samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Given the novel nature of the instrument, its amount and the difficulties in reaching agreements in the EU on such multi-faceted matters, I must say that the outcome is very satisfactory in terms of underscoring the shared will to move the European project forward. The challenge now is to convert these funds that will be made available to countries into a fiscal impulse that accompanies and steers the recovery effort needed in our productive system. In this connection it would be advisable to prioritise, in the short term, public investment projects in innovation, technological capital, education and lifelong learning, and projects that contribute to the transition to a more sustainable economy, in line with the strategic guidelines recently laid down by the European authorities. The fact that the recovery fund agreed by the Council focuses on medium and long-term objectives means there is still a significant need in the short term to fund the Member States’ budgetary effort in combating the effects of the pandemic. Also, in the medium term it remains necessary to equip the EU with an appropriate institutional framework to address the asymmetrical effect of economic shocks, e.g. through the launch of a common budgetary macroeconomic stabilisation capacity, a cyclical stabilisation function or a pan-European unemployment insurance scheme. That would influence greater pooling of resources and risks in the budgetary arena and would enhance the resilience of the Union as a whole to negative shocks.

You have provided exemplary leadership, driving progress on improving the functioning of payments systems and broader financial market infrastructure, both within the euro area and internationally. If anyone has prepared us to withstand the coming deluge, it’s you. Whether my remarks leave you seeing the world’s glass as half full or half empty, I’d ask you to charge yours now to toast, Benoît Cœure. 9  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  9
In light of the more challenging environment going forward, generating the supply pipe line for talent and addressing the short supply of critical talent with new skills need to be given urgent priority. What are these skills? There has been considerable attention to the shortage of new and higher technical competencies – including in the area of risk assessment and management – required by financial institutions in the new operating environment. The growth in Islamic finance has also added important new dimensions to the talent requirements. Beyond these clear gaps however, the promotion of more sustainable business models in finance will require additional new skills which have not traditionally been areas of focus in financial institutions. This includes skills in change and crisis management, business recovery planning, the ability to develop and sustain long-term customer relationships, and skills to direct and manage operations in international and cross-cultural contexts. Also particularly important will be the ability to build, motivate and lead strong teams under significantly more challenging conditions in which institutions may be more constrained by regulation in their ability to recruit and retain talent simply by paying more. Perhaps more than in any other sector, the response to the challenges facing the financial industry in managing talent needs to be much broader, forward looking and more strategic given its central role within the economy.

The bar on professional competence demanded of talent in the industry has also been raised  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  significantly and is also changing in its emphasis, with the ability to form sound judgments becoming a more important requirement of talent. New political and regulatory pressures are being brought directly to bear on talent management strategies, for example arising from compensation reforms and greater regulatory scrutiny of new hires at the top levels of management. There has also been a growing focus on the role of talent in regaining confidence in the financial sector, in terms of the ethical standards and values embraced and demonstrated by the workforce in the financial industry, and the strength and integrity of its leadership. The financial sector has historically been and remains highly productive in relative terms. In Malaysia for example, the financial sector has had the highest total-factor productivity growth over the recent decade relative to other sectors of the economy. Employment in the financial sector has also been growing annually with a large proportion of the growth being in the higher skilled segment. This accounts for the higher level of wages in the financial sector at about RM36,000 annually, compared to the national average of RM21,700 annually for the economy. Financial services employees are also generally educated to a higher level, with more institutions requiring post-graduate or professional qualifications, in addition to the relevant work experience, for holding key and senior-level positions within the industry.
There are over 2½ million Gulf War II veterans alone, many of whom served multiple tours of duty overseas, and a significant proportion of them might otherwise not be able to purchase homes today. Our nation owes them a great debt, and such a policy would provide a boost to housing demand quickly. Moral hazard Some argue that any interventions to improve the real estate market would lead to moral hazard – that is these intervention would reward bad behaviors. I think these concerns are overstated. First, the programs that have been proposed can be designed with the proper incentives to limit moral hazard and to encourage desireable behavior. Second, in contrast to the earlier phase of housing crisis when mostly subprime borrowers came under stress, many of the borrowers running into trouble with their mortgages today took out conforming loans subject to standard downpayment requirements, had respectable FICO scores and borrowed a moderate amount to finance an average house. The problem was that these purchases occurred near the peak in the market and now many of the buyers have suffered an adverse life shock such as unemployment or illness. This isn’t a moral hazard issue, this is just the bad luck associated with the timing of the purchase and an exceptionally weak jobs market. Punishing such misfortune accomplishes little. The taxpayer interest I believe that the proposals I put forward are strongly in the public interest. I also believe that they would be good for taxpayers. Consider, for instance, the proposal for earned principal reduction.

