samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
On the demand side, while private consumption maintains annual increases of 2% to 3%, investment in construction and other works falls more than expected. The tradables-related expenditure lines, such as consumption of durable goods and investment in machinery and equipment, have strengthened further, supported by an appreciating peso over recent quarters and financial conditions favoring inventory restocking after several years of low growth (figure 3). Consumption has performed in line with its fundamentals. On one hand, annual growth in total employment has been steady at around 2% for several months, outperforming salaried employment growth, especially in the private sector. On the other hand, real wages are growing in annual terms more than they did early in the year, mainly as a result of the low inflation (figure 4). This couples with interest rates remaining at record lows, a factor also put forward by qualitative sources such as the Banking Credit Survey and the Business Perceptions Report. This, despite still limited annual growth in credit in most categories (figure 5). Finally, confidence indicators show sustained improvement, although based more on the perception of the future performance of the economy than on the current situation (figure 6). Over the course of the year, the better prospects for the world economy have consolidated. The developed economies, in general, are growing more than in previous years, as are several emerging ones (figure 7).

And in highly competitive goods and services markets, consumers’ benefits show up in the form of lower prices, rather than entirely in higher pay, with important, not yet fully understood, implications for the distribution of benefits in our economy. Let us not forget the financial and corporate side of this picture as well. There is no doubt that the banking system in the United States has been far stronger in the 1990s than it was in the previous two decades. At the same time, capital markets have deepened significantly. Expanded equity markets have served as important sources of finance for new businesses, while venture capital markets have provided increased access to risk capital. By some measures, new financing from these and related markets has tripled the flow of new equity capital to business in the last five years. Also important has been the increased liquidity of financial assets. Today, asset portfolios of loans and credit cards are easily transferable through securitization or outright sale. As a result, the corporate sector, too, has witnessed significant change over this past decade, with the formation of many new businesses and the transformation of many old ones. Many of the household names today were formed sometime in the last 25 years, while a number of the corporate giants of 25 years ago still in operation today have changed dramatically. To remain competitive, many have had to shed some business lines that no longer fit their overall strategies and to invest in new lines.
The New York City economy continues to rebound strongly from the 2008–09 downturn – more strongly than the nation as a whole. The New York Fed’s index of economic activity for the city has grown solidly and steadily for the past three years, signaling a robust rebound in the local economy. This strength is reflected in strong job creation: while the U.S. economy has thus far recovered only about two-thirds of the jobs lost during the recession, New York City has recovered all its lost jobs and then some. In fact, total employment in the Big Apple recently surpassed not only its pre-crisis peak of 2008 but also its all-time peak of 1969. Here on Staten Island job creation has not been quite as robust over the past couple years. It should be recognized, however, that Staten Island’s economy was actually more resilient than Manhattan’s during the recession, experiencing only minimal job losses. Staten Island’s key industries – local-market sectors like health, education and retail trade – tend to be less susceptible to sharp economic downturns than more cyclical sectors, like manufacturing, construction and finance. Even so, not all indicators of the local economy are improving. Unemployment remains stubbornly high, at just over 8 percent. And home prices, though recovering gradually, are still down about 15 percent from where they were back in 2007. This compares to nationally where they are down about 25 percent on average.

Important progress is also being made at the operational and business levels. The most notable example mentioned by many today is T2S, a project with huge potential for market integration. T2S will enable the participating CSDs to focus on value-added services while the basic settlement service is provided via the single T2S platform. T2S will thereby make it easier for business to move from one CSD to another. The actors that harmonise in T2S have a greater chance of reaping the full benefits of T2S and widening their business. Conversely, the European CSDs that do not harmonise may see the securities issued via their CSD being settled predominantly in another CSD participating in T2S. An area of opportunities mentioned several times by speakers today is collateral management. Some of the regulatory initiatives I mentioned before, aiming to enhance safety in financial markets, are generating greater demand for high-quality collateral. At the same time, the crisis is making this collateral scarcer: there has been a shift from unsecured to secured funding and greater recourse to central bank liquidity. The increased demand for collateral is prompting market participants as well as the Eurosystem to develop innovative ways to make better use of existing collateral, i.e. to make assets more easily available, when and where they are needed. Harmonisation in this area is crucial to facilitate the efficient mobilisation of collateral across Europe. Examples are the auto-collateralisation functionality that will be offered by the T2S platform and the several initiatives underway to establish tri-party settlement interoperability.
Total mainland activity increased by 1 percent between 2014 and 2015. This is the lowest pace of economic growth since 2009. Growth may edge down even further this year before gradually picking up again. Growth is being restrained by the marked fall in petroleum investment and weak growth in other business investment, while it is being supported by household consumption, exports of traditional goods and public demand. The depreciation of the krone is also supporting inflation. The rise in prices for imported goods has increased over the past year, and the year-on-year rise in the consumer price index has been just over 3 percent in recent months. Inflation may be dampened ahead by the decline in wage growth and as the effects of the krone depreciation unwind. Chart: Key policy rate The key policy rate was lowered to 0.5 percent at the March monetary policy meeting. According to the Executive Board’s assessment of the outlook in March, the key policy rate may be reduced further in the course of the year. The key policy rate was kept unchanged at the monetary policy meeting in May. There is no crisis in the Norwegian economy, but we are facing restructuring. Restructuring must start in the business sector. Activity in the oil sector will be reduced to a considerably lower level. Other industries must emerge and provide the basis for new jobs. Economic policy can only facilitate this process. Restructuring takes time. Monetary policy is the first line of defence in managing the economy.

