samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
BIS Review 16/2009  7  The enlargement of the currency area for which we bear responsibility is a challenge specific to the ECB. No other central bank operates in an economic and monetary area whose expansion forms part of a structured integration process. No other central bank regularly integrates new institutions, as the Eurosystem does. With each addition to the euro area, the Eurosystem incorporates a national central bank in the “monetary team”, which consists of the ECB – the “captain” – and all the national central banks of the euro area countries. The euro was introduced ten years ago into 11 EU Member States as a single currency. At that time, the euro area had 292 million inhabitants. Today it comprises 16 countries with a total of 329 million inhabitants. Over the past ten years, five new members have joined: Greece, Slovenia, Malta, Cyprus and, on 1 January of this year, Slovakia. Slovenia and Slovakia were the first former communist countries from central Europe to join. Their entry bears witness to their transformation over the past two decades. The accession of five countries in ten years also reflects the openness of the euro area. We are not a “closed shop”. The euro area is open to all Member States of the European Union. To join, a Member State has to fulfil the Maastricht convergence criteria. These relate to inflation, long-term interest rates, exchange rates and state finances.

Significant resources have been devoted by the Bank in the last two years to achieve these objectives. One of it was the relicensing process. We had reassessed a total of 839 money changing companies and remittance service providers and issued new licences to those that met the necessary requirements. We have also provided time for companies to improve their operations. These companies had demonstrated that they are able to comply with the required rules. For those that qualify the licensing processes, improvements in their operations could be achieved within a reasonable timeframe. We have also made it clear to the industry that companies found to be carrying out unauthorised activities will be firmly dealt with through enforcement actions. Out of the 839 licenses issued earlier, the relicensing process had reduced a total of 365 licenses as a result of revocation, merger, voluntary surrender of license or industry players themselves decided to convert to become an agent of a larger entity. We have significantly increased our interactions with the industry to help companies understand the regulatory requirements that must be observed. These engagements have also helped the Bank better understand the practical issues that are faced by the industry and we have responded accordingly to some of these issues. I can assure you that we will continue to work with the industry to find solutions to legitimate issues raised by the industry but the industry must act responsibly and with the public’s interest in mind. Enforcing compliance will continue to be an important focus of the Bank.
As the pace of globalization intensifies and massive flows of capital take place, on-going reforms in regulation and supervision, the development of domestic capital markets, improvement in corporate governance and an adequate and credible legal framework have to take place effectively. Two, the maintenance of sound macroeconomic policies. Sound fiscal and monetary policies leading to low and stable inflation and an environment of exchange rate stability and sustained private sector investment is vital for sustainable development. Three, the implementation of policies that promote domestic savings and investment. It is important to note that while a steady flow of foreign savings is important for emerging markets, efforts to mobilize domestic resources are equally critical for long-term growth. Four, the maintenance of reasonable debt levels so that the repayment capacity of the economy is not compromised, even if some of the major risks were to materialize. Five, the improvement of the quality of information and statistics relating to all sectors of the economy. This policy action ensures the widespread and timely dissemination of information, thereby encouraging robust economic activity. Six, the continuous expansion of trade by lobbying for major changes within the industrialized nations, while promoting greater trade among the emerging economies and within regions. BIS Review 29/2008  5  Seven, the rapid implementation of consistent and significant poverty reduction programmes and infrastructure development projects so that it provides opportunity and hope to the poor and addresses regional imbalances.

