samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
We are building a system that will be flexible to protect against the threats we understand today and the ones we will need to withstand in the future. The renewed service will provide a platform for private sector innovation and one which can respond to and shape a fast changing environment. We will harness leading edge technology to deliver this, coupled with changes to our policies to support growth and resilience. Key features will include:   The renewed service will have a flexible and modular architecture, making it easier to change components of the service or add new components. This will enable us to respond quickly to market changes and continued innovation in payment technologies both from new fintechs and established players. Ultimately, we want to future-proof RTGS to interface with firms and technology that may not exist today.   The renewed service will not be built on a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) but firms who use DLT will be able to connect to the service. We have completed a Proof of Concept to understand 4  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  4  whether our renewed service could be capable of supporting settlement in systems operating on innovative payment technologies. The punchline was that it could. We continue to engage with fintech firms to maintain our understanding of technology developments.

It is usually considered desirable to have not only stable prices, but also as stable an economy as possible. One important question is therefore how monetary policy can contribute to this. The preliminary work to the new Sveriges Riksbank Act considered it natural that monetary policy could not be formulated merely in relation to price stability. The working group that produced the new act considered that the Riksbank should, without neglecting the long-term price stability objective, support the economic policy objectives of sustainable growth and high employment. However, the group also saw this as a natural consequence of the Riksbank being a public authority under the Riksdag. It was thus unnecessary to confirm by law any objectives other than price stability. The group also considered that it would be inappropriate to have several statutory objectives, as monetary policy is a blunt instrument and cannot affect, for instance, how growth and employment develop in the long term. In other words, the question has never been whether monetary policy should consider the real economy, but rather how this can best be done without neglecting the price stability objective. In practice, monetary policy takes the real economy into account in that we do not aim to bring inflation back on target as quickly as possible in every situation. When there is a deviation from target – which happens most of the time – our ambition is normally to return inflation to target within a time period of two years.
Mr Bäckström: The current situation for monetary policy in Sweden  Speech by Mr Urban Bäckström, Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank and Chairman of the Board of Directors and President of the Bank for International Settlements, before the Standing Committee on Finance, Stockholm, on 23 March 2000. *  *  *  In my opening remarks to your Committee six months ago I noted that the Swedish economy was developing impressively. Growth was stronger than many had counted on and inflationary pressure was moderate. New jobs were being created and unemployment was falling. Since then the economy has definitely continued to impress. Forecasters have had occasion to revise their assessments of activity successively upwards. GDP growth in 1999 amounted to 3.8% and the number of new jobs totalled almost 90,000 - the highest figure in thirty years. This has been accompanied by surpluses on the current account and government finances. Moreover, the upward revisions refer mainly to growth and employment. Forecast inflation has not been adjusted upwards to the same extent, which is a testimony to the good circle at present in the Swedish economy. Inflation in the past three years Measured in terms of the consumer price index (CPI), inflation has in fact been exceptionally low for three years; the average annual level has been 0.5%. This level for the period as a whole is made up of CPI increases of 0.9% for 1997, 0.4% for 1998 and 0.3% for 1999.

This could lead to higher growth being feasible for longer without inflation taking off. There are arguments in favour of each of these explanations but the empirical support is not clear-cut. The issue of potential growth and higher productivity has recently attracted particular attention in the light of economic developments in the United States, for example. Productivity growth in Sweden has improved but we do not yet have any notable evidence that potential growth has risen as it has in the American economy. An expected increase in trend productivity can also affect components of demand. The prospect of higher corporate profits leads to higher share prices for listed companies. Besides prompting companies to step up investment and improving the supply of venture capital, the appreciation of shareholdings may make households feel more wealthy and stimulate consumer demand. The strong upward stock market trend in Stockholm in recent years may be a sign that players have incorporated expectations that economic growth in Sweden will be appreciably higher than earlier. The relative paths of supply and demand in the Swedish economy and the development of the inflation propensity are obviously central issues in the assessment of inflation. If supply and demand develop at the same rate, no inflationary pressure will build up. This is what seems to have happened for a time in the United States. But there is, of course, a risk of one of them predominating and that would alter the conclusions for monetary policy.
Even if it does not provide guidance in all circumstances, I hope it can help explain why I voted for a 25bp hike – rather than something larger – last week. With that provocation, allow me to open up to questions. 14  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  14  References Blanchard, O. and J. Galí (2007). ‘Real wage rigidities and the new Keynesian model,’ Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 39 (1), pp. 35–65. Blinder, A.S. (1998). Central banking in theory and practice, MIT Press. Brainard, W. (1967). ‘Uncertainty and the effectiveness of policy,’ American Economic Review 57(2), pp. 411-425. Carney, M. (2017). ‘Lambda,’ speech given at the London School of Economics, 16 January. Cunliffe, J. (2018). ‘A little bit of stodginess?’ speech given at Cumbria Chambers of Commerce, 13 July. Currie, D.A. (1985). ‘Macroeconomic policy design and control theory – A failed partnership?’ Economic Journal 95(378), pp. 285-306. Evans, C.L., J.D.M. Fisher, F. Gourio and S. Krane (2015). ‘Risk management for monetary policy near the zero lower bound,’ Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Spring), pp. 141-196. Gerdesmeier, D. and B. Roffia (2004). ‘Taylor rules for the euro area: The issue of real time data,’ Bundesbank Discussion Paper 2004/37. Greenspan, A. (1994). ‘Risk and uncertainty in monetary policy,’ American Economic Review 94(2), pp. 3340. Haldane, A.G. (1995). Targeting inflation: A conference of central banks on the use of inflation targets, Bank of England. Issing, O. (2002). ‘Monetary policy in a world of uncertainty,’ Economie Internationale 92, pp. 165-179. King, M.A. (1999).

