samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Specifically, the first scenario considers, set against the second, that fresh outbreaks will require more limited containment measures in terms of their intensity and of the productive sectors directly affected, which will be confined to leisure and hospitality. Consequently, the adverse effects on production and employment will also be on a smaller scale, not only as a result of the lesser severity of the restrictions on activity, but also because the degree of uncertainty is also expected to be lower. Accordingly, this variable would dent households’ and firms’ spending decisions to a lesser extent. Under either of the two scenarios, the decline in Spanish GDP in 2020 would be very high. For the year on average, the fall would be -10.5% and -12.6%, respectively. In Spain’s case, it is all the more patent than in other countries that, despite the fact the source of the crisis is a shock which is in principle transitory, its consequences will have a relatively high degree of persistence. In this respect, the projected level of GDP for end-2022 is still expected, under the first scenario, to be around 2 percentage points (pp) below the pre-pandemic level at the end of last year, and more than 6 pp down under the less favourable scenario. The impact of the crisis on labour utilisation is proving very severe. Part of this effect has come about through the termination of employment relationships. That has meant that, at end-September, Social Security registrations were 2.3% down on a year earlier (almost 440,000 people).

The ABF Hong Kong Bond Index Fund made history by being the first bond exchange-traded fund launched in Asia. The PAIF has also set two records. It is the first listed Asian bond fund to invest in as many as eight bond markets in the region. As a listed fund, it allows easy access by both institutional and retail investors who wish to have exposure to the Asian bond markets in a cost-effective and convenient manner. Secondly, the PAIF is the first foreign institutional investor that has access to the interbank bond market of Mainland China. This is an important step in the opening up of China’s bond market to foreign participants. I am glad to see that the PAIF has played a catalytic role in development not only in China but also in all the markets in which the fund invests. 4. I take this opportunity to thank State Street Global Advisors (SSgA), the fund manager of the PAIF, for their commitment and dedication to the development of this innovative product and to the idea of an Asian bond market. We have seen a favourable response to the ABF Hong Kong Fund, and I hope that the PAIF, with its broader investor base, will also be well received by markets. I wish you every success in promoting the PAIF. Thank you. BIS Review 50/2005  1
43  If one feature of more effective communication with the general public is simplification, a second is story-telling. For most people, stories stick in a way facts and figures simply cannot. Recent experimental evidence has explored whether media narratives are able to stick in a way that can reshape public discourse, public opinion and public behaviour. 44  It finds compelling evidence that stories do just that. Some stories are, of course, more adhesive than others. I recently attended a conference on the merits of “Odyssean” and “Delphic” forward guidance. The use of Greek mythology is an example of story-telling. But are these stories sticky with the public? For most people, fictional goings-on in Ancient Greece several millennia ago are not especially sticky. Even modern-day citizens of Delphi might find them a stretch. The trick is in creating not just narratives but “popular narratives”, to use the language of George Akerlof and Robert Shiller. 45  One effective way of doing so is draw on stories that link to people’s personal, local or  recent experience. This helps people to visualise the story which, in turn, helps make it stick, in much the same way visualising a list of random items helps them stick in your memory. 42  The MPC’s decision to raise Bank Rate in November may also of course have had a role to play in generating extra hits. MuLuhan (1964). King, Schneer and White (2017). 45 See Shiller (2017).

Ladies and gentlemen, you will agree with me that automation of processes brings in some efficiency which should translate into effective utilisation of resources. Instead of spending time processing bulk payments, employees will have time to concentrate on other more important assignments, such as deposit mobilisation, credit portfolio growth and administration, all of which are important for the wellbeing of an institution in terms of profits, enhanced shareholder value and growth of the economy at large. The world is changing in terms of technological advancement and new methods of doing business are being developed every day. As a country and through innovations like the product we are launching today, we need to constantly keep up with these developments. Ladies and gentlemen, as you are aware the government continues to give tax and other incentives for institutions and individuals importing computers and computer parts. This is deliberate. It is aimed at stimulating economic growth and as such we all have no excuse for not taking advantage of this development. We expect all commercial banks in Zambia to take full advantage of this for the benefit of the Zambian people through improved service delivery. In this connection, I would like to take this opportunity to call on Zambia National Commercial Bank Plc, as a national bank, to take the lead in responding to our call and indeed government’s call to reduce lending interest rates further.
They establish the “framework conditions” for the actions of economic agents, and also define the objectives and scope of public policies. The final – and fundamental – layer of this structure underlying both markets and institutions is the set of “human values” which potentially influences and interacts with both. I will use the term “human values”, or simply “values” in a broad sense: to include social and cultural values which are reflected in people’s preferences and attitudes and which influence their behaviour, including their actions as economic agents and market participants. Edmund Phelps (2006), in a very recent paper, uses the term “economic culture” to describe the set of “cultural values, attitudes, morals and beliefs”. His concept is similar to the one I have defined as “values” and it seems to relate more to cultural attributes than pertain closely to economic behaviour. In principle, values can affect markets and economic performance both directly and indirectly, that is by shaping the features, objectives and functioning of institutions. There can also be interactions and feedback effects. The history of economic and political thought reminds us that great philosophers and economists, starting with Aristotle and including the Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and later on Max Weber (1905) and Joseph Schumpeter (1911), emphasised the role and influence of a society’s values or culture for the functioning and performance of the economy.

