samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
In general, most of these ideas are heading in the same direction: toward greater regulation and centralization of the financial sector, and toward less competition and a greater publicsector presence in the financial industry from now on. These thoughts – often presented in soft "Eurospeak" so as not to sound too alarming – seem as if their proponents thought them up long ago and were just waiting for a good opportunity to unveil them as miracle cures for all the financial world's ills and woes. It is as if we hadn't all known for years that unfortunately – in the world in general, and the financial one in particular – there are no such things as perfect rules, perfect regulation or, above all, perfect certainty. It is as if we'd forgotten that competition, rivalry, profit opportunities and staff motivation are not the spawn of the devil but do a lot of good. More important, the private part of the financial universe is being presented as a self-evident culprit of the crisis, while the role of the state faces much less scrutiny. The question of whether monetary authorities, prior to the crisis, properly regulated interest rates as a key price in the economy attracts much less attention in the debate than it should. The same is true for the question of whether the existing store of individual countries' supervision tools was used correctly and adequately before the crisis. This is interesting, as the crisis poses some new challenges and questions.

Ardian Fullani: Overview of Albania’s latest economic and financial developments Speech by Mr Ardian Fullani, Governor of the Bank of Albania, on the Monetary Policy Decision-Making of the Bank of Albania’s Supervisory Council, Tirana, 30 October 2013. *  *  *  Today, on 30 October 2013, the Supervisory Council of the Bank of Albania reviewed and approved the quarterly Monetary Policy Report. Based on the most recent monetary and economic developments in Albania, and following the discussions on their outlook, the Supervisory Council of the Bank of Albania decided to keep the key interest rate unchanged, at 3.5%. The Council notes that the inflationary pressures deriving from the real and financial sectors of the economy are weak and will continue to remain so. These circumstances require the stimulating monetary policy to persist in the period ahead. The monetary stimulus, transmitted through the low key interest rate and continuous injection of liquidity, provides the required conditions for meeting our medium-term inflation target. Let me now proceed with an overview of the economic developments and key issues discussed at today’s meeting. *** The Albanian economy was characterised by slow economic growth and weak inflationary pressures throughout 2013. Economic growth slowed down to 1.1% in the second quarter, while available information suggests weak economic activity will continue in the third quarter. The weak private demand offset the increasing positive impulses generated by the fiscal stimulus and foreign demand, in the first half of the year.
While this still essentially applies today, the modalities regarding distributions and building up equity capital have been adjusted over time. I will look at the current solution in more detail presently. The reason why the dividend payments to shareholders are limited, and why the profit distributions accrue to the confederation and the cantons, is that the SNB’s profits are not the result of how its share capital is used. Instead they stem much more from its monopoly on issuing legal tender. The SNB generally incurs only minor costs in issuing banknotes and Page 2/7  handling sight deposits, since manufacturing notes costs only a fraction of their nominal value and sight deposits ordinarily do not bear interest. Conversely, the SNB for its part mostly does achieve a positive return on the assets it receives in exchange for the banknotes and sight deposits. The SNB thus generates profits on average over the long term. However, against the backdrop of very low yields and high upward pressure on the Swiss franc, it cannot be taken for granted that the SNB will achieve a profit. I will come back to this point in due course. Generating profits is in any case not our aim. The Federal Constitution and the National Bank Act are quite clear in this respect. They state that we must as an independent central bank pursue a monetary policy that serves the overall interests of the country.

