samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
It will decline in the course of 2018, triggered by a slump in oil prices that the forecast assumes. Capital outflow will remain low and under $ billion helped by, among other things, a drop in net external corporate debt payments. Banks are expected to fully pay out their forex repo debt in the course of 2017, which is estimated, alongside the Finance Ministry-conducted foreign currency purchases, to help foreign currency reserves grow by as much as $ billion. The baseline scenario assumes that a reduction in oil prices will trigger no growth in inflation, which will continue to slow down on track to reach 4% before the end of 2017 and will be subsequently maintained near this level on condition our monetary policy remains moderately tight. Fifth, the risks that we may fail to deliver on the target for inflation by late 2017 have gone down. The outrunning slowdown in inflation to date is seen as a margin of safety going forward. At the same time, risks remain that inflation may fail to become anchored around the target level in the medium term. We see output prices accelerating growth across several core industries including oil production and metallurgy. This may have negative implications for costs and, as a result, for the economy overall. Should the baseline scenario that assumes a correction in oil prices materialise, this factor is expected to have only a minor and short-lived impact on inflation. The current inflation risks are also related to the deterioration in some global food markets.

We are continuously estimating this lag, which is quite small and adheres to the standard accepted in other countries. Therefore, even the reduction of 0.25 pp may drag down rates for the ultimate borrower. Having said that, risk assessment factors for specific borrowers are essential for banks, and we can see that this factor prevails. Question from Bloomberg: Before asking my question, let me congratulate you on behalf of all my colleagues on the Russian President’s decision to launch the procedure for expanding your mandate. It proves that your policy is correct and, as far as I can see, everybody is satisfied with it. My question is as follows. When you participated in the online reading of ‘The Master and Margarita’, you read a passage from Chapter 29 of the novel, in which Matthew asks Woland to let the Master have some peace. Have you asked for some peace from the President? And anticipating your answer, what will be your objectives for the new term? Thank you very much. ELVIRA NABIULLINA: Thank you for your question. Peace is something we can only dream of, I would say. Though I would prefer external factors to display more certainty and structural reforms to progress faster. This would make it easier for us to pursue our monetary policy. As for objectives, our monetary policy goal is, as a I have told you today, to ensure low and stable inflation everybody could rely on and feel the benefits of.
Investment has been dragged down, by weaker domestic demand and higher private debt burden in advanced economies, and slower foreign direct investments in emerging economies. Productivity growth has slowed significantly after the shock of the crisis and has still not recovered to pre-crisis rates. A striking feature of the post-crisis landscape is that while investment in the real economy has been sluggish, the appetite for risk-taking in financial assets has been voracious. Investors are extrapolating into the future, current low interest rates and realised asset price volatility, and continuing to reach for yield. Developed market bond and equity valuations are rich compared to history. The cyclically-adjusted price-to-earnings ratio for US equities is at the 97th percentile. There has been some dampening of exuberance in recent months. Even so, the question 1/6  BIS central bankers' speeches  remains: have markets over-priced the good news and under-priced the potential bad news? What are some of the risks? First, markets appear to be expecting macro outcomes that may be inconsistent with what economies need for medium-term sustainability. In the US, markets still expect – or hope – for some fiscal stimulus in the short-term, even though the economy is at full employment. What ought to matter is not the size of any stimulus but its composition. The key question is not how much the stimulus boosts demand in the short-term but whether and how it increases the medium-term supply capacity in the economy. Similarly, in China, markets are keeping close track of quarterly GDP growth rates.

