samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
In our view, this level corresponds to the state of the Russian economy: on the one hand, it is conducive to the necessary changes; on the other hand, it stimulates investment processes. On slide 6 you see our inflation forecasts for different scenarios. I will not dwell on them. (Slide 7) And on slide 7, if there is a desire, we may have a look at the international experience of formulating inflation targets, and determining the actual target. In our opinion, the inflation targets, that we set, are quite consistent with the international experience. The inflation targeting will allow us to steer the interest rates better. (Slide 8) Slide 8 shows that interest rate management within the framework of the inflation targeting regime allows creating a more predictable economic environment for our businesses. The interest rate is now no longer extremely volatile in the money market and, therefore, allows the economy to operate in a more predictable environment. It should be noted, that we do not intend to reduce the inflation very fast, we will proceed from the situation in the economy, and will not create excessive pressure on the economic growth. The current economic slowdown, in our view, is a result of structural limitations. On the last slides (slides 9, 10, 11 and 12), there is some evidence to this, i.e. the structural limitations constrain the economic growth and the top priority task is the liquidation of bottlenecks.

The level of 4.0% will be reached by 2017. In addition to scenario II, scenario III assumes a more significant decline in oil prices, i.e. down to $ per barrel in 2017. The GDP growth rate in this scenario slows down to less than 1%. The scenario forecasts the use of the Reserve Fund within the framework of existing budget rules in order to stabilise the situation in the economy. As a result, the fiscal policy, in our opinion, will make a more pronounced positive contribution to the aggregate demand dynamics. In scenarios II and III the reduction of inflation to the medium-term target of 4.0% will require more time than in the baseline scenario; we believe it possible to reach this level in 2017. According to the forecast, the inflation will be 6–6.5% in 2015, 4.5–5.0% in 2016 and 4.0–4.5% in 2017. In both alternative scenarios, the Bank of Russia will focus on ensuring financial stability, preventing the reduction of confidence in the domestic financial system and national currency. To do this, we will be ready to use additional tools, including non-standard ones that have not been applied earlier. Currently, the Bank of Russia is also developing the so-called stress scenario – an emergency scenario, which implies a sharp and more significant drop in oil prices over the forecasted horizon. We consider the possibility of adding this scenario to the Guidelines at the next stage of the document finalisation.
However it is worth recalling that when this massive inflation propagation began, private agents were expecting 4.4% for December 2008 inflation, while May’s Monetary Policy Report placed it at 4.7%. The actual figure was 7.1%, with a peak in October of 9.9%. The inflationary upsurge certainly took everybody by surprise, coinciding with peaking oil prices. Chile was, at the same time, one of the countries where inflation rose fastest during the episodes of increasing commodity prices and also where inflation dropped fastest afterwards (figure 3). Why was that? We know it was not because of changes in the traditional variables, such as the evolution of economic activity or the exchange rate. The speed of the adjustments may be explained by us being an open, market economy, with few price distortions. The rise in the oil price may have also created the perception that the increase would be very persistent, accelerating the adjustment of local prices. However, beyond the need to deepen our understanding of inflationary dynamics, what counts here is the capacity to react and the flexibility of monetary policy, two characteristics that it exhibited in its response to this phenomenon. In our May Report of last year, when the MPR was at 6.25%, we announced that in the most likely scenario the path of the MPR would be in line with market expectations, that showed a further increase of at most 25 basis points in the next twelve months. Things changed and, naturally, monetary policy decisions changed as well.