The banks’ Denar credits increased by Denar 7,463 million, or by 27.8%. The increase was primarily due to the abolishment of the credit limits of the banks’ Denar placements at the end of March 2000, which was a period of significant credit expansion. It should be underlined that according to the supervisory examinations of the NBRM, the newly extended credits are granted to good clients. In December 2000, compared to the same month of 1999, the banks’ foreign currency placements to the nongovernment sector decreased by Denar 1,421 million, or by 17.2%. The fall was primarily due to the higher attractiveness of the banks’ Denar credits due to the higher interest rates. At the end of March 2000, the NBRM continued with further reforms of the monetary policy instruments, where the abolishment of the credit ceilings being the most significant one. Hence, the transition to indirect market-oriented instruments for monetary regulation has entirely been completed. Moreover, the existing monetary instruments have been improved in order to be modern and closer to those used in developed market economies. Within the framework of continuous and intensive efforts to lower the banks’ interest rates, the NBRM, in April 2000, decreased the discount rate and the Lombard credit interest rate by one percentage points, thus reducing them to 7.9% and 17.5% p.a. respectively. 1  On December 30, 2000, according to the new methodology, the NBRM gross foreign exchange reserves equaled USD 478.1 million.
Also contributing to this is that factors causing restrictions on supply, and temporarily pushing up commodity prices, are fading away, and that international inflation is being curbed by central banks raising their policy rates. The economic agents trust that the high inflation rate is temporary and will return to the target fairly soon. The longer-term inflation expectations will thus remain anchored at 2 per cent. Wage increases and the Industrial agreement benchmark are based on the assumption that the inflation target will continue to apply in the future, despite the temporary rise in inflation. Companies are refraining from excessive price increases, which risk giving rise to compensatory wage increases that increase their costs, and which force the Riksbank to raise the policy rate further, which will drive their costs up even more. In turn, fiscal policy focuses on targeted support to households and companies that suffer particularly badly in the poorer times that can hardly be avoided going forward. In such a scenario, the inflation target will be able to continue to provide a basis for a long-term favourable development in the Swedish economy, without very large policy rate hikes by the Riksbank (Figure 6). In a bad scenario, the opposite happens. Interest rate hikes will be insufficient and economic agents start to doubt that inflation can return to the target in the foreseeable future. This leads to the longer-term inflation expectations in the economy rising.

SPEECH DATE:  9 December 2022  SPEAKER:  Deputy Governor Per Jansson  VENUE:  Swedbank  Monetary policy when inflation is too high – prerequisites and challenges* “There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.” The words are said to be Vladimir Lenin's, but it is disputed whether that really is the case. Nevertheless, the quotation is very well suited to what I intend to talk about today. Once a year, I usually make a longer speech, which is also published on the Riksbank’s website. The most recent was in December 2021.1 My speech then was about the division of roles in macroeconomic policy, and my main message was that in the future fiscal policy needs to be more active than has been the case in recent decades.2 I emphasised in my speech that the inflation target needs to be symmetrical, that is, it is as important to counteract too low inflation as it is to counteract too high inflation. But at that time, too high inflation was not regarded as a particularly pressing threat, nor was it something I specifically mentioned in the speech. The situation has changed rapidly To recall how the situation looked at the end of January this year, one can look up the inflation forecasts of Swedish forecasters at that time. As energy prices had begun to rise, all forecasters believed that inflation in 2022 would be higher than the target of 2 per cent.
So far, we have shown that reserve tiering and reserve-absorbing operations can support activity in the interbank money market and reduce the stock of excess reserves. To complete the discussion, we will now examine how these elements affect money market dynamics and determine money market rates. Let us start with the demand for reserves. It is reasonable to assume that a lower price (i.e. a lower interest rate) in the money market will cause demand for reserves to increase. In other words – and as illustrated on Slide 9 – the demand curve for reserves will be downward sloping. 14 How do reserve tiering and reserve absorption enter this picture? As we have 11  12 13 14  In the context of the SNB, the ‘upper remuneration rate’ and the ‘lower remuneration rate’ are generally referred to as ‘interest rate on sight deposits up to threshold’ and ‘interest rate on sight deposits above threshold’. In this speech, we use the terms ‘upper remuneration rate’ and ‘lower remuneration rate’. SNB Bills are classified as a ‘high-quality liquid asset’ (HQLA) under the Liquidity Coverage Ratio regulation and are included in the list of collateral eligible for SNB repos (SNB GC Basket). The overnight-equivalent of an interest rate represents the residual part of the interest rate after adjusting for the term structure of the interest rate curve. The traditional Poole (1968) model analyses the reserve demand curve in an environment where monetary policy is implemented without applying reserve tiering.

