samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
We were aware that discontinuing the minimum exchange rate would have significant effects on the outlook for the economy and inflation. However, as the Governing Board, we must be prepared to make decisions that may have negative effects in the short term. We are convinced that postponing a decision which was ultimately unavoidable would have caused far higher costs in the long term. Review and appraisal of the minimum exchange rate As mentioned before, the minimum exchange rate of CHF 1.20 per euro was the SNB’s key monetary policy instrument for almost three and a half years. I will therefore begin my brief appraisal of this instrument in the summer of 2011, shortly before it was introduced. That summer saw a renewed deterioration in the outlook for the global economy, which was only hesitantly recovering from the worst recession since the 1930s. In addition, at that time, the European debt crisis was escalating again. In the US Congress, a protracted battle about raising the debt ceiling was under way. Given these developments, uncertainty on the financial markets was increasing very rapidly, and demand for Swiss francs soared. The Swiss franc appreciated very sharply against all major currencies, including the US dollar. In August 2011, the Swiss franc was, by any measure, massively overvalued. The SNB began by expanding liquidity on the money market to an extent that was historically unprecedented. However, the effect of this liquidity expansion on the exchange rate was only temporary.

Detailed analysis of trade exchanges confirms high concentration of Albanian exports in certain geographical regions or in certain product groups and their low value added. For stable growth of exports and sound adjustment of the trade deficit, the policy-makers’ attention should focus on increasing the competitiveness of domestic products and expanding the base of exports through accelerated structural reforms. Financial market developments have reflected the low risk premia and inflation, hence enabling better transmission of easing monetary policy signals that started at the beginning of this year. Interbank interest rates have performed in line with the key interest rate, with slight volatility. The primary market yields on government securities have dropped sharply, particularly on longer-term maturities. Over the last months, the interest rate cut was faster on deposits but lower on loans. Interest rates on loans responded more slowly than other market rates due to low lending to economy during the last months. Monetary developments highlight continuation of weak inflationary pressures in the economy. The annual money-supply growth acceleration reflected primarily the private sector’s added demand for financing over the last two months. Also, households’ and businesses’ demand for money remained weak. Private sector credit slowed down sharply, and at the end of May it was 0.2% lower than a year earlier. The weak lending performance  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  is increasingly reflecting the businesses’ lower demand for loan, alongside the tight lending standards.
Finally, we need a good system of consumer protection in order to ensure fair and transparent provision of financial services. I believe that financial regulators have an important role to play in all three areas. The fact that we are all here today, already signifies our commitment to addressing such issues, thus ascertaining the success of financial inclusion. Not just for our own sake, but also for the sake of our friends around the world. After having seen this morning’s agenda, I am certain that there will be plenty of great discussions among us today. I myself am very interested to hear us take the current policy challenges further, arriving at how best we think AFI can play a role in tackling such issues. Of course, us working together to ensure the sustainability of the AFI community together with our policy impact would also be key. BIS Review 87/2009  1  I look forward to discussing our proposals of potential AFI flagship projects, all of which, I believe would make significant contributions to the global efforts on financial inclusion. In this connection, the Bank of Thailand will be presenting our proposal on “Using survey data to design financial inclusion policy” for your consideration. The project findings would not only provide a useful international research contribution in the area of financial inclusion, but also an easily replicable exercise for anyone to conduct and repeat over time, thus adding to the stock of critical grass-root information on financial access.

