samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
With respect to bond market development, we have taken a more active role both in the primary and the secondary market. This is because the bond market is where we operate monetary policy through liquidity injection and absorption in order to align short-term interest rate with the policy interest rate. Therefore, the more developed and efficient the bond market is, the more effective the monetary management would be. Besides, a vibrant domestic bond market is essential for a robust and efficient financial system, which is a solid foundation for long-term economic stability. In the primary bond market, while meeting with the sterilization needs, the issuance of BOT bonds and bills are also designed to promote the bond market. In particular, we coordinate closely with the MOF on issuance schedule to provide regular and predictable supply, reduce auction frequency and consolidate issuance to reduce the number of issues in order to  BIS Review 118/2008  5  facilitate secondary market trading. The BOT bonds have helped widen investor base and contributed to the growth of mutual fund industry, as retail investors are seeing this as an alternative to banks’ deposit. Other than the issuance of BOT bonds and bills, we also introduced floating rate notes to add diversity to the products in the market as well. With respect to secondary bond market development, developing the private repo market has been one avenue that the Bank has adopted to enhance a more liquid bond market.

Even if it were possible, going back to the ECU would present major disadvantages compared to today’s euro: until the euro was introduced, France did not actually participate in decisions on interest rate levels and had to follow German monetary policy; the franc was at the mercy of speculative attacks from the financial markets that drained our currency reserves as we saw in the 1992-1993 period. The euro was introduced to solve these problems. Today, the euro is alive and well. It is the currency of 340 million Europeans, is recognised worldwide and is trusted by the people of France. Almost 70% of French citizens are in favour of the euro because it protects their purchasing power, with prices that increase three times less rapidly than previously; because it makes borrowing easier, with interest rates that are 1.5% to 3% lower; and because it safeguards the value of their savings. Finally, I would like to add that the Eurosystem has not modified its sovereign debt purchase programme in relation to France’s presidential elections. The distribution of monthly purchases between the various countries is based on the ECB’s capital allocation principle. 1/1  BIS central bankers' speeches
In the case of fiscal policy, this problem has been properly addressed in our country by way of a fiscal rule that establishes that fiscal spending must be consistent with the economy’s capacity to generate earnings in the medium term. This rule has been carefully monitored, and has even 5 / 14  BIS central bankers' speeches  been replicated in other countries. Ending it could not only result in many problems in the future, but also lessen the macroeconomic effects of fiscal spending today. Make no mistake: I am not for total inflexibility, nor am I for mechanically subscribing to a rule, as I am convinced that flexibility is necessary on certain occasions. This has been the case, actually. My concern is rather whether we have exhausted these degrees of flexibility. Let me remind you that just over one year ago the initial structural balance (or zero deficit) objective was modified. In addition, to accommodate revisions to the long-term price of copper and trend GDP—both potentially curbing the spending capacity—the Ministry of Finance decided to recalculate the rule every year using the new parameters, and from there reduce the structural deficit by 0.25 percentage points of GDP. No doubt this is one way to adjust gradually to the new boundaries that the rule establishes for fiscal spending, but it obviously implies that in a cycle where the key parameters are revised downward, we will be spending above our medium-term revenues for a longer period of time.

In any case, there are differing appreciations about how it will resolve the tensions between the dynamics of the real sector, inflation and exchange rate conditions in the US economy. In Japan, the UK and Europe, the markets expect policies to remain as expansionary, or be even more so, considering their weak economic growth rates and projected inflation exceeding their central banks’ targets. 2 / 14  BIS central bankers' speeches  In this context, the fraction of fixed-income assets—including long term—with negative rates has increased considerably around the world. I draw your attention to this fact, because it was unimaginable some years back. Thus, higher risk appetite and the search for yield have pushed the prices of risky assets up, squeezing sovereign spreads and appreciating currencies vis-a-vis the dollar (figure 7). In any case, the intensity with which this change in financial conditions will impact activity or commodity prices is not so clear. In the baseline scenario, global activity projections do not change significantly. For the 2016–2017 biennium average growth in the world economy is expected to stand at 3.2%, while Chile’s trading partners should grow by 3.0%, also fairly unchanged from June. The terms of trade will deteriorate less over the projection horizon, although the trajectories foreseen for the prices of copper and oil are similar to those of June, expecting prices in 2018 of $ per pound of copper and around $ per barrel of oil (table 1). Locally, second-quarter data for domestic activity and demand confirmed bounded economic growth.
Total liquidities settled in the AIPS system during 2009 is about 4.3 times higher than the GDP. 3.2  European integration  The Bank of Albania plays a key role in the European integration process. The Bank of Albania has been active in revising the National Plan for the Implementation of the SAA for the period 2009–2014. The Bank of Albania has prepared monthly progress reports that reflect the achievements in terms of the accomplishment of the legal measures and implementing activities, and a description of the level of compliance of judicial acts approved by the Bank of Albania with the acquis communautaire. 3.3  Communication and transparency  Public communication was one of the major priorities of the Bank of Albania in 2009. We have aimed at transmitting the Bank of Albania’s decision-making to the financial market, other decision-making institutions, media, other economic agents and the public at large, timely and efficiently. The Bank of Albania’s communication has been materialized through added transparency in:   our analyses of economic and financial developments at home,    the risk balance and potential implications for the economy,    the entire regulatory and supervisory activity of the banking system. With the belief that added transparency is translated into higher integrity and transparency, the Bank of Albania has been paying an increasing attention to public education as well.

