samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
On an annual basis, cobalt output at 8,781.85 mt was 49.4% higher than the 5,879.14 mt of cobalt produced in 2009. The improvement in output was due to the resumption of production at Konkola Copper Mines and Chambishi Metals Plc. Manufacturing 20. During the quarter under review, production of clear beer by Zambian Breweries Plc increased by 6.2% to 237,458 hectolitres from 223,607 hectolitres the previous quarter. Further, this output was 46.7% higher than the 160,820 hectolitres produced in the corresponding quarter of 2009. On an annual basis, output of clear beer at 727,191.0 hectolitres was 27.6% higher than the 569,771.0 hectolitres of clear beer produced in 2009. 21. Similarly output of soft drinks by Zambian Breweries Plc rose by 28.8% to 163,848.0 hectolitres from 127,244.0 hectolitres in the previous quarter. Moreover, this output level was 45.3% higher than 112,722.0 hectolitres produced in the fourth quarter of 2009. On an annual basis, output of soft drinks at 561,910.0 hectolitres was 49.1% higher than the 376,747.0 hectolitres of soft drinks produced in 2009. 22. Production of milk by Parmalat Zambia Ltd during the quarter under review rose by 10% to 8,613,737.0 litres from 7,830,878.0 litres in the third quarter of 2010. Further, this output was 5.3% higher than 8,178,335.0 litres of milk produced during the fourth quarter of 2009. On an annual basis, output of milk at 32,456,505.0 litres was 8.2% higher than the 29,984,030.0 litres of milk produced in 2009. 23.

We commend the extensive IMF exercise, using data from millions of European companies and agree with its main conclusions. Job retention schemes, moratoriums on payment obligations, grants and credit guarantees can be effective in improving companies’ liquidity needs, even more so in advanced than in emerging economies. However, moving forward, the increase in indebtedness does raise concerns for solvency risks and investment prospects. It is true that, from the central banks’ perspective, all chapters of the report are extremely relevant. Personally, I always look towards the IMF’s research findings for confirmations of our own scenarios, different perspectives on certain topics, or even red flags. More broadly, the 2020 Regional Economic Outlook (REO) for Europe provides a much-needed analysis, from the IMF’s point of view of the opportunities and challenges that our region can expect following a very difficult year of restrictions, as well as social and economic difficulties. For 2020, the IMF forecasted a contraction of real GDP in Europe of 7 percent, the biggest contraction after World War II. Thanks to the extraordinary policy response, even more dramatic consequences have been avoided. I understand that the full extent of the pandemic’s impact on companies in 2020 is yet to be revealed as time passes and more data becomes available. I agree that long-lasting changes in the structure of the economy will occur, even though they are hard to predict at this moment.
“Irreducible uncertainty” and “multiple equilibria” are occupational hazards; so if you must predict the future, you are tempted to hedge heavily and must modify constantly. But in two areas I’m confident: the Three Lies of John Harvard will continue to be revealed for years to come, and with time, the Three Lies of Finance will come to enjoy widespread credulity again. To resist their siren calls, policymakers and market participants must bind ourselves to the mast. That means building institutional structures that make it harder to act on the lies. Over the past seven years great strides have been made. Take “this time is different”. To guard against future complacency, policy frameworks have been substantially overhauled. The Bank of England has been given formal responsibility to maintain financial stability and has considerable powers to promote it. In anticipation of problems, we have increased bank capital and tightened mortgage standards. We are using our monetary policy and macroprudential policy tools in concert, so that a low for long interest rate environment can promote both price and financial stability. Moreover, when next time proves no different, the financial intermediaries at the core of the system will be on a substantially stronger footing. Their capital requirements have already increased ten-fold and their liquid assets are up fourfold. Their trading assets are down by a third and intra-bank exposures by two-thirds. Though we cannot hope to eliminate systemic risk altogether, reform is ending Too Big To Fail for individual institutions.

