samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
7 That is associated with a commonly expressed concern that negative rates reduce banks’ profitability. 6  Measured at market exchange rates. 7  In some cases household borrowing rates have actually risen. 12  BIS central bankers’ speeches  To be clear, monetary policy is conducted to achieve price stability not for the benefit of bank shareholders. Nonetheless, when negative rates are implemented in ways that insulate retail customers, shutting off the cash flow and other channels that mainly affect domestic demand, while allowing wholesale rates to adjust, their main effect is through the exchange rate channel. From an individual country’s perspective this might be an attractive route to boost activity. But for the world as a whole, this export of excess saving and transfer of demand weakness elsewhere is ultimately a zero sum game. Moreover, to the extent it pushes greater savings onto the global markets, global short-term equilibrium rates would fall further, pulling the global economy closer to a liquidity trap. At the global zero bound, there is no free lunch. 8 For monetary easing to work at a global level it cannot rely on simply moving scarce demand from one country to another. Instead policy needs to increase primarily domestic demand, with the exchange-rate channel more a side effect that accompanies any monetary policy action.

Unconventional monetary policy measures, including large-scale purchases of government securities, were necessary to deliver effective market rates negative enough to mitigate globally deficient demand. In the UK, forward guidance supplemented such measures, ensuring households and firms could be confident that interest rates would not be raised prematurely, helping to secure the nascent recovery. 4  See Rachel, L and Smith, T (2015), “Secular drivers of the global real interest rate”, Bank of England Working Paper No. 571. BIS central bankers’ speeches  9  Central banks have also purchased other assets – in some cases using small-scale programmes to alleviate specific cases of market dysfunction, and, in others, larger ones to inject greater stimulus into the economy. By deploying a broad range of ammunition, the economy has been stimulated through a number of channels. Lower policy rates brought forward consumption to today from spending tomorrow – the real interest rate channel. The all-in costs of borrowing were lowered, boosting existing borrowers’ spending power – the cash flow channel. And lower funding costs for banks increased the availability of credit – the credit channel. Lower discount rates and portfolio balance effects supported asset prices – the wealth channel. Currencies’ values fell, boosting competitiveness – the exchange rate channel. And determined central bank action and forward guidance put a floor under inflation expectations and bolstered sentiment – the confidence channel. In this way, central bank actions combatted the worst global downturn since the Great Depression.
In order to allow banks to mobilise a larger share of assets for refinancing purposes, the Eurosystem expanded the set of assets that could serve as collateral for central bank credit. Belonging to the same family of tools are the two 3-year Longer Term Refinancing Operations that were announced a little more than a year ago, also to address a funding crunch in solvent banks. As a further step to address the banks’ funding problems and the deep financial fragmentation within the euro area, the instrument of intervening in securities markets was launched. This tool has been available to the ECB since the inception of the third stage of Economic and Monetary Union in 1999, but it was not until 2009 that it was actually used. The first action of this type was the purchase programme for bank-issued covered bonds. In May 2010 the Securities Markets Programme (SMP) took effect, in conditions in which the collapse in the markets for securities issued by distressed governments threatened a renewed wave of chain defaults. The SMP programme was finally superseded by the so-called Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT), announced in September 2012 but so far not activated. I will talk more about the OMT later. The standard measures have definitely served their purpose, to maintain price stability. And it is undisputable that the non-standard measures have helped repair the monetary policy transmission mechanism by alleviating funding pressures in banks and thus complementing standard measures.

