samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Jarle Bergo: The role of interest rates and the outlook for the Norwegian economy Address by Mr Jarle Bergo, Deputy Governor of Norges Bank, at a seminar hosted by Swedbank Markets Oslo/First Securities, Gardermoen, 23 March 2006. The  charts can be found on the Norges Bank’s website. The address is based on the assessments presented at Norges Bank’s press conference following the Executive Board’s monetary policy meeting on 16 March, Inflation Report 1/06 and on previous speeches. *  *  *  The interest rate is a variable that affects most of us, whether we are investors or borrowers. And even if we don’t have debts or assets, the influence of the interest rate on the economy will affect us indirectly. In this presentation, I would like first to discuss briefly the various roles played by the interest rate in a theoretical framework and as an instrument in monetary policy. With this as background, I will go on to present Norges Bank’s view of the Norwegian economy and our monetary policy assessment, which was published in the Inflation Report on 16 March. The interest rate has several functions Interest rates are the terms at which money or goods today may be traded off for money or goods at a future date - the price we pay to bring consumption forward in time and the compensation we receive for postponing consumption.

On the basis of the analysis in the Inflation Reports, Norges Bank’s Executive Board assesses the consequences for future interest rate development and adopts a monetary policy strategy for the period to the next Report. The Executive Board’s assessment in its meeting 16 March was that the interest rate may gradually – in small, not too frequent steps – be brought back towards a more normal level. The objective of bringing inflation back to target and anchoring inflation expectations nevertheless implies that monetary policy will remain expansionary. The sight deposit rate should be in the interval 2¼ – 3¼ per cent in the period to the publication of the next Inflation Report on 29 June 2006, conditional on economic developments that are broadly in line with the projections. Norges Bank’s Executive Board also decided at its meeting on 16 March to raise the sight deposit rate by 0.25 percentage point to 2.50 per cent. BIS Review 22/2006  5
And no discussion of the TMPG can go without mention of the “fails charge.” Instituted in May 2009, this practice provides a standard procedure for market participants to assess – or pay – a fee for settlement failures, and this has proven to be a highly effective remedy for curbing the volume of fails in the Treasury market. 5 I want to thank the entire TMPG for their leadership in supporting the efficiency and integrity of the Treasury market. I’d like to single out Tom Wipf with a personal thank you. Tom has served with distinction as the TMPG’s chair since its inception, providing credible, balanced and independent leadership to the Group. I would be remiss if I did not also mention the ongoing work of the Inter-Agency Working Group on Treasury Market Surveillance, or the IAWG. After the Salomon auction bidding scandal in January 1992, the official sector established the IAWG. Since that time, it has been a useful forum for the official sector to coordinate and communicate on the various issues that have arisen in the Treasury market. Indeed, over the years there have been numerous examples of questionable behavior that has come to the attention of the IAWG, and these have been channeled onwards to the appropriate authorities. The IAWG continues to meet biweekly, as it has since its inception.

The key policy has been the implementation of financial sector reform which has resulted in a much improved financial system, especially the banking sector. Policies have also been directed at developing the region’s capital markets, especially the bond market. And as I noted, policy cooperation has also been strengthened to support regional financial integration. But while policies have been important, financial integration in East Asia has essentially been left to the market, in the sense that the process is basically a market-driven one. My view is that, going forward, the process of integration should continue to be market-driven and not policy-driven. But policy can do more by focusing on developing robust, efficient, and resilient local markets. This is because well-developed local markets will make the process of regional financial integration much easier. As for policy cooperation, there are definitely areas that government policies can do more collectively, especially on issues that involve efforts on a region-wide basis. In this context, future efforts at policy cooperation should focus on few but concrete and specific issues to be addressed or projects to be executed. A case in point is the development of a shared regional financial infrastructure such as linking the clearing and settlement systems, harmonizing regulations on cross-border investment flows, and developing a shared facility to promote greater flows of investment information. This type of specific efforts and projects would be easier to win region-wide commitment and support.
Source: Norges Bank  If necessary, Norges Bank can supply liquidity to the payment system. Norges Bank is the bankers’ bank. 13  In addition, Norges Bank has a special responsibility for the payment system. The Bank oversees and supervises various components of the payment system and should drive new and efficient solutions. NORGES BANK ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES 14 FEBRUARY 2019  Today, nearly all payments from customers’ bank accounts are made using deposit money.7 This is money created by banks. When people borrow money from a bank, the bank credits the same amount to an account. The money deposited was created at the instant the loan was made. Deposit money circulates through the banking system, in and out of people’s accounts and is only to a limited extent converted to cash. As long as we have confidence in both the value of the Norwegian krone and in the banking system, we will also have confidence in deposit money. The cash provided by Norges Bank has important attributes. While deposit money is a claim on a private bank, cash is a claim on the central bank. Cash is a safe alternative if private payment solutions are not functioning or do not meet the expectations of the public in terms of security and efficiency. Even though the use of cash has declined, cash is still in use and has important contingency functions. But new digital alternatives are emerging.

