samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Think of the potential gain of efficiency for a supervisor if he could take advantage of big data and artificial intelligence, for example, to analyse the huge amount of quantitative and qualitative data reported regularly to him as well as weak signals collected in the market. Or if a supervisor could turn his backward looking monitoring tools into predictive processes. Of course, supervisors are just at the beginning of the learning curve and they will clearly face a number of challenges: facing risks inherent to innovative projects, understanding the capabilities and limitations of new technologies, enhancing a modern data culture in supervision, hiring people with new and rare skills. But these challenges must be overcome because the stakes are high. And it is not only a question of efficiency: it also has to do with supervisory credibility. How can a supervisor be in a position to supervise processes based on new technologies if he has no in-depth experience of it? On the contrary, a supervisor who engages in the “suptech journey” gives a clear and positive signal to market players: he is willing to accompany an evolving sector so that supervisory methods can be adapted and remain relevant and consequently, the financial system can remain safe and trustworthy. That is clearly the road that we, at the Banque de France and the ACPR, want to take.

1/6  BIS central bankers' speeches  Balance-sheet-light payment services have so far been the main gateway to the financial sector for Tech firms. From there, Tech firms have an avenue to expand their business further along the value chain, from payment to retail and commercial banking, wealth management and insurance. The Tech firms’ model is based on the unbundling of traditional universal banking into an array of distinct core functions (such as channelling payments, providing financing, sharing risk and allocating capital), which are reassembled in an online platform. In this model, the control of the platform is more strategic than the provision of financial services itself. (B) Among these Tech firms, the Fintech start-ups (also known as simply “Fintechs” with an “s”) and the Bigtechs are likely to have a different impact on financial intermediation. Fintech start-ups have already been a game changer in the financial sector. They have imported a customer-centric culture from the internet industry into the financial sector and they have targeted and called into question many of the long-standing financial rents. However, Fintech start-ups do not have the capital resources to disrupt incumbent banks and their future role is likely to be shaped by two main alternatives: to be acquired by an incumbent bank or to compete on niche segments such as equity crowdfunding or market place lending. It could be different with Bigtechs. The market capitalisation of the GAFA companies – Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple – is 25 times higher than that of the whole Fintech universe.
Some figures indicate that most of the adjustments have now been made, but the picture is not unambiguous. Nevertheless, a recovery is under way, after what must be regarded in many areas, and particularly in Sweden, as a fairly mild  2  BIS Review 15/2003  slowdown. Our forecasts indicate an average GDP growth over the coming years in line with the economy's long-term sustainable rate and resource utilisation is expected to remain largely unchanged over this period. This means that economic activity and the labour market are not expected to put any great pressure on prices and wages at present or in the coming years. There is, of course, a risk that developments will follow completely different paths than those we anticipate in our main scenario. This could in turn entail both upside and downside risks for inflation. The downside risk that concerns us most is connected to international developments. There are problems in the euro area in particular that could lead to a weaker development. The upside risks are mainly linked to domestic price-setting and wage formation. The rise in energy prices pushes up costs in other parts of the economy and can spread. It could also affect expectations and wage demands. We are facing collective wage bargaining rounds in the autumn, which will play a decisive role for the future of the economy.

As of the second quarter of 2012, for those people with a credit report, average debt per person in New Jersey was about $ roughly unchanged over the past several years. Delinquency rates on that debt are high: 8.4 percent of all debt in the state is seriously delinquent, up from 7.4 percent in 2011 and above the national rate of 6.7 percent. So, many New Jersey households are still struggling with their finances. Although there are some recent signs that home prices in the state are starting to firm, nevertheless, the housing crisis continues to take a toll on our homeowners. As of June, 9.3 percent of all mortgage debt in New Jersey was 90-plus days delinquent, three percentage points above the national rate. And that delinquency rate is actually a little higher here in northern New Jersey. National economic conditions The performance of the U.S. economy since the end of the recession in 2009 has been disappointing. Real GDP has grown at an annual rate of just over 2 percent over this period, and it was even slower in the first half of 2012. As a result, employment gains have been modest, unemployment remains above 8 percent – an unacceptably high level – and participation in the jobs market remains depressed. Moreover, about 5 million workers have been unemployed for six months or more.
The solid growth in general, including the inflows of foreign capital and rising investments, was a combined effect of the reform processes in these countries, and the extremely conducive global environment. Low interest rates, liquidity glut, expansion of global trade and global value chains were global features that supported investment growth in the region. Hence, the share of investment in GDP was rising prior to crisis (close to 10 p.p. in 2008 compared to 2000), reaching around 30% of GDP in 2008, well above the rule of thumb benchmark of 25%. Yet, according to the IMF (2016), given the easy pre-crisis funding conditions and low initial capital-labor ratio, “CESEE would have been expected to have much higher rates of capital accumulation than what they actually had”. One reason for this might be that the financial flows fueled consumption as well, thus precluding stronger growth of saving and investment. Chart 1: Share of investments in GDP, in % in constant terms)  Chart 2.

