samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
In Sweden and many other countries, the old idea, in the 1950s and 1960s, that a trade-off exists between inflation and unemployment resulted in an increasingly high level of trend inflation. When the drawbacks of active economic policies of this type became apparent, people in general and their representatives also feared the other extreme - a monetary policy that consistently aimed at keeping inflation as low as possible. Some countries, of which Sweden is one, are basically averse to deflation. So a regime whereby monetary policy has a systematic, long-term commitment to keeping inflation at a predetermined level of 2 per cent, neither more nor less, represents what many people perceive as a balanced approach to avoiding deflation as well as inflation. This has made it easier to establish the legitimacy of the regime in the public mind. Some relevant issues for a practitioner Let me now turn to some matters which a practitioner finds important and which will also be touched upon during the coming two days. BIS Review 58/1998  -3-  One issue concerns the indicator of inflation that is appropriate to use as an explicit target. The practical considerations in this respect are complex and are currently being debated in Sweden. The consumer price index has the advantage of being familiar to a wide public. Besides measuring trend inflation, however, it also gives information about price fluctuations that stem from transitory supply-side shocks, for example changes in indirect taxes and interest costs.

Bucharest, April 29th 2020  Mugur Isărescu, Governor of the National Bank of Romania Dear colleagues,  Early this year, we found ourselves during challenging times, under an awful threat of medical nature, which has affected our lives, as well as the global economy. Many sectors have experienced sudden stops. The negative effects of COVID-19 pandemic have required the adoption of comprehensive and coordinated packages of measures in order to respond to lockdowns and deterioration of economies, trying at the same time to establish grounds for future opening up and strategies for restarting the activities. Recent history has shown us that central banks have always exerted their full functions within mandate to support countries and people to overcome the economic effects of wars, catastrophes and disasters of any kind. These trying times make no exception. The outstanding cooperation within the framework of the prestigious Bank for International Settlements, of its remarkable members and management, will stand proof for deepening our commitments that bind us all. On a more positive note, I wish to let you know that the National Bank of Romania celebrates today its 140 year anniversary. The day of April 29th has a strong historical significance. Since mid19th century, the Romanian society had witnessed swift, in-depth social, economic, political and institutional changes. So, steps were taken to found a central bank, drawn on the statutory principles of Banque de France and the National Bank of Belgium. On April 29th 1880, the Law on the establishment of a discount and circulation bank, i.e.
Caleb M Fundanga: Recent economic developments in Zambia Talking notes by Dr Caleb M Fundanga, Governor of the Bank of Zambia, with the business community in Kitwe, Kitwe, 25 July 2011. *  *  *  RECENT ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENTS Introduction   The Zambian economy has recorded significant positive developments following the implementation of various reforms. This is reflected in positive real GDP since the early 2000s, low and falling inflation, a downward trend in lending interest rates, favourable external sector performance as well as relative stability in the exchange rate of the Kwacha.   These developments can be attributed to improved monetary and fiscal policy management and improved economic management, which in turn has enhanced investor confidence. Real gross domestic product (GDP)   Zambia’s national output, as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), has grown by an average of 6.4 percent annually in the last five years. The Zambian economy grew by 7.6 percent in 2010, compared to 6.4 percent in 2009, and exceeded the target of 5 percent.   The key contributors to the sustained increase in economic activity have been increased production in the mining, agricultural and construction sectors.   The agricultural sector recorded a historical bumper maize harvest of over 2.8 million metric tonnes during the 2009/10 season and another 3.0 metric tonnes during the 2010/11 harvest season. This was supported by favourable weather conditions and the Farmer Input Support programme.