This is particularly pertinent to the Distributed Ledger Technology 2/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  platform for trade finance that we are building with the industry. This is why we have earlier announced a collaborative initiative with Singapore in this area. And I am also very pleased to note that HM Treasury and the HKMA have just started a dialogue to explore further cooperation under this project. Green Finance If I am asked to predict what will be an emerging theme for the financial services sector in 2018, green finance looks like a safe bet. Green finance is growing rapidly and Mainland China has become one of the major markets for green bonds. Hong Kong is also keen on tapping into the green finance opportunities. The Hong Kong Government plans to issue a green bond for the first time next year. There is much we can learn from and collaborate with London, which has been a forerunner in this segment of the market. One of the burning issues is the divergence in various green bonds standards and assessments currently in the market. I hope today’s Seminar could shed some light on this and also the way forward for green finance development. Conclusion The future is not all rosy though. Challenges and uncertainties abound and this calls for stronger cross-border collaboration. The success of this Forum in the past six years shows that London and Hong Kong can be an all-weather friend. And I wish all of you a very fruitful discussion today. Thank you.
This register could be made available as a public good for all administrative purposes. Establishing such a core register would require a stepwise approach, intensive cooperation among the operators of administrative, statistical and commercial business registers and should draw on the initiatives to enforce the universal use of the legal entity identifier. The register could also support nonstatistical tasks, such as those of ECB Banking Supervision or the European Commission. Additional information could be added in concentric circles around the core business register, starting with the necessary statistical variables, which would be the reference for ESCB and ESS statistical production. More circles could be used to add variables for other administrative purposes, which would also allow for controlled access. While we can only take some initial steps towards such a system of concentric business registers, we are already in a position to make a start by bringing our registers closer together for statistical purposes. Doing so is challenging in that it certainly requires thinking big, making a sizeable initial investment and using EU law. But it also seems necessary if European statistics are to remain fit for purpose in the digital age. Third, an urgent review of the EU data confidentiality framework is central to improving the quality and value of our official statistics. While the exchange of confidential information for statistical purposes is already possible under EU statistical law, the experience of the last decade shows that more is needed in a number of Member States.

It also enables the emergence of large bilateral asymmetries in the measurement of the same variables, as observed, for example, between the euro area and the United States, but also within the European Union (Chart 3). [5]  Chart 3 Bilateral euro area-US current account (EUR billions; 2020)  Sources: ECB and US Bureau of Economic Analysis. Note: Positive balance indicates a surplus for the euro area. Turning to the financial side of globalisation, indicators of international financial trade increased from the early 1990s until the global financial crisis and have subsequently stabilised since then in proportion to global output (Chart 4). As shown in my work with Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, the expansion in external assets was concentrated in positions vis-à-vis international financial centres, which in turn are linked to the corporate structures of MNEs. [6]  Chart 4 Evolution of external assets (percentages of world GDP)  Sources: External Wealth of Nations database (Lane and Milesi-Ferretti) and ECB staff calculations. Notes: Aggregates for advanced economies, financial centres and emerging and developing countries are defined as in Lane, P. R. and Milesi-Ferretti, G. M. (2018), “The External Wealth of Nations Revisited: International Financial Integration in the Aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis”, IMF Economic Review, Vol. 66, No 1, International Monetary Fund, pp. 189-222. Gross foreign direct investment (FDI) transactions of euro area countries with financial centres have been so large that these have driven aggregate euro area developments.
Vítor Constâncio: Thomas Philippon’s contribution to macro-finance Speech by Mr Vítor Constâncio, Vice-President of the European Central Bank, at the ceremony awarding the Germán Bernácer Prize for Promoting Economic Research in Europe to Thomas Philippon, Madrid, 3 November 2014. *  *  *  I wish to thank Angela Maddaloni and Agnese Leonello, from the Directorate General Research, for their help in preparing this speech. Ladies and Gentlemen, I am delighted to be here today to award the 2013 Germán Bernácer Prize to Thomas Philippon, Professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University. Thomas Philippon is a renowned scholar with a wide-ranging research agenda, both theoretical and empirical. The numerous prizes he has won throughout his career, including “best paper” awards in several top journals, speak loudly about the academic quality of his contributions. Thomas’s research – being right at the intersection between macroeconomics and finance – is also highly policy-relevant, not least from a central banker’s perspective, as I will try to highlight today. In fact, many central banks and the ECB in particular have devoted considerable attention and actively contributed to the burgeoning literature on macro-finance. The financial crisis underscored the need for a better understanding of the linkages between the health of the financial sector and the performance of the real economy. Promoting economic research in this field is an essential step in the process of developing effective policies to ensure the stability of the financial sector and, ultimately, to foster economic growth.