In other words, many countries re-positioned themselves to become “net commodity exporters” from being “net commodity importers”, in the face of rising prices. They were quick to understand that such a shift was vital for their future economic development and well being. As in the 1970’s, today too, there is a clear trend where countries are quickly attempting to boost their capacity to produce oil and agricultural commodities. If, as expected, this re-positioning and/or restructuring occurs, and occurs quickly, the current imbalances will be addressed sooner than later. In fact, if we look at the recent increases in bio-fuel production, it has clearly been a case of steady increases in the production of all varieties of oil substitutes, all over the world. In that sense, the current vibrant and challenging economic environment provides new and exciting opportunities to both developing and advanced countries, and many countries seem eager to seize opportunities and implement decisions quickly. Mr. Chairman, at the same time, we should also probably realize that in our constant search for sustainable growth, the more regular issues that confront emerging economies also need to be addressed appropriately through a series of fundamental policy actions. Let us therefore, for completeness sake, take a quick look at some of those policy actions as well. One, the sound management of risk.
Mr Yam discusses the sustainability of monetary and exchange rate policies Speech by the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, Mr Joseph Yam, JP, at the International Conference on Central Banking Policies: Leading the Way Towards Sustainable Growth presented by the Monetary and Foreign Exchange Authority of Macau on 14 May 1999. Dr. Pessoa, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, It is a pleasure to be back in this beautiful city, and an honour to be invited to take part in such an important and timely conference. I warmly congratulate the Monetary and Foreign Exchange Authority of Macau on having put together a stimulating programme, and on having chosen this splendid new cultural centre for the venue. Apart from the inherent interest of the topics under discussion, the conference is significant in at least two respects. It takes place at a time when we are beginning to emerge from what has been, for much of this region, a period of sharp economic crisis, so that the questions we are addressing today perhaps have more relevance than ever. The conference is also taking place seven months before Macau becomes a Special Administrative region of the People’s Republic of China, on 20 December 1999. Hong Kong, Macau’s neighbour across the Pearl River Estuary, has a much shorter history as a city, but it does have a slightly longer experience as a Special Administrative region under the ‘one country, two systems’ formula.

As a result, markets have remained liquid, and activity has recently picked up. There is a renewed sense of optimism that, whatever adjustments remain to be worked out, the worst is now over. In labour markets, wage freezes are the norm, combined in many cases with cuts in bonuses in sectors that have been most affected by the crisis. Nominal wages are likely to show little, if any, growth this year, compared with increases of 7-8% in the period leading up to the crisis. Price inflation has also dropped markedly, and has turned negative in recent months. Price reductions inevitably cause short-run dislocations. But they are a key channel of adjustment for Hong Kong, and the improvements in our competitiveness that result will set the stage for a sound recovery. The important consideration is that this process should be completed quickly, and there is every indication that it will be. A few critics maintain that we should have ‘let the link go’ during the crisis to allow nominal exchange rate depreciation to restore our competitiveness. I believe that such a step would have been fraught with risks. Any direct impact on growth would almost certainly have been offset by reduced confidence in our longer-term policy direction and heightened anxieties about the short-term impact on the financial and corporate sectors. I do not need to remind you that Hong Kong did not suffer from the structural problems in these sectors that have been ascribed to some other economies.
L’Union monétaire est donc composée de pays dont les résultats monétaires et financiers ont convergé vers ceux des pays dont les monnaies sont les plus stables et les plus crédibles. L’objectif des autorités monétaires de la zone euro est la stabilité monétaire. Le Traité de Maastricht a conféré une mission claire au Système européen de banques centrales (SEBC) nouvellement créé, celle de maintenir la stabilité des prix. Le SEBC est totalement indépendant des autorités nationales et européennes dans la poursuite de cet objectif. En d’autres termes, les banques centrales nationales sont indépendantes et leurs statuts sont compatibles avec le Traité. Le SEBC a hérité de la crédibilité des banques centrales nationales des pays dont les monnaies bénéficient de la meilleure réputation, c’est-à-dire l’Allemagne et la France. Les 13 octobre et 1er décembre 1998, la BCE a présenté la stratégie de politique monétaire qui sera mise en œuvre durant la phase III de l’Union monétaire. Cette stratégie assure la continuité avec les politiques monétaires des banques centrales nationales participantes : - la stabilité des prix est définie comme une progression sur un an de l’indice des prix à la consommation harmonisé (IPCH) inférieure à 2 % dans la zone euro. La stabilité des prix doit être maintenue à moyen terme. Définir la stabilité des prix permet également de mettre en oeuvre les principes de transparence et de responsabilité. - un rôle de premier plan a été assigné à la monnaie.