José De Gregorio: What happened and where are we headed? Speech by Mr José De Gregorio, Governor of the Central Bank of Chile, at the meeting Visión Económica y Empresarial 2009-2010, organized by SOFOFA and Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago, 23 October 2009. *  *  *  I thank the federation of Chilean industry SOFOFA and Universidad del Desarrollo for inviting me once again to take part in this important annual event. When I was preparing this presentation, I realized I had two choices: one was to analyze the current situation in light of our latest Monetary Policy Report, which I already did in another public seminar and that may overlap other presentations you will hear today. The other was to take a longer perspective and examine how we came to where we stand today, how we sailed through the troubled waters of the world economy and where we are headed. I think this is the perfect audience to take this second option. To begin with, it is important to bear in mind that the Central Bank of Chile (CBC) complies with its mandate of safeguarding price stability via a monetary policy based on a flexible inflation targeting regime. The objective is to keep annual inflation around 3% most of the time. When deviations occur, monetary policy focuses on correcting them over a period of two years. In practice, in our discussions we estimate a path for the interest rate that is consistent with the inflation forecast 24 months ahead converging to the target.
This is an interesting hypothesis, but it must be pointed out that it is difficult to prove whether, and, if so, how much growth potential has actually changed. This obviously restricts the room for manoeuvre in monetary policy to a certain extent. What we must do here is to strike a balance between not holding the economy back more than necessary while at the same time making sure that the credibility of our inflation target policy, which has taken so much effort to build up, is not lost. 1  BIS Review 128/1999  However, there is another aspect of the American debate that has received much less attention than the “new economy”, but that I think is at least as important, and that is the role that monetary policy is assumed to have played in the favourable developments of the last twenty years. There is much talk in the US about the “long boom”, i.e. the period lasting from the early-1980s to the present, which has been characterised by a high rate of growth, with only one rather mild recession in 1990-91. Household sectors’ saving rate and debt ratio in USA 10  100 95  8  90 6  85  4  80 75  2  70 0  65  -2  60 80  82  84  86  88  90  92  94  96  98 Source: Ecowin  There are various theories about the reasons for this positive trend.

Likewise, the impulse by the fiscal sector is expected to be lower than in the past year. Under these circumstances, the growth speed and rate of the economy at home will be determined largely by the performance of private domestic demand components: consumption and investments. Our analyses reveal the existence of room for higher growth in the future. This growth will be supported also by stimulating monetary and financial conditions, in response to the monetary policy of the Bank of Albania. *** Taking into account the above overview, the Supervisory Council of the Bank of Albania deemed that the inflationary pressures remain subdued over the monetary policy horizon. The output gap will continue to be negative in the period ahead, materialising in low inflationary pressures originating from domestic demand. Moreover, inflationary pressures from developments in the global economy are expected to be downward, whereas inflation expectations remain anchored. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  The expected performance of real and monetary indicators is reflected in projections for the inflation, which is expected to range within the target of the Bank of Albania for the period ahead. At the conclusion of discussions, the Supervisory Council decided to keep the key interest rate unchanged at 4.50%. This decision serves to comply with our medium-term inflation target and provides the appropriate monetary conditions to stimulate Albania’s economic activity. The Bank of Albania remains heedful to future economic and financial developments at home and abroad as well as diligent to accomplish its mandate. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3
The ability of our economies to absorb these shocks was however different. The natural instinct of macroeconomic policies facing such a contraction scenario is to engage in countercyclical measures in the form of expansionary monetary and fiscal policies. However, the very presence of financial stability concerns in the equation significantly changed the equation. We can safely argue that countries which experienced the least macroeconomic and financial imbalances were the ones better placed to pursue countercyclical policies and in fact the ones which emerged the fastest from the effects of the crisis. I believe Albania is such a country:   We had no bank failures or public injections of capital;    We did contain and reverse the confidence crisis in the financial system and its adverse effects. In fact, we did not experience financial disintermediation;    We did continue to grow, albeit at a slower pace;    We did manage to keep inflation expectations anchored. Therefore, I will share with you our thoughts and measures throughout this period. To conclude this topic I will briefly summarize my personal lessons from this crisis. Before the crisis, Bank of Albania was concerned for the possible financial threats that were being accumulated during the years of fast financial intermediation. To illustrate the point: most of the credit growth went in the non-tradable sector, with services and construction accounting for most of the expansion.

Yves Mersch: Translating a shared vision into a winning story Closing remarks by Mr Yves Mersch, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, at the T2S Launch Celebration, Milan, 2 July 2015. *  *  *  We chose to call this T2S launch celebration “Translating a shared vision into a winning story”. Listening to the speakers for the past two hours I believe the name was just right. We have heard how the T2S Community transformed the shared vision of an integrated securities settlement landscape into a winning story, culminating in the launch of T2S on 22 June. Stimulating views have been shared tonight and I would like to thank the speakers for presenting their perspectives on the capital markets union. It is evident that T2S, post-trade harmonisation and the CSD Regulation are among the elements that will be pushing this agenda forward. Looking around the room I am happy to see so many familiar faces. Faces of people who have been part of the project since the idea of T2S was born in 2006. The journey over the past nine years has been an inspiring one. There have been some bumps in the road, some twists and turns, but with the launch of T2S we have achieved a monumental milestone. We made the vision of a single securities settlement platform for Europe a reality.
A free floating exchange rate would mean relinquishing our most effective inflation-fighting instrument. On the other hand a fixed exchange rate, pegged say to the US dollar, would lock our economic fortunes to US monetary policy, with no assurance that it would be appropriate to the state of our economy. The intermediate option of a managed float remains the best approach for us. In our experience, a managed float helps to buffer the adverse effects on the economy of short-term financial volatility, and to avoid sustained currency misalignments that can be damaging to our export sector. Managing the float requires us to lean against the wind at times, but provided our exchange rate policy is aligned with economic fundamentals, and our ability and determination to counter destabilising speculation is not in doubt, we need to intervene less than might be expected. Until recently, MAS did not reveal its view of the exchange rate, what it had done, or what it intended to do. But going forward, MAS recognises the need to be more communicative and less opaque about its exchange rate policy. Hence we have been making half-yearly monetary policy statements announcing our prevailing policy stance. We have also published the movements of the trade-weighted Singapore dollar, hitherto a closely guarded secret. We envisage that if market participants and the public understand our policy stance better, there will be less uncertainty, and policy implementation will be more effective. We have also reviewed and refined our policy on the internationalisation of the Singapore dollar.

