samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
This new technology has not only created a demand for new or improved payment services, it has also provided payment service providers with new channels through which their services can be supplied. The growing number of mobile payment services is an example of this. A number of challenges for the banks Banks have dominated the retail payments market for a long time and they still have a strong position. They are the “factories” of the retail payments market. They are usually BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  large scale and sell standardized payment services. However, they have to meet a number of challenges. One challenge relates to the fact that banks operate on a vast scale providing payment services that can be used in a broad variety of situations. In an environment that quickly changes and where tailor-made payment solutions are increasingly demanded, it is a tall order to meet such a variety in demand. We should also remember that the core business of banks is financial services including payment intermediation. They are not technology firms even though they are heavy users of technology. Innovation in payment services is usually not a question of inventing a wholly new payment process from account to account. Rather it is taking some service that is already out there and offering a new way of accessing that service. As an example, many mobile payment services and electronic wallets are just new ways of initiating card payments. A recent example is Apple Pay.

Second, assessments of global imbalances and implications for currency valuation need to adopt a “broader view” that takes into consideration not only current account imbalances but also capital flows which have become much larger than current account flows; taking a narrow perspective of current account imbalance alone could lead us to a policy misstep. And third, central banks should have a collective voice on how much central banks can do, and to what extent further monetary easing can prop up the economy facing with structural challenges and trade disruptions. When we think about policy space, we must not look at the zero lower bound, effective lower bound, or the optimal size of central bank’s balance sheet. We must also be aware of the “financial stability lower bound”: how much additional financial stability risks we are willing to take. This is so that the financial market would have a realistic view of monetary policy and not expect central banks to engage in excessive easing that might result in long-term financial instability. Preparing for the new macroeconomic thinking in the world of bilateralism This brings me to my third and last issue which is the importance of multilateral framework and international cooperation in a world that is becoming more and more polarized, both geopolitically and economically. Multilateral frameworks that have worked so well for us in the past recently got challenged by gravitation towards inward-  4  looking policies and bilateral economic relationships, and that has sent shockwaves to emerging nations on the periphery.
Yet, this sector generates less than 20% of value added in the economy, while productivity of labour force employed in agriculture and their income per capital are half of other branches of the economy. In my view, the sustained and balanced development of the country clearly needs a higher attention to agriculture sector, for improving its production capacity coupled with the growing of rural area population’s welfare, and in turn promoting social equity. The agricultural sector faces many and complex problems of development. At a considerable degree, these problems are out the competence and expertise sphere of the Bank of Albania. However, I believe that the topic of our today’s discussion: support with funds and loans to the agricultural sector, deserves a higher attention by the banking system. Currently, agricultural sector benefits only 1.7% of the funding that banks provide to private business. This ratio has not change over the last decade, despite the novelties that banking system has offered to lending market, while it remains far from the real needs of this sector. Specific lending issues to agricultural sector have been identified, from some time now, but a part of them are yet relevant. Nevertheless, I think that some of them are towards addressing, while the other obstacles should become part of a critical assessment and their solution should be an integral part of our next work agenda.

Gent Sejko: Lending to and funding the Albanian agriculture sector Address by Mr Gent Sejko, Governor of the Bank of Albania, at an event, organized to discuss on lending issues of the agriculture sector in Albania and launch the initiative on Albania Agribusiness and Tourism Support Facility (AATSP), Tirana, 26 January 2022. * * * Your Excellency Prime Minister, Honourable Madame Ministers, Honourable Head of Albania for the EBRD, Dear friends and colleagues, Let me first to thank you for the invitation to participate in this event, organized to discuss on lending issues of the agriculture sector in Albania and launch the initiative on Albania Agribusiness and Tourism Support Facility (AATSP) mechanism. The Bank of Albania has continuously welcomed the transparent and constructive dialogue amid public authorities, private sector, banking industry and international partners, to address issues which serve to unclog the potential development and welfare growth of Albania. In particular, allow me to emphasize the fact that – despite the considerable progress in the last years – the Albanian agriculture sector, overall, and branches related with it- agritourism and agribusiness – are still far from the full utilisation of both resources and potentials they have. In figures, almost half of the Albanian population lives in rural areas and around 1/3 of labour force in the country are employed in agriculture sector.
But I take this debate over the inflation target very seriously, and it will be at the heart of the “strategic review” that the Governing Council, chaired by Christine Lagarde, is to launch at the end of this month. Without prejudging the outcome, I would like to put forward three qualifying criteria:  Our inflation target needs to be symmetrical: if our core target is perceived as being an upper limit, we have less chance of achieving it.  It needs to be flexible, and we need to say to what extent and/or over which horizon: we cannot guarantee 2%, either all the time or straight away.  Last, it needs to be credible, and not just for the financial markets: we need to communicate even more with households and businesses; they are the ones that ultimately set prices and wages in the economy. We have to listen to them, which means measuring their own inflation expectations, and choose the most relevant inflation index. And at the same time we have to talk to them better about our target: they believe us on the imperative of avoiding the two opposite ills of inflation that is too high or deflation; but we have to recognise that today they are less convinced than the economists of the need to boost price growth from 1% to 2%. I believe the economic analyses and theories; but I also believe that they only have a real-world impact if they are perceived, accepted and assimilated by common sense and public opinion.

