samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
HB: What needs to be changed? Trichet: We certainly do need change in Europe – fundamental change. Not only in the area of surveillance and monitoring of fiscal policy, but also as regards structural reform policies and competitiveness policies. HB: Examples? Trichet: We need to improve drastically everything: the quality of the diagnosis and recommendations by the Commission, much more stronger procedures – and where necessary automatic procedures and tools – to prevent ex ante bad policies, and much more effective sanctions ex post. I will make all these points with the greatest energy in the Van Rompuy Committee. HB: Will the measures adopted by the ECB now dampen growth in Europe? Trichet: No. It is a complete fallacy to say that fiscal soundness dampens growth. It is exactly the contrary. It is the absence of fiscal credibility which dampens growth. Medium term sound and credible fiscal policies are a major prerequisite for confidence. And confidence of the households, confidence of the entrepreneurs and confidence of the investors is what is indispensable for the recovery. HB: Did you ever think that you would have to take such difficult decisions as President of the ECB? Trichet: I have had to take difficult decisions throughout my career – including as President of the Paris Club in the 80’s and Chairman of European Monetary Policy Committee in the 90’s as well as Governor of the Banque de France.

Trichet: I can confirm that three of the four decisions were unanimous or taken on the basis of a consensus. One decision namely the Securities Market Programme was decided, as I have already said, by an overwhelming majority. All our decisions – including last Sunday’s – are taken after weighing up all the pros and cons. HB: Were you not in contact with authorities? Trichet: Yes, I was in contact with my good friend Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and other central bank governors, throughout the evening and the night. It was not only a European but also a global serious situation. HB: For more than ten years, the ECB was able to keep inflation in the euro area under control. Now, all of a sudden, the Union has stopped functioning properly. What has happened? 2  BIS Review 67/2010  Trichet: We are currently facing challenges on a global scale. The events that we are now seeing have ceased to be a matter solely for Europe. The challenge of running sound sustainable fiscal policies is the problem affecting most of the world’s major industrialised countries. That needs to be understood. The crisis in private financial markets has now been followed by severe tensions in the public sector. Ultimately, all industrialised countries are very much in the same boat. HB: From Athens are coming only nice words, just words… Trichet: No, nice words aren’t the only thing coming out of Athens.
Prasarn Trairatvorakul: “Challenges and Opportunities” Speech by Dr Prasarn Trairatvorakul, Governor of the Bank of Thailand, at the German Business Talks event, Bangkok, 28 February 2012. *  *  *  Good evening, Ambassador Rolf Schulze, Distinguished guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to thank the German Embassy for inviting me to give the key-note speech at the German Business Talks event. Germany is by far the biggest trading partner of Thailand within Europe, accounting for over 20 per cent of total trade volume between Europe and Thailand. With the increasing presence of German multinational corporations in Thailand, I hope that our businesses will become more integrated and continue to prosper together into the future. In this session, I would like to focus on two key issues. The first concerns the future challenges facing Thailand. The second issue is about the Bank of Thailand’s (BOT) role in meeting these challenges. Let us begin with the challenges. On the external front, the global economy is beset by substantial risks and uncertainties. Major advanced economies are still grappling with fragile recoveries. In the US, despite some recent positive news from the labor market, economic activity continues to be weighed down by substantial debt over-hang. This inhibits a full recovery in the housing sector and consumer spending, which together form the backbone of the US economy. In the euro-area, everyone here is obviously keenly aware of the unfolding sovereign debt crisis.

