samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
But we are not content with this and aim for a further improvement. The tasks as such, the proximity to economic policy and the international dimension should be sufficiently attractive. If, in addition, we can create an environment in which people can grow and feel they are an important part of the organisation, then I believe we can do still better. There are many connections between an open, clear relationship with the outside world on the one hand and our internal work on the other. Distinct goals have helped to focus internal operations and tighten the analysis. By making things less hush-hush we have also made it possible to include more people in a realistic discussion of monetary policy, for example. We are now open to criticism of a sharper and more specific nature and that has been good for us. The Riksbank's motto, Hinc robur et securitas (Hence strength and security), which used to allude to our earlier functions as the producer of notes and coins, for example, now refers at least as much to our analytical competence, the accuracy of our analyses and our efficiency as an authority. Management with an executive board One consequence of the new Riksbank Act, effective from the beginning of 1999, was that a new Executive Board, consisting of six members, is collectively responsible for all the Bank's operations.

We have tried to delegate more matters more specifically to the heads of department, leaving them to run the operations and provide continuity and competence. At the same time, the number of departments has been reduced so as to have an organisation that is less top-heavy. The Executive Board's responsibilities have been shared out among the members. That does not mean that we are to manage day-to-day operations, which is a matter for the department heads. Our task is to act instead as a source of support and dialogue. The internal management and the way we handle monetary policy are interconnected. An arrangement with reservations and so on could lead to a polarised picture in the media and that in turn could have repercussions on the internal work. Even though we do not see any differences of opinion as something unnatural, others may do so and that might make it difficult to avoid splits in the organisation. In this respect I think we have been broadly successful. At times the media have presented a dramatic scene with major differences of opinion but with the passage of time we seem to have become less and less newsworthy. At the same time, we have handled the system rather carefully and abstained from arguing with each other. That I thing is wise because the system is rather fragile. BIS Review51/2001  3  Let me conclude by referring back to my opening remarks.
Although the debt ratio has been considerably below that of the euro area as a whole, the government’s determination to achieve its fiscal targets is welcome. Strong efforts need to be made in order to adhere to these targets, particularly during times of slow economic growth. Recent experience has shown that with the adoption of targeted and limited spending measures, the economy has proved relatively resilient to external shocks. Still, at this juncture, the continuing slowdown in external demand is likely to impact the economic growth rate, adding further pressure on the fiscal balance at a time of heightened institutional and market scrutiny. This will introduce a delicate balance between two considerations. First, cutting the deficit is important in order to reduce macroeconomic imbalances that in the longer run hinder economic growth. Secondly the immediate effect is to reduce aggregate demand, whether via spending cuts or through higher taxation, which would slow the economy down. 6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Given the desirability of avoiding such dilemmas, this may be the time to follow the lead of other countries and consider the adoption of self-enforced regulations, such as expenditure rules.5 Spending decisions involve the reconciliation of various spending needs. While it is the cabinet of ministers that collectively sign off on the budget, the compilation of the budget document involves the reconciliation of diverse demands. If, as is likely, the sum of the separate demands exceeds the previous year’s spending total, the end result is the observed and inefficient upward creep in total spending.

We have been hosting a series of events that bring together experts on economic inequality and the needs of low- and moderate-income communities in our District. Today’s event on food insecurity is part of that larger effort. But we recognize it’s not enough to merely study the issue. The role of our Community Development team is to champion promising solutions by connecting people, programs, and proposals with funding. Up to 40 percent of food produced in the United States goes to waste 1/2  BIS central bankers' speeches  each year, so there is a huge opportunity to distribute that unused food to those who need it. You’ll be hearing more about that later today. But first, we’ll start off with a presentation from Professor Tashara Leak. She’ll frame the discussion by talking about how food insecurity affects the health of children—and how that, in turn, shapes their economic prospects as they grow older. Then, we’ll convene a panel of business and government leaders, along with impact investors, who will spotlight some of the innovative work being done to make healthy and affordable food more accessible. Thank you all for joining us. And with that, I’ll turn it over to Professor Leak. 2/2  BIS central bankers' speeches
The fact that the concept of stability is slightly vague and difficult to define, as well as covering many different functions and operators, is of course one reason why it is difficult to determine when a threat to the system arises. It is also very rare that crises can be forecast. If we describe a crisis, it is probably already happening. It is difficult on the whole to describe different nuances of financial stability. Perhaps a financial system is either stable or instable. When is one situation more stable than another? The lack of clearly measurable goals for financial stability makes it difficult to be clear on this point. One means of dealing with this, apart from discussing possible threats and risks, is to focus on the resilience of the system. How large a shock can the banks manage without any threat to their survival? By testing how hard potential risks would hit the banks’ resilience, we can gain an idea of how robust, or stable, the system is. The Riksbank’s most important tool for influencing financial stability is our analysis. Credible and knowledgeable analysis can probably often be used to influence and convince market operators. Our analysis can also provide support to the Government and to Finansinspektionen who have more instruments at their disposal. Given all of these difficulties, why should the Riksbank devote itself to stability work? One reason is the central role we play in the payment system. The Riksbank, together with the commercial banks, forms the hub of this system.