I don’t have the time to survey that literature here today.7 But I will summarise a few points that I think are relevant both to my own remarks, and to the current conjuncture. Much of the analytical discussion has taken place with a framework that casts monetary policy strategy in the form of a control problem.8 Within a system that defines the behaviour of the economy, policymakers seek to minimise the social costs arising from the departure of inflation, employment and economic activity from their efficient levels, using the short-term interest rate (and potentially other monetary policy instruments) as a control variable. This is monetary policy as engineering. That cannot be an adequate or complete characterisation of the challenges the MPC faces. But it can help clarify and codify how to think about some of the important conceptual issues surrounding monetary policy decisions in the face of uncertainty. Characterising monetary policy as a control problem has a long history. It achieved renewed prominence as the academic literature sought to formalise and evaluate inflation targeting strategies, once they were introduced by central banks from the early 1990s.9 Since the UK was in the vanguard of these developments, unsurprisingly the Bank of England – in part, through the efforts of many attendees of today’s conference – contributed richly to that research programme.10  A common starting point was the standard new Keynesian macroeconomic model.
The types of misuse of statistics listed by Wikipedia are as follows:  2  BIS Review 36/2009  •  First, the statistician may discard the unfavourable data and make use only what is favourable for him to prove his point. •  Second, in field surveys, the statistician may ask loaded questions in order to elicit an answer of his choice. •  Third, the statistician may tend to over-generalise facts and make wrong conclusions. •  Fourth, the samples used may be biased. •  Fifth, the causality outlined may be fallacious. •  Sixth, the data may have been manipulated in order to show a result favourable to some interested party. •  Seventh, data may be dredged or mined in order to find a correlation that would not be there. How to gain credibility for statistics? All these instances of the misuse of statistics make the statistics less reliable and suspicious. The governmental statistical agencies throughout the globe are criticised by public on this ground. Once the organisations lose credibility regarding the compilation of statistics, it would be very hard to regain trust and confidence of users. The statistical bureaus run by former Soviet Union and its satellite states have been subject to this criticism. The way to avoid this criticism is to adopt global best practices with regard to compilation and dissemination of statistics. It requires countries to adopt a code of ethics and practices when it comes to dissemination of information.

