samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Risk assessment We see the risks to the economic outlook as broadly balanced. Economic activity could outperform our expectations if consumers become more confident and save less than currently expected. A faster improvement in the pandemic situation could also lead to a stronger expansion than currently envisaged. If supply bottlenecks last longer and feed through into higher than anticipated wage rises, price pressures could be more persistent. At the same time, the economic outlook could deteriorate if the pandemic worsens, which could delay the further reopening of the economy, or if supply shortages turn out to be more persistent than currently expected and hold back production. Financial and monetary conditions The recovery of growth and inflation still depends on favourable financing conditions for all sectors of the economy. Market interest rates have eased over the summer, but reversed recently. Overall, financing conditions for the economy remain favourable. 2/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  Bank lending rates for firms and households are at historically low levels. Lending to households is holding up, especially for house purchases. The somewhat slower growth of lending to firms is mainly due to the fact that firms are still well funded, because they borrowed heavily in the first wave of the pandemic. They have high cash holdings and are increasingly retaining earnings, which reduces the need for external funding. For larger firms, issuing bonds is an attractive alternative to bank loans. Solid bank balance sheets continue to ensure that sufficient credit is available.

However, you may have noticed that there was a split vote amongst the Committee last month, and that I voted to maintain the scale of the asset purchase programme at £ billion. 4  BIS Review 159/2009  It is important not to make too much of this difference. I fully recognised the potential benefits of a more expansionary policy given the downside risks to the economy. However, I was also wary of the potential risks of such a policy. My main concern reflected the considerable uncertainty about the degree of spare capacity in the economy and the behaviour of inflation when output is growing at above trend rates. These uncertainties are always present, but come to the fore in situations like the current environment in which there is a very substantial degree of economic slack. In order to keep inflation on track to hit the inflation target this slack needs to be eliminated. However, given the uncertainties about the precise margin of spare capacity and the behaviour of inflation as this spare capacity is being closed, my preference was to aim to grow the economy a little less rapidly. I was also concerned that further substantial injections of liquidity might result in unwarranted increases in some asset prices. I should stress that I do not think there is any strong evidence to suggest that any of the increases in asset prices seen to date are out of line with the improving economic outlook and the desired impact of our asset purchase programme.
Overview Following our exit from the EU, we have been examining the main bit of prudential insurance regulation (Solvency II) to see how it can be tailored to work better for the UK, working with the Treasury. [1] The Treasury has set three objectives for the review, which we support: a competitive insurance sector, investment to support growth and policyholder protection. While the details of the review can appear technical and abstract, the stakes are real. A stable insurance sector backstops the livelihoods of millions of policyholders, in particular current and future pensioners who rely on insurers for their retirement incomes. The insurance sector is also a major part of the wider financial sector, and an important source of finance for the real economy including productive and green investment. Brexit gives us an opportunity to rewrite the insurance regulations we inherited from the EU – and in doing so help drive further investment in the economy. But we need to be clear that this is not a  Page 3  free lunch. If changes simply loosen regulations which were over-cooked by the EU, without tackling other areas where regulations are too weak, then we are putting policyholders at risk. The interests of pensioners and other insurance policyholders can get lost in these debates, but Parliament has given the PRA a primary objective to protect policyholders, and it is a central part of our job to highlight risks and propose ways to deal with them.

