samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Taking a partnership approach to innovation, our common challenge as Europeans is to leverage – all together – the tremendous potential for innovation opening up before us:   In commercial banking, the phased launch of the European Payments  Initiative (EPI) – which has our full backing – will provide a modern, European payment solution, and what would appear to be a viable solution for circulating the digital euro alongside the commercial euro. French and European commercial banks could also develop tokenised bank deposits with enhanced features. In a remarkable report,vi the BIS recently stated its clear preference for these tokenised bank deposits that will offer greater security, rather than for stablecoins (all of which are issued by non-European players and mostly backed by the dollar). Issuing and trading of financial assets is also being modernised through tokenisation underpinned by new distributed ledger technologies. Page 6 of 6   In addition, in central banking, the development of “wholesale” CBDC  would appear to be just as important as the digital retail euro in extending the anchoring role of central bank money in the tokenised sphere, by securing interbank settlements and financial transactions. The Banque de France has played a pioneering role here through twelve experiments conducted with the private sector: we will be publishing the results this summer. We have demonstrated that wholesale CBDC could facilitate interoperability between different DLT platforms developed by the public or private sector as well as with existing settlement systems.

2023 Paris Finance Forum – Paris, 5 July 2023 Regulation and innovation: the yin and yang of the financial sector  Speech by François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Banque de France  Page 1 of 6 Ladies and Gentlemen, It is a real pleasure to be taking part in the Paris Finance Forum and I wish to warmly thank Augustin de Romanet for his invitation, and Europlace for their work. Europlace has contributed to the growing interest in the Paris financial centre in the wake of Brexit. As I have the privilege of speaking this lunchtime, I shall begin with dessert. According to an excellent Bloomberg article,i "If any city can make claim to being the European Union’s new pre-eminent hub, it’s Paris". Paris is the only financial centre to offer a broad range of financial activities – from global asset management to insurance and banking and market activities – and it has benefited from the relocation of all segments of the financial industry. Paris has now overtaken London as Europe's largest financial centre in terms of stock market capitalisation. With the presence of the European Banking Authority (EBA) and the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), there is also a 'regulatory hub' – to which I should add the ACPR, generally recognised as an exacting but extremely competent supervisor. The Paris financial centre is therefore a good illustration of harmonious coexistence between regulation and innovation. In my view, these are the yin and yang of the financial sector.
Without any doubt the main challenge remains their efficient use in our decision making process. We do appreciate that the products, we have been discussing during these two days, the confidence indices in general, will be a successful mean of communication for the Bank of Albania with the market’s actors and the general public. I do not hesitate to declare that the launch of these two products, especially in the context of our purpose to adopt inflation targeting, will further improve the decision making process at the Bank of Albania. Recently, the Bank of Albania has accelerated the development pace, regarding the improvement of the decision making process and the refinement of the mechanisms that lead to its decisions. The issue is how quickly the market’s actors will follow the current pace of the Bank of Albania. It is important that the difference between the two velocities reduces, in order that our dialogue with the market will be standardized and transparent. To enable an as much as possible contemporary communication, among others, an important part plays the cooperation between Bank of Albania, the financial market, Ministry of Finance, INSTAT and the other institutions. In addition, it must cooperate more with other groups of interest, such as Chamber of Commerce, Konfindustria, Medias and the general public. At this point, I want to emphasize that the role the media plays is really special. A professional media would be able to construct reliable and comprehensible communication models, easily understandable by the public.

So far, the results of these questionnaires have been indirectly reflected in the periodical analysis and reports and in other different papers of the central bank. The further consolidation of these indicators, paves the path of their publication for the purpose of being used by the economic agents, as an extra way of communicating with the central bank. A preliminary step in this direction is also the consolidation of the applied methodology for calculating these indices, through a professional expertise as that of IFO. The undertaken steps, in expanding and consolidating the statistical basis of the monetary authority in real time, will enable the management on time of the situations and challenges, which are lead by economic development and the further integration of the regional markets. Coordination of the work between regional central banks for adopting the methodology and the indices enables the maximal use of existing knowledge basis on the specific features of our region, against that of the most developed economies. The use of the same methodology for establishing the indices will make it easier to compare them to each other. In parallel, these indicators will serve as a communication tool with the international institutions, specialized in best presenting and identifying the priorities according to the countries and with the foreign investors interested in our country. BIS Review 118/2006  1  Our purpose is to maximally adapt the indices we are drafting to the best international practices in this field, far from voluntarily solutions.
And, at least to a degree, competing away their deposits would compromise banks’ ability to supply credit, or at least make it more expensive.15 It might also make that supply more variable. With an easily available alternative, banks’ remaining deposits would more readily migrate to the CBDC during times of stress. (It would certainly be more straightforward than stuffing cash under the proverbial mattress16.) Nor has the alternative source of funding the banks – raising debt in wholesale markets – proved that stable in the past. In fact, one striking feature of the financial crisis was that banks’ wholesale debt proved much less stable than deposits. That’s why regulators have since recommended that banks actually raise the share of (non-equity) funding that comes from deposits17. It’s hard to know how significant these effects would be. And, as I tried to explain earlier, a CBDC that sought simply to replicate cash would probably have a greater impact on the demand for banknotes than on commercial bank deposits, with more limited macroeconomic effects. If the central bank’s balance sheet were opened up only to non-bank financial companies, and no wider, the issue probably wouldn’t arise to begin with. But as you widen that access, and the more closely a CBDC substitutes for existing deposits – i.e. the further towards the south-east you move across (the extremely stylised) Chart 5 – the more prominent the issue becomes. No longer would a CBDC be a purely technical decision, about the costs and security of exchanging money.

