samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
These are investments through which an investor participates with at least 10 percent in a company abroad or establishes a subsidiary or branch abroad. In 2002, the stock of Swiss direct investment abroad amounted to almost 100 percent of Switzerland’s GDP, as against only 29 percent in 1990. Compared with other industrialised nations, Switzerland is in the top league. In the financial sector, globalisation has manifested itself particularly clearly. In the past few years, Swiss banks have seriously boosted their investment abroad, mainly by taking over foreign financial institutions. At the same time, however, the Swiss banking sector has undergone an intensive process of concentration, which partly resulted from domestic problems, but also came as a reaction to fierce international competition. The total number of banks halved from roughly 600 institutions at the beginning of the nineties to less than 300 institutions today. Of the four big banks, only two remain. Apart from this restructuring process, a number of other challenges have arisen over the past few years. Notably the clean-up of the legacy from World War II, the participation in the combat of money laundering, and also the protection of our interests vis-à-vis the EU, particularly with regard to banking secrecy and the taxation of savings income. Lastly, the stock market slump in 2001/2002 put the earning power of the financial industry to the test. The Swiss financial sector proved it could tackle these challenges.

We closed the last ones almost 20 years ago. Client relationships will remain the preserve of private players, to which central banks will provide the central bank money. There are also fears that CBDC accounts will “drain” commercial deposits and dry up bank liquidity. No: as I see it, they will offer no greater advantage in terms of remuneration, and there will have to be a limited amount that can be held in them. In addition, the ECB has shown that it is more than capable of safeguarding bank liquidity… If the CBDC is going to replace any liquid financial assets, then it is more likely to be banknotes in the long run and crypto-assets. In short, the scenario of a CBDC causing massive bank disintermediation is more a finance-fiction fantasy than a serious analysis. The “interbank” or “wholesale” CBDC would enable the efficient and secure settlement of transactions. We, as Banque de France, have already completed five experiments and will carry out four more by the end of this year, with private and public actors alike. We will publish through the summer a comprehensive stocktaking. Let me already stress three major lessons we learnt: -  Two experiments – one that was carried out with the EIB and SG Forgei and another that was carried out with Euroclear/Agence France Trésor,ii have proved that tokenised central bank money helps settling financial securities more efficiently and rapidly (instantaneously, compared with D+2 currently). It generates savings in liquidity and capital, which in turn lowers costs.
Net interest income has been an important driver of the improved bank performance, on account of the steeper yield curve and wider operating margins. The tightening of credit standards, the gradual pass-through of lower policy rates to lending rates and declining competitive pressures in the credit market have all contributed to higher revenues from core banking business. Trading income has increased even more strongly as the financial markets  4  BIS Review 168/2009  recovered after the first quarter of 2009 and has been the main contributor, on average, to the increase in revenues as a percentage of assets. With regard to bank capital positions and loan-loss provisions, I would like to highlight the following points. The recovery in major banks’ earnings, the slowdown in the growth rate of both risk-weighted and total assets and increases in capital have contributed to a slight increase in the regulatory capital ratios of the median institutions. Even those institutions with the lowest regulatory capital ratios comfortably exceed at present the minimum requirements (see the left side of Chart 11). Provisions on impaired assets had been a serious drag on euro area LCBGs’ incomes in 2007 and 2008. To a large extent these provisions still related to securitised loans, although the share of loan impairments had started to grow. Most institutions have reported sharply higher provisions for loan losses (see the right side of Chart 11). Moreover, expressed as a percentage of total loans, loan-loss provisions were the highest in the third quarter compared to the five preceding years.