Speech  Embargo 30 April 2021, 10.00 am  SNB distributions – not a matter of course even when profits are high 113th Ordinary General Meeting of Shareholders of the Swiss National Bank  Thomas J. Jordan Chairman of the Governing Board Swiss National Bank Zurich, 30 April 2021 © Swiss National Bank (speech given in German)  Page 1/7  Madam President of the Bank Council Dear Shareholders Dear Guests A warm welcome to you all to our Annual General Meeting. The pandemic has brought great suffering for many people. At the same time, coronavirus has posed unexpected challenges for the economy and politics in Switzerland. It has also placed a heavy burden on the finances of many households and companies, and on the public sector as well. Our sympathy goes to all those who have been affected by the disease or have lost people dear to them. From a professional perspective, our efforts are focused on the contribution that the Swiss National Bank can make within its mandate towards reducing the economic impact of the pandemic on our country. In the past months, we have used every means at our disposal to perform our mandate as well as we possibly can, even in adverse circumstances. Our policy is aimed at helping the people in Switzerland to get through these difficult times.
According to the trend, we can actually only detect an increase during the second half of the 1990s, which was broken recently both due to economic activity and to more structural causes. Several factors lie behind this development. Once again it is natural to go back to the crisis years in the early 1990s. At that point the number of hours worked declined significantly as a result of the large fall in demand that took place. Parallel with this, structural changes were implemented. Young people on the verge of working life chose to continue studying, partly because of the lack of jobs, partly because developments on the labour market meant that higher educational demands were made. Another explanation could be that the number of older persons in the labour force also declined considerably during the same period. The labour supply in the age group 60-64 years fell by approximately 40,000 persons during the 1990s, despite the fact that this group's percentage of the population did not change significantly. In addition, the number of people taking early retirement increased at an alarming rate. Recently, as we are all aware, the amount of sick leave has increased. BIS Review 16/2003  3  Another factor that appears to have had some significance is that the Swedish labour market has not been able to make adequate use of the labour reserve comprised of inhabitants who were born abroad. The employment frequency among these people has been much lower than the employment frequency among people born in Sweden.

The calculated growth in working hours is based on Statistics Sweden's forecast of the Swedish population up to 2050 and fixes other determining parameters at the 2002 level. The average increase in working hours amounted to approximately 0.4 per cent during the period 1981-2001. The calculated series' average increase 2002-2050 stops at a modest 0.01 per cent; in practice almost no increase at all. Conclusion I shall conclude with a summary. A high long-term growth rate is one of the most important objectives of economic policy. It becomes easier to achieve almost all other political objectives if economic growth is good. There is greater scope for private consumption and wage formation is made easier. It becomes easier to finance public sector services such as health and welfare. Higher growth also gives greater scope in other political areas, such as environmental policy. In addition, the potential, long-term growth rate is a variable of essential significance for monetary policy. The Riksbank cannot itself influence the development of the economy's long-term growth rate;  BIS Review 16/2003  5  this is governed by other factors, primarily by how much we work and how efficient the economy is. But the potential growth rate to a great degree sets the framework for monetary policy. Simplified, one can say that our task is to keep actual production as close to potential production as possible. Then inflation will also come close to the target level.
Only in America could two sons of a once-homeless beggar and the daughter of a boardinghouse cook become what you see here on this stage today: One the distinguished chairman of the board of trustees of Bryant University, and the other a policymaker for the most important central bank in the world who is somehow deemed worthy of receiving an honorary doctorate and being chosen as speaker for the 151st commencement of this fine university. We are blessed to be Americans. 1  Westbrook: Surviving Australia’s Most Sadistic Reformatory, by William Stokes, Sydney, Australia: Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia, 2010. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  The Sages of the Ages Now, the only thing that stands between you and receiving your Bryant degree is … me. I will speak quickly and take up just a few moments of your time before you celebrate your accomplishments. By now, you have taken enough writing courses to know the tongue-in-cheek definition of a good essay: It is a collection of other people’s thoughts disguised as your own!2 Most graduation speeches are no different. The standard routine for a commencement speaker is to dig through Bartlett’s or the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations or resort to Google and Wikiquote to find something said by some sage that will grace a graduation ceremony with a lesson students can take with them as they go off into this mysterious and challenging world.

