samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The Governing Board feels strongly, however, that there are significant advantages in aggregating the information from our different models and indicators in an internal process and subsequently publish a single SNB inflation forecast. Let me simply mention the most obvious one. In the SNB’s integrated approach, the Governing Board avoids the potential communication problem of conveying the impression that fixed weights are attached to the monetary and non-monetary analysis in the conduct of monetary policy. The biggest challenge the SNB Governing Board has so far faced with regard to the integration of both the monetary and nonmonetary views was in 2003. While monetary aggregates rose significantly, negative output gap  1  2  3  2  As extensively documented in Nelson (2006), "the competition between monetary and non-monetary views of inflation" was "resolved earlier and more decisively in favor of the monetary view" in Switzerland than in other countries, with the close observed relationship between money growth and inflation playing a determinant role in shaping monetary policy since 1973. The new regime was announced on October 1, 1978 and lasted until the end of 1979. It can be seen as an illustration of the fact that the SNB had traditionally employed money targets in a flexible way. Jordan and Savioz (2003)  BIS Review 107/2006  measures suggested a disinflationary risk. Similarly to what is described in the Fischer et al.

John C Williams: Preparing for the unknown Remarks (via videoconference) by Mr John C Williams, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at the 2021 US Treasury Market Conference, 17 November 2021. * * * As prepared for delivery  Introduction Good morning, and welcome to the seventh annual U.S. Treasury Market Conference. This is our second time gathering virtually. Although I miss seeing all of you in person here at the New York Fed, I am pleased that so many of you could join us today. This conference is a great opportunity for market participants, as well as members of five publicsector bodies—the Treasury, the Board of Governors, the SEC, the CFTC, and the New York Fed—to come together and take stock of the U.S. Treasury market. The events of the past 20 months have further underscored this market’s significance in the global economy—and the important role our five entities perform in ensuring that it functions as it should. In fact, the Inter-Agency Working Group for Treasury Market Surveillance (IAW G) came together to examine recent, notable disruptions to the Treasury market, and it issued a report ahead of this conference that identifies steps to strengthen its functioning and resilience.1 I won’t have time to go over the report in detail, but I strongly encourage everyone to read it. Severe disruptions to critical financial markets like we saw last spring should be rare.
Firstly, the expansion of the tourism sector and the associated construction boom have relied quite strongly on imported labour. Because of net migration the average rate of population growth since 2016 has been 2%, far higher than in other advanced countries. The rate of population growth has also been quite variable. To some extent, cyclical expansion has been facilitated by variability in the net migration rate rather than the domestic unemployment rate. Population growth fell into negative territory following the GFC, but has twice peaked at 3% during periods of tourism sector expansion, before and after the pandemic. Recovery of tourism causes net migration to rise  While the variability of net migration can be a useful shock absorber, helping to keep unemployment low and relatively stable during downturns and make the labour market less overheated during expansions, variable population growth creates problems in the housing market. The most recent surge in net migration has amplified the impact of COVID-related expenditure switching on housing prices. The demand for housing fluctuates in line with migration; however, the character-  istically inelastic supply of housing may become even more inflexible if volatile migration makes future housing demand more uncertain. As a result, what is gained in terms of a more flexible labour market may be lost due to a more volatile housing market. Variable net migration affects the housing market  Iceland’s tourism and construction sectors typically attract workers from other EEA countries during expansions.

