samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The need for fairness and transparency Banks are at liberty to impose such fees and charges, but it is essential that they should be fair and transparent in doing so. This is particularly the case if the banks are intending to get more involved in consumer and wealth management business where it is important to retain the trust of the customer. The banks cannot afford a bad image otherwise they may find their customers going elsewhere - for example, to internet-based financial institutions. As we have seen from some recent incidents, the banks in Hong Kong have been lagging behind in the provision of clear information to their customers about the cost of some financial products such as credit card advances. Moreover, there has been recent controversy about the provisions in credit card agreements that entitle the lenders to reclaim from debtors the full legal costs and expenses of recovering overdue debts. In a recent court case, the judge ruled that the relevant provisions were unconscionable and therefore could not be enforced. We have written to authorised institutions to ask them to review their terms and conditions in the light of the court’s ruling and to ensure that they are consistent with Hong Kong law. We have also initiated a review of the Code of Banking Practice with a view to strengthening the provisions on such issues as transparency in the provision of banking services and the proper and responsible use of debt collection agents.

There are strong indications that this option does not exist […] Personally, I am no longer in doubt that controlling inflation is essential to achieving other social objectives.” Norway adopted a nominal anchor when the devaluation policy was abandoned in 1986. We adopted an inflation target in the spring of 2001. Section 1, first paragraph, reads: “Monetary policy shall be aimed at stability in the Norwegian krone’s national and international value, contributing to stable expectations concerning exchange rate  1  Keynes, J. M., (1923) “Notes for Lecture to the National Liberal Club”, reprinted in “Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes”, Vol. XIX, Macmillian, London, 1981. 2  A price level target means that inflation that is too high for a period must be counteracted by negative inflation in the subseqent period. An inflation target, on the other hand, permits “base drift”, which means that prices do not have to return to a specific level. 3  See discussion in Bjerve, P. J. (1981) “Kva hende I Norge i 1970-åra- konjunkturpolitisk?”, Sosialøkonomen no. 5 1981, pp 10-21. 4  Schreiner, P. (1982) “Er Ola Nordmann smart nok? Den fulle sysselsetningen i fare!”, Universitetsforlaget. BIS Review 6/2004  1  developments. At the same time, monetary policy shall underpin fiscal policy by contributing to stable developments in output and employment. Norges Bank is responsible for the implementation of monetary policy. Norges Bank’s implementation of monetary policy shall, in accordance with the first paragraph, be oriented towards low and stable inflation.
Over the past few months banks have expanded the provision of credit to the private sector in an environment in which the overall size of their balance sheets has remained broadly stable. The challenge remains to expand the availability of such credit when demand picks up further. To address this challenge, where necessary, it is essential for banks to retain earnings, to turn to the market to strengthen further their capital bases or to take full advantage of government support measures for recapitalisation. To sum up, the current key ECB interest rates still remain appropriate. We therefore decided to leave them unchanged. Taking into account all the new information and analyses which have become available since our meeting on 2 December 2010, we see evidence of short2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  term upward pressure on overall inflation, mainly owing to energy prices, but this has not so far affected our assessment that price developments will remain in line with price stability over the policy-relevant horizon. At the same time, very close monitoring is warranted. Recent economic data are consistent with a positive underlying momentum of economic activity, while uncertainty remains elevated. A cross-check of the outcome of our economic analysis with that of the monetary analysis indicates that inflationary pressures over the medium term should remain contained. Overall, we expect price stability to be maintained over the medium term, thereby supporting the purchasing power of euro area households.

