samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
There is a much broader agenda to ensure that the availability of payments data can meet the demands of the modern financial system. Payment systems were originally developed in different jurisdictions to meet the needs of the users at the time, with little focus on interoperability or future-proofing. In the UK, as in many countries, the data standards developed piecemeal as the payment and underlying technology systems developed. The historical challenge of transmitting a file of a certain size with the computing power available a quarter of a century ago has left many of us, including the UK, with a legacy of only being able to gather and hold a very limited amount of information in a payment message. In the most widely used current payment message, Swift MT, the remittance field is just 4 unstructured lines of 35 characters. Without a structure to the payment message or even the possibility of including the full information, the additional information often included in a message, cannot be easily signposted or transmitted. To give one very important illustration, the critical activity of AML checks become trickier to achieve and more false positives are flagged, increasing global payment costs and delays for end-users like corporates and small businesses that they have to pass on. It is often difficult if not impossible to quickly ascertain the ‘purpose’ of a payment.

Page 1  Message received and understood − speech by Dave Ramsden Given remotely at a conference by the Lietuvos bankas and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) on the “Future of Central Banking”  Page 2  Published on 29 September 2022  Speech Introduction Thank you very much for the invitation to join this panel today and I am very sorry I can’t be with you in Vilnius. Real-time market developments kept me here in London, but I’m grateful to the organisers from the Central Bank of Lithuania and from the BIS for allowing me to contribute virtually to the Bank’s 100th birthday conference. I really welcome the focus of this panel on data since having access to fast, accurate, appropriately structured data is critical in equipping central banks with the knowledge they need to function in order to meet their objectives. The Bank of England’s mission to deliver monetary and financial stability is a broad and deep one. We need a similarly broad pool of data of varying depths to fulfil our mission. In 15 minutes I cannot hope to do justice to the variety of data we need to get a clear picture of the economy, the financial system as a whole and the firms we regulate in order to frame action. Last year the Bank and PRA published our data strategy, joint with the FSA, setting out how we will transform our collection and use of data to fulfil our responsibilities as a supervisor and regulator[1].
Our first data analysis PoC, undertaken with Privitar, looked at ways to desensitise mortgage data collected by the Bank so they could be shared more widely and used alongside other more aggregated data to draw conclusions about developments in the financial system as a whole. Another PoC, with Enforcd, examined tools allowing the Bank’s legal team to draw out common trends in publically available regulatory enforcement actions in order to inform their own work. The third PoC worked with Experimentus ORB to visualise the performance of internal Bank projects against a range of performance metrics. And our fourth PoC, which we are announcing today will be done with NTT Data and Reportix, will explore ways of storing, 7  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  7  organising and combining the Bank’s regulatory and analytical data in a more flexible or ‘multi-dimensional’ way based on the XBRL standard, rather than the current ‘form-centric’ (or tabular) format. Although on the face of it a rather dry and technical issue, improving the storage of data in this way would allow us to make broader connections between data sets, help analyse and visualise trends in new and innovative ways, and make it faster and easier to implement new XRBRL-based taxonomies in the future, without having to reformat all of our databases.

And those four driving forces I mentioned at the start – the economic pressures on traditional business models, sharply-reduced technology barriers to entry, changing consumer preferences and pro-competition regulation – will only intensify the pace of change in the years 11  ahead. So what are the challenges? I would pick out two . First, customer acquisition is hard! Households and firms are loyal to their traditional suppliers: they will only switch if the offering is genuinely innovative, not just a good-looking piece of marketing. Similar considerations apply to central banking applications. Second, widespread adoption also requires attention to those two traditional characteristics of successful financial systems: scaleability and resilience. It is striking how much our conversations with leading firms have increasingly turned to these issues, even over the short period we have been running our Accelerator project. These topics are dear to central bankers’ hearts, and will play a central role in shaping the next stage in our engagement with FinTech. I look forward to our conversation today. 11  For a similar perspective, see also the most recent World Economic Forum report on FinTech: https://www.weforum.org/reports/beyond-fintech-a-pragmatic-assessment-of-disruptive-potential-in-financial-services.
We will conduct a review of the effectiveness and the potential side effects of the monetary policy toolkit developed over the past decade. Finally, the review will include an examination of directions in which the economic and monetary analyses through which the ECB assesses the risks to price stability could be enhanced, as well as an evaluation of our communication practices. Our strategy review will have a long-term perspective, with the aim to build an efficient and lasting framework. It will not interfere with our meeting-by-meeting policy agenda, in which we will continue to set policy as appropriate given the evolving outlook. Our reaction function is clear and entirely data-driven. As we said after our last monetary policy deliberations, “the Governing Council continues to stand ready to adjust all of its instruments, as appropriate, to ensure that inflation moves towards its aim in a sustained manner, in line with its commitment to symmetry”. 3/3  BIS central bankers' speeches

