samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
There is growing anxiety the world over about the impact of globalisation and technology on jobs and livelihoods. The anxiety is not unfounded. If people cannot or do not adapt to meet new competition or integrate new technologies, they will be left behind. The answer is not to hold back globalisation or technology but to: make globalisation and technology work for everyone; use technologies to create new and better jobs; and most important, equip our workers and professionals with the capabilities to secure those jobs. Preparing the financial industry workforce for a future smart financial centre is the raison d’etre of IBF. The work we do together in IBF – involving all of us here in the industry – is critically important. And there is urgency to it. IBF’s mandate has been expanded to help synergise the efforts of unions, financial institutions, and the government around workforce transformation. IBF is now the single point of contact for all matters relating to skills, careers, and jobs in the financial industry. By looking at skills development, career pathways, and job placements in an integrated manner, IBF is in a better position to help finance professionals in a more comprehensive and holistic way. IBF, MAS, the industry, and trade unions have been working together on several fronts to help equip the financial industry workforce for the future. We are systematically assessing current and future skills requirements in various job roles in specific financial activities.

However, similar legislation has been introduced in several European countries, and mortgage bonds regulated according to this legislation on secured bonds have come in various ways to be viewed as more creditworthy than mortgage bonds that are not. It can therefore be claimed that Swedish mortgage institutions should be given the same opportunities to issue secured bonds as mortgage institutions in other countries, which is also the view held by the Riksbank. Swedish mortgage institutions today already observe such strict legislation that they can be viewed as a kind of special company in a securitisation. The potential effects of introducing particular legislation for secured bonds are therefore possibly less in Sweden than in other countries, and it is difficult to see that the legislation regarding secured bonds would entail any dramatic change in the activities of Swedish mortgage institutions. However, there are advantages involved in introducing such legislation. Having legislation that is in line with that of other European countries will contribute to reducing any uncertainty, particularly from foreign investors, regarding the terms connected with owning securities issued by Swedish mortgage institutions. This should reasonably result in a broader circle of investors that are willing to invest in securities issued by Swedish mortgage institutions, and hopefully also  BIS Review 35/2004  1  reduce their borrowing costs. In addition, European central banks currently regard this type of mortgage bond as more creditworthy than mortgage bonds not covered by legislation on secured bonds, when market participants pledge collateral with them.
26  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  26  Chart 18: Union membership Share of employment  60%  50%  40%  30%  20%  10%  0% 1892  1902  1912  1922  1932  1942  1952  1962  1972  1982  1992  2002  2012  Sources: Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, Bank of England and Bank calculations. Chart 19: Collective bargaining  Per cent 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1998  2000  2002  2004  2006  2008  2010  2012  2014  2016  Source: ONS and Bank calculations. Notes: Share of employees with Collective Bargaining Agreement coverage. 27  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  27  Chart 20: Union membership vs. change in labour share by industry  Change in labour share  0.3 0.2 0.1 0 -0.1 -0.2 -0.3  0  0.1  0.2  0.3  0.4  0.5  0.6  0.7  Initial unionisation rate Source: ONS and Bank calculations Note: Data shown at SIC1-digit level. X-axis shows unionisation rate in 2001, and y-axis shows change in labour share between 2001 and 2016. Size of bubbles represents size of industry. Trend line weighted by size of industry. Chart 21: Robot use by country in manufacturing  Robots per 10,000 employees in manufacturing 600 500 400 300 200 100 0  Source: International Federation of Robotics.

