samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Enlightened immigration policies can play a role – making sure that U.S. companies doing business here in the United States can augment the skill sets of workers here with those attracted from abroad. Tax reform, energy policy, and housing policy also have crucial roles to play – as does financial reform, a subject to which I will return later in the speech. Leveraging the comparative advantage that the United States has in higher education also makes sense. This should include encouraging foreign students to come here to study. Also, closer partnerships between universities and business could leverage the technological discoveries and advances that occur in university research so that the benefits accrue to a greater degree to U.S. firms and workers. These are fundamentally structural issues – not cyclical issues. They cannot be tackled primarily through monetary policy. Instead, monetary policy is mainly a tool for stabilizing the macroeconomy and keeping inflation expectations well-anchored. Nevertheless, monetary policy has an important role in supporting the transitions that need to take place, consistent with our dual mandate of full employment and price stability. As we do so, we must take international developments fully into account. The integration of the EMEs into the global economy has been associated with some major shifts in relative prices. For a number of years, the United States and other industrialized nations benefited from disinflation in manufactured goods produced in EMEs. This shift in relative prices – a positive terms of trade gain – helped contain inflation.

Moreover, we must recognize that the rest of the world is closely monitoring our ability as a nation to come to grips with our long-term fiscal challenges, and to pay our debts when they come due. This is an important litmus test of our credibility and ability to exercise global economic leadership. But the challenges extend far beyond fiscal policy. We, as a nation, have to take steps that facilitate the needed structural adjustment of U.S. economic activity that will position us to thrive in the next chapter of global economic transformation. We need to make sure the next business cycle will be more sustainable than the last, which was built on an unstable foundation of asset price gains, easy credit and outsized financial-sector profits. This will require a shift in orientation from consumption to export and investment-led growth. As EMEs have shown us, comparative advantage and global competitiveness are not inevitable consequences of factor endowments – they are the result of the choices we make as nations. There are no easy answers or quick-fix solutions. But in this regard, ensuring broad access to educational opportunity and improving opportunities for people to retool their skills mid-career so they can compete in a rapidly evolving global economy are important. So too is ensuring that regulation is calibrated such that it achieves public policy goals in the most efficient manner possible, with the least compliance costs and unnecessary delays. A continued commitment to open markets and free trade is essential.
However, there have been a lot of challenges and lessons have been learnt from the experiences we have undergone through as a country. These lessons must be turned into a platform to design and implement more effective medium and long-term policies. It is also important to note that one of the challenges confronting developing countries such as Zambia is the need to reduce inflation and ensure affordable credit through low lending interest rates. In this regard, I wish to appeal to professional bodies, like yours, to come up with options or ideas on how the issue could be tackled within the existing liberal financial environment. Although significant steps and progress have been made in improving the performance of the foreign exchange market, a number of challenges still remain. The main challenges in this area remain that of maintaining a stable and competitive exchange rate as well as diversification of the export base in order to tap into alternative sources of foreign exchange. Zambia’s continued reliance on the mining sector as a major source of foreign exchange has contributed to volatility in the exchange rate. Hence, there is an urgent need to explore all possibilities of diversifying the export base. To this effect, the different exchange rate regimes implemented since independence have provided us with good lessons upon which we can build our foreign exchange market and contribute to the buoyancy of our external sector.