6  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  6  losses on the swings of increased working hours more than made up for on the roundabouts of reduced time spent commuting. The second potentially potent effect, brought out in today’s study, is improved worker empowerment. This could arise in part from the increased flex home-working gives us, with our working days now tailored more to our personal needs and less to organisational requirements. It might also reflect on increased ability to “be ourselves” at work, when work is at home – the pyjamas, the unkempt hair, the Bermuda shorts - none of which, I hasten to add, I am sporting today. Well-being studies suggest these agency and empowerment effects are important for well-being. For example, studies have found that working from home is positively associated with perceived autonomy and this, in turn, has positive spillover effects to our job satisfaction and levels of stress.19 Both boost workplace productivity over the medium term. If home-working is broadly neutral in its impact on our economic contribution, but positive for our welfare, this suggests it is win-win, or at worst draw-win. The Covid crisis may inadvertently have fast-forwarded us to a better-way-of-working, perhaps even back-to-a-future where most work takes place in and around the house rather than in an office or factory, as was the case prior to the Industrial Revolution. I would hesitate before jumping to that conclusion.
35  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  35  Annex Table A1: Variables used Variable  Calculation/Description  Age groups  'AGEGROUPS'  Children under 2  ‘FDPCH2’ Number of dependent children in family aged under 2  Education  A combination of 'HIQUAPD', 'HIQUALD', 'HIQUAL4D', 'HIQUAL5D', 'HIQUAL8D', 'HIQUL11D', and 'HIQUL15D' to create 6 classes of highest qualification attained  Ethnicity  A combination of ‘ETHUKEUL’, ‘ETHCEN15’, ‘ETHCEN’ to create 9 classes of ethnicity as these change across time  Full-time / Part-time  ‘FTPT’ Whether working full or part-time  Gender  ‘SEX’ Sex of respondent  Job Type (Permanent or  ‘JOBTYP’  Temporary) Occupation  Occupation (main job).

25  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  25  Chart 21: Ethnicity pay gap Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition time series  Per cent  15 10 5 0 ‐5  Unaccounted for  Accounted for  ‐10  Ethnicity pay gap  ‐15 1997  1999  2001  2003  2005  2007  2009  2011  2013  2015  2017  2019  Source: ONS Labour Force Survey and Bank of England calculations. Note: A positive ethnicity pay gap in this chart indicates that ethnic minorities earn less than their white counterparts, whereas a negative ethnicity pay gap indicates that ethnic minorities earn more than their white counterparts. The decomposition also helps explain the otherwise puzzling finding of a larger ethnicity pay gap in London than elsewhere in the UK. That larger gap appears largely to reflect compositional effects. Once these are accounted for, the unexplained ethnicity pay gap in London, at 13 percentage points, is similar to the sample average, at just under 10 percentage points, and is about as persistent. An alternative, and more flexible, way of exploring the determinants of pay gaps is by using regression techniques. In our baseline regressions, we use the approach of Goldin (2014) to estimate gender and ethnicity pay gaps. Given the rich set of controls in our dataset, this offers robust estimates of conditional gender and ethnicity pay gaps. It also provides useful insights into the factors, individual and job-specific, most important for driving headline pay gaps.
BIS Review 99/2008  1  In line with this mission statement, the BoZ is responsible for regulating and supervising banks and the following types of NBFIs: •  Leasing and finance companies;  •  Housing financial institutions (building societies);  •  Savings and credit institutions;  •  Development finance institutions;  •  Microfinance institutions; and  •  Bureaux de change. As at June 30, 2008 there were 14 commercial banks and 71 NBFIs (see Appendix I). Currently, commercial banks dominate Zambia’s financial system with total assets and liabilities amounting to K14,465,045 million as at June 30, 2008 (about 31.8% of GDP). The reference NBFIs, notably, the leasing and finance companies (11, two of which are under statutory management of the Bank of Zambia 2 ), building societies (3), microfinance institutions licensed under the BFSA (15), development finance institutions (1) and savings and credit institutions (2). The combined balance sheet of these institutions, as at June 30, 2008 amounted to about 7.9% of the aggregated balance sheet of the commercial banks (see Table 1). 4.0  Access to financial services  In May 2007, here in Livingstone, the World Bank organized a Southern Africa roundtable discussion on the launch of their new report entitled, “Making Finance Work for Africa”. A common understanding arising from this debate was that financial exclusion has negative economic and social effects on society. These include the following: i.