Øystein Olsen: The conduct of monetary policy Introductory statement by Mr Øystein Olsen, Governor of Norges Bank (Central Bank of Norway), at the hearing before the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs of the Storting (Norwegian parliament), Oslo, 19 May 2016. *  *  *  Please note that the text below may differ from the actual presentation. Thank you for the opportunity to report on the conduct of monetary policy. My introduction here today is based on Norges Bank’s Annual Report for 2015 and our monetary policy assessments up to the monetary policy meeting last week. Chart: Inflation Monetary policy in Norway has since 2001 been oriented towards keeping inflation low and stable. The operational target is consumer price inflation of close to 2.5 percent over time. Over the past 15 years, inflation has averaged around 2 percent. This is close to the target. Norges Bank operates a flexible inflation targeting regime, giving weight in our interest rate setting to developments in output and employment as well as inflation. The effects of monetary policy are uncertain. This normally suggests proceeding with caution. As monetary policy also seeks to be robust and take account of the risk of particularly adverse outcomes for the economy, the tasks of monetary policy should include contributing towards mitigating the risk of a build-up of financial imbalances.
Wren-Lewis, S (2017), ‘Disentangling the UK productivity problem’, mainly macro, 28 November 2017. 27  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  27  Annex Chart 1: UK productivity, real wages and GDP per head Index, 1760 = 100 1800 1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0 1760  1810  1860  Productivity  1910  1960  Real wages  2010  GDP per head  Sources: Bank of England, ‘A millennium of macroeconomic data’, available online. Notes: Labour productivity per head uses GDP at factor cost. Real wages defined as nominal wage divided by GDP deflator at factor cost. Chart 2: UK productivity and real wages since 1990  Index, 2007 = 100  110  100  90  80  70 1997  2001  2005 Productivity  2009  2013  2017  Real wages  Sources: ONS and Bank calculations. Notes: Productivity defined as output per head; real wages defined as whole economy average weekly earnings divided by consumer prices. 28  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  28  Chart 3: UK productivity relative to continuation of pre-crisis trend Index, pre-crisis peak = 100 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 1980  1984  1988  1992  1996  2000  2004  2008  Continuation of pre-crisis trend  2012  2016  Productivity  Sources: ONS and Bank calculations. Notes: Productivity is output per hour worked.