The commercial banks should also respond to changing macroeconomic indicators consistent with low interest rates, while borrowers need to improve their credit culture. As for the Bank of Zambia, we continue monitoring financial conditions and take appropriate actions to contribute to lowering of interest rates. (iii)  A relatively stable and competitive exchange rate has a positive impact not only on inflation, but also on the performance of the external sector. In this regard, policies for stabilising the exchange rate must aim at increasing the export earning capacity of the country through stimulation and maintenance of strong export sector by, among other things: •  Developing a diversified and competitive export base; and  •  Ensuring food self-sufficiency to reduce food imports. In addition, continued implementation of appropriate monetary and fiscal policies, particularly the reduction in the fiscal deficits, is critical to maintaining stability in the exchange rate. BIS Review 5/2005  3  (iv)  External debt should be contracted to finance the productive sector so as to lessen the burden of debt service. Otherwise, it will result, as we have seen in the last 40 years, in huge outflows at the expense of expenditures on social and economic infrastructure development, which are pre-requisites to sustainable poverty reduction efforts. (v)  The need to diversify the economy, including the external sector, cannot be overemphasised. Diversification is a sure way of preventing external shocks to the economy and will contribute to maintenance of macroeconomic stability.
[45]Article 28 of the SSM Regulation requires the ECB to provide the necessary financial resources for its supervisory tasks, and Article 30 of the SSM Regulation empowers the ECB to levy fees on credit institutions to cover its expenditure on supervision. [46]Under the ESM Treaty, the ECB’s role is, generally speaking, as follows: (i) to assess together with the Commission the urgency of requests for stability support (Article 4(4)); (ii) to participate as an observer in the meetings of the Board of Governors and the Board of Directors (Articles 5(3) and 6(2)); (iii) the Commission, in liaison with the ECB, assesses requests for stability support (Article 13(1)); (iv) the Commission, in liaison with the ECB, negotiates an MoU detailing the conditionality attached to the financial assistance facility (Article 13(3)); and (v) the Commission, in liaison with the ECB, monitors compliance with the conditionality attached to the financial assistance (Article 13(7)). [47]Case C-370/12, Pringle v Ireland, ECLI:EU:C:2012:756, paras. 155-65. [48]Joined Cases C-8/15 P to C-10/15 P, Ledra Advertising Ltd and Others v Commission and ECB, ECLI:EU:C:2016:701. [49] See, in particular, Regulation (EU) No 472/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 21 May 2013 on the  http://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2017/html/sp170330.en.html[03.04.2017 15:53:14]  Central bank independence revisited  strengthening of economic and budgetary surveillance of Member States in the euro area experiencing or threatened with serious difficulties with respect to their financial stability (OJ L 140, 27.5.2013, p. 1). [50]Article 5 (1) and (2) of the Treaty. [51]Article 5 (1) and (2) of the Treaty.

Such private industry interference is less pronounced in the area of monetary policy. In addition, only “undue” political influence is prohibited. Recital 75 also explicitly refers to the notion of the “operational independence” of supervisors. In addition, Article 19 of the SSM Regulation does not contain an explicit prohibition on the ECB and the national competent authorities (NCAs) accepting instructions, unlike Article 130 of the Treaty with respect to the ECB and the NCBs. In the SSM context, Article 19 of the SSM Regulation only imposes such a prohibition on the members of the Supervisory Board and its steering committee. The drafting of Article 19 of the SSM Regulation reflects the legal situation in some Member States, where the NCAs are bound by the instructions of the respective ministries. [40] Article 19 of the SSM Regulation requires only that the ECB and the NCAs “act independently” while carrying out their supervisory tasks under the SSM Regulation. [41] Third, the principle of personal independence does not apply to the members of the ECB’s Supervisory Board (apart from the specific rules applicable to the Chair[42] , Vice Chair[43] and the ECB representatives[44] ). There is neither a legislatively protected minimum term of office for them, nor a limitation of the grounds for dismissal by the appointing authority.
Christine Lagarde: ECB press conference - introductory statement Introductory statement by Ms Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank, and Mr Luis de Guindos, Vice-President of the European Central Bank, Frankfurt am Main, 15 June 2023. *** Good afternoon, the Vice-President and I welcome you to our press conference. Inflation has been coming down but is projected to remain too high for too long. We are determined to ensure that inflation returns to our two per cent medium-term target in a timely manner. The Governing Council therefore today decided to raise the three key ECB interest rates by 25 basis points. The rate increase today reflects our updated assessment of the inflation outlook, the dynamics of underlying inflation, and the strength of monetary policy transmission. According to the June macroeconomic projections, Eurosystem staff expect headline inflation to average 5.4 per cent in 2023, 3.0 per cent in 2024 and 2.2 per cent in 2025. Indicators of underlying price pressures remain strong, although some show tentative signs of softening. Staff have revised up their projections for inflation excluding energy and food, especially for this year and next year, owing to past upward surprises and the implications of the robust labour market for the speed of disinflation. They now see it reaching 5.1 per cent in 2023, before it declines to 3.0 per cent in 2024 and 2.3 per cent in 2025. Staff have slightly lowered their economic growth projections for this year and next year.