Inflation Forecast June 2002 with Libor at 1,25%  Annual average inflation in %  BIS Review 39/2002  2001  2002  2003  2004  1.0  0.9  1.3  1.6  3
Barbro Wickman-Parak: Reflections on recent monetary policy Speech by Ms Barbro Wickman-Parak, Deputy Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB (SEB), Stockholm, 14 October 2010. *  *  *  The last fixed-interest rate loan granted by the Riksbank to the banks when the financial crisis was in full storm fell due on 6 October. The banks have not needed to use the Riksbank’s loan facilities to any great extent since the beginning of this year, and when we held the final auction of variable-rate loans just over a week ago, no bids were received. This means that the banks are now managing their short-term funding entirely in the private loan market. It also means that the banks have once again taken responsibility for the overnight market. There are some smaller outstanding loans that will be repaid during the winter. But on the whole, the Riksbank has now left behind what is called “extraordinary measures” and returned to “business as usual” in our monetary policy. Of course, we cannot rule out the possibility that the repercussions of the financial crisis may affect us in some way in the future. But it certainly seems as though we in Sweden can now turn the page and put the most acute chapter of the crisis behind us. Sweden has come through the crisis relatively unscathed So, where do we stand now? Looking back, it appears increasingly clear that the Swedish economy has come through the crisis relatively well.

CPI inflation was forecast to increase quickly next year, mainly as a result of mortgage rates rising due to the repo rate increases. CPI inflation was expected to temporarily overshoot the inflation target in 2012 and 2013, but to be around the 2 per cent target in the longer run when the repo rate has reached more normal levels. The majority of the Executive Board members made the assessment that it was appropriate to continue the process of normalizing monetary policy that had begun in the summer. The repo rate was raised to 0.75 per cent and the repo rate path was held unchanged from June. This is roughly the picture we painted in the Monetary Policy Update published in September. The statistics received recently have continued to point towards a rapid recovery in Sweden. The GDP outcome for the second quarter has been revised up relatively substantially compared with the preliminary outcome, and expressed as an annual percentage change amounts to 4.6 per cent. The National Institute of Economic Research’s economic tendency survey points to the mood among households and companies being much stronger than normal, and the indicator is now only marginally lower than the peak listing from 2000. New international statistics present a mixed picture. How the new information will be taken into account is something we will return to at our next monetary policy meeting.
John C Williams: Reading the recovery Remarks (via videoconference) by Mr John C Williams, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at the Council on Foreign Relations, 14 January 2022. * * * As prepared for delivery Good morning, everyone, and Happy New Year. Thank you, Charles, for that introduction. And thanks to Richard Haass for the opportunity to speak with the members of the Council on Foreign Relations once again. For the past two years, I’ve begun my remarks by saying how much I wish we could meet together in person. This time, I really was hoping for a chance to rewrite the script. After seeing so much progress on vaccinations over the past year and a moderation in COVID-19 infections during the fall, just a short time ago many of us had expected that we’d soon be turning the page. The story of the pandemic is a complicated one. It is writing itself as we live it, and the storyline has been far from predictable. This is, first and foremost, a health crisis. The unusual and extraordinary nature of the situation means that circumstances are constantly evolving. For the economy, this has meant that what we’ve experienced is unlike any recession or recovery we’ve seen—or read about—in the past. While there have been significant improvements in the overall economy, setbacks persist in some areas, and new challenges have appeared.

Már Guðmundsson: Financial integration and central bank policies in small, open economies – what are the key lessons from the crisis? Remarks by Mr Már Guðmundsson, Governor of the Central Bank of Iceland, in a plenary session on monetary policy and policies of central banks at the Singapore Economic Review Conference, Singapore, 5 August 2015. *  *  *  A revised and extended version of this talk will be published in a forthcoming Singapore Economic Review. Chairman and participants, I would like to thank the organisers for inviting me to speak at your conference here in Singapore, a country that I have long respected for its economic management. My remarks today bear the title Financial integration and central bank policies in small, open economies: what are the key lessons from the crisis? They are motivated by my experience as a policy-maker from a very small, open, and what used to be financially integrated economy, and my tenure at the Bank for International Settlements. 1 There is a widespread sense that global financial integration can be problematic for the conduct of monetary policy in small, open economies. Why is that? It is well known that the transmission mechanism of domestic monetary policy evolves as domestic financial markets develop, and that this in turn affects the relative effectiveness of different monetary instruments. The same applies to external liberalisation of domestic financial systems and the cross-border financial integration it gives rise to. Initially, it can give a boost to domestic financial market development.
If wages are slow to adjust, higher productivity growth lowers unit labour costs and thereby reduces price inflation. Here again there are important questions for policymakers. Should this effect be allowed to result in a temporary reduction of price inflation or unemployment? Third, an increase in the trend rate of productivity growth could also result in a higher equilibrium real interest rate, when the output gap is closed, in order to balance saving and investment. Fiscal policy and the development of public financial balances could at least partly offset this effect, as could the economy’s degree of openness. All this implies that monetary policymakers could face quite a few challenges. One of them is to identify structural changes and distinguish these from cyclical variations. Another challenge is to detect the magnitude of the effects. Furthermore, looking ahead in monetary policy is hard when the economy is going through major changes that make it difficult to forecast the future path of the economy and inflation. 5  BIS Review 65/2000  It is quite clear that this demands a great deal of forecasters as well as of those who construct macro models. The forecasts concern inflation one to two years ahead, which calls, for instance, for reasonable precision in the measurement of the output gap and the relationship between the output gap and inflation. It is already evident, for example, that inflation forecasts were frequently on the high side in many countries in the 1990s.