These observations confirm that the relationship between economic activity and inflation, as postulated by the Phillips curve, has continued to play a role at the euro area level.3 The link between inflation and economic slack is complicated by several factors. On the one hand, the degree to which prices respond to slack may depend on the state of the business cycle and could change, in particular, in severe and protracted recessions. The empirical evidence on such non-linearities, however, is not conclusive. On the other hand, secular shifts in the economy may have altered the relationship between inflation and economic slack. For instance, the trend towards a deeper integration of the global economy over the last decades is likely to have increased the importance of global relative to local conditions in shaping domestic cost and price pressures. A further often-cited factor is demographics – and especially the trend towards greater longevity – which may have interacted with cyclical conditions by inducing households to save more and, ultimately, put downward pressure on inflation.4 Empirical evidence on this issue is inconclusive and demographics would 2/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  only have lasting effects on the economy if left unattended by monetary policy. Overall, these observations have three important implications for monetary policy. First, the evidence confirms that the core Phillips curve connection linking inflation formation to resource utilisation remains a key ingredient in explaining the prevailing disinflationary pressures.
Since this category of people is unable to pay for their capacity development at the initial period of their entry to the project, training was provided in the form of a free grant. Since only the deserving poor people were admitted to the project through the self-selection process, the misuse of this free grant by project beneficiaries could be kept at a minimal level. Training of beneficiaries, an essential human capital development initiative, was instrumental in developing a highly disciplined group of men and women under the umbrella of the Isuru Project 22 . In order to empower women in poverty and bring them to the mainstream of economic life, the project envisaged to accommodate a minimum of 40% of poor women as beneficiaries. However, when the project got started, it was immensely popular among women compared  20  For instance, on-lending rates were set at 20% p.a., when the prevailing market rates were around 16% p.a. 21  The experience in other parts of the world has also been the same. See, Owens, John V & Agabin, Meliza H, “Experiences of the Philippnes’ Rural Banks in Microfinance” Finance for the Poor ADB, June, 2006, p 3. 22  The degree of the self-discipline of Isuru beneficiaries could be tested in 1994 when the then government announced a politically popular loan forgiveness scheme for farmers. Immediately after the announcement, recovery rates of other agricultural schemes fell from around 75% to around 30%.

Even in this century, however, there has been a conflict between fiscal and monetary policy – that is, fiscal policy has not supported monetary policy sufficiently, as it would if fiscal policy were anchored on a nominal expenditure plan several years ahead. This has proven difficult to carry out.2 It is hard to apply such a rule if exchange rate volatility causes  1  In recent years, the Central Bank has presented proposals for such reforms in two reports to the authorities. 2  An attempt to adopt such a rule was made in connection with the Government-IMF economic programme, but it appears to have been abandoned when put to the test. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  instability in Treasury expenditures (and revenues). Furthermore, Iceland lacks a proper institutional framework – either a domestic agency (such as an independent financial council) or a foreign body – to support such policy and exercise a measure of surveillance and discipline over fiscal authorities. 3. In the third place, the source of poor performance may lie in Iceland’s economic structure, e.g. its volatile export sectors and relatively undiversified economy. The structure of the Icelandic economy is not that different from other developed countries, however. Public and private services constitute the largest sectors of the economy. Although commodity-based exports could be a source of instability, Iceland is far from being the only developed country in such a position.
Willem Duisenberg: E-economy: will we still need banks in the future? Speech by Dr Willem F Duisenberg, President of the European Central Bank, at the Seventeenth German Banking Congress held in Berlin, 4 April 2001. *  *  *  Ladies and Gentlemen, I am very pleased to have the opportunity to speak here at the Deutscher Bankentag in Berlin today. It is a great pleasure to address so many bank leaders operating in the German - and of course, by implication the European - economy. One of the most striking economic events of the last years has been the pace and depth of change in information and telecommunication technologies, of which the development of electronic money is a good example. Some claim that these developments in information and telecommunication technologies have triggered a New Economy. In my remarks today, I would like to first discuss the economic opportunities being created by the potential emergence of this New Economy in the euro area. In a second part, I will more specifically review the development of electronic finance. There is no undisputed and unequivocal definition of what should be understood by the term "New Economy". As a central banker, I would like to trace a sharp distinction between a more popular notion of the New Economy and a more fundamental vision. The more popular notion of the New Economy that could be mainly found in the press covers a wide spectrum of statements.