Today, there are no signs of a financial bubble, but we are ready to act, if necessary, by implementing macroprudential measures, in the framework notably of the Haut conseil de stabilité financière (High Council for Financial Stability – HCSF) that you created via the Banking Act of 2013. For instance, at our eighth meeting held on 15 March 2016, we issued a warning about the office sector in the Paris area. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  2. Monetary policy thus contributes greatly to our economy, but it can’t do everything. It cannot be the only game in town. It is vital that Europe and France seize this opportunity now. In France, growth is expected to be both robust and inadequate: Robust, as it should remain in 2016 at least at the 1.2 percent level observed last year. But inadequate, as it will probably linger a little below the euro area average of 1.4–1.5 percent. For growth and employment, three essential actions are necessary: reforms in France; private and public investment; the coordination of economic policies in Europe. First, in France, orderly and sustained reforms are needed to rebuild confidence. Keeping our public deficit and our debt under control is a contributing factor: the good figures published on Friday (deficit reduced to 3.5% in 2015) are another reason to strictly respect our European commitments by bringing it below the 3% limit in 2017.
Mark Carney: The UK at the heart of a renewed globalisation Speech by Mr Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England and Chairman of the Financial Stability Board, at an event to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the Financial Times, London, 24 October 2013. * 1. *  *  Introduction  When the Financial Times opened for business in 1888 London was the world’s preeminent financial centre. It had the most international banks, the largest capital markets, and the deepest money and gold markets. It backed projects all over the world, and most of world trade was financed by bills drawn on London. Supporting the critical mass of banks, insurers and investors was an army of solicitors, accountants and clerks.1 What London had lacked, at least until the FT’s great rival Financial News was founded in 1884, was a ready provider of financial news. The FT famously set out to report “Without Fear and Without Favour”, and declared itself to be the friend of the honest financier, the respectable broker and the legitimate speculator; and the enemy of the closed stock exchange, the unprincipled promoter and the gambling operator. Perhaps as a consequence, its initial circulation was modest. The preoccupations of 1888 were not very different than today. Editions of the FT 125 years ago contained stories on economic development in China, the health of Spanish government finances, and the state of Irish banks.

Properly structured, this creates investment opportunities for British savers, reinforces trading ties for UK firms and improves access to credit for the real economy  13  14  15  6  See the FSB’s “Policy Framework for Strengthening Oversight and Regulation of Shadow Banking Entities”, http://www.financialstabilityboard.org/publications/r_130829c.htm. Nevertheless, there can sometimes be a case for such action, and the Bank will be considering what it should stand ready to do and in what circumstances. Clearly the Bank should not support any market that would otherwise be unviable. But we have, for example, intervened in the corporate bond market, buying and selling bonds to maintain the market during the crisis until it again became self-sustaining. See http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/2013/687.aspx. BIS central bankers’ speeches  across this country. London’s international markets in turn provide a valuable service to the global economy. These benefits, on both sides, will be greatest as part of an open, integrated global financial system. The Bank of England’s task is to ensure that the UK can host a large and expanding financial sector in a way that promotes financial stability. Only then can it be both a global good and a national asset. To those ends, we are working to complete the jobs of making banks more resilient and tackling too big to fail. We are making markets more robust in order to turn the shadow banking system from a source of risk to a pillar of resilience. And we are changing how we backstop private firms’ liquidity management.
2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Important to follow the international debate One aspect which has been debated a great deal both in Sweden and internationally, and which I do not intend to highlight here, is the level of the inflation target. That issue has recently been discussed quite thoroughly by some of my colleagues, and I do not have much more to add.5 I would just like to say briefly that if we are going to discuss a change in the target level, then I, like my colleagues, have greater sympathy for the argument in the international debate that central banks should raise their inflation targets than for the argument in the Swedish debate that the inflation target should be lowered. The main reason for this is the motive usually stated as the main justification for a rise – that if the target is too low, or if inflation expectations are permanently too low for some other reason, then the policy rate will hit its lower limit more often and for longer periods.6 This means that monetary policy in the future would find it harder to counteract a recession. However, it is too early today to draw the conclusion that 2 per cent is too low a level for the inflation target, and the discussion needs to continue.7 Nor do I intend to say anything about the issue debated both in Sweden and internationally as to whether monetary policy should be used to actively attempt to counteract the accumulation of financial imbalances.