Improvements in fiscal institutions, fiscal rules, public-private partnership, foreign financing partly in the form of grants, improvements in public investment management frameworks are some of the possible “remedies” that might generate improvements in the infrastructure in the CESEE region. 3. SMEs’ investment activity and access to finance  Apart from the needs for investment in infrastructure, as mentioned above, apparently what the region is also in need of are the investments in more technologically advanced and innovative segments, investments that are very often led by SMEs, or start-up companies. In order to grow and to be economically productive, this sector needs stable sources of financing. Without access to finance SMEs are unable to invest, which impairs their capacity to improve productivity, raise competitiveness, promote innovation, generate employment, and contribute to economic growth and development. And the importance of the SMEs sector is continually increasing. According to some studies, majority of enterprises globally are SMEs, accounting for approximately more than a half of private sector employment. In fact, the latest data on SMEs in the EU, as well as some of the countries in the region, confirm the importance of this sector in terms of the number of companies, its share in the total value added, as well as in the total employment. 6  Transition report 2015-2016 “Rebalancing Finance”, European Bank for reconstruction and development.
This suggests that there is room for somewhat stronger growth in the economy without pressures on real resources emerging. The low inflation environment we have witnessed in Norway lately reflects global phenomena and trends. Globalisation, new technology and increased trade among countries are key forces affecting the Norwegian economy, in addition to exchange rate developments. A global financial market Cross-border capital flows have increased considerably in recent decades. Bond markets have moved more in tandem, particularly since the mid-1990s. This also applies to equity markets. Investors are increasingly spreading their investments across countries. They are diversifying risk, and seeking high returns. In parallel, governments, banks and companies are issuing more debt externally. Currency trading has increased markedly since the 1980s. This trend was reversed when the number of currencies was reduced due to the introduction of the euro. Large trading volumes enhance market liquidity. The growth in currency trading reflects an increase in portfolio investment, higher foreign direct investment and growth in world trade. The forward exchange and options market have expanded in recent years. A deeper market reduces transaction costs, and it is easier to find counterparties. This has provided companies with greater scope for hedging against foreign exchange risk. The use of instruments that reduce the risk associated with a floating krone is also increasing in Norway. A considerably larger portion of credit in other countries is now channelled via the bond market. Less risk is being accumulated in banking systems.

However, Japan has also become an important market for Norwegian products. From the considerable deficits of earlier years, trade in traditional goods with Japan has moved into near balance. Strong growth in Asia is probably one of the prominent factors contributing to high oil prices in spite of low growth in the OECD area in recent years. China accounted for close to 50 per cent of growth in world oil consumption in 2002 and 2003. Trade in Asia has stimulated Norwegian shipping. The Chinese economy could continue to expand at a brisk pace for a longer period, which would open a large market that can also be entered by Norwegian enterprises. Norwegian exports to China have increased, but are still limited. Over several years, enterprises in Central European countries have been a source of competition for Norwegian jobs. Integration is also opening new markets and providing new sources of income for Norwegian enterprises. At the same time, tender requirements and the freedom of establishment have increased the competition facing Norwegian industries that were previously sheltered. A steadily larger share of Norway’s consumer goods imports come from China and Central European countries. Growth in imports from China was provided with an additional impetus after China became a member of the World Trade Organization in 2001. Imports from Eastern Europe have also continued to grow. There are many economic agents in Norway that are benefiting from globalisation. Consumers are enjoying lower prices for goods and services.
Policy  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  measures in the U.S., such as QE2, are trying to do just that. Beyond our professional assessment, a successful recovery in the U.S. is good for the world economy. By the same token, Chinese authorities have decided on a gradual path of adjustment to secure enough growth for all the social and economic needs they face. From a macroeconomic standpoint, their policy of exchange rate management is something many EMEs have tried several times, and although I am a firm believer that exchange rate flexibility is crucial for small open economies, it is of course not the general rule and is not be to be applied in all cases and under all circumstances, especially for large low-income economies. Overall, the world needs a sustained recovery in the U.S. and growth in China. The same is valid for EMEs. We need to contribute to the global adjustment, but our main concern must be the welfare of our citizens. Containing the current inflationary pressures is essential to allow for sustainable growth. Delaying monetary policy adjustment may result in more severe adjustments in the future. Also, rebuilding fiscal buffers is important in order to have a more balanced recovery and to be better prepared to conduct macroeconomic policies. Some days ago, the Chilean government announced a timely and relevant fiscal tightening that should contribute to the moderation of aggregate demand. The world is not going through a currency war; neither are EMEs being flooded by liquidity from advanced economies.