Germany has opened the debate; the Netherlands have shown the way with the announcement of the creation of an investment fund for the future. Low rates, here and elsewhere, can provide an opportunity to finance investments if – and only if – those investments deliver increased potential growth: the ecological transition, digitalisation, education and research. For that, we need – finally! – to focus our fiscal debate on the quality of our spending and investment, and not just on its quantity. At the European level, we have considerable borrowing capacity: we should use it, as soon as we know how to choose these priorities properly, beyond the success of the Juncker Plan or of InvestEU. **  Page 14 of 14  I shall conclude with a more “philosophical” consideration: interest rates are also the price of time. My generation created the euro and tried to tackle the financial crisis. Yours is inheriting a world that is equivocal, to say the least: the positive explosion of innovation and interdependencies, but also that of climate threats and inequality, and all with a worrying weakening, the world over, in public governance. A low price of time is as much a threat as an opportunity: a threat if we give in, in the short term, to the ease of abundant liquidity and allow financial instability to grow; an opportunity if we use low rates collectively to invest in the future, from the ecological transition to education. You can count on our determination to act on the monetary side.
We did it in March 2020, when it was still debated if it wasn't just a common cold that would go away in the summer. The alternative was to wait, monitor and analyse the situation for at least a few months before taking concrete action. From today's perspective, we can say that such waiting could have impacted very adversely banks, businesses and households alike. It was that anti-crisis package that allowed the introduction of a moratorium on loan repayments, which at its peak exceeded BGN 9 billion. Here is the place to emphasise that this was a private moratorium, an initiative by our commercial banks, as they better than anyone else understand that when their customers are not well, they are not well either. The Association played a key role in that process, which, among other things, is another testament to the excellent cooperation between the Association and the BNB. As with all our meetings, we prefer to look forward rather than backward. Unfortunately, what we see ahead are new challenges. On the one hand, these are the political and economic processes in the country. The intersections of their dynamics and development are basically three: prices, prices, and prices again. The outcome of the budget process that is currently underway will be indicative of the direction of these dynamics and development.

He believed “the policy was the one and only policy which ultimately would place the City and the country again on that eminence which it occupied before the war”. Such was his confidence that Norman mentioned only once, in passing, that “the policy” in question was to “attempt to regain the gold standard”, and he spent no time at all explaining what, apart from normalcy, would be achieved by it. Of course, this return to past certainties would eventually plunge the country into deflation and a deep recession. The old policy was not suited to the new normal and the UK was forced to abandon it a few years later. After all, what is normal when there are tectonic shifts? This dinner may look traditional, but its attendees have always recognised that the most longstanding and revered tradition of the City is its ability to anticipate, adapt to and accelerate change for the common good. That is why the UK’s financial system remains both a national asset and a global public good. Domestically, there are over 1 million financial services jobs, two-thirds outside London. Financial services run a trade surplus of 3% of GDP, while the rest of the economy runs a deficit almost twice as large. Last year, the UK financial system channelled £ billion in finance to UK businesses and helped 700,000 households to purchase homes. It provides pensions to 21 million people and insures the contents of 20 million homes.
However, the construction and provision of composite financial products that are easy for consumers to understand may be extremely complex. The new producers of financial services therefore face considerable challenges. Let me illustrate all this with one of the examples Merton offers. Assume that a family wants to save for the children’s university education. Even if the education is free, there may be costs for textbooks, food, lodging, travel and so on. And if it is a matter of studying abroad, even the education may have to be paid for. Relevant questions are the amount that needs to be saved, the likely return and the total cost when the education is ultimately complete. One solution would be for the sophisticated financial institute to draw up a contract whereby all the specified costs are financed during a given future period. The family gets a payment schedule that specifies all the requisite savings. In this example it is the bank or other financial institute that carries the various risks, not the individual household. So besides receiving advice about how to behave in order to save up for education, the household concludes a contract – a tailor-made financial instrument – that specifies payments and deliveries. The institute is more competent at managing risks than the individual function and therefore performs this function. Another example of financial innovations that households can use to reduce long-term risk exposure is financial products related to some real-estate index.

