samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Collateral: is not a constraint for my business (disagree). However, a sizeable share of firms, one third, judged that they had invested too little. And two thirds of these – 20% of the entire sample – reported a variety of external financial constraints as an obstacle to investment. These firms were less likely to receive the full amount of finance they had applied for and more often experienced other external financing constraints. They were more often unable to borrow at the maturity required or faced collateral constraints. And again, these constraints were higher for the smaller firms that judged they had invested too little. 30% of the smaller firms in the sample said they faced external financing constraints on investment. Moreover 16% of small firms did not even apply for external finance for fear of rejection. One in five firms, out of a large representative sample, facing external financing constraints on investment sounds high – as does nearly one out of three of the smaller firms. It chimes perhaps with the still negative overall perception of financing conditions on the part of small firms. 7  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  7  It is, however, hard to know whether or not these constraints were warranted. One would certainly expect the rejection rate of loan applications to be above zero. Not all investment projects are robust. It could represent prudent credit rationing by lenders. We do not have a sufficient time series to help gauge what a ‘normal’ rejection rate looks like.

These trends have been particularly visible in Latin America. During 2012, annual gross capital inflows to the seven largest Latin American countries – as classified by the IMF – amounted to more than 250 billion dollars. Sovereign EMBI spreads shrank to around 150 basis points, and, with a few exceptions, stock market prices recovered or surpassed their pre‐crisis levels.1 After the large depreciation suffered at the peak of the crisis, the real exchange rates of these countries persistently appreciated, continuing with a trend coming from the mid‐2000s. House prices in the region also experienced high annual growth rates, in many cases reaching two‐ digit figures. Chile was no exception to these patterns, although they were a bit less pronounced than in the average emerging or Latin American country. Our real exchange rate appreciated by about 15 percent between the peak of the crisis and the end of 2012, real house prices grew about 20 percent between 2009 and 2012, and our current account moved from a surplus of 2 percent of GDP in the last quarter of 2009, to a deficit of 3.5 percent of GDP by the end of 2012. Sure enough, these patterns could be explained by pull factors. The faster recovery of growth rates in emerging markets, the quick rebound of their commodity prices after the crisis, and the sounder policies being implemented by several of them during the last decade could give reason to allocate more capital to this group of countries.
The common interest is to keep the Basle standards at a level sufficient to ensure financial soundness, a minimum above which banks will choose to operate. To achieve this, we must fashion a set of standards that does not greatly distort incentives. Supervisors acknowledge that the current regulations and ratios need to be updated to be more meaningful, given the full range of risks banks face today. Supervisors are always challenged to keep pace with financial innovation and improvements in risk management practices, and this suggests that we will need a frequent monitoring and maintenance program for the present and future Accord. In closing, I would like to summarize the key supervisory objectives that we are mindful of as we look to revise the Accord and enhance the overall capital framework. Our first objective, of course, is to promote the safety and soundness of the financial system. Our second is to enhance competitive equality, while allowing for differences among banks based on  5  BIS Review 32/1999  differences in their risk profiles. These were the original goals of the Accord. Our third is to develop standards that are fundamentally applicable to banks of varying levels of complexity and sophistication, including those in emerging market nations. In developing this capital framework over the next year, we plan to consult closely with the financial and supervisory community and communicate openly about our progress. By yearend, we hope to have made great strides in furthering our objectives.

BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  Moreover, fiscal governance in the euro area needs to be reinforced by means of the strengthening of the Stability and Growth Pact. This means establishing stricter and more binding rules for fiscal policy, backed up by stronger sanctions or mechanisms to ensure compliance with the rules. At the same time, the effectiveness of budgetary institutions needs to be improved at the national level. In this context, effective rules on expenditure should be regarded as a means of promoting fiscal discipline and limiting fiscal vulnerabilities in the event of adverse economic shocks occurring in the future. III. (b)  Promoting sustainable growth and job creation  Euro area countries also need to increase their efforts to strengthen their growth potential and their ability to create jobs in a sustainable manner. European countries have made reasonable progress over the past ten years in the area of employment. Indeed, over 14 million jobs were created in the euro zone since the introduction of the euro, far more than in the previous ten years (around 8 million). The employment increase in the euro area since 1999 was even significantly larger than in the United States (7.6 million). This is an important achievement, but it remains insufficient, especially against the background of the massive employment destruction observed in some euro area countries during the crisis. Unemployment rates have reached unacceptably high double-digit rates in some countries and segments of the population (i.e.
It is also true that the movements of the exchange rate observed recently have surprised us to a certain extent. These surprises, however, should be taken as economic shocks that no economic relationship could have predicted. We central bankers are not very interested in short-term volatilities, but we should not miss breaks in the business cycle. For this task we need a relationship that has an economic grounding in the profitmaximising behaviour of the financial markets. And this is what the uncovered interest rate parity certainly has, and what the statistical models lack. Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to wish to all of us fewer exchange rate surprises and the best possible forecasts! 2  BIS Review 17/2007

