samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
There is not a single critical price that will constrain production or investment. Fourth, with respect to oil produced by fracking, productivity gains have cut drilling costs and raised oil production, so breakeven costs per barrel have been falling. Finally, if oil investment were to soften, this  2  2  Current world oil consumption is 92 million barrels per day (International Energy Agency, October Oil Market Report). BIS central bankers’ speeches  would lead to lower breakeven costs as resources currently in short supply – e.g., water, welders, housing and transport – became more available and less expensive. Of course, as with any forecast, there is some meaningful chance that growth will turn out to be either weaker or stronger than expected. However, I believe that the risks around this forecast are reasonably well balanced. The subsiding headwinds that I discussed earlier are the primary reason for seeing the downside risks as limited. In contrast, the ongoing geopolitical risks remain substantial. At the same time, several factors suggest that growth is unlikely to turn out to be substantially stronger than the consensus forecast. First, the upside from housing relative to the forecast is likely limited. Although there has been an impressive recovery of multi-family housing starts over the past few years, single-family housing starts are growing only slowly and are unlikely to climb much faster over the next year or two. The demand for new homes is still hindered by tight credit conditions for homebuyers.

In addition, household net worth has recovered sharply, boosted primarily by higher financial asset valuations, but also by some recovery in home prices. Third, the fiscal restraint that has held back growth in recent years has ended, with the federal budget deficit now at a level consistent with a stable to slowly declining federal debtto-GDP ratio. In the aggregate, state and local governments have also ended their retrenchment. One important piece of evidence in this regard is the fact that state and local  1  See, for example, the latest Blue Chip consensus survey (volume 39, no. 11, November 10, 2014). The median real GDP forecast for 2015 (fourth quarter over fourth quarter) is 2.9 percent. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  government employment is now rising at between 5,000 and 10,000 per month, after generally contracting during the 2009 to 2012 period. Now that these headwinds have subsided, buoyant financial market conditions spurred, in part, by a very accommodative monetary policy should do more to support economic activity. In particular, compared to historical patterns, the current household net worth-to-income ratio is high relative to the personal saving rate. This suggests some scope for a decline in the household saving rate. If this were to occur, consumption growth would outstrip income growth. Similarly, financial market conditions are conducive to sustained gains in business fixed investment. Equity prices are high, borrowing costs are low, cash flows are strong and corporate balance sheets are healthy.
In doing so, the legal professionals are thus well positioned to detect or identify and prevent the conduct of illegal activities, which involve such financial transactions that the profession is mediating. The resultant impact of a lawyer’s inappropriate conduct when dealing with a client, if left unchecked, may pose reputational risks and loss of confidence, not only to the affected individual lawyer or the associated firm but the legal fraternity as a whole. It is on this note that I urge the lawyers to always conduct yourselves in a manner that upholds the public trust and confidence in the legal profession. It is our hope that lawyers will err on the side of caution in interpreting their compulsory reporting obligations under the AMLA. Based on the outcome of the National Risk Assessment in 2017 on DNFBP sectors, in particular, the legal sector has been assessed as Medium High and Medium level for net money laundering (ML) and terrorism financing (TF) risk, respectively. The rating is predominantly driven by the inherent higher risk services provided by lawyers which are vulnerable to abuses for ML related activities, for example, the use of client account, conveyancing and provision of nominee services, which are further aggravated by the marginal level of AML/CFT control measures generally implemented by the legal fraternity. Consequently, the recent two years have seen the intensification of our outreach to the legal fraternity, in particular and to DNFBP sectors, in general, with the mix of on-site examinations, awareness and engagement sessions, off-site data and information submission activities.