Jean-Pierre Roth: No frontiers in monetary policy – from the fight to avoid internationalisation of the currency to the internationalisation of monetary policy Speech by Mr Jean-Pierre Roth, Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, at the Swiss Institute of International Studies, Zurich, 6 May 2009. The complete speech can be found in German on the Swiss National Bank’s website (www.snb.ch). *  *  *  In view of the challenges with which it has been faced, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) demonstrated its adaptability time and again. Over the past thirty years, for instance, it abandoned its endeavours to prevent the use of the Swiss franc as an international currency. Moreover, it has gradually incorporated international elements into its monetary policy strategy and its monetary policy instruments. The goal when making these adjustments was always to improve the effectiveness of monetary policy in order to protect the country from any inflationary trend. In managing the current crisis, both the internationalised monetary policy strategy and the internationalised policy instruments have served the SNB well thus far. BIS Review 552009  1
At present, it can take anything from three hours to three days to transfer money between two banks in Sweden. How long the payment takes depends on the time and day that it is initiated. A payment made on a Tuesday afternoon, for instance, will reach its destination around three hours later, while a payment made on a Friday afternoon will not go through until Monday morning. With interbank payments to a country outside of the EU it gets even more complicated. This type of payment currently takes 2-7 days to go through. They can be made more quickly, but this can be expensive. There is thus a major difference between what a consumer expects, given the technology available, and how the systems actually work and I believe that the two must converge soon. Within Sweden there are already instant payments available for individuals through the Swish mobile app. But this system cannot cover all Swedish payments. As the demand for instant payments will increase in the future, the systems must be adapted to manage them better. The Riksbank currently runs the central payment system for large-value payments between the Swedish banks and other major agents. The system has been constructed to manage large-value payments in a secure manner. Individuals’ payments are lumped together into larger amounts before they pass through the system. The Riksbank also has regular contact with all of the participants.

The new rules contain sufficient flexibility to deal with exceptional situations where public money may be required to ensure financial stability. Second, public risk sharing. A certain level of public risk sharing is necessary to create confidence in the overall financial system. Even wellcapitalised banks can fall victim to runs and contagion. This is why central banks act as lender of last resort and fiscal backstops should be in place to ensure trust in the stability of the financial sector. In the Banking Union, both supervisory responsibility and the fiscal backstop need to be at European level, to underpin durably confidence in the area-wide financial system. Just as necessary is the establishment of a European Deposit Insurance System (EDIS). The current situation, where supervision is common, but the consequences of potential bank failures are still predominantly national, should not last. In such an incomplete framework, national considerations inevitably continue to affect supervisory decisions. This is not without consequences for the incentives for banks to become more European. Concrete examples include a lack of fungibility of liquidity or capital. The fact that the euro area is not considered as a single jurisdiction may result in applying higher capital buffers to euro area G-SIBs. While the institutional underpinnings of the Banking Union do not yet meet the requirements of a genuine single financial market, the creation of the SSM has been a leap forward in the establishment of a coherent regulatory framework.
During the 19th century, the published accounts of Spanish banks became less frequent during episodes of crisis. Mussolini’s Italian government of 1931 went one step further, suspending publication of accounts by the banks to forestall panic. 14 It is unlikely Goethe and Mussolini would have agreed on the merits of double-entry. While less extreme, there is compelling evidence of British banks having massaged balance sheets from the late 19th century right up until the early 1970s, especially during crisis. Typically, this involved the systematic under-valuation of assets to allow hidden reserves to be carried on the balance sheet. The experience of UK banks in 1952 was typical. As the prices of government securities fell sharply, the basis for valuation by banks was shifted from “at or below market value” to “at or under cost”. This mirrored the Roosevelt and Bush forbearance announcements of 1938 and 1990. The motives for hidden reserves among UK banks were purportedly prudential, as protection against the “excessive dividend expectations” of shareholders and as a cushion against losses in crisis. 15 Although the Companies Act of 1947 prohibited the use of hidden reserves, the banks were exempt from its provisions. But the writing was on the wall. Non-disclosure by banks came under repeated fire during the 1960s. Sensing the inevitable, British banks “voluntarily” decided to pursue full disclosure in 1969, in the interests of shareholder transparency and protection, though there is evidence of hidden reserves persisting right up to the 1980s. 14  James (1992). 15  Billings and Capie (2009).

