samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
But we are considering other options in pursuit of our secondary competition objective too. We are considering, in particular, whether there might be scope to introduce a new regime for smaller banks following the UK’s departure from the European Union (EU) – a totally different mountain to climb (a Munro rather than an Alp perhaps). As Sam Woods noted in his Mansion House speech last October,10 complexity is a real challenge for smaller firms and a simpler but still prudentially robust regime could benefit the PRA’s primary and secondary objectives. We do of course already have different mountains in the range: we have a separate Source Book for building societies and a different regulatory regime for credit unions. So this is not unprecedented. Any new regime will of course have to be compatible with any international agreements the UK government makes as part of leaving the EU. And even once that is clear it will take us some time to work up the proposals. We need to get this right and make sure we properly understand the aspects of the current regime that are most problematic – whether from a complexity or barriers to growth perspective. Please do engage with us on that topic. Conclusion We recognise that the winding path up the mountain to become a large player can seem arduous, and strewn with rock faces that appear difficult if not impossible to scale.

Barriers to growth are in many ways the inevitable corollary of our lowering the barriers to getting onto the mountain in the first place and of us introducing proportionality into the regime. So ironically our actions to support competition risk creating the very barriers that firms then find it hard to overcome. 10  ‘Credit Union meets robot’: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2019/sam-woods-speech-at-mansion-house-london 9  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  9  Over the past few years, our focus has been on getting more banks onto the mountain at base camp. But as our next step, our focus has turned to ascending the mountain. And I hope the draft Supervisory Statement we have issued today goes some way to making the path up the mountain easier for you all to navigate. Our focus is also on the gradient of the climb and doing our best to ensure those rock-faces are traversable. And, where they prove not to be, to ensure there is a safe way down. In parallel, we will continue to work hard on the design of our prudential regime, including thinking about whether we can introduce a simpler mountain for smaller firms. But in doing so, we will not compromise safety and soundness nor create insurmountable barriers between mountains in the range. 10  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  10
But what I think this discussion leads to the broader conclusion, given that the euro is to go ahead, that structural reform - in labour markets and welfare systems and in broadening and deepening the single market for goods and services, but also capital markets - in order to improve supply-side flexibility - becomes more crucially important than ever. The need for greater supply-side flexibility was the subject of much of the discussion at the informal meeting of European Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors in York last weekend, and I was greatly encouraged by the degree of consensus around the table on this point. The United Kingdom of course will not participate in the first wave of monetary union. That decision, taken last October, was - as I noted earlier - a disappointment to some of our EU partners; but it was a considerable relief to others because UK participation from the outset would certainly have complicated the project - not least because of the substantial cyclical divergence between ourselves and the major countries on the Continent. But in making its announcement the British Government made it clear that it is not opposed to euro membership as a matter of principle. When the time comes - and that will almost certainly not be during the lifetime of the present Parliament - it will make its decision - and submit it to Parliament, and the people in a referendum - on pragmatic, economic, grounds.

The crucial and unique advantage of monetary union is the exchange rate certainty it will bring throughout the euro area - not just the reasonable de facto stability that can result from each EU member state individually pursuing disciplined macro-economic policies in parallel, and which has in practice been achieved within much of Europe for quite long periods within the framework of the Exchange Rate Mechanism - but actual, and in principle permanent, exchange rate certainty. There is no doubt that this is a very real advantage. One can argue that exchange rate certainty is not an essential complement to the European single market - any more than exchange rate fixity is essential to achieving the benefits of free trade more generally. But there is no doubt that intra-European exchange rate certainty will - through the intensified competition resulting from greater transparency of prices and lower transaction costs, through broader and deeper capital markets, and through the associated improvement in economic resource allocation - substantially enhance the macro-economic benefits to be derived from the single market. Whether or not it is essential, therefore, exchange rate certainty is very desirable from this perspective. The potential drawback of monetary union can also be simply stated, though it is more difficult to assess.
Climate change – Plotting our course to Net Zero Speech given by Sarah Breeden, Executive Sponsor Climate Change and Executive Director, UK Deposit Takers Supervision  University of Edinburgh and Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges – Webinar  18 May 2021  I am hugely grateful to Ryan Barrett for his assistance in preparing these remarks; to Chris Faint, Zane Jamal, Theresa Löber and Edo Schets for their comments; and to all those involved in the NGFS work on climate scenarios. Introduction  Good afternoon everybody. Thank you for the kind introduction Peter and to the University of Edinburgh and the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges for hosting this event. Making sustainability a core part of education is essential for inspiring the leaders of tomorrow and initiating the research and innovation that is needed for the momentous task ahead of us. I am honoured to be here today. Over the past year, we have seen scientists and academics, universities, pharmaceutical companies and governments work together at unprecedented speed in a race to develop Covid-19 vaccines. A task that was seen as nigh on impossible back in March 2020 has been achieved through urgency, innovation, and collective action. We must bring that same urgency to tackling climate change.

