samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The state has cut a considerable number of government jobs and reduced other expenditures as part of its effort to close significant budget gaps. These job reductions have disproportionately slowed Albany’s local economy.2 In contrast, I am pleased to say that Albany’s private sector is showing signs of recovery. Your private employers have been adding jobs at a fast enough pace to offset the public sector job losses. However, this job creation has not been robust enough to bring down the unemployment rate, which remains at 7 percent of the workforce. That is a lower rate of unemployment than the national rate, as is usual for Albany. However, it is almost double the jobless rate in early 2007; and it has barely budged since the recession ended. It will be  1  Regional Indexes of Coincident Economic Indicators  2  See, for additional discussion of this topic, William C. Dudley. 2011. Job Creation in the Region. Remarks at the Quarterly Regional Economic Press Briefing, New York City. August 12, 2011. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  difficult for growth in the region’s economy to resume and for unemployment to decline until the public sector stabilizes. An important plus for the local economy is the capital region’s housing sector, which has weathered the economic storm relatively well.

As always, what I have to say reflects my own views and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve System or the Federal Open Market Committee, also known as the FOMC. I am vice chair of the FOMC – a Federal Reserve committee that meets eight times a year in Washington to set interest rates and make other decisions about monetary policy. The members of this committee all strive to set policy to advance the mandate given to us by Congress to promote the maximum level of employment consistent with price stability. Sometimes we have different views on the specific policy choice on hand, and you should view this as completely appropriate: these are hard questions – particularly at times like this – and we make better decisions as a committee because we don’t all think alike. But we are united in our commitment to our mandate and in our belief that Fed independence is essential  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  to the public interest, because it allows us to take tough decisions insulated from short-term political pressures. At FOMC meetings, each Committee member presents a current outlook for his or her region and the nation. For these assessments, we consult our researchers and add critical information that we learn from listening to our boards of directors, regional advisory councils and community leaders, such as you and others I’ll meet on this visit.
32 For example, limits on foreign currency borrowing and restrictions on the activities of open-ended investment funds. History has shown that capital flow management measures can be both addictive and highly distortionary. That is why the IMF’s Institutional View makes clear that CFM should not substitute for domestic institutional reforms or warranted macroeconomic adjustments. 30  12  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  12  become more fragmented and its core – IMF resources – has shrunk relative to the size of the global financial system (Chart 11). Pooling resources at the IMF, and thereby distributing the costs across all 189 member countries, is much more efficient than individual countries self-insuring. To maintain reserve adequacy in the face of future larger and more risky external balance sheets, EMEs would need to double their current level of reserves over the next 10 years – an increase of $ trillion. A better alternative would be to hold $ trillion in pooled resources, achieving the same level of insurance for a much lower cost. This would imply a tripling in the IMF’s resources over the next decade, enough to maintain their current share of global external liabilities.33 One of the many advantages of this approach is it would reduce the demand for safe assets and with it, the downward pressure on r*. V. Long term: Changing the Game While such concerted efforts can improve the functioning of the current system, ultimately a multi-polar global economy requires a new IMFS to realise its full potential.

It involves in effect aiming to keep overall, aggregate demand in the economy (as a whole) more or less continuously in line with the underlying overall capacity of the economy (as a whole) to BIS Review 7/1999  –2–  meet that demand. Effective price stability is essentially a measure of our success in achieving economic stability in that much broader sense. It is a limited role. Neither we nor the ECB can do very much directly to affect the underlying supply side of the economy which depends upon its structural characteristics, and above all, in today’s world, on the efficiency and flexibility of goods, capital and labour markets. Monetary policy cannot substitute for supply-side reform, but by maintaining price stability we can, indirectly, help markets to function more effectively. Nor can either the MPC or the ECB do much directly to influence the pressures on particular firms or particular sectors or regions of the economy; we and they can only influence the monetary situation in the economy of our respective currency areas, as a whole. We have essentially one instrument: the short-term interest rate. But, again, if we are successful in achieving overall stability, that will also contribute over time to a more rather than less favourable operating environment for the different component parts of the economy. But that is the most that either we in the MPC or the Governing Council of the ECB can hope to do.
Against this background, we expect price stability to be maintained over the medium term, thereby continuing to support the purchasing power of euro area households. As the transmission of monetary policy works with lags, we expect that our policy action will progressively feed through to the economy in full. Hence, with all the measures taken, monetary policy is providing ongoing support for households and corporations. Once the macroeconomic environment improves, the Governing Council will make sure that the measures taken are unwound in a timely fashion and that the liquidity provided is absorbed in order to counter effectively any threat to price stability over the medium to longer term. By so doing, the Governing Council will continue to ensure a firm anchoring of medium-term inflation expectations. Such anchoring is indispensable to supporting sustainable growth and employment and contributing to financial stability. Accordingly, we will continue to monitor very closely all developments over the period ahead. As regards fiscal policies, the latest quarterly euro area data and developments in individual countries confirm a substantial deterioration of fiscal positions in 2009, which is projected to continue in 2010. In finalising their 2010 budgets and medium-term fiscal plans, governments must now substantiate their commitment to ensuring a swift return to sound and sustainable public finances in line with the Stability and Growth Pact. In particular, it is crucial that ambitious and realistic fiscal exit and consolidation strategies, underpinned by concrete structural measures, are put in place.

