samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
In this context, the cooperation between the institutions of public administration and the academia, the cooperation between different countries and the establishment of research nets on various areas are of prime importance. They would not only enhance the efficiency in carrying out the research, but also stimulate the professional critique and opposition and reach higher standards. The research mission described above, clear and well-defined within the framework of a central bank should not be understood as an isolate mission. The studies can not take place in a closed environment. They need debate and exchange of ideas with the academy, business and other interested stakeholders. In this regard, it is my pleasure to state that the Bank of Albania has made its research subject to reviews in activities organized particularly for this purpose (inflation targeting, round tables, Friday workshops, etc). I invite you to do the same thing even during this activity. In view of debate and discussion, we have made constant efforts to attract academy and intellectuals in the discussion of our works. The Bank of Albania has introduced the “series of Friday seminars”, as an infrastructure to promote this debate. Twice a month this forum invites the interested persons within and outside the Bank of Albania to discuss their research on topics of economic nature. The activity is as much open for home and foreign researchers from the academy and business as it is open for the Bank of Albania employees.

Payments after the COVID crisis – emerging issues and challenges Speech given by Christina Segal-Knowles Executive Director Financial Market Infrastructure Directorate  Webinar: London School of Economics and Centre for Economic Policy Research 11 June 2020  I would like to thank Natalia Dobrovolschi, Rachel James, Cordelia Kafetz, Hardeep Rai, Josh Sadler, Jonathan Wakefield, and Ellen Caswell for their assistance with preparing this speech and Laura Wallis and Stephanie Haffner for their comments and input. 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  Thanks Erik and thanks very much for inviting me to this webinar. I’ll talk through very briefly how payments were changing well before COVID-19 and the impact we’ve seen during the global health crisis. And then I’ll begin to cover what central banks can and are doing in response. Even before the current crisis, people were changing the way they pay. For many if not all of you– the fact that the way we pay has been changing significantly won’t be a surprise. You’ve experienced this. In London, where I live and work, contactless payments have become ubiquitous – from small coffee shops, to farmer’s markets, to stalls at sporting and music events, the need to rush to the cash machine is gone - you can tap your card, phone or watch. We’ve become accustomed to online baskets and clicks; to summoning and paying for services on our phone. People’s behaviour has changed.
This has enabled the banks to signal to the markets that they will pay off their debts on a certain date even if formally there is no specific date on which the securities fall due. Basel III thus entails a considerable tightening up of the minimum capital requirements. I think this is excellent. I have long advocated clearer and stricter regulations. As equity is expensive in relation to other sources of funding, tighter capital requirements will reduce the banks’ appetite for risk and at the same time increase their ability to manage losses. More and better capital will thus not only soften the effects of future crises but also reduce the likelihood of them occurring at all. A clear and uniform level for Core Tier 1 capital will also reduce the scope for arbitrary interpretations. This in turn will reduce the scope for creating a non-level playing field, which should benefit global competition. BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  Counter-cyclical capital buffer In addition to the new minimum requirements, Basel III comprises a counter-cyclical capital buffer of a maximum of 2.5 percentage points of Core Tier 1 capital. 6 The buffer acts as a dynamic capital requirement, which means that it varies over the economic cycle. The idea is that the banks should build up capital in good times that they can use to deal with losses in bad times.