Diana Sorensen’s dictum One of the most intriguing living thinkers, Diana Sorensen, the dean of arts and humanities at Harvard University, defines a knowledgeable graduate taking wing as follows: “He or she is competent in making discerning judgments with tools derived from science, engineering, social science, the arts and humanities. He or she should be a persuasive speaker who can articulate the reasons for his positions; who can write with clarity, elegance and conceptual power; an innovator who will take risks but first makes sure the limb they go out on is a sturdy one; a creative individual who has faced challenges posed by artistic production and experimentation; a global citizen who can speak, read, write in at least a second language; and who will learn what it takes to negotiate different world views emanating from different cultural traditions, a tolerant yet rigorous thinker whose moral compass is guided by ethical reasoning.”3 Class of 2014, I don’t want to put any pressure on you! But that pretty much summarizes the skill set we all hope you have started to acquire at Bryant and will now go on to hone in life. 2  If memory serves from my days at Oxford University, this observation was noted by Graham Chapman, one of the stalwarts of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. 3  Dean Sorensen’s comments are summarized in “Coming Back, Looking Forward”, Harvard Gazette, Sept. 26, 2012.
That is why strategic investors with new knowledge are so important for overall growth. Let me be a little provocative and state that unfortunately multilateral institutions rarely talk about human capital explicitly. For example, the EBRD Charter (quoted after Bronstone, 1999) does not mention developing human capital as EBRD’s role. A bureaucratic answer might be that that is not its mandate. But, according to the EBRD’s Transition Report: “The EBRD seeks to foster the transition to an open market-oriented economy and to promote private and entrepreneurial initiative in all 26 of its countries of operation”. (EBRD, 1999, p. vi.) If we agree that human capital is so important in transition, I ask myself how we can achieve this ambitious goal without knowing more about the level and development of human capital in its countries of operation? Does the EBRD have a set of measures of human capital in transition countries (both cross-country and time series), maybe invent a new index on human capital (like the broadly quoted one for privatization), a separate chapter in the Transition report? Please, let me assure all EBRD governors, management and staff that these remarks are made only in good faith in the hope that we will all reflect upon them a little bit. In a more general framework let us ask ourselves the following question: Have we done enough in the past to achieve this goal? I doubt whether a lot of people in this room (and policymakers in transition economies in general) will say yes without hesitation.

When international investors lost confidence in the ability of governments to defend the fixed exchange rate, the countries encountered difficulties. Sharp currency depreciations and major readjustments followed in many countries. Even though economies in this region have fared well in recent years, the experience may have left its mark. A number of Asian countries, China in particular, have chosen to keep their currencies pegged to the US dollar. As long as the Chinese authorities are successful in keeping the exchange rate fairly fixed, competitiveness and a trade surplus will be maintained. However,  3  2  US Bureau of Labor Statistics. International Labor Comparisons. Manufacturing in China. http://www.bls.gov/fls/china.htm  BIS central bankers’ speeches  such a policy is at the expense of deficit countries, which would have preferred to see an adjustment in the yuan exchange rate. China’s exchange rate policy is therefore under strong pressure, especially from the US. But China’s economic strategy is based on its own experience and the experience of others. First, China has chosen to focus on the export of finished manufactured goods rather than domestic consumption as the basis for growth. So far, this has resulted in dynamic developments where growth has been kept high owing to increasing opportunities for people in rural areas to move to new jobs in towns and cities. A stable exchange rate has contributed to predictable operating parameters for a rapidly growing export industry and has held up competitiveness.
In contrast, Bitcoin users can face queues of hours. Those wanting to get to the front to make time-pressing payments – for last orders, for example – need to offer up a transaction fee sufficiently large to persuade Bitcoin “miners”, who verify and process transactions, to do so quickly. The fees paid vary through time, but reached £ in late 2017. Fees are currently around £ but even that is expensive relative to cash, cards or online payments which cost the retailer around 1.5 pence, 8 pence and 19 pence respectively. 19  Over time, Bitcoin transaction fees could rise further because the subsidy miners enjoy by being partly paid with rewards of new units of currency, will decline given the total supply of Bitcoin cannot exceed 21 million. 20  Furthermore, the costs of Bitcoin mining are enormous. Its current annual electricity consumption is estimated by some to be up to 52 terawatt hours, double the electricity consumption of Scotland. 21  In  comparison, the global Visa credit card network’s energy use is less than ½ of 1% of that of Bitcoin, despite processing 9000 times more transactions. 22  18  Carstens, A., (2018), “Money in the Digital Age: What Role Central Banks?” See https://www.bis.org/speeches/sp180206.htm Based on the British Retail Consortium’s Payment Survey 2016, which surveys the costs that retailers incur for accepting payments, including bank charges, handling charges, infrastructure costs and write-offs (losses).