The expansionary fiscal policy provided the economic activity with the necessary impulse over the course of the year; however it was also accompanied by higher public debt and upward pressures on Government T-bill yields. The deepening of budget deficit resulted in substantial public debt increase, which as at year-end 2009 accounted for about 59.5 percent of GDP. The Bank of Albania encourages measures to reduce the budget deficit and public debt in the medium run. Lower budget deficit and public debt levels will provide more room in accessing of funds from the private sector and boost confidence in Albania’s macroeconomic stability. In addition, these measures will help to create appropriate conditions for attracting foreign capital in the form of private loans or foreign direct investment. BIS Review 78/2010  3  1.3  Monetary developments and financial markets  Financial intermediation in economy was conditioned by the contraction of financial resources, wavering of confidence in financial institutions and the decline of demand for banking loans in 2009. At the end of March, deposits fell to 55 percent of GDP compared to 63 percent in September 2008. The withdrawal of deposits during the first quarter of the year brought about the slowdown of money growth in economy. Banking activity recovered slowly during the following three quarters. Money supply grew by an average of 6 percent this year or about twice less than the previous year.
Not only are they uncertain about the value of specific parameters, but the probability distributions of target variables and shocks may have changed and standard linear approximations may not be valid anymore. Concretely, this means that they have to make up their mind and set the most appropriate policy considering competing models of the economy (and possibly misspecified models, because of the unprecedented nature of ongoing events). Risk management considerations are then of the essence. Risk management considerations are probably best understood as an application of the socalled robust control approach that notably L. Hansen and T. Sargent have adapted from the engineering literature. 3 Interestingly enough, lessons from this recent literature tend to violate the Brainard principle: under robust control, a stronger reaction to economic data may be warranted in order to prevent relatively unlikely but potentially disastrous outcomes (e.g. the Great Depression again). Mishkin’s case for a risk-management approach to US monetary policy in the present juncture obviously provides a sound rationale for the last three rate cuts by the FOMC (-75bp and -50bp in January and -75bp in March). President Bernanke’s indepth knowledge of the credit crunch of the 1930s in the US (cf. Bernanke, 1983) probably also helped shape this view that there is a non-zero probability in the current juncture of an “ugly equilibrium” of the debt-deflation type that must be discarded by prompt and vigorous policy action. An immediate question, then, is to determine whether these analyses are relevant for the conduct of monetary policy in the euro area.

Goodhart and Tsomocos (2007). BIS Review 37/2008  1  open-market operations that we have conducted so far in the euro area (they include in particular targeted ELA to an illiquid credit institution). 2 To make my point more explicit, let me briefly recall a standard result by William Poole (1970), which implies that, when demand for central bank money is uncertain, it is optimal to stabilise the short-term interest rate, letting money supply adjust endogenously. That is precisely what has happened in the euro area over the last few quarters. Indeed, the bulk of liquidity injections since last August has merely been an attempt to align the timing and maturity of liquidity supply with changing demand within the reserve maintenance periods, in order to stabilize the very short-term interest rate on the interbank market. Of course, this is always a difficult task, since the increase in the precautionary demand for liquidity altered the behaviour of banks and rendered the forecasting models we use to calculate the benchmark need for liquidity less effective, at least temporarily. However, since the Eurosystem acted as a price-taker during these liquidity injections, it is obvious that the interest rates at which these fine-tuning and longer-term operations were settled had no information content for the monetary policy stance.
Any agreements concerning wage increases should take their lead from the underlying inflation. These recommendations apply to both wage increases and, where applicable, to potential wage guarantee clauses. Arrangements such as these have already been used by the social partners in the past and have proven a useful tool for protecting jobs, making firms more competitive and spurring economic growth.10 Fifth, these guidelines on wage developments should be accompanied by explicit commitments to moderate profit margins. Only then will such wage restraint actually make firms more competitive, while, in turn, limiting the extent to which rising energy input costs are passed through to other goods and services in the economy. And some sort of mechanism would have to be set in place to ensure this restraint in profit margins can be verified. The simulations performed using the Quarterly Macroeconometric Model of the Banco de España (MTBE) underscore the benefits of a successful incomes policy. The MTBE  8  The weight of energy inputs in production and exposure to international competition vary considerably across sectors and firms. 9  To varying degrees, these types of clauses mean that, regardless of the type of underlying shock, any potential future price rises automatically pass through to wage increases, thereby triggering the second-round effects we hope to avoid.

