samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Peak to trough, output fell just over 6% in the United Kingdom, almost 4% in the United States, nearly 7% in Germany and more than 8% in Japan. And in the eight months following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, world trade collapsed by almost a fifth, a figure completely unmatched in peace time. Governments and central banks around the world responded by providing substantial support to their banking systems, relaxing fiscal policy, slashing official interest rates and, in some cases, introducing unorthodox monetary measures. This succeeded in avoiding the worst of the immediate downside risks to activity and employment. China and some other emerging economies have subsequently rebounded strongly, and during the second half of last year, we saw growth resume, albeit at a moderate pace, in most of the advanced economies. It appears to have taken a little longer for expansion to return here but, according to the current vintage of official data, output rose 0.3% in the final quarter of 2009. Production and trade are likely to have been adversely affected by the inclement weather in January, but business surveys suggest that a similar rate of expansion will occur in the first quarter of this year. While a return to growth is certainly good news, it is clear that we still have a very long way to go before recovery from the Great Recession of 2008–9 is complete. A large margin of underutilised resources in the economy remains and it will take time before these are returned to active use.

The event dates are the publication of the February 2009 Inflation Report and the associated press conference, which was taken to suggest a policy of quantitative easing was imminent; the decision at the March MPC meeting to use the Asset Purchase Facility as a monetary policy tool for initial asset purchases of £ and the subsequent extensions of planned purchases to £ in May, to £ in August and to £ in November. 2  BIS Review 31/2010  losses and capital market issuance has been unusually strong. Finally, nominal demand growth recovered to an annualised rate of around 4% in the second half of last year. Although we cannot be sure what would have happened without our asset purchases, these movements do at least go in the expected direction 2 . Some commentators have pointed to the weakness in bank lending and argued that this shows that quantitative easing has not worked. While the substantial increase in bank deposits and bank reserves as a result of the asset purchase programme could indeed encourage banks to extend more credit, such an effect was always likely to be quite weak, as at the current juncture banks are seeking to repair their balance sheets and to de-leverage. Rather, the objective of quantitative easing is to work around an impaired banking system by stimulating activity in the capital markets. Of course, some businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, will not find it possible to access funds through the capital markets.
The world around us is changing so rapidly, and the challenges we face so multi-faceted, that our best hope for creating sensible financial policy and effective conditions for sustainable development must lie in working together. This has certainly been our experience in Malaysia, particularly in recent periods. Let me just mention three of these partnerships. In Islamic and sustainable finance, the Value-based Intermediation Community of Practitioners or VBI COP has played a key role in driving the industry-wide implementation of VBI principles. The COP has been instrumental in developing practical frameworks, tools and guidance that have 2/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  been widely adopted by the industry in supporting the offering value-based financial solutions that are aligned with the SDGs. As an example, for green finance, the Islamic banking industry is supporting approximately 4,500 renewable energy and green projects worth more than USD2.2 billion. On climate, the Bank and Securities Commission Malaysia have established the Joint Committee on Climate Change or JC3 to pursue collective climate actions. The Committee brings regulators and the financial industry together to promote alignment and drive climate actions in five areas – risk management, governance and disclosures, green finance and innovation, data and capacity building. Finally, sustainable finance would ring hollow without ensuring that our communities – especially our most vulnerable communities – have the means and ability to make good financial decisions.