This was not actually a  BIS central bankers’ speeches  9  great problem in Sweden, but rather in the United States and some other parts of Europe. We have also underestimated the strength of the contagion risks that arose as a consequence of the connections between different agents in the financial system. If the banks are to be equipped to deal with their losses themselves we should endeavour to draw up capital requirements that reflect the banks’ real risks. Reactions and effects As always, when stricter regulations are introduced, a certain amount of resistance can be expected. The most usual criticism of the new banking regulations is that they will come at a high cost, both in terms of actual expenses and in terms of efficiency. I am very aware that stricter regulations entail certain costs. But these costs are worth incurring if they mean we will get a new regulatory framework that does what it is designed to do. What we want is a safer financial system. Having seen the results of many financial crises internationally and two in Sweden, I can also note that the costs of a deep and wide-ranging banking crisis can be exceptionally high. Looking back, we can see that financial crises are usually drawn-out processes that are followed by long periods of high unemployment and low GDP growth. Situations like this should be avoided, although of course not at any price.
If European policy-makers decided to follow their American counterparts, neglecting the different structure and shocks, this would result in destabilising economic policies, which would bring us to the high inflation and profligate fiscal policies of the 1970s. This judgement is backed by a lot of analysis, which – perhaps unconsciously – has been understood by European citizens and their governments. Those who lived the times of economic instability should have understood that offloading the weight of the macroeconomic adjustment onto future generations is elusive and counterproductive. With a longer life expectancy, the mistakes of a given generation are paid in large part by the same generation. It is best therefore not to commit those mistakes altogether, and let economic policies follow tested rules of good behaviour. Thank you for your attention. Figure 1. Official interest rates in the euro area and in the United States (percentage points)  Sources: ECB and Federal Reserve Council. NB: most recent observation dated 30 October 2008. Euro area interest reference rate is rate on main refinancing operations to June 2000, and minimum bid rate thereafter. Official US interest rate is federal fund rate. 12  BIS Review 135/2008  Table 1. Measuring long-term inflation expectations in the euro area and in the United States  Figure 2. Government budget balance in the euro area and in the United States  NB: Total budget balance shows degree of budget policy’s expansion or contraction.

Remarks on The Post-pandemic Landscape for Central Bank Statistics 11th IFC Biennial Conference Pablo García Silva, Deputy Governor, Central Bank of Chile August 25th 2022 I want to thank the organizers for the opportunity to participate in this distinguished panel, providing some remarks on the challenges we face as Central Banks and as providers of statistics, particularly in the environment we live today, as the pandemic recedes. Central Banks are keenly aware of the need to provide timely, accurate, and in-depth understandings of the changing economy. This not only to inform correctly policy making, but also to satisfy the shifting demands of society regarding the environment we live in. This inevitably implies trade-offs. Operative and budgetary constraints mean that a careful balance of timeliness, accuracy, and depth needs to be achieved. The ever-expanding complexity of economic relationships, and the speed at which policies have had to adapt to very large shocks, imply in my view that compared to a not so distant past timeliness is today at a premium. The times of change we live in require us to react promptly. This, however, carries the cost that both the accuracy and the depth of data will be inversely related to its timeliness. This brings about the implication that both policy making needs to consider the implicit uncertainty of the environment, and also that statistics providers need to be candid about those uncertainties when communicating with the public.
Once a monetary policy framework has been in force for long enough, the benefits of it tend no longer to be so obvious. In addition, if developments have been favourable, as has been the case since inflation targeting was introduced, it is easy for demands and expectations to rise. It is also easy to place greater focus on the drawbacks, which exist in all frameworks. For example, it is not so difficult to communicate that high and variable inflation is bad, as was the case when inflation targeting was introduced in the early 1990s. But when memories of those problems have faded, it is not as easy to convey that an inflation target is also supposed to prevent inflation being too low, that is, the importance of there not only being common expectations in society as to how much prices and wages will rise, but also that these expectations are anchored far enough above zero. Although this argument – that the inflation target should be sufficiently high – is crucial, it is after all also relatively abstract. There are above all two relationships that I think make it important to maintain confidence in the inflation target of 2 per cent – which is what our policy in recent years has aimed to do – and which indicate that the target should not be lower. One is that the conditions for wage formation to effectively allocate resources in the economy can deteriorate when average inflation is too low.