TCFD: strengthening the foundations of sustainable finance Speech given by Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England  Tokyo, TCFD Summit 2019 08 October 2019  I am grateful to Jennifer Nemeth for her assistance in preparing these remarks, and to Ryan Barrett, Jennifer Bell, Benjamin Bowry, Kaja Chhapia, Lawrence Dimery, Benjamin Guin, Christopher Gynn, Sini Matikainen, Gordon Readhead, Mathesh Sripraba, Quynh-Anh Vo and Matthew WIllison for background research and analysis, as well as to PwC for their research work. . 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  Introduction It is an honour to join this inaugural TCFD Summit. There could be no better host than Japan. Prime Minister Abe made climate change an important theme of the Japanese G20 presidency, calling on nations to put ‘promises into practice’. And Environment Minister Koizumi recently said Japan is “committed to realising a decarbonised society.” Japanese companies are heeding these calls. In the past year, almost 200 Japanese firms have joined the TCFD, bringing Japan to the top of the TCFD league table.1 This welcome progress, and that of the TCFD more generally, must be set against growing challenges. Over the past five years, global carbon emissions have risen by 20% and sea levels by over 3.3mm per year.2 Global temperatures are on course to increase by 3.4°C by 2100.3 Chart 1: Global warming projections to 2100 under different policy pathways  The physical impact of these changes will not be evenly distributed.
With a view to ensuring that the ratio between the desired level of equity capital and the currency reserves can be increased again somewhat, the SNB recently decided to adjust its rule on allocations to the provisions for the coming years. For the financial years through to 2025, the annual allocation to the provisions will be at least 10% of the preceding year’s provisions, compared with 8% per annum previously. A persistent erosion of the SNB’s equity base would undermine the credibility of our institution over the long term and would fuel doubts regarding our ability to act. 1 Ongoing allocations to the provisions are therefore essential for the SNB. The amount remaining after the allocation to provisions is referred to as the distributable profit. However, since a profit in any given year can be followed by a loss the next, the SNB does not pay out all of the distributable profit at once. Instead we seek to smooth the distributions to ensure that they are less dependent on variable annual results. This smoothing was introduced to facilitate better planning for the Confederation and the cantons. However, maintaining distributions at a steady level is also of pivotal importance for the SNB. The reason for this is an underlying asymmetry: the SNB can distribute profits, but it cannot reclaim any money if it makes a loss. If the SNB were to always distribute its profits in their 1  For more information on the importance of a central bank’s equity, cf. inter alia Jordan, Thomas J.