These must be judged – and reformed or  BIS Review 126/2006  1  discarded – on their merits”. My argument is simple. Existing institutions were designed for a world radically different from that of today. The cost of closing them down and building new institutions is high. So we must work with our existing institutions and make them more relevant to today’s problems. Unless we do so it will be harder to defend an open and liberal international economic order which has brought benefits to hundreds of millions of people around the globe. The generic challenge facing all the post-war institutions is to find a role relevant to present circumstances, and to decide on the operational capabilities and instruments which that role requires. Holding meetings and issuing communiqués is not enough. As a central banker, I naturally focus more on the IMF, and I shall do that today. But the lessons are general. It is worth noting the scale of the challenge. The specific commitments made at the end of the Second World War are no longer relevant. The shared experience of the Great Depression, protectionism and two World Wars has faded. And the majority of current nation states were not “present at the creation”. The world has certainly changed since 1945, and it is the nature of those changes which underpins the case for reform. The world today is different from that at the creation of the post-war settlement in two important respects.
First, that headline inflation is on a path to levels below, but close to 2% over a meaningful medium-term horizon; second, that inflation will be durable and stabilise around those levels with sufficient confidence; third, that inflation will be self-sustained, meaning it will maintain its trajectory even with diminishing support from monetary policy. And finally, the relevant metric in each case is euro area inflation, not the inflation rates of any individual country. However, in order to reap the full benefits of our monetary policy measures, other policy areas must contribute much more decisively to strengthening economic growth. This depends on the policies pursued by Member States, where national parliaments have a key role to play. But it also depends on our collective ability to further strengthen the architecture of Economic and Monetary Union in a way that fully reflects the interdependence among the euro area economies. Pursuing such policies will ensure a higher growth trajectory. I am now at your disposal for questions. 1 See ECB press release of 15 December 2016: Governing Council statement on Macroprudential Policies 2 See Structural reforms, inflation and monetary policy, Introductory speech by Mario Draghi, President of the ECB,  4/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  ECB Forum on Central Banking, Sintra, 22 May 2015. 3 The Five Presidents’ Report: Completing Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union  5/5  BIS central bankers' speeches

The essential raison d'être of banking is that an economically advancing society needs effective intermediation between savers and borrowers, and mechanisms for making payments efficiently. As already noted, the initial basic intermediary function of providing deposits and loans expanded subsequently into the organisation of alternative channels of intermediation such as bonds and equities (these activities may be conducted in some jurisdictions outside the narrowly defined banking sector, but the distinction is not material in the present context). Although it is human nature for savers to complain that the returns are inadequate, and borrowers that costs are extortionate, in the marketoriented economies competition in financial intermediation has mostly been quite intense, and most of us would probably agree that this has worked to the increasing benefit of customers on both sides of the balance sheet. Meanwhile, the provision of payment services has developed markedly at both the wholesale and retail levels. Banks are at the centre of this activity, typically supported by the central bank as ultimate provider of liquidity. In fact, whereas many other types of institution may nowadays be involved in lending money or providing avenues for savings, banks themselves remain firmly at the core of the payments system. A sound and efficient payments system is acknowledged to be a prerequisite if an economy is to realise fully its potential.
At the time, this framework appeared to be delivering much better results than its various predecessors: we were in the midst of the ‘Great Moderation’, enjoying the benefits of inflation remaining low and stable around its target level. [3] Yet, on the other hand, these favourable outcomes were typically accompanied by a lack of reference to money in descriptions of the conduct or transmission of monetary policy – even when those descriptions were offered by central bankers themselves. [4] In most jurisdictions, the monetarist experiments of the late 1970s and early 1980s – which had placed monetary aggregates at the heart of the design and communication of monetary policy strategies – were seen as discredited. In the face of rapid financial innovation, the operation of Goodhart’s Law had rendered the controllability of those aggregates and / or the interpretability of their role in the transmission mechanism sufficiently opaque for them to be deemed unreliable aids to the formulation and presentation of monetary policy decisions. [5] Lord King offered a reconciliation of these two observations. On my reading, the arguments he made back at the turn of the century have stood the test of time. Although not doing justice to the richness, breadth or quality of those arguments, one core theme builds on the insights of Poole. [6] As in other fields, a form of ‘duality’ between quantities and prices exists in monetary economics.

