samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
You would agree with me that it is quite difficult for a central bank, like ours, to implement monetary policy effectively in an environment characterised by inadequate banking facilities. It is for this reason therefore that I commend the Management of Stanbic Bank Zambia for bringing banking facilities closer to the people. In this regard, I wish to assure you that on our part we shall continue to support you in your endeavours to open more of such branches, because we firmly believe that you are making our work and that of the Government much easier. However, may I take this opportunity to advise the Management of Stanbic Zambia that if you want this branch or many of such branches you intend to open in future to be beneficial to the communities in which they operate, kindly be flexible on the requirements for opening accounts as well as lowering  BIS Review 13/2005  1  the minimum account balances to be maintained by your clients. I say so because communities like Matero and the surrounding areas comprise mainly of people who are in the informal sector. Therefore, it would be unreasonable for you to ask an unemployed prospective customer to bring a letter from their employer before an account could be opened with your branch! In other words, I strongly urge you to tailor your banking services to the needs of the community you operate in.

The banking union represents one of the greatest achievements of European integration. Banks are now supervised at the European level, which enables risks that transcend national borders to be identified. Completing the banking union, in particular by setting up a European deposit insurance scheme, should be a priority for national governments. If we look back 40 years, it’s clear that Spain today is a more prosperous and modern country. However, we must not forget that much remains to be done. Improving the functioning of the labour market is still an outstanding issue – more than 3 million people remain unemployed, and the youth unemployment rate is still above 30%. But there are grounds for optimism. Following the collapse in GDP during the hard years of recession, Spain, supported by the European Central Bank’s measures, has reached an annual growth rate of 2.8% over the last five years, well above the European average. Spurred by the need to search for new markets during the years in which domestic demand tightened4, Spanish businesses have managed to find opportunities overseas and many are now global leaders in their sectors. Spanish society has worked very hard to return to economic growth after almost a decade marked by the crisis, and it has done so while remaining true to its commitment to Europe. 40 years ago the Spanish people voted for a better country – one that was democratic, open and modern. The 1978 constitution and the process of European integration have enabled us to make this better country a reality.
Financial Integration and Inclusive Development: A view from the Mediterranean countries  Central banks, financial inclusion and digitization: Harnessing technology for inclusive growth  Intervention of Mr. Abdellatif Jouahri Governor of Bank Al-Maghrib  Madrid, December 13, 2019  Governor of the Banco de Espana, President of the European Institute of the Mediterranean, Deputy Secretary General of the Union for the Mediterranean, Dear friends and colleagues Ladies and Gentlemen,  First of all, I would like to thank the organizers, particularly the Governor of the Bank of Spain, Mr. Pablo Hernandez de Cos, and the President of the Executive Committee of the IEMed, Mr. Senén Florensa, for inviting me to participate in this conference. Taking part in the Mediterranean meetings organized by the Bank of Spain has become, for me, a tradition to be preserved, all the more since we are united by a cooperation agreement. It is also my pleasure to speak alongside panelists, both colleagues and friends, on a topic of particular interest to us from each side of the Mediterranean. Inclusive development issues have been one of the key concerns for Moroccan public authorities for several years now. With regard to financial inclusion in particular, which engages us as a central bank, we have, together with the Ministry of Finance and stakeholders, just finalized and started implementing a national financial inclusion strategy, whose preparation has progressed for a few years now.

Investment plans for 1997 appear to be less ambitious on the whole compared with capital spending plans at the same period in 1996. Nevertheless, the business leaders polled in January were more confident about future activity than they were a few months earlier. This could mean that previously postponed investment plans may be implemented in the coming months. However, plans for increasing output capacity remained few and far between, owing to the spare capacity currently available, and depend on stronger growth in demand. Retail sales in January were up markedly over December 1996, and only slightly down on the exceptionally high level recorded a year earlier. Employment levels remained stable in nearly all industrial sectors. They showed only a slight change in the services and retail sectors, but there were further falls in the building industry. BIS Review 23/1997
8 [13]  … but their cashflows are affected more by interest rate adjustments than before Increasingly higher household indebtedness – in combination with a large share of mortgages taken at variable interest rates – has resulted in their cashflows being more affected by rate changes than previously. Traditionally, we tend to talk about the so-called interest rate channel when discussing the effects of monetary policy on household consumption. Simplified somewhat, the interest rate channel implies that it will be more attractive to save than to borrow when the interest rate is raised – and vice versa when the rate is lowered – which affects consumption. Another effect is that when the interest rate is raised, disposable income for savers increases and decreased for borrowers – and vice versa when the rate is lowered – which also affects consumption. This is usually referred to as the cashflow effect of monetary policy. 9 We can understand this effect by looking at how disposable income is defined: Disposable income ≈ wages + transfer payments + interest income + other capital income – interest expenditure – taxes According to the Financial Accounts from Statistics Sweden, households’ debts are approximately twice the size of their interest-bearing assets. Which is why a rate increase has a negative net effect on total disposable household income. This effect has increased as household indebtedness has grown. What then does an increased effect mean in actual monetary terms? We have studied this as well.

