samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Significantly, this reforming drive has in no way been slowed by the fact that the Eurosystem has taken specific measures, such as the three-year long-term refinancing operations. In the specific case of the ongoing clean-up, restructuring and recapitalisation of the Spanish credit system, this process has intensified, to adapt to a new set of increasingly worse economic and financing conditions, by imposing stricter capital and real estate provisioning requirements on banks. Of the recently adopted structural reforms, I would underline the importance of the labour market reform. This is an area where Spain had built up evident inefficiencies that have now been tackled to some extent by the new legislation. The essential role of employment in any  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  scenario for exiting the crisis should also be highlighted, since only with a recovery in jobs can a stable path of public finances, a reduction in private debt and bank restructuring become entrenched. The labour market reform is intended to provide companies with various means to achieve greater internal flexibility, so that they may adapt working conditions more rapidly and effectively to their position in the cycle. In this respect, it allows the decentralisation of collective bargaining and shapes an environment more conducive to job creation and job stability, once the current difficult circumstances have been overcome. Overall, these changes should in time bring about a recovery in the competitiveness of Spanish companies.

One thing we can use, is to look at how things have been before. The empirical national economist’s traditional method is to gather data, to structure data and to seek correlations between different economic variables. Data is gathered from history, the correlations found are historical ones. For me, traditional forecasting is all about using history in various ways to tell us something about the future. But of course it is not always the case that things behave in the same way as before. Sometimes developments take a new path, a path that we had not imagined. Spring 2020 was a good example of this. When the crisis came, history was not much help to us. Apart from being unexpected, each crisis is unique. The April Monetary Policy Report therefore did not present any forecast. Instead, it presented two scenarios showing two possible developments over the coming period. I consider that this was as far as we could go when we could not use history to help us. To me, it has been natural that monetary policy in recent months has been very much in the here and now. The problems arising required immediate measures. The measures taken have made monetary policy more expansionary. And we cannot rule out the possibility of setbacks. When we can once again interpret inflation statistics and when we can once again use history to say something about the future, monetary policy can also become more forward-looking than it has been in recent months.
And research by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills suggests there are an incredible 17 million adults in the UK whose standards of mathematics are no higher than those of a primary school child. 40 The way maths is taught may be part of the problem here. For many, maths is a turn-off because it seems unrelated to their everyday lives; it lacks real-world relevance. Sad to say, payday lenders have a greater resonance to many people than Pythagoras’s theorem. The abstract nature of mathematics, as taught, leads many children to tune out or switch off entirely. Others conclude that they simply do not have “a maths brain”. This is an educational scar that can last a lifetime. Part of the solution may come from making maths relevant to people’s lives, to link it to realworld decisions. And what better set of real-world decisions than financial ones: how to draw up a monthly budget of debits and credits; how to make sense of an Annual Percentage Rate on a loan; how to decide between competing savings, pensions and mortgage products. These are big financial decisions that, if flunked, can have big social, as well as financial, consequences. Re-orienting the school curriculum in this, more practical, direction might help in bridging the information gap. So too would making available courses which help adults, all 17 million of them, make better financial decisions.

We urge you to discuss the many issues confronting our respective countries and attempt to learn from each other as well as from the broader experiences from international experts and develop our skills and expertise. We also look forward to your report at the conclusion of your deliberations. Let us also offer all of you our continued co-operation in your collective endeavors to combat money laundering and terrorist financing activities. Finally, we wish you a successful learning experience and hope that your efforts will effectively contribute to the prevention and suppression of money laundering and financing of terrorism. BIS Review 9/2007  3
It first seems reasonable to me to avoid, in this matter and at this stage, any Treaty change. We could keep the 3% deficit target, which is a useful anchor, and even the 60% debt target. But the rule of a 1/20 annual linear adjustment towards the latter target has become unrealistic because it is too strict, especially for highly indebted countries. And, instead of the structural deficit which no one really understands, or even knows how to calculate accurately we could set a ceiling on the growth rate of public spending as an operational target. At constant tax rates, this amounts to much the same thing in economic terms, and was the main thrust of the reform put forward in 2019 by the European Budget Committee (EBC) chaired by Niels Thygesen. These rules should not simply be seen as a constraint imposed by Brussels, but should be widely internalised, 'taken up' in our French budgetary debate, as they are in our national interest. 2. Adding a European stabilisation and investment capacity Allow me to imagine a successful exit from the forthcoming tough European and Franco-German - negotiations: the southern European countries - including France - accept domestic rules for fiscal discipline; the northern countries including Germany - accept a European fiscal capacity.

