samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Besides, we are working on revitalising market-based financing in the euro area, notably through the revival of a transparent, robust and efficient securitization market; this has the potential to provide a useful complement to credit, the ultimate objective being, of course, the healthy financing of the euro area recovery. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  In this context, of course, the key question at the heart of current debates is: how can we amplify this recovery? I believe that, fundamentally, what Europe needs in order to strengthen its pace of growth is to improve its competitiveness in today’s globalised world. Obviously, the euro area is not without its strengths, and the region is well-equipped to face the challenges of the 21st century. With 370 million consumers and a high level of purchasing power, it is still the largest market in the world. It is also the world’s most economically integrated zone, with a highly qualified labour force and extremely good infrastructure. Besides, we have achieved considerable improvements in our economic governance and are continuing to make progress in this area with the implementation this year of the single supervisory mechanism, which will be followed by a single resolution mechanism, as announced by the European Council of Ministers in March. This banking union is absolutely key to the strengthening of the euro area.

Subdued wage growth, together with subdued inflation, are presented among the risks in the euro-area – while the divergent wage growth trends between euro area and emerging Europe are considered to reflect differences in labor market slack. Alternative explanations provided by recent international literature for the disappearance of the Philips curve refer to under-measuring the amount of spare capacity (slack) in the labour market; a lower natural rate of unemployment; lower or more anchored inflation expectations; and changes in expectations of real pay growth. The IMF’ REO presents an innovative econometric model reshaping the wage Philips curve against a measure of unemployment gaps. This shows that the Philips curve is flatter in the euro area than in the NMS, but that in general it still works. However, caution in interpreting the results is needed because this model splits the EU countries into three distinctive groups (Germany a group of its own, some euro-area countries and some NMS countries including euro and noneuro area, but excluding Romania and Bulgaria – probably because, in particular for these 2 countries, any measure of unemployment should be regarded prudently given the large emigration and underground economy). Let us remember that catching-up is an inflationary process in itself, as postulated by BalassaSamuelson. Maybe not much convergence is taking place between North and South, but catching-up has continued throughout the crisis between East and West – as Daniel Gros recently concluded in a CEPS study.
Expressions like “stress-testing”, “black-swan”, “animal-spirits” and even “sovereign debt” have become the new buzzwords in the financial industry. Risk managers have been reminded of model risk; portfolio managers have discovered the true face of risks; market participants have started to think about the compound effects of risks, the dynamics of crises and the impact of systemic risks arising from macroeconomic shocks, contagion effects and “hidden imbalances”; academic and practitioners have further analysed market failures, particularly based on behavioural and institutional aspects; and a certain degree of scepticism has spread, leading to some people wondering whether there is a genuinely risk-free asset and what are the real benefits of diversification. It seems clear that the “risk reassessment” process in the wake of the financial and economic crisis has been rather extensive and, perhaps, even excessive. For instance, market reactions to recent rumours about the financial soundness of institutions and sovereigns have been in some cases “off-the-charts”. Likewise, markets that had traditionally enjoyed lively trading activity and relatively good liquidity conditions completely dried-out. The shift in attitude that we have experienced in recent years relates not only to the ability of market participants to take risks, but also to their willingness to take them. In general, the crisis has eroded the capital position of the financial industry, forcing some institutions to embark on a process of deleveraging and risk downsizing that, in absence of an orderly  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  mechanism, may bring global capital markets further down.

