samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
(c) The average 0% balance transfer term is the average of the maximum 0% balance transfer term available for each lender. 05  07  09  11  13  15  17  Source: Bank of England. 19  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  19  Chart 11. Major UK banks’ average risk (a) weights on consumer credit exposures  Chart 12. Cumulative distribution of credit scores on the flow of new consumer credit lending  100% Accounts opened in 2014 Accounts opened in 2016  80% 60% 40% 20% 0%  0  0.25  0.5  0.75  1  Anonymised credit score Higher risk  Lower risk  Source: Bank of England. (a) Risk-weighted assets include both IRB and standardised exposures and are measured as a percentage of drawn balances for end-year periods 2014 to 2016. Source: FCA CRA data. (a) Credit scores have been anonymised. (b) Blue lines represent distribution of scores at January 2015 on accounts opened between November 2013 and November 2014, weighted by balances as at November 2014. Purple lines show distribution of scores at January 2017 on accounts opened between November 2015 and November 2016, weighted by balances at November 2016. Chart 13. Value of annual dealership car finance for new car purchases, and proportion of private new car purchases funded with dealership car finance  Chart 14.

In taking this action, the Bank has sought to prevent the emergence of a self-sustaining vicious spiral of collateral calls, forced sales and disappearing liquidity from emerging in a core segment of the financial markets. Restoring market functioning helps reduce any risks from contagion to credit conditions for UK households and businesses. Such actions preserve the effective transmission of monetary policy. But crucially they are not monetary policy actions in themselves. Were monetary policy to be re-oriented towards serving financial stability ends, not only would it be less effective in addressing dysfunction than more temporary and targeted interventions in specific dis-orderly market segments, but it would also be distracted from its central task of maintaining price stability and returning inflation to the 2% target. At the time of writing, this distinction between monetary policy actions and actions taken by the Bank to support financial stability has been recognised and priced by market participants. 4/8  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  In the face of a substantial re-pricing of financial assets a few weeks ago, markets originally anticipated that Bank Rate – the active instrument of monetary policy in the eyes of the MPC – might be changed at an ad hoc meeting outside the regular schedule of MPC decisions.
Kredittilsynet is responsible for supervising individual financial institutions, while Norges Bank analyses the stability of the financial system from a macro perspective, aiming at identifying developments that may lead to the build-up of excessive risk in the financial sector and the build-up of financial imbalances that may pose a threat to financial stability. Norges Bank also has special responsibility for the clearing and settlement systems and inter-bank payment systems. Should a situation arise where financial stability is threatened, Norges Bank and other authorities will, if necessary, implement measures to strengthen the financial system. Norges Bank may supply extraordinary liquidity to individual banks or to the banking system as a whole but only against proper collateral. The Ministry of Finance will be responsible for decisions where use of tax-payers’ money would be an issue. Norges Bank publishes an overall assessment of the outlook for financial stability in the biannual Financial Stability report. The conclusions in the report are summarised in a submission from the  4  BIS Review 106/2006  Bank’s Executive Board to the Ministry of Finance. The report is also intended to foster dialogue with the financial industry and to increase awareness of and foster debate on the importance of financial stability. Norges Bank has also developed a macroeconomic model to assess developments in financial stability based on the forecasts published in the Bank’s Inflation Report. Based partly on the results from this model, financial stability assessments are taken into account in the monetary decisionmaking process.

