank the Lafferty Group for inviting me to speak at this Conference - an opportunity to engage in a discussion with practitioners in the banking industry. Therefore, it is with great pleasure that I accepted the invitation because I believe a gathering like this promotes interactive relationships between those in the industry and regulators so that, together, we can move with the industry trend. This year’s Retail Finance Asia-Pacific Conference adopts the theme “Innovative Strategies For The New Consumer - Winning The Competitive Edge. I trust that you must have learned a great deal from yesterday discussions among leading experts on how to address the customers’ needs with a wide array of new products and innovation. This afternoon, you will hear from me on the same theme but from a different perspective - what might be the expectations of regulators on the industry with respect to the retail banking sector.

Mindful of the importance of consumer protection, the Bank of Thailand already issued a regulation requiring financial institutions to disclose information, especially on effective interest rate and fee charged, financial position and operating results, so that customers can make well-informed decisions. Additionally, financial institutions will be required to have in place clear procedures for handling customer complaints. On a system-wide scale, the authorities will introduce a deposit insurance scheme in place of the existing blanket guarantee to ensure protection of retail consumers. BIS Review 22/2004  3  3. Supervisory concerns and challenges  I have already touched on regulators’ concerns that directly affect consumer benefits. Now allow me to go through the concerns and challenges of retail banking from a wider perspective. First, we are concerned for those considering jumping onto the booming retail credit bandwagon without having sufficient skills and resources to capitalize on the key drivers of this market segment. Second, the risks inherent in credit extension, which have to be adequately monitored and managed. Third, the one that directly concerns us, regulators, - how to achieve a balanced objective of financial institution stability and fostering development, competition and level playing field. Drivers of retail banking business The gaps of financial services provided by financial institutions in Thailand reflect untapped opportunities in the retail sector awaiting those having the capability to fill in these gaps. The opportunities are open to banks with the right business models for the identified niche markets.
4/4  BIS central bankers' speeches

In the digital age, households have become firms, and, in turn, producers hire the households’ services directly. Seemingly, free products and services have also emerged. All this calls for a revision of a number of assumptions behind GDP as a measure of the population’s well-being. What exactly is the digital economy is an issue still under discussion. According to the Organization for the Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the focus is on digital transactions, that is, those that order or deliver products using digital means. According to this definition, one important feature of digitization is the massiveness of peer-to-peer services intermediated by platforms such as Airbnb, Uber, or eBay, which facilitate transactions of goods and services. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), in turn, defines the digital economy as the use of digital information. Working groups of international experts are being convened to elaborate on these definitions and to propose a general framework for measuring the digital economy. The structural changes associated with digitization result in the emergence of new occupations and, at the same time, the decline or replacement of some jobs. Together with this, the costs of job search are falling, speeding up the process of matching demand and supply. Thus, impacts on productivity might be observed via the exchange of knowledge and the development of more efficient processes. In the financial area, digitization is redesigning the traditional payment systems, while drawing attention to concepts such as crypto-currencies and digital money.