Conclusion There are clearly several good reasons why sound regulatory and oversight practices remain vital for the stability of our financial system and why, therefore, the Central Bank of Malta and the MFSA must work more effectively together. It is also evident, however, that on their own these two institutions cannot provide full protection against systemic disturbances, and that the modalities for co-operation which are in place locally need to be strengthened further and extended to other bodies with comparable responsibilities at the international, and particularly at the EU level. 3  ECB. 2002. Financial Sectors in EU Accession Countries. BIS Review 50/2004  5
But as yet we do not know exactly where this process will take us, and how central bank operations will look in detail, say, twenty years from now. What we can say with certainty is that the discussion on monetary policy and central bank activities will be intensive over the coming years, both internally in individual countries and internationally. It is important that this discussion is unbiased and modulated and conducted in a good and positive spirit. This will help ensure that it results in wise and sustainable solutions. 12  BIS central bankers’ speeches  References Bank of Canada (2012), Bank of Canada maintains overnight rate target at 1 per cent. Press release 23 October. Bernanke, Ben S. (2010), Letter to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, 21 December. Available at: http://fcic-static.law.stanford.edu/cdn_media/fcic-docs/2010-1221%20B%20Bernanke%20ltr%20to%20Angelides%20and%20Thomas%20re%20FOMC%2 0information.pdf Blanchard, Olivier, Dell’Ariccia, Giovanni and Mauro, Paolo (2013), Rethinking Macro Policy II: Getting Granular. IMF Staff Discussion Note 13/03, International Monetary Fund. Cagliarini, Adam, Kent, Christopher and Stevens, Glenn (2010), Fifty Years of Monetary Policy: What Have We Learned? In Kent, Christopher and Robson, Michael (ed) Reserve Bank of Australia 50th Anniversary Symposium. Proceedings of a conference held in Sydney on 9 February 2010. Reserve Bank of Australia. Carney, Mark (2013), Monetary Policy After the Fall. Speech at the University of Alberta 1 May 2013. Bank of Canada. Committee on International Economic Policy and Reform (2011), Rethinking Central Banking. Brookings Institution, Washington.

Mario Draghi: ECB press conference - introductory statement Introductory statement by Mr Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank, and Mr Vítor Constâncio, Vice-President of the European Central Bank, Frankfurt am Main, 19 January 2017. * * * Ladies and gentlemen, first of all let me wish you a Happy New Year. The Vice-President and I are very pleased to welcome you to our press conference. We will now report on the outcome of today’s meeting of the Governing Council. Based on our regular economic and monetary analyses, we decided to keep the key ECB interest rates unchanged. We continue to expect them to remain at present or lower levels for an extended period of time, and well past the horizon of our net asset purchases. Regarding non-standard monetary policy measures, we confirm that we will continue to make purchases under the asset purchase programme (APP) at the current monthly pace of € billion until the end of March 2017 and that, from April 2017, our net asset purchases are intended to continue at a monthly pace of € billion until the end of December 2017, or beyond, if necessary, and in any case until the Governing Council sees a sustained adjustment in the path of inflation consistent with its inflation aim. The net purchases will be made alongside reinvestments of the principal payments from maturing securities purchased under the APP.
Charles Bean: Monetary policy developments Speech by Mr Charles Bean, Deputy Governor (Monetary Policy) of the Bank of England, at Cutlers’ Feast, Cutlers’ Hall, Sheffield, 21 May 2009. *  *  *  Master Cutler, Lord Lieutenant, High Sheriff, Lord Mayor, My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen. I am very grateful to you, Master Cutler, for inviting me here to Sheffield to speak at this great annual Feast, to meet the leaders of such an important sector of British manufacturing industry, and to enjoy your magnificent hospitality. We are now almost two years into the financial crisis, which broke in August 2007. The preceding decade or so was marked by steady growth and low inflation, not just in the United Kingdom but in many other parts of the world. In 2003, the Bank’s Governor, Mervyn King, even went so far as to christen it the NICE decade – standing for non-inflationary consistently expansionary. He was at pains to point out that one should not expect that unusual stability to be maintained. But although we subsequently fretted about the vulnerabilities building up within the global financial system as a result of the relaxed attitude to risk and the easy availability of credit, we never imagined quite how extreme the unwinding would prove, particularly after the bankruptcy of Lehman's last September triggered a near collapse of the financial system and a world-wide plunge in business and consumer confidence.