Being based on a common debt, this instrument would also make it possible, should it be activated, to raise the quantity of safe European assets available on financial markets, and thus to reinforce the Capital Markets Union and the international role of the euro. 3. Focusing the debate on the quality of public spending One essential point often remains the blind spot in our budgetary debate: the quality and efficiency of public spending. I am aware of the risk of appearing to give too easy or theoretical lessons on these subjects I am a great believer in our public service, and I am affected by the current crisis it is going through. So many public services in France are suffering from the dissatisfaction of both their players - the civil servants - and their users - the citizens. Pointing systematically to a lack of resources and staff seems to be a slightly simplistic explanation, when public spending in France is the highest of the advanced countries and ten GDP points higher than the average of our European neighbours sharing the same social model. This crisis is less a financial issue than a management issue for the public service: I believe in re-legitimising its objectives, better recognising its civil servants, granting greater autonomy to its managers, improving its capacity for performance and innovation, and investing in its modernisation. Hollow utopias?
The American and British experiences underscore that recovery is not possible without a meaningful and transparent re-capitalisation of the banking system, and that households need to de-lever before they have the confidence to consume again. 1  60,000 jobs per month in the UK is roughly the equivalent of monthly increases in US non-farm payrolls of 300,000. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  The question now is whether such progress is sufficient for durable, strong and balanced recoveries over the medium term. Growing pessimism The pessimists would argue that it isn’t. Their case starts from the observation that advanced economy growth rates remain below pre-crisis trends, despite the scale of the fall and years of emergency monetary stimulus. More fundamentally, pessimists point to the pre-crisis period when (retrospectively) loose financial conditions did not generate a boom in output and associated inflation. They ask: could stagnation be the new normal? Today I want to consider two possible explanations for why advanced economies may have entered a low growth phase. First, on the demand side, they could be in a persistent liquidity trap, making it difficult for resources to be fully utilized, and second, there may have been a persistent deterioration in the supply side such that full utilisation of resources is consistent with slower growth. 1. Persistent liquidity trap  A liquidity trap occurs when the short-term nominal interest rate hits the zero lower bound.

Mark Carney: The spirit of the season Speech by Mr Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England and Chairman of the Financial Stability Board, to the Economic Club of New York, New York City, 9 December 2013. *  *  *  Accompanying charts can be found at the end of the speech. It is always a pleasure to be in New York during the festive season. At this time of year in this city everything seems possible. However for some time now, appearances have deceived. The hopes and dreams of the holiday season have gone unfulfilled as the bright lights of December have given way to the grim realities of January. Around this time every year policymakers, investors and economists take stock. For four of the past five years, perhaps caught up in the seasonal spirit of goodwill, they have rendered the same verdict: the outgoing year was disappointing but the incoming one will be better (Chart 1). This year is no different. The IMF, the Bank of England and private forecasters all predict faster growth in the advanced and global economies in 2014. Will such hopes again be dashed once the New Year dawns? More profoundly, as the string of disappointments lengthens, some are raising deeper questions. It is being suggested that a malign spirit, a spectre of Christmases past, haunts our future. In particular, no less an authority than Larry Summers has raised the prospect that “secular stagnation” could be the root cause of past excess and current weakness.
As far as the theory is concerned, this is pretty much guaranteed in any formal description of the economy as long as (i) people are assumed to care about real not nominal things – what their wages can actually buy, not just what they’re worth in pounds or dollars – and (ii) prices are ultimately flexible. But for a while, in the immediate aftermath of Phillips’s paper, the point was temporarily forgotten. His eponymous curve was commonly interpreted as some unchanging, structural relationship, one that seemed to offer a long-run choice between controlling  2 Phillips (1958), ‘The Relation Between Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wage Rates in  the United Kingdom, 1861–1957’. Economica. Phillips actually estimated the relationship between wage growth and unemployment – what is now called the “labour market Phillips curve”. The plain description “Phillips curve” usually refers to the equivalent relationship between output and price inflation. Gali provides theoretical foundations to Phillips’ empirical relationship in his 2011 paper ‘The return of the wage Phillips curve’. Bank of England  Page 9  inflation and boosting real activity and incomes. If a country was prepared to tolerate a slightly higher rate of inflation it could (on this view) generate a permanent rise in its real income. It was Milton Friedman, in his famous 1968 presidential address to the American Economic Association3, who brought people back to earth. It was true, he said, that monetary expansions could boost activity and employment for a while.