This line of research points to the wide range of subjects that interest Thomas Philippon already shown in his 2007 book “Un capitalisme d´héritiers: la crise française du travail” 12  6  See speech by Vítor Constâncio: Banking Union: meaning and implications for the future of banking at the Banking Union Conference, Navarra University, Madrid 24 April 2014. 7  See the opening speech entitled “The implications of bail-in rules for bank activity and stability” by Benoît Cœuré at the conference “Financing the recovery after the crisis – the roles of bank profitability, stability and regulation”, held at Bocconi University on 30 September 2013. 8  Acharya, V., L. H. Pedersen, T. Philippon and M. Richardson, (2010) “Measuring Systemic Risk,” working paper. 9  See, for example, the Vox article entitled “Finance and growth: Too much of a good thing?” by Thorsten Beck, 27 October 2013. 10  Philippon, T., (2010), “Financiers versus Engineers: Should the Financial Sector be Taxed or Subsidized?”, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2(3), 158–182. 11  Philippon, T. and A. Reshef, (2012) “Wages and Human Capital in the U.S. Finance Industry: 1909–2006”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 127(4), 1551–1609. 12  Philippon, T., (2007) “Un capitalisme d´héritiers: la crise française du travail”, Éditions Seuil. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  where he musters a lot of empirical evidence to show that the labour crisis in France stems from bad employers-employees relations associated with a system that “preserves inheritance, direct or sociological”.
The latest freefall in commodity prices – though largely the product of actual and potential supply increases – has reinforced concerns about the  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  sluggishness of global demand. And a series of relatively small data disappointments for many major G20 economies have added to these worries. Necessary changes in the stance of monetary policy removed the complacent assumption that “all bad news is good news” (because it brought renewed stimulus) that many felt underpinned markets. And as I will discuss in a moment, several commentators are peddling the myth that monetary policy is “out of ammunition.” Is “the only game in town” over? As a consequence of these developments, investors are now re-considering whether the past seven years have been well spent. Has exceptional monetary policy merely bridged two low-growth equilibria? Or, even worse, has it been a pier, leaving the global economy facing a global liquidity trap? Can more time be purchased? If so, at what cost and, most importantly, how would that time be best spent? These are the questions we should address during China’s G20 Presidency. They must be met with a response that matches the ambition and pragmatism of our hosts across financial reform, monetary policy and structural initiatives. Recent market turbulence Since the start of the year, risk sentiment in financial markets has deteriorated sharply, stemming in large part from a renewed appreciation of weak medium-term global growth prospects accompanied by marked downside risks.

For all its problems and obstacles, the year has laid bare the degree to which financial institutions and banks are prepared for unexpected circumstances. The resilience of banks and other financial institutions, and their so-called ability to adsorb the shocks the epidemic has brought about, suggest that rehabilitation of the Russian financial sector is an accomplished fact. This is why recent months have seen — despite the difficulties — the financial sector evolving and carrying on with providing support to the economy, as borrowing from banks has been on the rise, and the stock market has been growing at a faster pace. Our current priority is to strike the right balance between the objectives of supporting economic recovery and long-term projects as part of our national development agenda. It is essential to ensure that a maturing financial market relies on the principles of trust and competition and — this is of paramount importance — the principle of customer interest protection (rather than only on a short-term gain strategy). You are aware that lending continued this year, unlike in prior times of crisis. More so, we have seen record growth in mortgage lending, which is the point the Speaker has made. For all these welcome developments, our central focus should remain with the real target, which is to make housing more available to people, and not to stage a kind of race for records.
To put the recent pace of growth into perspective, we believe that the economy’s long-run sustainable growth rate – what economists call the potential growth rate – is around a 2¼ percent annual rate. We need sustained growth above that rate to absorb the still substantial amount of unused productive capacity. Thus, our recent growth rates are barely keeping up with our potential. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  Even though the unemployment rate has declined sharply from 9 percent last September to 8.2 percent in March, it is still unacceptably high. In addition, many other measures of the labor market remain weak. The labor force participation rate, the percentage of people employed, and the total number of hours worked in the economy all dropped sharply during the recession and remain well below their pre-recession levels, even taking into account the impact of demographic shifts. Also, it appears that productivity growth has slumped recently. Although that means that a given amount of growth translates into bigger employment gains, it certainly is not an unmitigated positive development. Also, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the economy still faces significant headwinds and that there are some meaningful downside risks. In the headwinds department, I would include the run-up in gasoline prices mentioned earlier because that will sap purchasing power, the continued impediments to a strong recovery from ongoing weakness in the housing sector, and fiscal drag at the federal and state and local levels.