The guideline for fiscal policy implies that the central government budget deficit shall be equivalent over time to the expected real return on the Government Petroleum Fund. The new guidelines for economic policy received broad support in the Storting. The guideline specifying that only the real return on the Petroleum Fund is to be used means that the capital in the Fund is not depleted. The capital in the Petroleum Fund will increase as long as there is a positive cash flow (to the central government) from petroleum activities. When the conversion from petroleum assets to financial wealth has been completed, the objective will still be to restrict withdrawals so that the real value of the Fund’s capital is maintained - in principle, indefinitely. The guideline thereby provides a long-term anchor for fiscal policy. The guideline provides a stable framework that contributes to curbing fluctuations in the Norwegian economy that are caused by converting petroleum assets into investment at home and abroad. The guideline has been adhered to in the past two years. As mentioned, the largest conversion of our national wealth in the next thirty years will be from oil as recoverable reserves to oil as financial wealth. The question might, of course, be raised as to whether an alternative option would be to keep our wealth in the form of oil and extract what we needed. Whether this would be profitable or not depends on oil price developments compared with the return on financial assets.
A temporary and targeted backstop purchase facility for gilts proved effective in ending the firesale dynamic, providing the LDI funds with a window to increase their resilience while minimising risks to public funds, market incentives and the stance of monetary policy – which, unlike in 2020, was now in a tightening phase. [3] In my remarks today, I want to discuss four main lessons that I take from those events: 1. The changing nature of systemic liquidity risk: though focus naturally alights on the idiosyncrasies of the autumn fiscal announcements and the UK LDI sector, the real import lies in the features the events had in common with the dash for cash and other similar developments: another reminder, if more were needed, that we face a new era of liquidity risk, originating outside the banking system, that can amplify shocks, destabilise core markets and undermine monetary and financial stability. 2. Public backstops vs private self insurance: as a central bank it fell to us to provide a public backstop to prevent systemic liquidity risk from undermining monetary and financial stability. At the same time, the events revealed material weaknesses in pension fund and LDI risk management. Given the costs involved, we must ensure public backstops do not end up substituting for a failure to achieve the appropriate level of private insurance against liquidity risk here and elsewhere in the non-bank sector. 3.

As summarised in Table 1: The purpose of the intervention was grounded in the risk to UK financial stability from dysfunction in the gilt market. The Bank’s Financial Policy Committee (FPC) identified this risk and recommended that the Bank take action to safeguard against it; The operation was strictly time limited. The purchase window was open for 13 business days, the minimum period judged necessary (through contact with market participants) for pension and LDI funds to improve their resilience. This hard deadline, though criticised in some quarters at the time, proved critical in driving timely recapitalisation, and also gave policy makers and markets confidence that the time profile would be very different from QE. Similarly, the commitment to unwind the gilt holdings in a timely but orderly way gave confidence that there would be no lasting impact on the Bank’s stock of gilt holdings – the variable voted on by the MPC during QE. [16] Unwind was completed using an innovative demand-sensitive approach over a period of four working weeks – broadly the same time it took to run up the holdings. [17] The operation was targeted only at those assets involved in the LDI adjustment – long-dated conventional and (in the latter phases of the operation) index-linked gilts, whereas QE operations took place across the (conventional) curve; and  Page 10  The operations were subject to a system of backstop reserve pricing, aimed at ensuring we purchased only as many assets as required to resolve the financial stability issue and recatalyse the market.
And so that means that there will probably be a little bit less good returns in the fixed income market compared to the last 8 years. We’ve had a bull market in fixed income really going back to 1982. My first house I ever bought, mortgage rates at the time were 17%. They’re now around 4%. I got financing from the seller. I got a 12% mortgage. I thought it was a really good deal. So now mortgage rates are around 4%. We’ve had a very, very long bull market in fixed income. People are debating now whether this is the end of that bull market or it’s going to go on for a little bit further. So, we’ll see. 6 / 15  BIS central bankers' speeches  Dr. Olajide Oladipo: Thank you. If you look at the global economy, it’s looking buoyant now. Also the national economy, which is the United States economy, is looking buoyant now. I wanted to ask you, looking at the United States, which region do you think is growing at the moment? President Dudley: I would answer that question, which region is growing at the moment, in two ways. Regionally, in terms of the geography of the United States, it’s really the South and West, and this has been a pattern for a long time, that there has been sort of a migration to – when they invented air conditioning, they made the South a lot more attractive to people.

