samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
As a public institution, we must aim to reflect the diversity of the public we serve. And the wide range of policy challenges we face in the years ahead means we need those business advantages of diversity just as much as you. Choosing the best talent, wherever it comes from, with the broadest set of problem-solving skills, and the greatest capacity to engage in constructive challenge and creative thinking, helping to avoid groupthink and bias, and hence deliver the best possible public policy decision making. Promoting diversity and inclusion is therefore a top strategic priority for us, as the Governor recently set out in his remarks to the Women in Banking and Finance Annual Awards.18 We have signed the Women in Finance Charter and introduced a career returners programme in partnership with Women Returners. We have set stretching diversity targets, aiming for at least a 35% female senior management by 2020, and 50% female representation below senior management. Our BAME targets are to increase representation in senior management to 13% by 2022, and 20% below senior management by 2020. And we have a comprehensive internal inclusion strategy bringing together our initiatives on diversity, wellbeing and community with the goal of building an inclusive culture where colleagues can provide their best work. As part of this, I and my fellow Executive Directors sponsor individual female and BAME staff to support their progression into senior management – something I have personally found particularly rewarding.

Since the beginning of the millennium, the process of modernizing society was hastened with major reforms aimed at entrenching the principle of gender equality and equity. In 2004, the Civil Status Act (Moudawana) was amended and the status of women in the family further strengthened. In 2011, the country approved a new constitution that enshrines human rights and gender equality. Several laws have been adopted to ensure the harmonization of national legislation with international instruments that Morocco ratified and whose primacy are now recognized over its domestic laws. In the same vein, and to coordinate the various initiatives aimed at promoting gender equality and including women’s rights in public policies and development programs, a governmental plan for equality entitled “ICRAM” was developed for the period 2012-2016 and was later on expanded and extended until 2021. At the same time, a specific strategy for institutionalizing the principle of gender equality in the civil service was adopted in 2016. 2  EXPO 2020 DUBAI WOMEN ON BOARDS KEY ISSUES AND CHALLENGES IN THE MENA REGION  SPEECH OF MR. ABDELLATIF JOUAHRI GOVERNOR OF BANK AL-MAGHRIB (MOROCCAN CENTRAL BANK)  Today, the real challenge remains to succeed in the effective implementation of these laws and programs and to ensure a regular and close monitoring, which is hardly an easy task. Ladies and Gentlemen, Speeding up efforts to strengthen the economic role of women and reduce gender inequalities requires the mobilization of all stakeholders, government authorities, civil society, public and private institutions and national and international organizations.
Therefore, the global financial standards-setting organisations have initiated extensive regulatory and monitoring work to ensure that stablecoins do not threaten financial stability. For my part, I note that the interest in  7 One example could be the mobile payment services in each country. Here, certain steps have already been  taken with the intended merger of Norwegian Vipps, Danish Mobilepay and Finnish Pivo, announced in June this year. 7 [15]  stablecoins show the need for the existing payment systems to be improved to meet people's needs for efficient and cheap payments. More about that later. To conclude, having a credible issuer of money, and one single monetary unit within a jurisdiction, seems to be the prevailing system throughout history. With a trusted issuer, which has been the task of central banks for the past 300 years, the intrinsic value of money doesn’t matter. We accept that banknotes and coins are just paper and some fairly cheap pieces of metal. In addition, quoting prices in a host of different units that may fluctuate in value will never be efficient. The importance of monetary uniformity to a country’s prosperity can hardly be overestimated. Technology and innovation of ideas drive change My second lesson concerns the drivers behind evolution in payments. Based on history, one important force for changes has clearly been technological developments, often in industries far away from financial services. For example, the printing method invented by Gutenberg in the 15th century was a prerequisite for going from coins to paper notes.

On the other hand, with limited proprietary positions, banks generally emerged from a summer of stress unscathed. Certainly, no one wants to return to the days when major dealers’ trading books were crushed under the weight of worthless leveraged super senior debt. To strike a balance between making banks safer and maintaining adequate market liquidity, we need to draw lessons from the financial crisis, when contagion from stressed banks spread rapidly through the global financial system via counterparty credit concerns, liquidity hoarding and mass deleveraging. In this environment, core funding and OTC derivative markets seized up and conditions were set for the panic that ensued. By contrast, markets with greater transparency and more robust trading and settlement infrastructure, such as equity markets and exchange-traded futures and options, performed rather better. Prices were not always to participants’ liking, but these markets remained open. London should lead the way in ensuring that fixed income and derivative markets meet such standards. At the FSB, the Bank of England is helping to devise reforms that increase transparency, build more robust infrastructure and encourage better collateral management. Since collateral management is a cornerstone of resilient markets and goes to the heart of central banking, let me take a few minutes to expand on it.8 Collateral reduces credit risk between market participants and supports market-based sources of credit to the real economy. It is central to the functioning of OTC derivatives markets and the funding of the shadow banking system.
As a consequence, the shocks can become entrenched in expectations. In such cases, firms and households become more attentive to past inflation outcomes and less attentive to the inflation norm or central bank inflation target when forming their expectations about future price developments. To the extent that these expectations enter wage and price-setting decisions in 3/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  the economy, low inflation may become self-reinforcing: observed disinflation translates into a downgrade of inflation expectations, which in turn feeds back into lasting disinflation. Evidence on the evolution of inflation expectations during the crisis indicates that this scenario was a concrete risk that the euro area was facing in mid-2014. For instance, staff estimates suggest that market-based longer-term inflation expectations became more than 1.5 times more sensitive to macroeconomic surprises than they had been in pre-crisis times. By contrast, if longer-term inflation expectations are well-anchored, they do not respond to shorter-term macroeconomic developments. Instead, they remain entirely determined by the inflation objective that the central bank has committed to attain. But, especially after the oil price shocks in the second half of 2014, most measures for the sensitivity of inflation expectations have edged up.6 The observation of a weaker anchoring of inflation expectations, in principle, is consistent with different interpretations. It might reflect doubts either with regard to the central bank’s commitment to pursue its objective, or with regard to the central bank’s ability to achieve its aim.