John C Williams: The “new normal” for growth Remarks by Mr John C Williams, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at the Community Bankers Conference, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City, 4 April 2019. * * * As prepared for delivery Note: These remarks are based on those delivered at the Economic Club of New York on March 6, 2019. Introduction Good morning, everyone. It’s a pleasure to be hosting this conference, and I’d like to start by welcoming you all to the New York Fed. I know there’s an opportunity to tour the gold vault later, and I definitely recommend it. There’s something very exciting about our more traditional approach to storing money… even though the gold bars pose certain logistical and practical challenges. If you drop one on your foot you’ll definitely know about it. Community Banks I’m going to start today by talking a bit about community banks. Aside from a short period running a pizza restaurant, I’ve spent all of my career in the Federal Reserve System. And I’ve had the opportunity to travel extensively throughout the United States. When you visit communities in more rural or remote parts of the country, away from big urban centers like New York and San Francisco, you really see the value of community banks. In many places you’re the only game in town when it comes to banking services and credit.
•  Secondly, integrate tenets of good corporate citizenship into corporate structures and processes, create innovative and proactive Corporate Social Responsibility solutions, and collaborate with internal and external stakeholders on social challenges, and report and account for performance in this area. •  Thirdly, Corporate Social Responsibility awards can be introduced to acknowledge the works of those that make considerable effort and impact. This can help to act as an incentive to motivate employees and managers to advance Corporate Social Responsibility. The recognition can take place at different levels such as those of the project team, corporate management, company, specific industry sector, etc. •  Finally, companies can also have their managers and employees participate in networks and multi-partner organizations that aim to advance responsible business practices for the benefit of business and society. The partners can include other businesses, government, civil society, labour unions, investor groups, etc. As earlier alluded to, one of the tenets of good corporate citizenship is transparency and accountability. On the part of the Councils, the major challenge they face in this regard is the delivery of quality service to their clients, which is underpinned by better management of resources. 2  BIS Review 28/2006  In conclusion, Chairperson, Ladies and Gentlemen, in the interest of enhancing the competitiveness of business and maximise the value of wealth creation in Mufulira District in particular and Zambia as a whole, companies are urged to make social responsibility an integral part of the wealth creation process.

The nagging concern is whether this determined pursuit of macro-economic stability will be maintained - whether in fact the degree of macro-economic convergence that has been achieved is likely - in the terms of the Treaty - to be “sustainable”. A particular worry is that macro-economic stability, on its own, is not enough. It has not been enough to prevent the progressive emergence of very high, and very different, levels of unemployment in a number of the major Continental European economies. Unemployment has been for some considerable time, and it remains, much the most urgent and important economic issue confronting us in Europe. I do not suggest for a moment that the right answer would be to abandon macro-economic discipline and revert to old-fashioned demand management policies. In anything other than the very short term that would be likely to make matters worse. I share the broad consensus view that Europe’s unemployment problems originate essentially in rigidities on the supply-side of the economy. The point is that unless we are all more successful in bringing down this structural unemployment, through micro-economic policies designed to improve structural, supply-side flexibility, then some countries could find it difficult to continue to live with a common macro-economic discipline without significant tensions.
Savers are afraid that Germany could at some point end up being liable for the collapse of, say, an Italian bank. What would you say to that? A European deposit guarantee scheme is not about paying for other countries. It does not mean permanent transfers and it does not mean new taxes. A European scheme would increase confidence in banks and help them to operate on a pan-European basis, supporting the Single Market and hence growth and jobs. At the same time, it is of course important to keep reducing risks in European banks, in particular when it comes to non-performing loans. Savers need to be patient. The ECB has decided that it won’t raise interest rates before the summer of 2019. Why can’t it happen sooner? The euro area economy is growing and unemployment has fallen significantly. Price pressures are gradually picking up. But this doesn’t happen in one day. Ample monetary stimulus will remain needed to support a sustained convergence of euro area inflation towards our aim of 2/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  below, but close to 2%. In other words: monetary normalisation has started, but it is a gradual one. We expect interest rates to stay at the current level at least through the summer of 2019. But we have already started to reduce our net asset purchases and anticipate to end them after the end of December. That is an important step towards normalisation. What role does Brexit play in your planning?