Our output and demand outlook is fairly unchanged. There are still risks in our external scenario, even if its recent evolution surprised us for the better. Allow me some final reflections. Final reflections I will end with some thoughts on the capacity of monetary and fiscal policy to address the economic cycle. I think we must because, after years of slow growth and within a context of increasing social demands, pressures on both have become stronger and the way we decide to confront them will be crucial in the future of our economy and our country. I see three main challenges: First, it is obvious that neither monetary nor fiscal policy can flatten out the business cycle, much less affect the economy’s trend growth. But they certainly can smooth the cycle and help the economy make sound adjustments when suffering a domestic or external shock. Anyway, the capacity to smooth the cycle is proportional to the medium-term sustainability of these policies. Why? It is very simple: economic decisions —think of investment, for example— depend not only on such policies’ immediate effects, but also on how the various economic agents expect them to continue to affect the economy in the future. Thus, even if we believe that the effects of some policy action can be very powerful, if the agents consider that implementing that policy will be inconsistent with the macroeconomic equilibria, its effects will be diminished and may even be counterproductive.
Additionally, adjustments in electricity tariffs are forecasted to be made in compliance with this assumption. Assuming that policy rate stays constant for a while and gradually ease thereafter, our forecasts under this scenario suggest that inflation will be 6.1 percent at the end of 2009 and around 4.9 percent at the end of 2010. In sum, monetary policy will be conducted so as to minimize upside deviations from the targets should the upside risks materialize. Downward surprises in food and energy prices, on the other hand, will be perceived as an opportunity to bring inflation back to target in a shorter period than envisaged in our baseline scenario. 12  BIS Review 100/2008  Figure 15: Inflation Forecasts, Baseline and Alternative Scenarios Baseline Senario  End-Year Inflation Targets  Pessimistic Senario  Optimistic Senario  12  Percent  10 8 6 4  2011-II  2011-I  2010-  2010-III  2010-II  2010-I  2009-  2009-III  2009-II  2009-I  2008-  2008-III  2008-II  2008-I  2  Source: CBT. Distinguished Guests, Despite the expected decline in inflation in the medium term, uncertainties exist regarding the degree of inflation persistence. Long-lasting supply shocks have been keeping headline inflation at elevated levels and thus increasing the risk of rising backward-looking schemes in the wage and price setting behavior.

–  We are also exploring an “all-in-one” addressing system, that will enable us to pay someone electronically using the payee’s mobile number, email address, social network account, or other proxies. No need to know the payee’s bank account number. Two, seamless data sharing through publication of open Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs. –  We just had a two-day API conference earlier this week, where industry players shared their views on how we can take the API strategy forward. –  MAS is working with FIs to leverage on new technologies to share aggregated data to improve market and risk analyses, forecasts and projections. We are committed to building a Smart Financial Centre, where innovation is pervasive and technology is used widely to: •  Increase efficiency  •  Manage risks better  •  Create new opportunities  •  Improve people’s lives. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches
c.  Highlights of development in delivery channels and payment system infrastructure  As banks serve various segments of the economy, it is important to widen the accessibility of e-payment services through various channels to cater to the needs of different consumer groups. The industry should continuously identify and address any gaps in the current e-payment infrastructure and services by improving their product offerings. For instance, building on the wider penetration of online banking services which now have a total of 17 million subscribers (of whom 7.5 million are active users), banks have also provided alternatives to consumers to conduct electronic funds transfers using either the Interbank GIRO (IBG) or the Instant Interbank Fund Transfer (IBFT) via 9,410 ATMs and 2,475 selfservice Internet kiosks nationwide. While the fees imposed for IBG and IBFT are differentiated, consumers are given choices that suit their preference. To promote infrastructure sharing and reduce cost and enhance online bill payment facilities in Malaysia, there is currently an ongoing industry initiative led by the Malaysian Electronic Clearing Corporation Sdn. Bhd. (or MyClear in short) to develop a national bill payment scheme known as JomPAY. JomPAY leverages on shared infrastructure to significantly expand the scope and utility of bill payment facilities. At present, customers can only use the online channel of a bank to make bill payments to merchants who maintain banking relationships with the same bank.

This is set to change with the implementation of JomPAY, which is a common and open platform that allows customers of any bank to make online bill payments to any merchant registered with JomPAY. In other words, a merchant will be able to receive payments from customers across all participating banks. This would not only reduce duplication of investment costs by the banks, but also bring about greater convenience, cost savings and efficiency gains to both consumers and merchants. JomPAY is targeted to be rolled-out in phases starting from next month. (In the next presentation, the Director of Payment Systems Policy Department will provide you with further details of the supporting e-payment infrastructure and the strategies undertaken by Bank Negara Malaysia to accelerate the country’s migration to e-payments.) d.  Safeguarding the security of transactions  Ladies and gentlemen, let me now move on to the issue of security and consumer confidence in the use of online banking and e-payments. Considerable efforts have also been taken by the industry to improve user confidence in the use of payment cards. As I mentioned earlier, the banking industry had migrated our payment cards to the more secure chip-based cards in 2005. The investment cost of RM200 million was subsequently recovered through the projected fraud savings in just two and a half years.
Joint ICMIF/AMICE Regulatory Affairs conference Paris, Tuesday 4 December 2018  Keynote address Denis Beau – First Deputy Governor  “Old and new challenges for the insurance sector, its regulators and supervisors”  1  Good morning to all of you, dear Presidents and members of ICMIF and AMICE,  I am very happy to be here with you today to exchange views on the stimulating and no less challenging developments that the insurance sector, and especially mutual insurers, as well as their regulators and supervisors, will have to face in the upcoming months and years. After a few words on the economic and financial context and its related challenges for insurers, I will first focus on those brought by regulatory developments currently in the making, and will finish with the new risks that insurers, their regulators and supervisors will have to address, namely cyber-risks and climate change-related risks. Overall, the macroeconomic environment has been favourable. The recovery of the global economy strengthened last year. Global GDP grew at 3.8% in 2017 and is expected to grow at a similar pace for the next two years. The European economy performed well and the inflation rate in Europe is in line with the European Central Bank’s target (2%). Even if recent survey data have been somewhat weaker, the medium-term outlook for the euro area remains broadly positive. However,  global  and  domestic  uncertainties  are  growing.