Certainly we face risks and uncertainties in the short term. But it is important that we don't exaggerate those risks and allow them to cloud our judgement. The more likely outcome in my view - looking ahead over the next couple of years - and reflected in the Inflation Report - is for inflation close to target with growth close to trend - and with the imbalances within the economy beginning to adjust. In any event I am totally confident that Mervyn King, my successor from July, with his Deputies, Andrew Large and Rachel Lomax, and with the MPC, will be ready to adjust policy in either direction as the prospect changes, and that they will be as totally committed as I have been to maintaining stability and hitting the Government's inflation target, as a necessary condition for sustainable growth. That will provide the best possible context for the continued development of your business, and the important contribution that you make to the economy. I, myself, of course, will be looking for a new lease of life in retirement! I'm not aware that it's a lease product any of you actually provide. Given our ageing population perhaps you should develop one though you'd better be careful how you market it! In any event I wish you well. BIS Review 16/2003  3
Miguel Fernández Ordóñez: Pressing tasks needed to improve Spain’s economy Address by Mr Miguel Fernández Ordóñez, Governor of the Bank of Spain, at the “XXVII Reunión del Círculo de Economía”, Sitges, 3 June 2011. *  *  *  Good morning. Let me first thank the Círculo de Economía for kindly inviting me to participate in this forum. Had you invited me in March last year to talk about the foundations for a new economy in the 21st century, I would surely have focused on what I see as the main challenges facing us this century. Firstly, population ageing, which will affect not only the developed countries but also other emerging nations such as China. Secondly, the growing inequality that has appeared in some countries along with the positive effects of globalisation. Thirdly, the pressing need to use natural resources – and energy resources in particular – rationally. And finally, I would have taken the opportunity to discuss the changes under way worldwide in financial regulation to avoid a repetition of the crisis we have experienced. But I’m not going to talk about this, as in April last year the Greek sovereign debt crisis broke and, since then, the euro area has been immersed in a crisis still to be resolved and which might have very serious consequences not only for its members but for all Europeans and for the world economy as a whole.

Little to say because the government-approved Stability Programme, which envisages quickly attaining a significant deficit cut, has been favourably assessed by the EU and strictly met in its first year. The now-difficult task is for all levels of government to rigorously meet their adjustment commitments this year and to enable the 6% overall general government deficit target to be attained. Henceforth, we should expect local and regional authorities not to put off any longer the vigorous expenditure-cutting decisions that are needed to meet this overall target. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  Finally, concerning the restructuring of savings banks, the final part of what was legislated by Parliament in the recapitalisation Decree-Law approved in February remains to be done, but so far the Decree-Law has been implemented under the conditions and within the timeframe set. On 11 March the Banco de España published the core capital requirements of all Spanish credit institutions. Among them, 12 (4 banks and 8 savings banks) were identified as having a core capital deficit for a maximum amount of € billion. Later, when one of the integration projects came unstuck, the number of institutions needing additional capital rose to 13. On 14 April, the Banco de España approved the strategies and timetables submitted by these 13 institutions or groups.
Second, the scale of the underlying adjustment is large, and monetary policy cannot put off for long the necessary change in the pattern of demand and output. A downward correction of expectations about future incomes and wealth has rendered unprofitable some of the investments made before the crisis. A good example is the investment made in shopping centres which is now either proving less valuable than anticipated, or making redundant some of the other pre-existing stock of retail space. Almost 1,000 high street chain stores closed in the first half of the year. Lower asset values have left debt levels looking too high. Households, businesses and, especially, banks are all deleveraging. Nowhere is the overhang of debt more obvious than in the banking sector where deleveraging is holding back the flow of new lending. During the crisis central banks have provided liquidity to banks on a truly extraordinary scale, so much so that there were no takers for additional liquidity in our latest auction. It is still useful to keep that auction facility as an insurance policy. But banks are now overflowing with liquid assets. Their problem remains insufficient capital. Just as in 2008, there is a deep reluctance to admit the extent of the undercapitalisation of the banking system in many parts of the industrialised world. The  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  verdict of the market is clear – without central bank support banks still find it expensive to borrow.