Further, the issue of a parallel currency market existing among the cross border traders between the two countries point to the need to strengthen bilateral trade between our countries and put in place payment systems that should promote this trade based on the exchange of the two local currencies. In this regard, this agreement is critical to facilitate better trade between our sister countries. Your Excellency, there are, however, challenges associated with the currency of one country circulating in another country and these need careful scrutiny and handling. These include vices such as counterfeiting and facilitating illegal trade as well as enhancing cross border money laundering activities. Moreover, to us as monetary authorities, cross-border local currency circulation creates the potential of complicating the conduct of monetary policy, especially if a significant amount of the country’s domestic currency is being used outside the jurisdiction. For us who target monetary aggregates, this may lead to implementation of inappropriate monetary policy decisions which may adversely affect the real economy. Currency repatriation is critical as it will allow us adjust the currency in circulation, a key component of reserve money, which is the intermediate target in our monetary policy operations. We are therefore looking forward to the implementation of the agreement we are signing today to facilitate currency repatriation between our two Central Banks. I am therefore, very pleased that the long months of discussions between the Banco de Mozambique and the Bank of Zambia have resulted in the mutual agreement to repatriate both the Meticais and Kwacha.
However, as such cross-border operations become more common and complex, there is also the need to ensure the financial stability and integrity of each domestic market, and that the  2  McKinsey & Company: The World Islamic Banking Competitiveness Report 2007-08. BIS Review 63/2008  3  protection of its consumers and investors are not compromised. As several regulators on our IFSB Board have commented, risk management and prudential management cannot be compromised if we wish to have healthy growth and to avoid crisis. In this regard, the cooperation of supervisors is very important. 3rd task: promoting greater cooperation Beyond economic integration and supervisory cooperation, the third essential task is what I would call the “soft” or “people” aspect. It may seem tangential to talk about this when we are looking at technical issues of accounting, regulations and capital adequacy, but all cooperation depends on trust. Without trust, we cannot work together. But trust cannot be built overnight. Trust is developed over time in the face of challenges. There is an old saying that you know how good a horse is only after you have traveled with it over long journeys. At the highest level, we need strong political ties to promote integration between the Middle East and Asia. In this regard, I am glad to see numerous visits have taken place between the leaders of Middle East and Asia in recent years.

This includes the visit of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to four Asian countries in 2006 and several meetings between King Abdullah II of Jordan and Singapore’s President and Prime Minister, to name just a few. I am happy that frequent dialogue and cooperation are taking place at all levels, via platforms such as the Asia-Middle East Dialogues or AMED. AMED was first held in 2005 in Singapore, and Egypt recently hosted the 2008 meeting. The 2008 meeting involved a total of about 50 countries from the Middle East and Asia. I am also happy to see strong cooperation in training. The Islamic Development Bank’s IRTI 3 , Bahrain’s BIBF 4 and Malaysia’s INCEIF 5 are Islamic finance-focused training institutes which provide very good training in this area. Such training programmes, besides imparting knowledge, enable people to know each other better, and provide the basis for future cooperation. Conclusion To conclude, let me summarise. There are three essential tasks we face in promoting greater integration of Islamic financial markets. The first is to encourage greater economic integration and increased cross border flow of trade and investments. Economic integration drives financial integration and vice versa. The second task is to foster appropriate legal, regulatory and supervisory frameworks that effectively cater for the specificities of the Islamic services providers; and to work towards greater convergence of rules and practices in Islamic Finance. This requires greater trust and stronger ties among supervisors. The third is to cultivate stronger people-to-people bonds across all levels, through training, conference and dialogues.
These are encouraging developments, which show that past labour market reforms, immigration and wage moderation have helped to overcome some of the constraints on growth stemming from rigid and over-regulated labour markets. However, despite this progress, we are still a long way from having exhausted the potential for further increases in participation rates and employment. The overall employment rate in the euro area remains low by international standards [65.6% in the euro area compared with 72% in the United States, 4 and the unemployment rate is still clearly too high [7.2% compared with 5.0% in the United States at the end of 2007]. 5 More specifically, while the prime-age male employment rate in the euro area is comparable to that observed in the United States, considerable disparities remain when we look at youth, female and older worker employment rates. [For instance, in 2007 the female employment rate was 57.9% in the euro area compared with 66.1% in the United States, the older workers employment rate was 43.6% compared with 61.8% in the United States, and the youth employment rate was 38% as compared with 54.2% in the United States]. These features of the euro area, which incidentally – are broadly shared by the Spanish labour market, appear to be consistent with an “insider-outsider” characterisation of the European labour market, where structural impediments, triggered by the legal and regulatory environment, high taxes on labour and rigidities associated with wage regulations may prevent those groups “at the margin” from actively participating in the labour market.