The global economic crisis, which deeply affected all countries of the region, was accompanied by slowed exports, reduced remittances and other foreign currency inflows, increased uncertainty and slowed credit growth. Although 2010 is expected to be accompanied by a gradual improvement in the world economic environment, many of the factors that negatively affected the Albanian economy will continue to be present even during this year. The stimulating fiscal and monetary policy helped supporting the economic activity during 2009. However, fiscal trajectories and the need for long-term stability suggest that the Albanian economy can not rely for a long time on fiscal stimulus. Against this background, in 2010 a more conservative fiscal policy is necessary and is welcomed by the Bank of Albania. In a medium- and long-term horizon, we are of the opinion that fiscal sustainability should be ensured through a clear and prudent fiscal rule. Under new circumstances, the economic growth should be based more on boosting the private sector of the economy and bank credit plays a key role in this regard. The good financial health of our banking system and the progressive improvement of liquidity conditions and risk premiums in domestic and foreign financial markets are encouraging developments. The easing of monetary conditions and the liquidity injections by the Bank of Albania have supported and will further support this process.
In addition to lobbying and advising the HKSAR Government on the abovementioned measures that are crucial to Hong Kong’s development as a wealth and asset management centre, the HKMA has seconded staff to provide technical support to the Financial Services Branch during the policy formulation as well as the legislative process. 8. Ladies and gentlemen, while we have done a lot in the past few years to build and reinforce Hong Kong’s platform as the wealth and asset management hub, we fully appreciate that such work is a never ending task as most financial centres in the region, including those in Mainland China, all harbour the understandable aspirations to become an international financial centre. Outreaching to supplement platform building 9. Now let me turn to the second “building block” of soft powers, which is “reaching out”. I am sure most of you would agree with me that the platform building work must be supplemented by appropriate “outreaching” efforts. This is similar to the situation in which a company, having created a very superior and competitive product, needs to do a lot of marketing and advertising in order to increase customer awareness and market share. For this reason, the HKMA has over the past few years undertaken a series of outreaching and marketing programmes with special emphasis on Hong Kong as the Asian hub for wealth and asset management businesses. 10. Hong Kong is already a hub for private wealth and asset management. Nearly 80 of the top 100 global money managers are in Hong Kong.

I would like to highlight today three important pieces of work of the TMA: (a) the TMA has conducted a thorough review of the Hong Kong Interbank Offered Rate (HIBOR) fixing mechanism and presented to the Hong Kong Association of Banks (HKAB) recommendations to enhance the transparency, robustness and governance of the HIBOR fixing mechanism. These recommendations were subsequently accepted by the HKAB and endorsed by the HKMA in February 2013 for implementation. Under the new regime, the TMA has taken over from HKAB as the administrator of the HIBOR fixing mechanism with Hong Kong Interbank Clearing Limited serving as the calculating agent. (b) Another landmark achievement was the launch of CNH HIBOR. Having undertaken more than one year of pilot trials, the TMA officially launched in June 2013 the CNH HIBOR fixing, which is the first offshore RMB interest rate benchmark in the world. This is a very important piece of market infrastructure which will facilitate the development of a whole array of offshore RMB credit and interest rates contracts and products; and  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  (c) The TMA is also an important player in professional training. In close collaboration with the HKMA, the Hong Kong Institute of Bankers and the Hong Kong Securities and Investment Institute, the TMA has participated and contributed to the design of a new professional competency framework for practitioners in the private wealth management industry.
Aside from providing stable and long-term financing alternatives for businesses and public sector agencies in the region, this would also help strengthen the financial system in the region by making available a diverse choice of alternatives for investment, as well as support economic growth through more stable financial systems in the region. 2  BIS Review 24/2003  The necessity to develop a regional bond market While many countries in the region have begun the process of developing bond markets – or where they exist already, deepen and widen those markets – countries are also looking to promote the development of the regional bond markets in parallel with development of their own markets. Given the problems of economies of scale as mentioned earlier, development of the regional bond markets would offer a more efficient and viable option in neighboring countries until these countries’ financial systems are more developed and have a more sophisticated market structure in place. Roadmap for the development of Asian bond markets Over the past year, the development of Asian bond markets has been discussed in various international fora, such as ASEAN Finance Ministers Meeting, the Executives Meeting of East Asia-Pacific Central Banks (EMEAP), Asian Cooperation Dialogue (ACD), and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). Development of the demand side, involves promoting the pooling of investor base or the pooling of reserves under the Asian Bond Fund initiative, which has had a good start under the cooperation of central banks.