And when Bank Rate eventually starts to return to a more normal level, as one day it will, the Bank would then have no income, in the form of coupon payments on gilts, to cover the payments of interest on reserves at the Bank of England that we had created. The Bank would become insolvent unless it created even more money to finance those interest payments, and that would lead ultimately to uncontrolled inflation. That is a road down which the Bank will not go, and does not need to go. I suspect that the advocates of “helicopter money” and related ideas are really talking about a relaxation of fiscal policy. It would be better to be open about that. Enough of what the Bank of England should not be doing. So what should we be doing? Since the Monetary Policy Committee last published an assessment of the economic outlook, other central banks have been active. The European Central Bank announced its plans for Outright Monetary Transactions, the Bank of Japan expanded the scale of its asset purchases, and the Federal Reserve committed to continue with its asset purchases until the outlook for the labour market improves substantially. Our current programme of asset purchases will be complete by next month. What happens after that will depend upon the outlook, beginning with an appraisal of where we are today. Judging the present state of the UK economy is far from easy.
These developments in the growth rate and in the twin deficits highlight the need to critically evaluate the economy’s overall performance and its prospects. The recent IMF mission has done just that and we at the Central Bank concur with its findings. The IMF team concluded that while there do not yet appear to be clear signs of a loss of competitiveness, there are warning signals. What then are we to do? What viable strategic options are available to seek to overcome the obstacles that threaten the continued enjoyment of current living standards? In difficult times such as these some might be tempted to seek shelter from external shocks by pursuing an inward-looking growth policy. Numerous experiences of countries far larger than ours have shown that this course of action only serves to promote inefficiencies that would defeat the original purpose. Malta’s own experience during the early 1980s amply confirms this fact. The fastest-growing economies have been those who faced international competition head-on and pursued outward-oriented policies designed to achieve integration into a globalizing world economy. Malta itself recently reaped the benefits of a similar approach when the removal of protective levies last year was followed by an increase in output and employment in the hitherto protected sectors. Others advocate fiscally-led growth through an expansion in expenditure or a reduction in taxes. In this context, it must be understood that government expenditure puts money in people’s pockets without necessarily expanding the economy’s supply capabilities.

I want to look at one other aspect of the market over this quiet decade – distributional impact. Distributional effects are not a part of the Bank’s statutory primary objectives of price and financial stability. This is not because they do not matter. They certainly do, and access to housing is included in the Government’s economic policy, which the Bank has a secondary objective to support16. It is because these are issues primarily for elected authorities rather than technocratic ones, and there are more effective tools to address them. One cannot ignore that housing booms shift wealth towards existing and generally older homeowners and can therefore widen intergenerational inequity. The large increase in house prices in the decade leading up to the financial crisis came with a large expansion in mortgage debt. Much of the £ increase in household mortgage debt over that period represented borrowing by first time buyers and those moving up the housing ladder to finance an increase in housing wealth for those further up the ladder. Moreover, an increase in house prices often leads to higher rents which are predominantly paid as transfers from non-home owners to existing home owners, potentially even further restricting the ability of prospective first time buyers to put a foot on the housing ladder. As well as increasing intergenerational inequity, this shift in housing wealth also risks widening inequity within the younger generation going forwards as housing wealth is passed down within families17.
Yet much of modern physics does not, in fact, deal in great laws and unifying theories. Instead it deals in great unknowns and empiric regularities, in ragged edges and qualitative maxims (Buchanan (2014)). Advances in physics these days often come courtesy of massive empirical fishing expeditions,  3  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  3  industrial-scale searches for needles in haystacks, often using large-scale computational techniques. The large Hadron collider – in essence, a massive Monte Carlo machine - would be one prominent example of these techniques in practice. So even physics, for some the theoretical pinnacle of the natural sciences, is these days far from being a precise science. Through its evolution, the intellectual bloodline of physics and the other natural sciences has been mixed and re-mixed. What we have today is a methodological hybrid, an intellectual mongrel. This has been not just a natural evolution, but an essential one in making sense of our dappled world. From Natural to Social Sciences While Cartwright’s Dappled World aims to dispel the notion that natural science is precise science, it goes further in arguing that the self-same case can be made, just as forcefully, for the social sciences. It, too, is a haphazard patchwork of theories and hunches, operating at different levels of abstraction, often loosely held together. The economic and financial world is every bit as dappled as the natural world. And, as with the natural sciences, there is real virtue in that eclectic approach.