7 [13]  Figure 7. Households have increasingly high debt and shorter interest-rate fixation periods Household indebtedness has increased  Shorter interest-rate fixation periods for household mortgages 100  100  80  80  60  60  40  40  20  20  0  98  01  04  07 Variable  10  13  16  0  Fixed  Note. Left-hand graph. Percentage of disposable income. Total household debt as a share of their disposable income, totalled over the past four quarters. Right-hand graph. Percentage of mortgages. Refers to loans from mortgage institutions. Percentage of mortgages in each category is calculated based on the value of the loans. Variable rate refers to interest-rate fixation periods up to and including three months. Fixed rate refers to interest-rate fixation periods over three months. Sources: The Riksbank and Statistics Sweden  Most households can continue to pay their mortgages even at significantly higher interest rates ... The question is whether households’ interest-rate sensitivity – in combination with rising interest rates – might result in them quite simply not being able to meet their interest payments. This could lead to banks incurring direct credit losses on their mortgages, which in turn might affect financial stability. But I am not overly worried about this risk. Banks do what is known as a “left-tolive-on” or “discretionary income” calculation, as part of their credit assessment. As a rule, they don’t grant mortgages if there is a deficit in the calculation.
The sluggishness of the recovery in many advanced economies from the global financial crisis – the so-called Great Recession - was striking even by historical standards. For example, the level of activity in the UK lies very significantly below its level at the equivalent stage following the 1930s depression (Chart 7). The UK’s Great Recession was far-worse than the Great Depression. A number of factors are believed responsible for the persistence of weak global demand. One often given prominence was heightened risk-aversion among lenders, consumers and businesses, which in turn constrained credit and spending growth in the economy. This so-called “psychological scarring” of risk appetite was also a dampener of credit and aggregate demand following the Great Depression. 7  7  Malmendier and Nagel (2011). 7  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  7  On the supply-side of the economy, several factors have contributed to subdued global inflation over recent decades.

While affecting both demand and supply, most economists believe the hit to demand from Covid has been larger than to supply, opening up output gaps. The IMF estimate the output gap among the G7 countries rose from around -0.4% in 2019 to 3.8% in 2020. In the UK, the MPC judge that the output gap has widened and will continue to widen in the near term, peaking at 3% and lowering inflation by around ½% in 2021. 10  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  10  Chart 10: Velocity of Broad Money  Nominal 0.3 GDP/Broad money  0.25 0.2 0.15 0.1 0.05 0 06  07  08  09  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  Source: ONS and Bank of England. There are contrasting views among economists about the pace at which these output gaps will close. The MPC’s central view is that the UK’s output gap will close this year, although uncertainty around the timing and pace is considerable. A key factor, as after the global financial crisis and the Great Depression, will be the extent and persistence of psychological scarring among lenders, households and companies. The deeper and longer-lasting these psychological scars, the slower the likely pace of recovery, the more persistent the output gap and the greater the disinflationary drag from the Covid crisis.
Investing even more government capital in Norway would reduce the return on investments in the Norwegian business sector and prompt other investors to invest elsewhere. Using even more capital in the Norwegian economy would probably also lead to a rapid relocation of jobs to other countries, as the krone would tend to appreciate. BIS Review 18/2002  3

