samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
My intention today is to concentrate on the central role played by the Riksbank in the management of liquidity in the financial system. The risks that are generally given prominence as being the greatest where the millennium period is concerned are the risks of technical malfunctions arising, primarily as a result of problems in adapting all computer systems to the year 2000. Such malfunctions have the potential to disrupt the financial infrastructure. Irrespective of how high a degree of probability is assigned to these risks, they have to be treated with the utmost seriousness. The very uncertainty about the possibility of problems arising is in itself enough to lead to disturbances; for this reason, preparations have to do not only with technical adaptations but also to a great extent with instilling confidence that the systems will function in practice. One way to build confidence is to use various types of agreements to attempt to limit the burden on systems around the millennium period, hence reducing the risks. One example of a measure of this kind is that the European Central Bank, the ECB, has decided that the European payment system, Target, is to be closed on 31 December. The reason for this decision is to enable all measures that need to be taken by the end of the day and the year to be carried out in good time before midnight. The closing of Target makes it possible to close down all financial trade within the EU on New Year’s Eve.

In recent years, both our central bank researchers and external researchers financed by us have been selected to present their papers. In this year’s edition, the conference has been jointly organised with the CEPR’s Economic History section. Secondly, since 2009, the Banco de España has had a biannual programme in place for economic history research grants. Under the programme, universities commit themselves, following an agreement signed with the Bank, to pursuing the research selected and to presenting and publishing their findings. The possibility of collaboration between researchers from both institutions is also envisaged. Since 1980, under the initial backing of Luis Ángel Rojo, the Bank has published a collection of monographs relating to monetary and financial history, Spanish and international alike, under the name “Economic History Studies” (more familiarly known as the “Red Series”). To date, this collection had solely included papers prepared or financed by the Banco de España. Currently, however, with a view to extending and maintaining its continuity, we are assessing opening it up to other research not necessarily financed by the Bank. To be added to the foregoing is all the sponsorship and funding activity of associations, universities and royal academies in the field of economic history. Actions of a differing nature and scope are involved, giving continuity to our long-standing and intense promotion work. I am particularly gratified to be able to share with you today my satisfaction at the recognition recently granted by the Spanish Economic History Association to the supportive work by the Banco de España.
Together, these efforts allow us to expand the reach of our operations while making tangible progress on our commitments to diversity and inclusion, including to minority-, women-, and veteran-owned firms. Let me now turn to transparency and accountability. In the spirit of these principles, we have reported to the public in near real-time our market activity, including the details of every SMCCF transaction. Our holdings are publicly reported on a weekly basis through the Fed’s H.4.1 release. Every month the Fed publishes the full holdings in a detailed Congressional report. We also provide the attributes of the Broad Market Index, including detailed issuer-level weights. Aside from portfolio activity, we have also disclosed the CCF’s legal agreements. On the New York Fed’s website, you can find all documentation with the Department of Treasury that governs the operation of the facilities, as well as all contracts with external vendors. On the latter, we remain committed to disclosing all fees to service providers as they are paid. Impact on Credit Conditions As you all know, corporate credit conditions have recovered substantially from the worst strains of March.

The Fund must enhance its surveillance activities and its advice must be acted upon to a greater extent. However, this probably requires changes in the IMF’s governance structure. Countries that are now gaining in economic strength are seeking greater influence, and the IMF must also improve its reputation in these countries. We have to ensure that the Fund has sufficient resources to grant loans to member countries that are particularly hard hit by the financial crisis. The financial resources of the IMF are being discussed at the G20 summit in London. The IMF aims to double its lending capacity and has called on member countries to provide the necessary funding. Several countries have responded positively, among them Norway. The Government has offered to make available a contribution of up to NOK 30 billion to the IMF, subject to approval by the Storting. The US has asked for the NAB 3 to be increased substantially. Even a special one-time allocation of SDRs 4 to strengthen global liquidity may be considered. The Government Pension Fund – Global Let me now turn to the Government Pension Fund – Global. International capital markets have been a boon to Norway. We drew on borrowing opportunities abroad when the petroleum industry was being built up. We did the same in order to expand welfare schemes and to finance the countercyclical policy of the mid-1970s and the early 1990s. National oil and gas resources are now converted into equities and bonds abroad in the Government Pension Fund – Global.
In addition, the extent to which the external environment will be affected by the higher energy prices and rising interest rates, and its implications on our domestic economy, will be important considerations in the future direction of interest rates. The risk to higher inflation and to the growth prospects will be carefully balanced. Monetary policy will continue to promote sustainable growth in an environment of price stability. Since the dialogue a year ago, the financial landscape continues to be transformed. The domestic financial industry has seen further rationalisation and consolidation in the banking groups in retail banking and investment banking. While the rationalization in the retail banking industry would benefit from the economies of scale, reduce duplication of resources and promote cost efficiency, the new investment bank framework is expected to bring about the emergence of more effective, efficient and resilient capital market intermediaries. It will essentially result in the consolidation of 32 entities into 16 investment banks by the end of this year. Another significant development in 2005 was the establishment of the Malaysian Deposit Insurance Corporation which will further strengthen the domestic financial infrastructure by providing an explicit guarantee of deposits, while simultaneously reinforcing incentives for the improvement of risk management practices by banking institutions. To promote greater financial inclusion in our financial system, development financial institutions have also been strengthened to ensure that they are more focused and complementary in their objectives and business strategies.