It is clear, however, that the ambitions of most countries still fall short of the requirements in the Stability and Growth Pact. This is certainly attributable in part to the economic slowdown, with Italy as the clearest example. But it is also notable that the ambitions for budget consolidation are now lower than before the move to Stage Three. The relatively good growth during 1998 ought to have left room for budget consolidation in many countries but it was not used and in certain countries the structural deficit has actually increased. The Ecofin Council has in fact criticised a number of countries, including Germany, France, Austria and the Netherlands, for the low level of ambitions in their stability programmes. In Sweden, the budget position looks comparatively healthy. Our fiscal policy is likewise less restrictive than before but the structural deficit has been turned into a surplus that is now growing and the ambition is still to achieve a budget surplus of 2 per cent of GDP on average over the business cycle. At the same time it should be underscored that some variation in the objective across countries seems reasonable. The degree of fiscal readiness — and thus the requisite size of the surplus — depends on a number of factors. One is the cyclical sensitivity of government finances and another is the level of government debt. It is then reasonable that a country like Sweden has a larger public sector financial surplus than a country where the automatic stabilisers and government debt are smaller.
It is very important that the reform should be accompanied by measures that improve the competitive environment in which companies take decisions, promoting the liberalisation of activities where there are still obstacles to competition. But let me move on to the main part of my testimony: the examination of Spanish budgetary policy. I said at the outset that Spain is the centre of attention for the international economic community. This is because we face a particularly complex situation, where there is an overlap between various adjustment processes and imbalances, generated following a long upturn. Possibly, Spanish fiscal policy was not the source of the current difficulties. But clearly, overcoming these problems will require us to swiftly move public finances towards a path of stability, as this is crucial for restoring agents’ confidence and reducing uncertainty about the economic outlook. As you know, following the recent revision, the budget deficit ended 2011 at 8.9% of GDP, a long way off the 6% target set in the previous Stability Programme. The public debt/GDP ratio stood at end-2011 at 68.5%, more than 30 pp above the 2007 figure. The deficit targets have been set at 5.3% of GDP for 2012 and at 3% for 2013. If these targets are met, the public debt/GDP ratio would stabilise in 2014, albeit at a level somewhat higher than 80%. The consolidation involved in meeting these fiscal targets will be tremendously hard to achieve. Events in 2011 show the difficulties of reducing the budget deficit at times of economic weakness.

–  Or should it be deposited in a bank or lent through another channel? Even before discovering oil, the state had long been a substantial direct owner of Norwegian companies. The value of state investment in Norwegian companies is more than NOK 600 billion. 15 The state owns more shares in Norway than in the US where the oil fund has its largest investments. 16 But will substantial investment in one’s own business – or one’s own nation – guarantee growth and prosperity? Many OPEC countries received enormous income after the oil price shocks in the 1970s. They later not only experienced low growth, but negative growth. 17 Professor Ragnar Torvik writes that one of the main reasons behind the decline was that such a large portion of the additional income was invested domestically. Politicians invested in projects that may have brought political gains – but resulted in economic loss. 18 We can also draw on Norway’s historical experience. In the post-war period, the Norwegian economy was to be reconstructed through a large-scale investment programme. 15  Report no. 13 to the Storting (2010–2011) Aktivt eierskap – norsk statlig eierskap i en global økonomi [Active ownership – Norwegian state ownership in a global economy], Ministry of Trade and Industry (in Norwegian only): http://www.regjeringen.no/pages/16193771/PDFS/STM201020110013000DDDPDFS.pdf) and the annual reports of the Government Pension Fund Norway and the Government Pension Fund Global.
I have emphasised that banks must and can prepare for facing and responding to these challenges, underscoring the fact that the industry, following the progress achieved in terms of solvency and cleaning up balance sheets in recent years, is today better placed and has greater resilience with which to tackle these challenges. Among the possible courses of action, I have advocated, inter alia, moving for greater efficiency gains and continuing with the orderly correction of excess capacity, and giving priority to bank customer care. And it is precisely the relationship with bank customers on which I wish to focus my speech today. I believe this focus sits well with the title of this Meeting, namely “Competitive Banking in a New Society”. I consider that, amid the major changes in which banking is immersed, the relationship with customers will be key. It is always key, since customers are a bank’s most important and most fragile asset. But in the future I believe it will be even more relevant. And a fundamental factor in defining what the relationship with bank customers in the future will be is technology. Mindful of this, the Banco de España is stepping up the efforts it devotes both to monitoring technological innovation and to anticipating its potential consequences. Through a crossdepartmental working structure, various matters are being addressed in order to contribute to constructing an informed opinion and helping define the central bank’s strategic positioning.