Diagram 2:  ”The IT-bubble” 800  800  700  700  Affärsvärlden: IT-index  600  600  Index  500  500  Nasdaq: Nasdaq: Composite  400  400  300  300  200  200  Dow Jones: Industrials  100 0 96  97  98  USA Dow Jones Industrial Average, close daily [index 1996-01-02]  99  00  100  01  0  Sources: Hanson & Partners AB. USA Nasdaq Composite index, close daily [index 1996-01-02]  BIS Review 90/2001  1  One is what has happened to the discussion about the “new economy”. Swedish media are mentioning the subject less and less (Diagram 1). I believe that mirrors how people’s interest in general has waned. And considering how rapidly and extensively prices have fallen for IT and telecom shares, one is inclined to the view that all the talk about the third industrial revolution was really something of a dead end (Diagram 2). That leads on to my other question, namely the part that technological breakthroughs play for corporate profits and thereby for the return on equity. Where did the “new economy” go? Concerning my first question, perhaps it is not so surprising that we now hear less and less about the “new economy” than we did last year. Share prices for IT and telecom companies have fallen markedly. Many people have lost a great deal on their investments. We hear or read about redundancies and cutbacks in this sector almost daily.
The banking system lacked the necessary know-how for risk management, both for its own institutions and for its clients. People had become used to credit being rationed and were now suddenly able to borrow large amounts. The political system, the authorities and professional economists all stressed the advantages of deregulating the financial system but were less clear about the risks. In their struggle for readers, listeners or viewers, the media sometimes forgot to question and scrutinise important  2  BIS Review 50/2002  elements of what was happening. Think how much advice about share transactions has been passed on airily in recent years without a careful scrutiny. In the early 20th century these financial cycles and the risks of major crises were given a lot of thought by economists, not least those of the Austrian School. They pointed to the existence of transitory risks in the process of adjusting to a higher rate of productivity growth in connection with technological breakthroughs. At first there is a good circle: rising productivity tends to pull share prices up, making it easier to finance new investments. New investments and a growing capital stock lead through capital deepening to even higher productivity growth. When productivity goes on rising, however, expectations may become excessive and push share prices up still more. In certain cases, moreover, expectations of increased profits may lead to higher lending. All this can generate a vicious circle where a further increase in asset prices results in a continued expansion of credit.

Only little more than 12% are in the form of government securities, whereas the rest, around 6.5%, are invested in investment or private pension funds, accounting for only 0.1% of total financial system assets. Statistics show that only a small number of companies operate in other segments of the financial sector, and their activity in terms of the Domestic Product or of the financial market remains insignificant. Regarding the above, we may logically conclude that the financial market architecture may not be considered complete yet. Financial instruments with long-term maturities are rare, whereas the short-term ones outside the banking system are apathetic and fragmented, in terms of both products and markets. An outcome of such a financial architecture is a kind of added pressure on the banking system, depriving the economy of other financing alternatives, beyond what the banks offer. This vacuum may not be filled with strained efforts by the banking system. It has been broadly accepted that each segment of the financial market plays a complementary rather than substituting role. I could mention a number of examples to illustrate my point, but for the moment I would rather not, as in the next panels these issues will be discussed in greater detail by other 2/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  colleagues and academics during the day. Overall, the above elaboration regards investment-related financial institutions and financial instruments.
Projections The central scenario projections contain limited changes with respect to the March Report. Inflation is expected to continue to fall and will converge to the target within the second half of 2024. For December of this year, the annual variation of total CPI is foreseen at 4.2%, compared with the March estimate of 4.6%. Core inflation will end 2023 at 6.5%, which compares with the 6.9% projected in March. Both indicators will converge to 3% during 2024 and will remain in the neighborhood until the end of the policy horizon, that is, the second quarter of 2025 (figure 16). Core inflation will decline more noticeably towards the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, as anticipated in the March Report. The projections reiterate that, in the short term, the monthly variation of services inflation will continue to exceed its historical averages. This incorporates the greater rigidities that these prices normally present and the impact of the still-high inflation on the usual repricing mechanisms. Goods inflation, meanwhile, will benefit from a lower than expected trajectory of the real exchange rate (RER) in March. This is consistent with the nominal appreciation of the peso in recent months, in a context where, as I mentioned, local uncertainty has diminished. Looking ahead, the effect of tight external financial conditions continues to be considered. Compared to March, activity projections show minor changes, mainly associated with the mining industry. This year, the annual variation of GDP will be between a 0.5% fall and a 0.25% rise.

