samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
And it also makes the economy more equitable by allowing as many citizens as possible to participate in those opportunities. For this reason, education and training need to be as much a part of the reform agenda as creating more flexible markets and reducing red tape. But there is also a second way in which the economics and politics of integration need to be reconciled. The more decision-making over economic issues moves to the European level, the more democracy needs to move with it. This is not just because democracy is a core value of the EU. It is because making policy without adequate representation and accountability does not work. So we need to deepen our economic union and our political union together. And this means strengthening the channels for genuine European democratic legitimacy, like the European Parliament. Inevitably European democracy will be different. Voters in any one country may initially fear that they have less influence over decisions than at present. But it is my belief and certainly what has happened in the monetary policy area that in giving up some formal sovereignty, people will gain in effective sovereignty. They will empower institutions with euro-wide responsibilities able to tackle the pressing problems of jobs and growth – and so their votes may in fact make more of a difference to their lives than they do today.

Adnan Zaylani Mohamad Zahid: Re-inventing payments - the future of financial services Keynote address by Mr Adnan Zaylani Mohamad Zahid, Assistant Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia (Bank Negara Malaysia), at the Malaysian E-Payments Excellence Awards (MEEA) 2019, Kuala Lumpur, 31 July 2019. * * * It is my pleasure to be speaking here today, at such an exciting time for our payments landscape. Malaysia’s progress in migrating to e-payments has been promising. In less than a decade since 2011, we have reduced cheque usage by half to 101 million in 2018. E-payment acceptance points such as point-of-sale (POS) terminals have more than doubled to 16 terminals per thousand inhabitants in 2018. More merchants are also accepting QR payments with over 400,000 registrations recorded to-date. Meanwhile, e-payment transactions have almost tripled to 125 transactions per capita in 2018. At the same time, new business models are emerging. We estimate that 40% of fintechs in Malaysia are in payments or payment-related services – making it the largest segment. The ewallet space has been particularly vibrant, contributing to rapid growth in mobile payments. From 2017 to 2018, mobile payment transaction volume had increased twenty-fold from just below two million transactions to over 34 million transactions within a year. Keeping these developments in mind, allow me to share three broad priorities in taking Malaysia’s payments journey to greater heights.
In the US by contrast saving is $ trillion – about 17% of GDP. The question is whether those savings are being used most productively. For example, in the case of households, they remain compartmentalised in member states and predominantly locked up in the banking system, which is still healing. Bank deposits, as a share of household financial assets, are three times the US level. And they are heavily concentrated in financial assets like debt instruments that do not encourage risk capital. The objectives of Capital Market Union should be threefold. First to put European savings to better use by deepening and diversifying the sources of finance available to business and offering more investment choices and portfolio diversification to savers. As was recognised in the Giovannini report 20 years ago, there is very good reason to believe that improving the efficiency with which savers are matched to borrowers increases economic performance. The second objective should be to enable greater risk sharing across the EU by creating deeper cross border markets. Cross border investment allows economic risks – upside and downside – to be shared across individual countries. Done in the right way, this can help to smooth out the impact of the economic shocks that hit individual countries – reducing the danger of economies sliding into very deep recessions that can permanently damage their ability to grow.

