samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
31  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  31  Table 1: Growth in the firm-level productivity distribution (aggregate, by region and by sector)  Aggregate  Annualised growth in average firm-productivity between 2004 and 2014 Top 0.1% Top 1% 12% 8%  99% of firms 1%  Region North East North West Yorkshire & Humberside East Midlands West Midlands East of England London South East South West Wales Scotland  7% 6% 12% 30% 19% 16% 9% 11% 23% 0% 13%  5% 4% 3% 15% 10% 8% 8% 6% 12% 4% 7%  0% 0% -1% 1% 0% 0% 2% 1% 1% 1% 0%  Sector Manufacturing Electricity Water Construction Wholesale trade Transportation and storage Information and communication Real estate activities Professional, scientific and technical activities Administrative and support service activities Education Health Arts and entertainment Other services  12% -10% 25% 14% 4% 41% 32% 5% 9% 25% 20% 17% 9% 10%  7% -14% 8% 8% 4% 28% 18% 3% 6% 14% 13% 7% 4% 0%  -1% -13% 1% -2% 0% -1% 3% -1% 4% 4% 0% 2% -5% -5%  Sources: ONS Research Database and Bank calculations. Note: Data refer to non-financial business sector. Calculations over the ten-year period in question are only possible for firms that exist for entire decade period and sampled throughout; these are likely to be larger firms.

51  17  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  17  These extraordinary monetary policy measures have been an important factor supporting growth in the UK since the global financial crisis. Without these measures, we estimate the economy would have been around 53  8% smaller and unemployment 4 percentage points higher. Highly accommodative monetary conditions  have helped maintain UK growth at steady, if unspectacular, rates for the past six years. Recent data suggest UK growth continues to be steady, at or around its trend rate of roughly 1.5% per year. At the same time, the labour market has continued to perform strongly. Almost 3 million new jobs have been created over the past six years. The unemployment rate in the UK, at 4.2%, has fallen to its lowest levels in over 40 years. Measures of tightness in the labour market have picked up notably. And the Bank’s estimates suggest little or no slack remains in the economy. Consistent with that, and despite undulations in shorter-run measures, we have seen a steady pick-up in annual rates of wage inflation over the past 18 months, as well as in pay settlements. Private sector regular pay growth has risen from around 2% this time last year to just shy of 3% currently. And average pay settlements of around 2% last year have picked up to around 2.5% this. Surveys of pay and recruitment difficulties, including from the Bank’s Agents, have gone up a gear comparing this year with last.
Clearly the wage bill cannot be expanded by major pay rises, since this eventually leads to a higher relative cost of labour and, consequently, less job creation, higher unemployment, loss of household confidence and fresh falls in demand, which would mean still lower growth and more unemployment. Therefore, it is crucial to adapt wages to the specific situation of firms, to their activity, productivity gains, profits, etc. The current wage bargaining system does not take into account the large differences in individual firms’ specific situations, so it is not the most suitable one to prevent the bout of weak demand from generating a sharp fall in employment. Further, the predominance of indexation clauses in collective labour agreements is a problem that becomes particularly harmful when, as in the current circumstances, inflation has risen due to an external shock, like oil prices, at a time of cyclical weakness. It is naive to believe that automatic wage adjustment to reflect past consumer price increases provides any protection to household disposable income. On the contrary, these clauses (which have now been done away with in most European countries) lessen the ability of firms to compete and keep creating jobs, generate inflation (which affects those not protected by similar provisions) and, in short, hinder adaptation to the external shock. In general, these characteristics of the Spanish labour market have meant that employment has so far been the economy’s main adjustment variable in periods of crisis, since it is the quantities (i.e.