Lars Nyberg: Financial reforms and financial crises - Swedish experiences Speech by Mr Lars Nyberg, Deputy Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, Colombo, 28 March 2006. *  *  *  Let me begin by thanking you for the invitation to come hear and speak today. It is a great honour to be asked to give a speech within the framework of this prestigious lecture series. On many occasions I – and several of my colleagues at the Riksbank – have described the financial crisis in Sweden at the beginning of the 1990s, both here in Colombo and in other contexts. That is because this crisis made a considerable impression on the Swedish economy, resulting in low – and during a number of years negative – growth and high unemployment. However it also made an impression in terms of making us consider what basic conditions were necessary to ensure that a financial system functions smoothly. There were many interacting factors behind the crisis experienced in Sweden. Mistakes made by bank management, by the supervisory authority and by politicians made the situation worse for the real economy. These mistakes were probably due to some extent to the financial markets having been regulated for almost half a century and so this affected the financial agents' way of thinking and perception of reality.
In steady-state, this inflation bias is:  𝜋𝑡 =  Ʌ𝜅 𝜅 2 + 𝜆(1 − 𝛽)  (17)  This inflation bias is clearly bigger, the greater is the degree of market power. Chart 21 plots the relationship between mark-ups and the inflation bias implied by the model. Using our simple model, the rise in mark-ups by global firms since 1980 might have added as much as 20 percentage points to the inflation bias! This calibrated effect is implausibly large. Nonetheless, the qualitative point remains: a rise in market power may, by constraining demand, generate an added incentive to run loose monetary policy. That makes institutional arrangements which resist those temptations – such as independent central banks charged with meeting an inflation target – more important than ever (Rogoff (1985), Svensson (1997)). Finally, while we find little evidence of mark-ups having a material effect on investment, market power also gives rise to at least the possibility of lower productivity growth, and hence, r*. There are a number of other structural forces currently lowering productivity growth (for example, Gordon (2012), Andrews et al (2016)). And there are a larger number still of structural factors bearing down on r* (for example, Monetary Policy Committee (2018)). To the extent market power is another, this increases the chances of those falls in productivity growth and r* proving long-lasting. The empirical link between market power and productivity is not, at present, well-defined. But the implications of a persistently lower r* for the setting of monetary policy are reasonably well understood.

The associated shifts in market power, too, might plausibly have altered some of the key macro-economic relationships in the economy (De Loecker and Eeckhout (2017)). They may have influenced the pricing and provision of goods and services in the economy and hence the Phillips curve. And they may have influenced the amount of investment and innovation undertaken by firms and hence the aggregate demand curve (Aghion et al (2005)). They, too, might thus have a bearing on the setting of monetary policy. These structural shifts in product and labour markets may, in some cases, have had common cause. For example, network economies of scale and scope could potentially have increased some companies’ market power both over their labour inputs (through monopsony effects) and product outputs (through monopoly effects). This could show up in both a falling labour and a rising profit share, with potential macro-economic implications for activity, costs and prices (Autor et al (2017), Barkai (2017)). 1  As Blanchard (2008) said, “How mark-ups move, in response to what, and why, is however nearly terra incognita for macro.” Some notable papers that discuss the impact of product market developments on the macro-economy include Cacciatore and Fiori (2016) and Eggertsson, Ferrero and Raffo (2014). 3 Unlike many other advanced economies, it is worth noting that the UK labour share has not been on a downward trend.
Low inflation is not simply an end in itself - it is a necessary means to the end of sustainable growth, to sustained high levels of employment, and to rising living standards which are, of course, the really good things of economic life. And what gives me personally - and my colleagues - real satisfaction is the fact that stable, low inflation has over this period been accompanied by steadily increasing overall output and employment, and by a progressive fall in unemployment. GDP growth since the Spring of 1992 until this summer has averaged just about 3% a year - which is well above most estimates of our trend rate of 2¼%-2½% - and the longest period of sustained quarter-by-quarter growth we have enjoyed since quarterly records began in the UK in 1955. Employment increased steadily from a low point of 25 ½ mn people in the Spring of 1992 to a peak of over 28mn in the summer of this year. And the rate of unemployment has fallen from a peak of over 10½% on the LFS measure to around 5%; while on the Claimant Count measure it has fallen from some 10% to just over 3%, which means that the number of people claiming unemployment benefit, at under 950,000, is the lowest for 26 years. And what has been a good period for the UK economy as a whole, has also been good - in an absolute sense - for Wales.

