samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
These are attributes that we have been strengthening over time and that we must hold onto in the face of new challenges. At the same time, we must be aware that the specific scope of action of the Bank is the macroeconomy and, in particular, the control of inflation and the safeguarding of financial stability. The process of recalibration of monetary policy was triggered by the drop-in inflation measured by the CPI and the policy response boosts economic activity because it seeks to reduce gaps in activity to ensure the convergence of inflation. Estimating greater trend and potential growth was the result of an analysis of macroeconomic phenomena and it influenced the adjustment of the MPR but does not ensure all the microeconomic or institutional conditions to take advantage of all the leeway that it potentially generates. Monetary policy may provide an additional cushion against external shocks, but it cannot shield the economy completely. For this reason, it is important that, at the end of this presentation, as in other opportunities, we understand the focus of the Board’s commitment: to keep inflation low and stable, as the main contribution that the Bank makes to the well-being of Chileans. The stability that this brings to the country should facilitate the contribution of other players to the same end purpose. Thank you.

Yet, this sector generates less than 20% of value added in the economy, while productivity of labour force employed in agriculture and their income per capital are half of other branches of the economy. In my view, the sustained and balanced development of the country clearly needs a higher attention to agriculture sector, for improving its production capacity coupled with the growing of rural area population’s welfare, and in turn promoting social equity. The agricultural sector faces many and complex problems of development. At a considerable degree, these problems are out the competence and expertise sphere of the Bank of Albania. However, I believe that the topic of our today’s discussion: support with funds and loans to the agricultural sector, deserves a higher attention by the banking system. Currently, agricultural sector benefits only 1.7% of the funding that banks provide to private business. This ratio has not change over the last decade, despite the novelties that banking system has offered to lending market, while it remains far from the real needs of this sector. Specific lending issues to agricultural sector have been identified, from some time now, but a part of them are yet relevant. Nevertheless, I think that some of them are towards addressing, while the other obstacles should become part of a critical assessment and their solution should be an integral part of our next work agenda.
First and foremost, international linkages have risen dramatically over the past few decades, increasing the importance of cross border spillovers.6 Growing cross border trade means external demand has greater effects on domestic resource allocation and therefore inflation. The integration of low-cost producers into the global economy has imparted a steady disinflationary bias through its direct effect on prices. The expansion in global value chains has increased the synchronisation of producer prices across countries. Financial linkages have increased leading to a faster and more powerful transmission of shocks across countries. And globalisation has increased the contestability of markets, weakening the extent to which slack in domestic labour markets influences domestic inflationary pressures.7 Second, the changing nature of trade invoicing is affecting import price pass through and changing the inflation-output volatility trade-off facing monetary policy makers. Dominant currency pricing is widespread (partly due to the growth of supply chains), leading to deviations from the law of one price and misalignments in countries’ terms of trade.8 The dollar represents the currency of choice for at least half of international trade invoices, around five times greater than the US’s share in world goods imports, and three times its share in world exports.9 The resulting stickiness of import prices in dollar terms means exchange rate pass-through for changes in the dollar is high regardless of the country of export and import, while pass-through of non-dominant currencies is negligible.

