samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
With new knowledge and new solutions, the sea will continue to be a force that carries us forward. Chart: The new banknotes More than a thousand years ago, the Vikings brought home the idea that Norway should have its own monetary system. Olav Tryggvason was to be the first Norwegian king to have his name stamped on Norwegian coins. Our methods of payment have changed since then – from coins via banknotes and plastic cards to online and mobile payments. But banknotes and coins will stay with us. Norges Bank’s responsibility is to ensure that they are safe to use – based on the most advanced modern technology. And they should be beautiful – as beautiful as the sea that surrounds us. Thank you for your attention. 4/4  BIS central bankers' speeches

Furthermore, any measures taken on this basis would need to be proportionate, and fully justified by the need to fulfil our monetary policy tasks. I also want to stress that, as a rule, the implementation of the regime for non-EU countries should continue to rely as much as possible on cooperation with, and deferral to, local authorities. Let me also stress the crucial importance of finalising the adoption of key pieces of EU legislation – such as EMIR II – well in advance of Brexit, in order to be prepared for all possible contingencies, including a no-deal scenario. Failing to do so could leave central banks and supervisors without the appropriate tools to handle the risks linked to systemic euro CCPs operating outside the umbrella of EU regulation. Naturally, we are available to provide any assistance in the context of these discussions. Finally, we should not overlook the systemic cross-border implications of central clearing within the EU. We should therefore also strive to achieve enhanced supervisory convergence within the Union. This would contribute to ensuring the integrity of the Single Market 3/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  and a level playing field, consistent with the objectives of the capital markets union. The European Parliament can play a key role in furthering these objectives. Conclusion Let me conclude. Our monetary policy measures have had tangible benefits for the euro area economy. Further policy initiatives are however needed to reduce vulnerabilities, strengthen resilience in crisis situations and increase growth potential.
There are nonetheless a number of French specificities that could be playing a part in slowing productivity. Let me just cite three: First, failings in our system of initial and lifelong training, as highlighted by the OECD’s PISA and PIAAC surveys [slide]. France stands out as scoring only average overall among OECD countries, and, most importantly, as having high levels of inequality linked to parents’ social background. Second, corporate investment tends to be weighted more towards construction at the expense of equipment machinery and intangible assets. And while we’re on that subject, it is essential that French banks finance intangible assets better than they do today. Lastly, the specific features of the French labour market and the associated policies. A number of studies have highlighted factors such as the shortening of the duration of temporary contracts. Questions have also been raised as to the impact of labour policies. How can we strike the right balance between supporting productivity and supporting jobs? Policies aimed at reducing the cost of low-skilled labour – be they targeted cuts in employers’ social charges or the CICE – all have a positive effect on GDP per capita via an increase in the employment rate; but they can also have a detrimental effect on productivity, especially when targeted at sectors with low productivity. Put another way, these policies make it all the more necessary that we improve our system of initial and lifelong learning – failing this, we risk fuelling a downwards spiral in labour skills and productivity.

Philipp Hildebrand: Developments in the international financial markets and managing the Swiss National Bank’s assets Introductory remarks by Dr Philipp Hildebrand, Member of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, at the end-of-year media news conference, Zurich, 16 December 2004. * 1. *  *  Developments in the international financial markets  Looking back at the year gone by, it becomes evident that two opposing price movements have dominated the markets: the strong depreciation of the US dollar on the one hand and the sharp rise in oil prices on the other hand. Developments in the bond and equity markets were, by comparison, rather restrained. In the past few weeks, the dollar has continued its downtrend that commenced three years ago, at which time the greenback was still worth over CHF 1.70. Given the structurally inflated US current account deficit, the sustained downward revision comes as no surprise. However, the fact that the revision to date has been relatively one-sided vis-à-vis the European currencies and the Canadian dollar is problematic. Major Asian currencies have either remained completely pegged to the dollar, such as the Chinese renminbi, or joined the dollar in its slide - at least to some extent - like the Japanese yen. This was only possible, however, at a price, namely huge dollar-buying efforts on the part of the central banks and governments in question. As a result of this asymmetric trend, European exporters are currently bearing the brunt of the additional competitive pressures stemming from the weaker dollar.
As long as the adjustment continues, there is a risk that the problems in the subprime market will be aggravated and the financial turmoil will intensify. It is difficult to assess how the financial turmoil and the problems in the housing market affect the real economy. Growth in the United States weakened substantially during the final quarter of last year and the fall in housing investments made a significantly negative contribution. Nonetheless, household consumption was maintained relatively well during the fourth quarter. The question is how resistant household consumption, which corresponds to approximately 70 per cent of GDP, will be given the shocks facing the US economy. The fact that house and share prices are falling means that household wealth is declining, which  2  BIS Review 30/2008  could have a negative impact on demand. The upturn in oil and food prices also means that households’ purchasing power is being undermined. These negative effects have been counteracted to some extent by the Federal Reserve’s cutting the policy rate and by various fiscal policy measures. The forecast in the main scenario of the Monetary Policy Report entails fairly weak growth in the US economy over the coming quarters. Nevertheless, I considered there to be an evident risk that the problems would be more prolonged than was forecast in the main scenario of the Report. Growth in the euro area was also more subdued in the fourth quarter last year.