By transferring risks to those most willing to bear them, they help households and businesses insure against the unexpected. But if left unattended, markets can be prone to excess and abuse. That is particularly so in financial markets, where means and ends too easily become conflated. Value becomes abstract and relative. And the pull of the crowd can overwhelm the integrity of the individual. Lie three is that “markets are moral” – that financial capital can take for granted the social capital necessary for markets to fulfil their promise. Consider the example of fixed income, currencies and commodities markets, which historically have relied heavily on informal codes and understandings. That informality was well suited to an earlier age. But as markets innovated and grew, it proved wanting. Markets need to retain the consent of society – a social licence – to be allowed to operate, innovate and grow. Repeated episodes of misconduct (such as the Libor and FX scandals) have called that social licence into question. To restore it, we need to rebuild fair and effective markets. 9  Knight, F (1921), Risk, uncertainty and profit, Signalman Publishing. 10  In Keynes (1936), Chapter 12, he wrote: “Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation, whether moral or hedonistic or economic.
Two observations might be made about the case the Bank was making. First, there is a conviction that the long-term health of the real economy is affected by the monetary regime. In the jargon, money neutrality but not “superneutrality” which, put broadly, holds that monetary regimes are irrelevant to the long-run performance of the real economy. 12 The way I think about this is that low and stable inflation can bring two (related) benefits to the real economy. Relative price signals will be clearer, aiding the efficient allocation of resources. And greater macroeconomic stability will reduce risk, reflected in lower risk premia and so in a lower effective cost of capital for firms and households, as well as possibly in longer investment horizons. Second, some of the arguments might have seemed to shade into a “moral” case for price stability, which has recently been excoriated by Willem Buiter 13 on the grounds that it has typically come packaged with central bankers presenting themselves as akin to spiritual leaders who are above needing to explain their actions to the public. Well, I don’t think we had much truck with central banking as religion, and from the early 1990s the Bank could reasonably claim to have been in the vanguard of transparency. But there did run through our corridors a sense of outrage that homes, livelihoods and businesses could be destroyed by quite unnecessary lurches from boom to bust; and that the economy’s progress was being arrested by the lack of sustained and credible nominal stability.

21 It also meant that the Committee would reach its decisions on a “one person/one vote” basis, with that going for the five Bank executive members too. 17  Thus, a whole chapter of Lord Roll’s pamphlet on the case for independence was devoted to solutions to this problem. “Independent and accountable: a new mandate for the Bank of England”, report of an independent panel chaired by Eric Roll, Centre for Economic Policy Research, 1993. 18  In another example, Ulrich Kohli has discussed how the SNB’s consensual approach to monetary policy making is “to do with” the culture flowing from Switzerland’s multi-cantonal federal political structure. See Kohli, U., 2005, Comment on “The monetary policy committee and the incentive problem: a selective survey” by Fujiki, H., at conference on “Incentive Mechanisms for Economic Policymakers”, Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies, Bank of Japan, May. 19  The parallel with the judiciary was made in the early 1990s in a speech by Governor Leigh-Pemberton, drawing on work by Ralph Dahrendorf. 20  See transcript of interview on 1 May 2007 of Mervyn King by C. Giles and S. Daneshku for the The Financial Times on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Bank of England’s operational independence (published 11 May 2007); and transcript of interview on 30 March 2007 of Lord George by C. Giles and S. Daneshku for the The Financial Times on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Bank of England’s operational independence (published 4 May 2007).
The other big step in this space will be a Liquidity Accord from Basel. This will be a new Accord. It is a quarter of a century late, as the need for an agreed international approach to the regulation of liquidity was first discussed in the mid-1980s. There remains a great deal of work to be done on this front but no-one should underestimate its importance. This is a package that is likely to change the shape of capital markets by effectively charging banks for the liquidity lines they provide to other parts of the financial system. For that reason there  BIS Review 145/2010  1  will be what the Governors and Head of Supervision call an Observation Period. But some change will be acceptable, as it won’t do for parts of the financial system to subsist on the basis of liquidity lines from commercial banks against which the banking system itself does not actually hold any liquidity buffer. That is not a bad definition of an unsound financial structure. Beyond that staple diet, I want to pick out four things – two of which are central to what has been going on already at the G20 Financial Stability Board work programme, and two of which lie a little bit ahead. The first two are the work on systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) and on capital markets.