4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  This stability is underscored by our latest quarterly consumer credit panel data, which shows that total household debt burdens have remained relatively low by national standards and that mortgage delinquency rates are lower in the Buffalo area than in other parts of the state and nation. The recovery is proceeding in Buffalo, slowly but surely. So far, the region has gained back nearly 12,000 of the roughly 20,000 jobs it lost during the downturn. This is somewhat faster progress than the nation has made, although, in part, that’s because the downturn was less severe here. One particularly good bit of news is that for the first time in decades, manufacturing has been a source of job growth in the region, rather than decline, adding more than 3,000 jobs over the past few years. That’s nearly twice the pace of growth of the U.S. manufacturing sector. That said, it is somewhat worrying that the pace of the recovery locally has actually slowed in recent months just as the national recovery has started to gain some momentum. Despite this recent slowdown, I believe there are reasons to be optimistic about Buffalo’s longer-term outlook. In particular, the decades long economic restructuring that has occurred in the region has resulted in a more diversified economy. While the region still maintains a strong manufacturing presence, it is no longer the main source of jobs in the area.
Of course, there is plenty still left to do with parts of the City still among the poorest in the UK. But compared with when I last visited a few years ago, there is now a real sense of opportunity and optimism in Bradford, lifting the spirits of the businesses operating here and the people living here. Regional visits such as these are the most useful and most interesting part of my job. Over the course of two days, I will speak and listen to over two dozen businesses of all shapes, sizes and sectors. I will speak and listen to a number of charities, not-for-profit enterprises and schools. I will do a walkabout in Sunbridge Wells, an underground parade for retail and leisure and a great example of that civic investment and entrepreneurial spirit operating once again in the City. And I will have with me a film crew, distilling some of the key bits of my visit to a wider audience across the whole of the UK. This is part of a renewed effort by the Bank, under Mark Carney’s leadership, to engage with as wide a cross-section of people, and as broad a range of views, as possible. Events of the past twelve months – indeed, events of the past twelve days – have illustrated just how important it is for policymakers to do so.

Nonetheless, this pattern is at least consistent with a shift in working practices, towards a more divisible, idiosyncratic workforce, having contributed to a flatter Phillips curve relationship. None of this evidence is definitive or decisive. Taken together, however, it is at least suggestive that recent trends in the nature of work may have had some bearing both on wage-setting behaviour in general and on the weak wage puzzle in particular. Shifts in working patterns seem very unlikely, by themselves, to have been the prime-mover of weak wages. But they have probably been a contributor in the past and, more significantly, are likely to continue to do so in the future if these trends, as seems likely, perpetuate. 9  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  9  The Case for Holding Fire  Let me now turn to monetary policy. Clearly, wages are a key factor when judging inflation pressures in the economy and the monetary policy stance. Continuing the pattern since the crisis, recent wage growth has been, once again, surprisingly weak. Despite unemployment falling to its lowest level, and employment rising to its highest level, in a generation, whole-economy wage growth has failed to pick-up. Indeed, wage growth over recent months appears, if anything, to have been falling. At the start of the year, the Bank of England Agents’ annual wage survey suggested pay settlements would slow from 2.7% last year to 2.2% this. At the time, there was healthy scepticism within the Bank about these findings.
Stefan Ingves: Basel III – much-needed regulations for a safer banking sector Speech by Mr Stefan Ingves, Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at the Swedish Society of Financial Analysts, Stockholm, 1 February 2011. *  *  *  More than two years have passed since the collapse of the major US bank Lehman Brothers triggered panic on the global financial markets and we were close to a widespread financial meltdown. We will never know what would have happened if the authorities had prevented Lehman Brothers from going bankrupt. We do know, however, that financial turbulence spread like wildfire throughout the world. Market agents lost confidence in each other and liquidity on the funding market was severely impaired. Many banks therefore found it difficult to fund their operations and suffered an acute liquidity shortage. In order to stabilise the situation on the financial markets, governments and central banks around the world were forced to take exceptional measures. By offering loans on favourable terms, providing capital injections and setting exceptionally low policy rates, they managed to prevent a total collapse. But this has not been free, and it is not over yet. To date, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank have lent millions of dollars and euros to the banking system to stop the crisis. In addition to this there have been a great number of national rescue measures. These have largely been funded by governments borrowing money. In this way, debts in the financial system have been converted into centralgovernment debts.

Whether it is the volume of foreign exchange reserves or the growth of foreign exchange turnover or the amount of savings that needs to be mobilised for promoting economic growth and development, Asia is likely to occupy top position in the world, if it is not already there. The prospects of a strong relative shift of financial market liquidity into Asia are clear, so is the need for upgrading professionalism in finance, hopefully at a pace that is commensurate with its increasing importance in global finance. It is therefore absolutely right for the first regional office of ACI to be established in Asia and, if I may add, for it to be established in Hong Kong, as the truly international financial centre in the region. On the choice of Hong Kong, we are of course grateful and feel honoured, and I as Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and as Honorary President of the Treasury Markets Association offer the full support of the two organisations to the activities of ACI and ACI Asia. Thank you. BIS Review 90/2008  1