The primary purpose of near-term policy actions should be to set the economy on a long-term, permanent path to price stability and sound economic growth. This orientation puts the focus of policy on inflation expectations over the long term -- the time horizon that is appropriate for most saving and investment decisions. Businesses and households are understandably concerned about the long-term consequences of inflation and price level uncertainty. This is the frame of reference reflected in the conceptual definition of price stability offered by the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan -- that price stability is achieved when people do not consider inflation a factor in their business and economic decisions. Long-term inflation expectations must be anchored to a transparent and rigorous commitment by the central bank to a well-defined standard of price stability, and unavoidable deviations from the goal of price stability must be explained with reference to that standard. In my view, price stability is a means to an end -- the promotion of sustainable economic growth. Only with long-term price stability can the economy expect to achieve the maximum levels of productivity and living standards. Price stability is both important and desirable because a rising price level, even at moderate rates, imposes substantial economic costs on society.
In my view, a future European financial architecture should include a fully-fledged financial market union which rests on three pillars. •  First, a European banking supervisory authority with sufficient instruments and competencies to implement on a level playing field the regulatory framework in the euro area. This authority should in particular have the competence to order the closure and the resolution of non-viable institutions. The resolution of non-viable banks should no longer be a rare exception in Europe. Here we can learn a lesson from the US where 464 banks were closed since 2008. 8  •  Second, a resolution authority and a coherent regulatory framework for the resolution of systemically important banks. The costs of a resolution shall ultimately be borne by a fund. This fund needs to be financed by the financial sector itself to unwind systemically relevant financial institutions without relying on public finances and ultimately taxpayers’ money. •  Third, deposit insurance should be organised or at least further harmonised at the European level. While it is clear that moving towards a financial market union cannot be achieved overnight, it is important to stress that we need all of the just mentioned three elements. The banking supervision can only work efficiently if it has access to the relevant information, for example on the deposits. It can only act effectively if it has the adequate instruments in its toolbox, such as the closure of a non-viable bank.

In addition, the SMP had unintended side effects such as a perceived preferred creditor status of the ECB vis-à-vis other creditors. The Governing Council therefore decided last Thursday to terminate the SMP. Nevertheless, the current situation in sovereign bond markets continues to be characterised by a)  heightened aversion of non-resident investors to hold sovereign bonds of some euro area countries,  b)  extreme illiquidity and yield volatility in these bond markets and  c)  widespread concerns over redenomination risks. This all reflects a general fragmentation in financial markets; but excessively high and volatile risk premia hinder the effective working of monetary policy. In this environment, monetary policy signals do not reach all parts of the euro area in the same way. In light of these continued severe malfunctionings and to counter the risks of redenomination, last Thursday the Governing Council established Outright Monetary Transactions – or OMT – as an additional monetary policy tool. The OMT is introduced to contribute in safeguarding the monetary policy transmission mechanism to the entire euro area to ensure the singleness of monetary policy. The OMT is in no way a substitute for continued efforts in structural reforms and fiscal consolidation on the side of governments. They are essential steps to regain trust and to ensure the sustainability of the euro area in the long-run. This is also the reason why strict and effective conditionality and adherence to an appropriate EFSF or – later hopefully – ESM programme is a necessary condition to activate the OMT purchases.
But it does represent a substantial evolution in our collective thinking over the past decade or so towards a much more common approach to economic management, which serves as a valuable framework within which countries' performance can be assessed. The snail may have moved slowly but it has in fact travelled a considerable distance! But broad agreement on the principles, does not make them any easier to apply in practice. This is evident from the imbalances which have built up within and between the major industrial countries in recent years. It is uncertainty as to how those imbalances are likely to be corrected that underlies much of the current concern about the prospects for the global economy. The major uncertainty relates to the situation in the United States which has experienced a period of exceptionally strong economic growth with relatively low inflation until quite recently. Briefly – and no doubt oversimply – this very strong performance is widely seen as driven largely by exceptional productivity gains, as the application of new information and communications technologies spread through the economy. This development promised a higher sustainable rate of growth in the US economy and higher corporate earnings growth. That expectation contributed to a rapid rise in equity prices, especially in the "high tech" sectors, which in turn helped stimulate both business investment in the US and consumer demand causing the private sector to move into financial deficit.