In the longer run, that increase in productivity would be expected to flow through fully into real wages. By contrast, the peak to trough fall in real wages following the crisis was in the region of 10%. 14  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  14
When inflation is expected to be high, the real interest rate can be made very low, but this also means that, as inflation expectations fall, the scope for cutting the real interest rate also decreases. The fact that inflation expectations were anchored around the target of two per cent meant that the low nominal interest rates of 2009 and 2010 (see Figure 2) gave households and companies very low real interest rates and supported the recovery of the Swedish economy. With lower inflation expectations, the same interest rate policy would have had a less powerful stimulatory effect and that would probably have meant lower employment and even lower inflation in recent years. Inflation expectations are thus of vital importance for how expansionary monetary policy is and how expansionary it can be made when the Swedish economy is subjected to new severe stresses. The stimulus provided by a really low real interest rate can make it possible to avoid more prolonged low interest rate periods with the drawbacks in the form of rising indebtedness and exaggerated risk-taking that we are now concerned about. But if inflation expectations are too low, not even the lowest possible repo rate may be enough to push the real interest rate down to the desired level. To sum up, it is thus of great benefit to the Swedish economy if households and companies, savers and investors, expect a future rate of inflation that is on a reasonably low level and that their expectations more or less correspond.

Today, I will just express my own initial reactions to a few of the elements in the assessment that come closest to the theme of today’s address. First and foremost, I cannot, of course, avoid noting that Goodfriend and King also consider that Swedish monetary policy since the introduction of inflation targeting has been an overall success. Neither is there any doubt that they support an inflation target as the starting point for monetary policy. However, they would like to switch target variable to the CPIF, that is the CPI with a fixed mortgage rate. It would not be difficult for us to make such a change, as we already focus most of our analysis and communication on the CPIF. At the same time, I think that there may be reason to evaluate several possible measures, for example the internationally-comparable measure HICP, as my colleague on the Executive Board Per Jansson has previously discussed in a speech.7 I appreciate how much Goodfriend and King have endeavoured to base their assessment on the information and experience available at the time of each individual decision, rather than proceeding on the basis of everything we know today about how developments turned out. As they note, we have been through a difficult period with major challenges and difficult decisions. One consequence of this is that it has been particularly difficult to make a good forecast of the repo rate and to take into consideration the repo rate expectations reflected at that moment by pricing on the financial markets.
These regulations will focus on enhancing Bank Negara Malaysia's overall oversight on banking institutions, whilst according greater flexibility for the Boards and management of the banking institutions to chart business strategies within the parameters set by the regulations. Ladies and Gentlemen, In an environment where group structures are becoming more complex, prudential regulation and surveillance over diversified financial conglomerates will be further strengthened. In this regard, Bank Negara Malaysia will finalise the Framework for Consolidated Supervision of Financial Conglomerates in 2005. The first Concept Paper that was issued in December 2003 has received positive feedback from the industry. On the group structure, there has been wide acceptance of the proposal for all financial groups to be headed by financial holding companies. The essence of having the financial holding company is to allow banking institutions within the financial group to rely on the holding company as a source of financial strength. Flexibility will, however, be given for commercial banks to remain at the apex of the financial groups. Nevertheless, safeguards will be introduced to ensure that the commercial banks exhibit higher standards of risk management practices and oversight to manage the higher risks arising from such structures. A further issue is the scope and nature of activities that would be permissible within the financial holding company structure. The principle for defining financial activities or activities that are incidental to financial activities will be clearly outlined to facilitate any likely restructuring that will be required as a result of the new policy.

But, given the stickiness of pay and prices, that would necessitate inefficient fluctuations in activity and employment. Now during the first decade of the MPC, such shocks were small and generally benign, with access to cheap manufactures from emerging economies providing steady downward pressure on prices. But the past few years have provided a less felicitous backdrop. Not only have we had to deal with the consequences of the financial crisis but we have also had to manage several major cost shocks. These include: a 25% fall in the sterling effective exchange rate; fluctuations in the price of oil between $ and $ a barrel; and movements down and up in VAT. Moreover, the impact of these changes has often proved hard to predict. For instance, we significantly underestimated the pass-through into inflation  1  See e.g. Bean et al. (2011). BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  of the exchange rate depreciation. So it should not be surprising that inflation has been both higher and more variable than during the Great Moderation. The question is: would outcomes have been materially better under an alternative framework, such as a nominal income target? The first thing to be said is that the idea of directing macroeconomic policy towards targeting nominal income is by no means new.
I do not suggest that this urgent problem of unemployment can be directly addressed by differential macro-economic stimulus -- most commentators agree that it is rather the result of structural, supply-side rigidities and can only be effectively tackled by greater labour market flexibility. The worry is that the necessary structural changes will occur to varying degrees and at a different pace in different countries itself, resulting in different macroeconomic policy needs. This is why meeting the convergence criteria, in economic substance not just in some formal accounting sense, are crucially important. Without genuinely sustainable convergence -- and I emphasise the word sustainable! -- serious tensions could emerge between different countries living with the single monetary policy. It is true that the prospect of EMU has had a powerful effect on countries’ behaviour -- causing some of them, for example, to address fiscal problems to a degree that might well not have happened without the external incentive of the Maastricht timetable. And some argue that the disciplines of EMU itself will enforce convergent behaviour, including structural adjustment, so that the regional tensions which I have described will not in practice materialise. I am not convinced that one can simply rely upon that happening -- and the longstanding weakness of the economy in the south of Italy, despite a single currency with the North, or the continuing weakness of the East German economy since currency reunification with Western Germany suggest that such behaviour is by no means certain.