Maiava Atalina Ainuu Enari: Educating individuals to manage their personal finances Opening remarks by Ms Maiava Atalina Ainuu Enari, Governor of the Central Bank of Samoa, at the MoneyPACIFIC “Money Guide” launch, Apia, 2 April 2014. *  *  *  Members of the Diplomatic Community Youth and Education Directors of the Church denominations present today Our MoneyPACIFIC partners – Kim Hailwood and Becky de Beer-Lamont Distinguished Guests Ladies and Gentlemen It is indeed an honour for me to address this gathering today, at this important milestone in the partnership of the MoneyPACIFIC project and the Central Bank of Samoa. The MoneyPACIFIC Project was established in 2007 under the umbrella of the NZ-Pacific Remittances’ Project which stands to help reduce costs of sending money within the Pacific Region, and has concurrently worked hard to lift Pacific Communities awareness of the need to prudently manage their personal finances. We have worked closely with the MoneyPACIFIC programme over the recent years and we consider them a great ally in the promotion of financial inclusion and financial literacy here in Samoa. In a moment Kim and Becky will elaborate more on the MoneyPACIFIC initiative and its latest resource but before that I would like to take a few moments to talk a little bit more on why financial literacy is important to the Central Bank of Samoa.
BIS Review 97/2006  1  since Europe will be able to take advantage of what Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas and Helene Rey describe as the “exorbitant privilege” 3 . Payment systems of the Euroland countries do not follow these changes swiftly enough. These systems have supported national and international retail operations in various European currencies so far. The only exception were activities of the central banks under the aegis of the European Central Bank. These banks quickly developed and launched the TARGET system for real-time gross settlements of large volume euro transactions. As regards the cashless turnover in pan-European relations, foreign currency exchange savings were the only measurable benefit stemming from the introduction of the euro for the consumers. Apart from that, the settlement time and the costs of crossborder transactions remained on the same high level as before the implementation of the single currency. These costs were much higher than prices of national transactions. One of the causes was the lack of the appropriate technical infrastructure, discrepancies in information and business standards applied in individual countries and the willingness of the banking sector to gain financial benefits from higher fees for cross-border transactions. This problem was raised already at the very beginning of the implementation of the single currency in Europe and the lack of visible and effective activities undertaken to change the situation encouraged the European Union decision-makers to take regulatory action. The aim was to provide mechanisms for effective euro payments in the Euroland and uniform principles for cashless payments.

Notwithstanding the fact that people might derive utility from the pure fact of having in their wallets banknotes with Polish kings instead of European bridges, I have no idea how to measure this utility and how to compare it to the utility derived from more standard arguments of preference functions like consumption. For this reason I will speak in terms of standard macroeconomic variables, bearing in mind that this is certainly not the whole story. If economists speak about the advantages and disadvantages of joining a common currency area, they ultimately end up comparing the costs and benefits of accession. This is also the way I would like to proceed. However, bearing in mind that many issues have already been described in several voluminous reports (NBP 2004 for Poland, Csajbok, Csemerly 2002 for Hungary, HM Treasury 2003 for the UK), I will try to focus on issues which are less familiar to the general public or which are potential risk factors. The nature of these issues is that they are mainly concentrated on the cost side of the analysis. Thus, it might seem from my lecture, that I mainly care about the costs or that costs outweigh benefits. Let me, in the very beginning, stress that this is by no means the case.
Adherence to the oft-quoted Bagehot principle (“lend freely at a high rate against good collateral” to solvent, but illiquid institutions2) ensured that lender of last resort activities did not threaten monetary stability. The pendulum began to swing away from this pre-war consensus when World War I prompted many countries to subordinate monetary policy to financing war and to suspend the gold standard. Countries returning to the gold standard after World War I, however, turned to overly rigid management of monetary affairs. Lacking the necessary discretion, following the Wall Street crash and the global recession in 1929, and the subsequent banking crisis, monetary policy prompted a precipitous collapse in money and prices.3 This spawned the greatest loss in jobs and output on record in what came to be remembered as the Great Depression. In a fateful irony of monetary history, the role of monetary policy in precipitating these calamitous events did not usher in monetary reform. On the contrary, notions hardened that monetary policy was powerless and that macroeconomic stability needed to be safeguarded through other policies.4 This shift in emphasis culminated in fiscal dominance, which contributed to the monetary mismanagement of the 1960s and 70s, paving the way for the “Great Inflation”. Only a few countries that preserved central bank independence, such as Germany, were able to maintain low inflation rates throughout these years. The Great Inflation was eventually overcome as monetary policy once again gained centre stage and was recognised as a powerful factor in macroeconomic stability.