The views and conclusions expressed in the presentations are of the authors and not necessarily of the respective institutions or the Bank of Albania. Wishing success to the conference, I hope that all the participants will benefit from the interesting presentations that will be shared with the audience today. I have now the pleasure to invite our keynote speaker, Prof. Olivier Picard, former Director of the French Archaeological School in Athens, Professor at the Sorbonne University, Member of the “Académie des Inscriptions et Belles – Lettre” (Institute of France), who will hold a presentation on “Minting of coins in Illyria in wartime”. Thank you! 2/2  BIS central bankers' speeches
On this front, Thailand has done remarkably well, registering a substantial increase in net inflow of foreign direct investment in the four years following the crisis despite the overall net capital outflow due to debt repayment within the banking sector. Foreign direct investment (to the non-bank sector) increased from an average around 1.4 billion US dollars during 1992-1996 to 3.4 billion US dollars during 1997-2000. Though much work is required on the corporate sector in the march toward modernization of the Thai economy, the government and the central bank also have vital roles in maintaining stable economic environment and providing the required infrastructures to allow the private sector to drive forward to create wealth and prosperity. Several long-term plans have been made in the past couple years. On the macroeconomic front, the Bank of Thailand has adopted Inflation Targeting as a framework of our monetary policy since May 2000. It may be a little too early to claim our success, but the results thus far have been encouraging. Long-term interest rates of the interpolated 14-year government bonds were reduced from 8.3 percent at the beginning of 2000 to currently at 6.1 percent. Inflation remained subdued and will stay within the target range during the next two years. The maturity of state enterprise debentures offered in the market increased from a maximum of 7-year in 1998 up to 20 years in 2000, reflecting greater confidence on the long-term economic stability.

Prosperity of our nations rests on the hard work of the corporations, for what really matters in the long run is your productivity. Corporates must strive to improve their competitiveness, increase their economic value added, move up the technological ladders, and stay innovative. All of these cannot be achieved without true corporate reform. For those of you who love to play soccer, good government policies are like good players in the backfield. We can help defend the goalie – the stability of the country; send the ball up to you who are in the front field. But, if you do not try hard to score on the behalf of our countries, then who will? So, I wish to congratulate those who win the award today. They have set the examples of what the Netherlands and Thailand need in order to prosper in the new millennium. Thank you for your attention..  BIS Review 41/2001  3
The question is why we didn’t see the problems in the Stability and Growth Pact from the beginning? Perhaps because we were fortunate to have something that could work as a temporary replacement for rules: clear objectives, strong leadership and the market as a quickly reacting judge. Most countries wanted to meet the convergence criteria and thereby join the euro area. Germany led the way, both in terms of its economic size and its example of fiscal discipline. Now the objective of joining the euro has been achieved for many countries, and, in addition, Germany has lost its leading role and the markets react less to fiscal laxity. Instead of national leadership towards clear objectives we have seen the opposite – the political exploitation of the gap between the national and European level. The requirements of the Pact are blamed on heartless “accountants in Brussels”, and when a majority within the countries puts narrow national political interests first the agreed rules become moot – “peer pressure” becomes ”peer protection”. Incorrect facts have been more or less deliberately sent to the Commission ahead of sensitive elections. A study by Barclays Capital shows that during the years 2000-2003 growth projections were overestimated by 1.5 percentage points on average each year by the euro area countries, leading to fiscal balances turning out worse than expected on average by about 1% of GDP per year.