The rationale for this was brutally underlined in the euro crisis. The members of the euro share more than a single market. They share a currency, they share risk of the break up of that currency and they share a lender of last resort. With the creation of the European Stability Mechanism, they have begun to share a common backstop. At that level of integration, it is right to ask to what extent financial stability is ultimately primarily a national responsibility and where the buck should stop. The creation and full implementation of the Banking Union should in my view increase the financial stability of the currency union, thereby improving stability for everyone in the EU. It is, however, impossible to ignore the fact that to do so, the Banking Union must continue to develop the necessary backstops – painful though that may sometimes be. There are agreed plans to move further in this direction. It is important that they are implemented. To return to the history for a moment, one sees the need to find a balance between the single market and financial stability in the way in which Europe ultimately came to free movement of capital, with strong Treaty prohibitions on restrictions but within that – and within constraints – a recognition of the need for member states to be able to take the necessary action to defend stability including in relation to prudential supervision.
11  Page 12 of 19  The long-distance run towards the stabilisation phase We are now entering a new, slower, longer and more open phase. After the sprint comes the long-distance run. Expectations are continuing to focus, excessively in my view, on our speed: are we going to continue our 50-basis-point hikes after March? I shall not answer that today, first because our decisions over the coming months will be guided by the data. Above all, it is also because there are two more important variables in this new phase: the level of interest rates that we reach, and the duration for which we stay there. The level of the “terminal rate” Regarding the level, the markets’ estimate of the “terminal rate” was, until the last few days, around 3.5% in the euro area. The fluctuations since yesterday may be excessively volatile, but I shall just make one comment here on the calendar and another on the substance. Regarding the calendar, without setting ourselves any strict time limit, I think it is possible that we will have reached this peak by summer... which officially ends in 12  Page 13 of 19  September. That would leave us four Governing Council meetings, after the one in March where we will have reached 3%. We shall probably go beyond this 3%, but there will be no obligation to act automatically at each Council meeting, and we are not ruling out acting subsequently if new elements justify it.

The main thing is that our future decisions shall remain dependent, first and foremost, on the economic data. Amidst the uncertainty, I am calling, more than ever, for pragmatism. What is the current level of market inflation expectations? After remaining fairly stable for a long period below the 2% inflation target, expectations initially increased markedly in the recent period – including five-year ahead expectations which are the most important for us – and rose to over 3% in spring 2022. 6  See François Villeroy de Galhau (2022), Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, 27 August 2022, “Monetary policy post pandemic: balancing between science and art, predictability and reactivity”. 5  Page 6 of 19  But these expectations have since improved spectacularly as energy prices have subsided; swap markets are now expecting inflation to fall rapidly towards 2%, including in one year’s time. This can also be seen in five-year options markets. 6  Page 7 of 19  These expectations can be regarded as too volatile, or a little too premature when it comes to the inflation decline. But they still have a significant impact on the rise in expected real rates, and this leads me to the channel of financial conditions. The channel of financial conditions and demand The fact that an expectations channel exists does not mean that monetary policy only works like a magical incantation.
CPI inflation rose to 2.1% in May, just above the MPC’s target and above where we thought it would be in the MPC’s May forecast. Goods prices were strong, while consumer food prices ticked down slightly, and the pattern for services prices was very mixed. For instance, hairdressing and personal grooming inflation was strong in particular, at an annual rate of 8%, and saw a 29 year high. Pent-up demand, essential need, or recreating the early 1990s David Beckham look, I leave that to others to judge. Further up the supply chain, food input prices were up, and producer input inflation was around a 10-year high. However these price rises are certainly not universal, and for balance I should note that we also learned last week that Victoria Beckham is reducing the average selling price of her dresses by almost 40%.footnote[1] 2/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  There are at least three reasons why the increase in inflation should be temporary. First, there are annual inflation base effects caused by very weak activity and prices last year which will not last beyond a year as a matter of arithmetic. But while they are present, they mechanically push up inflation. An illustration helps here. Let’s suppose that here in the UK, from May onwards, the consumer price level rises each month by an amount consistent with an annual rate of exactly 2% (i.e. at the inflation target).

In this respect, the BNR opinion has been repeatedly expressed in public, namely that such a correction can only be made via a balanced mix of monetary, fiscal and income policies, coupled with faster structural reforms that would lead to higher productivity. What would be the effects of a downgrade for Romania? Let me stress this again, I do not believe in a downgrade. As I have already mentioned, we may see a change in the outlook. If there is a downgrade, its consequences would be rather serious. It would primarily be reflected by the marked increase in external financing costs, but also by deterring FDIs, which would limit the country's rapid growth potential. Why do you think rating agencies are more cautious about Romania than about other countries? It may be because of an insufficient clarity regarding the real economic and financial situation of Romania, which may derive also from the inconsistent signals that sometimes come from inside the country. Thank you very much, Mr. Governor. BIS Review 113/2008  3
It is also hard to assess the degree to which the current constellation of global monetary conditions has influenced the behavior of long-term interest rates. This makes it harder to assess the appropriateness of the current stance of monetary policy. And it may also mask some of the pressures on risk premiums we might expect to see given the deterioration of the U.S. long-term fiscal situation and the magnitude of the U.S. current account imbalance. In reviewing these dimensions of uncertainty, I want to emphasize that the fundamental conditions of the U.S. economy, and much of the world economy, are very strong today. But these aspects of uncertainly help illustrate what makes monetary policy interesting, and they help explain why central banks may confront wide bands of uncertainty around even a strong central outlook. They also emphasize the importance of the process we use to make decisions about policy in a state of limited knowledge. Policymakers can use a range of approaches to deal with uncertainty. In addition to making a very substantial investment in trying to capture changes in economic activity that may not be fully evident in the national data, we typically spend a lot of time looking at the assumptions that underpin the central forecast, and the sensitivity of that forecast to the possibility that those assumptions prove wrong. We regularly and systematically examine a range of alternative scenarios that attempt to capture a broad range of different paths for the main forces operating on the economy.

