samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The central bank will ensure that economic agents do not believe that inflation of 5 per cent has become the normal level,  29  The new recognition that policy should be based on confidence rather than a series of surprises reflects the influence of theoretical developments on practical policy, c.f. footnote 24. 30  In recent times, central banks throughout the world have become more independent but at the same time more predictable in their communication with other economic agents. This is also related to the new recognition referred to in footnote 24. 31  Norges Bank reports on the conduct of monetary policy in its Monetary Policy Report and Annual Report. Norges Bank’s reporting obligations are set out in § 75c of the Constitution and § 3 of the Norges Bank Act. The Annual Report is submitted to the Ministry of Finance, presented to the King in Council and communicated to the Storting in the Government Credit Report. The Governor of Norges Bank also appears at an open hearing of the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs. 32  The objective of EMU is consumer price stability in member countries as a whole, rather than stable prices in the individual country. The arguments for a stable value of money are the same as for Norway. 8  BIS Review 136/2008  thereby preventing such a belief from affecting their behaviour. Under an inflation targeting regime, the central bank will accept, when shocks occur, a price increase without having to reduce other prices.

Combatting fraud is a high priority for the Bank, and we will continue to work with the financial industry, Government agencies and law enforcement authorities to further improve banking and payment fraud incident response and recovery actions. Alongside these efforts, increasing digital and financial literacy will be extremely important to build and preserve confidence in the use of digital financial services. Learning how to use digital financial services safely is just one dimension. An important goal of improving digital financial literacy is also to help individuals make better use of digital financial services to improve their financial well-being. With an explosion of digital tools that can help individuals plan and manage their finances better, a much wider range of financial solutions, and easier access to financial advice - financial literacy, including digital financial literacy, is critical to help individuals navigate the complexity that comes with more choice. Faced with the same set of choices, individuals armed with the knowledge and skills to make good choices and good use of facilities available to them could significantly improve their standard of living, while others who make poor financial choices could be plunged into personal financial hardship. 15. The Financial Literacy Month this year aims to amplify the importance of digital financial literacy in helping Malaysians build financial resilience, and enable them to participate fully in the digital economy with confidence. Our efforts should reduce the digital divide, expand accessibility, and strengthen individual skills to manage money wisely. 16.
•  Third, it is striking that virtually none of these onion layers is captured by official statistical measures of activity, such as GDP. And, indeed, only some are captured by broader measures of subjective well-being. Measuring the value of volunteering typically relies on secondary, often non-official, statistical sources. In combination, this means that very little of the value created by the volunteer sector is easily visible to statisticians, to policymakers, to politicians, to companies, indeed to the volunteers themselves. This is a vast, but often invisible, army. So let me try to improve that visibility somewhat by piecing together some evidence. The economic value of volunteering Let’s start with the easiest bit – the economic value of volunteering. In other words, when volunteers give up their time to paint a building, take an elderly neighbour to hospital or feed the homeless, what is the value of the output they are producing? GDP measures the monetary value of goods and services produced in an economy. Because it is not normally associated with a monetary transaction, volunteering activity is not captured by existing GDP statistics. This point is well-recognised by statisticians, which is why the ONS publishes a series of Satellite Accounts to pick up important sources of activity which lie outside GDP. The Household Satellite Accounts are one example. They measure activities like childcare, adult care, meal production, laundry services and also the work of volunteers which do not involve a monetary transaction. In aggregate, these activities are huge.

My expectation is that once the price reversals and short-run imbalances from the economy reopening have played out, inflation will come back down to about 2 percent next year. Although the U.S. economy is on a very favorable trajectory overall, we must remember that our economy does not exist in a vacuum. The speed of the recovery will also depend on the global picture. We are seeing a slower rollout of immunizations, emerging strains of the virus, and a more subdued rebound in other parts of the world. This international context is another reason why a complete U.S. recovery will take time to achieve. 2/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  The Fed’s Policy Response Given all of this information, it’s clear there is a big shift in the economy, and the outlook has improved. But let me emphasize that the data and conditions we are seeing now are not nearly enough for the FOMC to shift its monetary policy stance. For these reasons, the FOMC decided last week to keep strong monetary policy support for the economy in place. Specifically, the FOMC maintained the target range for the federal funds rate at zero to ¼ percent and made no changes to its program of asset purchases. In thinking about adjusting its stance in the future, the FOMC has defined conditions and measures that will inform its decision-making.
iii)  Third, a domestic card association had indicated early on that it would build a shared NFC platform for its member banks, which is able to support over 20 banks  3  Based on statistics from Octopus, HKICL, HKMA. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  to provide NFC payment services. The project would to a large extent achieve the objective of having a piece of interoperable infrastructure. 23. So far, the market-driven approach has served us well. One stored value card company has launched such services, so have four other banks, in partnership with two major card associations. By the end of this year, the shared NFC payment platform I mentioned should be ready for operation. IV. Sound regulatory framework  24. While Hong Kong is well-positioned to capture business opportunities brought by mcommerce, we need a legal and regulatory framework to address the related risks. With that in mind, the HKMA and the Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau are jointly proposing a regulatory regime for stored value facilities and retail payment systems in Hong Kong. 25. Under the new framework, multi-purpose stored value facilities would need to be licenced and observe a set of regulatory requirements. For instance, it must have a physical presence in Hong Kong and must be a body corporate under Hong Kong law. The issuer must meet a minimum ongoing capital requirement of $ million. There are also “fit and proper” requirements on management and ownership. 26. Of particular importance is the need for adequate consumer protection.

