samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
As for the cost of labour, while it is true that since 2004 wages have been growing more in line with productivity, it also the case that not all the loss in competitiveness experienced before 2004 has been reversed. In 2006, in fact, unit labour costs were still 18% higher than in 2000. And although wage growth has been moderate in recent years, it has been even more so elsewhere. Indeed, when compared to those in the euro area, Malta’s relative unit labour costs have risen since 2000. There is little doubt that external competitiveness has deteriorated and that continued wage restraint, therefore, remains an essential ingredient in the recipe for achieving faster export-led growth. Productivity can also be boosted by making education and training systems better attuned to the needs of a competitive economy, by further reducing compliance costs and simplifying administrative procedures, and by improving the quality of the business infrastructure. Together with those suggested above, these measures can make a substantial contribution to strengthening the economy’s capacity to deal successfully with globalization. Lastly but no less importantly, it also needs to be realized that action on all these fronts is essential for preserving a social model that has reduced income inequality and secured wide access to education, health and pensions. Conclusion Mr. President, at this critical juncture in the country’s economic development on the eve of joining the euro area, the national interest calls for a strong sense of realism.

BIS central bankers’ speeches  15  the use of cash means that central bank revenue from the issuing of banknotes and coins – known as “seigniorage” – decreases, which further inflates the risks of central bank finances becoming more strained than previously in the period ahead. Less room for manoeuvre in the wake of financial globalisation Central banks’ room for manoeuvre is affected not only by how independent they are in accordance with national regulatory frameworks. I have today spoken about how central bank operations, in basically all areas, are influenced by financial globalisation. Over the past 30 years, international capital flows have increased dramatically. 34 This reflects the gradual liberalisation of capital flows that has occurred over a long period. In the right circumstances, especially when countries have achieved a certain level of institutional and financial development, and when there are regulations and oversight, free capital flows lead to considerable efficiency gains. But it does not mean that the completely free movement of capital is good for all countries at all times. The fact that many countries have been affected by the US credit cycle is nothing new, but the fact that this synchronisation now includes developing countries as well as a large number of other countries is a more modern phenomenon. This increased global financial covariation does not just apply to credit in relation to GDP but also within basically all financial asset types.
Other elements were:   Fiscal policy oriented towards full employment    Credit regulation within limits specified in a separate credit budget    Channelling of loans through state banks    Regulation of capital movements    Low nominal interest rates stipulated by the government authorities    A fixed, though adjustable, krone exchange rate    Use of price regulation    An active business policy through state ownership and state grants and subsidies  The proposal to establish an incomes policy council did not receive support. Government regulation and coordinated wage regulation became excessive. 29  25  The collaboration between the authorities and bankers’ associations did not disappear completely. In the economic policy tightening of 1979 and 1980, the “konsumlånsforståelsen” (consumer loan understanding) played an important role. Banks undertook to reduce lending to households. This led to a marked rise in saving. 26  In Økonomisk Rapport Magasin, 12 January 2002: “Graver Gjedrem sin egen grav?” [Is Gjedrem digging his own grave?]. 27  Knut Getz Wold (1972): “Norges Banks samarbeid med statsmaktene, bankene og utlandet,” [Norges Bank’s cooperation with government authorities, the banks and bodies abroad],Kristofer Lehmkuhl Lecture, Norges Handelshøyskole 20 September. 28  See NOU [Official Norwegian Report] 1973:36. Om prisproblemene [On price problems]. 29  See NOU [Official Norwegian Report] 1983:36 Om prisproblemene [On price problems].

By way of conclusion, let me say that there is currently no shortage of challenges. However, the reforms introduced in the regulation and the efforts made by banks to enhance their resilience over the last decade have borne fruits and the European banking system has demonstrated with the Covid crisis not only its ability to withstand enormous shocks but also its ability to support public authorities efforts to overcome difficulties to the benefit of the European people. This is a major positive development. While this is not the time for complacency, this development should collectively encourage us to maintain our attention and efforts and to address the current and forthcoming challenges with both confidence and determination. 4/4  BIS central bankers' speeches
Mr Clementi comments on UK financial services following the launch of the euro Speech by Mr David Clementi, a Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, at the Economist Conference in London on 23 April 1999. It is a great pleasure to be here this morning. My announced topic – UK financial services following the launch of the euro - is obviously a large one. But ambition is a fine thing, and so not content with just that, I want also to say a little about the wider forces – especially technological change – which are shaping changes in financial services markets and institutions everywhere, not just in Europe. The importance of financial services to the UK economy is enormous, and I do not need to devote much time to underlining it. Financial services are a major invisible export and contribute a substantial proportion of GDP. The UK does more foreign exchange business, more OTC derivatives business, more international bank lending, more bond origination and trading, and more equity fund management than any other country. Personally, I have no doubt that – provided we are not complacent - the UK will retain its dominant position for the foreseeable future. But that said, the nature of the financial markets in which UK–based practitioners have to operate will certainly continue to change. The plan for my march through this difficult terrority is as follows. First, by way of background, I want to say a bit about the “new” Bank’s role in relation to the financial services sector.