For all these reasons, it is clear that there is no room for complacency and that institutions must act to achieve tighter cost control and to rationalise their procedures. Against a background of rising doubtful assets it seems essential to build up both the amount and quality of capital and to establish sound risk control mechanisms. Lastly, institutions should continuously carry out stress testing and develop contingency plans to anticipate what line of action to take in the face of different market situations. Regarding the supervisor, I believe there has been widespread recognition of the reliability and quality of Spanish banking supervision. Therefore this work should continue to cultivate a close relationship and permanent contact with institutions, but without relaxing the demands made of them. The last agent to which I wish to devote attention is households. In the current circumstances it is inevitable that households should regard the future with greater uncertainty and restrict their spending, stepping up their saving and reducing their level of indebtedness. The behaviour of households will be influenced by whether or not they are indebted and, if so, the weight of this debt burden on their current income. In the case of the more heavily indebted households (in proportion to income), the picture is more complicated since, to the prevailing uncertainty about the economic outlook may be added the tightening of financing conditions, which is largely a result of the financial turmoil.
The consequences, quite naturally, were first evident in the US financial market which plays an exceptionally important role in the funding of the banks and the private sector. It also became clear that the banks' off-balance sheet activities, in environment of illiquidity of entire segments in the global financial market, will cause enormous losses which will have to be funded with the banks' capital. This, understandably, further increased the mistrust with respect to banks' capital adequacy rate. In a short period, the markets went dry. The ghosts typical for the crisis of the thirtieth (1929-1933) flied over, although I agree with those asserting that any comparison between that and this crisis is virtually unsuitable. In mid-October 2008, the governments of the developed countries started taking measures to get the trust in the financial system back. On October 8, the Government of Great Britain disclosed a complex plan for recapitalization of the banking system. This measure followed the first coordinated measure for cutting the interest rates, undertaken by the six most influential central banks. Moreover, the governments of the Euro-area states adopted a joint decision to issue guarantees and inject capital for stabilization of the banking system. In mid-October, the US Treasury Department also announced that it will invest US Dollar 250 billion to recapitalize the major banks. The undertaken measures for stabilization of the banking system helped curbing the global trust crisis in the international financial system, but gaining it back goes slowly.

The implications of the crisis internationally-wide entered primarily through the external sector, and particularly through the transmission channels given below: -  the export-based production registered swift and rapid fall, due to the depreciated global demand, whereas the downward revision of the domestic demand took place  2  BIS Review 127/2009  in a slower pace, leading to some import reduction (particularly in the last quarter of the last year and the first quarter of this year), -  this uneven pace of the fall in the exports and the imports brought about widening the trade gap, whereas the increase in the uncertainty and establishment of bearish expectations caused decrease in the net inflows from private transfers, Reasonably, it led to higher current account deficit in this period,  -  although the syndrome of sudden cessation was not present, the capital inflows went down significantly, making the current account funding fall considerably on the foreign reserves,  -  the perceptions for increasing the macroeconomic risks made the banks accumulating foreign assets, the households converting large amounts of Denars into foreign currencies, thus creating additional pressure on the foreign reserves of the Republic of Macedonia. Accordingly, the consequences of the crisis could not be avoided, which is understandable if the size and the openness of the Macedonian economy are taken into consideration.
Lim Hng Kiang: Singapore’s key role in Asia Opening remarks by Mr Lim Hng Kiang, Minister for Trade and Industry and Deputy Chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, at the 8th Annual Citi Asia Pacific Investor Conference 2011, Singapore, 16 February 2011. *  *  *  Distinguished guests, Ladies and gentlemen, 1. Good morning and a very warm welcome to everyone here today. It is my pleasure to join you here at the 8th Citi Asia Pacific Investor Conference. 2. This conference is taking place at a time when the global economic recovery is picking up pace. Against this backdrop, there will be many opportunities to be explored. I am confident that this conference will provide an excellent platform for participants to share ideas and build networks. 3. The world’s economic landscape has been re-shaped since the recent global financial crisis. The recent crisis was said to be the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Today, the advanced economies which were at the epicenter of the crisis still face headwinds in their recovery. In the United States, economic recovery remains fragile after two rounds of quantitative easing measures. In the Euro-zone, concerns over sovereign debts have yet to subside. There are still uncertainties in the horizon for these advanced economies. 4. This time, Asia is at the forefront of the global recovery. Asia’s resilience, built up over the years since the Asian Financial Crisis, has enabled us to weather this crisis better.