If this proposal is well-received, apart from seeing SOR being discontinued after end-2021, we would also see SIBOR cease after that. 9 This is a critical piece of work for MAS and the industry. SIBOR and SOR have served as cornerstones in our financial markets for at least two decades since the late-1990s. LIBOR has been around for almost four decades, since the 1980s. We are now at the juncture of having to replace all three. It is thus, of vital importance that we work together to ensure a smooth and successful transition. C MAS is fully behind the transition to SORA 10 MAS fully supports the industry’s shift towards a new SORA-centered interest rate landscape. We have taken significant measures to set a firm foundation for SORA and to encourage its adoption. First, as the administrator of SORA, MAS has issued a Statement of Compliance with the IOSCO Principles for Financial Benchmarks (IOSCO Principles) for SORA. This follows recent enhancements to the SORA methodology to broaden its market representativeness by capturing both brokered and bilateral interbank transactions. Compliance with the IOSCO Principles demonstrates that SORA meets international best practice, and will help it gain greater traction among global market participants.
The FCI is an average of two alternative FCIs, one in which the weights are derived from the impulse response of HICP inflation to a shock in each of the four financial variables from an estimated value at risk (VAR) model, and the other where the weights are derived from the elasticities drawn from a set of projection models used in the (broad) macroeconomic projection exercise. The latest observations are for 14 May 2020. Chart 9 External financing conditions of euro area NFCs (percentages per annum)  Sources: Refinitiv, Merrill Lynch and ECB calculations. Notes: Monthly data. The blue dots refer to the nowcasts for April 2020 (left dot) and May 2020 (right dot) for the overall cost of financing, assuming that bank lending rates remain unchanged at their March 2020 levels. The latest observations are for May 2020 for the costs of equity and debt, and March 2020 for the costs of lending. Chart 10 Financial and non-financial equity prices  https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2020/html/ecb.sp200519~e5203d3520.en.html  7/14  5/19/2020  Pandemic central banking: the monetary stance, market stabilisation and liquidity  (1 January 2019 = 100)  Sources: Bloomberg, Datastream, Refinitiv and ECB calculations. Notes: Daily data. The indices used are the Datastream indices for non-financial and financial corporations. The latest observations are for 14 May 2020. Chart 11 Euro area corporate bond spreads (basis points)  Sources: iBoxx, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and ECB calculations. Notes: Daily data. The latest observations are for 14 May 2020.

Market stabilisation Once investors absorbed the full implications of the pandemic crisis and sought to rebalance portfolios, market liquidity in securities markets dried up and investors looked for safe havens in the context of revisions to future prospects and intrinsically high uncertainty. A marked tightening of overall financial conditions in the euro area (and globally) took hold with the deepening of the coronavirus crisis (Chart 8, left panel). The fall in stock prices, the increase in market-based financing costs for firms and (to some extent) the appreciation of the euro contributed to the tightening that took place between mid-February and mid-March (Chart 8, right panel and Chart 9). This was also evident in the equity and corporate bond markets (Chart 10 and Chart 11). It was also reflected in an increase in the average spread of sovereign yields relative to the OIS curve (Chart 12). Chart 8 Financial conditions in the euro area  https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2020/html/ecb.sp200519~e5203d3520.en.html  6/14  5/19/2020  Pandemic central banking: the monetary stance, market stabilisation and liquidity  (index)  Source: ECB. Notes: Daily data. The financial conditions index (FCI) is constructed as a weighted average of the one-year OIS, the tenyear OIS, the euro area nominal effective exchange rate vis-à-vis 38 trading partners and the Euro Stoxx Broad Stock Exchange Index. All variables are in deviation from their long-term average.
After the fall in share prices we have seen over the past four years, the focus of the general debate has once again landed on the conflicts of interest that exist between the different areas of a bank’s operations. The repealing of all parts of the Glass Steagall Act is now being questioned, and there have once again been demands for different types of regulation. What bearing does this have on Sweden? The question is what we in Sweden can learn from the American example. In my opinion, it shows that there are potentially dangerous conflicts of interest between traditional commercial banking and investment banking. The question is whether we need to do anything about this in Sweden. Can these conflicts be handled by means of the markets, by sector norms and standards, or is some form of public regulation required? I draw four conclusions here. Let me take the most important one first. I do not believe that it is appropriate to use regulation to forbid dealings between traditional commercial banks and investment banks. Nor do I believe that it is necessary at present to introduce regulation that would force different legal entities to be formed for investment banks and traditional commercial banks. They should be able to remain departments in the same legal entity. There are two arguments in favour of this. The first argument against regulating to separate banking activities is that it could limit the positive economies of scale and synergies.