  Countries in Africa that are in this class, lower middle income, include the following Angola, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Arab Republic of Egypt, The Gambia, Ghana, Lesotho, Mauritania, Morocco, Nigeria and São Tomé and Principe. IMPLICATIONS OF SOVEREIGN CREDIT RATING   The rating that has been assigned to Zambia reflects strong economic performance as shown by the GDP growth rate. This has also been supported by low rate of inflation and fiscal deficits, external sector performance supported by the mining sector, and activities in key economic sectors, including agriculture and tourism, as well as strong external balance position after huge debt relief from international creditors obtained in 2005.   The rating puts the Zambian business community and government in a strong position to access finance globally at risk adjusted interest rates for investment that is essential for sustained economic growth and improved living conditions of the citizens.   Furthermore, the rating entails transparency in the economic management of the country’s resources and provides an opportunity for the country to work on the weaknesses identified by the rating agencies. For instance, from the rating report it was noted that Zambia still faces challenges in the energy sector and infrastructure development. It therefore, follows that once the country addresses the identified weaknesses, the rating could improve.   In summary, the rating assigned to Zambia shows stability and predictability of government policies and signals improvements in the business environment. This is also comparable to our peers in Africa.
These actions include the signing of a memorandum of understanding that further facilitates information sharing related to the Treasury market, and again co-hosting this conference. Going forward, the staff of the Joint Member Agencies will continue to work together on effective and comprehensive data collection, monitoring of market activity and liquidity through the Interagency Working Group, development of principles and best practices for Treasury market data transparency, and the regulatory framework for government securities. A main focus of recent work by the Joint Member Agencies has been to improve the availability of information to both the official sector and the public. Given this emphasis, it is worth spending a few moments discussing the benefits of obtaining timely and robust data on Treasury market transactions. Data are essential to understanding flash events and market liquidity. Attendees at this 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  conference are very familiar with the events of October 15, 2014, when the 10-year Treasury yield experienced a 37-basis-point trading range over the session. At that time, market participants struggled to identify what had caused that sharp movement. Similarly, a flash event occurred in the British pound just this month. The pound depreciated nearly 6 percent, and then largely retraced this move within several minutes, seemingly without a major catalyst. Once the domain of equity markets, flash events have happened with increasing frequency, also occurring in the dollar-yen and euro-dollar currency pairs in recent years. Treasury and foreign exchange markets share a number of common attributes.

Conversely, when home prices are flat or declining, or mortgage credit is tight, this will put a damper on retail spending. Events of the last decade have driven this point home in a very clear way. It is well known that beginning in the mid-1990s and intensifying in the early 2000s, there was a massive U.S. housing boom that dramatically increased the value of residential real estate in the United States. Over the period from 1995 to 2006, the aggregate value of real estate owned by households and nonprofits nearly tripled, rising from $ trillion to nearly $ trillion. A remarkable, yet not widely-known, fact about this boom period is that while home values were rising very quickly, borrowing was growing almost exactly as fast. Rather than saving the extra wealth that was being generated by the housing boom, households were diverting a large share of it to other purposes. Indeed, the fraction of every additional dollar of households’ housing wealth that was consumed seems to have been higher than that for financial wealth—such as investments in equities and bonds—suggesting that they viewed the increase in home prices as permanent. In order to be able to assess the evolution of household finances more precisely, we worked with Equifax—a major credit bureau—to create a new database that tracks the credit files of a random sample of households over time.
In consequence, other banks struggled to get the liquidity they needed via market mechanisms, particularly term borrowing, even when there was more than sufficient cash in the system as a whole and even if the firms had good quality collateral. The amounts being rolled in overnight markets became a risk in itself. The Bank responded by massively increasing its lending at three months maturity from £ before the crisis to a peak of around £ in early 2009. Essentially we chose to lend so that any bank which needed to could bid for and obtain liquidity at three months. The significant increase in term liquidity that ensued meant that there would have been downwards pressure on short-term interest rates. So in order to keep market interest rates close to Bank Rate, the Bank drained the excess liquidity via issuing Bank of England bills. At its peak, the Bank issued around £ of one-week bills. 6  Currently, the deposit rate is zero and the borrowing rate 75bps. In more normal conditions, these spreads can be expected to be symmetric around Bank Rate. 7  The Bank can choose to lend in variable rate repos. This happened for a brief period in mid-2009. 8  Again, variable rate bills could be used. This happened during the first few months of the asset purchase programme.