Tarisa Watanagase: Creating sustainable financial inclusion Welcome remarks by Dr Tarisa Watanagase, Governor of the Bank of Thailand, at 1st AFI Start-up Committee Meeting, Bangkok, 10 July 2009. *  *  *  Deputy Governor, Director-General, Dr. Hannig, Colleagues, It is a pleasure to welcome all of you to Bangkok, which for some of you, I know is a long way from home. Thank you for making such an effort to be here. I cannot tell you enough how much your presence and participation in this meeting is appreciated. Though we have work to do this morning, I hope that you will also have a chance to enjoy your stay in Bangkok, including our sight-seeing tour this afternoon. At the AFI Public Announcement back in April where President Babatz and I had a chance to address the meeting as members of our Start-up Committee, I was delighted to see the kind of positive response and enthusiasm shown by policy makers from a broad spectrum of countries. Many of whom, I learned, have decided to jump on board with us, making AFI membership grow to more than fifty countries, worldwide. This only confirms that among many agenda laid on the table in international policy forums today, financial inclusion is the one agenda that we can all agree and give our full support to.
Speech  Embargo 27 April 2018, 10.00 am  Comments on monetary policy and banking regulation 110th Ordinary General Meeting of Shareholders of the Swiss National Bank  Thomas J. Jordan Chairman of the Governing Board Swiss National Bank Berne, 27 April 2018 © Swiss National Bank (speech given in German)  Page 1/8  Mr President of the Bank Council Dear Shareholders Dear Guests It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to our Annual General Meeting. As is customary, the first part of my speech will be devoted to comments on the current economic situation and monetary policy. Ten years after the start of the global financial crisis, we can now look back on a year in which economic momentum has been much more positive – both in Switzerland and worldwide. The question is: has the global economy now finally completed its unusually sluggish recovery process? As I will show, there are indeed grounds for optimism, but it is still too early for this to give way to euphoria. In the second part of my speech, I would like to look at the state of play in banking regulation. A decade on from the global financial crisis, we should not just be asking whether we have recovered from the consequences of this event; we should also take stock of what we have done to improve the ability of our banking system to withstand future crises.

Page 2/8  Monetary policy  With a view to ensuring appropriate monetary conditions, we are continuing to pursue our expansionary monetary policy. This is based on the negative interest rate that banks and other financial market participants are charged on their sight deposits at the SNB and on our continued willingness to intervene in the foreign exchange market as necessary. Both instruments remain essential as the situation is still fragile. While the foreign exchange market has largely shrugged off recent equity market turbulence, circumstances in the financial markets – and thus by extension monetary conditions for the economy – could rapidly deteriorate again. Such a development would be undesirable in the current environment. Inflation is now within the range that the SNB equates with price stability, and capacity utilisation in the economy has continued to improve. Nevertheless, inflation remains low and inflationary pressure is modest despite our expansionary monetary policy. Tightening monetary conditions would be premature at this juncture, and would risk unnecessarily jeopardising the positive economic momentum that has been established. The Swiss economy picked up markedly last year against a positive global economic backdrop. However, we should not let ourselves get carried away. Despite the easing on the foreign exchange market in the past twelve months, both short-term (cyclical) and longer-term (structural) challenges remain. Competition with other business locations around the world remains as intense now as it was prior to the crisis.
The focus of their concerns shifted from future profitability to future survival. CDS premia rose to unprecedented levels (Chart 6), bank equity prices fell sharply and the money markets seized up. Interbank lending spreads widened dramatically (Chart 7) and lending became almost entirely concentrated in the overnight market. The shortening of interbank maturities generated a dangerous “snowball” effect as maturing term funding had to be rolled overnight. It was to tackle that wider loss of confidence that the UK authorities announced on 8th of October its comprehensive package of support for recapitalisation, guaranteed funding and enhanced liquidity. It was designed to remove solvency fears by ensuring that banks had more than sufficient capital to survive a severe economic downturn and thus to enable them to continue to lend on normal criteria to good credits. The new capital and the government guaranteed borrowing and liquidity support was designed to ensure and be seen to ensure that banks would be able to sustain their businesses through a downturn. With the banking system fully solvent, guarantees could be extended without exposing taxpayer to unacceptable risks. In a remarkable show of international consensus, a similar approach was quickly adopted by many other countries both in the US and EU and more widely. Looking ahead The early signs suggest that the package is underpinning the banking system both directly and as a demonstration of the authorities’ determination to do whatever is needed to reestablish confidence. In particular CDS premia for banks have fallen markedly (Chart 6) since the package was announced.