For example, Thailand is the largest source of imports for seven of the nine ASEAN countries, excluding Thailand. The only two countries, where it is not Thailand, are Brunei, where it is Malaysia, and Singapore, where it is Malaysia, but if you are talking about links from a trade standpoint with other countries, it turns out it is Thailand. In terms of investment, the largest source of direct investment to the region is Singapore contributing about 60 percent of total intra-ASEAN FDI flows in 2020. However, a large share of that is not from Singapore itself, for example, when Taiwan firms invest in other countries through their Page 7 of 8  subsidiary in Singapore. Excluding Singapore, the next country on the rankings is Thailand contributing about 24 percent of total intra-ASEAN FDI flows (about one-fourth). We can see that both trade and investment linkages are very strong in Thailand. Furthermore, if we think about a country as a good production base, one thing we might think about is the degree of labor access. A place where labor from different places can move has the potential to act as a centralized production hub. Again, the country with the highest number of ASEAN migrants, not surprisingly, is Thailand because we have a lot of workers from Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. According to the United Nations in 2019, the number of intra-ASEAN migrants in Thailand is about 3.5 million compared to Malaysia, the second place, which is around 2 million.
No matter how rapidly or how slowly the economy is growing, or how fast or slow the money is circulating, the aggregate amount of reserves will be exactly the same. So it should be clear that the quantity of central bank reserves held by the commercial banks is useless as an indicator of the effectiveness of Quantitative Easing. Now obviously we would prefer that the money circulates more rapidly and that this is done through increased bank lending and deposit taking. In other words, we would like to see a further expansion of credit and broad money. Since the banks collectively are now awash with reserves, they should not be prevented from making additional loans because of any liquidity concerns. Banks are, though, constrained by a lack of capital and are looking to reduce leverage rather than increase it. Fortunately, increased bank lending is not necessary for Quantitative Easing to work. Indeed, it was precisely because the Monetary Policy Committee expected the additional monetary injection not to stimulate bank lending directly at the current juncture, that the Asset Purchase Facility’s purchases were targeted at assets held primarily by the non-bank private sector 1 . So if the Asset Purchase Facility buys gilts from pension funds or asset managers, they will then have to look for another home for their money. As it is not very rewarding just to hold it on deposit, they are likely to look to put their money into other assets, including equities and corporate bonds.

The company issuing the bond then deposits that money in their own bank. So now it is the corporate’s bank that holds the claim on us. A similar sort of circle occurs if the corporate then uses its deposit to buy a new piece of machinery, because the seller of that machinery will end up putting the proceeds into her bank, so that the claim on the Bank of England is now held by the capital goods producer’s bank. Whatever the type of purchase, it will always end up with someone’s commercial bank having a claim on us. That is even the case if the money is used to buy foreign goods, as the foreign commercial bank will need to exchange the sterling claim with a commercial bank that holds an account with us, if it does not do so itself. The only way that the claim can be eliminated from the system is if a bank chooses to exchange it for cash, which would make little sense since cash pays no interest at all. The reason for going through this in such mind-numbing detail is to make the point that the level of commercial banks’ reserves in aggregate is determined by the way we have funded the asset purchases, not by the commercial banks’ own decisions. The size of banks’ reserves cannot, as is frequently claimed, be a sign that they are “sitting on them”.
The dosage of the drug may be increased as dependency rises, but eventually a fairly severe anti-dote of austerity may need to be administered to break the growing addiction. It may reasonably be argued, however, that, even if the underlying path of the real exchange rate is determined essentially by structural forces within the economy, monetary policy should be utilised so 1  In fact it is necessary to take into account all one's trading partners and thus arrive at the real trade-weighted or "effective" exchange rate - the REER. For ease of exposition, however, only the term "real exchange rate" is used in this paper. 2  The precise interpretation depends crucially on the set of prices or costs which is used in the calculation, but this aspect is not addressed here. 2  BIS Review 17/2002  far as possible to prevent excessive divergences from trend which may prove damaging to the economy. For example, if a currency is artificially strong for a prolonged period, a particular sector of the economy may become so damaged that it is incapable of recovering when the exchange rate eventually returns to equilibrium. In practice, however, it is extremely difficult to determine, at the time, whether a particular movement in the real rate represents a divergence from the equilibrium path or a fundamental shift in the path itself. At various moments over the past 20-30 years there may have been calls for a weaker HK dollar in order to preserve the local manufacturing sector.