14 Customer-oriented attitude has induced the public sector to open itself to the public and private partnership solutions. One of its manifestations in Singapore is the ability to apply for a passport at the photo-shop, immediately after the passport picture is taken. Another significant factor, which stimulates the growth of both e-administration and e-economy, is the penetration of innovation and search for new applications for technologies in use between the private and public sectors. For instance, the abovementioned RFID technology was initially used to mark goods in transport and storage, as a technique more advanced than the bar code. China, which has implemented the RFID standard as a result of the efforts of Wal-Mart, the world-largest retailer, is currently considering its use in blood banks to track the location of blood batches. Another use of the RFID technology — also in the health care sector — is currently tested at the orthopaedic ward of the Singapore General Hospital. For the duration of hospitalization, the patient receives a band that facilitates tracing the patient’s location, whereas a built-in thermosensor measures the temperature without bothering the patient. Portable devices provide the nurses and physicians with an ongoing access to information on the patients. Moreover, there is a possibility to integrate the system with 15 monitoring of the heart action and blood pressure . A completely different, although slightly controversial, use of RFID has been found at the prosecutor’s office in Mexico, whereby a chip is implanted under skin of employees that have access to secret documents.
Our decision to shift the focus of the presentation to market rates was coupled with a decision to publish forecasts for three years, rather than two, as was previously the case. This did not reflect a change in policy horizon – we are required to meet our 2% target ‘at all times’. But it did provide useful context for interpreting the gradient of inflation forecasts at the two year horizon, and hence a clearer indication of future policy, if the economy evolves in line with the central projection. The shift to using a market rate assumption was a very modest step towards greater transparency. At a technical level, it is a non trivial task to translate any market rate yield curve into a conventional forecasting assumption which is a genuine reflection of market expectations of future official interest rates.18 And markets are themselves uncertain about the path of future rates so we publish a fan chart for market interest rate to help quantify that uncertainty, based on options prices. There is a big difference between a conditioning assumption and a commitment, not least because there is a big gap between anyone’s current guess at where rates might need to go to meet the inflation target, conditional on the data available at any point in time, and where the MPC will actually take rates given the information it may have in the future.

It is important to note that, as from this MP Report, for the purposes of the conjunctural analysis of activity and the measurement of the gap, the concepts of “natural resources GDP” and “other GDP” have been replaced by “mining GDP” and “non-mining GDP”. A box in the Report explains the reasons behind this change. There we note that the sectors that we discounted from GDP until now (i.e. mining, fishery, and electricity, gas and water) are actually more volatile and less persistent. It is also shown that, in general, its relationship with the rest of the economy is limited. However, in line with the change that I have just commented, it is concluded that only the exclusion of mining activity has significant effects in the analysis of the dynamics of the aggregate economy, because of its important effects on the variance of growth. In such circumstances, and considering that broad measures are better to work with than narrow ones, 3  we adopted the distinction between mining and non-mining GDP to substitute for natural resources GDP and other GDP. Moreover, this change allows the analysis in the MP Report to be aligned with the publication of the mining and non-mining Imacec2 that we introduced a few months ago. Returning to the recent evolution of activity and demand, the sectoral composition of nonmining GDP shows better figures for sectors linked to consumption than those related to investment, particularly construction.
Irma Rosenberg: Rising commodity prices Speech by Ms Irma Rosenberg, First Deputy Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at SEB, Stockholm, 9 May 2008. *  *  *  A challenge for the central banks What have we been able to read in the news in recent months? Let me give some examples. Mining companies have begun prospecting for ore in many parts of Sweden, particularly in the Norrland region. Municipalities which have long experienced problems with emigration, such as Pajala, are now facing a more positive situation. Optimism has increased. Increased trade barriers are being reported in some parts of the world. But this is not a question of what has been the usual case, where countries protect domestic industries by limiting certain exports. Instead they have introduced high charges to prevent exports of foods such as grain and rice. We have also been able to read about demonstrations and food riots in poor countries such as Haiti, Cameroon and Burkina Faso. The UN food organisation FAO has also warned of social and political unrest in several countries. Why am I taking up these examples? What have they got in common? Well, they are the result of one and the same phenomenon – that world market commodity prices have almost exploded in recent years. The high metal prices have made it profitable to search for ore and extract metals that earlier would have been left in the ground.

Rising prices All in all, inflation has largely developed in line with the forecast in the February Monetary Policy Report. The consumer price index, CPI, increased by 3.4 per cent in March. This is an inflation rate well in excess of the target of 2 per cent. A large part of the upturn in the CPI – close to one percentage point – is linked to an increase in mortgage interest expenditure for home-owners and thus to the interest rate increases made by the Riksbank over the past two years. However, the upturn is also due to the rapidly rising commodity prices in the world market. This became clear in autumn 2007 in particular. CPI inflation then rose by just over 1.5 percentage points in just a few months. The primary reason was higher commodity prices. When such rapid price impulses from abroad have an effect on inflation, monetary policy is unable to counteract them immediately. Moreover, it may be very difficult, if at all possible, to predict this type of fluctuation. This is why one cannot expect to avoid effects on inflation like those we have seen recently. A balancing act Now, as I have said, both we and other central banks have to manage the balancing act I described. The Riksbank’s statutory target is price stability, and we must conduct monetary policy so that inflation attains the target of 2 per cent within a couple of years.
Miguel Fernández Ordóñez: Financial crises – impact and challenges for Spain Opening speech by Mr Miguel Fernández Ordóñez, Governor of the Bank of Spain, at the “XIX Encuentro del sector financiero”, organised by Deloitte-ABC, Madrid, 10 April 2012. *  *  *  Good morning, Four years have gone by since the Federal Reserve had to bail out Bear Stearns and what was then known as “turbulences” began, ultimately turning into the most serious crisis the developed countries have faced since the Great Depression in the 1930s. A year earlier, Spain had begun to feel the effects of the exhaustion of a long phase of disproportionate expansion, in the form of a build-up of private debt and a loss of competitiveness. The latter, under way before Spain joined the euro, was fuelled by the low interest rates that suited the euro area as a whole, prompting an extraordinary deficit on the current-account balance. The joint outbreak of these two crises, the international one and the domestic one in Spain, led output to fall and public revenue to collapse. And this, together with a further increase in public spending aimed at softening the recession, meant that the budget surplus run from 2005 to 2007 turned into a deficit in 2008 and came to exceed 11% of GDP in 2009. If this were not enough, in April 2010 a third crisis hit Spain: the sovereign debt crisis or the euro crisis.