Even countries that have not experienced a financial crisis at first hand are now spending more time on stability work. Although financial stability issues have always been important to central banks, the speeches made by my colleagues at other central banks more often take up these questions now. These issues also appear more often on the agenda of the international meetings I participate in. The increased complexity of the financial markets with new operators and new instruments and the fact that connections between the countries have increased have contributed to added emphasis on stability work. Why is financial stability important? Why should the authorities spend time and energy on this? The primary reason is the important role played by the financial system. Every day each of us sitting here uses the financial system in some way; either to make payments, to save or borrow money or to obtain help with some form of risk management. A huge amount of payments flows through the system. The Swedish payment system has a daily turnover of around SEK 500 billion. This means that in less than a week the turnover corresponds to the entire annual Swedish GDP! While the importance of the financial system has increased, the number of crises in different countries’ systems has also increased. The crises that break out are proving more costly.
Of course, it is never easy to judge what levels of financial asset prices are realistic, and the risk of volatile adjustments remains, as we have seen in recent days, but the important point is that the downwards adjustment experienced last year, which could have been abrupt and might have generated wider economic effects, was in fact achieved without significant repercussions on the real economy. In both cases, the result is a better foundation for the prospects for sustaining growth in the economy. Let me now turn from the year past to the year ahead. I have stressed the encouraging performance of the economy over the past year, and the confidence we can hopefully take in its underlying soundness, because we undoubtedly face serious challenges and a material increase in uncertainty in  BIS Review 22/2001  1  the year ahead. Most notably, we have to manage the UK economy against the background of an international environment in which the US economy has begun to experience a sharp slowdown. Each quarter the Bank of England publishes an Inflation Report which sets out the MPC's considered view of the prospects for growth and inflation looking two years ahead. Let me start from our latest Inflation Report, published last month. That recognises that the weaker outlook in the US will depress global demand and dampen growth prospects in other countries. The UK cannot, of course, expect to be immune to this weakening process.

Charles Bean: Pension funds and quantitative easing Speech by Mr Charles Bean, Deputy Governor for Monetary Policy of the Bank of England, to the National Association of Pension Funds’ Local Authority Conference, Cotswolds, Gloucestershire, 23 May 2012. All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  *  *  *  Thank you, Joanne (Segars), for that kind introduction. When I was invited to address this conference, I was asked to discuss how the Monetary Policy Committee’s asset purchases – colloquially, though rather inelegantly, known as quantitative easing or QE for short – affect pension funds. I was actually quite pleased to be assigned this brief, as in my view some of the commentary regarding QE has taken a rather partial view of its effects. Not only is the adverse impact of QE on pension funds often exaggerated, but the excessive focus on QE as a cause of low long-term risk-free interest rates also risks distracting attention from other factors driving yields which may present a more durable challenge to the sponsors and trustees of pension funds. To begin with, it may be helpful if I remind you how QE works and what it seeks to achieve. QE essentially involves us trading one liability of the state – gilts – for another – monetary claims on the Bank of England.1 The maturity structure of our purchases is designed to ensure that the gilts are largely sourced from private sector non-bank investors, such as insurance companies, pension funds and hedge funds.
Nonetheless, probably the most important factor is that the banking sector is one of the most highly regulated sectors in society and is subject to strict supervision. A bank cannot operate without a licence, and banks are required to satisfy a number of requirements relating to capital adequacy and liquidity management, all of which limit bank lending and money creation. Norwegian banks cannot behave as Stockholms Banco did in the 1600s. By ensuring that banks are solid and sufficiently liquid, regulation and supervision also underpin trust in the money we use. The financial crisis in autumn 2008 was triggered by the collapse of an under-regulated financial institution – the Lehman Brothers investment bank.10 In the years preceding the crisis, Lehman’s equity was less than two percent of its assets. With so little capital supporting loans, it does not take more than a puff of wind to bring down a house of cards. New forms of payment and new forms of money Trust is necessary, though not sufficient, for money to function as a universal means of payment. It must also be efficient and safe to use. When you make a payment in a shop using a bank card, one of the largest systems we have is set in motion. Payments move back and forth between banks. Banks settle the payments by transferring money between their accounts at Norges Bank. Your payment then becomes available in the recipient’s account, normally a few hours after the payment process was initiated.