Jean-Pierre Roth: Once a student, always a student Summary of a speech by Mr Jean-Pierre Roth, Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, at the University of Bern, Switzerland, 9 February 2006. The complete speech can be found in German on the Swiss National Bank’s website (www.snb.ch). *  *  *  Like all decisions relating to the future, monetary policy decisions involve numerous uncertainties. Economic researchers are divided as regards both the effects of monetary policy and the form that this policy should take. There are a number of competing models in economic theory, and their policy recommendations often vary. Relationships that have been stable in the past may change at any time, due to the fact that the structural equations used in economic models are not based on the laws of nature. The Swiss National Bank's monetary policy concept takes account of these uncertainties. Our inflation forecast is a key element in this concept and combines the results obtained by a variety of different models. Research is extremely important in our changing world. We can only be sure of identifying new developments as early as possible and basing our monetary policy decisions on a solid foundation if we engage in constant research. BIS Review 9/2006  1
Temporary illiquidity events may reflect unanticipated, complex and dynamic interactions among high-frequency trading strategies that can play out faster than the timeframe in which human intervention can occur. In addition, high-frequency trading activity, by undercutting the returns to providing liquidity services on a lower frequency and a higher trade size basis, may have both increased liquidity in the small – hence narrowing bid/offer spreads in normal trading conditions – but decreased it in the large – when selling or buying pressure on one side of the market predominates. For the corporate bond market, market structure has also changed in important ways. For example, bond mutual funds and exchange traded funds now hold a much higher proportion of corporate bonds than before the financial crisis. Presumably, this shift in the structure of the market has affected liquidity provision and liquidity risk in the corporate bond market through the redemption risk faced by these funds. Also, shifts in market structure and regulation have undoubtedly affected other markets related to the corporate bond market. For example, changes in capital requirements for single name credit default swaps have presumably – and appropriately from a supervisory perspective – increased hedging costs and affected dealer market-making appetites and capabilities. What are the costs associated with shifts in liquidity and how do these costs compare to the benefits of a more resilient and robust financial system?

Most noteworthy to me is the fact that the regulatory regime that was in place in 2008 and 2009 was associated with an episode of the most illiquid market conditions since at least the Great Depression. A return to such a regime could lead to a higher cost for liquidity over the long-run. I think we are in a much better place today. We have a financial system that is much more resilient, and the available evidence suggests that this transformation has not resulted in any significant erosion in market liquidity. What future work is needed? There is a tendency to compress a complex world into a sound bite – such as, “tougher regulation is increasing the cost of liquidity and driving up liquidity risk.” Policy needs to be based on evidence and the available evidence supporting this claim is mixed, at best. Most importantly, I think it ignores the complex nature of the changes underway in financial markets. The methods of intermediation are changing and will likely continue to evolve. There are new players with different objectives and goals, and technology is evolving rapidly. These factors strike me as just as important as the increase in regulatory requirements for the large dealers. The recent work analyzing the October 15 Treasury market flash rally illuminates the complexity of today’s market structure.
It is an essential competency for individuals to navigate the increasingly complex financial landscape. At a global level, in recent years, we have seen a significant increase in the complexity of financial products and services, making it more difficult for individuals to make informed decisions that safeguard their financial well-being. What is alarming is the fact that the level of financial literacy globally is very low. International research finds that, only 1 in 3 adults worldwide are financially literate. This is worrisome not only because of the negative repercussions at the individual level, but also, because of the potential impact it may have at the broader level of a country's economy, including financial resilience and stability. For instance, there are studies indicating that poor financial decision-making, including excessive risk-taking by individuals, preceded financial crises in the past. This phenomenon appears to be accentuated when the preceding prosperous periods have a longer duration than usual, as described by Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis. Examples include the Global Financial crisis, where  1/5  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  many people became over-indebted to purchase real estate, as prices appeared, at least to them, to be ever-increasing. When the bubble eventually burst, they were unable to cope with their financial obligations creating a domino of bankruptcies thus, raising further financial stability risks. The negative repercussions of financial illiteracy and of other shortcomings of financial markets, especially on financial stability, can be addressed by enhancing the efficiency of financial regulation.

