samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The credibility of the ECB will crucially depend on its ability to  8 Speech by the President of the European Monetary Institute, Dr. W.F. Duisenberg, at the conference on “European Monetary Union : Prospects for European Financial Markets”, held in Paris, 22 October 1997. BIS Review 112/1997  -9-  adamantly pursue its strategy aiming at price stability and on its fortitude in resisting any pressure to deviate from this strategy. BIS Review 112/1997

It is therefore the expectation of the Bank of Zambia that this Conference will discuss this trend and its implications, particularly with regard to limited accessibility to technology and technicalknow how of consumers in SADC member countries. Other themes I am sure you will deliberate upon include confidentially of financial information, money laundering and terrorist financing. Effective payment system oversight needs to be promoted so that public confidence in the safety and soundness of the national payment systems is maintained. Understandably, this is a new area and in most member countries work is still exploratory. I therefore urge you all to double your efforts in this regard and deliver on this very important central bank responsibility. Ladies and Gentlemen, another new area is that of mobile phone enabled payment services. This development has a huge potential to help the SADC region leap frog a number of financial sector development challenges particularly those related to improving access and availability of financial services. This is because mobile phone based services, particularly those focused on low-value payments where swift and convenient service is the primary goal could be a practical solution for SADC member countries. The challenge therefore is how well we all respond without damaging this sprouting and potentially cost-effective delivery channel for financial services, which can be damaged with over regulation or lack of mitigation for the risks its poses.
Let us assume that Finansinspektionen conducts a wise policy in the coming decades and succeeds in preventing one or more financial crises that would otherwise have occurred. It would be very difficult to actually prove that this was due to successful macroprudential policy – the only thing that can be observed is that no crisis has occurred. I can easily imagine that the general impression in retrospect would be that Finansinspektionen had been imagining things and tightened macroprudential policy unnecessarily. Ironically, it may be the case that the more successful macroprudential policy is, the less useful it is perceived to be. Over time, this could lead to fairly strong pressure on Finansinspektionen not to take any action. In addition, there will of course also be the common criticism that one, as in monetary policy, is “taking away the punch bowl just as the party gets going”. Moreover, it is possible that macroprudential policy measures will be perceived as more dramatic and as a larger intervention than raising the repo rate, and the pressure not to take action can thus be particularly great in this field. Macroprudential policy also needs support Just as monetary policy cannot be left alone to try to manage the risks linked to household debt and developments on the housing market, macroprudential policy cannot be left without support. I believe it is important that there is some degree of concordance between macroprudential policy and monetary policy – so that they, so to speak, do not pull in different directions, but help one another.

However, I believe there is a risk of now leaning back and assuming that all of the problems will be automatically resolved, or perhaps are already resolved. This is not a quick fix. Making decisions in the field of macroprudential policy is no easy task and Finansinspektionen has a difficult workload ahead. Many people have questioned the efficiency and expediency of the policy rate in this context. But, of course, there are a number of questions regarding macroprudential policy as well. An obvious complication is that macroprudential policy is a new field. There is rather limited practical experience of the effects of macroprudential policy measures and nor is academic research able to provide any clear guidance as yet. This means that, at least during a transitional period, there will be considerable uncertainty over the effects of the measures taken. The objective of macroprudential policy – to prevent risks to the financial system as a whole – is moreover clearer on paper than in practice. It is of course not easy to know when the system is sufficiently resilient or if some form of imbalance is building up, which the crisis clearly illustrated. There are no numerical targets here, and determining when a certain deviation has begun to be abnormal is rather difficult.10 Finansinspektionen will probably also need to struggle on occasion with the scepticism of general opinion towards the need for macroprudential measures. There are different reasons for this.
In such a situation it was natural to study the form of the economic recovery following previous crises. The overriding conclusion that could then be drawn was that the recovery would be slower than normal.6 However, it is also the case that every crisis is unique in many respects and there were circumstances that pointed in the opposite direction. Among other things, the emerging economies in Asia, led by China, recovered relatively quickly and became something of a driving force for the recovery in the rest of the world. Another positive factor was that growth was rather good around the world when the crisis began.7 With hindsight, it can be noted that the recovery in many areas, and not least in Sweden (see Figure 1 above), has been much more rapid than we could have expected. As can be seen in Figure 2, the Riksbank began to increase the repo rate somewhat earlier than predicted during the most severe phase of the crisis and the repo-rate path was given a somewhat more “top heavy” profile. It is natural to try to learn from previous crises, but at the same time we must be careful not to draw too far-reaching historical parallels. In the midst of the crisis there was, for example, sometimes a slightly careless tendency to refer to the Swedish crisis of the 1990s, despite the fact that the circumstances at that time were entirely different.