4/9  BIS central bankers' speeches  MAS has comprehensively expanded its liquidity facilities – in four ways: what currency we lend in; how long we lend for; what rate we lend at; and what collateral we take. The MAS USD Facility has helped to maintain stable US Dollar funding conditions. Since its introduction in March last year on the back of a swap line with the US Federal Reserve, the MAS USD Facility has provided $ 25 billion to banks for use in Singapore and the region. Alongside the extension of the Fed swap line, MAS has extended the USD Facility to endDecember 2021. The MAS SGD Term Facility has extended the tenor of Singapore Dollar lending from overnight to up to three months. The facility was set up pre-emptively to meet higher precautionary demand for SGD liquidity by banks and finance companies. This helped promote more stable funding conditions and support credit intermediation to businesses and households. The MAS SGD Facility for ESG Loans has provided funding at 0.1% to financial institutions for lending to small and medium enterprises under the ESG loan schemes. The Facility, which has helped to reduce the borrowing costs for viable businesses, has been extended till end-September 2021. As of 31 March 2021, about $ billion was lent to eligible financial institutions, catalysing around $ billion of ESG loans and benefitting more than 22,000 firms. Utilisation of the Facility was lower in 2021 compared to 2020 as the cashflows of firms improved.
16  14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 -2 -4  50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 95 00 05 10 15  Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics  In November 1974, when the rate of inflation according to the consumer price index amounted to more than 12 per cent in the United States, Milton Friedman wrote the following in Newsweek: 5 That monetary expansion on the average could be expected to produce an inflation of something like 6 per cent a year, not of 12 per cent. The difference is attributable to nonmonetary factors, mostly transitory, and so constitutes something of a bubble on the underlying inflation trend. In the past, when such bubbles have broken, the rate of inflation has declined precipitously. For example, in the Korean War bubble, the rate of inflation of consumer prices fell from 10 per cent to 2 per cent in nine months. One now began to use different filtered measures in the econometric research literature. Gordon (1975b) calculates an equation where the aggregate selling prices exclude energy and food prices. He motivated his choice by saying that variations in food and energy prices, particularly in the beginning of the 1970s, were due to other factors than domestic supply and demand. 6 7  5 See Newsweek, 4 November 1974, p. 84. 6 See Gordon (1975b), s 622 “But the magnitude and timing of the 1973-74 explosion in energy prices can only be regarded as noneconomic and exogenous”.

And we will consider how to maintain focus as memories fade and the temptation to turn inwards returns. We are doing so because we know that everyone has a shared interest in real markets. Real markets are professional and open. They are resilient, fair and effective, and they maintain their social license. Real markets are not ends in themselves but serve the interests of end-users. Real markets don’t just happen. They depend on private actors and public initiatives to ensure the quality of market infrastructure. That includes ‘hard’ infrastructure, the plumbing of markets that determines the mechanics of markets; and ‘soft’ infrastructure, like standards and codes that define how market participants should behave. Since the crisis, the UK has played a leading role in addressing misconduct in domestic and global markets. 1  See Fair and Effective Markets Review Final Report, HM Treasury, Bank of England and FCA (June 2015). At: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/report/2015/fair-and-effective-markets-review---final-report  2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  2  We know that the City has a particular responsibility given London’s position as the pre-eminent global financial centre. 2  What has been achieved? So what has been done to re-build the necessary market infrastructures for real markets to thrive? 3  In the UK, laws and regulations have been strengthened by, for example, introducing a criminal regime for manipulating benchmarks. Public authorities know they cannot and should not try to legislate for every circumstance, monitor every transaction, or anticipate every market innovation.
And it works by setting clear limits on the role of governments themselves. This is of course a caricature. But it is certainly true that the 1990s were a period of considerable reform and innovation in central banks across the world; many new central banks were established and many established central banks were given greater independence from their governments, often in exchange for a clear commitment to meet specific targets for inflation. From the time when we left the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, the UK has led this wave of change. Looking back, the adoption of formal inflation targets in 1992 marks a decisive break with the past. The other key date is 1997, when the Bank of England was granted operational independence; the institutional framework then put in place entrenched and enhanced the credibility of inflation targeting, and has been widely admired. Moreover, in the UK, as in many other inflation targeting countries, a  1  I would like to thank Jens Larsen for research support and Luca Benati, Melissa Davey, John Power and Sally Srinivasan, whose work I have drawn on extensively. I have also benefited from comments from many colleagues at the Bank, especially Peter Andrews, Charlie Bean, James Proudman and John Keyworth. The views expressed here are mine, and do not necessarily reflect those of the Bank of England or the Monetary Policy Committee.