Regarding the International Capital Standard, which aims to develop an international capital standard in order to be able to establish a comparable basis in terms of prudential requirements for all international groups, recent progress was made in Kuala Lumpur in November 2017 which should lead to, by the end of 2019, a version called “ICS 2.0” that will be used as a reference in international supervision Colleges, for a transitory period of five years. During this timeframe, each internationally active insurance group will have to ensure a compulsory and confidential five-year monitoring period based on the ICS, after which this standard is expected to become effective. Now, I will turn to IFRS17: it would be unreasonable to apply the new IFRS17 accounting framework right now. Given the obvious issue of timing, it is quite welcome that the IASB reopened the discussion and that the application of this standard has now been postponed by one year. This will primarily give us time to reach an agreement on identifying groups of loss-making contracts. We also want to bring the discussion on the 4  treatment of reinsurance contracts held to a satisfactory conclusion. At this point, there is too much room for interpretation in the standard, which could interfere with the comparability and consistent application across countries. In Europe, the current “hot topic” is the forthcoming Solvency 2 review. This review must include a full and objective assessment of the framework that has now been in place for three years.
Hungary was in a similar position, tightening the monetary policy stance, as a reaction to the pressures on the domestic currency and rising risk premium. In Serbia, apart from the tightening at the crisis outburst, it was also observed in 2010 and 2012, in presence of large deviation of the inflation from the inflation target. Yet, excluding these “episodes”, the monetary policy stance in the region was lax, with policy rates declining across the board. The most recent data point to an average adjustment of policy rates close to 4.5 p.p. since 2007, which is a somewhat bigger adjustment compared with the change of the ECB policy rate (4 p.p.). The adjustment ranged between 1 p.p. in Macedonia and 6.6 p.p. in Hungary. Hence, the spread to the Euro Area rate narrowed in most of the economies, which was particularly pronounced after 2012, when a debate on the future of the single currency came to the fore. In such a context, when the anchor currency undergoes a crisis, the compression of the spreads seemed unlikely to become a hurdle for capital influx in the countries in the region.

PLATFORM FOR DISCUSSION  EVENT: BIS Meeting of the Working Party on Monetary Policy in Central and Eastern Europe DATE:  NATIONAL BANK OF THE REPUBLIC OF MACEDONIA  9–10 February 2017  info@nbrm.mk  LOCATION: Budapest, Hungary  www.nbrm.mk  Lingering low interest rate environment and monetary accommodation in the euro area - impact on the region? Anita Angelovska Bezhoska, Vice Governor of NBRM Ana Mitreska, Director, MPRD1, NBRM Sultanija Bojceva Terzijan, Deputy Director, MPRD, NBRM  1  Monetary Policy and Research Department. Lingering low interest rate environment and monetary accommodation in the Euro Area – impact on the region? A decade after the global crisis outburst, withdrawal of the ECB unprecedented monetary stimulus seems distant. The low interest rate environment, breaking of the nominal zero lower bound frontier and the enormous balance sheet of the central bank, linger on, being a reflection of the economic malaise and low inflation. Decisive standard and non-standard monetary policy2 action supported the impaired financial markets and impacted the terms of financing and hence the recovery of the Euro Area economy. Yet, the growth agenda is to be completed, as healthy expansion is still not achieved and balance sheet crisis in the Euro zone is still present.
In Europe, the economy is still marked by stagnation, and projections for growth in 2003 have been revised downwards a number of times. A moderate upturn is expected in 2004, but activity will remain at a low level. Even though Norges Bank is forward-looking in its conduct of monetary policy, thorough knowledge of the current state of the economy is extremely important. An up-to-date and correct picture of the current situation is necessary to make accurate projections for the period ahead. In autumn 2002, Norges Bank established a regional network as a tool to gauge the level of activity in the Norwegian economy. 1  Based on an assumption concerning forward rates and a gradual depreciation of the exchange rate. BIS Review 43/2003  3  Official statistics and evaluations of developments in financial markets will continue to be the main basis for our assessments, but due to the time lag and revisions of such statistics, supplementary information is useful. The regional network provides up-to-date information on the state of the Norwegian economy. Regular communication with local contacts in Norway’s business and community life provides us with information that supplements available official statistics. It also provides us with supplementary information on areas not covered by official statistical sources, and we learn which issues are of particular concern to enterprises. The network consists of companies, organisations and municipalities throughout Norway.