The first day of our seminar is dedicated to this topic. The second day of the seminar targets mainly the corporate sector. The Small and Medium Enterprises’ access to finance is also important for financial stability. Small and Medium Enterprises constitute the overwhelming majority (99 percent) of businesses at European level, with important contributions both in terms of value added generated by non-financial corporations (57 percent) and employment (67 percent). Increasing access to finance in this sector is among the EU priorities. It is also 3  true that this portfolio accounted for the highest post-crisis NPL ratio in the European Union. At its peak, the average NPL ratio for Small and Medium Enterprises reached around 20 percent at European Union level. In Romania, the ratio was 35 percent, while the NPL ratio for microenterprises accounted for 53 percent. Therefore, the same lesson learnt from the household sector also applies here: the Small and Medium Enterpises’ financial inclusion should unfold in a sustainable way. On the other hand, the experience with macroprudential instruments for companies is extremely limited at the European level. For example, France has recently implemented a measure focusing on highly indebted firms, but it applies only to large companies. Therefore, I think that deepening this area of research is very useful for macroprudential policymakers. In Romania we have also tried to come up with solutions that might improve Small and Medium Enterprises’ financial inclusion.
In particular, the Banco de España is now empowered to require that banking institutions establish countercyclical capital buffers by credit segment, limits on concentration in relation to economic activity sectors, and limits and conditions when underwriting new loans (in terms of loan-to-value, loan-to-income and debt service-to-income ratios, and also the maturity, the currency in which the operation is denominated and whether the interest rate is fixed or variable, among others). These new instruments complement those previously available to the Banco de España and included in the European legislation:11 the countercyclical capital buffer, the systemic risk buffer and the buffer for systemic banks, among others. In addition, this year saw the creation of the Macroprudential Authority Financial Stability Council, whose main goal is to contribute to the promotion of coordination and the exchange of information on financial stability issues among the Banco de España, the Ministry of Economy and Enterprise, the Spanish National Securities Market Commission and the Directorate-General of Insurance and Pension Funds). All in all, this new institutional setting is a significant step forward in reinforcing financial stability in Spain. 4. Other policies should also promote economic and financial stability The notion that other economic policies should complement monetary policy and also contribute to economic stability has always been embedded in the design of the European Economic and Monetary Union.

Preserving central bank independence thus requires acknowledging this interaction among policies and, hence, it is the duty of central bankers to call for an appropriate mix of economic policies that help us achieve our price stability goal while minimising potential side effects. The specificity of the euro area, with a common monetary policy and 19 different fiscal and economic policies, considerably increases the complexity of finding the right alignment of economic policies. The aggregation of national fiscal policies does not necessarily translate into an adequate fiscal stance for the euro area as a whole. In short, the current euro area institutional architecture does not allow for a systematic implementation of an active fiscal policy based on targeted, timely and temporary measures. Thus, the absence of a common fiscal capacity in the euro area makes it difficult to achieve an appropriate policy mix. Building this fiscal capacity, with adequate size and design, should be a priority on the agenda. The Eurosystem should continue to push for more growth-enhancing reforms at the national and European levels and for the completion of a more robust euro area institutional setting. This includes completing the Banking Union, the Capital Markets Union and creating a stabilising central fiscal capacity that will help the euro zone economy reduce its vulnerabilities and better weather potential future episodes of stress. This brings me to highlight one further dimension of the value of central bank independence. Independence contributes to the role that monetary authorities tend to play with respect to other policies.
Also, all the participants would benefit from getting a view from the Academia on the implications for the Economics of the lack of diversity. Gender, of course, is one important aspect of diversity, but this webinar also brings together studies from authors affiliated to institutions all over the world. This geographical diversity would enrich the discussion and expand the menu of possible action points. The conclusions we may reach over the course of these two days will certainly boost the actions to be carried out by our institutions which should be expected to lead by example 1  not only within the financial sector but also, as a public administration, fulfilling our duty to serve public interest. Banco de España has already committed different internal actions. Among others we have created a group of D&I Ambassadors, representing all the business areas together with HR -of which I am proud to be the Sponsor-. This group has the purpose of enhancing diversity and inclusion consciousness and helping to step up specific measures across the organization.