As a result, import prices do not adjust efficiently to reflect changes in relative demand between trading partners, in part because expenditure switching effects are curtailed,10 and global trade volumes are heavily influenced by the strength of the US dollar.11 This is less of a problem when all boats are rising with the global tide of synchronised growth. But when the tide is rising in America while receding elsewhere, those authorities face more difficult trade-offs between price stability and output volatility – a situation that could create large potential gains from policy coordination that independent policymakers would not address. 6  World trade as a share of global GDP has doubled since 1970. Over the past two decades, 80% of the increase in total trade has come from intermediates goods trade, driving up the value added of imports as a share from 10% of exports in 1990 to around 20% in 2015. Cross-holding of countries’ assets and liabilities increased almost fourfold since 1990, and measures of stock market integration are at their highest ever (see Bastidon, C, Bordo, M, Parent, A, and Weidenmier, M (2019), ‘Towards an Unstable Hook: The Evolution of Stock Market Integration Since 1913’, NBER Working Paper No. 26166. 7 For more detail on these changes, see ‘[De]Globalisation and Inflation’, ibid. 8 Dominant currency pricing refers to the widespread use of a single currency – the US dollar – in trade invoicing, in place of the currency of either the producer or the importer.
Nevertheless, it is envisaged that the DFIs are expected to evolve from being the direct financiers to function as a strategic conduit to facilitate financing by the banking system, especially through the provision of credit enhancement. In addition, the DFIs would also increasingly become specialised institutions to render advisory and business support services, in order to increase their effectiveness in meeting the financing and developmental needs. At the same time, the need for DFIs to remain financially sustainable while performing their mandated roles cannot be over-emphasised. This would require continuous capacity and capability enhancement of the DFIs, especially the strengthening of human capital skills and institutional efficiency, together with the adoption of good corporate governance and best practices by the DFIs. In addition, to ensure that available resources are channeled adequately and appropriately to support the targeted sectors, DFIs would need to strategically reduce the channeling of funds to the sectors and businesses that have matured and, on their own, would be able to obtain financial resources from the banking institutions or the capital market. In conclusion, I must say that the theme for today's forum on "Revving up the SMEs as the engine of growth" is both timely and appropriate given the importance and potential economic contributions of SMEs, particularly in the developing countries. Therefore, it is important that the SME sector continues to receive adequate and appropriate financial and ancillary support to ensure their sustainable development towards meeting a nation's development objectives.

Norman T L Chan: Can central banks save the world? Keynote address by Mr Norman T L Chan, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, at the 19th Annual Hong Kong Business Summit Luncheon, Hong Kong, 25 November 2013. *  *  *  C K (Chow), Stephen (Yiu), distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. 1. It has been five years since the onset of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. The Crisis – followed three years later by the European Sovereign Debt Crisis – exposed the weaknesses of the global financial system and the vulnerabilities of the global economy. Today, peripheral countries in Europe are suffering a sharp contraction in their economies, and major advanced economies are experiencing very weak growth, if any at all. The economic output of several European countries, including the UK and France, is still below the levels prior to the Global Financial Crisis. The US, which seems to be the only bright spot among the advanced economies, still hasn’t recovered in full the 8.7 million jobs it lost following the Crisis. 2. Confronted by this extremely difficult environment, it was not surprising that central banks in the advanced economies began taking unprecedented steps to lower interest rates as far as possible. And, once the rates hit rock bottom, they began introducing different forms of very aggressive quantitative or credit easing.
But it remains to be seen how wages will react in the face of more buoyant domestic demand. Throughout 2006 the stance of demand-side policies was consistent with the pick-up in private agents’ spending. However, in the monetary policy realm, the strength of the recovery warranted a gradual adjustment in monetary conditions by the European Central Bank. Following the rise in official interest rates in December 2005, the ECB continued in 2006 progressively to withdraw the stimulus provided in recent years in the light of the observed risks to price stability in the medium term. Turning to budgetary policies, the improvement in the business cycle contributed decisively to tax revenue growing substantially above forecast in 2006 and to the euro area budget deficit declining by almost 1 pp. Given the persistence of high deficits in many countries, it is of paramount importance to harness the opportunity provided by the current boom to complete the ongoing restructuring of public finances and to push through measures to boost productivity and employment generation. Precisely in this latter area, the year 2006 saw progress – albeit uneven across countries and economic policy areas – in the application of the structural reform agenda. Undoubtedly, the favourable performance in 2006 in terms of employment and growth in activity is largely the result of the course of the business cycle.