In fact, I would only like to reinforce the conclusion you have no doubt arrived at – that you made a good choice when you invested in your further education. In 1987, when Robert Solow was awarded Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions to the theory of long-term economic growth, it was already clear that his model of long-term economic growth had certain shortcomings in its description of reality. On the one hand, this is by no means unexpected, as all economic models suffer from a similar syndrome to a certain degree. On the other hand, the causes of the empirical problems surrounding Solow’s model are very inspiring from our point of view. The whole issue revolves around determining to what extent long-term economic growth is aided by human labour and capital measured as the sum of all previous investments that are still in use. In practical calculations, the contribution of human labour is always simplified as the ratio of wages paid to output. This ratio is about two-thirds for the developed world. Therefore, two-thirds of output in developed countries are used to remunerate labour and the remaining one-third to remunerate capital. Problems occur if the contributions of human labour and capital calculated in this way are applied to two countries at a different level of development. In such cases, there is a significant degree of divergence between the characteristics of these economies observed in reality and predicted by the model.
If the first part of the 19th century had seen substitution effects dominate, the latter half saw compensation effects in the ascendancy. Moving into the 20th century, and the third industrial revolution, these emerging patterns in jobs and wages have become clearer. Technology appears to be resulting in faster, wider and deeper degrees of hollowing-out than in the past. Why? Because 20th century machines have substituted not just for manual human tasks, but cognitive ones too. The set of human skills machines could reproduce, at lower cost, has both widened and deepened. Chart 22 shows the employment pattern in the UK over recent years, ranking professions’ skills by their average pay, while Chart 23 shows the picture for a set of countries over a similar period. They tell a striking and consistent story of mid-skill jobs being lost, counterbalanced by employment gains at the high-skill and, to lesser extent, low-skill segments of the workforce. The U-shape, or “hollowing out”, has deepened and widened. What has happened to these displaced mid-skill workers? Some appear to have “skilled-up”, typically through higher or further education. In the UK, total numbers in higher education have increased from around 130,000 in 1970 to over 2 million today. In the US, total numbers in higher education have increased from 2.4 million just after the Second World War, to over 20 million today. As in the late 19th century, this skilling-up has enabled workers to keep one-step-ahead of the machine. But some displaced workers have not been on the up-escalator.

Risks to the outlook for price developments are broadly balanced. Upside risks over the medium term relate, in particular, to the evolution of commodity prices. Furthermore, increases in indirect taxation and administered prices may be greater than currently expected, owing to the need for fiscal consolidation in the coming years. At the same time, risks to domestic price and cost developments are contained. Overall, the Governing Council will monitor closely the future evolution of all available price indicators. Turning to the monetary analysis, the annual growth rate of M3 was unchanged at –0.1% in April 2010. The annual growth rate of loans to the private sector increased somewhat further and turned positive, but remained weak at 0.1%. Together, these data continue to support the assessment that the underlying pace of monetary expansion is moderate and that inflationary pressures over the medium term are contained. Shorter-term developments in M3 and loans have remained volatile and, given the renewed tensions in some financial market segments, volatility in M3 and its components may well continue. The actual growth in M3 continues to understate the underlying pace of monetary expansion, but the downward impact of the rather steep yield curve and the associated allocation of funds to longer-term deposits and securities outside M3 appear to be gradually waning. The same holds for the shifts within M3 that have been observed as a response to the narrow spreads between the interest rates paid on different M3 instruments. At 10.7%, annual M1 growth is still very strong.
We must look at the institutions active in the financial markets; monitor how borrowers and other operators who could affect the banks behave and how the infrastructure supporting the financial system functions. It is difficult to determine which problems could constitute a threat to the system. Let me take the IT bubble in 1999 and 2000 as an example. If the banks had financed the many newly-started IT companies, they would have been hard hit when the air went out of this market. This would in turn have had repercussions for the real economy. However, it was not the banks who acted as venture capitalists here. This meant that the risk of shocks in the economy as a whole was less. Another example is what happened at Barings Bank a few years ago, when one of their foreign exchange traders speculated and lost around SEK 10 billion. The Bank of England refrained from intervention and did not provide the bank with any support, although a major bank was suffering serious problems that eventually caused its failure. This is because Barings’ problems were not expected to have any serious repercussions for the system as a whole and thus were not a stability issue. As in other sectors, bankruptcies do occur. This is normal and also important for market discipline.