Most tail companies are not zombies, overburdened by an insurmountable mountain of debt or a broken business model. Rather they are companies surviving, but not yet thriving. And they account for fully 80-90% of all jobs. They are not the tail; they are the dog. If you restricted creative destruction to true zombie – those whose productivity was negative – this would make little arithmetic difference to average productivity, raising it by perhaps 1%. 55  A more creative solution to the long tail problem would be to build a stronger diffusion infrastructure – that is to say, creating some stronger and longer diffusion spokes to attach to the UK’s strong innovation hub. Let  54 55  Schumpeter (1942). Assumes workers with negative productivity flow into firms with zero productivity. 20  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  20  me discuss three approaches for creating those institutional spokes. All three are already underway, to some extent. Once in place, they could speed-up the process of technological trickle-down to the long tail. (a) Supporting Supply Chains  Recent years have seen a lengthening and deepening of supply chains, nationally and internationally. 56  The  largest UK companies have direct supply chain links with several thousand other companies, large and small, national and international. As well as benefitting efficiency and lowering costs, these supply chains provide a natural infrastructure that could be harnessed to spread good practice across companies.
“The important thing is that economic capital will be close to regulatory capital.” But Caruana did acknowledge the need for further study, especially on how diversification of banks' activities across business lines and economic zones. “We do not recognise properly all the diversification that a bank has when it has exposure to several markets,” he said. “We need to know what the best practice is so it can be incorporated.” Potential future risks posed by credit derivatives exposure would also require more work, Nouy said. “There are many different practices in the industry and we simply do not yet know which is the best one going forward,” she said. Consolidation not a goal Caruana distanced himself from speculation that the new accord could drive sweeping strategic changes in the financial sector, including mergers and acquisitions, saying it was not the committee's goal to drive consolidation among banks. Some banks, however, may conclude on their own that the new accord will increase pressure on them to join forces with other players in order to improve their business models under the new accord, he said. BIS Review 39/2003  3  “I think this will be more based on decisions taken by the industry,” Caruana said. “We don't have this as an objective.” Caruana also rejected criticisms that the accord could punish banks in some developing nation markets because they lack the sophisticated risk-measurement techniques used by the world's biggest banks.

In addition, changes in the market, specifically increasingly complex relationships that firms have with hedge fund counterparties, suggest the need for higher standards in some areas relative to what seemed appropriate in the wake of the events of 1998. Let me emphasize a few specific areas that my colleagues and I believe should be the focus of attention by market participants: First, firms need to give greater attention to the full range of exposures they face in the different, and often multiple, relationships they have with hedge funds - including those related to prime brokerage and counterparty credit extensions, proprietary investments in hedge funds, the provision of structured hedge fund products, and the offering of external funds of funds and in-house managed hedge funds as investment products, among others things. An important part of this involves managing the potential conflicts that arise from these multiple relationships and the legal and reputational risks entailed. Hedge fund-related activities need to be integrated into the broader compliance discipline. Second, improving the overall discipline of the stress testing regime is critical. This is an area where we see the greatest divergence in practice across firms and the greatest gap relative to the achievable frontier of best practice. Potential future exposure measures produce what can be misleadingly low overall measures of counterparty credit risk.
BIS central bankers’ speeches  I hope that we are learning some of the lessons from the past. Taken at face value, the depth of the recession might suggest there is considerable spare capacity within our economy. And indeed there is considerable slack within the labour market – unemployment has risen by almost 900,000 since the start of the recession – and this has acted to contain wage pressures. But the degree of slack within firms is probably significantly less than implied by the shortfall in productivity for all the reasons I’ve just explained. An assessment of the output gap requires an evaluation of the current level of supply. But the MPC also needs to form a view about the pace at which the supply capacity of the economy is growing. When faced with a period of weak output growth, it is tempting to conclude the policy should be eased in order to boost the pace of growth and so stop the output gap widening further. And that may well be the right policy prescription. But just how much demand should be boosted depends on the extent to which the weak demand growth is matched by sluggish growth in potential supply. If indeed underlying productivity growth in our economy has been weak in the recent past – perhaps due to the lingering effects of the financial crisis – this may well continue for a while yet.

Expenditure should be used for productive purposes and for young people: education and training, and research, which have a strong impact on long-term growth. On the contrary, fiscal transfers have a much weaker multiplier in the long run. 3/ Better control of public spending: unfortunately, in many countries including the one I know best, we have not managed to keep spending under control. Covid-19 related public spending is clearly the buffer mechanism that the economy needs in the current circumstances. But there are also less warranted expenditures and this is precisely what we must focus on since the pace of extra-covid spending seems in several countries to be accelerating even more quickly than before the virus crisis. Broadly speaking, the recipe for debt reduction depends on each country’s “own speciality”: some countries need above all to boost productivity growth; others need to control their public spending but they have one ingredient in common: efficient reforms. Let us not forget this imperative of reforms in the short-term urgency of the covid-crisis. III. How to revisit the interaction between Monetary Policy and Fiscal Policy? In the current context, both monetary and fiscal expansions are indispensable to sustain demand and inflation and to mitigate the costs of the current crisis. However, given the unprecedented rise in public debt and extremely low or negative interest rates, some are tempted by the seductive lure of “fiscal dominance”, a situation in which the central bank would have to follow another objective: the financing of public debt.
I am pleased to note that a local conventional bank and an Islamic bank have recently embarked on an innovative financing for the renewable energy sector with the launch of a green mortgage to facilitate installation of solar systems for home owners to benefit from the nation’s Feed-in Tariff plan. This positive move is an indication that banks are not only looking at corporate but also retail green financing. In providing home owners the opportunity to directly participate in the renewable energy sector, this distinctive financing also helps to boost investment and awareness on green technology in Malaysia. This is an exciting prospect for further achievements in the field of renewable energy, one which provides Islamic financial institutions the opportunity to take such initiative, in support of the government’s aim to be environmentally sustainable. The sukuk market, which is a high growth segment in Islamic finance also has an important role in supporting the growth of the green technology sector. Sukuk has become an important source of funding for long term development projects, ranging from infrastructure building, healthcare, transportation, telecommunication to education. The increasing role of the sukuk market in financing green and renewable energy projects illustrates the appeal of Islamic finance towards the growing socially responsible investment, sustainable investments and ethical finance. There is strong compatibility between sukuk and funding of green projects, which usually require large capital outlays with long gestation periods.