Over the past decade, monetary policy has had to assume almost sole responsibility for getting these economies back on their feet. After a few years of solid growth in the euro area, growth has fallen back. The interest rate level in Europe remains low, and monetary policy normalisation will take time. In this environment, new negative shocks would be very untimely for those economies. The policy space available for coping with a new downturn is limited. CONCLUSION To conclude, globalisation, digitalisation and structural changes are facets of the same long-term trend – we are in the midst of a technology-driven growth process that encompasses much of the world. It is easy to focus on the downsides, but we must also keep our eyes fixed on the big picture: never before have so many taken part in a journey with such a great leap in prosperity. But growth is unevenly distributed. The winners in global competition are reaping substantial rewards, while broad categories of wage earners in the traditional industrial economies have been left behind. The harmful effects of rising inequality must be taken seriously. 15  Our friend Kristoffer from the year 2030 awoke to rain and mild weather, and the news that an electronic platform had been hacked. Perhaps the money he had on that platform had vanished. But some of the news was positive. Today’s two major economies, China and the United States, had worked together and made progress in addressing climate challenges.
This part of the reform agenda – the restructuring of the continuing shadow banking system – must not be neglected. Market maker of last resort? The purpose of providing liquidity insurance to banks is well known – having been developed since Bagehot’s day and before. It serves us well to put a finger in the dyke, with a view to preventing a liquidity panic developing unnecessarily into a solvency problem through the forced-sale of assets. But this crisis has reminded everyone that it is not only firms that can suffer liquidity runs. Markets can too. Liquidity insurance facilities that underpin banks' funding are obviously helpful to preserving market liquidity, as they increase the probability of bank-dealers being able to finance unwanted inventory. But arguments have been advanced during the crisis that the authorities should be able to act more directly to preserve market liquidity, especially if bank-dealers withdraw from market-making because they become capital constrained. That is, essentially, the origin of suggestion that central banks should stand ready to act as Market Makers of Last Resort. 2 As the amount of credit that gets intermediated via markets rather than via institutions grows, the need for a MMLR grows too. This is by no means straightforward, and not only because it is not central to our inheritance. Whereas lending to a bank does with certainty give that bank more liquidity, entering a market as a buyer does not automatically enhance the liquidity of that market in a sustainable way.

Currently, there are enormous business opportunities which still lie unexploited in Zambia in virtually all sectors of the economy. The overall economic growth in the economy would be enhanced underpinned on low and single digit inflation and relative stable exchange rate. With an enabling environment, the private sector would exploit their full potential. Hence, employment would increase and poverty reduction would be achieved. This would contribute to the achievement of MDGs and towards the attainment of the Vision 2030. 6  BIS Review 76/2008
In contrast, the NAIRU will vary both with changes in the natural rate and in response to macroeconomic shocks. So those who argue that estimates of the NAIRU are too time-varying to be plausible are, I think, in danger of missing the point. The NAIRU can be used as an ex-post device to describe the level of unemployment at which inflation started (or would have started) to increase. But the usefulness of these estimates as an ex-ante predictor of future inflationary pressure depends critically upon the economic environment. In particular, for estimates of the NAIRU to be a good predictor of future inflation, the natural rate would need to be relatively stable, and the magnitude of likely shocks would need to be small. This perhaps goes some way to explaining why estimates of the NAIRU in the recent past have appeared to contain more ex-ante information about future inflation in the US than they have in Europe. More fundamentally, the distinction between the natural rate and the NAIRU illustrates the difficulty of using those concepts for the month-to-month implementation of monetary policy. The natural rate, although clearly relevant to the dynamics of inflation, is not sufficient to explain changes in the inflation rate. The NAIRU, which is defined to be a measure related to short-run inflationary pressures, requires knowledge of the reduced form of the transmission mechanism and the history of shocks to the economy.