This would contribute to both better understanding and greater legitimacy for the policy conducted by the central bank. It should be added here that the Riksbank’ monetary policy is evaluated every year, that is, how the Riksbank has performed its remit. The Riksdag Committee on Finance performs an annual review based on background material such as the “Account of monetary policy”, a report compiled and published by the Riksbank. 15 In addition, the Committee on Finance occasionally hires external experts to review Swedish monetary policy. So far three such reviews have been conducted: By Francesco Giavazzi and Frederic Mishkin for the period 1995-2005, by Charles  14 Advocates of a higher inflation target include Blanchard et al. (2013), Ball (2014), Krugman (2014), Rosengren (2015) and Yates (2019). 15 See Sveriges Riksdag (2018) and Sveriges Riksbank (2018a) for the latest versions of these publications. 9 [21]  Goodhart and Jean-Charles Rochet for the period 2005-2010 and by Marvin Goodfriend and Mervyn King for the period 2010-2015. 16 Although these external reviews have sometimes touched upon issues related to the policy objective, their main purpose has been to evaluate the monetary policy conducted, based on the existing policy objective. These reviews are undoubtedly valuable and fulfil their purpose effectively, but it is something else I have in mind here. Canada has chosen a system with reviews of the central bank’s remit every fifth year. 17 The latest review from 2016 analysed, among other things, whether the level of the inflation target was the most appropriate.
36. The “travel rule”, already used in traditional finance, will in the future cover transfers of crypto-assets. Information on the source of the asset and its beneficiary will have to “travel” with the transaction and be stored on both sides of the transfer. The law also covers transactions above € from ”self-hosted wallets” (a crypto-asset wallet address of a private user) when they interact with hosted wallets managed by crypto-asset service providers. See Regulation (EU) 2023/1113 of the European Parliament and of the  Council of 31 May 2023 on information accompanying transfers of funds and certain crypto-assets and amending Directive (EU) 2015/849 (Text with EEA relevance), Official Journal L 150, 9 June 2023, p. 1– 39. 37. Crypto lending is a centralised or decentralised finance service that allows investors to lend out their crypto holdings to borrowers. Decentralised crypto lending platforms use smart contracts to automate loan payouts and yields, and users can deposit collateral to receive a loan if they meet the appropriate requirements automatically (see Duggan, W. (2023), “Crypto Lending: Earn Money From Your Crypto Holdings”, Forbes, 30 January). A non-custodial wallet, or self-custody wallet, entails the crypto owner being fully responsible for managing their own cryptos. The users have full control of their crypto holdings, manage their own private key and handle transactions themselves (see “Custodial vs Non-Custodial Wallets”, crypto.com, 17 February 2023). 38.

This is a sort of prospectus for crypto-assets that informs potential holders about the characteristics of the issued crypto-asset before they offer a token to the public or list it on a trading platform. 39. See Financial Stability Board (2023), “Crypto-assets and Global “Stablecoins”. 40. See European Central Bank (2023), “Crypto-assets: a new standard for banks”, Supervision Newsletter, 15 February. 41. Panetta, F. (2022), “Demystifying wholesale central bank digital currency”, speech at the Deutsche Bundesbank’s Symposium on “Payments and Securities Settlement in Europe – today and tomorrow”, Frankfurt am Main, 26 September. 42. European Central Bank (2023), “Eurosystem to explore new technologies for wholesale central bank money settlement”, Frankfurt am Main, 28 April.
Explanation (3): Uncertain business case – “The Code is a useful guide to market conventions, but that doesn’t mean we need to sign up. The Code is really about the sell-side putting its house in order – the buy-side has nothing to apologise for. At best, the Code just reiterates what we already do; at worst, it’s more regulation in disguise.” This is for me the most important observation to address, and vital for securing the buy-in of CEOs and Boards. In putting together that case, I think there are five points worth stressing:  7  https://www.nex.com/insights/20180904-fx-code-changing-behaviour. 8  https://www.globalfxc.org/press/p181129a.htm 7  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  7    First, the Code provides a simple and powerful ‘off the shelf’ way to educate and promulgate globally-recognised best practice amongst your FX trading and operations staff internally, complementing other tools and regulations;    Second, it sends a clear signal to your sell-side counterparties of the standards you expect them to uphold in their dealings with you, and your intention to hold them to account for those standards – strengthening market discipline and sending a clear collective message that the buy-side expects the highest standards of service for their customers;    Third, in demonstrating a commitment to best practice both by your own traders and from those you trade with externally, it gives your firm a competitive advantage in the market for investors and other customers.