As we just noted, in our reserve tiering system, banks with excess reserves have an incentive to lend those reserves to banks whose reserves fall short of their thresholds. Unless the borrowing capacity of these banks is substantial, there may still be excess reserves in the system even after all interbank trading is accounted for. This is precisely what we see in the 9  For each bank that is subject to the minimum reserve requirement, the individual threshold corresponds to the moving average of the minimum reserve requirements over the preceding 36 reference periods, multiplied by the applicable threshold factor. The instruction sheet governing interest on sight deposits provides further information. 10 We gained the insight that reserve tiering promotes interbank trading during the time when our policy rate was negative. As we applied a negative interest rate to reserves that exceeded bank-specific exemption thresholds, we were essentially making use of reserve tiering during this period. Fuhrer et al. (2021) investigate monetary policy implementation via reserve tiering both theoretically and empirically. Page 5/10  case shown on Slide 7. Even after factoring in interbank trading, there are still excess reserves, here depicted in light blue. In such an environment, the equilibrium interest rate that would prevail in the interbank money market would be relatively close to the lower remuneration rate on reserves, which is currently 0%.
For example, the European Banking Authority (EBA) is developing binding technical standards on a prudent valuation methodology by end-2012. These developments are a significant departure from past practices in reporting bank balance sheets. At present, this prudent valuation information will form part of the regulatory return, which may be publicly disclosed. But in time, it would be desirable if it formed part of banks’ reported annual accounts to maximise investor transparency and consistency. This would parallel the approach used in other realms of public policy to capture economic uncertainty – for example, the “fan charts” for inflation and GDP published by the Bank of England. Bank liabilities and maturity mismatches A second dimension along which banks’ balance sheets are different is the structure of their liabilities. Typically, these have a considerably shorter duration than their assets – in others words, banks engage in maturity transformation. This is one of the main reasons for separate regulatory and resolution rules for banks. But it has a bearing, too, on appropriate accounting rules. To see why, consider a bank with 50-year assets funded by overnight deposits. The bank intends to hold these assets to maturity. Under current rules, holding intent, alongside the characteristics of the assets themselves, is the arbiter of valuation. So those intentions would enable the bank to hold the asset in its banking, rather than trading, book for regulatory purposes. But the liability structure of banks means that holding ability may in practice matter much more than holding intent.

The higher the participation of non-residents in the bond market, the more vulnerable the market is to volatile portfolio outflows. So it is said that with history, if we learn it well, will not repeat itself. Nevertheless, sometimes lessons in history are cloaked in apparent success. The 2008 Global Financial Crisis and corresponding policy responses by major central banks caused risks not seen before. In the periods after, unconventional monetary policy and a prolonged period of low interest rates had negative spillovers to emerging markets. This was notably evident through the waves of volatile capital flows in large magnitude. These flows were drawn by the search for yields, and ironically coincided with a significant expansion and development of our financial markets, a key reform measure following the AFC. The region was once again at the mercy of global easy money, flattered with an overvaluation of asset prices and domestic financial market exuberance. As these capital inflows mainly originated from the advanced economies, regional financial markets became increasingly exposed to their vagaries. Take the Taper Tantrum for example, which exemplifies how fragile the region’s fate is when just a hint of the US Fed possibly tapering its asset purchases was sufficient to trigger massive 2/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  capital outflows from the region. Time and again, a clear policy lesson has come to the fore – the importance of diversification and the need to reduce reliance on the de facto reserve currencies to manage negative spillover effects.
In the end, unemployment was 6.7 percent by the end of 2013, and the year-end 2014 level of the SOMA portfolio reached $ trillion: a $ trillion change relative to June 2013. If we interpolate the bins using a uniform distribution, then this outcome is around the 81st percentile of the distribution conditional on the good labor market outcome and in the 75th percentile of the unconditional distribution. If we were to judge on the basis of our survey of primary dealers, the outcome of the asset purchase program was on the high side but not surprisingly so. However, we don’t know how other market participants assessed the implications for the size of asset purchases from the September 2012 FOMC statement, particularly going into the June 2013 FOMC meeting. Many may recall that the June FOMC press conference continued something called the “taper tantrum.” As former Chairman Ben Bernanke writes in his memoir, “What explained markets’ strong reaction and why did it surprise us? In retrospect, I think our view of market expectations was too dependent on our survey of securities dealers.”48 Importantly, it is possible that the size of future asset purchases was seen as smaller by primary dealer respondents than by the marginal investor.49 Following this experience, we introduced the Survey of Market Participants to better capture the diversity of views in the market.