Early in his career Professor Rogoff worked as a central banker in the International Finance Division at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In this period, he wrote two of the most celebrated papers in monetary economics and international finance. One, which appeared in 1985 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics under the title “The optimal degree of commitment to an intermediate monetary target”, is especially cherished among central bankers (and still his most cited contribution according to Google Scholar with over 2,100 citations). It forcefully laid out the rationale for the delegation of monetary policy to an independent central bank with an explicit price stability objective, a fundamental principle obviously enshrined in the ECB mandate. The second contribution, co-authored with Richard Meese, appeared in 1983 in the Journal of International Economics under the title “Empirical exchange rate models of the seventies: Do they fit out of sample?” and is one of the most cited papers in international finance. It established key empirical regularities about major currencies exchange rates. The implication that nominal exchange rates are best modelled as unpredictable “random walks” is still the basis of the best practice followed by many institutions. This paper marked the beginning of Professor Rogoff’s long-standing prominence in the field of international finance and was followed by a steady flow of equally distinguished contributions, in some instances literally rewriting history.
Krzysztof Rybiński: A day in the life of Homo Sapiens Globalus Address by Mr Krzysztof Rybiński, Deputy President of the National Bank of Poland, at the 11th Teleinformatics Forum, Legionowo, 21 September 2006. *  *  *  Ladies and Gentlemen, Today, I would like to present a vision of the citizen of the world in the year 2026. Homo sapiens globalus will be found almost everywhere on the globe, and his traits will be identified by his ability to capture the benefits brought by the global financial market, global labour market, and global knowledge market. He will work, obtain information, establish and foster his professional relations as well as arrange his leisure activities primarily with the aid of the Internet. Homo sapiens globalus has mastered the fine art of capturing the benefits of the (continuously improved) functions available on the Internet. He is able to absorb frequent changes, and he turns them to his advantage. This makes him increasingly effective, knowledgeable, and capable of pursuing activities he finds interesting. Let us now consider a typical example of homo sapiens globalus, namely John Global. I would like to introduce him to you, but in order to do so, I have to take you on a short journey. This will be time and space travel. Just imagine that by the time I will have finished the previous sentence, twenty years have passed. This means that we are now in the year 2026.

quick redemption of a holding in a money market fund should be assured. But there are situations where, say, holding a three month tenor instrument is appropriate because it satisfies treasury management objectives. The critical need is to avoid ambiguity of definition and mismatches between an instrument’s liquidity and its use. Funds that do not meet this requirement should be clearly labelled and treated as part of the investment fund world, serving a different purpose (where there are also issues, but these are not my focus today). You may well say “he really is labouring this point”. Yes I am, because the post financial crisis reforms did not tackle it conclusively. So, what reforms are required to establish money market funds as cash-like without ambiguity? The first thing to say is that no single reform will solve things on its own. We must identify a coherent package of reforms that address the current vulnerabilities in the money market fund sector. It is easiest to describe three broad approaches to illustrate the potential options available that could deliver this objective. These are intentionally somewhat stylistic, to draw out the tradeoffs we face in addressing these issues. First, at one extreme, asset holdings could be limited to government instruments. Given the low risk and liquid nature of these instruments, run risk would be materially reduced.
Yves Mersch: Behaving responsibly in a low interest rate environment - a central banker's perspective Speech by Mr Yves Mersch, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, at the Stiftung Marktwirtschaft: Expertentagung "5th Kadener Gespräch", Alveslohe, 10 February 2017. * * * The policy of the European Central Bank (ECB) is often said to be at the root of the current problems in the banking and financial sector. Particularly in Germany, there’s the added accusation of monetary policy “expropriating” savers. A closer look quickly reveals that such hasty judgements fail to appreciate the complexity of the matter. Today, therefore, I shall examine carefully the underlying reasons for our monetary policy action. By focusing on the reasons for our actions we can understand more easily how to get back to a normalisation of monetary policy. Low natural interest rates Why are interest rates so low? The growth trend has been declining in many mature economies not just since the crisis, but for several decades. This slowdown in growth has led to lower long-term interest rates. The structural causes of this trend of slowing growth is a subject of controversy among specialists. Demographic and technological developments are mentioned, as are the effects of the financial cycle, which may be out of sync with the business cycles. I do not want to pre-empt this ongoing discussion.

(2016), “Low interest rate environment – an economic, legal and social analysis”, speech at the  University of Applied Sciences of the Deutsche Bundesbank, Hachenburg, 27 October. 5 Brunnermeier, M., Langfield, S., Pagano, M., Reis, R., Van Nieuwerburgh, S., Vayanos, D., (2016), “ESBies:  Safety in Tranches“, ESRB Working Paper Series, No 21, September. 5/5  BIS central bankers' speeches