Safeguarding the credibility of this goal is crucial for monetary policy to be an effective tool that not only succeeds in keeping inflation low and stable but also helps to reduce the volatility of output and employment. Now I would like to take a look at recent macroeconomic developments and their implications for the conduct of monetary policy. From the high inflation to the great recession In the early part of the past decade we enjoyed relative quiet in the macroeconomic front. Inflation moderated across the world and the economies resumed their trend growth rates. There were some tensions here and there in the region, a mild recession in the U.S. when the tech bubble burst, but the years were generally calm. However, towards 2007–2008 we were hit by an unusual price shock in foodstuffs and oil that triggered a significant increase in inflation around the world (figure 2). In Chile, this shock was visible only in the inflation of foods and fuels because core inflation was contained (figure 3). The Bank hardened monetary policy, but the unusual transmission of said prices to the rest of the economy caused inflation to deviate largely from the target. Several reasons explain the unusual propagation of this inflationary shock to other prices. The economy was operating with narrow or even negative output gaps. The cost pressure this generated combined with the effects of the oil price increase on the cost of electricity (figure 4). Meanwhile, as the crisis incubated, the exchange rate depreciated.
These rates are not only modest, but are also subject to certain risks, which, on balance, point to even lower increases in economic activity. Turning to prices, for some months now inflation has been well short of the 2% benchmark, which is the ECB’s medium-term monetary policy target. The forecasts available continue to point to the risk of inflation remaining too low for too long. The ECB’s latest projections entail a further downward revision, with inflation expected to stand at 0.7% in 2015 and 1.3% in 2016. In recent months, against a background in which, given the weakness of demand and fierce competition, firms have limited price-setting power, the slump in the price of oil has exacerbated the drop in inflation. At the end of 2014, the annual rate of inflation stood at –0.2% (the average rate in 2014 was +0.4%) and it is expected to remain at very low or negative levels in the early months of 2015. This heightens the risk of second-round effects on wages and prices that could have an adverse impact on inflation expectations in the medium term. Indeed, the latest private sector forecasts have seen substantial downward revisions for all terms. Thus, for example, according to the January edition of Consensus Forecasts, the leading private sector economic forecast publication, the average rate of inflation forecast for 2015 is just 0.1%, compared with 0.6% forecast for the same period a month earlier.

Currently, the main source of funding are either companies’ own funds or bank loans. Alternative financing by providing funds through the capital market is limited, as confirmed by the low share of the stock exchange turnover in GDP, which on average in the period 2010 – 2013 totaled 1.5% of GDP. In this context, a significant support could be provided by international financial institutions. All in all, in our views, solid economic growth higher than 4% is expected also in the next two years. The main growth factors are the present and the announced foreign investments, as well as the fiscal impetus in the infrastructure, which are key determinants of the growth of investments and exports. Credit support and growth in demand and price of labor are considered factors that will support also the private consumption. The risks around the baseline scenario are mainly downward and depend on the external environment. However, what is crucial is to increase the development potential and productivity of the economy in the long run, wherefore it is especially important to continue the plan for structural reforms, particularly in the already established vulnerable areas. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches
Financial resilience and economic earthquakes Speech given by Alex Brazier, Executive Director for Financial Stability Strategy and Risk, Bank of England Member of the Financial Policy Committee  University of Warwick 13 June 2019  I am grateful to Kiman Bassi, Jon Bridges, Jeremy Franklin, Andrew Gimber, Shahzad Gitay, Nick Jackson, Ben King, Philip King, Miriam Kurtosiova, Cian O’Neill, Rupal Patel, Simon Pittaway, Matt Roberts-Sklar, Jamie Semark, Sagar Shah, Nick Vause and Danny Walker for their assistance in preparing these remarks. 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  In the aftermath of the financial crisis, a new buzz phrase emerged in economic policymaking: macroprudential policy. It tells you something about economic policymakers that this phrase qualified as buzz. But after a fragile financial system had sideswiped the economy, turning what could have been an economic downturn into a disaster, it was difficult to disagree with the aim: to promote a financial system that could serve households and businesses in bad times, as well as good. That means a financial system that is resilient to the bad times, but not so resilient as to be inefficient the rest of the time. In many respects, the idea of macroprudential policy was vintage wine in a new bottle.