13/15  Testifying to this is the letter sent last week by the US authorities to Facebook. In its first paragraph, a request – or rather a demand – is made for the implementation of the project to be delayed while its potential consequences are evaluated. The same paragraph indicates that the libra project “is intended to rival US monetary policy and the dollar”. I do not think this is an exaggerated reaction, since the irruption of big tech has potentially systemic implications. Customer relations I think it is also important to talk about customer relations as another key factor of any future business model. I shall not dwell on this point, the ground for which has been previously covered. But I would like to point out that this change is the only means of responding to the challenge the sector faces to restore its image and reputation. Society has changed in terms of its demands of the financial sector. The rules governing customer-bank relations have likewise changed. A good example of this is the recent law on real estate lending. Banks should, therefore, change to respond to the new social and regulatory reality. Evidently, legal cases from the past continue to weigh on and hamper the restoration of image. But if banks change their behaviour today they will be laying the foundations on which to build the industry’s future reputation. In this respect, last year we saw a decline in claims lodged against banks.
Andrew Bailey: The state of the building society sector and the Prudential Regulation Authority’s approach to governance Speech by Mr Andrew Bailey, Deputy Governor of Prudential Regulation and Chief Executive Officer of the Prudential Regulation Authority at the Bank of England, at the Building Societies Association Annual Conference, Harrogate, 21 May 2015. *  *  *  It’s a great pleasure to be at the BSA annual conference again, and in Harrogate again. I note that Harrogate is confirmed as “the happiest place in England!”, so I feel a certain sense of expectation by inviting the prudential regulator to speak at the happiest place. My plan this morning is to cover two areas in my remarks: first, an overview of our impressions of the state of the building societies as a whole; and, second, some comments on the PRA’s approach to the governance of firms, to coincide with the publication today of consultation of our supervisory statement on board responsibilities. So, since we are in the happiest place in England, let me start in what I hope you will regard as an appropriate spirit, namely that even though the environment remains one of continuing low interest rates – and, as I always do at this point, let me stress that I am making no judgement on monetary policy whatsoever – the aggregate net interest margin for the building societies has picked up, arrears rates on loans remain low and net new lending has been strong over the last two years.

With these words of welcome I now turn the floor over to Mr. Moises Schwartz, the Director of the IEO to set the scene for the discussion of the workshop. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches
Also, there is a broad consensus about maintaining a high degree of budgetary stability, probably the most significant development in the Spanish economy in the past decade. That said, the unemployment rate is rising rapidly and the growth rate of activity has begun to decline notably. Today I have tried to put forward the idea that all economic agents (authorities, social partners and households) can contribute to making this adjustment phase brief and to helping the Spanish economy to harness this opportunity to strengthen its foundations for growth. In particular, a bolder attitude on the part of the authorities in their reforms and on the part of the social partners in their shaping of wage-setting and other labour-market mechanisms would lead to an earlier and stronger emergence from this complicated phase. BIS Review 117/2008  7