As the fed funds chart shows, market expectations for monetary policy are very sensitive to changes in the economic setting – consider the shifts in the shape of the federal funds over time. Thank you for your attention. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  BIS central bankers’ speeches  7  8  BIS central bankers’ speeches  BIS central bankers’ speeches  9  10  BIS central bankers’ speeches  BIS central bankers’ speeches  11  12  BIS central bankers’ speeches  23  BIS central bankers’ speeches  13  14  BIS central bankers’ speeches  BIS central bankers’ speeches  15  16  BIS central bankers’ speeches  BIS central bankers’ speeches  17  18  BIS central bankers’ speeches  BIS central bankers’ speeches  19  20  BIS central bankers’ speeches  BIS central bankers’ speeches  21
Central banks need to focus on second round effects from inflation, and prevent large but temporary price surges, like those we have seen in very volatile energy and food prices, passing through into other prices, labour costs and inflation expectations. If they do, they could cause a wage-price spiral, which would then stop inflation from falling back to its medium-term target level after the temporary shocks have faded. The interaction of monetary, fiscal and structural policies High inflation is clearly a challenge not only for people, companies and central banks, but also for governments. Europe has recently witnessed significant turmoil in energy markets and governments have tried to find ways to provide relief to households and companies either by direct subsidies or through new regulations in the energy markets. But even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it was expected that the green transition would push energy prices up. The signal given by that rise in energy prices was intended to have an important role in encouraging the green transition. The problem now is that not only are energy prices being steered by the green transition, but they have also moved much more sharply because of the extreme tension in geopolitics. We should distinguish between two features of the current problem. The first is that higher prices have undermined purchasing power, increased inequality and made energy intensive industries less competitive. The second is that energy prices have become increasingly volatile, and this in itself is a problem that policymakers need to tackle.

Looking ahead, this boost to public finances is likely to be reversed when  4/8  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  inflation comes down, at which point deficits will creep up again. This is something that politicians should keep in mind as they plan their government's spending and taxes for the years ahead. The monetary policy response Times are clearly challenging for central banks. It is difficult for monetary policy to address supply-side shocks that are both inflationary and recessionary at the same time. If such shocks do not last for long, it might be appropriate to wait and see whether inflationary pressures will recede by themselves without any additional strain being put on the economy by higher interest rates. This was not the case this time however, and central banks were not able to just wait and let inflation spread through the economy. Because once the inflationary mind-set has taken hold, it is very difficult to change. Businesses and consumers must have confidence that central banks are determined to bring inflation down to its target, even if they cannot do it overnight. Before I discuss the latest monetary policy decisions of the Governing Council of the ECB, let me take a brief detour into not-so-distant history. Late in autumn of 2021, we were quite confident in the Governing Council that most of the supply-side inflation pressures caused by the pandemic would fade by the coming spring.
Svein Gjedrem: Monetary policy, forecasts and market communication Speech by Mr Svein Gjedrem, Governor of the Norges Bank, at the Norwegian School of Management’s Centre for Monetary Economics, Norsk Hydro, Lysaker, 7 June 2001. *  *  *  The long-term objective of monetary policy is to contribute to low and stable inflation. Price stability is the best contribution monetary policy can make to economic growth and prosperity. A nominal anchor is also a necessary precondition for stable financial markets and property markets. We cannot achieve higher employment in the long run by accepting higher inflation. On the contrary, the experience of our country and that of others in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s is that periods of high inflation are followed by downturns with high unemployment. High and variable inflation also leads to an arbitrary redistribution of wealth and income. This spring, the Government assigned a new operational mandate for monetary policy to Norges Bank. Norges Bank shall set the key rate with a view to maintaining low and stable inflation. The inflation target is set at 2½ per cent. I will use this occasion to elaborate on our interpretation of the mandate and to discuss how it will affect the conduct of monetary policy. The inflation outlook is presented three times a year in Norges Bank’s Inflation Reports, and forms a basis for the Bank’s interest rate decisions. Further assessments are presented every six weeks in connection with the Executive Board's monetary policy meetings.

Two weeks after each meeting, the Bank publishes minutes, which make it clear whether there was a lack of consensus in the Committee. Publication of the minutes is required by law. An account of the implementation of monetary policy is provided in the Annual Report. All committee members are free to express their personal views on economic issues and monetary policy. In Sweden, too, interest rate decisions are made by a board of experts – the Executive Board. The members work full time, and participate in the daily operations of the central bank. An inflation report expressing the Executive Board’s collective view of the inflation outlook is published four times a year. As in the UK, special emphasis is placed on the individual responsibility of the Executive Board members. The individual members’ voting and assessments are disclosed. Any lack of consensus regarding the inflation outlook and setting of interest rates emerges from the minutes that are published from two to four weeks after each monetary policy meeting. Grounds are given for decisions on interest rates, but no press conference is held immediately after monetary policy meetings. The Executive Board does not directly announce its stance regarding interest rate movements in the period ahead, but this is implicit from the uncertainty associated with the projection, which Sweden’s Riksbank also illustrates by means of a fan surrounding the inflation projection. The Executive Board reports twice a year to the Swedish parliament, the Riksdagen.
Moreover, this board will manage a common resolution fund – funded by the industry – that over time would become a common backstop to cover resolution costs for all significant banks in all participating countries. Arguably, the envisaged system is relatively complex. Major resolution actions may involve not only the Single Resolution Board but also the European Central Bank, as a supervisor, the national resolution authorities, the European Commission and, finally, the Council. Given the limited time-span in which decisions must often be taken, swift interaction among those agencies in a resolution process will be required. Indeed, the coordination of the SRB and the ECB is crucial for the success of the SRM. Experience in most countries shows that the supervisor should be fully involved in decisions to trigger resolutions and in the design of resolution plans. Indeed, as of now, in many European countries the resolution authority is embedded in the supervisory agency, albeit in some cases with specific decision making processes. Although the draft SRM regulation envisages a framework for cooperation between the resolution board and the supervisor, more concrete arrangements are needed to ensure satisfactory coordination.