Asset prices, on the other hand, display much greater volatility, and the collapse of property prices has created problems for some homeowners and financial institutions, despite presenting opportunities for others. Plainly, stability is preferable to volatility. But the plunge in prices has much more to do with the earlier exuberance, plus structural influences, such as growing cross-border integration, than with the exchange rate. Although the current deflation may undoubtedly be painful to some, before we rush to argue that deflation could be avoided if only we had a floating exchange rate, let's pause to reflect on the Japanese experience. At times, Japan experienced deflation accompanied by upward pressure on the yen, which only served to exacerbate the deflation. It may not be appropriate to draw too close an  BIS Review 17/2002  7  analogy, given the contrasting economic circumstances between the two economies, but it is worth noting that, with a fixed exchange rate, deflation, if it continues, eventually restores any lost competitiveness and will then bottom out (assuming no significant continuing deflation overseas). In other words, in the Hong Kong context the peg in effect sets upper and lower bounds to the inflation rate relative to the rate in the United States. In sum, the peg has certainly not been the only contributor to deflation, and such contribution as it has made, has probably not been severe. The presence of deflation does not itself make a compelling case for altering the exchange rate regime.
It would mean in total approximately 2-3 years from a referendum until the euro were introduced completely. However, I believe that this preparation time can be shortened somewhat, assuming that the political process is open and establishes a clear timetable and that a transition process is chosen. It is worth remembering that there is nothing to say that EMU membership or a currency changeover should take place at the start of a year. For practical reasons it might be better to introduce the currency changeover in particular in, say, March or October. Another alternative described in the report is what is known as Big Bang, i.e. to begin the currency changeover at the same time as the krona exchange rate is fixed and membership of the third stage of the EMU takes place. This scenario would require a preparation period of 2-2.5 years. It would require that the euro could be processed in all transactions in Sweden, both physical and electronic, and by everyone in Sweden, from the local tobacconist to the Swedish national social insurance board and the major banks, right form day one. As this alternative at the same time requires a changeover in IT systems, other practical items such as accounting, tax payments and a physical currency changeover, it makes great demands for co-ordination and information.

T-copying: the payer bank sends a payment order for the entire amount to the payee bank, with a copy to the data centre or the settlement bank, which sends a confirmation to the payee bank when settlement has occurred. BIS Review 7/2000  8  Thus, a delayed or rejected netting - resulting from payment problems in one bank - can cause serious problems for other banks, at any rate if the netting is prolonged until the following day. In addition, there are no exposure limits or transaction limits for this netting system. The system really does not live up to its name, because it involves both small and large-value transfers. As I pointed out previously, this may call for us to place stricter requirements on this clearing system than what we would demand if only retail payments were involved. If it should turn out that the bank responsible for the delay in the mass settlement really is insolvent, then we cannot rule out that the other banks will incur such sizeable losses that systemic problems may arise. We have very roughly estimated that the bilateral (gross) exposure may exceed NOK 5bn in certain settlements. However, this situation will soon be improved when the netting is given legal protection. This may reduce the total maximum loss to the amount of the multilateral net debit of the insolvent bank.
They start with the product and try to persuade the customer why their product is good for him. 2 / 10  BIS central bankers' speeches  Many banks do not have a complete picture of their customers. They are weighed down by legacy IT systems and bureaucratic processes. But several banks are stepping up to the challenge. Athos is learning from Porthos. Banks are investing heavily in technology to optimise their operations and enhance their systems. They are collaborating with technology firms to accelerate the pace of innovation. They are becoming more customer-centric. These banks are using technology to provide customised solutions, complete solutions, and seamless solutions. First, customised solutions to suit the individual needs and characteristics of the customer. Some banks are experimenting with personalised products and services, not just based on what the customer asks for but by anticipating what the customer might need. Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s mobile app is using behavioural science to provide customers with financial management advice based on their spending patterns and financial goals. Some banks are offering personalised interactions at every customer touchpoint. Royal Bank of Canada has enabled its customers to pay their bills on the mobile app via speech and voice recognition. Second, complete solutions that are based on the total picture of the customer. Today’s customers are more sophisticated and want holistic solutions. In a survey of 10,000 tech-savvy customers, Accenture found that 80% of them want integrated solutions that address both their financial and non-financial needs.

The Principles are centred on four pillars – fairness, ethics, accountability, and transparency. Hence, the short-hand name FEAT Principles. They are not prescriptive but represent an industry consensus that individual financial institutions take reference from when formulating their own data governance policies and practices. We believe that the FEAT Principles will help to promote public confidence and trust in the use of data analytics and artificial intelligence in our financial sector. Conclusion Let me conclude. Technology and Finance must come together. And they must do so in a manner that maintains Trust. Finance, Technology and Trust are like the three musketeers of old. Like Athos, Finance allocates resources to those who need it. Like Porthos, Technology represents the aspiration for Finance to innovate. Like Aramis, Trust engenders confidence in Finance. The motto of the three musketeers is: “Tous pour un, Un pour tous” – “One for all, All for one”. If Finance, Technology, and Trust can do the same, we can have innovation and dynamism with safety and stability. We can benefit not only the financial industry, but society at large. We can raise productivity, expand opportunity, and enrich the lives of our people. Thank you. 10 / 10  BIS central bankers' speeches