The most recent significant development was the establishment of International Islamic Liquidity Management Corporation in Kuala Lumpur. This corporation will act as a conduit to issue highly rated short-term  4  BIS Review 162/2010  Islamic instruments to enhance cross-border liquidity management and provide Islamic financial institutions with an additional avenue to manage their short-term liquidity. Complemented by other initiatives under the “Malaysian as an Islamic Financial Centre”, I am quite confident that Islamic financial markets in Malaysia, for both ringgit and foreign currency, is set to thrive in the coming years. Recently, we have allocated a small portion of funds to be disbursed to prospective and existing Islamic Fund Management Companies to invest primarily in foreign currency sukuk. This will provide a platform for fledgling fund managers to build track records and spur their growth of asset under management, besides broadening the sukuk market in Malaysia. In parallel, this initiative is also expected to catalyse the development of end-to-end value chain capabilities, encompassing the areas of secondary market trading and supporting infrastructures. Conclusion I would like to end my remarks by concluding that in the current global economic environment, uncertainties loom large and we have to be mindful of the challenges ahead, either as an investor or policymaker. This conference is indeed very timely to encourage open discussions on key themes in global investing, and hopefully we can all gain new insights in managing the exciting and challenging times ahead. Thank you for your kind attention. BIS Review 162/2010  5
China uses 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks per year, which requires 25 million full-grown trees to make (International Herald Tribune, 27th October 2005). This means massive deforestation and an adverse impact on the environment. Another problem is the widening income gap. Bear in mind that there are 26 million Chinese still living in abject poverty, earning less than $ annually. China will also face the trickier problem of managing the demand for political change and greater political participation as it becomes a middle income country. For the first time, China recently published a White Paper on 'Building of Political Democracy in China'. 15. China's leaders know that they will retain the mandate of heaven only if they deliver the economic goods and a better standard of living. Having tasted the fruits of market-oriented policies, the Chinese people will want more. To grow, China needs a stable external environment. This is why China's leaders have been careful to assure the world that it will pursue a 'path of peaceful development' ( ). They are well aware that China's rapid growth is creating enormous pressures on the international system and that they need to craft a development and foreign policy strategy that will ensure the peace and stability needed for its growth. The trundling Indian elephant 16. Let me now turn to India, which is also shaking off old mindsets and taking pragmatic steps toward reform and liberalisation. 17. I first visited India as Prime Minister in 1994.

If the money you hold is losing its value, you have every incentive to get rid of it as quickly as possible. If, on the other hand, it is gaining value fast, you want to hoard it and store it. In any case, swift changes in purchasing power are the mortal enemy of any good currency. Some bitcoin enthusiasts put forward that this problem will moderate over time as more and more bitcoins are mined and the “velocity” of bitcoin money demand increases with more 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  universal acceptance of the cryptocurrency. I don’t think so, since there is no guarantee of purchasing power stability for any commodity-based money. Its key principle is exogenous “money supply”, which in my eyes invites inherent volatility in value. From this perspective, bitcoin is the antithesis of our elastic money system, which is based on the notion that to keep the value of money and purchasing power relatively constant and predictable, the amount of money has to change flexibly over time. This is the lesson of the late 19th and 20th century in monetary policy: price stability matters. People take this as such a self-evident statement that typically they do not even think about it and take it for granted. But this observation does nothing less than confirm the most beneficial feature of our money and the monetary policy behind it – people use the currency and don’t have to think about why, in fact, they trust it.
But this means that, simply put, the people of the United Kingdom are not getting the most out of the data the Bank collects. 11  For further discussion see Broadbent (2016), “Central banks and digital currencies”, available at: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/2016/886.aspx. 12  This allows an efficient check of a firm’s cyber defences akin to the way a policeman could walk by a house and observe, from the outside, its security features – whether the gate is locked; whether it has an alarm; whether windows have been left open; what routes intruders might use to gain access to the property; and so on. BIS central bankers’ speeches  7  That’s why we are investigating ways of anonymising and de-sensitising data – fully respecting privacy laws without losing analytical content – to allow wider sharing. Progress has been encouraging creating the prospect of better informed policy making. 13 These are just two examples of a bigger programme of collaboration between the Bank and technology innovators. We are open to further collaboration and tomorrow will provide details of the next steps. Finally, the Bank is calibrating its regulatory approach to FinTech developments. FinTech should neither be the Wild West nor strangled at birth. The Bank is devoting considerable resources to ensure whatever develops is sustainable, not ephemeral. If FinTech enables a great unbundling of financial services, risks will change in tandem.