With economic indicators below expectations since April, long-term yields fell back to their mid-2001 level. The expectations reflected in the futures markets concerning the development of money market rates – and therefore also monetary policy – have undergone a marked downward adjustment, notably for the US dollar, but also for the euro and the Swiss franc. Hopes of a vigorous and rapid economic recovery have given way to a more realistic assessment. The SNB as asset manager In the context of its statutory mandate, the National Bank manages sizeable assets (table 1). In May 2002, their market value exceeded Sfr 100 billion. The free assets (Sfr 21 billion) are to be withdrawn from the National Bank and allocated to other purposes. Mr Blattner will provide details on the management of the free assets. The monetary assets (Sfr 86 billion) serve monetary purposes. Claims from repo business (Sfr 16 billion) reflect our money market activities on the assets side of the balance sheet, while Swiss franc securities (Sfr 5 billion) are available for absorption repos if necessary. Foreign exchange reserves (Sfr 41 billion) are at the centre of our activity as asset managers. At the end of 1997, the leeway  BIS Review 39/2002  1  previously granted solely for money market investments was legally extended. This provided a possibility to spread fixed-interest investments more evenly across various maturities and currencies and to widen the range of instruments.
Greater focus on incentives is needed But, I also think we must take a broader view of what characterizes a resilient and robust financial system. To that end, we need to carefully monitor the incentives that influence the behavior of financial firms and their employees. Indeed, the record from the crisis and more recent years shows just how powerful incentives can be in driving firms and individuals to do things that are imprudent and/or unethical. Bad incentives can lead to conduct that not only generates large risk exposures and market excess, but also erodes trust and confidence in the financial system.

This process must be grounded on prudent macroeconomic projections, involve all tiers of general government and translate into a medium-term plan detailing the government receipt and expenditure measures aimed at ensuring a gradual reduction in the imbalances. This would shore up the sustainability of public finances and bolster the credibility of, and confidence in, economic policies. The fiscal consolidation should also go hand-in-hand with an improvement in the quality of public finances, boosting their contribution to the economy’s potential growth. And it must take into account the impact of structural aspects such as population ageing, which will exert upward pressure on public spending on pensions and other expenditure items. At the same time, addressing social imbalances is also essential as increasing inequality could undermine social cohesion and foment social conflict, with adverse repercussions for the security of investments, the incentive to work and opportunities for future generations.25  25  Grossman (1991), Dijkstra, Poelman and Rodríguez-Pose (2020), Persson and Tabellini (1994), Alesina and Rodrik (1994) and Corak (2013). 8  In recent years, the Banco de España has actively contributed to identifying sources of inequality. One factor that crucially affects productivity is educational inequality.
Loan conditions are more favourable and the terms on sight deposits are better than they would be under a sovereign money system. Since banks have to compete with each other, they are left with only enough of the profits from money creation to enable them to remain in business. In a sovereign money system, money creation would be centralised at the SNB, from where the corresponding profits would be distributed. But total profits would be no higher than under the current system. For the general population then, the whole thing would be, at best, a zero-sum game. Damaging effects of sovereign money The fact that the Swiss sovereign money initiative promises too much is only one issue. Even more serious is that adoption of the initiative would have profound implications for Switzerland on three levels, namely the real economy, monetary policy and economic order. Real economy  The initiative would negatively impact the real economy through lending because banks would no longer be able to draw on sight deposits. Instead, they would have to attract liquidity from other sources. A key such source would be savings deposits. However, since  Page 5/8  savings – like any funds which investors forego for an extended period – are more expensive than sight deposits that can be withdrawn at any time, borrowing becomes more costly in a sovereign money system. The Swiss sovereign money initiative affects us all directly, as borrowers and savers. Of the loans granted in Switzerland, 94% go to households and SMEs; 86% are mortgages.

A country with such challenges should not and actually – given our euro area membership and the background of market globalisation – cannot pursue any economic policy avenue other than one which, firstly, provides for and boosts higher employment growth or, on the other side of the same coin, brings about swifter and more sustainable gains in our productivity and competitiveness; and, secondly, helps curb the growth of our public and private debt with a view to subsequently reducing it. In economic policy, hits and misses only become clearly manifest after some time. Just like big vessels which, owing to their great inertia, can only change course or speed slowly, an economy such as ours also moves with considerable inertia: correcting mistakes takes time and, almost always, entails losses in income and well-being, and social instability. Our experience – both in the pre-crisis expansionary phase while the imbalances were accumulating and during their correction and the recovery of growth – should help us avoid errors, persevere with reforms to safeguard and enhance our competitiveness, and fulfil our public finance commitments in the European Union. Thank you. BIS central bankers’ speeches  5