A second group would be those supervisory agencies, central banks, multilateral financial institutions, and other public authorities around the world who shared with us the perspectives and needs of banking systems that are based in many different markets, economies, and legal systems. Thanks to discussions with these colleagues, such as through joint working groups like the Core Principles Liaison Group and through regional consultations and meetings, the Committee was better able to ensure that the new framework would be relevant to many different kinds of banks and economies that are in various stages of growth and development. The cooperation of so many public authorities worldwide has helped to make Basel II a truly global product. The Committee will continue to seek opportunities to deepen its relationships, and its opportunities for discussion, with other supervisors and central banks in the months and years ahead. Of course, this work would have been impossible without the sponsorship of the Bank for International Settlements. I would like to offer my sincere thanks to Malcolm Knight, the General Manager of the BIS, for his institution’s support of our work on Basel II. The BIS has been a staunch ally and advocate for our work over the entire thirty-year history of the Committee. With regard to Basel II itself, the BIS is fostering a greater understanding of the new framework among central bankers and supervisors  BIS Review 38/2004  1  worldwide through programs organised by its Financial Stability Institute, the “FSI”.
Andrew Bailey: Banknotes in circulation – still rising. What does this mean for the future of cash? Keynote address by Mr Andrew Bailey, Executive Director for Banking Services and Chief Cashier of the Bank of England, to the Banknote 2009 conference, Washington DC, 6 December 2009. *  *  *  I am grateful to Helen Allen, Nikki Brownlie, Victoria Cleland, Nick Davey, Andrew Dent, Iain de Weymarn, Lee Dobney, Andrew Hauser, Matthew Hunt, Orla May, Sally Reid and Andrew Wardlow for their comments and assistance. It is a great pleasure to be the keynote speaker at Banknote 2009. I want to use my time today to consider the implications of developments in banknote circulation for the future of cash. In particular, I am going to examine what I regard as the apparent paradox of banknotes, namely that the value of notes in circulation continues to rise, while the evidence we have suggests that the use of banknotes as a payment mechanism is declining gently, not I should say dramatically. I am going to illustrate this using our experience of Bank of England banknotes. There are three parts to my remarks. I am going to begin by describing trends in banknote circulation and use. Then I will consider the paradox in these trends. Finally, I will draw out some key challenges that we face in managing the circulation of Bank of England notes.