It is not easy to grasp the concept of operational risk, although the Basel Committee’s definition is a good start: “risk of losses resulting from inadequate or failed internal processes, people and systems, or external events”. Although public opinion associates operational risk with dire consequences for specific institutions, you and I know that it is present in all banks’ daily operations, and in all their areas, from the most traditional to the most complex. Given the relevance of operational risk, it is not surprising that both supervisors and the leading banks are making an increasing effort to measure its impact. Only if progress is made in such measurement will it be possible first, to conduct analyses of the impact that strategic decisions (expansion in new areas or regions, rationalisation of expenses, outsourcing, etc.) may have on the operational risk profile and, therefore, on the possibility of introducing corrective measures aimed at improving this risk profile. As things stand we are still far from achieving - in technical terms- a satisfactorily broad and deep measurement of operational risk. This is why the Basel Committee, by setting for the first time an explicit capital charge for operational risk at banks, has done so avoiding, in the most advanced alternatives, mechanistic formulas that may curb operational risk management developments in the coming years.
That includes: implementing decisions; monitoring market developments; identifying and, where appropriate, addressing risks to resilience and effectiveness. In many ways the November MPC decision was a historic change in policy – the first increase in Bank Rate in over a decade (Slide 9). I remember the previous increase in Bank Rate well as the July 2007 MPC meeting was the first I attended as the Treasury’s representative. A lot else has happened in the intervening 10 years, but from an operational perspective it was a relatively straightforward change for the Markets area of the Bank to implement. Bank Rate, which is the rate paid on reserve accounts held at the Bank by 183 financial institutions, was changed immediately after the MPC’s decision and used as the basis for calculating interest due for that day. Because reserves held at the central bank are the ultimate liquid and risk-free asset in any currency, the rate paid on them serves as the reference point for all other overnight interest rates in the money market. As a result a range of key overnight market rates increased on the day of the MPC’s decision including the Sterling Overnight Index Average (SONIA, a key benchmark for unsecured overnight borrowing and lending) and the Repurchase Overnight Index Average (RONIA, a key benchmark for overnight borrowing and lending secured against gilt collateral). In the period since the change in Bank Rate, both SONIA and RONIA have been on average 25bps higher than in the month preceding the decision (Slide 10).

Although the economy confounded the initial expectations embodied in usually-reliable surveys taken immediately after the referendum – which implied that growth was headed for negative territory - there is no doubt that demand has now slowed. This can primarily be accounted for by a sharp slowdown in consumption growth, from 3.1% as recently as the middle of 2016 to 1.5% in the year to 2017Q2, the weakest four quarter growth since 2012. The primary driver of this weakness has been the weakness in real income, itself reflecting the 18% depreciation of sterling from its pre-referendum peak as financial market participants have reacted to the prospect of Brexit. Working in the opposite direction, we have witnessed a rotation toward other components of demand. While this is a positive development, it hasn’t been enough to offset an overall slowing in GDP growth.   Business investment has picked up a little to grow at 2.5% in the last year, though this is weaker than the 3.9% growth on average across our G7 counterparts, and the strength of future investment implied by capital goods orders in the US and euro area (Slide 4). In addition to the Decision Maker Panel survey and findings of the the Bank’s own Agents, a range of survey results suggest that Brexit related uncertainty is an important factor weighing on investment in the UK despite otherwise favourable conditions for capital expenditure (Slide 5).   Relative to other components of demand, exports have benefited from sterling’s depreciation and stronger than expected global demand.
Higher quality capital and larger capital buffers are critical to bank resilience – delivering a more stable system both through lower sensitivity of lending behaviour to shocks and reducing the probability of failure and with it the risk of dramatic shifts in lending behaviour. The capital adequacy framework has made much needed progress in recent years. The framework is now being designed to be fit for purpose both for the micro-prudential purpose of each firm’s safety and soundness, and for the macro-prudential purposes of addressing the risk certain major firms individually present to financial stability and the risk that imbalances building up in the sector as a whole, or part of it, may threaten financial stability. The key elements of the framework are: -  first, a common definition of capital resources focussed on genuine loss absorbency in a going concern – Common Equity Tier 1.