Thanks to the promotional efforts of various payment service providers, people in Hong Kong are very used to making contactless payment. Some statistics show that among non-  2  2  Sources: PayPal Consumer Online and Mobile Shopping Insights 2012. BIS central bankers’ speeches  cash transactions, the portion of contact-less transactions amounts to about 85%. 3 With such a technology-savvy population, there is a huge market that m-commerce merchants can tap into. (b)  Policy support  18. Now, let me turn to “policy support”. Development of the policy framework for mobile payment services started a few years back. In 2012, the HKMA commissioned a consultant to examine how our city should best embrace the m-payment technology, and promote creativity through competition, while ensuring sufficient protection of the users in terms of prepaid stored value and data security. The consultant made two recommendations. “Soft” infrastructure – best practices 19. The first one focused on building the critical “soft” infrastructure. The consultant suggested that the HKMA should work with the industry to develop a set of standards to ensure inter-operability and system security. We agreed on this point, and worked proactively with the banking industry to produce the Best Practices for the NFC Mobile Payment, which was released in 2013. 20. This common set of technical standards has laid the foundation for achieving security and interoperability among different m-payment services.
With banks having substantially reduced their exposures in the past decade, largely by reducing their lending to commercial property companies, the resulting losses amounted ‘only’ to £ And following the shrinking of banks’ trading books in the past decade, their losses on trading assets totalled ‘only’ £ The losses resulting from this, and other parts of the stress scenario, would have wiped out the entire banking system in 2007. However, major UK banks have tripled their capital strength. Even after a stress like this, they have more than twice the capital they had going in to the crisis. They can now absorb losses like this and continue to supply credit to the real economy. 5. Are bond markets resilient or might they amplify adjustments? This is the final channel through which stretched markets could affect the wider economy. It would magnify any effect on corporate and bank balance sheets. And it could affect the cost of finance directly, as market interest rates are driven up and credit availability tightened. We have a duty to spot new market developments that could drive this and to simulate, rather than wait for the empirical proof, because by that point it can be too late. And as your mission statement acknowledges, we must move beyond the causes of market fragility in the last crisis. The resilience of markets is not guaranteed by the safety of the banking system and other core intermediaries. To do that, we’re going to have to delve into some of the detail.

Page 5  As ever, I will come to my own conclusions about Bank Rate on those occasions on the basis of my assessment of the data flow, with my decision focused on meeting the MPC’s price stability mandate through achieving the 2% inflation target on a sustained and lasting basis. Before opening up to questions, I wanted to conclude with a few comments on the title of my remarks this evening: ‘Inflation is a wicked problem’. The challenges posed by the cost-of-living squeeze are all too real for many households and businesses. This is especially true for those households towards the lower end of the income distribution, which spend a greater share of their income on food and energy – items for which prices have risen the most. Addressing these challenges – and containing the difficult implications of the cost-of-living squeeze – motivates the MPC’s actions to return inflation to target. But in talking about ‘wickedness’ this evening, I am referring to a different dimension of the inflation problem. This draws on the social science literature, where a ‘wicked problem’ is defined as one that – because of the complex web of interdependencies within which it is embedded – is resistant to resolution. [7] In particular, the effort to solve one aspect of a ‘wicked problem’ may reveal or create other related problems across other aspects. This literature describes a tendency to address ‘wicked problems’ by converting them into socalled ‘tame problems’ or ‘puzzles’.
While this smoothing through risk sharing is of benefit to all EU members, as the recent crisis has shown it is particularly important for the euro area given the relative lack of adjustment mechanisms available to individual euro members when they are hit by shocks. And, the third objective should be to create resilience by ensuring that if the banking system is damaged there is an effective alternative channel of finance to the real economy. It is very probable that one of the reasons the US has recovered faster from its financial crisis than Europe is that in the US banks do not dominate the provision of finance to anything like the same degree as in the EU. When the banking system was damaged in the US, a welldeveloped alternative existed to help meet the financing needs of the real economy. To achieve these three objectives, reforms will be needed on both the supply and demand side of the equation. The supply side of the equation has two dimensions. First, enabling more household and corporate savings to flow to vehicles that will invest in capital markets. And second, encouraging more investors to allocate capital across the borders of EU members – or, to give it its technical name, to reduce “home bias”. As I have noted, assets under management in Europe outside the banking system are typically around half the size of the US. Creating large pools of market-based private capital is in part about creating the right investment vehicles.