Chart 2 Highly indebted companies cut investment  Chart 3 UK current account balance as a  and employment more than unleveraged  percentage of GDP since 1955  companies in the global financial crisis Investment  Employment  Percentage change in crisis  % of GDP 6  15 10 5 0 -5 -10 -15 -20 -25 -30 -35 -40 No leverage  4 2 0 -2 -4 -6  High leverage  -8 1955  Sources: S&P Global Market Intelligence and Bank calculations. 65  75  85  95  05  15  Source: ONS  Notes: Change in investment and employment in the financial crisis for unleveraged companies and companies with high leverage ratios. Percentage change reflects the average log change in investment and employment between 2007 and 2009. High leverage companies are those with net debt/EBITDA ratio higher than four in 2006. See, for example, Olivier Blanchard and Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, ‘(Why) Should Current Account Balances Be Reduced?’, IMF Economic Review, April 2012 and Julián A. Caballero, ‘Do Surges in International Capital Inflows Influence the Likelihood of Banking Crises?’, Economic Journal, March 2016. 5  5  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  5  Recent developments  What, then, has been happening in the UK to these drivers of underlying economic vulnerability? Developments are summarised in the ‘heat map’ below (Chart 4). The colours represent how high each indicator is relative to past outcomes.
Cost efficiency will probably become even more important, meaning there are no grounds to expect that access to cash services in rural areas will improve. I do not conclude that the commercial banks ought to maintain an unnecessarily large network of branch offices and cash machines. There is no real difference here whether such a network is supported by the clients of the banks or by the Estonian taxpayer, in any case it is an unreasonably expensive solution. That said, the commercial banks do need to explain their vision for access to banking services more clearly than they have done so far, and they should themselves arrive at a solution that is acceptable to society. In short, the position of Eesti Pank is that the guiding principle for the provision of cash and banking services across Estonia is that it should make economic sense. At the same time, every person in Estonia must have access to banking services, and so we must find alternative flexible solutions in Estonia. The next question is how those flexible solutions should be supplied.

Local authorities can establish who in their area has such difficulties and then they can provide help by delivering cash to homes or help with paying electricity bills and so on. The experiences of other countries can’t simply be copied straight across here, but it is worth discussing them to see whether we could use them in some way to provide cash and payment services to people all across Estonia. I am certain that the commercial banks in particular, though also the state, should be able to provide better solutions than has been the case so far, and I would invite the banks, state institutions and local authorities to take an active role in the discussions about access to banking services. Eesti Pank is of course ready to join the discussion and I do not believe that any solution should be ruled out. Thank you for your attention and I am quite happy to answer any questions you may have. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches
In general, the proposals put forward by Mr Aksakov, there are many of them regarding several areas — we will, of course, carefully develop them together with you. Some have been worked out, some require further development, and we will maintain constant dialogue with you. We also understand that we have a fairly consistent, intense, and constructive dialogue with the Association, and we value it very much. In conclusion, I would like to say that yes, every crisis entails losses. Yet, there are not just losses, there are opportunities. It is a platitude, but we can see from the situation in the banking sector that this could be a new impetus and, above all, could kick-start the expansion of digital banking. That should be taken advantage of. On our end, as a regulator, we will do our best to ensure that all banks are on an equal footing in this race. To close, I would like to highlight that the way the banking system is handling the situation really inspires optimism. Rapidly adapting to new conditions, restructuring its work all the while implementing large-scale restructuring programs (I do not recall there being such large-scale restructuring programs in recent history), and at the same time not stopping lending — it really was a very serious challenge. The banks are dealing with it honourably. There are rough edges of course. There are always problems and we are discussing them, but in general, of course, we are coping.

Level 3 is ‘expert judgement’ — where a panel bank has insufficient Level 1 or 2 transactions, it estimates the rate at which it could fund itself in the unsecured wholesale funding market, based on an approved procedure. Further details are available at: www.theice.com/publicdocs/ICE_LIBOR_Methodology.pdf 3 Interim Financial Stability Report, May 2020 – Box 1 The continued importance of the transition away from Libor, https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/financial-stability-report/2020/may-2020.pdf 2  3  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  3  benchmark. Libor rates – and hence costs for borrowers – rose as central bank policy rates fell to support the economy.4  It is logical that credit spreads on bank debt (a measure of perceived risks in lending to banks) should increase during periods of stress. It is also unsurprising for banks to be attracted to the idea of being able to pass that cost directly onto their customers, but it does raise an important question:  Given this cost is passed directly onto borrowers through the interest rates they pay, how well does that rate actually reflect the cost of bank funding? There have been significant changes to the way banks fund themselves since the global financial crisis, making them more robust. Regulatory changes have significantly reduced dependence on the fickle shortterm unsecured markets that Libor measures.5 We have seen the benefits of those reforms through the first half of this year as banks have continued to lend and markets have remained open.