As a consequence, the bank capital framework de facto becomes a partial substitute means of achieving more forwardlooking provisioning, through the internal models regime for credit risk which requires the deduction from capital of expected losses in excess of provisions. A forward-looking approach to provisioning based on expected losses would help move to a more appropriate position where the accounting standard requires a prudent valuation of banking book assets and the capital regime can focus on unexpected loss. I hope that implementation of the new accounting standard for provisioning, IFRS 9, is a step in this direction. I now want to turn to the issues around risk-weighted assets in the capital framework. Basel I was a simple framework, as I described earlier. In my view, that was its strength and weakness. The strength was that it was quite easy (certainly by today’s standards) to see the balance sheets even of the largest banks laid out and broken down by broad risk weights. The weaknesses were two-fold. First, it provided little insight into how firms measured and managed risk. As a supervisor in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I remember well meetings with firms which would start by the firm reminding that while they had filled in the risk weighted assets form faithfully, it bore no resemblance to how they assessed and managed risk in the business – what is often called “economic” as opposed to “regulatory” capital.
One example is Kuwait, which for a period chose large strategic investments instead of diversifying more evenly. To our knowledge, the results were not positive. Another example is the oil fund in the Canadian state of Alberta, where investments up to the end of the 1990s were partly influenced by political considerations and a large share of the capital was invested in local businesses. This resulted in far lower returns than in other comparable Canadian funds. The best pension funds stand out as highly professional investors. Norges Bank has had close contact with the largest funds in the Netherlands and Canada for many years, and we have learned a great deal from them about our own fund management. These funds have broadly diversified portfolios. As an example, I would like to draw your attention to the composition of investment portfolios in the largest European fund, ABP. ABP is the pension fund for public sector employees in the Netherlands. Forty-four per cent of the fund is invested in fixed-income instruments. Investments with more variable returns account for 56 per cent of the portfolio. Fixed income investments are intended to contribute to a relatively stable return on the fund as a whole, while the rest of the portfolio is to achieve high expected returns. To minimise risk, investments are spread across many countries and companies. Investments with variable returns also include what are usually known as “alternative investments” i.e. private equity, real estate, commodities and investment in hedge funds and the like.

And very recently the Financial Services Committee decided to further investigate (1) how to manage supervision of cross-border banking groups, whether subsidiary or branch structure, and (2) arrangements for cross-border crisis management. 2  BIS Review 22/2004  So, which are the developments in cross-border banking that have necessitated further consideration of the existing rules, policies and structures? Which are the regulatory challenges indicated in the title of this speech? I think the convergence of regulations is a process that, although being long and slow, is already going in the right direction. Even though, as mentioned earlier, there are still way too many differences in implementation and actual practices. But when it comes to the genuine conflicts of interest between nationally motivated regulators and an integrated European financial market, we are just in the beginning of a major rethinking. The challenges regulators have to face At the heart of the matter lies the emergence of large foreign subsidiaries and branches. The presence of foreign subsidiaries and branches is not new. What is new is that they might make up a substantial part of your domestic financial system. Whereas the typical bank group might be described as “Big mama, small daughter”, the opposite may now be increasingly true in many cases, and in particular if seen in relation to the size of the home and host countries. This is already true in most of the acceding countries. To give an example, more than 90 percent of Czech banking assets are held by foreign owned banks.
Yet there are structural issues that have to be faced, and dealing with them may take effort, imagination and a strong will. One of these issues is the fiscal deficit. This was around $ bn, or 4.9% of GDP in the last fiscal year, and, according to the Government's latest estimates, may exceed that figure for the current fiscal year. Economic recovery will undoubtedly help contain or reduce the deficit. But the larger, structural questions, such as how to produce a more stable revenue base, will still be there, and they will involve difficult choices. As we know, this much-debated question is something that the Financial Secretary is actively addressing. The other great structural issue is unemployment, which reached its highest level in recent history during the SARS crisis, and which is expected to remain high for some time. Again, economic recovery will help to ease the problem, and sectors of the economy that have been seeing intensified growth, such as the tourism industry, will provide further opportunities in many areas of employment. BIS Review 44/2003  3  But a substantial part of the unemployment problem is a structural one, resulting from our transition from industrial to post-industrial economy and from the movement of jobs, particularly unskilled jobs, out of Hong Kong.