Swedish inflation 1900–2022 Annual percentage change 60  60 First World War  50  CPI  50  40  40  30  30  20  Second World War  Wars in the Middle East and oil crises  Korean War  20  10  10  0  0  -10  -10  -20  -20  -30 1900  1910  1920  1930  1940  1950  1960  1970  1980  1990  2000  2010  2020  -30 2030  Note. The figure for 2022 relates to the average of January-April. Source: Statistics Sweden  4 [14]  There are some occasions when it has been higher than 10 per cent, sometimes much higher. All of them occur in connection with war or some other type of conflict. Some periods are short peaks, where inflation rapidly falls back again, while inflation in the 1970s and 1980s was fairly high over a longer period of time. Although inflation did not always exceed 10 per cent, I have chosen to regard this as a continuous period. I intend to go through each of these periods – why inflation rose, why it fell back again, and how economic policy-makers thought and acted. Highest inflation in connection with the First World War So let me then begin with the First World War. The inflation during the First World War is by far the highest in the whole period and peaked in 1918 at 47 per cent.
We introduced this concept exactly three years ago. You are acquainted with the main elements: definition of price stability, inflation forecast as main indicator and target range for the three-month Libor rate as operational target. Overall, our experience with our monetary policy concept has been good. Recently, this experience was discussed at an internal conference. Since the new concept was adopted, we have widened the basis of our monetary policy decisions and further developed our analysis of indicators and models. The more extensive use of relevant information enabled us to react more swiftly and with more foresight than formerly to changes in the economic situation. Our monetary policy concept met with a positive public reception in Switzerland. The same applies to the financial markets and international organisations such as the IMF and the OECD. The concept has vastly improved transparency. By publishing studies on internal decision-making processes and the forecasting models used, we have made further relevant information accessible. The public is thus in a better position to understand the reasoning behind monetary policy decisions. 2  BIS Review 73/2002  So far, we have published our inflation forecasts regularly in June and December. We should like to take this a step further and will in future publish an updated inflation forecast after every quarterly assessment of the situation. This will further help to improve transparency. From 2003 onwards, we will also inform the public of our monetary policy by publishing new inflation forecasts in March and September.

Inflation forecast I shall now turn to the course of inflation and our new inflation forecast. Our inflation forecast of June 2002 (the green dash-dotted curve in the graph) shows that at that time we assumed, based on a stable three-month Libor rate of 1.25%, that inflation would gradually rise to 1.9% in the first quarter 2005. Year-on-year inflation, as measured by the national consumer price index, dropped to 0.3% in the third quarter 2002 from 0.7% in the second quarter. In October and November it rose to approximately 1%. These fluctuations are due mainly to changes in the exact points in time when data on clearance sales prices are collected. This is also the main reason why our forecast of June 2002 over-estimated the development of inflation in the third quarter 2002. Our new inflation forecast (red dashed curve) is based on the assumption that growth in the US will pick up again from the second quarter 2003 onward. The US economy is likely to achieve its growth potential stepwise until the beginning of 2004. In the EU, the upswing will take a little longer. We are not expecting a significant acceleration of growth before the end of 2003. We assume that the  BIS Review 73/2002  1  dollar/euro rate will remain at about the current level and that the oil price will be around $ per barrel.
Chart 5: Surveys suggest underlying investment  Chart 6: Investment growth unusually weak  trend still negative  relative to employment growth  Sources: BoE, BCC, CBI, ONS and Bank calculations. Sources: ONS and Bank calculations. However, even then it was quite a bit weaker than in other countries, weaker still than in previous economic expansions in the UK (Chart 4). And it then started to decline. Business investment fell in every quarter of 2018 – outside recessions that’s the longest period of continual declines on record – and, although preliminary estimates suggest it recovered slightly in the first quarter of this year2 the standard business surveys suggest the underlying trend is still negative (Chart 5). This is remarkable at a time when the economy has been growing. What’s particularly striking is that firms have been cutting back on investment while adding jobs. Even as investment was shrinking, employment grew in every quarter of 2018, and quite strongly over the year as a whole (Chart 6). 2  It’s possible that this was driven, somewhat perversely, by the same no-deal worries that pushed up firms’ inventory holdings (certainly there will have been similar incentives to expand warehousing and logistical capacity). 3  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  3  As I say, the impact of Brexit uncertainty on investment has been talked about quite a bit already and I’m not looking to give an exhaustive account of it today.