Prasarn Trairatvorakul: Bank of Thailand’s policy direction in 2013 Speech by Dr Prasarn Trairatvorakul, Governor of the Bank of Thailand, at the Bank of Thailand, Bangkok, 22 January 2013. *  *  *  Honourable guests and members of the press, Thank you all for attending this annual event, in which I would like to outline the Bank of Thailand (BOT)’s policy direction in 2013. Throughout history, our country might at times be faced with economic challenges and obstacles of different nature and severity, but the BOT’s mission and resolve to safeguard Thailand’s economic and financial stability has remained unchanged since its birth over 70 years go. Today our country is moving into an era of ever-closer linkages, whose scope extends well beyond the technology and communication dimension. It involves regional economic integration, not least among neighbouring countries or what is collectively known as the CLMV area. Within our country itself, the volume of cross-provincial trade and the number of SMEs outside the capital have grown, suggesting that growth has been increasingly inclusive. On the other hand, the greater economic interdependence brought about by closer trade and financial integration could also be a source of systemic risk, if an imbalance, however small, was allowed to develop unchecked. The BOT, as one of the nation’s key policy makers, strives to foster a sound and stable economic environment that enables the private sector not only to grow, but also to retain sufficient resilience and flexibility to withstand competition and uncertainties.
A good scenario would be what policymakers and analysts call a “soft landing”, where growth slows down sufficiently to reduce inflation but the economy avoids recession. Given how high inflation has climbed and the degree of monetary policy tightening that may be necessary to bring inflation down, the pathway to achieve such a scenario is quite narrow. A more likely variant of a good scenario is a mild, short-lived technical recession that tames inflation and sets the stage for a sustained recovery in growth. A bad scenario is a deeper recession in some of the major economies even as inflation is brought down: a so-called “hard landing”. Such a scenario could occur if monetary policy tightening precipitates sharp dislocations in financial markets. In many countries, financial vulnerabilities have increased due to a run-up in private sector debt during the last ten years of highly accommodative monetary policies. Overvalued assets and high debt could magnify any growth slowdown. An ugly scenario would be one where growth stagnates while inflation remains high – stagflation. This could happen if fresh supply shocks or disruptions further boost inflation while monetary policy tightening sharply reduces economic activity. Stagflations are rare but when they occur, they present difficult policy dilemmas for governments and central banks. Economic growth in Singapore is expected to moderate further in 2023 in tandem with the slowdown in our major trading partners. The extent of the growth moderation will depend in part on how the scenarios for the global economy will pan out.

Currently, the inflation rate is too low, but the main factors pushing down domestic inflation are of a transitory nature. Medium-term price stability is not in doubt. Thank you very much for your attention. 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
Outside the UK, the model of independent regulators with mandates making rules is common practice in most other jurisdictions. The need for operational independence is reflected in the Basel Core Principles for banking supervision.8 All jurisdictions represented in the Basel Committee implemented the Basel 3 reforms through regulators’ rules or guidelines rather than primary legislation, with the exceptions of the EU, with its very specific supranational structure, and Switzerland, with its unique federal structure. Details of the FPC’s objectives and primary responsibilities are set out in section 9C of the Bank of England Act 1998. In particular, the FPC is charged with ‘the identification of, monitoring of, and taking of action to remove or reduce, systemic risks with a view to protecting and enhancing the resilience of the UK financial system’, but this does not ‘require or authorise the Committee to exercise its functions in a way that would in its opinion be likely to have a significant adverse effect on the capacity of the financial sector to contribute to the growth of the UK economy in the medium or long term’. For a more detailed discussion of the FPC’s mandate, see my colleague Alex Brazier’s May 2019 speech, ‘Citizens in service, not people in power’, available at https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/speech/2019/citizens-in-service-not-people-in-power-speech-byalex-brazier.pdf.

By contrast, the financial regulator’s task is solely focussed on delivering and maintaining rules that are fit for purpose for their regulated sector only – there is no competition for other initiatives and the process and timetable provides certainty to industry. In a second model, prudential regulatory-setting powers could lie with government ministers. This model would be dynamic because the government would be able to adjust prudential regulation. It would be legitimate since the government is directly accountable to the parliament and ultimately the electorate. But it may not be time consistent because it creates the possibility that prudential regulation will be influenced unduly by the electoral cycle, as was deemed to have happened to monetary policy prior to central bank independence. Alternatively and in a third model, these powers could be given to an independent regulatory body. This model is likely to ensure that prudential regulation is both dynamic and time-consistent. An expert regulator would be able to identify and implement necessary dynamic adjustments, and, for reputation reasons, it would have an incentive to maintain prudential standards provided that it avoided industry capture. But, absent further accountability mechanisms to enhance it, it would lack legitimacy. In summary, each of these models lacks one of the ideal features for the institutional structure of prudential regulation.
Mugur Isărescu: Romania and the EIB after 25 years Opening speech by Mr Mugur Isărescu, Governor of the National Bank of Romania, at the EIB conference "Investment and Investment Finance in Romania", Bucharest, 4 December 2018. * * * Vice President McDowell, Distinguished guests, Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to welcome you all at the National Bank of Romania. Allow me to extend a warm greeting to Mr. Andrew McDowell, Vice President of the European Investment Bank and to Ms. Debora Revoltella, Chief Economist of the European Investment Bank. It is a privilege for the National Bank of Romania to co-host with the European Investment Bank this conference on Investments and Investment Finance. The European Investment Bank celebrates this year its 60th anniversary since its creation in 1958, under the Treaty of Rome. Allow me to congratulate this important institution and the teams of the EIB Office in Romania and the EIB Office in Luxembourg, for their outstanding work and diligence in promoting strategic investment projects for Europe and Romania. The topic proposed for today’s conference outlines the fact that 2018 has been rich in lessons for the future, showing the impact of policy decisions upon the economic development. The economic growth is strongly linked with the economic cycle, but its durability is dependent on long-term strategic investments by far more than short-term consumption boost. I invite you all to debate the subject of Investments and Investment Finance in Romania during the two panels of today’s conference.