Employees shall usually work in the best interests of the company, but can in some contexts have interests of their own that are in conflict with the company’s best. Divisional managers within a corporate group may have an interest in promoting their own division rather than the group as a whole. Company management does not always have the same aims as the shareholders. Many of these conflicts of interest are common and quite natural elements of real life, and rarely cause problems. It is important to bear this in mind when discussing methods of dealing with them. This does not mean that conflicts of interest in financial operations are irrelevant, quite the reverse. The relevant question here, however, is which conflicts of interest are real problems and which are not. The conflicts without problems are those where there is little incentive to improperly favour one interest over another. For instance, most employees are usually loyal to their employer - otherwise they risk losing their jobs. A company that does not take into account the interests of its employees and its customers risks gaining a bad reputation and losing its competitiveness. Other conflicts of interest are more problematic. When an agent has a considerable incentive to favour one party at the cost of another, there could be scope for some form of regulations. Many companies also have ethical guidelines and rules for dealing with the cases where there is most incentive to take other interests into account.
Given the apparent current compression of risk pricing, such a correction could be a sharp one. Conclusion  The level of the global debt stock relative to GDP remains near its record high, though it has stabilized over the past five years. The sustainable level of debt to GDP is not, however, a constant and there are reasons to believe that the lower trend real rate will likely support sustainability. While less expected, however, a relatively small increase in the trend rate could lead to a reassessment of debt sustainability. While there is evidence that the level of debt, as opposed to the growth rate, does not appear to be a good predictor of recessions and financial crises, the level does seem to be associated with depth of losses when crises occur. The historically high level of debt may generally suggest a higher vulnerability in periods of stress. The composition of debt, within the aggregate numbers, has changed since the crisis. Emerging market debt has grown as a proportion of the global debt stock, over the past 10 years, with much of the increase driven by China. Advanced economy public debt has risen but household and financial sector debt is lower now and the lower post crisis levels have been stable for a number of years. Advanced economy corporate debt, however, has grown rapidly in recent years in some major jurisdictions, particularly the US, and its riskiness has increased. The pricing of risk in financial markets is relatively compressed by historic standards, as is market volatility.

Another perspective on the risks around debt is pricing – whether investors have taken all risks into account, and priced them prudently or whether there’s a degree of optimism that is reflected in the pricing (just as optimism can be a factor in rising debt levels). Pricing for much of the stock of global debt is not easily visible, but for debt traded in markets – typically corporate bonds – we can observe the following. Spreads – the amount charged for risk, be that credit risk or liquidity risk – are low by historical standards at the moment. The relatively low compensation demanded for risk can also be seen in the small difference between the price of investment grade and high yield bonds. We can observe some of these trends in non-traded debt. Spreads on leveraged loans are roughly 100bps lower than they were in 2015 for the US, which comprises most of the global market, and 70 bps lower in the UK. Alongside this low pricing for risk, volatility is low. The VIX ended April at about 13 – well below its 21st century average of about 20. And US equities are similarly priced – implying investors are demanding a low equity risk premium. Moreover, risk-free rates are low in many jurisdictions, and yield curves are broadly flat in all major jurisdictions. This suggests there is little market expectation of any pickup in growth or, perhaps more notably, inflation. Similar conditions have persisted for much of the last few years.
Global warming, growing inequality of wealth and opportunity, and continued exploitation of natural resources, have elevated the issue of social responsibility across all players in the society. If we look at the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index (DJSI), which is used to measure sustainable performance of listed companies worldwide through analysis of various factors in economic, environmental, and social dimensions, we see only one bank from ASEAN included in the Index for the first time this year. I congratulate this Thai bank and certainly hope other ASEAN banks will soon follow. Sustainable banking encompasses wide-ranging areas from codes of business conduct, responsible lending, environmental policy and financial literacy, as well as financial inclusion. These initiatives have to be incorporated into banks' way of doing businesses. Banks as the main players in the allocation of resources, play a key role in ensuring sustainable growth of the whole economy. 4  A strong culture of ethics and responsibility of banks should also be in place. This ranges from employees’ integrity, customers’ data privacy, anti-bribery and corruption, to strictly complying with laws and regulations. Socially, banks’ responsibilities should start with the design of products that meet the needs of customers. Financial literacy will also increase customers’ financial discipline and understanding of financial products and associated risks. Nowadays, as banks also provide digital services, financial technology literacy is another aspect that needs to be deepened to improve awareness of cyber security and promote greater usage of digital products.

[…] a fund mechanism […] makes it easier to decouple annual spending of petroleum revenues from current revenues.”3 7/9  BIS central bankers' speeches  Returns in financial markets also vary more over time than other revenues. With the current size of the oil fund, fluctuations in the value of the fund may be considerable from one year to the next. Fiscal policy and the Norwegian economy must be shielded from these fluctuations in the years ahead. The needed decoupling that was highlighted in the Revised National Budget for 1995 has taken on a new form. Chart: Fiscal spending of petroleum revenues Combined with high oil prices and healthy returns, the fiscal rule has brought considerable fiscal leeway. This year around a fifth of government spending will be financed by transfers from the oil fund. The level of oil revenue spending has reached 8 percent of mainland GDP. There will be less leeway further ahead. Last year was the first time money was transferred out of the oil fund to finance the non-oil deficit. We can no longer assume that the oil fund will continue to grow as a share of the economy. With a high level of oil revenue spending, there is a risk of a sharp reduction in the fund’s capital. This could, for example, happen if a global recession triggers both a decline in oil revenues and low or negative returns on the fund’s capital.