Figures differ across countries – with the lowest numbers in the Czech Republic (around 20 percent) and the highest in Romania (above 50 percent) – but the tendency is the same. Referring to the benefits of euro adoption, one of the prominent ones, namely the lower financing costs, is no longer obvious. The incomplete institutional setup of the European project in general and the European Monetary Union in particular – weak fiscal rules and the lack of any transnational instruments that would have enabled monitoring cross-border private capital flows – gave rise to a number of vulnerabilities which the recent crisis has exposed. To be more specific, what sets the European Union apart from the other industrialized economies is precisely the fact that the initial banking crisis which hit everybody here gave birth to fears of sovereign default, which reinforced banking system vulnerability and sapped investor confidence further, thus deepening the recession. The consequence of all that was the financial fragmentation issue, which is precisely the reason why the lower financing cost benefit of euro adoption, seems to have vanished. Another unfortunate consequence was that the benefits brought about by commercial integration were significantly diminished by lack of growth in the euro area. The fixes proposed to the institutional architecture of the European Monetary Union, such as the setup of the European Stability Mechanism and even that of the Banking Union, brought 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  about direct costs of adopting the euro.
They must, however, increasingly take account of effects that spill back on their economy as well as shifts in the global equilibrium interest rate that their actions can spur.28 As the weight of EMEs in the global economy has steadily risen, the size of the spillbacks from a tightening in US financial conditions has tripled relative to its 1990 - 2004 average. With EMEs projected to account for three quarters of the global economy by 2030, these spillbacks will only continue to grow (Chart 10). IV. Medium term: reshuffling the deck by reforming the existing system In the new world order, a reliance on keeping one’s house in order is no longer sufficient. The neighbourhood too must change. There can be innocent bystanders but there should be no disinterested observers. We are all responsible for fixing the fault lines in the system. Addressing Pull Factors in EMEs EMEs can increase sustainable capital flows by addressing “pull” factors including: -  reinforcing monetary policy credibility including safeguarding the operational independence of central banks;  -  building the resilience of their banks;  -  deepening their domestic capital markets to reduce the reliance on foreign currency debt; and  -  expanding the scope and application of their macroprudential toolkits to guard against excessive credit growth during booms.

$ trillion of global assets are held in investment funds that are particularly flighty, reflecting their promise of daily liquidity to investors despite investing in potentially illiquid underlying assets, such as EME debt.30 This structural mismatch means that these funds can behave particularly pro-cyclically. Bank of England work finds that redemptions by EME bond funds (with large structural mismatches) in response to price falls are five times those for EME equity funds (with lower structural mismatch). In turn, EME equity funds are twice as responsive as advanced economy equity funds. Under stress, investment funds may need to fire sell assets, magnifying market adjustments and triggering further redemptions – a vicious feedback loop that can ultimately disrupt market functioning and the availability of finance to the real economy. The vast majority of these funds are managed out of the US and Europe, including the UK. As is the case for banks, it is a global public good to ensure that investment funds prudently manage their leverage and liquidity. The Bank of England is acutely conscious of these responsibilities, given the City’s role as the world’s leading international financial centre. That’s one reason why we have transformed the resiliency of UKbased banks, why we are well on the path to ending too big to fail, and why we have fundamentally overhauled our liquidity facilities to support continuously open markets. And it’s why the Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee has supported the FSB’s 2017 recommendation that funds’ assets and investment strategies should be consistent with their redemption terms.