•  And when subsequently questioned by their superiors or regulators, they offered an array of self-justifications, chief of which is “everybody does it”. But everybody does not do it. I believe the vast majority of people working in the financial industry are committed to serving their clients or customers fairly and with integrity. But the unethical actions of a few have undermined trust and created instability. Reform of the financial industry will not be complete until this issue of trust and ethics is addressed. This requires “getting the culture right”. And by culture, I mean the shared values, attitudes and norms that guide actions. There is increasing international regulatory guidance to improve risk governance and align compensation schemes with long-term sustainability and customer interests. This is necessary but not sufficient. There are limits to what externally imposed rules can do to promote the right values in financial firms. •  Because culture develops from within a firm, it invites a certain resonance from the members of that firm – in a way that will be difficult for an externally imposed set of rules to achieve. •  For the same reason, the behavioural norms that a firm’s culture and value system promotes are more amenable to internal governance and self-policing than rules that rely on external enforcement. In short, rules tell us what we can do, but values tell us what we should do.
This is also true for most of the other countries in the region as well. As the crisis unfolded, the quality of assets deteriorated with NPLs reaching 11.9% by December 2010 (up from 2.4% at the end of 2008) but sufficient capital buffers were preserved. The banking system continued to make profits despite the rise in non-performing loans and the subsequent increased provisioning. Today the average capital adequacy ratio  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  exceeds 17%, with Tier 1 capital adequacy above 15% and overall liquidity ratio of around 24%. That is not the case in the most developed markets. Beware of superficial announcements It is equally important to stay aware of the consequences of speculative public speaking and bad communication. Despite even the most prudent policies and sound financial fundamentals, stability may be put at risk by repeated negative superficial public comments. Let me tell you now that an important share of our work during the crisis was devoted to monitoring and promptly reacting against the numerous ridiculous statements that were coming from abroad, even from international financial institutions of good reputation. That is why two months ago the Bulgarian National Bank organised a seminar for the local media where we presented a “Top 30” list of failed doomsday scenarios and forecasts made by foreign and Bulgarian observers since 2008. The Greeks are well aware how the accumulation of adverse market sentiments may lead to “self-fulfilling prophecies”. And a few words on the so-called “Greek” banks in Bulgaria.

Irrespective of all electoral cycles, the support for the currency board by the business community, the general public and all political parties has stayed intact. The current crisis started to affect Bulgaria towards the end of 2008, with the decline in external demand and the lower capital inflows. However, the banks in Bulgaria did not have any exposure to foreign “toxic” assets and did not suffer directly from the “domino effect” of collapsing financial institutions abroad. The Bulgarian case was different from the AngloSaxon scenario because we had learned our lessons from 1996–1997 and we had accumulated enough reserves to serve as a cushion. To talk in numbers, the government entered the crisis with a fiscal reserve of 12% of GDP at the end of 2008. The gross international reserves of the Bulgarian National Bank were 36% of GDP then. The banking system average capital adequacy was 14.9% in December 2008. Our banking system has never been a source of problems. Engaged in traditional commercial banking, our banks were affected by the crisis only when the general economic activities declined and as a result some of their clients found it harder to service their loans. The banking system itself withstood the crisis, displaying outstanding soundness and stability. But this did not happen on its own, neither was it simply due to the presence of reputable names on our market. We, the BNB, as supervisors have always believed that the good times with strong growth must be used to “save for a rainy day”.
Second, while the Federal Reserve has great confidence that our normalization framework will be effective at allowing us to raise money market interest rates when the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) determines it is appropriate, we expect to learn a lot about how money markets react to that framework as we move away from the current very low interest rates with a large amount of reserves in the banking system. We can then incorporate knowledge gained during our post-liftoff experience into our thinking. We have the benefit of not starting from scratch in this effort. There already exists a rich academic literature on monetary policy implementation frameworks, and we saw some relevant examples this morning. This literature dates at least back to the late 1960s, when Bill Poole developed a model that is still being used today.7 Recent developments have revealed that our money markets are not frictionless, and current research incorporates this reality of market segmentation. Some of the papers we have seen today try to contend with the effects  negative rates did not require any changes in these central bank’s respective frameworks for policy implementation, although some legal and operational work was required. 7  William Poole, “Commercial Bank Reserve Management in a Stochastic Model: Implications for Monetary Policy,” Journal of Finance 23, no. 5 (1968): 769–91.

However, the condition for these welfare gains is that there has been considerable confidence in the Swedish state, Swedish banks and the Swedish housing and mortgage markets. Today a large percentage of the market agents investing in Swedish bonds are outside of Sweden. This means that the Swedish financial system is also dependent on how other countries assess the Swedish mortgage and housing markets. It is important that these markets function well so that we can continue to enjoy a high level of confidence on the financial markets. We therefore have a major responsibility to ensure that the vulnerabilities are limited and that confidence remains strong. This is particularly important given the weaknesses that have emerged as a result of the structure of the financial system. The good access to capital and the large increase in mortgages has also meant that the Swedish banking system has grown, and become one of the largest banking systems in Europe. Moreover, the Swedish banking system consists of a few large banks that are closely interlinked. This means that problems at one bank can easily spread to other banks. All this means that the costs to society could be substantial if we were to suffer a financial crisis. 7  See T, Jansson (2014), Households’ amortisation decisions, The analysis group’s memorandums on household indebtedness, No. 4, Sveriges Riksbank. www.riksbank.se. 6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  How do we attain a better balance?