It is an indication of how far we have come that the weaknesses and uncertainties which so preoccupied policymakers and market participants in 1997, 1998 and early 1999 have given way to concerns about overheating in some parts of the world. The acceleration in global growth has refocused attention on inflationary pressures and on sustaining the monetary stability that economic policymakers have strived so hard to achieve in recent years. Steps are also being taken nationally and internationally to improve the working of the financial system. Ensuring financial stability has indeed become an important task in the light of events in the past decade - years that saw financial problems in a number of European countries as well as in Mexico and Asia, the devaluation of the rouble and suspended payments in Russia, the collapse of the hedgefund Long Term Capital Management, considerable turbulence in western financial markets and financial unrest in Brazil. The crisis in the international financial system developed, to cite President Clinton, from being “just a few small glitches in the road” into “the worst financial crisis in fifty years”. Although the momentum of the world economy and the policy actions taken to date to ensure financial and monetary stability give grounds for optimism, there are still challenges ahead of us. In my talk tonight I will discuss a few of these challenges. Financial stability The transition to a more global financial system has certainly not been free from problems.
Annual wage growth in these years was a little less than 4½ per cent. The low pay increases in this year’s wage settlement may indicate that the social partners are now placing more weight on the negative effects of large pay increases on future developments in interest rates, the krone exchange rate and employment in contrast to what appeared to be the case in the past few years. In the light of experience from 2002, it must be assumed that public agencies will be more cautious in future wage settlements. The labour market outlook underpins expectations of moderate wage growth. Developments in the krone exchange rate represent another source of uncertainty. The relationship between the krone exchange rate and the interest rate differential against other countries is not necessarily stable over time. Themes in international financial markets change. However, the depreciation of the krone this year is contributing to stabilising inflation and activity in the economy. We may not yet have seen the full effects of the interest rate reductions on the krone exchange rate. At the same time, the krone may be influenced by fiscal policy and the outlook for wage growth. Norges Bank has no set target for the level of the exchange rate. Developments in the krone are nevertheless of considerable importance in interest rate setting. The response to a change in the exchange rate will depend on its expected impact on inflation. This requires an evaluation of the reasons for the duration of the change.

Christian Noyer: Regulation in the face of global imbalances Opening speech by Mr Christian Noyer, Governor of the Bank of France and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Bank for International Settlements, at the VIth International Symposium of the Banque de France on “Which regulation for global imbalances?”, Paris, 4 March 2011. *  *  *  Ladies and Gentlemen I am very pleased to welcome you here in Paris to the International Symposium of the Banque de France. As you may know, this symposium is a recurrent event – this is the 6th edition – but this year it has taken a particular significance as it coincides with the French Presidency of the G-20. This presidency occurs at a key moment of the reform of governance and regulation of the global economy. Hence, today’s topic “Regulation in the face of global imbalances” was not chosen at random. However, beyond this proximity with the work of the G-20, I hope this symposium will also provide an excellent opportunity for extending discussions beyond this institutional forum, for strengthening relations between central bankers (there are more than 100 in this room), government officials, business managers and leading academics from around the globe who honour us with their presence today and to whom I would like to extend my warmest thanks. The world economy has experienced major developments over the last two decades. These changes have brought progress – strong growth, low inflation, less poverty – but they have also led to crises.