G20 Leaders and Finance Minsters need to keep our We may not be able to abolish the occasional waves of optimism that grip humanity and the tendency to excess they set off. But we can and must dampen their effects on the financial system and economy. This must include changing the incentives that bankers face. It will include a simplification of the capital markets; and constraints on the effects of exuberance through policies on leverage, capital and liquidity – applied beyond banking where warranted. And it must include macroprudential regimes that help us to refresh the microregulatory regimes and enable the authorities to take away the punchbowl when the party threatens to get out of control. Markets will, in time, forget about the risks, but the system will be safer if we succeed in building official institutions that do not forget. Parliament can underpin that by holding us to account in this endeavour, as it does on monetary policy – incentives matter in the official sector too. That will make for a safer and sounder financial system that can meet the abiding needs of the economy as a whole. And, to those of you here today, I would say that the Bank believes what it always believed: that sound and honest finance is not only essential for the economy, it will be good for the City too. 8  BIS central bankers’ speeches
This translates into a return on assets (ROA) of -0.21% (down 72 bp on the figure of 0.51% recorded in 2019), which rises to 0.33%8 if the negative extraordinary adjustments applied during the year in three of the system’s main banks are stripped out.9 Notable in these results is the increase in impairment losses, of over 50%, which entailed provisioning that was € billion higher in 2020 than in 2019.10 As to Spanish banks’ external business, the effects were also adverse given the global nature of the crisis. This was the case both for the total volume of lending and its contribution to the consolidated result, while the depreciation of emerging countries’ currencies also came into play.11 In any event, the weight of external business in the main Spanish banks’ ordinary net income has increased. Hence, without taking into account the  5  However, behaviour was uneven in firms (with an increase of 6.6%) and in households (where there was a decline of 5.6%). 6 See, for example, the October 2020 Bank Lending Survey in Spain. Menéndez-Pujadas and Mulino (2020) summarise the results of the survey for the participating Spanish banks. 7 See D. Rodríguez-Miera and R. Vegas (2021), “Impact of the dividend distribution restriction on the flow of credit to non-financial corporations in Spain", Analytical Articles, Economic Bulletin, 1/2021, Banco de España. 8 The return on equity (ROE) stood at -3.1% (10 pp down on the figure of 6.9% recorded a year earlier), and at 4.8% if extraordinary adjustments are stripped out.

“The Fault Lines in Cross-Border Banking: Lessons from the Icelandic Case”. SUERF Studies 05/2010, European Money and Finance Forum (2010). Baldursson and Portes give a recent assessment of the rise and fall of the Icelandic banks: Friðrik M Baldursson and Richard Portes (2013), “Gambling for resurrection in Iceland: the rise and fall of the banks”, CEPR Discussion Paper 9664, September. 5  Fleming and Klagge describe the Federal Reserve’s foreign exchange swap lines: Michael J. Fleming, and Nicholas J. Klagges. “The Federal Reserve’s Foreign Exchange Swap Lines. Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Current Issues in Economics and Finance”, 16, 4 (2010). Allen and Moessner analyse the important role of the US Dollar surplus in the policy response to the crisis and compare it to the policy response during the Great Depression: William A Allen and Richard Moessner (2010), “Options for meeting the demand for international liquidity during financial crises”, BIS Quarterly Review, September 2010, http://www.bis.org/. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  of the safety net and the associated moral hazard-mitigating mechanism in cross-border banking applied across the board to regulation, supervision, LOLR, deposit insurance, and crisis management and resolution. The adjustment that needs to take place after the crisis in order to make cross-border banking safer is clear in principle: the market action and the public framework in the form of the safety net and other arrangements has to be better aligned.
In addition, dollars would no longer be fungible, because each dollar would have a different amount of interest accrued on it. The difference in those two situations is the subject of money illusion – the behavioral tendency of people to think in nominal terms. 4 To the extent that money illusion is operative, then imposing negative nominal interest rates will be perceived as more costly to people than engineering an increase in inflation of the same amount – in both cases, the real wealth of the person’s money holdings is the same, but in the case of inflation, the person holds the same number of dollars at the end of the period, whereas with negative nominal interest rates, some of the person’s money holdings have been paid out as interest. Money illusion causes the payment of interest to be perceived as more costly, much as people resist nominal decreases in wages which manifests itself as downward wage rigidity. 3  Charles M. Kahn, James McAndrews, and William Roberds, “Money Is Privacy,” International Economic Review 46, no. 2 (May 2005): 377–99. 4  See Eldar Shafir, Peter Diamond, and Amos Tversky, “Money Illusion,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 112, no. 2 (1997): 341–74, for evidence on money illusion. BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  2. Legal and operational frictions  Legal and operational challenges will also arise as money and capital markets adjust to negative rates.