The latter approach is called “certainty equivalence” in academic research and is a good policy only under fairly restrictive assumptions of how the economy functions. It is therefore probably less useful as guidance in policy-making. Moreover, the central banks’ actual behaviour and communication indicate that uncertainty plays an important role in the monetary policy decisions. 21 See Greenspan (2003). 20 [24]  A more useful approach is probably William Brainard’s insight that monetary policy should be conducted more cautiously when there is considerable uncertainty over its impact. 22 Brainard’s uncertainty principle is based on the insight that central banks’ actions can affect the uncertainty in the economy. If, for instance, a central bank were to act more forcefully to try to attain its inflation target more promptly – in a scenario where there is great uncertainty over the impact of monetary policy – there is a risk that it would instead miss the target by a wide margin. By acting forcefully, the central bank contributes to greater variations in inflation and also to greater uncertainty in general. To avoid this, the central bank should act more cautiously. This uncertainty principal is often referred to by central banks and can be one reason why central banks, who want to avoid making major mistakes in all circumstances, are sometimes perceived as “sluggish” in their behaviour. One of my themes today has been long-term trends. When such trends change, it often takes a long time before one notes the change and this can moreover be difficult to assess.
Emerging economies’ trade volume relative to the global market is, at best, minuscule. Fourth, non-resident participation has increased tremendously in most emerging markets. Non-resident holdings of Government bonds in Uruguay for example. In a little over a year, non-resident holdings surged from 2% to 45% of the outstanding bonds in May 2013. Closer to home, non-resident holdings of Malaysia and Thailand Government bonds increased from 10.2% and 2.5% in 2009 to 32.2% and 14.1% in 2016 respectively . These non-resident investors tend to be driven more by global rather than domestic factors, motivated by the search for yields. As participation becomes too high, it brought heightened risks to domestic markets through the distortion in asset prices. The disproportionate influence of NR investors further amplified the disconnect between domestic interest rates and economic fundamentals. Fifth, asset prices in emerging economies are increasingly correlated with global factors, exposing emerging markets to shocks in the advanced economies. Stock market indices and long-term bond yields in emerging markets have shown strong co-movement with the indices and bond yields in the advanced economies, particularly the United States. This has led to signs of weaker monetary control. The increasingly correlated yields between advanced economies and emerging market economies have weakened the transmission from policy rate to domestic yields. Given this new landscape, policymakers in highly open economies are often caught in a “catch 22” situation. Raising interest rates to manage rising inflation and the central bank may stoke capital inflows and further currency appreciation.

SPEECH  The Song Remains the Same June 01, 2022 John C. Williams, President and Chief Executive Officer Remarks at the New York Fed and Columbia SIPA Monetary Policy Implementation Workshop, New York City As prepared for delivery  Good morning, everyone. I'd like to give my thanks to Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs for partnering with the New York Fed once again and for hosting us today. It's wonderful to be here and to see so many colleagues who have traveled from near and far to attend this workshop. We'll have many important conversations over the next two days. To kick us off, I'm going to share some observations on the digital transformation of money and payments. I'll also discuss the potential implications for monetary policy implementation and for central banks more broadly. Before I begin, I must give the standard Fed disclaimer that the views I express here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) or anyone else in the Federal Reserve System. I will get to payments technology in a minute. But first allow me to take you back to the year 1877. You're amazed at the sound of music coming out of a new invention—the phonograph. Fast-forward a century, and you're listening to your favorite band on a cassette tape. In the 1980s, it's a CD. In the 2000s, you're scrolling through the greatest hits on your iPod.