How should we react? Not by less Europe. This would be a mistake if we want to take collective control of our destiny in this new world. But by a “better” Europe, less caught up in the detail, more focused on a few key priorities, and more efficient. To achieve this, Europe needs the energy of Germany and France, and of their remarkable friendship. I will now cite Chancellor Helmut Kohl: “The Germans and French must together build the hard core of the European Union – a union that sees itself not merely as a common market, but as a community of values, a democracy based on freedom, the rule of law and the social responsibility of the State”.3 Naturally I won’t talk to you this evening about the French election debate: I will simply say that as friends of France, you must not underestimate the strength of its institutions. I will talk to you even less about the German election debate. But I strongly believe that after these democratic elections, whatever the outcome, the governments of our two countries will have to confer to decide on a number of shared bilateral projects, and above all prepare a common initiative for Europe. Because for Germany and for France, the other country is certainly the best possible partner: there is no serious alternative, neither in the east nor the west for Germany, nor in the south for France.
Third, many of their transition projects are only marginally bankable. Regulatory and political risks heighten the likelihood of default, transaction lead times are long, projects require prohibitively large amounts of start-up capital, and there is limited access to expertise in project development and financing. The current model of multilateral bank lending is inadequate to mobilise the capital that countries need for their transition. A good part of multilateral bank lending goes to bankable projects that could well have been financed by private capital. Multilateral banks tend to prioritise projects with lower risks to support their mandates of macroeconomic stability and growth. But in truth, their capital is most needed for riskier projects that are only marginally bankable but can support the transition. What we need is public-private partnership in financing that is synergistic not duplicative. We need to make every dollar of public capital count. We need blended finance. Catalytic and concessional funding from the public sector, multilateral development banks, and philanthropic sources can potentially enhance project bankability and help to crowd in private capital. They can: mitigate a portion of project risks to improve the risk-return profile and attract a broader set of private investors; provide technical assistance at the project design stage to increase the pipeline of investable projects; and facilitate the development of a mature climate blended finance ecosystem in emerging markets and developing economies. Blended finance is not new but we need to scale it up and this requires a collective effort.

Second, when interest rates are at the zero lower bound, the risks of tightening a bit too early are likely to be considerably greater than the risks of tightening a bit too late. A premature tightening might lead to financial conditions that are too restrictive, resulting in a weaker economy and, in turn, an aborted lift-off. This would be problematic in that it would harm the Fed’s credibility and, more importantly, would be difficult to rectify. The U.S. experience during the Great Depression and the Japanese experience over the past two decades illustrate the risks of raising interest rates too soon, especially when inflation is running below the central bank’s objective. Finally, given the still high level of long-term unemployment and the outlook for inflation, there could be a significant benefit to allowing the economy to run “slightly hot” for a while in order to get those that have been unemployed for a long time working again. I believe this can be done without jeopardizing our price stability objective. If the long-term unemployed are not employed relatively soon, their job skills will erode further, reducing their long-term prospects for employment and, therefore, the productive capacity of the U.S. economy. This would be a very unfortunate outcome for them, their families and the country. Market expectations that lift-off will occur around mid-2015 seem reasonable to me.
Jessica Chew Cheng Lian: Building back better together through a sustainable and future-ready workforce Keynote address by Ms Jessica Chew Cheng Lian, Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia (Bank Negara Malaysia), at the 24th World Conference of Banking Institutes, Kuala Lumpur, 28 June 2023. ***  Introduction It is my delight and great pleasure to be a part of the 24th World Conference of Banking Institutes hosted in Malaysia this year. Let me start by congratulating the joint organisers, the Asian Institute of Chartered Bankers (AICB) and the Global Banking Education Standards Board (GBEStB) for putting together what promises to be great event, the first physical instalment since before the pandemic in 2019. Of the many challenges and equally, opportunities, that are facing the financial sector today, none in my view come close to the importance of understanding the implications of the profound change we are seeing in world of finance for its workforce. The latest Future of Jobs Report released by The World Economic Forum last month revealed that over 80% of organisations surveyed identify higher adoption of frontier technologies, broadening digital access and the application of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) standards as key trends most likely to drive workforce transformation. It might surprise some of you to know that early thinkers predicted similar trends on the future of work as far back as the 20th century.

Ong Chong Tee: Life insurance industry - riding the technology wave Address by Mr Ong Chong Tee, Deputy Managing Director (Financial Supervision) of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, at the LIA Annual Luncheon, Singapore, 7 March 2018. * * * Mr Patrick Teow, President of LIA Singapore Distinguished Guests Ladies and gentlemen Thank you for inviting me to join the 2018 LIA Annual Luncheon. Allow me to first congratulate the new LIA Management Committee. I last spoke at this event in 2015 on a theme of confidence and resilience of the industry. Last year, my Assistant Managing Director Lee Boon Ngiap spoke on the importance of strong culture and ethics as key drivers of good conduct. Today, I like to build on these themes with the backdrop of the technological wave sweeping our shores. For those of you who have visited London and taken its underground trains, you will be familiar with the rather famous broadcast in the Tube stations repeatedly telling commuters to “mind the gap”. In an analogous way, as technology innovation and business model disruptions impact various economic areas including the insurance sector, it is worthwhile to remind ourselves to “mind the gap” as we ride the technology wave. Let me elaborate. My remarks will cover three aspects: (a) Bridging the protection gap; (b) Leveraging FinTech (or more specifically, InsurTech); and (c) Doing more to eliminate ‘conduct gaps’. Protection gap Many studies have found sizeable insurance protection gaps across countries.