To complement this theme, we will release historical data sets including detailed breakdowns of the Bank’s inflation expectations survey, our Agents’ company visit scores, and very long back-runs of key economic and financial variables. This is one of the ways we will look to increase the permeability of our research. We are seeking also new ways to visualise and analyse the increasingly rich information sets that are available. The fifth and final research theme covers the “Response to fundamental changes” Fundamental technological and structural trends will have a significant bearing on economic dynamics. Although they are likely to play out over a period that is longer than the Bank’s typical policy horizon, these trends will have profound implications for central banks. They include changing demography, increasing longevity, inequality, climate change, the increasing importance of emerging economies and the development of digital currencies. By affecting a range of phenomena – from the evolution of real interest rates to risks to the financial sector to the future of money and banking itself – all of these trends have the potential to re-shape our policy challenges. We need research to set us on the front foot to face them. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Competitions Before concluding, to catalyse interest in the One Bank Research Agenda, I am delighted to announce that today the Bank of England is launching two competitions. The first is on Data Visualisation.
Last year, adverse weather (and production constraints) dented yields yet again, causing the sector to contract by up to 2.5% in the second quarter. This is not an isolated problem for the agriculture industry. These shocks can also jeopardise domestic food production and cause prices to inflate. For instance, the irregular weather and prolonged haze conditions in 2015 caused the prices of fresh vegetables to rise by 7.7%. Climate change can also affect the economy structurally and gradually. We know that the earth is warming. The global average temperature has been increasing by 0.1 degrees Celsius each year since 1950. What we may not realise is that our cities are becoming hotter even more quickly. Some cities, despite efforts to maintain green lungs, are heating up twice as fast – as the relentless construction of high-rise steel, glass and concrete buildings work in tandem with asphalt roads to trap heat in the city. Global warming is not just a problem on dry land. Warmer oceans affect the food chain for marine life and aggravate the already declining supply of fishery resources. This in turn affects the fishing industry and the livelihood of fishermen. Warming oceans also mean melting ice caps, raising sea levels. One in three people in Southeast Asia live in low-elevation coastal zones. Alarmingly, since 1993, the Straits of Malacca has risen by the width of an iPhone 5. If this rise doubles, we may see 15 metres of shoreline erosion, which will displace many coastal populations and businesses.

The key mandates of the Joint Committee are to: Build capacity through the sharing of knowledge, expertise and best practices in assessing and managing climate-related risk; Identify issues, challenges and priorities facing the financial sector in managing the transition towards a low carbon economy; and Facilitate collaboration between stakeholders in advancing coordinated solutions to address arising challenges and issues. Beyond resilience As we intensify our efforts to increase climate resilience, let us not forget that climate action begins with each of us. For the Bank, this has meant making changes to our own internal operations to reduce our carbon footprint. For several years now, we have been watering our grounds using rainwater harvested by our roofing systems. We have also actively reduced our 4/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  carbon footprint in our currency management operations. We print fewer brand new notes and use durable polymer banknotes to prolong their lifespan in circulation. We also employ coprocessing, where shredded old notes are converted into productive energy – this has saved 440 tons of CO2 emissions since 2016. The Bank has also embarked on a digitalisation strategy that will significantly reduce internal usage of paper. We have also progressively moved to incorporate wider sustainability considerations in our investment decisions. Within the financial sector, the leadership shown by the Islamic finance industry in adopting value-based intermediation is a positive step towards sharpening the focus of finance on creating a positive impact to the economy, people and the environment.
BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  Monetary policy in the advanced economies has been extraordinarily loose for a prolonged period of time. It has been unconventional in three important regards. •  First, short-term interest rates are at or close to the zero bound – and have been so for over four years now. •  Second, central banks are purchasing non-traditional assets in large quantities to exert downward pressure on long-term interest rates. This has been going on for close to five years now, with central bank balance sheets in the US and the UK, for example, ballooning to more than three times their pre-crisis levels. •  Third, central banks are providing “forward guidance”, either in the form of commitments not to raise interest rates until certain real economy thresholds are met or plans to expand the monetary base until an inflation target is reached, helping to extend expectations of easy monetary conditions. The overall impact of these measures has been to reduce tail risks in the advanced economies and prevent a sharp deceleration in growth. But they have been less successful in restoring economic growth to pre-crisis trend rates, in the face of deleveraging pressures. Debt-to-GDP ratios in the G3 economies must normalise at lower levels to restore macroeconomic and financial stability. This necessitates a decline in consumption. Banks are less willing to lend, and the private sector less willing to borrow. The relationship between liquidity and credit appears to have broken down.