This is important because residential mortgage lending terms tightened significantly during the crisis, and have not eased subsequently.12 Indeed, over 50 percent of all new loans – and 70 percent of new prime conforming loans – go to borrowers with FICO scores of 760 or above, compared with about 30 percent before the crisis. Borrowers with credit scores of 720 or less now make up less than 30 percent of new originations, although they represent 52 percent of the population with credit scores. Steps should be taken to improve households’ access to credit. Currently, lenders are discouraged from making new prime conforming loans due to excessively stringent put-back rules on these mortgages. Such rules give Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac broad scope to force the originator to repurchase at par loans that go delinquent if there are any errors in the mortgage loan paperwork – even if the error has no direct link to the delinquency. It is essential that lenders are accountable for the representations they make and are appropriately penalized for any misrepresentations. However, doing this via a blanket  10  “The National and Regional Economic Outlook,” October 24, 2011, and “Securing the Recovery” November 17, 2011. 11  Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. 2012. White Paper, “The U.S. Housing Market: Current Conditions and Policy Considerations,” January 4. 12  According to the Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey.
The current reforms in the motor insurance sector will introduce far-reaching changes in a key segment of the industry, with significant implications for the business strategies of insurers and their approaches to risk management. With the introduction of a new scheme for basic motor insurance cover, pricing for non-statutory motor insurance will be gradually liberalised, thus removing price distortions. This will allow rates to adjust to underlying risk factors. This will also be accompanied by a holistic review of motor insurance practices and the supporting infrastructure to enable more scientific underwriting and improve claims management. Industry groups have been formed to study these issues and make recommendations for the smooth transition to this new and more competitive  environment, while at the same time improving practices across the entire value chain of the motor insurance sector. The groups have made good progress and the recommendations are expected to be finalised for implementation in the second half of 2010. A new blueprint for the financial sector Beyond this international financial crisis and economic recovery, a global shift is taking place that is resulting in an increasingly multi-polar world. In this new phase of globalisation, the concentration of economic power in the global economy will become more dispersed. Asia will be very much part of this new future that is emerging. As Asia’s importance as a growth centre in the world economy increases, three major trends can be expected to intensify going forward.

This improvement has been underpinned by a recovery in domestic demand, particularly in consumption, supported by better employment conditions, the accelerated implementation of fiscal measures, the accommodative monetary environment and the continued access to financing. In 2010, the Malaysian economy is expected to sustain the growth momentum, driven by domestic economic activity and reinforced by improvements of growth of our major trading partners. The role of the domestic sector in driving growth is not new. Domestic demand has in fact been the main source of growth for the overall economy since 2003, complementing our large external sector. This trend highlights the fact that our economy is evolving towards a balanced growth model, deriving advantages from our economic linkages with the global economy while at the same time strengthening the domestic sources of growth. While growth in domestic consumption has been encouraging, the next step towards further rebalancing the sources of growth will be to increase the contribution from investment. A higher level of private investment would further improve our productive capacity and increase the potential for higher growth. In this, many new areas of growth would benefit from higher investment, including in the services sector, as well as in the development of enabling infrastructure for modern economies such as in broadband and green technology. Rising above the economic challenges While economic prospects have improved, the road to economic recovery will not be without challenges.
Although government-owned, the Fund has no role at all in Norwegian foreign policy. The Fund is managed within an ethical framework. This framework has two pillars. Some companies are excluded from the investment universe, by the Ministry of Finance. And Norges Bank has a corporate governance department which works together with the companies we invest in. The overall principle for the investment strategy of the Fund is to keep a medium risk profile, defined by the Parliament and Ministry. Norges Bank makes investment decisions within this  4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  risk profile, to achieve as good a return as possible. As time has gone by and crises have emerged and subsided, the Norwegian parliament and public have increased their risk tolerance. From the start, the Fund was invested alongside our foreign currency reserves, exclusively in government bonds with high liquidity, low risk and mediocre return. In 1998 we started investing in stocks, placing 40 per cent of the Fund in equity and keeping 60 per cent in bonds. In the following years, the investment universe was gradually expanded. Emerging markets were included, as were corporate bonds and stocks from small companies. In 2007, the Norwegian parliament decided to increase the Fund’s equity share to 60 per cent. Last year, we started investing in real estate. When the real estate target of 5 per cent is reached, bonds will constitute only 35 per cent of the Fund.