The one thing you can be reasonably sure of as you look ahead to 2020 is that you will be confronted with a continuing challenge to keep ahead of the competition in your existing industries and that you will need to be able to respond to changing demands and embrace new activities to replace those where your present comparative advantage becomes impossible to sustain - as is unfortunately bound to happen in some cases. So my first point is that the market economy is with us to stay, with all that that implies. We've also learned that one of the conditions that are necessary if a market economy is to function effectively is a framework of macro-economic stability. For much of the post-war period macro-economic policy - not just in this country, but including in this country - focussed heavily on the short-term management of aggregate demand in the economy. It paid too little attention to the underlying, supply-side, capacity of the economy to meet that demand. Faced with slow growth and rising unemployment both fiscal and monetary policy were used, in combination, to stimulate demand until accelerating inflation and a worsening balance of payments threatened to run out of hand, when the brakes were slammed on and everything went into reverse. The go-stop policy cycle in other words produced the familiar boom-bust business cycle. Over time this experience induced a pervasive short-termism in economic decision-making on the part of both businesses and consumers.
Timothy F Geithner: Hedge funds and derivatives and their implications for the financial system Remarks by Mr Timothy F Geithner, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at the Distinguished Lecture 2006, sponsored by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and Hong Kong Association of Banks, Hong Kong, 14 September 2006. *  *  *  I want to thank Joseph Yam for inviting me to Hong Kong for this occasion. We are approaching the 10-year anniversary of the financial crises of 1997-99. Those crises were remarkable both in the scope of countries and markets they affected, and for their speed and severity. The circumstances leading up to the crises varied across countries and regions, as did the magnitude of the resulting damage to the real economy. But each of these events had one dynamic in common the confluence of a sharp increase in risk perception, and the subsequent actions taken by financial institutions and investors to limit their exposure to future losses. As asset prices declined and volatility increased in response to increased concern about risk, firms moved to call margin, to reduce positions and to hedge against further losses. These individual actions had the aggregate effect of inducing even larger price declines and further heightening perceptions of risk, ultimately propagating and amplifying the effects of the initial shock. The dynamic I just described was not unique to the crises of the late 1990s, nor was the damage to overall economic activity they left in their wakes.

While this issue is at the heart of risk management challenges for the provision of credit more broadly, the rise in the relative size of the private leveraged fund sector and the rise in the importance of new derivative financial instruments may complicate the design of policies and risk-management practices to counteract these traditional frictions. Virtually all types of credit markets suffer from informational problems - consider the challenge faced by a bank in assessing the risk associated with lending to a small unrated company. But the complexity of new financial products, the rapidity with which positions can change, and the lack of a long time series of historical relationships seems likely to enhance these problems for leveraged institutions operating in new markets such as credit derivatives. Funds typically deal with several different banks and investments banks. The desire to maintain the confidentiality of their trading strategies has traditionally led firms to be quite opaque to outsiders and reluctant to give their banks sufficiently detailed information on a real time basis about the risk profile of the overall fund. Without that information, individual dealers or banks have a difficult time evaluating the probability of default of a leveraged counterparty and the potential covariance with other positions of the firm. Individual firms may also see only a piece of the hedge fund’s positions, and if their direct exposure to the individual fund is small, may perceive less need to worry about the overall risk profile of the fund.
At the same, this conclusion should not be taken too far, so that the tendency is assumed to be permanent. As we have seen, there have been periods when the rate of price increases for imported consumer goods has been held back by other factors than just an altered exchange rate pass-through. In a situation where resource utilisation is high, a weakening of the exchange rate is no longer perceived as transient and favourable one-off effects have ceased to act, the pass-through from exchange rate movements can be larger than what we have observed in recent years. Currency interventions and transparency Before concluding, I would like to say something with reference to the discussion that arose in connection with the Riksbank’s currency interventions in June. First I should underscore that for a number of years now we have taken great pains to be as open and clear about monetary policy as it is possible to be. I have no qualms about claiming that during the past five years we have become one of the world’s most transparent central banks. What we have achieved in this respect is something of a cultural upheaval. The most recent step, in spring 1999, was that we began publishing the minutes of the new Executive Board’s monetary policy meetings. As I have explained in other contexts, transparency and clarity serve several purposes. They can enhance monetary policy’s credibility and legitimacy. They can also make monetary policy more predictable.

We now have the same policy commitment to price stability as the rest of the world. That leaves around 40 per cent of the depreciation to account for. Our work at the Riksbank suggests that in the 1970s and ’80s, the major part of the real exchange rate’s weakening can be attributed to deteriorating terms of trade, low GDP and productivity growth compared with the rest of the world and growing external debt. One of the models we have used indicates that about three-quarters of the depreciation stemmed from relatively poorer growth in Sweden and about a quarter to worsening terms of trade. The picture in the 1990s looks different. As far as we can tell at present, in the past decade neither productivity nor GDP growth has been poorer than in the rest of the world (Fig. 1). So in this respect, too, there seems to have been a change for the better. It is partly against this background that the krona’s persistently weak average path in the latter part of the 1990s is surprising. BIS Review 75/2001  3  Fig 1.