Given that, owing to structural reasons, the general level of interest rates is substantially lower than in the past, the vast majority of our investments can therefore be expected to deliver only a very modest return going forward. The development of share prices and exchange rates will therefore be determining factors with regard to the profits in the coming years. Given that these are by their nature subject to marked fluctuations, predicting the medium-term return on our assets is fraught with particularly high uncertainty. The approach set out in the new profit distribution agreement addresses this issue. Should the high earnings of recent years prove to be sustainable, the Confederation and the cantons will participate in them. However, should the net profits quickly dwindle, there will be an orderly reduction in the distributions based on the set thresholds. This brings me back to the demands for greater distributions that I mentioned at the start of my speech. Ladies and gentlemen, the rise in the allocations to the provisions coupled with the increase in the maximum profit distributions represent a balanced solution. On the one hand, it contributes to the robustness of the SNB’s balance sheet. On the other hand, barring any financial market upheaval, it allows for substantial amounts to be distributed to the public sector, in the best case totalling CHF 36 billion for the financial years 2020 to 2025. The distributions have not been raised as a response to the coronavirus crisis or higher government debt.
We shall continue to listen to constructive ideas for strengthening our monetary system and examine them vigorously as we have diligently done so in the past ten years or so. Prudent macroeconomic policies, our rule-based monetary system, sound regulatory framework and robust financial infrastructure are the best guarantee for the stability of the currency, more precisely the durability of the Hong Kong dollar’s fixed link to the US dollar. We shall continue to be, in the words of Michel Camdessus of the IMF, a pillar of stability for the Asian region. *  *  *  ANNEX The Clearing Balance of the Banking System 1. This note sets out the circumstances in which the clearing balance of the banking system, the crucial part of the Hong Kong dollar monetary base, will be affected. The clearing balance of the banking system is the sum of the Hong Kong dollar balances in the clearing accounts that all licensed banks maintain with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) for the purpose of effecting the Hong Kong dollar settlement of transactions between the banks themselves and transactions between the banks and the HKMA. Inflow and Outflow of Funds 2. In line with the discipline of the currency board system, the clearing balance of the banking system will be affected by the flow of funds into or out of the Hong Kong dollar. 3.

It is one of the most robust interbank clearing systems in the world, and is a very important piece of financial infrastructure contributing greatly to financial stability in Hong Kong. But in running the system, the HKMA cannot avoid lending to the banks at the end of the day to effect what are really residual interbank payments. But in providing such liquidity money is created in the form of a larger overnight balance of the banking system that appears not to be directly matched by an increase in the holding of foreign reserves by the HKMA. BIS Review 19/1998  - 11 40. However, the manner in which this “last resort” liquidity is provided does not involve any real conflict with the discipline of the currency board system. Lending through the LAF is organized largely through a repo arrangement of paper issued by the HKMA22. Such paper, in the form of Exchange Fund Bills and Notes, are liabilities of the HKMA which are fully backed by foreign currency assets. The HKMA runs an Exchange Fund debt programme involving the issue of debt instruments of maturity from three months to ten years. The proceeds of such issues have largely been switched into foreign currency assets. In any case, with a real time payment system, overnight lending in the term of repos through the LAF, though essential, is infrequent and the money is to be repaid the first thing in the following morning.
That has happened in a typical European bank, without significant concentration of deposits or coordination of depositors through social networks, as was the case in the SVB. There are also many risks luring outside of the euro area – geopolitical tensions can have a detrimental effect on growth and inflation, prompting further monetary policy tightening and disorderly adjustment in the financial markets. Recent failures of banks outside of the euro area have exposed vulnerabilities in markets and institutions, and how quickly shocks can transmit through the system. Complacency and overconfidence are chief enemies of every bank and every regulator. Temporary boost to profits may be like a sugar rush – weakening bank discipline on costs and hiding deeply rooted weaknesses. Banks should use the opportunity to improve their capital position, prepare for the potential losses if outlook deteriorates and intensify preparations to resist the rising competition from the non-banking sector. Failure to do so may become expensive in the medium term. Conclusion – a few lessons that we learned 1. Structural issues in the European banking system have likely not gone anywhere – they may just be hiding behind the huge excess liquidity created over the last years, and windfall profits that have started to accrue and will stay with us for some time. However, as they dry out, problems are likely to reappear. In some corners sooner than in others. Banks need to put an effort into efficiency improvements and regulators should not be complacent and need to be cognisant of over-banking.

Today, Croatian banks are amongst the best capitalized in Europe, have fairly efficient operations and comfortable profitability, which adds to their ability to withstand even major economic and financial disturbances. However, this transformation was not quick or simple. Neither was the progress linear, as there were no textbook solutions to many problems that arose along the way. Nevertheless, every step forward and each single setback provided us with important lessons that are helping us navigate in the complex economic and financial environment. So, today, I thought of sharing with you some of the insights we got along this journey, and what we bring into the euro area and banking union in particular, what we have learnt along the way. A tale of two crisis First, I want to draw on the Croatian experience of two banking crises from the 1990s, the first at the beginning of the decade, and the second at its very end. Both crises had a strong macro dimension. However, the roots of the problem were always in the banking sector, although set in different corners of the system. In the first case, the background was economic collapse amid transition from socialism into market economy and market disruption caused by war in the former Yugoslavia. Banks operating in such an environment were underdeveloped, poorly capitalized, loosely managed and regulated, and their main function was to grant cheap loans to the state-owned companies, often without adequate risk assessment.