Speech  Embargo 19 September 2019, 5.30 pm  Fourth Karl Brunner Distinguished Lecture Introduction of Raghuram Rajan, ETH Zurich  Thomas J. Jordan Chairman of the Governing Board Swiss National Bank Zurich, 19 September 2019 © Swiss National Bank, Zurich, 2019  Page 1/4  Ladies and gentlemen I am very pleased to welcome you all to this year’s Karl Brunner Distinguished Lecture. This occasion marks the 30th anniversary of Karl Brunner’s death. In the Karl Brunner Lecture Series, the Swiss National Bank pays tribute to academics whose research is of particular relevance for central banking. Today we are celebrating the outstanding contribution made by Raghuram Rajan, the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. We are honoured that Dr Rajan has accepted our invitation to deliver this lecture. Raghuram Rajan was born on 3 February 1963 in Bhopal, India. He started his career with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. Following the decision to leave the sphere of electromagnetic fields and waves in favour of the oscillations of the economy and financial markets, Raghu joined the doctoral programme at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he received a PhD for his thesis ʻEssays on Banking’. Four years later, at the age of just 32, he became a full professor of finance at the University of Chicago. Exceptional academic Raghu is an exceptional academic.
In the event, the Hong Kong Government and the clearing banks underpinned the Clearing House. This episode warrants more study than it has received. Had it been London, Chicago or New York, it would have entered the folklore of policy memory. As with banks, public policy has to have two components. First, minimum standards to ensure that CCPs do not fail. IOSCO/CPSS are currently consulting on updated standards. (My earlier remarks go to that.) But second, a clear ex ante framework is needed for limiting disorder if, nevertheless, a CCP does in fact fail. I shall therefore close with a few preliminary thoughts on frameworks for handling the failure of a CCP. As with any business activity, if an institution is insolvent or otherwise cannot pay its debts, it has to stop trading, close and go into liquidation. That can be a disastrous course for a major financial institution at the very heart of important capital markets. Policy in this general area revolves around building regimes that avoid taxpayer solvency support but are less disruptive than orthodox corporate liquidation. In the banking sphere, where a great deal of work is underway internationally, this is known as “resolution”. In the case of a distressed CCP, it is most likely that it would have been brought down by the failure of a very large clearing member and so would have unmatched positions as well as continuing matched positions.

Commentators have, indeed, been emphasising that CCPs are becoming systemic. To my own way of thinking, they have already been systemic for the markets they clear for a very long time. Three clearing houses have failed in recent decades. In 1974, the Caisse de Liquidation failed in Paris, due to default on margin calls when sugar-futures prices fell sharply. In 1983, it was the turn of the Kuala Lumpur Commodities Clearing House, when half a dozen large brokers defaulted following a crash in palm-oil futures. And, most dramatically, the Hong Kong Futures Exchange clearing house failed in the wake of the global stock market crash in 1987. The effects were devastating. The Futures Exchange had to close. Traders had hedged margin-financed cash equity positions in the futures market. They faced margin calls on their cash positions but, with the futures market closed and the clearing house bust, they  1  “The role of margin requirements and haircuts in procyclicality”, Committee on the Global Financial System, March 2010. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  could not get margin moneys returned on their profitable futures positions. For that and other reasons, the stock market closed too. The upshot was that Hong Kong’s main capital market shut down. Reopening the market was no small feat. World markets had fallen further in the meantime, so there was a risk that a modestly “recapitalised” Clearing House would go broke again if positions had to be marked down immediately.