Here is Chancellor Denis Healey, writing in his memoirs3 about a spat with the Prime Minster of the day:  3  2  Healey, D (1989), The time of my life, Michael Joseph London. BIS Review 11/2004  ‘At this time my own relations with Jim were shaken by an incident just after the Party Conference. On October 6 I had asked him to let me raise interest rates by another 2 per cent to the then unprecedented level of 15 per cent…He refused. I said I wanted to take the matter to Cabinet that morning. ‘All right’ he replied ‘but I will not support you.’ Nevertheless I insisted…’ In the event this did not prove necessary: Callaghan backed down, leading Healey to comment wryly that ‘This was the only time I have ever used the threat of resignation to get my way.’ The new framework has taken the politics out of interest rate decisions without sacrificing democratic accountability or oversimplifying the policy process. It is an elegant institutional solution to the lengthy debate between those who favoured untrammelled discretion and those who advocated rules (such as monetary targets); one, moreover, which manages to respect the constitutional priorities of a parliamentary system. Achievements Performance over the six years since the Bank became independent has been impressive. Against the target of 2.5% for RPIX which ran from 1997 until December 2003, average inflation was 2.4%.
By regions, it is worth noting the widening divergence between the United States – with a more consolidated recovery – and other developed economies, such as the Eurozone and Japan, which have made further downward revisions. In the emerging world, prospects are also weaker, with Latin America making the bigger downward corrections. In the baseline scenario, our trading partners are expected to grow 3.5 and 3.9 percent in 2015 and 2016, respectively (table 2). In the baseline scenario, external financial conditions and prospects will be less expansionary than they were this year, but will remain favorable from a historical perspective. In the United States, the Federal Reserve Board ended its asset purchase program and is expected to raise the federal funds rate in 2015, probably pushing US long-term rates up. The Eurozone and Japan have pursued a more expansionary monetary policy, because of weaker economies and deflationary risks, and further efforts in this direction are expected in the coming quarters. Thus, long-term interest rates in the main developed economies continued to recede or remained low. The better relative performance of the United States compared with the rest of the world has led to an overall strengthening of the dollar, affecting the other currencies, including the Chilean peso. In Chile, its trajectory has also been influenced by the adjustment of the local macroeconomic scenario, changes in monetary policy and the decline in copper prices (figure 8). The drop in commodity prices has triggered important changes in the world inflation outlook.

This, considering that few bank credit operations are performed at rates higher than 41 and 39 percent, the actual TMC levels for the third quarter in operations between UF 0 and UF50, and between UF 50 and UF 200, respectively. Still, such provisions regarding the TMC are still in the process of being implemented, so future reductions  BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  are expected, which might have a greater impact because of the significant number of operations that are performed with interest rates in the 35 to 40 percent range (figure 13). Bank financial indicators are sound and stress tests show that capital levels are adequate to confront a severe stress episode (figure 14). Although bank profitability has increased lately, this was boosted by the temporary effect of higher inflation. The interest rate spread has been stable over 2014 and continues to be the main contributor to the banking system’s profits. The impact of the stress scenario involves a drop in profits similar to the one in the previous IEF, but as the initial profitability was better the banks can obtain a positive closing ROE in this scenario. Bond issues, locally and abroad, have helped to diversify the banks’ funding sources (figure 15). Lower funding costs have favored debt issues locally and abroad, increasing the duration of liabilities. Some banks operate with high dependence on wholesale sources, which can be a significant vulnerability if these investors change their portfolio decisions or flows become more volatile.
During the recovery phase after the crisis, the Riksbank has also tried to reduce the risk of exaggerated indebtedness and overly-inflated housing prices by conducting slightly less expansionary monetary policy than would otherwise have been the case. 6  See, for example, Mishkin (2007) and Cagliarini, Kent and Stevens (2010). Heikensten (2008), writes: “With house prices increasing drastically, risks for the real economy have been perceived to be bigger. On a few occasions in 2004–05 the Riksbank did for that reason not follow a strict inflation-targeting rule. We “leaned against the wind”, in the sense that we did not take rates down as quickly as we could have done considering the outlook for inflation alone.” The development of house prices and household debt have long been on the agenda of the Riksbank’s Executive Board, see for example Srejber (2002). 7  Ingves (2007). I said, for instance: “[W]hen we observe long periods of high growth rates in asset prices and debt, growth rates that appear to be unsustainable in the long run, our view is that it is not reasonable to completely ignore that there may be risks associated with this[. ]…What this view has meant in practice is fairly marginal changes in the timing of our interest rate changes, and substantial oral and written focus on the issue.” This problem is also taken up in Ingves (2010).