Likewise, Malaysia’s currency in circulation (CIC) over GDP of 6.1% is much higher than 3.8% on average in these countries. Over the past three years (2010 – 2012), cheque volume has declined only marginally at an average rate of 0.2% annually and the CIC over GDP remained at 6%. Malaysia has a banking population of 92% of which about 70% are internet banking subscribers. Moreover, the household broadband penetration rate in Malaysia has increased significantly from 32% in 2009 when we introduced the electronic processing of cheques, to 67% as at end-Sept 2013. With the necessary infrastructure in place, it is timely that all Malaysians migrate to electronic payments in our quest to become a high income, high value-added economy by 2020. To nudge the systematic migration to electronic payments, Bank Negara Malaysia has set targets in its Financial Sector Blueprint to reduce the number of cheques processed per annum by half from 204 million in 2012 to 100 million by 2020. At the same time, there are also targets to increase the number of Point-of-Sale terminals from 9 in 2012 to 25 unit per 1,000 inhabitants and to increase electronic payment transactions per capita from 56 in 2012 to 200 by 2020. Only by migrating from cheques and cash to electronic payments, can the country anticipate to achieve further cost savings and efficiency gains. Cost of cheques Although significant improvement has been made in the cheque processing infrastructure, cheque remains an expensive payment instrument to process at about RM3 per cheque.
On the other hand, trying to maintain an artificially depreciated exchange rate, especially in contexts of growing financial integration, can only foster speculation and capital inflows, as it increases expected appreciation. Any exceptional measure must be applied only in extreme circumstances and for a limited period of time, once every other instrument has been reasonably exhausted. References Borensztein, E., O. Jeanne, and D. Sandri (2009). “Macro-Hedging for Commodity Exporters.” CEPR Discussion Paper 7513. Caballero, R.J. (2009). “Sudden Financial Arrest.” Mundell-Fleming Lecture prepared for the IMF 10th Jacques Polack Annual Research Conference. Calvo, G., L. Leiderman, and C. Reinhart (1993). “Capital Inflows and Real Exchange Rate Appreciation in Latin America: The Role of External Factors.” IMF Staff Papers 40: 108–51. Calvo, G., L. Leiderman, and C. Reinhart (1994). “Capital Inflows to Latin America: The 1970s and the 1990s.” In E. Bacha (ed. ), Economics in a Changing World, proceedings of the Tenth World Congress of the International economic Association, Vol. 4, London: McMillan. Cowan, K. and J. De Gregorio (2007). “International Borrowing, Capital Controls and the Exchange Rate: Lessons from Chile.” In S. Edwards (ed. ), Capital Controls and Capital Flows in Emerging Economies: Policies, Practices and Consequences, NBER and The University of Chicago Press. 6  BIS Review 72/2010  De Gregorio, J. and A. Tokman (2005). “El Miedo a Flotar y la Política Cambiaria en Chile.” Economía Chilena 8(3): 29–54. Kamil, H. and B. Sutton (2008). “Corporate Vulnerability: Have Firms Reduced Their Exposure to Currency Risk?” IMF, Regional Economic Outlook, Western Hemisphere, chapter 5, October.