The priority now is to complete the “second pillar” – the resolution of failing banks – with the establishment of a common backstop to the Single Resolution Fund. This should go hand in hand with a sufficient reduction in risks; however, we should not allow ourselves to be held back by layers of rigid quantitative criteria. It is also vital that we remove the obstacles to sound cross-border consolidations, which would allow banks to move savings more freely across borders. But this financing union must also build on the Capital Markets Union. There is a political consensus for this, but we now have to make concrete progress on revising bankruptcy laws and strengthening ESMA. In addition to private risk-sharing, there is also a vital need for a common public solidarity mechanism [slide]. One aspect of this is the reinforcement of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), in particular its precautionary tools: credible crisis prevention means not just ensuring fiscal discipline, but also having the necessary tools in place to help Member States cushion asymmetric shocks, which can appear suddenly despite all efforts to avoid them. To be efficient, precautionary tools should, in my view, be based on objective and simple ex ante criteria [such as abiding by certain rules], rather than on the current burdensome conditionality system which is too similar to an assistance programme. The euro area budget proposed by France could also play a stabilising role, by supporting investment, especially in education and training, and of course in new technologies, when national finances are constrained.
In general, a system comprising three bodies undergoing motion via a force cannot be solved analytically – the “three-body problem”. And there are many problems in physics which involve the interaction of “particles” in ways which are complex and non-deterministic. 13  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  13  These features have resulted in ABMs being extremely widely used in the physical sciences, at various different levels of resolution. At the micro scale, some of the earliest applications of ABMs were to study plasmas – charged particles which constantly interact. Plasmas are the fourth state of matter after solids, liquids and gases. They are prime ABM candidates because they exhibit rich, non-linear, complex behaviour. In 1966, Edward Teller wrote a paper which described how to build a plasma ABM with 32 interacting particles (Brush, Sahlin and Teller (1966)). Even with “only” 32 interacting agents, this was a formidable computational challenge. But the advent of parallel and high performance computing since the 1990s has changed the scale of plasma particle simulations. Simulations today regularly use as many as 10  9  computational agents (Turrell et al (2015)). These plasma ABMs have found widespread application, micro and macro. At the micro level, they have been used to help identify and kill cancer cells with pinpoint accuracy, while leaving healthy surrounding cells unharmed (Bulanov et al (2002)).

In order to ensure timely and credible information for the effective supervision of banks and other financial institutions, the Bank of Zambia has been playing a key role in developing the Bank Supervision Application System (BSA), which is a Southern African Development Community (SADC) region initiative. The BSA is a standardized tool designed for capturing supervisory information, financial and risk analysis and provides a workflow mechanism for communicating the different aspects of the supervisory process. Distinguished delegates, the legal and regulatory framework governing the supervision of the financial sector must provide for a fast and flexible way of adapting the banking system to the constantly changing financial landscape. The legal and regulatory frameworks in Zambia  2  BIS Review 63/2010  comprise of the Banking and Financial Services Act, Chapter 387 of the Laws of Zambia; the Bank of Zambia Act, Chapter 360 of the Laws of Zambia; the National Payment Systems Act; the Prohibition and Prevention of Money Laundering Act; the Bank of Zambia Anti-Money Laundering Directives; and the Bank of Zambia Corporate Governance Guidelines. The speed at which changes to these regulatory frameworks can be made is a crucial element of the reform process in regulatory and supervisory arrangements as it improves policy responsiveness. A number of challenges exist in this area including the need to update some of the Statutory Instruments (SIs) in order to reflect the dynamics presently characterizing the financial markets.
Looking ahead, the stock of information is forecast to double over the next 3 years (Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger (2013)). On these trends, by 2020 the stock of information will have risen 150-fold since the turn of the century2 At that stage, the information created this century will account for over 99% of  1  A bit is a 0 or a 1. A byte is 8 bits. An exabyte is 10 or a quintillion bytes. 2  18  www.economist.com/node/15557443. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  that ever created. That CD pile will stretch to the moon and back more than 10 times. Each person alive will have nearly 1500 times more information than was housed in Alexandria.3 These remarkable trends in global integration have delivered significant benefits to global wealth and welfare, providing a large boost to growth (Kose et al. (2006), World Bank (2008)). There is also now decisive evidence of the IT revolution having materially boosted economy-wide productivity (Jorgenson et al. (2008)). As more of the economy has become virtual and global, and less physical and local, it is possible that existing national income methods may, if anything, have understated these gains (Arthur (2009)). Yet, as recent events attest, rapidly rising integration and information are not costless. They can reshape and rescale the risks facing social, economic and financial systems.