They are the natural rate of unemployment and the rate of unemployment consistent with stable inflation, usually known as the NAIRU. The concept of the natural rate of unemployment introduced by Milton Friedman and Edmund Phelps 30 years ago is the level of unemployment that – as Friedman famously described – would be “ground out by the Walrasian system of general equilibrium equations” reflecting the structural characteristics of the labour and product markets. Friedman was the first to recognise that this natural rate of unemployment was neither constant over time nor immune to policy influences. The natural rate hypothesis implies a vertical long-run Phillips curve. In other words, if the monetary authorities attempted to “peg” the level of unemployment below the natural rate, then this in time would cause the inflation rate to rise indefinitely. The work of Friedman and Phelps soon proved highly relevant. The futility of using monetary policy to choose between different combinations of unemployment and inflation became only too apparent in the 1970s. Monetary shocks can – and in the early 1980s and 1990s did – cause unemployment to deviate from its natural rate, but only for a period. As inflation expectations catch up with the consequences of the monetary shock, unemployment returns to the natural rate. BIS Review 103/1998  –3–  But the responses of unemployment and inflation expectations to monetary shocks are far from immediate. Indeed, Friedman speculated that the full adjustment to an unexpected change in inflation might take up to “a couple of decades”.
Lim Hng Kiang: Seeking new growth horizons Opening address by Mr Lim Hng Kiang, Minister for Trade and Industry and Deputy Chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, at the 1st Annual World Islamic Banking Conference: Asia Summit 2010, Singapore, 14 June 2010. *  *  *  H.E. Governor Rasheed Mohammed Al Maraj, Central Bank of Bahrain, H.E. Governor Sultan Bin Nasser Al Suwaidi, Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, Distinguished guests, Ladies and gentlemen Introduction 1. Good morning and a warm welcome to our overseas guests. First of all, let me thank Governor Rasheed and Governor Sultan for joining us at this inaugural World Islamic Banking Conference: Asia Summit (WIBC Asia). Your presence here today is testimony to the strong and long-standing ties that Singapore enjoys with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and warm relationships between MAS and your respective central banks. 2. The World Islamic Banking Conference has been held successfully in Bahrain for the past sixteen years. We are honoured that WIBC Asia is now anchored in Singapore. We hope that the Summit will become an important event on the Islamic finance calendar over time and catalyse even greater engagement between the Middle East and Asia. Hence, the theme: “Seeking New Growth Horizons” is highly appropriate for this inaugural Summit. Strengthening Asia-Middle East engagement 3. Uncertainty and fear from the financial crisis have abated somewhat, but risks still remain. Global economic output had begun to pick up from the second quarter of 2009.

I therefore wish to thank, from the outset, Celpay for organising this timely conference and to welcome most warmly our foreign participants who I’m sure will bring a rare insight to this conference with their own experiences. It is widely acknowledged that expanding access to financial services for Zambia’s unbanked population remains one of the biggest challenges confronting the financial sector in this country. Findings from the last FinScope Zambia Survey which was conducted in 2009 showed that 62.7% of Zambian adults still remained financially excluded compared to 66.3% reported in 2005. This slight increase in access to financial services, however, fails to match the significant increase in the number of banking and non-banking institutions which over the same period increased from 14 to the current 19 banks and to over 90 in the case of the nonbank sector. The mismatch in growth between the supply side and the demand tells us a story that the physical increase in the number of the traditional financial service providers does not necessarily translate into a corresponding increase in access to financial services among the population. I believe it is this mismatch that calls for the need to examine the role that the non traditional platforms, such the mobile phones, can play in enhancing greater access to financial services.
Nevertheless, when you take up a position as a board member, you also have a responsibility to discharge your responsibility in a very professional and systematic manner. My dear friends, it is necessary for everyone to exercise a certain financial discipline within the organization. If the top people are lax, or if the board members do not ask the questions that need to be asked, then the tendency is for financial discipline to erode within the company. My dear Chairmen and CEOs, don't be frightened of, or upset with, the people who ask tough questions at Board Meetings. My dear Directors, don't feel over-awed or shy to ask the tough questions at Board meetings. You must do that. We want you, as Directors, to do that because it is not possible for the Department of Supervision of Non-Bank Financial Institutions to be doing all the questioning from the Chairmen & CEOs. We are performing a regulatory function. We will see whether the overall framework is in place. We will want to see whether your overall risk assessment positioning is acceptable. But, the actual running of the business is your responsibility. You have to ask the tough questions. You have to ensure that sound internal controls are in place. You have to look at the future plans to ascertain whether you are on the right track. Often, I have seen eminent and respectable people accepting board positions, but not getting involved in the governance of the company. That is not good enough, especially in finance companies.