There are two aspects to this: we recognise that life insurers can be an important source of long-term, stable financing for corporates, infrastructure and mortgages – this is an important function that we want to see maintained; but we also must consider the wider financial stability angles, avoiding undue influence on the asset allocation behaviour of insurers. Solvency II should not materially drive investment decision making except in so far as it helps to make certain that insurers fully understand the risks that they take. The Prudent Person Principle will seek to ensure that the industry understands and is capable of managing its investment risks. Specifically, insurers must be able to demonstrate that they can properly identify, measure, monitor, manage, control and report on their investment risks and not place reliance upon information provided by third parties. Investment choices should be made in the best interest of policy holders and beneficiaries. Those running a business are best placed to make business decisions. That being said, the PRA does have the benefit of perspective. The PRA has the ability to look across the industry and can also draw upon the expertise of specialists working across the different areas of the Bank of England. Whilst on the subject of the role of management, we understand that there has been some uncertainty around our expectations of the non-executive director role for firms that have internal risk models. Non-executive board members need not be technical experts in risk modelling.
In Britain the creation of the Financial Services Authority led the Bank of England to build up its resources in financial stability analysis. This was a result of the Bank’s efforts to ensure that oversight of the financial system did not fall between the gaps in the new institutional structure of supervision. Since then other central banks have followed the Bank of England’s lead. Financial stability units – small teams with backgrounds in economics and banking supervision whose job it is to monitor wider trends in the financial system – are now increasingly a feature of the organisational charts of many central banks. These factors have led to a redefinition in the way in which central banks have begun to approach their traditional macro prudential remit. I would like to mention four of these in particular: •  The formalisation of payments and settlement system oversight;  •  The publication of financial stability reports;  •  Stress testing and scenario analysis; and  •  Concern with financial condition of non-bank financial intermediaries and health of corporate and household balance sheets. Let me now briefly talk about each of these in turn. Payment system oversight has been part of the core functions of central banks almost from the very beginning. However, once the formal responsibility for banking supervision was split away from central banks like the Bank of England and the Reserve Bank of Australia, these central banks began to formalise their role in payment system oversight.

In many parts of the world banking laws were passed for the first time and the central bank often became the bank supervisor. In this process the distinction between the micro- and macro- perspectives became blurred. What has changed in the past ten to fifteen years is that central banks have started to give much more explicit emphasis than in the past on their macro prudential responsibilities and have distinguished it more clearly from the micro-supervision perspective. This renewed emphasis has several different sources. One of them was undoubtedly the financial crises that hit Asia in 1997. This experience showed that even if the individual banks in a financial system appear to be sound, the system itself can still be overwhelmed by financial shocks. For example, the system can be exposed to a common risk that isn’t obvious from looking at each bank individually. In the Asian crisis countries the exposures of banks to foreign exchange risks didn’t show up on bank balance sheets. The risks were instead in the balance sheets of their major borrowers, who had borrowed heavily in foreign currencies even though they had domestic currency cash-flows. And this also points to another feature of macro prudential concern – it cannot stop at the traditional boundary of the banking system, but must look at the risks in the nonbank financial sector and at the structure of household and corporate balance sheets. There are also two other factors worth mentioning.
The deeper point is that, if the very existence of money is accounted for by the presence of various financial frictions (i.e. departures from Hahn’s Arrow-Debreu world) then supplying more of it might plausibly ease these constraints. Conceivably this could boost spending even without any change in bond yields or the prices of other assets. If for no other, this is one reason why policymakers should always pay attention to the behaviour of the monetary aggregates. One should not presume that an IS relationship (based on something like [1]) always captures fully the degree of inflationary pressure in the economy or the transmission of monetary policy. Stronger claims about quantities not borne out by the evidence Equally, one cannot conclude either that these aggregates are the only thing you need to consider. Nor should one imagine –this was an approximation that that both “Keynesians” and “monetarists” often seemed to make – that the one (broad money) is uniquely determined by the other (narrow money). Using recent experience in the UK I want to discuss some of the challenges in interpreting these data. Some, highlighted in the introduction, are evident in a simple split of the data over the inflation targeting period (for convenience, I’ve reproduced the relevant Charts here).

History demonstrates that shifts in the quantity of money have often been driven – or at least accompanied – by shifts in the demand for deposits (i.e. what the private sector would like to hold for a given level of spending). Following the financial liberalisation earlier that decade, banks began during the 1980s to pay interest on standard deposit accounts. This increased their attractiveness, relative to other “stores of wealth” – they were not the precursor to higher spending and inflation – and broad growth remained stubbornly high even as inflation declined sharply (at least until the boom at the end of the decade). For similar reasons broad money growth was extremely strong throughout the first fifteen years of inflation targeting (1992-2007). Nor is there a tight correspondence between “narrow” and “broad” money. QE involves the creation of central bank reserves to buy financial assets (usually government debt). So in the decade or so that passed between the first use of the policy in 2009 and the onset of the pandemic, reserves grew extremely rapidly. Yet broad money growth was significantly slower than it had been before the crisis (Chart 1). And, in both periods, average inflation was close to 2% (Chart 2). Page 4  Chart 1: Reserve creation neither necessary nor sufficient for strong growth of broad money  Sources: ONS, Bank of England and Bank calculations. Unless stated otherwise “broad money” refers to M4 excluding intermediate other financial corporations (M4ex).
The National Mediation Office also received increased powers of authority to take action in connection with wage bargaining rounds. The National Institute of Economic Research was given the task of annually producing reports on the economic conditions for wage formation. The results of these changes are clear and positive. Since the crisis at the beginning of the 1990s, wage formation has functioned much better than before. The agreements no longer contain flexibility clauses and wage drift is much more limited. The number of labour market conflicts has been lower than before. Real wage increases, which reflect what we can buy for our wages, have been better than before, while the nominal increases have been markedly lower than before (see Figure 6). The social partners have contributed in a constructive manner to this positive development. The positive institutional changes in several areas – e.g. new regulations for fiscal policy, monetary policy and wage formation - are strongly contributing factors to the favourable developments since the crisis in the early 1990s. Conditions for wage bargaining rounds The inflation process has changed in nature in recent years, not only in Sweden but also in many other countries. As the inflation-targeting policy has gained credibility, inflation is increasingly determined by inflation expectations. Inflation has become lower and also appears to be less dependent on variations in capacity utilisation (the short-term Phillips curve has shifted downwards and become flatter). Capacity utilisation mainly affects inflation through wage formation. However, wage costs still play an important role in the inflation process.

Can non-interest rate policies stabilize housing markets?. Evidence from a panel of 57 countries. BIS Working Paper no 433. Lim, C.H., F. Columba, A. Costa, P. Kongsamut, A. Otani, M. Saiyid, T. Wezel and X. Wu (2011). Macroprudential policy: what instruments and how to use them? Lessons from country experiences. Working paper 11/238, International Monetary Fund. Peek, J., E. Rosengren and G.M.B. Tootell (2015). Should U.S. Monetary Policy have a Ternary Mandate?, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, mimeo. Tovar Mora, C.E., M. Garcia-Escribano and M. Vera Martin (2012). Credit growth and the effectiveness of reserve requirements and other macroprudential instruments in Latin America. Zhang, L. and E. Zoli (2014). Leaning Against the Wind: Macroprudential Policy in Asia. Working paper 14/22, International Monetary Fund. BIS central bankers’ speeches  7
As a result of the Maastricht convergence criteria, the central banks of these countries were increasingly aligning themselves with the Bundesbank. Exchange rates between the affected currencies, as well as exchange rates to the Swiss franc, consequently stabilised. This phase of low exchange rate volatility continued in the years immediately following the launch of the euro. The most recent period of exchange rate volatility against the euro has its roots in the international financial and debt crisis, which rapidly evolved into a euro crisis. Doubts about the viability of some euro area member states’ sovereign debts caused markets to lose confidence in the euro. As in past crises, the mounting uncertainty triggered substantial upward pressure on the Swiss franc. Why Switzerland doesn’t have the euro Considering its close economic ties to the euro area, why didn’t Switzerland ever seriously contemplate joining the single currency? Politically and legally speaking, the answer is simple: a country can only join the Eurosystem if it is already an EU member state. Swiss voters and cantons rejected accession to the European Economic Area in a referendum in 1992, and in 2001 followed this up by voting against a popular initiative favouring a “Yes to Europe”. These decisions settled the question of whether Switzerland should join the EU for the foreseeable future. Quite apart from these political and legal factors, the economic case for joining the euro had always been weaker for Switzerland than for many other European countries.

Floating exchange rates allow a country to pursue its own, independent monetary policy; however, the disadvantage of such an approach is that it can result in major (nominal and  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  real) exchange rate fluctuations. A country’s currency may thus be substantially under or overvalued – sometimes for considerable periods of time. The problems associated with both fixed and floating exchange rates mean that, time and again, central banks have been on the lookout for compromises. Since the end of the Bretton Woods system, the SNB has twice introduced a temporary exchange rate floor in order to cap Swiss franc appreciation: first in October 1978 against the German mark, and latterly in September 2011 as a minimum exchange rate against the euro. The minimum exchange rate as a monetary policy instrument When a central bank announces a minimum exchange rate, it commits to enforcing a floor, if necessary by means of foreign currency purchases. Such a policy is designed to cap a currency’s appreciation. The minimum exchange rate is not conceived as an instrument for fine-tuning the exchange rate. Rather, it is intended to give guidance to the markets in a period of extreme uncertainty and to reduce excessive appreciation. However, a minimum exchange rate is not a long-term instrument. This is especially true in a country like Switzerland which has lower long-term average inflation rates than most countries and a currency that has appreciated consistently over the decades – both in real and nominal terms.