Changes in supply due to so-called scarring and structural change are though likely to be more persistent. To what extent is the nature and form of economic activity likely to change? I want next to take a look at a number of key aspects that will underpin the recovery, and in doing so address a further important question, namely to what extent is the nature and form of economic activity likely to change, and what will be the implications of that change? In the November Monetary Policy Report (also Ramsden, 2020) we covered this ground under three headings: what we buy; what we make; and how we work. The key point is that the impact of Covid has required and encouraged very sizeable adjustments, but it is far from clear whether or to what degree these will persist post-Covid and therefore what will be the longer-term impact on the economy. Let me briefly describe and assess some of the major changes. 3  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  3  Last autumn, estimates suggested that around a third of workers in the UK undertook at least some of their job away from their normal place of work. As we all know, remote working has become much more common and businesses have delivered services in new ways, often using technology to reduce personal contact. Prior to Covid, only 5% of people in employment worked mainly from home. There have also been notable changes in the way we consume.
Before the decline, the housing market had seen an important boom fuelled by expected future higher earnings, an important inflow of migrants and low financing costs. The buoyancy of aggregate demand, in turn, supported a wage-setting environment that did not correspond to the underlying gains in productivity. In the future, changes in labour market institutions to make wages adjust to productivity are essential to repairing past cumulative misalignments. There is a need for moderation in wage claims to regain competitiveness. This window of opportunity cannot be missed in those countries where substantial increases of production costs have been one of the causes for widening imbalances in current accounts, and Spain is one of them. In this country, the burden of the crisis has fallen disproportionately on temporary workers. Compensation for those employed on a permanent basis has seen only minor adjustments. Looking into the future, wage flexibility will need to be made more widespread. At the same time the main asset for growth and development in our societies is human capital. Incentives need to be shaped to maintain and develop knowledge by each individual and – collectively – by companies and institutions. This includes training and investment into the workforce, supported by well-designed employment contracts. Reforms in services, can further support the recovery and contain price increases once private expenditure recovers. In the end, these reforms, by increasing productivity and competitiveness help rebalance the external accounts on a permanent basis and reduce the reliance on external financing.

Norges Bank had kept the key policy rate at 0.5 percent for a year, and there was a slightly higher probability that the key policy rate would be reduced further than that it would be increased in the near term. There were signs of some brightening, both internationally and in Norway, but considerable uncertainty prevailed. Chart: Global GDP growth The economic outlook changed through 2017. Global growth gradually gained a firm footing, and global growth projections were revised up. For several of Norway’s main trading partners, unemployment was lower towards the end of 2017 than before the financial crisis. Despite rising growth abroad and falling unemployment, wage growth remained moderate. In 2017, most of Norway’s trading partners were still experiencing below-target core inflation. Chart: International interest rates Policy rates in the US, UK and Canada were raised in 2017. In addition, the Federal Reserve started to cautiously reduce its balance sheet, while the European Central Bank (ECB) announced that it would reduce its asset purchases from 2018. Nevertheless, international interest rates remain low, and signals from central banks as well as market expectations indicate a very gradual rise in interest rates. Chart: Oil prices and the krone exchange rate Oil prices have risen over the past two years, which may reflect steady growth in global oil consumption. Oil prices have recently increased further owing to geopolitical tensions. The krone has appreciated somewhat in this period.
And when risk taking increases, it must not be at the expense of the resilience of lenders to any future downturn in the economy. They must remain capable of serving in the bad times, as well as the good. Our annual stress test provides the basis for checking that but, in this environment, more regular check-ups are needed too. That’s why (as we said in the Record of our March meeting) we intend to “re-consider the adequacy [of capital levels] in June, with a focus on the evolution of domestic risk appetite.” We’ll keep standards up with the risks that are being taken. Alongside that, we must also keep up with the third macro trend: a fundamental re-shaping of the system. 9  In part due to regulatory efforts to level playing fields, banking is becoming more competitive. Smaller banks are taking market share. In the past 12 months, smaller banks – that account less than a fifth of the outstanding stock of household lending – have delivered half the new lending to UK households (see chart 5). Their newfound importance in the supply of credit means that, even though they are individually small, their collective risk taking has increasing relevance to the whole economy. Collectively at least, smaller banks must – like their bigger cousins – have the resilience to withstand economic bad times. That trend to greater competition should continue as Payment Services reforms and Open Banking come into play.