In 2019 we expanded the geographical scope of this initiative to the "Montevideo group" made up of the central banks of Colombia (Banco de la República), Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay.With all these central banks of Latin America and some others which joined Morocco, from the African continent, we organized what was going to be the 3rd meeting of central banks to promote female leadership “Fostering Women's leadership in Central Banking”. Unfortunately, in March 2020 the pandemic broke out and this event had to be cancelled at the very last moment. The work initiated by so many central banks and the questions addressed are not the result of a fad or political ideologies. The matter of female leadership and gender diversity is an economic concern of global importance, which, according to the World Economic Forum, after the pandemic, has suffered a setback with respect to the progress that was previously made: “gender equality is still almost a century away from being achieved with the current rate of change.” For this reason, studies and research such as those which are going to be presented here today and tomorrow assessing the challenges and evaluating the policies that lead us to the path towards gender equality, are of the utmost importance in order to accelerate the necessary change. Several central banks have also included the topics of diversity and inclusion in their research agendas, and the webinar features several good examples of those.
That autumn, two separate but interrelated sub-stories of the recent Icelandic saga converged in a tragic grand finale. The first story was related to Iceland’s boom-bust cycle and problems with macroeconomic management in small, open, and financially integrated economies. This is a story that has played out many times around the globe, and many of its elements have been seen before in Iceland. It might have been somewhat more extreme this time around, but it wasn’t fundamentally different. The second story was the rise and fall of three cross-border banks operating on the basis of EU legislation (the European “passport”). This story was much more unique, as it involved the first banking crisis in Europe since the EU single market was formed in the early 1990s. Let me turn first to the banking story. In a few years prior to the crisis, the banking system had expanded very rapidly, as you can see from Figure 1, making it one of the biggest in Europe relative to GDP. Most of this expansion was cross-border, and a significant part of it was really off-border, having little to do with Iceland, as both financing and investment took place abroad. Towards the end, around two-thirds of the combined balance sheet of the three cross-border banks was denominated in foreign currency. On the liabilities side, the share of FXdenominated debt was actually higher, as can be seen from Figure 2, with almost half of the financing in the form of FX deposits and other short-term FX financing.

Philipp M Hildebrand: Current monetary policy situation and economic prospects Speech by Dr Philipp M Hildebrand, Member of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, at “Finanzinstitute Thurgau bei der Universität Konstanz”, Kreuzlingen, 26 April 2004. The complete speech can be found in German on the Swiss National Bank’s website (www.snb.ch). *  *  *  Due to the vigorous monetary and fiscal policy stimuli from the US, the global economy is expanding again. In Switzerland, too, the upswing has become a reality. In the current year, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) is expecting growth of 1.5% - 2%, which slightly exceeds the present growth potential. Since capacity utilisation is still fairly modest, such economic growth does not bring an immediate threat of inflation for Switzerland at the moment. The downward risks still existing therefore justify a cautious monetary policy. In order to be able to ensure price stability in the medium term, the SNB must, however, bring its expansionary monetary policy back on normal course again as soon as the economic recovery sets in and capacity utilisation improves markedly. BIS Review 24/2004  1
One thing that helps to keep the talk relatively short is that I’ll use a few symbols here and there (you’re economists so I reckon I’m allowed to). As well as saving space it helps to make clear the effects at work and to give some idea of the orders of magnitude. That said, the points I’ll try and make are, I think, perfectly intuitive. I’ll begin by reviewing exactly why it is that uncertainty can have such powerful effects on decisions that are costly to reverse. In doing so I’ll emphasise that what really matters is not uncertainty per se but the scale of the downside risks in particular. This is a standard feature of the economics literature in this area. As long as it doesn’t take too long to make an investment, once the decision to go ahead with it has been made, a firm can profit from upside events as and when they occur. The real value of delaying a project is in avoiding bad, loss-making outcomes. I then want to say something about the perceived duration of the uncertainty. Does it make a difference if firms expect things to be resolved soon or only after a longer period of time? This is where it’s helpful to construct a little “toy” model to work out what matters. In this set-up there’s a discrete event whose outcome either raises or lowers the profitability of a sunk-cost (irreversible) investment project.

The Brexit process – and by that I mean not just the exit agreement but the negotiation of (and transition to) future trading agreements as well, with the EU and with other countries – will take the time it takes and I don’t pretend to know more than the next person how long that might be. The point here is that, for any given duration of uncertainty, the impact is worse if, along the way, firms continually expect things to be resolved sooner than they actually are. Just to be clear, one should not draw the conclusion that a rapid resolution of uncertainty is always desirable, no matter how that’s achieved. As I said earlier, if investment has been postponed for fear of what firms see as a bad outcome, guaranteeing precisely that outcome will probably make things worse. It’s likely to mean that projects delayed will instead be cancelled. The point is simply that the impact on investment of a given period of uncertainty is worse if, erroneously, firms keep believing that it will end sooner than it’s actually likely to. 8  The particular way I’ve set things up here means the date at which the news arrives is itself uncertain – it happens with probability q every period. But it’s easy enough to model it instead as a fixed, known date in the future. The results are quantitatively a bit different – and marginally less easy to write down – but qualitatively they’re exactly the same.
Misconduct costs by banks globally have exceeded USD320 billion since 2008, with USD42 billion incurred in 2016 alone. At the institutional level, there should be a ‘clear tone from the top’ that unethical behaviour will not be tolerated. This culture of ‘zero tolerance’ for unethical behaviour should permeate across all levels of the organisation, including in the process of recruitment, retention and remuneration. As a community, we cannot possibly expect ethical behaviour to be burnished if we persist in retaining, hiring or rewarding people who had acted otherwise. Our work environment should also evolve, making it conducive and safe for individuals to speak up on ethically questionable practices. Encouraging conversation about ethical behaviour in the workplace can go a long way in empowering all layers in the organisation to serve as an ethical beacon. This can significantly reduce the probability and occurrence of unethical conduct. The third is Calling. We should marvel at the deep sense of purpose and identity contained in the medical profession. One sentence in the modern version of the Hippocratic Oath is particularly resonating: “I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.” Ultimately, to make sense of what we do in our profession, we cannot shy away from its purpose.