But, at the same time, in the interest of the entire system, there may be occasions that we have to do that. So, please understand the rationale for our regulation. We are responsible for financial system stability and you, in an indirect way, are also responsible for that. 4  BIS Review 55/2008
Since the banks themselves have massive investments in this market, they were obliged to make writedowns which, in some cases, were hefty. There is still uncertainty about the volume of additional bank writedowns that will be needed, so that the situation on the international money markets remains tense. In this crisis, central banks have reacted fast and flexibly in order to secure the supply of liquidity to banks and counter distortions on the money market. By means of various measures, the Swiss National Bank was able to stabilise the three-month Libor within the target range, thereby keeping fluctuations in the relative restrictiveness of monetary policy low by comparison with other countries. However, it is not possible to solve the fundamental problems in the banking sector through the flexible deployment of an expanded range of monetary policy instruments; neither can they be resolved by means of coordinated actions on the part of central banks alone. The banks themselves must make a substantial contribution to solving the problems which triggered the current crisis. In this respect, the most urgent matters are transparency with regard to endangered positions and their valuation, increasing the capital base, and improving risk management and control systems. BIS Review 37/2008  1

In this context, a high enough level of real convergence (in addition to the compliance with the nominal convergence criteria) is needed when joining the euro area, to limit the costs associated with losing monetary policy independence. A high enough level does not mean that we are so ambitious as to aim for a convergence level of 90% of the Eurozone average or a level equal to that of Germany (as is the case with certain approaches put forward in Hungary or Poland). However, we need to achieve a real convergence level of at least 70–75 percent of the Eurozone average. Otherwise we would be insufficiently developed and, therefore, vulnerable to asymmetric shocks and unable to synchronise our business cycle with that of other euro area economies. However, we must take care that the level of convergence increases in a sustainable manner. We should be able to preserve the pace of this process, and once steps forward have been made, we may not stop or go backwards. Past achievements in nominal and real convergence, while significant, do not guarantee future success. To this end, allow me to bring up an old, but reliable principle. The Latin saying festina lente is perfectly suitable in this case: hurrying in a slow manner, if I can say so, on the convergence path means achieving a sustainable pace in the medium and long term. In other words, we need to be a marathoner, and not a sprinter.
The framework could not be implemented while the US remained neutral in the War, and the Federal Reserve Act prevented the provision of accounts to a foreign power. But within little more than a year, both obstacles had been removed. The Bank’s Court of Directors ratified the agreement in May 1917 – and the accounts were opened shortly afterwards. In the years that followed, Strong and Norman used these financial foundations to build a much broader conception of central bank co-operation, summarised in their 1921 ‘General Principles of Central Banking’. 7  Many of those principles, including the merits of operational independence for central banks, the need for appropriate supervision of financial institutions, and the importance of balancing national and international interests in the development of policy, show extraordinary foresight and remain highly relevant today. Days Present: correspondent banking services at the Bank of England today  Much has changed since those days, of course. World War 1 brought about a profound shift in the balance of global financial power, setting the US dollar on its ascent to top slot. Strong and Norman’s beloved gold standard ended ignominiously in the Great Depression. And even its post-World War 2 successor – the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates – is long gone.

But the potential sophistication of today’s attackers, and the financial, reputational and legal risks they pose to central banks are far greater than a century ago. 8  The Bank of England Archives hold a number of letters between Cunliffe, Cokayne and Strong on this subject. 6  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  6  As Simon Potter has already said, that is why it is so important that, just as central banks co-operate to provide the services they need to another, they must also co-operate in raising the standards and controls applied to those services to the highest possible levels – because we are only as strong as our weakest link. Raising standards means:   Within our own organisations – having robust risk-based processes for assessing counterparties and transactions, in compliance with relevant law and guidance; for controlling the access, people and system risks in central banking processes; and for monitoring and responding to potential risks if and when they crystallise.   And, externally, it means sharing intelligence and promoting best practice; and complying and attesting promptly, and with candour, to relevant international standards. Making progress in both of these areas is vital if the expansion in access to central banks services of recent years is to be maintained. I want to end on a positive note. The international system is constantly evolving. Policy regimes come and go. And the importance of specific reserve currencies may rise and fall: the minnows of today can be the giants of tomorrow.