In doing this, we should not lose sight of two other, related challenges. One is to keep an eye on the longer term, both in applying solutions to current problems and in building the infrastructure for future needs. The other is to maintain confidence in our monetary and financial systems. This requires, above all, doing our job effectively through achieving the objectives set for us by the Government. It also requires transparency and education. And here, there is, I think, some final observation to be made on recent events. We have, as you know, placed great stress on transparency, to the extent that our accounts and operations, at least on the monetary side, are for the most part an open book. We have also paid a lot of attention to public education, on our website, in our publications, and through numerous special events: our efforts here will be boosted later in the year with the opening of a permanent HKMA Information Centre, which I cordially invite you all to visit. But, despite all this work, it seems, from the events in the market in the last few weeks, that there is nothing as good as real-life experience to encourage people to learn more about how our system works. This has been brought home to us in the HKMA by the quite remarkable surge in visits to the information on our website about the Link and the Currency Board system over the past couple of weeks.
Percent 70  2)  70  60  60  50  50  40  40  30  30  20 1968  20 1974  1980  1986  1992  1998  2004  2010  2016  1) Trade is defined as the sum of exports and imports of goods and services. 2) Projections for 2017 and 2018. Sources: IMF, World Bank and Norges Bank  Global trade has generated substantial welfare gains. As consumers, we have gained access to cheaper and better products. More importantly, over one billion people have been lifted out of poverty.3 Many people would be negatively affected if the tendency is reversed towards higher trade barriers. 3 http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview. 3  For a long time, trade primarily consisted of finished goods. In recent decades, global value chains have grown rapidly. Lower transport costs and new technological solutions have fostered new ways of organising production and trade. Firms have ready access to information about contractors in other countries. Today, it is also possible to manage production processes in distant locations. This has made it easier to locate high-tech production in low-cost countries. Norges Bank Economic perspectives 15 february 2018  Society is being transformed by advances in information and communication technology. The capacity of computer devices has increased while their size has become smaller and smaller. Moving a 5 megabyte hard disk used to require substantial muscle. Today, a several hundred thousand megabyte memory stick is easily lost among pocket change.

Interestingly, interest rates were not included in the commission's report as a means of influencing economic activity and inflation. The view at this time too, especially from a political point of view, was that the interest rate was to mainly be regarded as a cost factor.17 Nevertheless, the policy during the Second World War was much more successful than that during the First World War. There was no post-war recession, and the inflation peak were short-lived and was not followed by any appreciable deflation.18 Developments during the Korean War in 1950-53 followed the same pattern, with a high but short-lived peak in inflation. The upturn was preceded by a devaluation against the dollar in 1949, which Sweden and a number of European countries carried out to meet the competition from American industry. After the outbreak of the war, international inflation rose sharply. The price increases on commodities were particularly high. Profits in the Swedish manufacturing industry rose 13 Wetterberg (2009), p. 270. 14 Boianovsky (1998). 15 Jonung (2000). 16 See, for example, Jonung (2017). 17 Wetterberg (2009), p. 314. The Social Democratic Government’s post-war policies were focused on full em-  ployment and keeping interest rates down, known as low interest-rate policy. Instead, fiscal policy would steer economic activity. The Riksbank opposed the low interest-rate policy and Riksbank Governor Ivar Rooth tendered his resignation in 1948. 18 According to Statistics Sweden's annual statistics, inflation was −0.4 per cent in 1944 and 1945.