The fiscal rule states that the government every year shall use the estimated long term real return on the Fund, set at 4 per cent. However, there is no direct link between petroleum revenues and the Fund. The government collects taxes from the whole economy, including the petroleum sector. After all government expenditures are paid, the surplus is transferred to the Fund. The last 10 years, fiscal policy has been geared towards a cyclically adjusted non-oil deficit which corresponds to 4 per cent of the Fund every year. Let me now turn to one very specific Norwegian issue: the management of our oil fund, called the Government Pension Fund Global. For the last 20 years, Norway has been a major petroleum producer. At the maximum, our nation produced about 4 per cent of global petroleum. This geological luck has given the Norwegian state an overwhelming cash flow. The first money was transferred to the fund in 1996. Fifteen years later the Fund stands at NOK 3.2 trillion, or EUR 410 billion. It is probably the second largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. The Fund is now 120 per cent of Norway’s GDP. Norges Bank, as manager of this financial wealth, has laid down several governing principles for the Fund. We seek no controlling stakes. In fact, the maximum ownership in any one company is 10 per cent. We seek as good a return as possible, given the moderate level of risk defined by the Norwegian parliament and the Ministry of Finance.
16  13  Campbell et al (2011). 14  This was not estimated in Fujiwara et al (2014), but estimates of the impact of TV on well-being are available in Frey et al (2007). 15  The exact figure is £ from Fujiwara et al (2014). 16  This is for all employee jobs from the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings. BIS central bankers’ speeches  7  If you multiply that per-person benefit by the 15 million or so regular volunteers, you get a private benefit of volunteering close to £ billion per year. 17 If you added in non-regular volunteers, you would get a larger number still. In other words, adding together private and economic benefits roughly doubles estimates of the value of volunteering, to something perhaps closer to £ billion per year. (b)  Health benefits  The Centre for Mental Health estimates that the economic and social costs of mental health problems are huge. The health and social care costs alone are worth over £ the associated output losses £ and the human costs over £ So anything that improves mental health, even in a small way, can make a big difference to social welfare. Volunteering is typically found to have a positive impact on mental health – for example, by enhancing social integration and engagement. 18 Certainly, that is what volunteers themselves say. Remaining active and socially engaged can be particularly important for older age groups, post-child raising and post-retirement.

Usage of services, such as cloud computing, increase the interdependence of banks to third-party providers and consequently increase operational risk. Therefore, the banking system is becoming increasingly more vulnerable to operational incidents at third-party service providers. 2. The reliance of banks on digital platforms for the marketing and distribution of financial services is creating new forms of reputational interdependencies within the EU's banking and payments sector. 3. Furthermore, excessive reliance on automation and IT might increase the challenges for Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures and offer new scope for money-laundering. 4. Cyber risk can be further exacerbated in the case of unsupervised parallel payment systems and rising interconnectedness between application interfaces (such as smart phone payments). Further financial risks include: 1. the robustness of Fintech companies which has not been tested yet fully. In fact, the Financial Stability Board has noticed several high-profile failures among Fintech platforms such as the Lending Club in the US and Trust Buddy in Sweden; 2. also, the evolution of BigTech companies and the risk of becoming too-big-to-fail can be another source of systemic financial risk. A malfunction at a systemically important BigTech company, could bring down key services across multiple banks and countries. The above risks translate directly to financial stability threats. The transmission of any of the above risks to one institution could be immediate to other institutions or sectors as a whole. These systemic risks should be tackled by authorities.
Zdeněk Tůma: Statistics – investment in the future Welcome address by Mr Zdeněk Tůma, Governor of the Czech National Bank, at the International Conference “Statistics: Investment in the Future”, organized by the Czech National Bank together with the Czech Statistical Office and the Prague University of Economics, Prague, 14 September 2009. *  *  *  Dear Prime Minister, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, I am very pleased that the Czech National Bank can host this conference in its premises. It is also our great pleasure to co-organize the conference together with the Czech Statistical Office and the Prague University of Economics – it is the evidence of good, I even would say, above-average relationships between these three institutions. The international conference “Statistics: Investment in the Future” we are opening by this plenary session is the second conference of this kind, organized five years after the first one. But this year’s venue is held in a rather different economic and financial environment compared to the previous conference. The whole world has been affected by the global financial crisis. Let me say a few words about the impact of the financial crisis on our economy. In autumn last year the first signs of the global financial crisis were detected in the inter-bank market. The main cause was a lack of confidence among banks spreading from abroad, resulting in their preference to keep more liquidity than usual.