Thailand is transitioning to a new era of digital payment system and financial technology in which the Bank of Thailand is fully committed to foster. First and foremost, electronic payment infrastructures must be put in place to realize the full potential of digital economy. Under the National e-Payment Masterplan, last year the Bank of Thailand together with the Ministry of Finance and 6/10  the Thai Bankers’ Association launched our new faster payment system – PromptPay – which propelled the wider adoption of e-payment in Thailand. PromptPay is an instant payment platform that links bank accounts to various forms of identification including national ID numbers and mobile phone numbers. With PromptPay, funds can be transferred to a recipient’s preferred bank account in real time and at virtually no cost. This new technology has significantly boosted the usage of mobile banking, and has potential to lead to significant growth in e-commerce in Thailand as well as to radically change the way government welfare payments are distributed. In just over a year since the launch of PromptPay, there are over 40 million IDs registered on the platform and more than 2.7 million transactions a day. The increasing usage of PromptPay also served as a catalyst that eventually led to the announcements of most commercial banks two months ago, to eliminate transfer fees for all transfers through mobile and online banking. All in all, PromptPay provides a crucial payment infrastructure which opens the door to many other digital payment services.
Therefore, maintaining our focus on ensuring the resilience and competitiveness of our economy and financial system will serve us well as we sail the stormy global seas. BIS central bankers’ speeches  9

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
For the general public, by contrast, only 40% were positive or neutral. This is only one poll. And I am not, at this stage, making any value judgement on which faction is right. But if nothing else, these results suggest a yawning gap in people’s perceptions of finance. It seems very unlikely these word-clouds form part of the same nephological formation. To borrow from the title of a recent book by Nobel Laureate economist Joe Stiglitz, these results suggest to me a Great Divide: 2 a Great Divide between the views of financial insiders  1  Videos of the Open Forum are available at www.boeopenforum.co.uk. 2  Stiglitz (2015). BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  and outsiders, between the perceptions of producers and consumers of financial services, between the silent majority who buy and the vocal minority who sell financial products, between the echo chamber of the elites and the voting chamber of wider society. They underscore just how far finance still has to travel to regain its social licence. 3 This “Great Divide” is my jumping-off point. I want to discuss the crucial role finance plays in society and why. I want to discuss the progress made, so far, in restoring trust in finance. And I want to discuss what further progress might be needed to narrow that trust deficit.

Notes: A dataset of around 600 paragraphs from each of the following sources was used. Banks – a mixture of terms and conditions and various reports from Barclays, RBS, HSBC and Lloyds. BoE – a mixture of Bank of England speeches, reports and news content. AH – a selection of my recent speeches. Political speeches – the Leaders’ speeches from Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat party conferences in 2012 and 2014. One Tabloid and one Broadsheet newspaper were also included. These measures consider not only sentence length but also the number of polysyllables (words of three syllables or more) and the average number of syllables per word. In general a lower number signifies lower complexity, apart from the Flesch-Kincaid reading grade level and Coleman correct completion measures where a higher number implies lower complexity. For further details please see DuBay (2004). 18  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Chart 4 Average sentence and word length across publications Sentence length / words  26  Banks  24 22  BoE  Broadsheet  20 Tabloid 18 AH 16 14  Political speeches 4.2  4.4  4.6  4.8 Word length / letters  5  5.2  5.4  Source: Bank calculations. Notes: A dataset of around 600 paragraphs from each of the following sources was used. Banks – a mixture of terms and conditions and various reports from Barclays, RBS, HSBC and Lloyds. BoE – a mixture of Bank of England speeches, reports and news content. AH – a selection of my recent speeches.
Josef Bonnici: Strengthening economic resilience Address by Professor Josef Bonnici, Governor of the Central Bank of Malta, at the Annual Dinner of the Institute of Financial Services, Saint Julian’s, 20 November 2015. *  *  *  Honourable Minister, members of the Institute, distinguished guests, I would like to thank the President and Committee of ifs Malta for once again organising this Annual Dinner and giving me the opportunity to share my thoughts with such a distinguished audience. Mr President, I am pleased to hear you speak about the Institute’s commitment towards raising the standards of financial services education, as this is exactly what we need for our dynamic financial sector to remain successful and a key contributor to our economic development. Over the years, the Central Bank of Malta has worked closely with the Institute, and more recently participated in the successful ifs Annual Conference on The Future of Pensions. This national conference acted as a catalyst to rekindle the debate on private pensions in Malta. I commend the Institute for this important initiative. I wish you success in all the Institute’s future endeavours. Introduction The current international economic environment poses a number of key challenges, including the weak recovery in the euro area, the slowdown in emerging economies, the enduring geopolitical tensions, and possible spill-overs from the US monetary policy that could affect financial conditions on a global scale. Clearly, our economy is not immune from developments beyond our shores.