But there is no doubt that the unique, intra-European exchange rate certainty that would be provided by a single currency could nevertheless -- through increased competition as a result of greater price transparency and lower transaction costs, and through the associated improvement in resource allocation -- greatly increase the benefits that are to be derived from the single market. So, on the positive side there is no doubt that it would -- other things equal -- be a very desirable complement to the single market. The problem is that other things may not necessarily prove to be equal. Essentially, the downside is that there is a risk that the single monetary policy -- the single short-term interest rate -- throughout the euro-area, which is a necessary corollary of the single currency, may not, in the event, prove to be appropriate to the domestic needs of each of the participating countries. That risk was quite clearly recognised by the drafters of the Maastricht Treaty. They quite deliberately included in the Treaty the famous convergence criteria in order to ensure that countries wanting to participate in the euro-area should have to demonstrate, before they were allowed to join, at least a minimum degree of sustainable economic convergence precisely in order to reduce the risk of divergent national monetary policy needs once the single currency is introduced. Without that, the potential problems could be serious.
As of June last year, the combined market capitalisation of the top four US coal producers had fallen by 95% since the end of 2010, and three of the top five US firms had filed for bankruptcy. There has also been a similar, albeit less severe, valuation shift for German utilities which have been seen as slow in responding to changes in domestic energy policy designed to shift towards renewables. 1  PRA (2015), The Impact of Climate Change on the UK Insurance Sector, https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/prudentialregulation/publication/2015/the-impact-of-climate-change-on-the-uk-insurance-sector and Scott, M., Van Huizen, J. & Jung, C. The Bank of England’s response to climate change. 98–109 (Bank of England, 2017). 2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  2  The financial risks from climate change are clearly therefore already with us. But more significantly, these risks, both from physical and transition channels, will increase if global temperatures continue to rise or the re-allocation of capital implied by the transition to a ‘well below 2C’ world becomes more significant. I will refrain from spending too much of my time outlining the scale of the challenge given the number of reports published that have highlighted the issue. But the main messages in all of these reports is that if we are to make our climate goals a reality, significant amounts of equity, bank loan, and bond financing will need to become ‘green’.

6  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  6  The PRA is a founding member of the Sustainable Insurance Forum, a network of around twenty insurance regulators from around the world who are sharing knowledge and best practice on how to consider climate risk in insurance supervision. The Bank, as many of you know, has also co-chaired since 2016 the G20 Green Finance Study Group on behalf of the United Kingdom, with our colleagues at People’s Bank of China. We continue to do so under Argentina’s Presidency, the group now being the G20’s Sustainable Finance Study Group. And most recently, the Bank has become a founding member of the Central Bank 7  and Supervisors Network for Greening the Financial System . Conclusion  We are part way through a transition in thinking where climate change is moving from being a social responsibility issue to being a core financial risk at the heart of how companies manage their business. It is these financial risks that create the link from climate change to the Bank of England’s mandate - given our core responsibilities to ensure the safety and soundness of banks and insurers and our responsibility to support a stable financial system. It’s clear to me that many different actors - companies, investors, financiers, climate scientists, governments, financial policy makers - have a part to play, given their mandates and specialisms, to support this transition in thinking.
Thomas Jordan: Central banks in action – financial market turbulences and policy measures Speech by Mr Thomas Jordan, Member of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, at the 36th General Assembly of the Association of Foreign Banks in Switzerland, Geneva, 6 June 2008. The author thanks Caesar Lack for very helpful comments and suggestions. * 1. *  *  Introduction  It is a pleasure and honour for me to have the opportunity to speak at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Foreign Banks. The foreign banks are the fastest growing group of banks in Switzerland. This demonstrates the attractiveness of Switzerland as a financial centre. At the same time it also shows how important the foreign banks are for Switzerland. I am therefore very much looking forward to interesting interaction with my distinguished audience. In my talk, I will focus on the financial market crisis and the policy measures taken by central banks in response to the crisis. I will also try to identify some preliminary lessons that central banks have learned through applying these measures. In recent weeks, financial markets have improved, to some extent, from the situation that prevailed at the height of the turmoil in mid-March: risk premia have fallen on most assets, and equity prices have recovered. Even money markets, although still tense, have improved somewhat. These developments have given rise to the hope that the worst of the financial crisis might have passed by now. However, it may be too early to give the all-clear.