To restore stability to the financial system, the most immediate step taken was to ensure that financial institutions have adequate capital to withstand future risks. The sources of capital were to come from the private sector including the original shareholders and new partners, both Thai and foreign. As it turns out, in some cases, the authorities did eventually provide a recapitalisation scheme. Nevertheless, this scheme was not much utilized by banks. In fact, only 74 billion baht of the scheme was actually used. Another important step taken to stabilize the financial system was to raise the prudential and supervision standards such as the rules on loan classification, provisioning, asset valuation, just to name a few examples, to be in line with international standards. As a result, commercial banks in Thailand have gradually recovered from the crisis. Here are some facts and numbers. ·  The banking sector now has a capital adequacy ratio of 11.9%. ·  The Thai banks recorded a better result in the first quarter of this year. They turned in a profit of 1.9 billion compared to a loss of 39 billion baht in the same period last year, as loan provision expenses declined significantly. This is partly due to the large provisioning and loss recognition, which were already taken last year. In addition, there has been substantial progress in debt restructuring the Thai banks recorded.
So even the conventional IS curve says the result would be stronger demand. But let’s  Page 14  suppose the “drop” is financed by a tax on other, non-monetary assets, leaving household wealth in aggregate (the “W” term) unchanged. Because people’s financial positions differ, partly by age – older people have positive net financial wealth, those who’ve just bought a house have negative “W” – this pair of transactions redistributes resources, away from long-term savers and towards borrowers. And if the latter group is “credit constrained” – if they’d like to spend and borrow more at the prevailing level of interest rates but, perhaps for want of collateral, cannot do so – then this transfer should boost demand. Net payers of the tax will cut back on their spending by less than the increase in demand from beneficiaries of the policy. Even when offset by an equal and opposite tax, and even for given interest rates, this addition of liquid assets would add to demand and inflation. To me this sounds perfectly plausible. Indeed the MPC has often argued that these constraints can matter for the transmission of more standard changes in interest rates. If borrowers are (on average) more credit constrained than savers, and therefore more sensitive to changes in cash flow, equal declines in debt interest costs on the one hand, and deposit receipts on the other, will on balance be expansionary. Nor is this the only way in which a “helicopter drop” might matter.

The deeper point is that, if the very existence of money is accounted for by the presence of various financial frictions (i.e. departures from Hahn’s Arrow-Debreu world) then supplying more of it might plausibly ease these constraints. Conceivably this could boost spending even without any change in bond yields or the prices of other assets. If for no other, this is one reason why policymakers should always pay attention to the behaviour of the monetary aggregates. One should not presume that an IS relationship (based on something like [1]) always captures fully the degree of inflationary pressure in the economy or the transmission of monetary policy. Stronger claims about quantities not borne out by the evidence Equally, one cannot conclude either that these aggregates are the only thing you need to consider. Nor should one imagine –this was an approximation that that both “Keynesians” and “monetarists” often seemed to make – that the one (broad money) is uniquely determined by the other (narrow money). Using recent experience in the UK I want to discuss some of the challenges in interpreting these data. Some, highlighted in the introduction, are evident in a simple split of the data over the inflation targeting period (for convenience, I’ve reproduced the relevant Charts here).
However, despite the success attained in reducing inflation, I would like to underline the fact that we have not reached our final target yet. Turkey is one of the very few countries where double-digit inflation prevails. As I have mentioned repeatedly both at the very beginning of the disinflation program and the point we reached today, our final target is to achieve and maintain price stability. Now let me emphasize once more what price stability stands for. The well-known definition of price stability relates to the currently low inflation rate in one hand, and the expectation of economic agents that the ongoing decline in inflation will continue in the future. Such an inflation rate is so low that people do not need to take it into account in their investment, consumption and saving decisions. At the point we have reached in inflation, it is clear that our economy is surviving from chronic inflation. However, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that we have not fully maintained the price stability that I have just mentioned, and our economy is still in a “falling inflation” period. Honorable guests, The point we reached in the fight against inflation is remarkable. Both the dynamics of inflation and economy go through changes along with the transition from chronic inflation to falling inflation process.