Survey of Consumer Expectations So a second important example of data innovation at the New York Fed is the Survey of Consumer Expectations, which we introduced to the public just last month. Consumer expectations of future economic outcomes are crucial inputs to the policy process, but we felt that our standard measures of these expectations were quite limited. The primary goal of this new national survey is to collect timely, rich, and high-quality information on consumer expectations about a wide range of household-level and aggregate economic and financial conditions. The survey covers expectations about inflation, price changes for specific goods, home price changes, future wage growth, future quits and layoffs, and residential mobility, as well as expectations of household income, spending, taxes, and credit access. The SCE has two advantages over existing surveys of expectations: It collects information about consumers’ expectations and decisions on a broader range of economic and financial topics, and it does so in a way that captures respondents’ beliefs more fully. The objective is to measure an individual’s beliefs about the likelihood of future outcomes, thereby capturing how certain or uncertain the person is about future events. In some cases, we do this by eliciting a “density forecast,” where respondents are asked to assign a percent chance to  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  different values (or intervals) for the outcome of interest.
Denis Beau: Building an appropriate climate stress testing framework for capital markets Opening remarks by Mr Denis Beau, First Deputy Governor of the Bank of France, at the Future Europe Sustainable Europe Global Virtual Conference "Europe’s global response - promoting global financial coordination towards our common sustainable future", 6 July 2021. * * * I would like to thank you very much for your kind invitation to present the work the Banque de France and the ACPR, its supervisory arm, conducted on climate stress-testing and to share some of the lessons we have drawn from it. I will focus my remarks on 1/ the objectives to be set to such exercice 2/ the tools to be used. ***** 1- I think it is not a matter of debate between financial institutions and their supervisors that climate change affect financial institutions through the traditional risks categories they face. Sizing the exposure to and impact of climate-related drivers on those traditional risk categories is however difficult, given the specificities of those climate-related risk drivers, which are not necessarily economic in nature, and the multiple layers of uncertainty which affect them. In particular, data on past changes in climate and their financial impact may be a particularly poor guide to future magnitude and dynamic of climate related risks. In addition, financial institutions decision-making horizons are usually too short-term oriented to fully account for the long time horizon of risks associated with climate change, the so-called “tragedy of the horizon".

Neither more nor less.’ Hence, while more or fewer notes would have impaired Mozart’s harmony, more or less emphasis on money in the ECB’s strategy would have created monetary instability. The fact is that the development, implementation and communication of the ECB’s new monetary policy strategy went smoothly and successfully. This was a remarkable achievement, given the lack of data and the high uncertainty about the structure and functioning of a new and heterogeneous currency area. Commitment to price stability Ladies and gentlemen, allow me now to proceed to the second reason for paying tribute to Otmar, namely his commitment to price stability. Reportedly, back in 1998, finance minister Theo Waigel had to persuade Chancellor Helmut Kohl to appoint Otmar to the ECB Board, despite his uncontested merits. At the time, Otmar was considered to be sceptical about the early starting date for monetary union. Ultimately, Waigel convinced the chancellor that the appointment of Otmar Issing would help convince ordinary Germans that the future of the euro was in safe hands. In fact, at the ECB, Otmar continued his insistence on a policy oriented towards price stability in the medium term. Indeed, Otmar was convinced that a monetary policy that is geared to steadiness and medium-term objectives reinforces the stability of the economic area. When Otmar left the ECB in May 2006 at the end of his eight-year term, the ECB had gained a reputation for price stability and the euro had established itself as the world’s second most important currency.