Money and credit, the universal instruments of commerce, could not exist without this most fundamental of financial technologies, which allows debits and credits to be netted off; debt to circulate as currency; money to replace memory; and with it, trade to expand exponentially. How much have we progressed since Keynes’ bed-ridden globalisation? Replace “telephone” with a “tablet” and “tea” with a “soy latteccino” and you have not the start of the Twentieth Century but the Twenty First, a century in which opportunities are no longer limited to men or denizens of the City. Nonetheless, finance continues to be arranged around a series of hubs like brokers, clearing houses and exchanges; whereas, in other domains, people form connections directly, instantaneously and openly, and this is revolutionising how they consume, work, and communicate. The extent to which finance continues democratising and transforming depends on superficially arcane, but fundamentally vital, enabling technologies. The emergence of mobile telephony, the ubiquity of the internet, availability of high-speed computing, advances in cryptography, and innovations in machine learning could combine to enable rapid changes in finance – just as they have in other areas of the economy. The ledger, once stone, wood, or paper – and always centralised – is now digital and may become distributed. FinTech has the potential to deliver more resilient financial infrastructure, more effective trade and settlement, and new ways to encode, share and analyse data. For the financial sector, these could offer shorter, speedier transaction chains; greater capital efficiency; and stronger operational resilience.
While net lending to companies remains subdued, that partly reflects lenders running down their commercial property loans; new lending to businesses has picked up significantly over the past year. In sum, there are reasonable grounds to expect that the handover from households to businesses will be realised. As far as the prospects for productivity go, the picture is murkier. A feature of this downturn has been the unusual weakness of productivity growth. To give you an idea of the scale of the puzzle, output per person-hour worked is just over 15% below where it would have been if it had simply continued growing at its pre-crisis average rate (Chart 4). Part, but only a small part, of this shortfall can be traced to the low rate of business investment and special factors such as the decline in North Sea oil production. A possible explanation is the presence of overhead labour and the desire to hang on to skilled labour that might be difficult to replace when demand picked up; the low rate of pay growth will certainly have encouraged this. Some businesses also tell us that they have had to devote more effort to winning business while demand is depressed. Finally, the need to repair balance sheets may have led banks both to forbear on delinquent loans to some weaker businesses while simultaneously inhibiting the extension of new credit to riskier, but potentially more productive, enterprises. Now several of these explanations imply that a recovery in demand could be met largely with the existing workforce.

14  BIS Review 149/2007  Chart 17: UK wholesale M4 growth  Chart 18: 10-year rolling averages of UK broad money growth and inflation  % change on a year ago  % average annual growth 20  40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 -5 -10 1987  1990  1993  1996  Source: Bank of England  BIS Review 149/2007  1999  2002  Broad money 15 10 5  CPI  0 1880  1900  1920  1940  1960  1980  2000  2005  -5  Source: Capie, F and Webber, A (1985), “A monetary history of the United Kingdom, 18701982”, and ONS. 15
In the US, the federal government still persistently registers fiscal deficits (averaging 3.2% of GDP per annum since 1980s) only except for the second term of the Clinton presidency in 1997–2001. Incurring persistent fiscal deficit means that the governments have to continuously raise additional debt to finance their spending. Quantitative easing: Lessening of pain of excessive debts? 10. This ballooning government debt raises concerns about long-term fiscal sustainability. For now, the situation seems manageable as central banks in these economies are pursuing quantitative easing (QE) policies to artificially suppress government bond yields. The aggressive asset purchases by major central banks have now suppressed bond yields to extremely low levels, where shorter-term government bond yields in some European economies like Germany, Austria, Denmark and Switzerland have already turned negative. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Negative government bond yield means that lenders are paying borrowers for the privilege of holding their debt, which is clearly not making any sense. I doubt how long such an unusual phenomenon could last, but in any case, I’m certain that such distortions will definitely come with unintended consequences. At least, one side-effect I can already observe is that QE penalises prudent savers and pensioners very badly. In Japan, for example, QE helps reduce the financing cost of public debt at the expense of eroding the purchasing power of JGB holders, with many of which being retirees and pension funds, by paying them negative real yield. Sovereign debt crisis: Mishaps that belong only to EMEs? 11.