As noted above, however, in the process of moving from EU accession to ERM II the euro would progressively gain in importance as the reference currency in the currency basket until it finally ceases to function as a foreign currency on joining the EMU. In addition, upon EU accession the Central Bank will be expected to transfer an amount of external reserves, other than the euro and a number of other specified currencies, to the ECB. In order of time, therefore,  the composition of the external reserves of the Central Bank would change to reflect, first, the move towards a 100 per cent peg to the euro, then the transfer of a portion of the non-euro reserves to the ECB, and lastly the adoption of the euro as the national currency. The Bank is currently studying how the necessary adjustments could take place without increasing its exposure to exchange rate risk. Given the implications which the simultaneous move out of euro assets by all acceding countries could have for the international value of the euro, moreover, the Bank - in common with the central banks of the other acceding countries - would co-ordinate these adjustments with the ECB. Operational framework for open market operations and reserve management Upon joining EMU, the Central Bank would act as agent for the ECB in the management of the ECB’s foreign reserve assets and in the implementation of monetary policy.
According to the Accenture study, 48% of customers said they wanted relevant advice and product information from their banks as they go about their daily lives. They also want banks to play a supporting role in the purchasing process for products such as a house or new car, and even related services such as insurance. Banks need to focus on providing long-term value for customers, rather than viewing them as a short-term opportunity for sales. We have already seen the harmful impact of this ‘short-term’ outlook that led to the subprime-mortgage crisis, as banks sold mortgages to customers who couldn’t afford them. Banks’ profits surged in the short term, but everyone suffered in the end; not only customers and the broader economy but also the banks. Banks therefore need to revisit their value propositions towards their customers in order to ensure that they are truly providing the products and services their customers need while keeping the interest of their customers and the society in Central Bank of Kuwait - Public ‫ عام‬- ‫بنك الكويت المركزي‬  - 11 -  mind. It will be helpful for the industry to reflect upon its ultimate objectives – to ensure inclusive prosperity and put the welfare of society on a sustainable footing. iii. Battle for Efficiency To win over customers and provide value, banks must operate in an efficient and intelligent manner, with their limited resources optimally deployed. The battle for efficiency is the third of the battles that banks need to win.

Firms have developed a wide range of more-or-less polite methods for providing us with feedback on the letters we write to them. But letter writing is an art rather than a science, and evaluating objectively how clear we are does not lend itself easily to traditional forms of quantitative methods. Advances in ML,  6  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  6  however, are helping. We recently analysed the letters we write to firms on the key risks they face and our supervisory strategy. We quantified a number of qualitative features of these letters, for example, how blunt we are in our messaging, how personal we are in terms of to whom we address the letter, and the overall sentiment expressed by the letter. We then used an ML model called random forests to detect whether, for example, the PRA writes to firms differently than the prior regulator, the FSA. (We do. )10 On the back of that project, we have built an app that now enables supervisors to analyse their written communications. Supervisors can use the app to analyse any of their draft documents before they are sent to firms. IV. CONCLUSION  Advanced analytics, machine learning and AI seem to be everywhere now – from image and voice recognition software to driverless cars and health care.
We examined a range of balance sheet and income statement items, market indicators, and organizational structure data to draw some preliminary conclusions. The results, reported in the appendix, are generally supportive of the notion of greater homogeneity among the largest banks, but a more rigorous assessment of these preliminary conclusions would be a fruitful area of investigation. Why Do We Care? I now turn to a final question – does this matter for supervisors and regulators? I think it does. I will consider four potential reasons why this shift is relevant for the official sector’s concern for 3/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  safety and soundness and efficient financial intermediation: a firm’s risk management approach, the evolution of supervisory focus, the development of macroprudential risks, and allocative efficiency of financial services. I’ll begin with our core microprudential focus on ensuring that banks develop and implement the appropriate risk management infrastructure for their evolving risks. While this is more linked to the changes in business models than greater similarity, the underlying drivers are the same. As banks respond to environmental factors by expanding into new activities or shifting their strategic focus, they naturally face new risks and must adapt their risk management infrastructures along with their evolving business models.

§  6  Increases and decreases in financial flows - - and the fluctuations in pricing that naturally accompany positive or negative trends in policies and economic and financial performance - - are a reflection of, and act as a natural brake on, the development of imbalances. BIS Review 61/2002  §  G  But an assertion of control by the international community risks diverting attention from the policies of the local authorities. As a result, denial and delay, aggravating factors in almost every crisis, may well continue and be exacerbated. And then, as a practical matter, once market processes have been stopped, how and when do you get things started again, particularly if needed corrective policies still have not been convincingly and transparently implemented? To sum up, I believe the one-size-fits-all disposition inherent in a preemptive approach risks making situations much worse than they need to be. The only thing that strikes me as predictable under such an approach would be that market access would be harmed across the board. Just as bailouts risk encouraging too much risk taking, efforts to orchestrate preemptive bail-ins may encourage too little. •  Underlying the suggestions that I have made is a firm belief that the success of our approaches to crisis management needs to be viewed and assessed with a wide focus. Certainly, there is the question of efficacy in containing the crisis at hand, and the balance between this and the costs, actual and potential, to the public sector.
A key element for the convergence of inflation to the 3% target within two years is that the significant imbalances that accumulated in the economy in 2021 are further resolved. In the central scenario, in 2022 and 2023 the economy will grow below potential, with the activity gap narrowing gradually and remaining negative for some quarters. This will be compounded by a slow reduction in the international prices of fuel and foods from their current levels and a declining real exchange rate (RER), but still remaining above its averages of the last 15 to 20 years (figure 11). It is important to note that this projection does not consider changes in the structural parameters of the Chilean economy, which we are currently updating and will make available later in the year. The liquidity that remains from the stimulus measures adopted in 2021 will continue to sustain consumption in the immediate future. However, most fundamentals suggest that it would weaken in the second half of the year. In the labor market, job creation continues, but has slowed down compared to previous months and with lower real wages, in a context in which the unemployment rate remains below 8%. The financial conditions faced by households have tightened, because of both higher interest rates and stricter credit requirements. Accordingly, coinciding with the effects of inflation on households' purchasing power, consumer expectations have deteriorated sharply in recent months, with worsening perceptions of employment, inflation, and purchases of goods.