At this point, let me clarify certain points with regards to the floating exchange rate regime, which has been implemented in Turkey since 2001 and in almost eighty countries all over the world up to now. This has to do with the exchange rate being among the first contracts to be operative in the Turkish Derivatives Exchange, as well as its significance within the context of risk management, which is the primary function of derivatives markets. As we have emphasized at all times since the first day of the floating exchange rate regime in Turkey, under this regime exchange rates are determined by supply and demand conditions. The level of the exchange rate is shaped by economic developments, external shocks, and expectations and fluctuations in the risk premium are applicable to all of them. Neither the Central Bank nor any other authority has any commitment or target whatsoever as regards the level of exchange rate. 3  Bank for International Settlements (2004), “Triennial Central Bank Survey of Foreign Exchange and Derivatives Market Activity in April 2004”. 4  Chinese proverb. 4  BIS Review 17/2005  At this point, I would like to underline two points missed by those who held the opinion from the start that the floating exchange rate regime could not be implemented in Turkey, as the risk in this regime was too high, there would be too much volatility in the foreign exchange markets, and the economy, especially the foreign trade would be adversely affected as a result of these.
In this regard, the Eurosystem welcomed the ambitious Financial Services Action Plan (FSAP) launched by the European Council in Lisbon in 2000. This plan is aimed at harmonising and improving the conditions under which issuers, investors and intermediaries conduct their activities in the European Union. The European Council set a tight timetable so that this plan can be implemented by 2005, and even sooner, by 2003, as regards the measures relating to the securities markets. At present, 30 out the 42 FSAP objectives have already been brought to a successful conclusion, allowing significant breakthroughs in various crucial areas. All these objectives involve far-reaching reforms, such as, for instance, introducing a single passport for issuers, with the planned Prospectus Directive, setting up an adequate framework for the oversight of the activities of financial conglomerates or harmonising rules concerning the use of collateral in financial transactions, especially in a cross-border context. The Eurosystem also supports the strategic conclusions of the Committee chaired by A. Lamfalussy on the integration of the European securities markets, ratified by the European Council meeting in Stockholm in 2001 and approved by the European Parliament in early 2002. We are convinced that the implementation of these broad guidelines and the new cooperation structures at the European level will help make it possible to take full advantage of the introduction of the euro.

Mohd Razif bin Abd Kadir: Brief overview of Islamic banking and finance Speech by Mr Mohd Razif bin Abd Kadir, Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia, at the Official Launch of Kuala Lumpur International Islamic Finance Expo 2006, Kuala Lumpur, 24 November 2006. *  *  *  It is indeed an honour to be here this morning at the launching of the Kuala Lumpur International Islamic Finance Expo 2006, organized by the Association of Islamic Banking Institutions Malaysia (AIBIM). It was exactly five years ago that all of us witnessed the launching of the first Islamic Banking and Takaful Week by the then Deputy Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. And now, after those years, Alhamdulillah, we are pleased with the positive impact of the comprehensive awareness campaign in the year 2001 as it has paved the way to subsequent nationwide annual campaigns on financial awareness in Islamic banking and finance. In this regard, I wish to congratulate all financial institutions involved for providing their unwavering support in this virtuous endeavour. Before I proceed, allow me to take this opportunity to welcome our exhibitors, both local and foreign, who will be participating in the Kuala Lumpur International Islamic Finance Expo 2006. We believe that your participation will benefit the patrons to this expo.