The partnership between the European Investment Bank and the commercial banks in Romania ensure the effective transmission mechanism to allocate and distribute the European structural funds to the infrastructure projects, to the development of production capacities of the small and medium enterprises and to the creation of new jobs in the economy. The banks are well capitalized, have an excellent solvency and a superior liquidity, prerequisites for co-financing the companies and the economy. The loan-to-deposits ratio is below 100%, indicating available resources for financing. Nonperforming loans have decreased more than three times, from 22% to about 6%, showing a positive trend in a healthier internal ratings model and a sound balance sheet position, while the lending dynamics for companies is below the European average. We have the potential to accelerate the access to finance to support investments as a base for economic growth, instead of a consumption driven growth. This potential is demonstrated by the low financial intermediation in Romania, around 29%, although this percentage can be misleading, as large corporations usually access financing directly abroad, from the headquarters or from the financial institutions in the countries where they are headquartered. The more prudent lending policies and the risk aversion of commercial banks are factors that could be perceived as a break in financing investments at full capacity; however there is a positive side, too. It is a safe approach to credit as a driver of economic growth, as credit (lat.
U.S. Regulations and Approaches to Cryptocurrencies December 03, 2019 Posted December 12, 2019 Michael Held, Executive Vice President and General Counsel  Remarks at the BIS Central Bank Legal Experts’ Meeting, Basel, Switzerland As prepared for delivery Thank you, Diego, for “volunteering” me to speak about digital currencies—a field in which I count myself as very much a trainee, not an expert. Today I will focus on the U.S. regulatory landscape for digital currencies, in particular on digital currencies issued by private organizations that are intended to be used like money. As always, the views I express are my own, not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System.1 Policy makers and regulators in the United States, to date, have not developed an overarching framework for regulating private digital currencies. The field has been seen as too new for a comprehensive regulatory response. To be sure, the digital nature of new private currencies will raise challenges to which policy makers must respond. In my view, however, we spend so much time wrestling with the novelty of digital currencies that we forget that private currency is nothing new. The theme of my talk today is accordingly best encapsulated by a quote that is attributed—perhaps wrongly—to Mark Twain: “History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” The Past Is Not Dead. It Isn’t Even Past So, let’s take a little walk through the history of privately-issued currency.

It was a push towards harmony in private currency, a pressing need for a wartime government in the throes of a civil war. Unlike wildcat banknotes, national bank notes were backed universally by federal government bonds and deposits of other money, such as U.S. government issued “greenback,” in each case held by the United States Treasury, and they circulated at parity with other forms of money.15 The National Bank Act also introduced the division between banking and commerce in the United States, which may have erased some of the more-speculative bank activities of the wildcat era.16 Federal intervention and tighter regulation meant that national banks and their notes were both safer and more fungible than their wildcat predecessors, and the United States’ transition into national bank notes, coupled with new, unfavorable tax treatment for state bank notes, meant the demise of wildcat banknotes.17 Decades later, the establishment of the Federal Reserve System, a central bank currency, and a push for banks to engage in deposittaking activities meant the overall demise of private currency in the United States for decades.18 The Child Is Father to the Man This is, admittedly, a fairly crude history of money and banking in the United States, but you see where I’m going with this. It is hard not to see certain parallels between today’s digital currencies and the bank notes issued during the wildcat era.
However, they have reached an affluent status today through their various actions and initiatives. Obviously therefore, as in the case of any successful outcome, we could learn from those case  BIS Review 83/2006  1  studies. In fact, we in Sri Lanka felt that we should do so professionally and objectively. We began by examining the economic and political environments in which many of the highly successful countries operated. We studied the external and internal conditions that prevailed during the early days of growth of those countries. We also attempted to analyze the factors which enabled those countries to break the shackles and reach a stable platform from where they launched themselves to the next level of development. In that exercise, one of our key findings was that, in the journey to reach developed and industrialized country status, many of those countries had immense space and flexibility to grow in an uninhibited environment. Further, when the present day rich countries were growing, (from per capita income of US dollars 1,000 to US dollars 10,000), they faced very few obstacles in the movement of capital and labour. They did not have to be overly concerned about human or labour rights. They were free to impose trade quotas and grant very visible and obvious subsidies to their local entrepreneurs and farmers. They were not subjected to stringent global standards for copyrights. They were not desperately worried about safeguarding the ozone layer or the environment.