The inflation accumulated between March and April —3.3 percentage points— was significantly more than we projected in the March Report. When broken down, the surprise shows that over 90% of it came from higher-thanexpected increases in the prices of foods, energy, and other volatile components (figure 2). Inflation expectations two years out are still above 3% annually, although the biggest increases are seen in the shorter-term measures. At one year, the median of the surveys to economists (EES) and financial specialists (FTS) place inflation at 6.2% and 6.8%, respectively, which compare with 5.3% and 7.4% last Mach. For the end of the monetary policy horizon, prospects show no big changes with respect to the March Report, remaining above 3%. The expectations implicit in financial asset prices have also risen further, but these increases have been concentrated on the one-year horizon. The inflation expectations of businesses have also increased. Both the Central Bank's Survey of Price Determinants and Expectations (EDEP) and the IMCE indicate that firms expect inflation to be close to 8% in a year's time. Moreover, almost 80% of the firms surveyed under the May Business Perceptions Report expect inflation to be well above what is considered to be normal over the next twelve months. (figure 3). Data for early 2022 show that the economy has already entered an adjustment phase, with a slight decline from the high levels it reached last year.
Within the section on risk management and compliance, principles focus on recognizing and understanding the risks faced and employing tools to mitigate those risks where possible. In this context, the Code highlights that it is important for each institution to evaluate these risks based on the role it plays in the market. Two areas we focused significant time on during the development of the Code were prime brokerage and electronic trading platforms. The Code notes that market participants who provide credit intermediation and/or market access to other market participants should (a) take that activity into account in their risk assessment and (b) engage in dialogue with the participants they are providing access to about responsible behavior in the market. Finally, the last section includes various confirmation and settlement principles that reduce operational risk related to FX transactions where possible. These principles encourage smooth, efficient, and timely settlement of FX trades and highlight various steps to help support that aim. Adoption of the Code The FXWG central banks had a clear mandate from the BIS governors to not just develop the Code, but to also develop means to promote its adherence and ultimate effectiveness. Central banks and the industry can take steps to support the Code’s widespread adoption in the market across all types of market participants—from FX dealers, regional banks, asset managers, and corporations, to hedge funds, high frequency trading firms and others, such as FX trading platforms and algorithmic service providers.

As you might suspect, Principle 17 on last look likely consumed the most time and energy of any of the principles in the Code. In many areas within the last look principle there was broad consensus as to what constitutes good practice. What was clear from this process was that market participants seemed to define last look in different ways and apply it in different ways as well. Last look is described in the Code as a practice in which a market participant receives a trade request and has the opportunity to accept or reject that trade request against its quoted price. The Code notes that if utilized, last look should be used as a risk mechanism to verify validity and/or price. The principle focuses on the importance of transparency and fairness. Market participants should be clear about whether and, if so, how last look might apply to their client trade requests to allow clients to make an informed choice regarding their execution. In one particular area—that of trading during the last look “window”—there was a definite diversity of views. On the one hand, some market participants argued that such trading activity would always be detrimental to the client as it could move the market in a direction that is not to the client’s advantage. On the other hand, some market participants felt that such trading activity could increase their ability and willingness to conduct client trades presented by clients without necessarily placing the clients at a disadvantage.