Maja Kadievska-Vojnovik: Global, European and Macedonian developments in the area of payment systems and services Speech by Ms Maja Kadievska-Vojnovik, Vice-Governor of the National Bank of the Republic of Macedonia, at the Ninth International Conference on Payment and Securities Settlement Systems, Ohrid, 6 June 2016. *  *  *  Dear ladies and gentlemen, It is with great pleasure and honor to welcome all of you to the Ninth Conference on Payment and Securities Settlement Systems this morning in Ohrid. This year, again, the National Bank of the Republic of Macedonia, in cooperation with De Nederlandsche Bank and Banco de Portugal, continues the tradition in organizing international conferences in the domain of Payment and Securities Settlement Systems, thus enhancing the awareness of the importance of development of the payment systems and services for the national economy and beyond. Therefore, allow me to use this opportunity to express my gratitude and appreciation to De Nederlandsche Bank and Banco de Portugal, as well as their esteemed representatives, for this fruitful collaboration and the privilege to continue this traditional cooperation in the future. In addition, we in the NBRM are very pleased with the presence of the representatives of the central banks of the countries of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, and the participation of the countries of the Black Sea and the Middle East region, as well as those of the Northern Africa.
These efforts will all contribute to a more resilient system, one that is better able to withstand the effects of a major decline in asset prices or deterioration in credit. Are there other tools that policy makers and market participants could use to address this risk? Some policy makers have argued that public disclosure of information could help reduce the risk of future systemic financial crisis, by preventing the buildup of "excessive" leverage or concentrations of risk. The principal focus of attention, as in the immediate wake of the failure of Long Term Capital Management, has been on two quite different types of public disclosure. The first is information that would make it easier to evaluate the overall leverage or risk profile of major hedge funds and their counterparties, and thereby judge their vulnerability to a sharp movement in asset prices. The second is information about the actual positions of individual funds or institutions: information that would make it easier to identify concentrated exposures to specific risk factors, and thereby assess more accurately the potential impact of the failure of a major fund or institutions on the market as a whole. These pose very different challenges and offer different benefits. There are a number of crude measures of overall risk profile that, if disclosed to the market, would give counterparties information they do not now typically get about the risk of failure of the fund.

But what can policy makers do ex ante to limit the risk of crisis? The most powerful instruments we have are those that affect the strength of the basic, fundamental shock absorbers in the financial system. When capital and liquidity cushions at the major institutions are strong, then markets as a whole are less vulnerable to the adverse spiral of asset price declines, increased volatility, and declining liquidity. And when the operational infrastructure is robust, markets will be able to absorb larger shocks and sharper changes in risk appetite with less risk of broader contagion. These shock absorbers are substantially stronger today than they have been in even in the relatively recent past. These issues are the principal focus of day-to-day supervision and market oversight in the major financial centers around the world. The Federal Reserve is actively involved in a range of efforts, working closely with the primary supervisors of the major global financial institutions and the critical parts of the financial infrastructure, to encourage further progress. In this context, we are working to put in place a stronger regulatory capital regime and to strengthen the capacity of firms to absorb losses in stress conditions. We are encouraging more sophisticated and more conservative management of credit exposures in over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives and structured financial products, as well as of exposures to hedge funds. And we are encouraging a range of efforts to modernize the operational infrastructure that underpins the OTC derivatives markets, and to improve the capacity of market participants to manage adversity.