Hopefully, the report can contribute to a well-informed debate on the stability of the Swedish financial system and influence those participating in the system. The Riksbank can also use the Financial Stability Report to show how we work to achieve the objectives the Riksdag has set us. The layout of the report provides a good insight into the way we work. It begins with a review of international events, describing growth and prices in the financial markets and on various assets. In this context, the analyses and assessments of developments outside the Swedish borders play an increasing role, in line with the ongoing internationalisation process. After describing the environment in which the banks and their borrowers operate, we devote a chapter to a survey of how the borrowers - households and firms - have been affected. What is the level of indebtedness and the ability to service debts? Are there any risks entailed in their actions? If things go well for the banks’ borrowers, they normally go well for the banks. Developments over the past five years, with the Swedish banks increasingly investing abroad, have meant that a substantial percentage of their borrowers are in other countries - mainly in the Baltic region. This means that our analyses cannot focus exclusively on Sweden; we must also take into account developments in, for instance, neighbouring Nordic countries. The banks own actions can also affect the stability of the payment system. What strategic choices do the banks make?
Now, the last point I would like to comment on in a little more detail is an issue the Speaker 2/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  has already raised, and one we are very concerned about. This is the issue of stock market development. This market is undergoing drastic and rapid changes. Retail investment is becoming a mass phenomenon, with the numbers of retail investors growing very rapidly. In two years alone, the number of individuals who opened brokerage accounts rose more than fourfold to 8.5 million people (equalling the number of accounts). This is a positive development, which we all acknowledge, and the real sector is poised to benefit from it. Still, our concern is about people. Do they really understand the risks of the stock market? Is there enough transparency in the operations of financial institutions and their offerings? It was only deposits that consumers dealt with until recently. The deposit is a fairly simple and reliable product with up to 1.4m insurance coverage. At this juncture, however, deposit interest rates are in decline, as are other interest rates in the economy, including loan rates, which makes people try their hand at the stock market. With many of them being inexperienced, we can ill afford a stock market that has deceived their expectations. We have passed a non-qualified investor protection law, which we previously had a thorough discussion about at the Federation Council.

The banking system’s claims on companies are forecast to increase by 7–11% this year, and those on households — by 14–18%, largely as a result of the accelerated expansion of mortgage lending. As regards fluctuations in banking sector liquidity observed in recent months, they had no impact on monetary conditions. As before, the Bank of Russia preserved money market rates close to the key rate. This became possible owing to the streamlined operational procedure which is efficient amid both a deficit and a surplus of liquidity. Today, we have published the Bank of Russia’s updated baseline forecast. It relies on the following assumptions: First of all, external conditions have become more promising. The global economy is expected to grow faster owing to mass vaccination and additional fiscal stimuli in advanced economies. This will strengthen external demand for Russian exports. Therefore, we have increased our forecast of oil prices from 45 to 50 US dollars per barrel for 2021 and 2022. Nonetheless, our forecast remains conservative given the high uncertainty about a potential further spread of the pandemic. According to our estimates, a faster recovery of the demand for oil may translate to a greater extent into a rise in oil output rather than oil prices. 2/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  As regards the 2022–2023 horizon, our forecast remains unchanged. The economy will expand by 2.5–3.5% in 2022 and by 2–3% in 2023.
The inflation target provides economic agents with an anchor for their decisions concerning saving, investment, budgets and wages. Households, businesses, public entities, employees and employers can base decisions on the assumption that inflation in Norway will be 2½ per cent over time. The inflation target is a vehicle for allowing monetary policy to stabilise developments in output and employment. This intention is also expressed in the Regulation on Monetary Policy. High demand for goods and services and labour shortages normally point to higher inflation. When interest rates are increased, demand falls and inflation is kept at bay. When demand is low and unemployment rises, inflation will tend to slow. Interest rates will then be reduced. The mandate implies that the interest rate must be adapted to the outlook for the Norwegian economy. If it appears that inflation will be higher than 2½ per cent with unchanged interest rates, the interest rate will be increased. If it appears that inflation will be lower than 2½ per cent with unchanged interest rates, the interest rate will be reduced. This orientation of monetary policy will normally also contribute to stabilising output and employment. The impact of monetary policy occurs with considerable and variable lags. The current inflation rate does not therefore provide sufficient information to determine the level at which interest rates should be set now. Our analyses indicate that a substantial share of the effects of an interest rate change will occur within two years. Two years is thus a reasonable time horizon for achieving the inflation target.