In monetary policymaking, central bankers have long pointed out the importance of measuring the expectations of financial market participants, households, and firms – especially with regard to inflation and the central bank’s so-called “reaction function” to changes in the economic outlook. For example, measuring market participants’ expectations for the policy rate path sheds light on both the central bank’s effectiveness in communicating its policy intentions and the transmission of anticipated future monetary policy actions into financial conditions. Inflation expectations of households, firms, and other economic agents influence a variety of decisions, including those related to consumption, saving, investment, and the setting of prices and wages, as well as the determination of the real interest rates that influence these decisions. The aggregation of these choices in turn determines realized inflation in equilibrium. Thus, inflation expectations are a crucial determinant of actual inflation and, as such, need to be carefully monitored. Further, the effectiveness of monetary policy and central bank communication relies on longer-run inflation expectations being wellanchored, making their reliable measurement very important for policymakers. More generally, expectations by consumers and businesses about a number of household, firmlevel, and economy-wide outcomes are increasingly useful inputs into a variety of forecasting and “now-casting” models. In addition to tracking measures of expectations implied by asset prices, central banks today rely increasingly on survey-based measures of subjective expectations. At the New York Fed, we conduct a diverse set of surveys to measure policy-relevant expectations.
Paul Tucker: Reflections on operating inflation targeting Speech by Mr Paul Tucker, Executive Director and Member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, at the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, Chicago, 25 May 2006. My thanks for comments to Peter Andrews, Alex Brazier, Roger Clews, Spencer Dale, Paul Fisher, David Walton and Anthony Yates. For comments and background work to Damien Lynch, Richard Harrison and Tim Taylor. And for secretarial support to Katherine Bradbrook and Michelle Wright. *  *  *  Next month will be the fourth anniversary of my appointment to the Monetary Policy Committee. It is time to draw together some of my thoughts on operating an inflation-targeting regime. Very much from the perspective of a practitioner, but engaging with some of the academic literature on our mission and, in particular, policy strategy. 1 At the outset, I should make it absolutely clear that these are my own personal views, and do not necessarily represent those of individual colleagues on the MPC or those of the Committee as a whole. Scene setting The UK was not quite the first country to adopt inflation targeting – Canada and New Zealand got there before us. But it has certainly taken off since our conversion, in 1992. It is now the explicit framework of over 20 countries, including more than fifteen in the emerging market world. And the IMF recently reported 2 that another 20 have sought technical assistance on introducing it.

Some of us made it clear that, so far as our individual decisions were concerned, we expected, other things being equal, to vote for a gradual withdrawal of monetary accommodation if/as demand recovered and the slack in the economy was gradually absorbed. 17 Crucially, those statements were state contingent. Some policy strategy issues Against that background, I should like briefly to review, without reaching firm conclusions on, four issues that feature in the recent literature. Whether central banks should publish an expected (optimal) path for their policy rate. Second, whether stabilisation policy is subject to a bias, meaning that a central bank will find it optimal not to deliver on promises and that, in consequence, its policies to offset shocks will be less effective than they could be if it could commit itself. Third, whether stabilisation policy could be more effective if the central bank targeted a path for the price level rather than an inflation rate. And, fourth, how central banks should respond to asset price inflation. (a)  Should central banks publish an expected policy path? 16  For a discussion of some implications of different loss functions, see Vickers, J., 1998, ‘Inflation targeting in practice: the UK experience’, Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, November, pages368-75. 17  For example, Tucker, P.M.W., speech at the National Association of Pension Funds Annual Investment Conference, March 2004, Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin Summer 2004, vol 44, number 2; and ‘Bank’s market man is ready for rate rises’ P.M.W.