For that reason, Norges Bank’s initial activity was to enter this market. Norges Bank provided loans secured by real property. At its birth, the Bank was, to use current terminology again, “market maker of last resort”. A private banking system gradually took shape. The first savings bank was founded in 1822 and the first commercial bank in 1848. In 1852 the first state mortgage bank was established. These developments allowed Norges Bank to withdraw from the mortgage market and concentrate instead on providing liquidity to the short-term money market. However, it was not until the 1860s that the Bank’s predominant task was supplying short-term liquidity. Much digging and research remains to answer the question of how Norges Bank dealt with the challenges during the 19th century. So far, scholars have not found that the Bank took emergency action when a financial crisis affected Norway in 1847. But when the crisis hit again ten years later, the Bank sent silver abroad to Hamburg, which was the financial centre of the Norwegian merchants. This support was important to enable Norwegian industry to carry out international payments and have their bills of exchange discounted. In 1892 a new Act was passed whereby Norges Bank became the bankers’ bank. As the Governor mentioned in his speech yesterday, this made Norges Bank a modern central bank in a legal sense. In 1899, Kristiania (as Oslo was called at the time) experienced dramatic fall in house prices.
As soon as the euro was adopted, they ceased to differentiate between countries and sovereign yield spreads narrowed, even aligning themselves at the lowest levels, i.e. those of Germany and France. For the first decade of EMU, the single currency appeared to play a buffer role that in addition to protecting countries against monetary instability – which the euro successfully did and was its raison d’être – also protected them against the economic reality. Member States were labouring under the illusion that they could, without ever suffering the consequences, allow themselves to flout the rules for budgetary discipline or make no efforts to remain competitive. The crisis came as a very severe wake-up call. 3. The third cause of this crisis, interlinked with the other two, is institutional: monetary union was not built on sufficiently robust economic, fiscal, financial and political institutions. The fiscal discipline mechanisms were insufficient, there was no mechanism for the surveillance of macroeconomic imbalances, nor was there a crisis management mechanism; financial union worked when times were good: banks held the bonds of other Member States, but it very rapidly fragmented when the crisis erupted, due to the lack of institutional soundness. 2. The causes of the crisis are being addressed  I will now explain how the euro area is dealing with the three fundamental causes of the crisis it is facing.

I shall look first at the immediate and palliative responses, and then focus more on the longer term preventive measures, since the most effective solutions lie not in short-term fixes, but in building healthy domestic and international systems that minimize the possibility of future turmoil. Immediate and palliative responses are often necessary to cope with a shock to the system, particularly when the scale and nature of the shock are beyond expectations, even by the most pessimistic, as is the case with the financial turmoil of the past 18 months. These responses include, first, rescue packages mounted either independently by individual economies, if they have the necessary resources, such as Japan, or through the assistance of international financial institutions, such as the IMF, involving the provision of external financial resources. These packages are having some effect, and in some countries - Thailand, for example - have already helped stimulate recovery. It is vital that individual economies get themselves back on their feet if they are to move on and meet the challenges of and derive the benefits from continued global economic growth and development. The IMF and other international financial institutions have an important role to play in this, in mobilising international financial resources, from both the official and private sectors, to assist those who have stumbled and fallen, very much as victims of the internationalisation of financial markets.
In addition, financial institutions must also ensure that consumers regularly receive sufficient information on ways to protect themselves against possible fraud. Fraud threats continue to evolve and financial institutions should anticipate such new threats and act ahead of the curve. While the number of new and emerging fraud threats is small relative to the total number of transactions and the fraud losses are negligible compared to the investment cost for security upgrades, financial institutions should not underestimate the potential for such threats to increase in frequency and impact. Aside from financial losses, the reputational damage to financial institutions arising from service disruptions can be severe. This is especially so in today’s environment, where adverse publicity can spread exponentially through the social media. Financial institutions must therefore keep abreast with the latest fraud schemes in and outside the country, and continuously invest in fraud prevention technology to keep fraud incidences at a minimum. Security investment decisions must carefully weigh the likely growth of new fraud threats and the implications for financial institutions if such threats are not averted. The ramifications of failing to do so could be catastrophic. e.  Importance of consumer education and awareness  Consumers also have an important role to play to avoid becoming victims of fraud. As consumers, we should learn about the simple yet important steps that we can take to conduct safe payment transactions. There have been cases where the public have been deceived to transfer their funds into another account, only to be siphoned off by a fraudster.

This may involve shifting resources to new areas of business or markets. In striving towards long-term competitiveness. Experience has shown that the aptitude for hard work, prudent practices, the agility to adapt to changing conditions, perseverance and the ability for reinvention are some of the qualities of the successful SMEs in our economy. The creation of the SME Credit Bureau is another milestone in the development of the enabling supporting infrastructure for strengthening the SME sector. The creation of such an information credit bureau industry is a further step forward in generating a financial intermediation process that is more efficient and effective. I hope that financial institutions and the SME Credit Bureau would work together towards making today's initiative achieve its objective. In enhancing greater access to credit to the SME sector, it would strengthen the potential for SME contribution to the economy. BIS Review 47/2009  3