Sunil Mendis: Central bank governance and how such governance is related to strategic planning in central banks Opening remarks by Mr Sunil Mendis, Governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, at the 3rd SEACEN EXCO Seminar and Meeting, Colombo, 28-29 January 2005. *  *  *  Deputy Governors and Heads of Delegations of SEACEN member and observer countries, Mr Gavin Bingham, Head of International Liaison of BIS, Dr Subarjo Joyosumarto, Executive Director of the SEACEN Centre, distinguished invitees, ladies and gentlemen. It gives me great pleasure to inaugurate the 3rd SEACEN EXCO Meeting and Special Seminar to mark the Meeting. As a founder member of SEACEN, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka is honoured and delighted to host these two events in Colombo, Sri Lanka. On behalf of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, I extend a warm welcome to all the delegates from the SEACEN member and observer countries, our special guests, and of course, the officials of the SEACEN Centre. The gathering of several distinguished Central Bankers today demonstrates the emphasis and importance placed by them on the need for co-operating with each other to resolve issues of mutual interest. We host these two events just a month after the deadly ‘Tsunami’ hit some of our countries causing unprecedented and unimaginable destructions to the life and property. We are still recovering from this severe blow. Tsunami, indeed, brought all of us even closer. Our thoughts and prayers are with those who lost their beloved ones, property and suffered injuries.
As the post-pandemic recovery became better established last year, these risks receded – and the need to maintain an ‘ultra-accommodative’ stance receded with them. What’s more, the risks themselves became more symmetric, especially as Bank Rate moved away from its lower bound, and concerns about monetary policy transmission and downward nominal rigidities diminished. As a result, the case for ‘buying insurance’ using monetary easing via QE fell away. By its nature, an asymmetric ‘risk management’ approach to setting monetary policy designed to protect against skewed downside risk is inevitably somewhat over-stimulative should those downside risks not materialise. The challenge is then to manage the impact of this insurance premium, and ensure that it does not lead to departures of inflation from target. Just to be clear, I don’t see this insurance premium as being an important driver of inflation’s rise above target over the past year. That rise follows from new shocks to the UK economy, which I will discuss in a moment. Rather than in the form of inflation, the insurance premium to protect against downside risks through risk management has been paid in complicating what was anyway set to be a challenging process of monetary policy normalisation. By the autumn of 2021, the need to start tightening the monetary policy stance was becoming more evident as those new inflationary shocks mounted. That process was always likely to prove challenging.

“UK Monetary Policy – ‘Crossing the river by feeling the stones,” speech given at the Confederation of British Industry, Newcastle upon Tyne. Bank of England  Page 14  Pill, H. (2019), “Whatever it takes within our (new?) mandate” in R. Barwell and J. Chadha (eds.) Renewing our monetary vows: Open letters to the Governor of the Bank of England, pp. 37–54 (London: National Institute of Economic and Social Research). Pill, H. (2010). “Monetary policy in a low interest rate environment: A checklist,” NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics 6(1), pp. 335-345. Tenreyro, S. (2022). “The economy and policy trade-offs,” Dow Lecture, National Institute of Economic and Social Research. Bank of England  Page 15  Endnotes 1  2  3 4  5 6 7 8  9  10 11  12  13  14  15 16 17 18 19  20  See: Vickers (2022). “The regulation of inflation: Reflections on 25 years of the MPC,” Beesley Lecture, 9 November 2022. The MPC’s communication following its 3 November 2022 meeting set out why both the market-implied path of future Bank Rate and the path where Bank Rate was maintained at a constant 3% level were seen as inappropriate given the prevailing economic circumstances. This is a form of guidance. But the preferred outlook for Bank Rate was left to be determined by the evolution of the data. See: Evans et al. (2015) for an articulation of this approach.