The increased international integration of both capital and goods markets has brought a huge increase in the scale of cross-border financial activity. The largest global financial institutions now play significant roles in a large number of financial systems outside of their home market. These changes are likely to affect the manner in which financial shocks in one region are propagated to other regions. Finally, we have witnessed an increase in the degree of concentration in some markets, a development that has the potential to make the system more vulnerable to the deterioration in conditions at one of the major bank or nonbank financial intermediaries. The degree of systemic risk presented by these changes depends importantly on two things. It depends on the robustness of the infrastructure that supports these markets. And it depends on the level of reserves, capital, margin and collateral that the major financial institutions hold against risk, which is in part a function of the strength of risk management systems. In both of these areas, market practice has made significant progress over the past decade, and further improvements are underway. A few quick points about two areas in which we believe further progress offers the highest possible return in terms of improving the overall resilience of the financial system. In the broad area of market infrastructure, we think the greatest near-term imperative is to strengthen the post-trade processing systems that underpin the rapidly growing over-the-counter derivatives market.
This was a critical measure. I said this earlier, at the meetings with parliamentary fractions, and would like to repeat this again: we are very thankful for the timely amendments to the laws in those areas where they were truly needed. I would like to focus on mortgage lending separately. Mortgage lending soared last year, adding 20% as of the end of the year. Banks’ total mortgage loan portfolio reached 9.5 trillion rubles. This is a really large amount — almost one half of all bank loans issued to households. This year, mortgage lending continues to grow, adding 5% in Q1 alone. The rise in lending was spurred by low interest rates, primarily owing to the lending programmes subsidised by the Government. That was a very efficient programme in the conditions of the acute phase of the crisis, but in March the interest rate on both market-based and subsidised loans averaged 7.2% compared to nearly 9% as of the beginning of 2020. 3/6  BIS central bankers' speeches  Eventually, such a significant increase in the demand for mortgage loans, coupled with other factors hindering supply expansion, pushed up housing prices. According to Rosstat, price growth in the primary market in 2021 Q1 reached 17.6% in annualised terms, and it is also rather high in the secondary market — 13.6%. I would like to remind you that currently annual inflation is about 5.8%, that is, price growth in this market is significantly higher than inflation.

Contrastingly, beginning from early 2021, we have been recording a rise in prices for an increasingly larger number of goods. This is evidence that the impact of aggregate demand factors on observed inflation is intensifying. This in turn proves that accommodative monetary policy has already made the necessary contribution to creating the conditions for economic recovery. We expect that Russia’s GDP will return to its pre-pandemic levels already in 2021 H2, possibly by the middle of the year. What might happen if we delay the end of accommodative monetary policy? First of all, inflation would remain elevated. Its rate is elevated at the moment. This would undermine the purchasing power of households’ incomes. Second, deposit rates would remain low. This would adversely affect both the purchasing power of savings and households’ demand for deposits as a store of value. Eventually, the banking system would have fewer resources to further support economic development and promote the growth of economic potential. Third, if an increase in the key rate was delayed, this would prolong the period of elevated inflation and, thus, higher inflation expectations. A delay might force us to raise the key rate more significantly and not only return to a neutral rate (which ranges from 5% to 6% in nominal terms), but, possibly, even switch to tight monetary policy. I would like to emphasise once again that we were able to shift towards accommodative monetary policy last year solely because we had been keeping inflation at a low level for several previous years.
In any case, as a policy, the Central Bank at the moment of making a decision and defining scenarios takes as given what happens in other spheres of national life. There is no clear rule, but there are some principles. First, the Central Bank must be rigorous in referring to all matters that have macroeconomic impact and consequently condition its actions. Secondly, when the connection is not so straightforward, we must be particularly cautious, especially when politically controversial subjects are involved. The Central Bank is a technical and autonomous institution and must take great care that the messages it puts out are not used politically. There are some very important subjects requiring discussion in our country, such as the educational reform, but it would not be prudent for the Bank to be affected by approaching any matter in an inadequate or inopportune way. Even more complex would be to discuss a tax reform that changes the composition of taxes or a labor reform that alters the dynamics of the business cycle. Subjects like these have enormous implications for economic efficiency, but they also evoke tremendous political passion. Since there are no clear rules, and I have no defined position on this matter, I can offer two popular recommendations that I tend to follow: “nothing can be rejected out of hand” which allows an ample degree of flexibility and “when in doubt, refrain,” which is the best advice to prudence.

As before, the main risk is that households’ and businesses’ increased inflation expectations may remain high for a long time. If people expect price growth to stay as high in the future, their saving activity will be low. As a result, it will take more time to bring inflation back to the target. Another critical proinflationary risk is the increasing mismatch between labour demand and supply. Specifically, if wage growth is only driven by elevated inflation expectations and labour productivity does not improve, this might accelerate the inflationary spiral. Eventually, price growth will quickly absorb the earlier increase in wages. Another important group of proinflationary risks is related to external factors. Inflation has surged worldwide. This is especially obvious in prices for the products accounting for a large portion in Russian exports or imports (energy commodities, wheat, and sugar). The actual increase in prices for commodities and intermediate goods in production chains has not yet fully passed through to producer costs. Our baseline scenario assumes that price trends in some product groups will reverse to a certain extent next year. However, this change might be less significant than we expect. The risks of a further acceleration of price growth worldwide are associated with both supply- and demand-side factors. As regards supply-side factors, it might take more time to restore production and logistics chains and cope with staff shortages. As the pandemic situation is uncertain, international borders may remain closed longer.