Chart 7: Three-month interbank rates relative to expected policy rates  Chart 8: Three-month UK interbank rate relative to expected policy rates  Sterling  Basis points 250  Basis points Euro 400  US dollar  200  350 300 (d)(e)  150  250  Forward spread on 7 October 2008 (c)  (c) 200 150  100  Forward spread on 20 October 2008 (c)  100  50  50 0 Jan.  Apr. 2007  Jul. Oct.  Jan.  Apr. Jul. Oct.  Sources: Bloomberg 08 and Bank calculations. 0 Jul. 2008  Sep.  Nov.  Jan.  Mar. May. Jul. 09 Sources: Bloomberg and Bank calculations  BIS Review 132/2008  7  Chart 9: Dynamic provisioning  Specific provisions as a percentage of total loans General provisions as a percentage of total loans Total provisions as a percentage of total loans  Upswing  Per cent of total loans  Downturn  0  Time  Table 1: Key actions to improve resilience  • Macroprudential tools are needed to guard against systemic risk • Capital levels need to rise and need to be of sufficient quality • Liquidity standards should be strengthened • Strengthen the legal framework for depositor protection and bank resolution • Better management of cross-border financial institutions • More disclosure, including potential future balance sheet volatility • Developing centralised infrastructures for over-the-counter instruments  8  BIS Review 132/2008
This is a substantial project that will take about a year to complete. In the meantime, we shall be issuing new and revised supervisory guidelines in the new format as they come off the production line. Conclusions To sum up, our reform package is not intended to be revolutionary. The Hong Kong banking system is already well-managed and competitive. But even good players need to improve their game as conditions become tougher. The main responsibility for doing this in the Hong Kong banking context will rest with the banks themselves. We in the HKMA are trying to do our bit by removing possible barriers to change in a cautious manner, and by making sure that our supervisory approach remains appropriate to the changing market environment. 5  BIS Review 69/2000

The FOMC decided at its November 2010 meeting to expand the amount of domestic securities held in the System Open Market Account (SOMA) portfolio by $ billion by purchasing longer-term Treasury securities through the end of June 2011. Those purchases were in addition to ones already being made to reinvest the principal payments from SOMA holdings of agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) into longer-term Treasury securities. The purchase program was implemented by the Open Market Trading Desk (Desk) at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. To be sure, it was a busy period for the Desk. Over the life of the program, we conducted 140 outright purchase operations to meet the directive set out by the FOMC. That meant that we were active on nearly every day possible over that period. In those operations, the Desk bought $ billion of Treasury securities, which included the $ billion expansion of the portfolio and $ billion of reinvestments. Our operations ranged in size from just over $ billion to around $ billion, with an average size of about $ billion. Those operations brought the amount of domestic assets held in the SOMA portfolio to $ trillion. The current directive from the FOMC instructs the Desk to continue to reinvest the principal payments on all domestic assets held in SOMA into Treasury securities. Thus, the amount of assets held in the SOMA will remain at that level until the FOMC decides to change the directive. Of course, the portfolio at these levels is unusually large.
Rather, it lays out a framework and set of principles to govern actions in the face of circumstances in whatever form they take. The distinction between a strategy and a particular course of action is well known in monetary policy. A monetary policy strategy provides the framework for assessing economic circumstances and responding to ever changing contingencies. But a strategy does not spell out interest rate decisions in the future. In my view, the exit strategy from non-standard measures is comparable. As of today, we do not have all the information necessary to decide which exit path will be desirable or optimal from the perspective of tomorrow. But we have developed a set of criteria that will guide our future decisions. In this sense, exit considerations are subject to the same qualification that I always make when I speak on behalf of the Governing Council on monetary policy matters: we are not pre-committed. 4  BIS Review 103/2009  Accordingly, as of today, we are not committed to a particular timing or sequence of actions for the exit phase. But our future decisions will not be arbitrary. They will be guided by a framework. In my view, four cornerstones have to be considered in our approach to exit from non-standard measures: the link to our monetary policy strategy; the forward-looking initial design of the measures; our technical and institutional ability to act; and our reputation for swift and decisive action when it is required. BIS Review 103/2009  5  1.