•  We are working to encourage firms to proceed with their investments in greater resilience and geographic range called for in the Interagency Paper on Sound Practices to Strengthen the Resilience of the U.S. Financial System. •  We continue to encourage efforts to strengthen all aspects of our national payments and settlement systems. •  And we are engaged across a number of fronts internationally to provide a more integrated framework of supervision that better matches the integration of national financial systems and the increased global reach of the largest financial institutions. As part of our supervisory process we monitor closely the evolution in risk management practice across a broad array of financial institutions. Through horizontal reviews that focus on specific dimensions of risk management, we have a reasonably good sense of where the frontier in risk management practices is across the industry, and understand where the gap between this frontier and average practice is the greatest. The size of this gap in practice can increase in market conditions where competitive pressures and a search for return works to erode discipline. I thought it might be useful to highlight some of the areas where leading practice is farthest ahead of typical practice. Leading practice does not imply that there is a definitely superior model that we expect all firms to converge to over time. In most of these areas, there is some diversity in what defines the frontier of excellence.
Growth in business investment is an important factor, contributing over 25% in 2011. Business investment measured 9½% of GDP during the year. This is somewhat below the 30-year pre-crisis average of 13%, but the good news is that in Q4 the ratio of business investment to GDP was up to 12.2%. Of course, business investment should rise up above the average in a conventional upswing. But our upswing, as that of most other countries hit hard by the financial crisis, is not conventional. Iceland suffered a deep banking and currency crisis in 2008. Research shows that the contraction following such a twin crisis is usually deeper and more protracted than a contraction following either one of these crises. In addition, research shows that the economic recovery following a financial crisis is generally weaker than after a normal recession, as domestic debt levels are high. And finally, studies show that the post-crisis recovery of investment is usually slower than usual if the investment level was high before the crisis struck. All of these factors apply to Iceland and should be borne in mind in any discussion of the strength and pace of the economic recovery. The labour market has developed broadly in line with the business cycle and the historical experience of Iceland and other countries. During the downswing, firms appeared to have tried to avoid layoffs, opting instead to reduce the number of hours worked and step up parttime employment.

European Central Bank: Press conference - introductory statement Introductory statement by Mr Willem F Duisenberg, President of the European Central Bank and Mr Christian Noyer, Vice-President of the European Central Bank, at the press conference, held in Frankfurt, 4 April 2002. *  *  *  Ladies and gentlemen, the Vice-President and I will now report on the outcome of today's meeting of the Governing Council of the ECB. As usual, we examined recent monetary, financial and economic developments. The Governing Council concluded that the current level of key ECB interest rates remains appropriate for the maintenance of price stability over the medium term and, accordingly, decided to leave them unchanged. Starting with the analysis under the first pillar of our monetary policy strategy, the three-month average of the annual growth rates of M3 stood at 7.8% in the period from December 2001 to February 2002, compared with 8.0% in the period from November 2001 to January 2002. The high level of the annual growth rates of M3 continues to reflect the past portfolio shifts to liquid positions. These shifts primarily occurred during autumn 2001, when the economic and financial environment was characterised by high uncertainty. However, in the meantime, some normalisation in the development of M3 has taken place. This is indicated by a significant slowdown in the short-term dynamics of M3 in early 2002, a period in which the annual rate of growth of loans to the private sector has also continued to decline.