Combatting fraud is a high priority for the Bank, and we will continue to work with the financial industry, Government agencies and law enforcement authorities to further improve banking and payment fraud incident response and recovery actions. Alongside these efforts, increasing digital and financial literacy will be extremely important to build and preserve confidence in the use of digital financial services. Learning how to use digital financial services safely is just one dimension. An important goal of improving digital financial literacy is also to help individuals make better use of digital financial services to improve their financial well-being. With an explosion of digital tools that can help individuals plan and manage their finances better, a much wider range of financial solutions, and easier access to financial advice - financial literacy, including digital financial literacy, is critical to help individuals navigate the complexity that comes with more choice. Faced with the same set of choices, individuals armed with the knowledge and skills to make good choices and good use of facilities available to them could significantly improve their standard of living, while others who make poor financial choices could be plunged into personal financial hardship. 15. The Financial Literacy Month this year aims to amplify the importance of digital financial literacy in helping Malaysians build financial resilience, and enable them to participate fully in the digital economy with confidence. Our efforts should reduce the digital divide, expand accessibility, and strengthen individual skills to manage money wisely. 16.
To date, this has focused on capital, but will be expanded over the next year to encapsulate local implementation of the LCR, as well as the frameworks for global and domestic systemically important banks (G-SIBs and D-SIBs), since these come into effect over the next couple of years;  •  undertake a full set of implementation assessments for 2013. We will conduct reviews of Singapore, Switzerland, China, Australia, Brazil and Canada. Follow-up  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  reviews of the European Union and the United States are also planned once their Basel III regulations are finalised; and •  publish a report on the initial, detailed review of risk-weighted asset calculations for the banking book; we hope to publish the full results by the summer. Together with the recently published results on the trading book, this analysis identifies the specific drivers that lead to variations in risk weights for similar exposures. The Committee’s next step will then be to consider policy responses to reduce any unwarranted variability and to therefore improve the comparability of banks’ ratios. A theme I will be returning to is the importance of this implementation monitoring work for the Committee. While it is a relatively new component of the Committee’s mandate, it should not be seen as an adjunct to the Committee’s standard-setting role. Rather, it is absolutely critical to successfully delivering desired policy outcomes. Where to next?

Figure 2 Contributions to monthly CPI inflation (*) (accumulated in moving six-month periods, percentage points) 3  3  2  2  1  1  0  0  -1  -1 Jun.11  Dec.11 Goods CPIEFE  Jun.12  Dic.12  Jun.12  Services CPIEFE  Foods  Dic.13 Energy  CPI  (*) Starting in January 2014, calculations are based on the new indices with base year 2013=100, so they may not be strictly comparable with earlier figures. Sources: Central Bank of Chile and National Statistics Institute (INE). BIS central bankers’ speeches  7  Figure 3  Private consumption (annual change, percent)  Investment (annual change, percent)  60  60  72  45  45  54  54  30  30  36  36  15  15  18  18  0  0  0  0  -15  -15  -18  -18  -30  -30  -36  -36  09  10  11  Durable goods  12  13  72  12 09 10 11 13 14 Construction and engineering works  14  Non-durable goods  Machinery & equipment  Source: Central Bank of Chile.
We also report home price change expectations and price change expectations for various commodities. In our latest survey in May 2014, these expectations remained stable for the most part. Interestingly, medical care price change expectations have been gradually declining since December 2013, dropping from around 11 percent to 9.5 percent. The expected cost of a college education has also been dropping since the start of 2014. These results are shown in Charts 2 and 3. For the labor market, we report the median expected earnings growth over the next twelve months. This figure has been stable at around 2 percent over the sample period, with a small increase to 2.4 percent over the winter that has since been reversed, as seen in Chart 4. We also track workers’ perceived chances of losing their current job, of leaving their current job voluntarily, and of finding another job in three months should they lose their current one. Quits, layoffs, and the job-finding rate are important flow measures, and workers’ expectations about these events enable us to gauge households’ perceptions of future labor market conditions. As I will mention later, these expectations seem to be meaningfully related to job search behavior and other economic decisions by households.

But the Taylor rule is a good test because, other things being equal, the policy rate should be reasonably well in line with it unless there are convincing reasons for a deviation. With this in mind, let us turn to the November interest rate decision. The Monetary Policy Committee decided to raise interest rates by 0.25 percentage points. That decision, of course, was based on the most recent statistics and the indications in the Bank’s forecast. First of all, inflation is far above target and is forecast to continue rising until early in 2012 before tapering off as the year progresses. Second, available measures of inflation expectations indicate that longer-term expectations are considerably above target. These measures of inflation expectations are flawed, of course – perhaps especially so at this time. Survey measures have a tendency to take excessive account of recent inflation, and bond market measures of inflation expectations are skewed by a variety of market imperfections at present. But flawed though they may be, these are the only measures we have, and it would be irresponsible simply to ignore them. Third, indicators suggest that domestic demand was strong in Q3 in spite of the global situation, and that the economic recovery is strong enough not to be derailed by resistance to inflationary pressures through modest rate interest hikes. Fourth, we have the global situation, which is mainly a risk factor at this juncture and has not yet had a measurable impact on domestic economic developments. But we did not merely raise interest rates.