Structural reforms are needed to unleash the productive potential of the euro area economy. Such reforms fall beyond the remit of the ECB and are the responsibility of other national and European policymakers. Now is the perfect time for such reforms, since the current accommodative policy of the ECB can help offset any short-term adjustment costs of their implementation. This is a window of opportunity that needs to be seized. Doing so will raise future income in the euro area, supporting an increase in the natural rate and boosting the returns to saving. 1 See Orphanides, A and J. Williams, (2002), “Robust Monetary Policy Rules with Unknown Natural  Rates”, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Vol.2, 63–145, Laubach, T and J. Williams (2003), “Measuring the Natural Rate of Interest”, Review of Economics and Statistics 85, No4, pp 1063–70, Laubach, T and J. Williams, (2015), “Measuring the real natural interest rate redux”, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper, No. 2015–16 and Taylor, J.B, and V. Wieland, (2016), “Finding the Equilibrium Real Interest Rate in a Fog of Policy Deviations”, Economics Working Papers 16109, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. 2 Notwithstanding the uncertainty over estimates of the natural rate, key drivers of long-term interest rate in a  standard Solow growth model such as productivity and population growth have been slowing for decades in advanced economies, suggesting that the natural interest rate may have indeed declined.
To support philanthropy and non-profit organisations seeking to invest in Asia, the International Organisations Programme Office was set up in 2007 by the Singapore Economic Development Board as a whole-of-government effort to facilitate international organisations planning to locate in Singapore. The Government has also developed supporting physical infrastructure, such as the Tanglin International Centre for clustering and shared services. Connectivity 20. In addition, Singapore has excellent international transport and communications connectivity, and can serve as an intermediary for giving in the region. Our location and stable and safe environment provide international donors with a convenient base from which to oversee their giving in the region. Governance 21. Lastly, we cannot over-emphasise the importance of good governance in charities. Governments are working to address this issue. For example, last year, China launched the China Foundation Centre (CFC) to promote greater transparency and accountability among foundations. But there is still much that countries in Asia can do to improve charity governance. 22. Singapore, too, is working on improving governance. We have put in place a sound regulatory framework and a code of governance to ensure transparency and accountability of our local charity sector. In addition, the National Volunteer and Philanthropy Centre will also be introducing an independent charity analysis system this year. Conclusion 23. In closing, I would like to say that philanthropy makes the world a better place. It balances our emphasis on economic growth and the pursuit of profits with our warm, human side.

It is important to maintain a high level of confidence that institutions and markets will function in the way that the customers expect them to function. It is quite possible to combine a good general consumer protection with flexibility in the range of products which could make production more efficient. On the other hand, a far-reaching harmonisation of detailed conduct of business rules would probably involve greater costs for consumers than what they would stand to gain from completely harmonised services. The principles that form the basis of the EU’s regulatory framework for the financial sector are to a great extent based on this general orientation. The directives generally establish criteria of minimum harmonisation in order to enable financial operators to be active throughout the entire union. On this basis, authorisation and supervision should in principle be performed by the authorities within one member state, normally the home country of the institution in question. This “licence” to conduct financial operations should thus be recognised by the authorities in the other member states and financial institutions should be able to operate there from their establishments in their respective home country. In the same way, the EC directives on securities markets have led to some minimum harmonisation of the conditions for trade in financial instruments, e.g. what the issue prospectuses should contain and how insider trading could be limited.