This measured was introduced in June 1991 with a rate of 20% that was raised to 30% in 1992. It was subsequently lowered to 10% in June 1998 and further down to 0% in September of the same year. Empirical evidence indicates that the reserve requirement had a small, short-lived effect on interest rates, probably because agents adjusted their portfolios toward longer maturities and found their way around the measure (Cowan and De Gregorio, 2007). The effect on volumes was also small, around 2% of GDP, with total capital inflows that amounted to nearly 27% of GDP in the period 1991–1997. No material effects have been perceived on the real exchange rate. Where a significant effect did occur was in the composition of total inflows: the share of short-term debt dropped dramatically as a percentage of total debt. However, financial fragility was not completely eliminated. Severe speculative attacks against the peso in 1998 showed that the reserve requirement policy did not isolate the economy from global financial turbulences (figure 9). Lastly, it is possible to contend that the reserve requirement did have significant distributive effects, because large firms continued to access the international bonds market directly to obtain long-term funding, while smaller firms could only access short-term banking loans, which were made more costly due to the reserve requirement.
The natural rate of interest (R*)  The second concept of the interest rate I want to look at today is the natural interest rate. The natural rate of interest is quite an old concept, first posited by Knut Wicksell at the end of the 19  th  Century as the rate of interest at any given time that keeps the price level stable. Wicksell argued that if the market rate exceeded the natural rate, prices would fall; if it fell below, prices would rise. The economics discipline then went on an intellectual journey over the 20  th  Century, first largely abandoning the natural rate  concept in favour of Keynes’ advocacy of fiscal policy for demand management and then returning to monetary policy, albeit in the form of the famous quantity theory of money. By the start of the 1990s, however, the difficulties of targeting the growth in monetary aggregates were clear and central banks turned to interest rates as the principle instruments of policy. Nowadays, we tend to think of the natural rate not so much as the rate that would hold prices stable at any given time but, given frictions in the economy and lags in the impact of monetary policy, as the interest rate that will close the output gap over the monetary policy horizon. However, unlike the trend real rate, the natural rate is a shorter-term concept.

Speeches 31 Oct 2022  Opening Keynote at the Hong Kong FinTech Week 2022 Eddie Yue, Chief Executive, Hong Kong Monetary Authority Innovation in action - looking back to look forward Introduction 1. Good morning, everyone. A very warm welcome to Hong Kong FinTech Week. 2. This is an exciting week for Hong Kong. For the first time in three years, we are welcoming many of our overseas friends to Hong Kong again for this Fintech Week and also the Global Financial Leaders’ Investment Summit and Rugby Sevens after that. This marks the beginning of our path back to normality, and all visitors can see and feel the vibrancy and dynamism of our city. 3. Part of this dynamism comes from the fast-growing fintech ecosystem in Hong Kong. Innovative fintech firms are exploring ways to drive the momentum towards an even more tech-enabled financial industry. Many are looking at how to make use of the fastevolving blockchain protocols to create products or services through crypto, stablecoins, NFTs, DeFi and the metaverse. 4. Some financial institutions are already using elements of the metaverse for brandbuilding and customer education; and it will be fascinating to see whether and to what extent the metaverse can form a new landscape for real-world financial activities one day. I hope the opening you just saw illustrates how the metaverse can mirror – and even improve on – reality. For example, my avatar definitely looks cooler, and is obviously a much better table tennis player than the real me. Looking Back 5.
However, it is not entirely clear what we mean by resource utilisation. We use a broad approach to describe resource utilisation and make an overall assessment based on a number of different measures. Some measures are based on GDP, employment, the number of hours worked and unemployment related to a normal or sustainable level. For example, GDP is related to potential GDP and unemployment to a sustainable level. Other measures are based on business tendency surveys and other high-frequency data. But no forecasts are made for these. Uncertainty is not reported for any of these measures in the same way as for GDP growth and inflation, either at the starting point or during the forecast period. We should be clearer about what we mean by resource utilisation. As things stand now, there is no unanimous agreement among the Executive Board regarding how to define resource utilisation as a target variable. Of course, it is an undesirable situation that something as important as a target variable for monetary policy is not clearly defined. It should not be a question for individual Executive Board members to determine the objective for monetary policy; it should be a question for the Riksbank as an institution, or even for the Government and Parliament. I believe that we should use the GDP gap as the main measure of resource utilisation.

It would be less of a problem if things turned out better than we were expecting than if they turned out worse.3 At the National Institute of Economic Research Professor Lars-Erik Öller and others systematically analysed the forecasting performance of the institute itself and others, with regard to both Sweden and other countries.4 The results showed that the forecasting errors for GDP growth and inflation were large, but that the forecasts in the autumn for the coming year were nevertheless better than simple (naïve) forecasts, such as using the average of earlier years as a forecast. The studies showed that there was a certain forecasting ability up  1  Catch-22 is a novel by Joseph Heller first published in 1961. 2  Ministry of Finance, Long-term surveys 1990, main report, SOU 1990:14, 1990. 3  Ministry of Finance, “Convergence programme for Sweden”, June 1995. 4  L.-E. Öller and B. Barot, “The accuracy of European growth and inflation forecasts”, International Journal of Forecasting 16, pp. 293–315, 2000. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  to one year ahead, but no further than that. The same limitations have also been noted in many other studies, both in Sweden and abroad. After these experiences I came to the Riksbank, where monetary policy is to a large extent based on forecasts several years ahead. It wasn’t very easy dealing with this task, given my previous experiences.