Yet, the case of Spain also suggests that the bail-in of junior debt instruments entails significant additional complexity when they are held by retail investors. As a consequence of the commitments agreed with European authorities in the context of the financial assistance programme and the application of EU State-aid rules, Spanish authorities had to promote or directly implement the conversion of preference shares and subordinated debt into equity and apply large haircuts in all institutions requiring public support. That massive bail-in of instruments mostly held by retail investors not only generated a significant social problem but also reduced the value of the franchises, thereby exacerbating the fragility of the institutions requiring public capital support. It is now clear that preference shares and subordinated debt instruments were sometimes mis-sold to bank customers who were unable to understand the risk entailed by those assets. The possible infringement of rules of business conduct – notably the EU Directive known as MiFID – is being investigated by the securities regulator and the courts of justice. However, more generally, legislation should be passed at EU level – as has already been done in some jurisdictions – to strengthen regulation and tighten controls over the sale of complex instruments carrying an implicit option to be converted into equity in specific circumstances. Finally, a third thought drawn from the Spanish experience relates to the institutional arrangements for resolution actions.
Therefore, coordination between the different national authorities participating in these CMGs will be relevant in the application of TLAC. Some examples of these key decisions are: (1) determining adjustments for Multiple Point of Entry groups regarding the location of deductions and requirements; (2) identifying material subsidiaries and resolution entities; and (3) discussions as to whether the minimum TLAC is sufficient to ensure orderly resolution or whether additional firm-specific requirements are needed. TLAC is quite a demanding new standard. The estimated increase in issuances of TLAC debt is not negligible, if we consider the impact assessment performed by the Financial Stability Board and the Basel Committee: the aggregate shortfall for G-SIBs under the low calibration represents 16.9 % of the € trillion G-SIBs unsecured debt market. Compliance will be facilitated by the agreed phase-in for TLAC and the replacement of unsecured liabilities maturing in coming years which will be an important source of TLAC eligible instruments. However, the success of both the roll-over and the issuance of new TLAC-eligible instruments will depend on the absorption capacity of financial markets. In any event, we should monitor compliance with the requirements and any potential unintended impact during the transition period. 4. The plan to address misconduct risks  With the publication of the TLAC term sheet, the Financial Stability Board has virtually completed its work to address the too-big-to-fail problem in the banking sector. But there are other important areas where the FSB is working to fulfil the G20 mandate.

A broad-based transition to more robust overnight risk-free rates can provide the safe descent from Libor we set out to achieve, to a more resilient and transparent financial system. [10] Active and liquid underlying markets underpinning overnight rates have demonstrated resilience and we expect liquidity to move to these markets. [11] But there are also specific and limited use cases where forward-looking term rates may help facilitate this journey. We have seen constructive engagement in the UK. In 2018 the RFRWG surveyed the sterling market – and to be honest, we received a mixed response on the role of term rates, but with a small majority supporting a limited role for them. [12] The UK authorities have been supportive of the development of forward-looking term SONIA rates for limited use in cash markets. These rates have now been available for use in sterling contracts since January. [13] But while a narrow majority of the market made the decision to support the development of those rates, a broader consensus has firmly endorsed the limited use case for such rates. It has done this through the RFRWG but also through the FICC Markets Standards Board (FMSB) that has published a proposed market standard that considers limited use cases where there is a robust rationale for use of forward term SONIA, to meet specific needs, such as in trade finance and Islamic finance products. [14] Let me be clear – forward-looking term rates can support transition.