The characters that made it through to the final shortlist were:   Mary Anning    Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace    Paul Dirac    Rosalind Franklin    Stephen Hawking    Caroline Herschel and William Herschel    Dorothy Hodgkin    James Clerk Maxwell    Srinivasa Ramanujan    Ernest Rutherford    Frederick Sanger    Alan Turing  The shortlist epitomises the breadth and depth of scientific achievement in the UK. Their work covers both the theoretical and the practical, and spans from the smallest building blocks of the universe to the nature of life itself. 1  Characters must be non-fictional and deceased. We also need to ensure that a suitable, easy to recognise, portrait of the person is available. 2 https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/about/people/banknote-character-advisory-committee. 2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  2  Rosalind Franklin’s and Frederik Sanger’s revelations about DNA, for example, furthered our understanding of the biology of life, and Dorothy Hodgkin’s discoveries about the structure of insulin and vitamins better enabled us to preserve it. Mary Anning’s palaeontological discoveries helped us understand the history of life on earth, while Caroline and William Herschel and Stephen Hawking opened up the heavens. Srinivasa Ramanujan’s pioneering research transformed modern theoretical mathematics. More practicably, the ground-breaking work of James Clerk Maxwell, Ernest Rutherford and Paul Dirac on electromagnetism, radiation and quantum mechanics laid the foundations for telecommunications and nuclear physics.
On that view, and given the recent moderate decline in sterling's effective exchange rate, it is reasonable to look forward to a gradual improvement - and I emphasise gradual improvement - in the external environment which would clearly be very helpful from a UK perspective. I don't deny that there are downside risks to this scenario. The Eurozone has for example recently put back its projected expansion until later this year. And financial markets, and both business and consumer sentiment, have recently been severely affected by uncertainty over Iraq - though financial markets, certainly, now that the war has started, have factored in its rapid conclusion. I hope they prove to be right - for more than purely economic reasons. Notwithstanding these risks, I still think that the most likely outcome is that we will see a gradual pickup in the pace of global recovery over the next year or two - which is the view shared by the Monetary Policy Committee in our February Inflation Report and by most other economic commentators. On that basis we would also expect to see a gradual recovery in domestic business investment as we go through this year and into next. And, while fiscal prudence is clearly important for the stability and efficiency of the economy over the medium term, the Chancellor's projected increase in public spending is in my view positively welcome in the immediate situation confronting us.

The Rt Hon Sir Edward George: A brief review of economic and financial developments in the UK Speech by The Rt Hon Sir Edward George, Governor of the Bank of England, at the Finance and Leasing Association Annual Dinner, London, 24 March 2003. *  *  *  Mr Chairman, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, I must confess that I was surprised when I discovered that it was seven years since I last spoke at this Finance and Leasing Association Annual Dinner. I'm delighted to be with you here this evening. On that earlier occasion - in 1996 - I emphasised the corrosive and debilitating effect of high and variable inflation that we had experienced in this country over much of the previous 50 years. I stressed the damage that this had done to our economy - the pervasive uncertainty and unpredictability, and the short-termism that it induced, in personal and business as well as financial behaviour, the incentive to borrow and spend rather than save and invest, the masking of real price signals as the guide to efficient resource allocation, and the masking, too, of productive inefficiency that was too easily covered up by generally rising prices and earnings. But I suggested that the tide had already then finally begun to turn. I drew attention to the growing constituency in support of stability in this country - as a necessary condition for sustainable growth after our particularly bitter experience of boom and bust in the late 1980's and early 1990's.