The Bankruptcy Act of 1831 gave accountants a role in winding-up enterprises and the Companies Acts of 1844 and 1862 established a legal requirement for companies to register and file accounts. By the end of the century, audit practices were becoming established. The accountant’s role was to provide a true and fair view of a company’s assets and income, as protection for the state (to whom it paid taxes) and investors (to whom it paid dividends). It was these concerns that led to the gradual emergence during the second half of the 19th century of fair-value based accounting conventions in the US. From the late 19th century, banks’ securities were carried at market values and their fixed assets at “appraised values”. In other words, by the early 20th century fair value principles were widely applied to companies in general and to banks in particular. In many respects, this period may have been the high-water mark for fair value principles. In the US, this first wave of the fair value debate ended in 1938. 4 The backdrop was inauspicious. The first phase of the Great Depression, between 1929 and 1933, saw the failure of a large number of US banks. Between 1933 and 1937, the US economy recovered somewhat. But by 1938 there were fears of a double dip. At the Fed’s prompting, Franklin D Roosevelt called a convention comprising the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve Board, the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
It is important that knowledge among practitioners of this art of bank resolution does not fade with time and is not dulled by the comfort of the relative stability and financial resilience we have been fortunate enough to enjoy over the past decade and more. I want to reflect tonight on the changes in the structure of the U.S. financial system of the last 20 years or so, and what implications these have for the nature of systemic risk. For those of us who are responsible for thinking about the overall stability of the financial system, the questions we face are, of course, broader than the potential insolvency of a large bank and the most appropriate resolution methodology. They include not just how to make the system better able to withstand the failure of a major bank or financial enterprise built around a bank, but also how to better withstand the failure of a major non-bank financial intermediary or a systemic liquidity crisis that may or may not arise from a solvency problem at a large supervised financial institution. The central bank of the United States was legislated into existence in the wake of the banking crises of the early 20th century. And the framework that evolved in the decades that followed was directed specifically at dealing with the special risks posed to banks and by banks to the economy as a whole.

Institutions and markets seem better positioned to handle a substantial degree of stress. Shocks may be less likely to result in the type of trend amplifying, self-reinforcing dynamic for sustained periods of time that can threaten the stability of the financial system. But it is important to recognize that that we do not know a lot about the underlying dynamics of financial crises in the context of the evolving financial system I have described. It is also worth reflecting on the fact that the favorable judgment of U.S. financial resilience at present is rooted in a  BIS Review 55/2004  3  period of lower overall volatility in macroeconomic outcomes, with lower inflation and less variability in inflation, and shorter and shallower recessions. Financial innovation has brought about a dramatic increase in the opportunities for diversification and risk transfer and in the sophistication of risk management, but it is unlikely to have brought an end to the periodic tendency of markets to experience waves of mania and panic. The systemically significant financial institutions are larger and stronger than in the past, but they are not invulnerable, and the impact of a failure would be greater. And it would be imprudent to expect that the lower overall magnitude of recent macroeconomic shocks that has contributed to lower volatility in growth and inflation outcomes will be with us indefinitely. What are the implications of these changes for how we think about managing systemic risk in the United States?
The lessons learned from the financial crisis point to the fact that systemic risk can arise from any part of the financial system. That is why we also need more data to monitor the other financial institutions, supervised and regulated, and unregulated, as well. In this context, Macedonia started collecting detailed data from the other financial institutions (OFIs) since 2012. Later on, the regulators expressed interest in data sharing of these data with the National Bank. Our experience, as worldwide, confirmed that this is where the cooperation between the central bank and other regulatory bodies becomes a necessity, but even more so, good statistics and inter-agency exchange of information and data sharing becomes a priority. Let me point out that Macedonia did not experience significant damage in the crisis period, since the structure of the financial system is very traditional (the MFI subsector holds almost 90% of total assets), as well as conservative in terms of the financial instruments employed (mainly deposits and credits). Nevertheless, the financial stability analysis scrutinizes the risks in all financial institutions, and conveys inter-sectoral contagion analysis to assess possible spillover effects in case of a shock. The central bank cooperates very closely with other regulatory bodies through the Financial Stability Committee, and the cooperation has intensified in the last couple of years, spreading to statistical data collection as well.

2  Holthausen, C. and T. Ronde (2004): “Cooperation in international banking supervision”, ECB Working Paper 245. 3  On financial stability as a public good, see for instance Beck et al (2010): Bailing out the Banks: Reconciling Stability and Competition An analysis of state-supported schemes for financial institutions. 4  Banking union and the future of banking, speech by Vítor Constâncio, Vice-President of the ECB, at the IIEA Conference on “The Future of Banking in Europe”, Dublin, 2 December 2013; Towards the Banking Union, speech by Vítor Constâncio, Vice-President of the ECB, at the 2nd FIN-FSA Conference on EU Regulation and Supervision “Banking and Supervision under Transformation” organised by the Financial Supervisory  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  developed before the crisis. Without unified supervision, it was impossible to contain the build-up of such imbalances in the pre-crisis period. National supervisors had to respect the single market rules and lacked the macro-prudential tools to offset the effects of large capital inflows. As I have often underlined, private debt intermediated by the banks, more than public indebtedness, was at the heart of developments in peripheral countries.5 By introducing supervision at the European level, the Banking Union now offers a possibility to better pre-empt such developments in the future – and therefore to better protect the real economy and financial stability in the whole area. A third objective of the Banking Union is the contribution it can provide to financial integration, by separating banks’ robustness from sovereigns and consequently reduce markets’ fragmentation.