In June 2014 monetary policy in the euro area embarked on a phase of renewed expansion, aimed both at enhancing monetary policy transmission, in a context of continued bank deleveraging, and increasing policy accommodation in view of persistently weak inflation. Having limited room for manoeuvre on the main refinancing rate, the ECB initiated a series of new unconventional measures. These consisted of our targeted longer-term refinancing operations 2/6  BIS central bankers' speeches  (TLTROs), our asset purchase programme for public and private sector securities (APP), and our policy of charging a zero interest rate on main refinancing operations and a negative rate on excess reserves. As the floor of our monetary policy corridor – which by then had become the key instrument steering monetary conditions in the money market – was reduced to negative levels, other short to medium-term market yields dipped below the zero line as well. Given the novelty, scope and size of the measures taken, and given their potential interaction with other public policies, communication of these measures proved to be much more difficult than before the crisis, when we only had to explain how changes in the main policy interest rates affect the economy and ultimately the price level. Likewise, holding the ECB accountable for its monetary policy has also become more difficult. Let me illustrate this difficulty by considering how observers have been using Taylor rules to compare our policy interest rates with rule-based benchmarks.
Investors at the end of this chain, who bore the final risk, had less information about the underlying quality of loans than those at the start and became very dependent on rating agencies and their models. It also reduced the incentives on originators to assess and monitor credit risk carefully. 1  The dotted line represents the end of 2006. BIS Review 24/2008  1  The downswing – how the crisis unfolded Growing problems in the sub-prime market started the downswing. Chart 3 compares the path of US housing prices with the price of the triple-B ABX index (which captures the cost of insuring against default losses on sub-prime mortgages) and bank equity prices: •  As you can see, the US housing market began to turn down in mid 2006; and banks holding sub-prime loans on balance sheet began to make provisions at that point. •  But it wasn’t until early in 2007 that rising defaults led to markdowns in even the riskier tranches of sub-prime backed securities. •  Last summer, problems at Bear Stearns, IKB and BNP Paribas brought home to investors the market risks they were running and led to an “investors’ strike” on mortgage-backed securities and asset-backed commercial paper. •  That in turn led banks to hoard liquidity; inter-bank markets spreads rose and volumes fell beyond the very short term; Northern Rock ran out of road, and bank equity prices began to drop.

Fourthly, the central bank’s ambition to steer asset prices directly could perhaps pave the way to a much larger bubble in the future. In other words, can safeguards against financial bubbles and an absence of subsequent economic consequences lead to a moral-hazard type of phenomenon among the market participants? Circumstances must evidently be very special to warrant central bank action to counter asset price bubbles if there is no concurrent upward pressure on consumer price inflation. BIS Review 58/1998  -6-  It is also reasonable that the central bank presents a clear case for such a course of action and does so before such a special situation arises. The Riksbank has started a biannual series of reports on the financial system’s stability. The idea is to draw lessons from our recent experience of a bank crisis and be in a position - should the need arise in some distant future - to discuss any policy measures that might be called for in the event of a risk of financial instability. This could also be done in our Inflation Reports. The situation today in Sweden is very different from the 1980s. Asset prices have been rising steeply since 1994 but indebtedness did not turn upward until quite recently. This suggests that the risk that the banking sector will experience significant problems in the event of a fall in asset prices is relatively small today. However, we must continue to monitor risks in this field in the years to come.
Christian Noyer: Interview with the Financial Times Interview of Mr Christian Noyer, Governor of the Bank of France, conducted by Mr Ben Hall, Paris correspondent, and Mr Ralph Atkins, Frankfurt bureau chief on 11 March 2009 in Paris, published on 12 March 2009. *  *  *  Financial Times: Is the US appeal for a bigger and more concerted economic stimulus by Europe merited? Christian Noyer: If one wants really to make sure that all countries are making the appropriate contribution to the stabilisation and further recovery of the world economy, one should take into account everything. It so happens that in some countries the automatic stabilisers play a greater role than in others. Automatic stabilisers mean public expenditure. They may be automatic but they have the same kind of impact on the economy. One could even say a bigger impact because, since they are automatic, they are disbursed immediately and feed into the purchasing power of citizens . Therefore their ability to spend, is quicker than when you go through a budgetary process that takes time to be decided and then implemented and then disbursed. If you take everything into account, my general feeling is that the efforts being made by the major industrial countries are fairly comparable. FT: Do they need to do more?

So we may feel that at a certain point we need to do something more, or we do not. But we can expect the effect to be relatively limited. Second, I think the framework we have set, results in something very different from what we had before. Having decided that we refinance at fixed rates for unlimited quantities, and with a large corridor between the deposit facility and lending rate means, the lending rate has become the ceiling and the deposit facility rate is the floor and markets tend to move the money market rates in between, with overnight rates at a very low level and the three month rate at a level which can be below the refinancing rate. As a consequence, the rates effectively paid by borrowers are much closer to the situation in the US or the UK than most people would imagine. FT: What does that mean in practice? That the main policy rate need not go any lower, or can’t go any lower? CN: I didn’t say that. FT: Or that the deposit facility rate can’t go any lower? CN: I didn’t say that either. But it is clear that the room for manoeuvre on the deposit facility is limited. What I mean is that if we keep the present framework, we cannot move much. That’s obvious. If we want to move more, we have to change the framework, which could cause inconvenience.