Bank of England  Page 16  Chart 9: “Excess deposits” have fallen only slightly but households’ overall financial wealth is down sharply  125 120  Household financial wealth relative to disposable income 410 Household M4 (LHS) 390  115  370  110 350 105 100  330  Net financial wealth (RHS)  95  310  90 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022  290  2022 Q3 data points are estimated. Sources: Bank of England, ONS and Bank calculations. But to varying degrees these cushions have since been eroded. The saving rate has fallen sharply and is now around a percentage point below its long-term, pre-Covid average. Most of the excess deposits remain, it seems. But one might ask why they do – why, at a time of significant reported pressure on household finances (when consumer confidence has been setting new record lows), more of them haven’t been spent – and therefore whether it’s realistic to think that they will be in the near future. As many have pointed out, these deposits are probably skewed towards the upper end of the income distribution (and therefore away from those for whom rises in energy prices are the most burdensome). It’s also worth recognising that other household assets have been weakening sharply this year. Despite higher deposits, households’ overall net financial wealth is quite a bit lower than before the pandemic.
Richard W Fisher: Uncertainty matters (with reference to kinky monetary policy, two nickels and a dime) Remarks by Mr Richard W Fisher, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, before the Causes & Macroeconomic Consequences of Uncertainty Conference, Dallas, Texas, 3 October 2013. *  *  *  The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect official positions of the Federal Reserve System. The speaker is indebted to Dallas Fed Senior Vice President and Principal Policy Advisor Evan Koenig for his input in developing the themes articulated in this speech. Thank you, Evan [Koenig] It is a pleasure to share this platform with John Taylor. I first met John at a Carnegie Foundation seminar when he was Undersecretary of the Treasury; I have been among the legions of his admirers ever since. He is thoughtful, no-nonsense and, importantly, dedicated to making monetary policy work with maximum efficacy. We at the Dallas Fed are grateful that he chairs the advisory board of our Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute. And we all, as Americans, are grateful for his service and dedication to our country. Thank you, John, for being the good patriot and man that you are. Uncertainty matters Uncertainty matters. A lot. This won’t be a surprise to many of you. The first thing you are taught in any MBA program, be it at Stanford, where I earned my degree, or anywhere else, is that “business” is the process of managing under conditions of uncertainty.

Over the past five years, for example, PCE inflation has averaged 1.2 percent per year. The FOMC’s announced long-term inflation objective is 2.0 percent. Over a single year, the difference between 1.2 percent and 2.0 percent inflation is inconsequential. Over five years, though, that small difference cumulates to a 4.26 percentage point difference in the price level, which is not insignificant, perhaps, if back in 2008 you took out a mortgage with a fiveyear balloon. Alternatively, nominal GDP growth over the past five years has averaged 2.4 percent per year, when ordinarily one might have expected 4.5 percent average annual growth (2.5 percent real growth plus 2.0 percent inflation). Again, the difference is inconsequential in any given year. Accumulated over five years, though, the level of nominal income today is fully 12 percent below what might reasonably have been expected when mortgage and auto loan agreements were made back in 2008. Kindly note that I am not advocating any change to the FOMC’s 2 percent inflation target. My point is simply to highlight the longer-term consequences of what might appear to be smallish, shorter-term deviations from the norm. Business operators plan capital expenditure and payrolls not in one- or two- or even three-year increments; they plan and budget over longer-term horizons. The nominal stability that people need if they are going to negotiate  7  See “A Defense of Moderation in Monetary Policy,” by John C. Williams, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper no. 2013-15, July 2013.
The Governing Council therefore decided that for the next two main refinancing operations the same conditions will apply as for the three main refinancing operations settled earlier this month. This means they will be fixed rate tenders conducted at an interest rate of 3.0% Furthermore, the Governing Council confirmed that it did not see a need for continuing the application of the narrow interest rate corridor beyond the date of 21 January 1999. It was thus decided to revert to the interest rates on the Eurosystem’s two standing facilities, which it had set for the start of Stage Three. It set the marginal lending rate at a level of 4.5% and the deposit rate at 2.0% with effect from 22 January 1999. This decision has to be seen against the background of the experience with the functioning of the euro area-wide money market since the beginning of the year. Difficulties of some market participants with the functioning of the area-wide money market have diminished substantially over time. As a consequence, overall, the integration of the euro area money market has therefore reached a satisfactory state only three weeks after its creation. The first regular longer-term refinancing operation, which was conducted using parallel tenders with three different maturities of one, two and three months, was also settled successfully on 14 January 1999. It was conducted as a standard variable rate tender, using the single rate allotment procedure.