In 1997 and 1998 the economy shifted from an upturn with high growth rates to an expansion with lower growth but low unemployment, labour shortages in many sectors and strong growth in labour costs. The period of strong expansion has ebbed away in the course of the past year. Winter 2002 marked the turnaround in the Norwegian economy. Growth in the mainland economy is now lower. Unemployment is approaching the average for the 1990s. Industrial leaders are pessimistic. Companies report a decline in production, employment and orders for both the export and domestic markets. Many companies have relocated or have plans to relocate all or some of their production operations abroad. In particular, enterprises producing capital goods are experiencing problems. The number of bankruptcies has increased sharply. The number of bankruptcy petitions is the highest in nine years. If we disregard personal bankruptcies, there has been an increase of 32 per cent from the first quarter of 2002 to the first quarter of 2003 - 200 more than a year ago. The largest increase in the first quarter is in retail trade and the property management and commercial services sector, while manufacturing and the construction sector accounted for the largest increase in the previous quarter. The number of bankruptcies increased in all counties compared with 2002, with the sharpest increase in Hordaland, Buskerud and Oslo (161, 111 and 18 per cent respectively from 2001 to 2002). Oslo accounted for most bankruptcy petitions, with 249 in the first quarter.
But adjusting the level of the inflation target to the structural underlying trends that for the moment are influencing the economy does not seem like a good idea. A related and equally important circumstance is that even if globalisation and digitisation can subdue inflation, this does not mean that they determine inflation – and transform the central banks into passive onlookers, without any opportunity to influence inflation over time. In practice, the central bank has the possibility to try to estimate how much digitisation and globalisation will dampen inflation and to compensate for this. This is what central banks with an inflation target do now. It is not always an easy task, I will admit, as knowledge of the quantitative effects of digitisation and globalisation is so far fairly limited. This also means that a monetary policy that tries to compensate for the effects of these trends on inflation will not always be right, but will sometimes compensate too much and sometimes too little. However, digitisation and globalisation are not different in this aspect from other factors that affect the economy and that the central bank must try to take into account. My point is that structural trends that put downward pressure on inflation during a period of time do not necessarily mean that actual inflation will be permanently lower than the national authorities intend it to be on average.

This is well exemplified by the recent emphasis on the need for regular stress testing to understand the effects of shocks on the solvency of individual banks, the stability of the entire financial system, the broader economy and, more importantly, the feedback effects. The roles of granular statistics and sound stress testing methodologies have become vital. While the recent global financial crisis has necessitated a substantial policy focus to address short-term challenges, policymakers also need to keep sight of the economy’s long-term vision. Continuous structural reforms are needed to strengthen fundamentals and improve economic resilience. This involves measures to remove structural bottlenecks, improve productivity and promote innovation and enhance competitiveness. Formulating such structural policies to improve growth prospects hinges on rigorous empirical research in these areas. For Malaysia, the economy is currently undergoing a transition towards becoming a higher value added economy. This has involved setting clear, time-bound and measurable targets, to allow for the policy approach to be focused. This has depended heavily on the availability of good data and statistics that capture developments across all sectors. It also enables us for the monitoring of the progress and the effectiveness of the policies. It is also now widely recognised that economic growth can only be sustainable if it is inclusive. Growth will only slow as income disparities widen. It is also recognised that financial inclusion is an important contributor towards achieving such a more inclusive economic development.