In other words, their balance sheets look much worse than they had anticipated. Households who have found themselves in this situation in many other countries have reduced their consumption and begun to save to achieve a better balance between assets and debts. Not only the supply, but also the demand for credit thus declines. The consolidation of households’ balance sheets gives a fall in demand that tends to be fairly long-lived. 4 The fall in the economy can be reinforced if the weaker economic activity means that borrowers, households and companies, experience difficult in meeting their obligations and the banks suffer loan losses. This process often leads to a substantial weakening in public finances, too, partly because of the rapid decline in economic activity and partly because the banking system may in a worst case scenario require support. In this way, one can say that the credit cycle and the economic cycle pull one another down. Sometimes one uses the expression “credit boom gone wrong” to describe this kind of development. 5 Of course, not all credit cycles look like this, but history shows that it is difficult to avoid it happening now and again. There is fairly good empirical evidence to support this description.
By that metric, the contribution of equity markets to economic growth in the US, Europe and Asia has been static, at best mildly positive, during the course of this century. Yet that picture of apparent stasis in equity markets conceals a maelstrom of activity beneath the surface. To see this, Chart 2 plots stock market turnover in the US, Europe and Asia over the same period. It shows a dramatic rise, especially in the world’s most mature equity market, the United States. Equity market turnover in the US has risen nearly fourfold in the space of a decade. Put differently, at the end of the second World War, the average US share was held by the average investor for around four years. By the start of this century, that had fallen to around eight months. And by 2008, it had fallen to around two months. What explains this story? Regulation is part of it. Two important, and almost simultaneous, regulatory developments on either side of the Atlantic changed fundamentally the trading landscape: in the US, Regulation NMS (National Market System) in 2005; and in Europe, MiFID (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive) in 2004. Though different in detail, these regulatory initiatives had similar objectives: to boost competition and choice in financial market trading by attracting new entrants. Central exchanges for the trading of securities evolved from the coffee houses of Amsterdam, London, New York and Paris in the 17th century.

Hurst found that flooding exhibited a persistent pattern. Large floods were not only frequent, but came in clumps. They had a long memory. The Hurst coefficient summarises this behaviour in a single number. For example, a measured Hurst equal to 0.5 is consistent with the random walk model familiar from efficient markets theory. A Hurst coefficient above 0.5 implies fatter tails and longer memories. In his study, Smith finds that the Hurst coefficient among a selection of stocks has risen steadily above 0.5 since 2005. In other words, the advent of HFT has seen price dynamics mirror the fat-tailed persistence of the Nile flood plains. To illustrate, Chart 11 plots the path of three simulated price series with Hurst coefficients of 0.5, 0.7 and 0.9. A higher Hurst coefficient radically alters the probability of sharp dislocations in prices. It also prolongs these dislocations. Prices become de-anchored and drift; their variance grows over time and is unbounded. If this long-memory property of prices is emerging at ever-higher frequencies, it might provide an important clue to how HFT affects systemic risk. 4. A sketch model of market macrostructure  To see that, consider a sketch model of market-making. This builds on an analytical insight which is already more than 40 years old. It owes to the late Benoit Mandelbrot, FrenchAmerican mathematician and architect of fractal geometry. Mandelbrot found that a great many real-world topologies exhibited a fractal pattern. By this he meant that the basic pattern repeated itself, whatever the scale at which it was observed.