Its roots in the olden leeuwendaalder or the Dutch lion-thaler show not only its descent from the former Dutch coin (and therefore its being related to the US dollar), but also its European dimension as ever since its birth, shortly after the creation of the modern Romanian state, our leu currency was French. This means that the 1867 Monetary Law was designed in terms of the Latin Union, most of all France. The law stipulated that metal coins should be minted in French style. But our bonds with Europe were broader as the law set forth that the gold and silver coins issued by France, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland (all members of the Latin Union) should be accepted by all exchange houses, along with the Romanian ones. Thus, Romania’s European aspirations were strongly asserted, while spreading to Germany through King Carol I of Hohenzollern, whose effigy was placed on the first Romanian gold and silver coins, and to Spain, Mr. González-Páramo, via its Latin spirit. Ladies and Gentlemen, It is my pleasure to restate here with you what I have often underlined throughout 2010 when we celebrated the NBR’s 130th anniversary since its establishment which made it the 16th central bank in the world in chronological order. The fact is that the history of the Romanian monetary system is closely linked to the history of the modern Romanian state. Feel free to discover this reality by visiting the space dedicated to the leu in the lobby of the Euro Exhibition.
Zeti Akhtar Aziz: The development of the Malaysian bond market Remarks by Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz, Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia, at the Launch of the Electronic Trading Platform by Bursa Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, 29 April 2008. *  *  *  Let me first of all thank Bursa Malaysia for inviting me to say a few words on this occasion of the launch of the Electronic Trading Platform. This initiative marks another important advancement in the development of the Malaysian bond market. The Electronic Trading Platform will take over the function that was previously performed by the Bond Information and Dissemination System (BIDS). Bank Negara established BIDS ten years ago, in 1997 to provide market information on domestic debt securities. BIDS was developed as a centralized database that provided information on the terms of the issue, details of trade done and the relevant information on the various debt securities, to facilitate increased transparency and efficiency in the bond market. BIDS therefore aided the price discovery process thereby promoting secondary and primary activities in the bond market. BIDS was revolutionary in its time as authorities in other jurisdictions subsequently launched similar initiatives in their respective markets. This Electronic Trading Platform is a significant enhancement to the mechanism in the development of a more vibrant bond market. Indeed, this development is timely because the Malaysian bond market is now at the threshold of its next stage of development. Several factors have brought the development of the bond market to this threshold.