Overall, the composite weighted average Treasury bill yield rate stood at 16.2% in 2005, down from 17.8% recorded in 2004. In contrast, the composite yield rate on Government bonds stood at 23.0%, up from 20.9% registered in 2004. As at May 5, 2006, the composite weighted average Treasury bill yield rate came down sharply to 7.7% while the composite yield rate on Government bonds declined to 11.0%. The sharp reduction in yield rates on Government securities has been due to low inflation expectation coupled with high demand for these securities by the non-bank financial institutions and private sector. Mr Chairman, with respect to developments in the money market, commercial banks lending rates have also been coming down, though not as fast as the decline in inflation and Treasury bills rates. Commercial banks nominal weighted average lending base rate declined from 29.8% in 2004 to 27.6 % in 2005. As at May 5, 2006, the weighted average lending base rates stood at 23.7%. Clearly, there is a need for commercial banks to do more to reduce lending rates in order to influence a substantial expansion of private sector credit. Lower lending rates will contribute to the reduction in the cost of doing business in Zambia. Sustainable lowering of lending rates by commercial banks should occur in the current environment of low inflation. Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, the macroeconomic gains attained in 2005 will be consolidated in 2006. The real GDP growth is projected at 6.0% while inflation is projected at 10.0%.
With our range of publications, films, the competition for schools Target 2.0, and our programme of regular regional visits, the Bank of England invests a good deal of resources in achieving this objective. We also monitor progress using opinion polls and report regularly their findings. Building a large constituency for price stability is an essential part of convincing people that low and stable inflation will be at the heart of macroeconomic policy for the indefinite future. For the MPC, there is the specific task of explaining that by price stability we mean our target of 2% inflation as measured by the CPI. The second task relates to communication about the reasons for monetary policy decisions to financial markets, households and businesses. No communications strategy can ignore the fact that the Monetary Policy Committee was set up precisely because there is no timeless “reaction function” to be communicated to the public. It is as important to explain what we don’t know as what we do know. We are trying to get across the fruits of our learning about the economy, not a static view of the world. Our aim is to help people understand the thinking behind the Committee’s decisions, the various hypotheses that the Committee entertains about the current conjuncture and the data that we shall be examining in order to discriminate among them. That should help people work out how we are likely to react to future data as they come in.

The stability charts – 3a and 3b – show the stability of growth and inflation in the G7 countries in the two time periods. In these charts a good performance is to be near the origin of the axes, close to the bottom left hand corner of the chart. The rather poor performance of the United Kingdom prior to 1997 is evident, as is the remarkable degree of stability in the United Kingdom relative to the rest of the G7 after that date. Of course, correlation does not imply causation. And there is little reason to suppose that the MPC is responsible for the higher average growth rate over the past decade. That more likely reflects structural changes in the UK economy, associated with other policy reforms. It is the stability of the UK economy which appears to be the most marked contribution of the MPC. That is a surprise. The conventional wisdom is that, although there is no long-run trade-off between the levels of inflation and output growth, there is a trade-off between the stability of inflation and of output growth. Inflation can be kept closer to the target only by larger changes in interest rates and bigger fluctuations in output growth. Policy-makers thus face a choice between different combinations of inflation and output growth volatility, which, when plotted on a chart, describe a “stability possibility frontier”.5 They can choose a point on that frontier depending on the relative importance they place on stabilising inflation and output growth, but they cannot move inside it.