With this requirement, my wish is that it will provide an impetus to the attainment of the chartered banker qualification. Second is Character. If competence represents the ‘head’ of a professional banker, then character must surely be the ‘heart’. Over the last decade, the ethical scorecard of the financial sector was blemished by irresponsible risk-taking and opaque practices of bankers in the lead up to the global financial crisis. Ethical lapses and conduct failures in more recent years have compounded matters. Far too often, we witness the rise of bankers who are highly competent but ethically deficient. Worse, we allow and tolerate such practices. This is unsustainable. It also tarnishes the reputation of the many who spent their lifelong careers in the industry, and who hold the profession with great dignity and regard. Another principle worth attention in the Hippocratic Oath is the adage, “Do no harm”. There is a lot of richness in this ethos. It is worth emulating. Considering that consumers come into contact with banking personnel far more frequently than they visit their doctors, one may even argue a higher expectation ought to be applied for the banking industry. The Bank has actively worked towards reinforcing this objective over the years. The Bank believes that when the right set of fundamental principles is followed, it can positively shape the 2/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  actions and behaviour of people. Therefore, the Bank, in consultation with the industry, is due to publish five universal ‘Principles for a Fair and Effective Financial Market'.
There is often considerable uncertainty about what the current situation is - a particular problem relating to Q3 as we try to assess the impact of the petrol price crisis in September. Even the past is uncertain and we regularly receive from the ONS revisions to past data about growth of different parts of the economy. As I look at the data each month, knowing that some of the dials are misreading, I am reminded of the saying: that the intelligent man knows that half the data he is looking at is false; the brilliant man knows which half! More seriously we need to have in our mind a view about which data series are reliable and which are particularly erratic. Happily the RPIX data, our goal, is easily observable. But, by way of example, wages, which are a key piece of data, are much less easy to observe. And as we look at the average earnings data, we need to recognise that, not only is it difficult to measure and calculate, it will also occasionally exhibit “noisy” features that may obscure what is going on in the real economy. Indeed, over the Millennium period, as special Y2K bonuses were being paid, it was very difficult to determine what represented real “news” about the economy, and what was mere “noise”. Sitting at the controls of the aircraft, trying to pilot a sensible middle course between the extremes of unsustainable take-off and hard landing, we need “eyes and ears” on the ground.

Jean-Pierre Roth: What to expect from monetary policy? Summary of a speech by Mr Jean-Pierre Roth, Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, at the International Center for Monetary and Banking Studies (ICMB), Geneva, 25 November 2003. The complete speech can be found in French on the Swiss National Bank’s website (www.snb.ch). *  *  *  A number of current issues, such as the weakness of the economy and the new National Bank Law, raise the question as to what we can expect from monetary policy. With regard to the stability of consumer prices, the answer is relatively simple. The goal of price stability is at the very top of the Swiss National Bank’s priority list. Since both inflation and deflation are monetary phenomena over the long term, the SNB can and will guarantee price stability in future too. Expectations of monetary policy are considerably lower when it comes to regulating economic activity. Economic activity in Switzerland is strongly dependent on growth abroad. Inflation does not bring about long-term economic growth. Stable prices, however, are the best precondition for sustained growth. A goal of price stability automatically ensures a degree of stability in the economy. Because of uncertainty and time lags, however, fine-tuning the economy is an impossible task. Speculative bubbles in the real estate and equity markets have been an increasing source of macroeconomic instability during the past two decades.