For example, a million U.S. dollars, made up solely of $ bills, would form a stack measuring approximately 43 inches or 109 centimeters in height and weighing 22 pounds or about 10 kilos. Consequently, currency is inconvenient to use, especially for those who seek to make large investments or payments. Second, currency is subject to theft, requiring a big investment in security and insurance. Third, recounting currency every time it is moved or transferred between people entails time and expense. Finally, currency is subject to degradation, accident, fire, counterfeiting, and other mishaps. Because currency is costly to invest in, then we could refine the proposition we stated earlier to say that a person would invest a dollar in an account or bond that promises to pay back less than a dollar so long as the person could not preserve more of his or her initial wealth by investing in currency, net of its costs. So one might suggest that it is the negative net return on currency that establishes the lower bound to interest rates – zero is only a rough approximation. This formulation is sharper, certainly, but it may also be too blunt for the following reason. Notice that the costs of handling currency vary by the size of the investment one is considering.
The MPC’s post-meeting statement made clear of the need to monitor the situation in the global market closely so that the stance of monetary policy can be appropriately and flexibly calibrated to ensure price stability and steady growth. Finally, the last point I want to stress is that the ability of the Thai economy to weather external shocks and global slowdown at this time are now much greater compared to the situations say ten years ago. 2  BIS Review 29/2008  First, the country’s economic fundamentals have improved from the crisis years, with solid external positions marked by current account surpluses, high level of international reserves, and much lower level of external debt. This stronger financial position will enhance the ability of the economy to cushion itself against external shocks. Second, our banking sector is in excellent shape, with good profitability, strong capital base, and improved asset quality. The corporate sector is also in good financial shape with strong earnings and low financial leverage. These qualities will make the private sector more resilient to the impact of economic volatilities from outside. And third, policy regime in Thailand has become more flexible, especially the exchange rate, with market force now playing a dominant role in allocating resources. Such attribute provides the private sector with a mechanism to efficiently adjust to the impact of external shocks.