Gent Sejko: Welcome remarks -15th SEE Economic Research Workshop Welcome remarks by Mr Gent Sejko, Governor of the Bank of Albania, at the 15th SEE Economic Research Workshop, virtual, 6 December 2021. * * * Dear professors and researchers from academia, Dear fellow central bank colleagues and researchers, Dear participants, It is a great pleasure to open the proceedings of the 15th SEE Economic Research Workshop, which is being organised virtually this year as well, due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions that are still in place. I take this opportunity to express my wish that we would all stay safe and healthy and for the negative effects of the pandemic to come to an end as soon as possible. I hope that the vaccination process, progress in knowledge, cures against COVID-19, and an improvement in the overall situation caused by the pandemic, would enable us to welcome you in Tirana next year. I am glad to note that we have again a full house and a rich agenda this year, with two days in which colleagues and researchers from central banks as well as distinguished universities in Albanian and worldwide will present their works. We really appreciate your interest in participating in this workshop and in the research carried out by the Bank of Albania throughout 2021. I am confident that discussions across this workshop’s panels will be very interesting.
Inflation has been much lower and more stable since the target was introduced and the new Sveriges Riksbank Act came into force in the 1990s (see Figure 3). Having said that, the good target attainment would not have been possible without an overall reform of the entire stabilisation policy framework. As the 1990s crisis was a sovereign debt crisis, a foreign currency crisis (or monetary policy crisis if one prefers) and a financial crisis, there was a lot of homework to be done. Both monetary policy and fiscal policy came to be reformed in the direction of a more norm-based framework from the 1990s. 17 Wage formation was also significantly improved. 18 For a long time, we were also aided by strong growth under low inflationary pressures. The period from the middle of the 1990s up to the global financial crisis was marked by what is known as ‘The Great Moderation’. Combined with the new framework, the stable macroeconomic environment had clear consequences for how monetary policy was conducted in practice – in the direction of a more ‘minimalist’ system, where the Riksbank controlled the repo rate with the aim of attaining the inflation target. This made accountability relatively simple. There was namely a clear link between a tool – the repo rate – and a target – an inflation rate of 2 per cent. The Riksbank gradually developed so-called flexible inflation targeting – we took into account developments in production and employment without neglecting price stability.

One can summarise this by saying that we need to better understand, clarify and explain the effects of new monetary policy tools. We are far from alone when it comes to this challenge. The Bank of England recently had to relate to an investigation that emphasised that these elements needed to be developed with regard to QE programmes. 31 We are working continuously on developing our analyses and communication of monetary policy. As I mentioned earlier, I think that the proposal for a new Sveriges Riksbank Act is good in several aspects. This includes the extended scope for the political system to examine our activities. Information, scrutiny and evaluation are central conditions for our strong independence. The world has changed a lot since 1668, but the Riksbank’s monetary policy task has remained a common denominator over the years. If we are to supply a monetary policy with price stability as objective, we need to accept that the conditions change over time and that the tools need to be updated when these changes occur. Independence is a large measure of confidence to hold in trust. Continued freedom with responsibility will enable the Riksbank to contribute to good economic developments going forward. Thank you for listening! 30  See, for instance, Melander (2021) and Di Casola (2021). 31 See Bank of England (2021). 12 [20]  References Alesina, A. and L.H. Summers (1993), “Central Bank Independence and Macroeconomic Performance: Some Comparative Evidence," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking.