samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The tight monetary policy stance of the Central Bank as well as the relatively tight fiscal policy stance of the government, which were adopted with the aim of regaining macroeconomic stability, partly affected public and private investment spending that also contributed to low economic growth. Consumer price inflation increased, mainly due to high food prices associated with weather related domestic supply disruptions, revisions to indirect taxes and increased prices of imported commodities, making our efforts to anchor inflation expectations challenging. Despite the tight monetary policy stance maintained by the Central Bank, growth of monetary aggregates was high during most of 2017, before decelerating to envisaged levels towards the end of the year. Although we have seen signs of a firm recovery in exports with better prospects in key export markets and the flexible exchange rate policy of the Central Bank, the trade account continued to be affected by a largely weather induced increase in  import expenditure. The decline in workers’ remittances resulted in a reduction in the cushion against the widening trade deficit in the external current account. Although the fiscal sector has recorded notable improvements in terms of revenue collection, some slippage in the budget deficit is likely in 2017 mainly as a result of weather related fiscal costs and higher interest payments. This could have an adverse impact on achieving the envisaged fiscal consolidation path, while complicating the conduct of monetary and exchange rate policies.

Actions will be taken to amend/repeal Financial  23  Transactions Reporting Act No 6 of 2006 (FTRA) and Prevention of Money Laundering Act, No. 05 of 2006 (PMLA) in line with international recommendations. We will also facilitate and coordinate with stakeholders to amend the Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters Act (MACMA), NGO Act and Trust Ordinance. In 2014, an AML/CFT National Risk Assessment (NRA) was conducted by the Central Bank with the support of more than 70 professionals representing key stakeholders. In 2018, we will take actions to update this NRA report. We will also coordinate with the Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) to assist stakeholders to develop individual databases to maintain statistics in relation to AML/CFT. Moreover, we will coordinate with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) and other stakeholders to implement UN Resolutions on proliferation financing (UNSCR 1718 and UNSCR 2231). Further, we will continue to coordinate with the international community, including the Egmont Group, to fulfil our international obligations and to strengthen cooperation. During the year 2017, the Central Bank continued to strengthen the regulatory framework for the microfinance sector by issuing directions to licensed microfinance companies and principles, standards and guidelines to the Registrar of Voluntary Social Service Organisations, for the regulation and supervision of Microfinance NGOs.
This dialogue will now be held annually to serve as a platform for cooperation among the Shariah scholars to promote greater understanding on emerging developments across the world in the area of Islamic finance. This is to promote a greater understanding on the approaches taken by different jurisdictions in their Shariah interpretations. To support the Shariah scholars' activities especially in the areas of research and capacity building, Bank Negara Malaysia has also allocated a RM200 million endowment fund to meet the financing requirements of the Shariah Scholars' Dialogue research activities and the provision of scholarships. It is hoped that this will contribute towards greater understanding in the process of harmonizing the international implementation of Shariah in Islamic finance. These initiatives have contributed to the success in the creation of a robust Islamic financial environment. It is further supported by the requisite financial infrastructure that includes the financial markets and that is reinforced further by a comprehensive regulatory, prudential, legal and accounting  1/2  framework. These elements have provided an enabling environment that increases the potential for Malaysia to evolve as an Islamic financial centre. These measures, however, need to be reinforced by efforts by the Islamic financial institutions to take on a more active role in promoting Islamic finance. Indeed, the rapid progress of Islamic banking over the last two decades would not have been possible without the pioneering efforts of the Islamic financial institutions in building up a successful and vibrant industry.

Therefore, it is important for the Islamic financial services industry to continually promote human capital development and expertise to create a larger pool of experts and high calibre professionals. This involves attracting not only the existing talent pool, but also building a robust pipeline of skilled human resources for the future. This is vital to drive the development of the industry to greater heights. Ladies and Gentlemen, On this occasion of the official launch of Hong Leong Islamic Bank Berhad, it is with pleasure that I congratulate Hong Leong Bank Berhad for its interest and commitment to contribute to the success of Islamic finance by allocating resources in having a dedicated subsidiary to drive its Islamic banking business forward. The establishment of the Islamic subsidiary is a positive step forward in the aspiration of making Malaysia as a leading and attractive integrated Islamic financial hub. I wish Hong Leong Islamic Bank Berhad every success in its endeavours. Ladies and Gentlemen, Dengan lafaz Bismillahirrahmanirrahim, saya dengan sukacitanya merasmikan pelancaran "Hong Leong Islamic Bank Berhad". Terima kasih. 2/2
Furthermore, government finances are solid and are not affected to any great extent by shortterm exchange rate movements, allowing the exchange rate to play an important role in absorbing shocks to the economy. Particularly in periods of falling oil prices, a weaker krone has had a stabilising effect on the business cycle. With confidence in the inflation target, monetary policy has been able to underpin such movements. At the same time, in a world of high capital mobility and extensive trade, monetary policy’s room for manoeuvre is constrained by the exchange rate channel. In a small open economy with a floating exchange rate, the domestic interest rate can differ from interest rates abroad. However, an interest rate differential that becomes too wide can lead to considerable exchange rate volatility, which will in turn feed through to inflation, output and employment. Thus, the domestic interest rate cannot be set without regard to the level of external interest rates. The room for 2/8  BIS central bankers' speeches  manoeuvre in monetary policy is further constrained in periods when external interest rates are close to or below zero. Under an inflation-targeting regime, a numerical target is set for the inflation rate, either in the form of a point target or a target range. In its conduct of monetary policy, the central bank aims to keep inflation close to the point target or the midpoint of the target range over time. Inflation can impose costs on society if it is too high and if it is too low.

Since 2012, the FOMC has clearly and consistently communicated its resolute commitment to its 2 percent longer-run inflation goal and the importance of well-anchored inflation expectations consistent with that goal.5 This provides a "North Star" for our policy decisions and has helped keep longer-term inflation expectations well anchored.6 According to our most recent Survey of Consumer Expectations, three-year-ahead inflation expectations are now where they were before the sharp increase in inflation that started in 2021, and one-year-ahead expectations have been trending down since the middle of last year.7  Economic Outlook Declines in commodity and goods prices will not be enough to bring inflation to 2 percent on a sustained basis. We need all the gears turning at the right pace to restore balance between demand and supply in the entire economy. We still have some way to go to achieve that goal. And it will likely entail a period of subdued growth and some softening of labor market conditions. As a result, I expect real GDP growth to come in around 1 percent for 2023. And I anticipate the unemployment rate to edge up over the next year to between 4 and 4-1/2 percent. As tighter policy actions continue to work to restore balance to supply and demand, I expect PCE inflation to fall to 3 percent in 2023, before moving closer to our 2 percent longer-run goal in the next few years.
2/2  BIS central bankers' speeches

Specifically there is asymmetry in the access to information and bargaining power between the consumers and financial service providers. These imbalances can be addressed by three mutually reinforcing strategies. Firstly, promoting stronger transparency and disclosure standards in financial institutions; secondly strengthening the mechanisms for consumer protection; and thirdly enhancing consumer education. An increasing number of countries have undertaken this more comprehensive approach in order to give greater focus to consumer protection issues for ensuring the soundness of financial service providers and ultimately to the stability of the financial system. This will also in turn promote more effective consumer participation in the economy, thus contributing more significantly to the economic growth and development process. The approach and mechanisms adopted to protect consumers in individual jurisdictions will vary from one country to another, given the unique characteristics prevailing in the different respective economies and financial systems. Consideration of country-specific circumstances and contextualisation is important to evolve relevant and effective consumer protection and education infrastructures. Individual countries need to customise the consumer protection and education framework to their environment, taking into account factors such as the stage of economic and regulatory development, the structure of the financial system and the level of consumer sophistication. BIS Review 86/2005  1  Prudential safety and soundness, competition and consumer protection need to co-exist to effectively serve the various stakeholders' interests. Hence, implementing an effective consumer protection and education framework involves achieving an appropriate balance between providing adequate safety for consumers while promoting competition and financial innovation.
To be clearer in our communication, though, we also need to better understand the businesses you are in and how your businesses operate. As I indicated earlier, we need more context to understand your operations – and your sharing more global information with us does provide that necessary context. •  Second, improve collaboration and communications with other supervisors – both U.S. and foreign. For true consolidated supervision to work, information has to flow  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  freely among supervisors. We need to eliminate the legal impediments for supervisors on the ground to be able to share information in a more routine and natural way. There are many efforts underway, through such venues as the FSB and the Senior Supervisors Group, to promote enhanced information sharing and collaboration among supervisors. We also need to work more collaboratively together. This means sharing concerns about issues and agreeing on work necessary across the global firm to address the issues. This means jointly conducting examinations, as well as concurrently conducting work with similar scopes so that the full picture of the firm can be drawn, and we can capture all the relevant insights of these globally managed businesses. Finally, it also means leveraging the results of work from other supervisors and not undertaking duplicative work.

Lessons from the Asian crisis Five years have passed since the Asian financial crisis began, prompting a major re-think of policies held to be obvious and valid before the crisis. In particular, the crisis has highlighted three major issues in Asian economic and financial systems. First, some analysts have questioned East Asia’s growth model, with its emphasis on high savings, reliance on foreign investment, and export growth. East Asian economies, it is argued, should instead lower savings rates, in order to stimulate domestic demand, develop indigenous enterprise, and insulate themselves from volatile external conditions. Second, the crisis highlighted the dangers of liberalising capital markets too rapidly and without adequate safeguards. Before the crisis, capital account liberalization was the vogue. Conventional wisdom emphasized benefits rather than costs of free capital flows. The crisis demolished this complacent confidence. Undoubtedly, structural flaws and policy errors, especially in the financial and corporate sectors, contributed to the crisis. However, the financial markets’ reaction to these weaknesses was out of proportion to the severity of the crime. Markets proved highly susceptible to contagion and herd behaviour. Crashes and panics shook seemingly sound economies to their roots. Third, the crisis demonstrated the dangers of over-reliance on bank-based financing. In many Asian countries prior to the crisis, capital markets were underdeveloped. Bond markets, in particular, were illiquid or nonexistent. So Asian firms relied on bank loans for working capital and to fund capital expenditure. When banks ran into trouble, firms were left without alternative sources of capital.
4  BIS Review 11/2004  It has been harder work to explain our thinking about the altogether more newsworthy subject of the strong growth in household spending, and its relationship with escalating house prices and household debt. Bad memories of boom and bust in the late ’80s and early-’90s get in the way of more nuanced explanations which try to reflect how the world has changed in the past decade. The truth is that the present situation is rife with uncertainties. For example, while it is not difficult to think of reasons why the level of house prices relative to income might have risen significantly in recent years, at no less than 40% above their long average, current levels definitely stretch the imagination. Are people behaving rationally? Hard to say - individuals are notoriously prone to over-optimism about their own prospects, but it is not obviously misguided to base decisions on a view of the future which reflects the record of macro economic stability I described earlier. What clearly is irrational is to assume that current rates of house price inflation will continue indefinitely. It has also been a challenge to explain how house price inflation and borrowing fit within an inflation targeting framework. One commentator has claimed that they are ‘the targets that dare not speak their name’. This is not so.

In 1997 and 1998 the economy shifted from an upturn with high growth rates to an expansion with lower growth but low unemployment, labour shortages in many sectors and strong growth in labour costs. Unemployment has increased again since 2001. Capacity utilisation in the mainland economy has fallen again from a high level and is now on a par with the level in the years 1995-1997, before cost inflation accelerated. The output gap has again closed. At the same time, wage growth has dropped to a more sustainable level. However, growth in the economy stalled last winter. It has therefore been appropriate to reduce interest rates markedly. Even though the krone has depreciated this year, competitiveness is still fairly weak. In the period 1996-2003, competitiveness in Norwegian manufacturing has deteriorated by about 13 per cent. The deterioration is solely ascribable to higher growth in labour costs in Norway than among our trading partners. The krone measured in terms of the trade-weighted exchange rate index (TWI) is currently at about the same level as in 1996. Compared with the average for the last 30 years (1970-2003), wage growth has contributed to a deterioration in competitiveness of 15 per cent. In the years around the turn of the millennium, the depreciation of the krone veiled the underlying deterioration in competitiveness. In May 2000, the krone exchange rate reached its lowest level in six years.
The dashed red curve represents the new forecast which covers the period from the second quarter of 2007 to the first quarter 2010. It shows the inflation outlook after today's increase in the Libor under the assumption that the level of 2.50% will be kept constant during the forecasting period. For purposes of comparison, the dash-dotted green curve shows the inflation forecast of the March monetary assessment which was based on a Libor of 2.25%. The combined effect of higher oil prices, economic developments that were better than expected and a weaker franc leads to a deterioration in the inflation forecast for the coming months. Today's interest rate rise will stabilise the rate of inflation at a slightly higher level from mid-2008 onwards than that established last March. Inflation will subsequently continue to rise and approach the 2% mark towards the end of the forecasting period. *** In lifting the three-month Libor by 25 basis points today, deterioration in the inflation prospects over the past months will be offset. Any forecast and any decision are obviously fraught with uncertainty and risk. Should economic momentum remain unchanged or should movements in the Swiss franc result in a further relaxation in monetary conditions, further increases in the interest rate are likely in the months ahead. BIS Review 67/2007  3  4  BIS Review 67/2007

We are currently working on a solution regarding offshore krónur that would fulfil the same criteria regarding the exchange rate and make it possible for us to move to the third and final stage of lifting capital controls, which is vis-à-vis domestic residents. The difference is that this time around we are putting part of our own FX reserves on the table to facilitate the solution. It will be offered in an auction, along with long-term euro and ISK bonds. The aim is to release and tether the offshore overhang so we do not have to worry about it when we lift the controls on domestic resident’s outflows. For that final step, we need a solid external position, a resilient financial sector, and sizeable FX reserves that are to a significant degree not financed by foreign borrowing – all of which we have or are on the way to securing. This is why we bought FX in the market for an unprecedented 12½% of GDP last year and have continued on the same path this year. Before lifting capital controls on domestic residents, we will have to finalise the necessary adaption of monetary policy and financial stability frameworks to the potentially rough seas of unrestricted capital movements.
Making this translation in the loss function, we see that the conservative central banker attempts to minimize the equally weighted sum of squared inflation and unemployment deviations: L = (π – π*)2 + 1 * (u – u*)2 where u and u* are the actual and natural rates of unemployment6 The bottom line is that a conservative and tough-minded central banker can still value deviations in unemployment from the natural rate equally with deviations in inflation from its target. Accordingly, an inflation rate of 5% against an inflation goal of 2% presents this  3  Taylor, John B. 1979. “Estimation and Control of a Macroeconomic Model with Rational Expectations,” Econometrica 47 (5) September, pp. 1267–1286. 4  For example, Woodford, Michael, 2005. “Central-Bank Communication and Policy Effectiveness,” Paper presented at Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Symposium on “The Greenspan Era: Lessons for the Future,” Jackson Hole, Wyoming, August 25–27, 2005. Available at: http://www.columbia.edu/~mw2230/JHole05.pdf  5  Rogoff, Kenneth S. 1985. “The Optimal Degree of Commitment to an Intermediate Monetary Target,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 100 November, pp. 1169–1189. 6  That is, Okuns’ Law says (y – y*) = 2*(u – u*), where u and u* are the actual and natural rates of unemployment. Making this translation in the loss function (so squaring and multiplying by ? = ¼ yields L = (? – ? *)2 + 1 * (u – u*)2.

It bears keeping in mind that the Reinhart-Rogoff predictions of a slow recovery are based on historical averages of macroeconomic performances across many different countries at many different times. They highlight a challenge we face today, but from the standpoint of the underlying economic analysis, there is nothing pre-ordained about these outcomes. They are not theoretical predictions – rather, they are reduced form correlations. The economy can perform better than it did in these past episodes if policy responds better than it did in those  7  Reinhart, Carmen M. and Kenneth Rogoff, 2009. This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. Princeton University Press. New Jersey: Princeton. 8  Reinhart, Carmen M. and Kenneth Rogoff, 2011. Remarks at the 2011 NBER Summer Institute. For similar analyses, see Reinhart, Carmen M. and Kenneth Rogoff, 2008. “Is the 2007 US Sub-Prime Financial Crisis So Different? An International Historic Comparison” American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings 98(2), pp. 339–344; and Reinhart, Carmen M. and Kenneth Rogoff, 2008. “The Aftermath of Financial Crises” American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings 99(2), pp. 466–472. BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  situations. In my opinion, maintaining the Fed’s focus on both of our dual-mandate responsibilities is a necessary and critical element of an appropriate response to the financial crisis that can produce better economic outcomes.
Outcome and forecasts of UND1X made at different points in time 4.0 3.5  4.0 IR 02:1  IR 01:4  IR 01:3  IR 01:2  IR 01:1  IR 00:4  IR 00:3  IR 00:2  IR 00:1  Utfall  3.5  3.0  3.0  2.5  2.5  2.0  2.0  1.5  1.5  1.0  1.0  0.5  0.5  0.0 jan-98  0.0 jul-98  jan-99  jul-99  jan-00  jul-00  jan-01  jul-01  jan-02  Sources: Statistics Sweden and the Riksbank  Building materials in CPI versus total CPI 10  10  8  8 Byggvaror i KPI  6  6  KPI, totalt  4  4  2  2  0  0  -2  -2 jan95  jul95  jan96  jul96  jan97  jul97  jan98  jul98  jan99  jul99  jan00  jul00  jan01  jul01  jan02  Source: Statistics Sweden  6  BIS Review 32/2002  GDP forecasts Percentage annual change 5.0 4.5 4.0  5.0 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004  4.5 4.0 3.5  3.0  3.0  2.5  2.5  2.0  2.0  1.5  1.5  1.0  1.0  0.5  0.5  0.0  0.0  IR 99 :1 IR 99 :2 IR 99 :3 IR 99 :4 IR 00 :1 IR 00 :2 IR 00 :3 IR 00 :4 IR 01 :1 IR 01 :2 IR 01 :3 IR 01 :4 IR 02 :1  3.5  Source: The Riksbank  BIS Review 32/2002  7

Weathering the challenges requires courage and professionalism. In addition, banking institutions should provide an environment where accountable and professional human capacities are in the service of the public and the institution. I am confident that you will prioritize the foregoing matters in 2011. I wish you success in your work and many wishes for the New Year! Thank you. BIS Review 174/2010  3