It was mainly due to lower annual percentage changes in the prices of food and a further reduction in energy prices. A significant contribution was also made by moderate wage increases. In combination with high overall productivity gains throughout the whole economy, a reduction in unit labour costs was reported. On balance, the described overall economic environment and all available forecasts for 1999 do not point to significant upward or downward pressure on price developments in the short term. Nevertheless, factors contributing to risks to price stability on both sides need to be taken into account. On the one hand, downward risks relate to the global environment and potential repercussions on the euro area, for example via import prices and further pressure on producer prices. These developments will be monitored closely. On the other, unexpected upward pressure on wages and a relaxation of the fiscal stance would clearly alter the general environment. Therefore, we shall also carefully monitor the outcome of ongoing wage rounds, the plans for fiscal policy in 1999 and over the medium term, as well as the implementation of such plans in compliance with the Stability and Growth Pact. In summary, the current situation, which is characterised by monetary growth compatible with continued price stability and the absence of immediate upward or downward pressure on price developments, justifies maintaining the current monetary policy stance, with an ECB interest rate of 3% for the main refinancing facility. Indeed, monetary policy in Stage Three started with very low interest rates by historical standards.
Sabine Lautenschläger: Monitoring, regulation and self-regulation in the European banking sector Speech by Ms Sabine Lautenschläger, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank and Vice-Chair of the Supervisory Board of the Single Supervisory Mechanism, at the evening reception at the Deutsche Aktieninstitut, Frankfurt am Main, 21 April 2015. * 1. *  *  Introduction  Dear Mr Baumann, dear Mr Engels, ladies and gentlemen, My topic today, “Monitoring, regulation and self-regulation in the European banking sector”, cannot currently be discussed without asking ourselves the following questions. Do we need to do more to make sure that we never have to experience another financial market and banking crisis like that in 2008–09, or have we done too much and thus prevented the European banking industry from being able to offer financial services to the real economy? After a long phase of deregulation, a comprehensive re-regulation has been in vogue since 2009. At the global, European and national level, we have tackled almost everything that can limit, reduce or prevent risks to and risks caused by banks. The general public, politicians, academics, supervisors and even bankers – simply everyone – called for comprehensive and tough rules for banks and for their close supervision. But the mood seems to have changed over the past year. In Germany and Europe, more and more people are complaining of overregulation. In the rest of Europe, a connection is being made between the words “credit crunch” and “regulation”.

Switzerland is to be represented as an entirety, as a country open to the rest of the world and also as a meeting place for the world. The focus should not be on any individuals, inventions or achievements. Much rather, a basic attitude and its manifestations should be conveyed: Switzerland as a platform for dialogue, progress, humanitarian commitment, exciting experiences, creativity and the search for practical approaches to solutions within organisations. It is envisaged that these topics will be dealt with through the lens of economics, education, research and development, human rights, tourism and recreation, culture and, lastly, sports. Six topics have to be depicted, namely the activities of negotiating and exchanging, teaching and researching, helping and mediating, enjoying and relaxing, creating and designing, and deciding and implementing. Each of these topics will be assigned to one denomination of the new banknote series. The artistic representation must emphasise the topics rather than specific events or institutions. The traditional portrayal of personalities and the depiction of institutions and previous achievements should be dispensed with. The illustration of a university, for example, should not serve as a self-portrayal but could symbolise “progress”. As previously, the banknote series should form a “family” both with regard to content and design. In other words, although each banknote type must have its own characteristics, they must at the same time share sufficient features to be easily recognised as part of the new series.