Lessons from the Asian crisis Five years have passed since the Asian financial crisis began, prompting a major re-think of policies held to be obvious and valid before the crisis. In particular, the crisis has highlighted three major issues in Asian economic and financial systems. First, some analysts have questioned East Asia’s growth model, with its emphasis on high savings, reliance on foreign investment, and export growth. East Asian economies, it is argued, should instead lower savings rates, in order to stimulate domestic demand, develop indigenous enterprise, and insulate themselves from volatile external conditions. Second, the crisis highlighted the dangers of liberalising capital markets too rapidly and without adequate safeguards. Before the crisis, capital account liberalization was the vogue. Conventional wisdom emphasized benefits rather than costs of free capital flows. The crisis demolished this complacent confidence. Undoubtedly, structural flaws and policy errors, especially in the financial and corporate sectors, contributed to the crisis. However, the financial markets’ reaction to these weaknesses was out of proportion to the severity of the crime. Markets proved highly susceptible to contagion and herd behaviour. Crashes and panics shook seemingly sound economies to their roots. Third, the crisis demonstrated the dangers of over-reliance on bank-based financing. In many Asian countries prior to the crisis, capital markets were underdeveloped. Bond markets, in particular, were illiquid or nonexistent. So Asian firms relied on bank loans for working capital and to fund capital expenditure. When banks ran into trouble, firms were left without alternative sources of capital.
Nina Stoyanova: Forthcoming new developments in the area of payment services and digitalisation Publication by Ms Nina Stoyanova, Deputy Governor and Head of the Banking Department of the Bulgarian National Bank, in the Quarterly Bulletin of the Association of Banks in Bulgaria, issue 65, January 2021. Digital technologies have changed the financial services provision business, and the payment sector is the leader in this trend. The speed of development of innovations and the scale of technological changes in it require concrete and targeted effort. The pending strategic projects and directions of development of the European payment infrastructure in the short term, as presented in the digital finance package of the European Commission of November 20201, are related to the development of instant payments, digitalisation of financial services and support of secure, profitable and interoperable payment solutions within the single market. 1. Forthcoming review of the Second Payment Services Directive In 2021, there will be a review of the Second Payment Services Directive2 (PSD2) adopted in 2015 and transposed in the national legislation at the beginning of 2018 with the new Law on Payment Services and Payment Systems. An analysis of the results of the directive’s implementation is expected to cover the following areas: - Updating the requirements to technical solutions used by payment services providers for strong customer authentication, which are to ensure high level of security to customers, while being convenient and user-friendly. Emphasis will be placed on the so-called ‘nontransmittable’ elements, such as biometrics.

Opening up the market to competition and authorizing a second credit bureau in 2016 was a further step towards improving the quality of services provided to credit institutions and consumers. The range of products offered has expanded to include new decision-aiding tools, such as “behavior scoring”, “portfolio monitoring” and “alerting”. In close coordination with the Ministry of Economy and Finance, Bank Al-Maghrib is currently working to rapidly develop the legal and regulatory framework of “credit bureaus” in order to expand its scope to other nonfinancial data providers, including telecom operators and water/electricity suppliers. This will help the unbanked population to have access to financing, as demonstrated by the experience of pioneering countries in this area. 2  As regards the implementation of the second pillar, the Bank has undertaken since 2016, in collaboration with the IFC, an appraisal of the existing system and has identified the characteristics of the future credit registry. In this connection, today’s seminar is a real opportunity for us to learn about the experiences of forerunners in this field, with a view to finalizing our own roadmap. Ladies and gentlemen, Six regulators, well known for their optimal use of credit registries, will present to us today how they use credit reporting data to achieve their core missions, particularly micro and macro prudential regulation, systemic risk control and monetary policy, and strengthen off-site supervision.
As a result, the Bank of Albania supports the scientific research and the activity of Albanian students, studying at university and other academic institutions, in Albania and abroad. In this framework, I would like to continue a cherished tradition of the Bank of Albania, the ceremony of Governor's Award for the Best Diploma Thesis. For 16 years, the Bank of Albania selects and awards research studies conducted by Albanian students, graduating in Albania or abroad. Over the years, the focus of the presented research materials is on recent economic issues. The research follows how the needs and the economic, financial and social events affect the authorities, businesses and the society. Simultaneously, the process of setting the hypothesis, selecting and implementing the applied methodologies, is conducted in congruence with the best up-to-date research practices. This renders analysis and research investigation valid and professional. During this year's competition, there were a series of applications received, mainly focusing on topics that deal with recent phenomena taking place in the fields of economics and finance. The studies are directly or indirectly connected with the activities of the central bank. Some of the most interesting topics of these studies were the following: the impact of policies on the central bank's balance sheet in the corporate bond markets;  2/4  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  the impact of credit and the expansion of banking products; the effect of prices on the real estate market; the multiplier of government expenses and consumption, and their effect on the economy.

Undoubtedly, the Bank of Albania has also paid attention to its research analysis and materials, emphasizing the role of balance sheet policies on supporting the economy with liquidity, particularly during the  3/4  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  pandemic, without ignoring the risks that these policies may pose, not least, to the emerging economies. On the other hand, Pegi has meticulously analysed the theoretical and empirical literature and the methodological approach, laying out a discussion and presenting results that deserve the first prize in this competition. I congratulate her for being part of this competition, and I take the opportunity to wish all participants and winners' great successes in their professional career endeavours! 4/4  BIS - Central bankers' speeches