François Villeroy de Galhau: Causes of and answers to the European slowdown Speech by Mr François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Bank of France, at the New York University, New York City, 16 October 2019. * * * Accompanying slides of the speech. Ladies and Gentlemen, dear students, I am very pleased to be with you today. Dear Thomas, both sides of the Atlantic benefit from your skills in economics. The high quality education you students receive here at the NYU Stern Business School will give you the tools to understand and address global challenges. In my introductory remarks today, I will address one of these, the current European slowdown, and quickly elaborate on 3 paradoxes: 1- the causes of the slowdown are mainly outside the euro area, but its effects are very acute on its biggest economy; 2 – the recent monetary policy controversy is of little interest for the future; 3 – the euro area has more policy room than others in the non-monetary domain, but under-uses it. **  I. The causes of the slowdown are mainly outside the euro area, but its effects are very acute on the region’s biggest economy The causes of the slowdown are mainly external to the euro area: uncertainty is undoubtedly the most important; it is mostly man-made, and must also be fixed by man.
It is important to realise that this constitutes major progress, in particular from the point of view of European integration. No one would have imagined that this would have been possible a few years ago. However, it was not enough to contain the crisis. As of last August, against the backdrop of expectations of slower growth, financial market tensions increased again. A vicious circle developed between the risk of a Greek default, uncertainties surrounding the debt of other euro area countries and their banking sectors. In other words, as sovereign debt had previously been considered a risk-free asset, banks purchased massive amounts of government bonds. This was especially the case in Europe due to the interdependence of the economies and the free movement of capital. For instance, German and French banks have a relatively large exposure to Greek, Italian and Spanish debt. The fear of a credit default by these countries therefore constitutes a risk of very heavy losses for banks. Since this would ultimately affect the public finances of the States if it materialised, it in turn increases concerns about the fiscal soundness of these countries, creating a vicious circle. So you can see that much of this mechanism is not entirely rational. Only the Greek debt situation is truly critical, while all the other countries have solemnly undertaken to repay their debts in full and they are in a position to do so.

Tackling the urgent issues To tackle the urgent issues stemming from the crisis, it was first essential for the three countries that were experiencing major difficulties to be able to continue funding themselves:  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  the EU and the IFM stepped in to assist them. They did this via bilateral loans in the beginning, and then in the framework of a structure that borrowed on the markets backed by a guarantee from the euro area Member States: the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF). This support was subject to strict conditionality to ensure that the sustainability of public finances was restored and the country in question regained its competitiveness. These countries therefore undertook to meet deficit reduction targets in order, ultimately, to be able to tap the markets directly for their funding needs. This support was always designed to be temporary and encourage sound fiscal policies. Central banks also played a decisive role throughout the crisis. First, they cut their key interest rates sharply after the crisis of 2008 in order to guarantee price stability and boost lending and activity. Furthermore, they provided financial institutions with liquidity to limit credit crunches. Since 2008, the Eurosystem, for example, has conducted fixed-rate tenders with full allotment against an extended range of eligible collateral.
In April it was 3.4 per cent according to the CPI. This was entirely in line with our assessment at the most recent monetary policy meeting. Since April the oil price has risen substantially. Spot and forward prices of oil are now around 30 per cent higher than they were in April. It is probable that the higher oil prices may affect inflation via higher petrol prices. In July we will once again weigh up these counteracting forces This was some of the new information received in recent weeks. Further information will be presented over the coming weeks, and we will give consideration to this information as well at our next monetary policy meeting. At the most recent meeting in April the Executive Board’s view of the interest rate path was the same as in February. My view then was that there was a greater risk of international price impulses forcing up inflation through higher inflation expectations. This was a reason why I voted to hold the repo rate unchanged. At the same time, I also considered that the financial unease and the slowdown in international growth could mean a risk of weaker growth and inflation in the long term. The counteracting forces we had to consider in April are still in place. There are discussions of what will happen to monetary policy when the oil price has risen roughly in line with the alternative scenario outlined in our February report. This could indicate a higher interest rate path. But it is not that simple.

While inflation has remained elevated and is likely to stay above 2% for some months to come, inflation rates are expected to decline further in the course of 2012 to below 2%. A cross-check with the information from our monetary analysis confirms that the underlying pace of monetary expansion continues to be moderate. After today’s decision, inflation should remain in line with price stability over the policy-relevant horizon. Owing to their unfavourable effects on financing conditions and confidence, the ongoing tensions in financial markets are likely to dampen the pace of economic growth in the euro area in the second half of this year and  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  beyond. The economic outlook continues to be subject to particularly high uncertainty and intensified downside risks. Some of these risks have been materialising, which makes a significant downward revision to forecasts and projections for average real GDP growth in 2012 very likely. In such an environment, price, cost and wage pressures in the euro area should also moderate; today’s decision takes this into account. Overall, it remains essential for monetary policy to maintain price stability over the medium term, thereby ensuring a firm anchoring of inflation expectations in the euro area in line with our aim of maintaining inflation rates below, but close to, 2% over the medium term. Such anchoring is a prerequisite for monetary policy to make its contribution towards supporting economic growth and job creation in the euro area.