The same declaration undertook to steer the group’s efforts to overcome poverty, ignorance and disease, as well as to raise standards of life and achieve a more equitable international society. 20 years later, in 1991, the Harare Declaration was issued. This declaration conceded that many Commonwealth countries were still poor and that they faced acute problems, including excessive population growth, continuation of poverty, debt burdens and environmental degradation. At the same time, it was acknowledged that while disparities among members appeared to have worsened, some favourable results were also being achieved. For example, despite the widening economic gap, many nations had been able to establish better democratic processes, good administrative frameworks, more independent judiciaries, keener respect for human, fundamental and labour rights, and several other social successes. Those were of course significant achievements, and we should all be proud that we have been able to create such conditions in our countries. Notwithstanding those gains as noted in 1991, and the many subsequent successes, we may still have to admit that our collective efforts to address one of the fundamental Principles of the Singapore Declaration, namely, that of addressing the issue of income disparity, has been, by and large, unsuccessful. Today, 35 years after the Singapore Declaration, it is actually becoming even more acute, and consequently, we need to respond to that widening gap appropriately, urgently. Your Excellencies, Distinguished Guests, As we all know, countries that are affluent today were not affluent at some point in time in their history.
Speech delivered by Dr. Indrajit Coomaraswamy at 20th Annual General Meeting of the Exporters Association of Sri Lanka Today, in addition to the growth and employment objectives, we have this onerous debt problem that we have to address. We can’t really address that without a significant improvement in our export performance. Now, by way of introduction, before I get into the issues relating to the export sector, specifically, let me just give by way of background, some remarks about the growth model that the government is trying to put into place. It is private sector driven with exports and FDI as key figures. If I may say a few words about each of those: I’ve been a public servant all my life, so I don’t subscribe to the view that the private sector is the panacea for all our ills. In fact, if you look around the world, you get different mixes of the private sector and the State in terms of delivering good development outcomes. But in our case, the public debt and deficit dynamics are such, that the State simply cannot lead the development process. It’s nothing to do with ideology. It is a purely pragmatic assertion that it has to be the private sector that has to drive the growth in the regeneration process of this country.

This was especially so between 2000 and 2016, wherein GDP increased by a compounded annual growth rate of 10.4%, while exports grew only 4%. Page 5 of 17  Sri Lanka’s economic growth during the past decade or so has mainly been generated by the expansion of domestic demand, rather than increased exports. The tradable sector, that is Imports and Exports as a percentage of GDP, declined from nearly 80% to 45% from 2005 to 2015. As a Small Open Economy you simply  cannot do that. The problems were compounded by a heavy recourse to foreign commercial borrowing for projects with low returns. That is what has led to the debt problems and many of the other difficulties we are having. When compared with regional peers and competitors, Sri Lanka’s export performance has lagged behind significantly. The Export Value Index presented by the World Bank shows the extent to which Sri Lanka’s export sector has been lagging in comparison to its regional counterparts, during the period from 2000 to 2015. Sri Lanka has only increased its exports by 1.9 times in that period 2000 to 2015, while Vietnam and Bangladesh have increased by 11.2 times and 5.1 times respectively. Even South Korea and  Thailand which have a much higher base, increased their exports by 3.1 times, whereas we, as I said only recorded a 1.9.