A reference to the letter appeared in Skidelsky, R. John Maynard Keynes Volume 1: Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920, Macmillan, London, 1983, page 280. The official attendance on 13 September was 38,575; the Villa scorer was the incomparable Clem Stephenson, who may have lacked pace but whose passes were, according to contemporary observers, “as sweet as stolen kisses”; and the ‘most expensive’ right winger for Blackburn Rovers was John “Jocky” Simpson who cost Blackburn a record fee of £ when he was transferred from Falkirk in 1911. BIS Review 5/2004  1  do those prices come from? Each month - on “Index Day” (either the second or third Tuesday of the month) - around 300 “price collectors” visit a wide range of retail outlets and record the prices charged for 130,000 different items, ranging from small loaves of brown bread to large lawnmowers. Each of these different items will have changed in price by a different amount. A key difference between the CPI and RPIX is how these 130,000 price changes are averaged to give a measure of overall inflation. RPIX inflation is, for most goods, an arithmetic average of the inflation rates for each item. In contrast, CPI inflation is measured as the increase in the geometric average (the average of the logarithms) of the different prices.
Ladies and gentlemen, The significant importance of “credit reporting” is widely recognized today, particularly in assessing borrowers’ credit risk, reducing loan defaults and expanding access to bank financing. Experience has shown that countries with credit bureaus have been able to address the problem of “asymmetric information” and substantially improve the quality of credit institutions’ portfolio. However, the recent crisis has highlighted the limited knowledge of counterparties’ real health and revealed the pressing need for more granular, interconnected and flexible statistics. For central banks and supervisors, this need is creating a new paradigm for monitoring and evaluating financial stability, based on an integrated infrastructure of credit information sharing. This infrastructure is based on two core pillars:    the first is a “credit bureau” system that helps credit institutions to assess risks; and the second is a “central credit registry” managed by central banks for their institutional functions. Ladies and gentlemen, Let me give you a brief overview of the steps that Bank Al-Maghrib has undertaken over the last ten years to develop its financial information system and enhance its convergence towards international standards. In close cooperation with the IFC, the Bank put into operation in 2009, under the first pillar, the 1st Credit Bureau. This was a decisive step towards the establishment of a modern and state-ofthe-art credit reporting infrastructure. Indeed, the credit bureau has become an essential tool for lending decisions for individuals, businesses and micro-credit associations.

These topics are of particular importance in the current context in which our economies are undergoing significant changes in the credit market as well as in the behavior of consumers and borrowers. Therefore, it is essential to upgrade financial infrastructures, which constitute a central element in the credit risk management system, in order to accompany these changes and help us to meet the challenges we face. Before concluding, I would like to emphasize the invaluable opportunities that the new information technologies can offer us in terms of data sharing, collection and storage. But they also involve major challenges, particularly in terms of cyber security and personal data protection. I wish you a successful and fruitful meeting, and hope that you can combine business with pleasure and allow yourself some time to discover the millennial richness of Rabat, this imperial city which was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site on June 29, 2012. Thank you for your attention. 3
In a broad sense a need for greater transparency was recognised in relation to public policy, to the relationship between the public and private sectors, to corporate governance and accounting and so on. In a narrower sense there was seen to be a need for greater and more timely disclosure of financial information generally, but especially in relation to countries’ true foreign exchange reserve positions and in relation to their short term external debt. The general point is that we cannot reasonably expect markets to make a proper assessment of the risks of their lending if they do not have adequate information in accessible form. The corollary is that where they do have adequate information they can be expected to accept the penalty if their judgements prove ill-founded. The second condition for more stable capital flows is stronger financial systems. That includes for example the broadening of capital markets so that the allocation of capital is less concentrated on local banking systems. It includes robust financial infrastructure - for example payments and settlements systems. And it includes more effective financial regulation and supervision. A key feature of future arrangements for me in this area is the encouragement of more active management of short-term foreign currency assets relative to liabilities, by both the public BIS Review 36/1998  -6-  sector and the local banks, taking account of the nature of the exchange rate regime. weaknesses in this area, above all, in my view that turned the Asian problem into a panic.

And that is not just in relation to international trade. Domestic deregulation is increasingly in vogue in many countries; and there is much greater openness around the world to inward investment and foreign ownership. I see the same presumption in favour of competition, for example, in the global trend to privatisation, through which governments have increasingly returned commercial activities, in which they have no necessary comparative advantage, to the market sector. At the same time, against the background of financial globalisation, attention has in the past few years increasingly focused on removing restrictions on the free flow of capital again domestically and internationally - essentially on the grounds that this can further improve the effective allocation of productive resources, increasing the benefits to be derived from competition in markets for goods and services. The IMF is in fact currently working on an amendment to its Articles of Agreement to give it a greater role in promoting the liberalisation of external capital movements. BIS Review 36/1998  -3-  Of course, it remains true that market competition, and the supply capacity of the economy more generally, are inevitably influenced by virtually every other aspect of public policy, and will be affected to varying degrees by the particular social and economic judgements made by national politicians. This is true whether one is talking about direct public sector provision - of education and training, for example, or incentives to saving and investment, or current or prospective welfare provision, or the structure of taxation.