To end that session, the paper by Benjamín García, Mario Giarda, and Carlos Lizama , will show us the current state of a HANK model developed for Chile and will analyze the average and the distributional effects of fiscal transfers on consumption in the presence of household heterogeneity. On the second day, we will continue the study of the role of heterogeneity in policy design in the session "heterogeneity and economic policy". The paper by Felipe Alves and Gianluca Violante sheds light on different monetary policy rules that focus on different parts of wealth distribution, with an emphasis on the unequal costs of inflation. On the other hand, the paper by Valerie Ramey, Jacob Orchard, and Johannes Wieland will offer an alternative perspective on the role of household heterogeneity in macroeconomics, arguing that the consumption responses estimated at the micro level are not necessarily consistent with the macroeconomic responses of consumption in the US during the Great Recession. The last academic session of the conference named "financial markets and monetary policy" focuses on the role of financial markets, firm-level and bank-level heterogeneity in shaping the transmission channels of monetary policy. The work by Boragan Aruoba , Andres Fernández, Bernabe Lopez-Martin, Will Lu, and Felipe Saffie studies the financial channel of monetary policy, showing that the response of firm-level employment and investment to monetary policy shocks heavily depends on firms' financial conditions.
Today, while the world trade has on the average expanded by 10 percent over the period 2001-2005, Asia's trade with the Middle East has increased at the average rate of 24 percent. There is also increasing interest by the Middle East investors in the Asian region driven by the investment opportunities. While the US remains the major recipient of investment flows from the Middle East, Asia has surpassed the Euro region as the second most popular investment destination. Of the USD2 trillion foreign investment flows from the Middle East in 2006, USD450 billion flowed into Asia. Malaysia is centrally located in the ASEAN region which comprises a potential market of about 570 million population and a combined GDP of more than $ trillion. Malaysia is well positioned to provide the linkages to support investment flows in the region. The development of Malaysia as an Islamic financial hub in the Asian region has facilitated this process. In relation to this, Malaysia has become a centre for origination, distribution and trading of Islamic bonds or sukuks. It is also becoming a centre for Islamic fund and wealth management services and for international Islamic banking business, and for international takaful and retakaful business as well as a centre for Islamic finance education, training, consultancy and research. Significant progress, in particular, has been achieved in the development of the Malaysian sukuk market. The Malaysian sukuk market has now evolved into the world's largest Islamic bond market.

Could that then have some impact on the feasibility of continued price stability in Sweden? Yet another risk is, of course, that the international price of crude oil does not fall back as most observers expect. It is not the oil price as such that is primarily important for the analysis but rather any impact it may have on other prices in the economy, for example wage increases. The discussion in the euro area has, moreover, highlighted the international crude oil price’s interaction with exchange rates. Risks of these types have to be weighed against the probability of a faster correction of existing imbalances in the world economy, for instance the US current account deficit, the level of stock markets and the dollar’s exchange rate. Assessing the likely course of such adjustments is exceptionally difficult. Instead of attempting to predict such a course, which may be impossible, one needs to be alert to signs that it is appearing. Concluding remarks The picture I have painted of the Swedish economy is fairly bright but it is accompanied by a number of clearly identified risks. It looks as though the favourable trend can continue but our economy is now in the cyclical phase that calls for heightened attention. The conceivable risks have to be assessed and weighed up by us on the Executive Board.
Do you have the impression that the Heads of Government have understood what is at stake? I believe they are conscious of their extraordinary responsibility. They all have to make decisions in the context of democracies which, in the advanced economies, are very inwardlooking, which is a real problem at the time of the worst global crisis for the last 66 years. What will happen if the European Heads of Government do not get the crisis under control? My working assumption is that the Heads of State and Government will overcome the crisis. Europe must realign its fiscal policy, as other large developed economies must also do. This year, at 10%, the deficits in the United States and Japan will be around twice as high as in the euro area on a consolidated basis. In spite of this, Europe is the epicentre of the government debt crisis. The reason for this is the mutual dependence of the 17 euro area countries. This is why it is so important that every euro area country plays by the rules. A few days ago in the European Parliament, I quoted what I told the Members of the Parliament in my first hearings, eight years ago, four years before the crisis, concerning the absolute necessity to stick to the Stability and Growth Pact. At your Governing Council meeting last week you reactivated all the crisis instruments. Is the euro in serious danger? The euro as a currency is evidently not in danger.

5 Richard H. Clarida, Vice Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, The Federal Reserve’s  Review of Its Monetary Policy Strategy, Tools, and Communications Practices , speech delivered at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, April 9, 2019. 3/3  BIS central bankers' speeches