Having said that, the HKMA will of course have its own views on what levels of sophistication of risk management we would expect to see in different types of banks. While we won’t mandate particular approaches, we will expect to see levels of risk management that are commensurate with the types and levels of risk being run. So, for example, we won’t necessarily expect even a large bank with significant credit risk to implement advanced IRB. But we would expect a bank of such a type to have a fairly advanced internal credit rating system. As another example, we would generally expect banks with a significant level of market risk to implement a models based approach to measuring the risk. BIS Review 31/2003  1  This flexible approach - in contrast to the approach being adopted by some other supervisors, who are mandating that particular approaches be adopted by particular types of banks - is, we feel, the most appropriate approach for Hong Kong. In Hong Kong we have a wide variety of banks, RLBs and DTCs. We have different nationalities. We have different sizes. We have banks that focus on the retail market, and ones that focus on the wholesale market. We have banks that specialise in mortgage lending, ones that specialise in SME lending, and ones that are jacks of all trades. It’s perfectly appropriate, therefore, that with such a wide variety of banks there should be a wide variety of credit risk management and other risk management practices.
I now come to central banks’ foreign exchange market interventions. The exchange rate is an important variable for a small open economy like Switzerland, and thus for its monetary policy. Yet the SNB only rarely intervened directly in the market in previous decades, and 5  6 7  In addition to the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan have also introduced securities purchase programmes. With respect to Switzerland, the SNB’s purchases of Swiss franc bonds in 2009 and the large-scale repo transactions and foreign exchange swaps concluded in August 2011 may be termed quantitative easing. These are exchange-traded funds which replicate the TOPIX, Nikkei 225 or JPX-Nikkei 400 indices. Andrade et al. (2016), The ECB’s asset purchase programme: an early assessment, ECB Working Paper Series, No. 1856, September 2016. Page 4/8  then only with small amounts. Since March 2009, this has changed. It was at this point that the SNB began buying foreign currency on a large scale, in order to counter excessive upward pressure on the Swiss franc and prevent an undesirable tightening of monetary conditions in Switzerland. Alongside the negative interest rate, our willingness to intervene in the foreign exchange market as necessary constitutes a key element of our current monetary policy. To sum up my remarks so far: the sphere of influence of monetary policy on the financial markets has increased markedly with the broad application of unconventional measures.

Jean Claude Trichet: Welcome Malta! Speech by Mr Jean Claude Trichet, President of the European Central Bank, at the event for launching the joint communication campaign for the euro changeover at the Central Bank of Malta, Valletta, 30 September 2007. *  *  *  Ladies and Gentlemen, It is a great honour and pleasure for me to be here at this festive moment. This is to mark the launching of the joint communication campaign for the euro changeover in close co-operation with the Central Bank of Malta and with our friend, Michael Bonello, just 92 days before Malta adopts the euro on 1 January 2008. This will signify a great milestone in Malta’s history, especially since Malta only joined the European Union (EU) almost four years ago, on 1 May 2004. Let me first offer my warm congratulations to all of those who have helped bring Malta to this point. In 2002 for the countries that were in the euro area at the time, as well as for Slovenia this year, it was a memorable moment and a positive step. So I can well imagine how the Maltese feel at the moment. You can be proud of Malta’s successful convergence process. In fact, we are very pleased about the fruitful cooperation between the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Central Bank of Malta in the preparations for the changeover, be it at the technical level or through the participation of Governor Bonello as observer in the Governing Council since last July.
With the view of enhancing the transparency and tradability in the secondary market, measures are being taken to introduce a new primary issuance system for Treasury bills. A distinct electronic trading platform, with a central counter party (CCP) arrangement for government securities, along with required legal 35  reforms to deepen and broaden the secondary market for Treasury bills and Treasury bonds, as well as a mechanism to disseminate secondary market information on debt instruments through the proposed e-trading platform and a clearing house are to be established. In addition, the Medium Term Debt Strategy (MTDS) is to be further streamlined with the assistance of multilateral agencies. Further, we will introduce amendments to the Local Treasury Bills Ordinance (LTBO) and Registered Stock and Securities Ordinance (RSSO) to ensure smooth and efficient functioning of the debt management system. In view of the increased volatility in global financial markets, we also intend to reduce the threshold for foreign investment in rupee denominated Government securities from 10 per cent of the outstanding Government securities stock at present to 5 per cent. Management of the Employees’ Provident Fund In discharging powers and duties vested with the Monetary Board in relation to the largest superannuation fund in Sri Lanka, Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF), the Central Bank has strived to improve the services provided to its stakeholders, while ensuring the enhancement of the return to members and the safety of the Fund. During 2018, the EPF continued its fund management activities to enhance returns by aligning the investment strategy with market conditions.

The Central Bank will be resolute in preserving this achievement of a low inflation environment going forward irrespective of domestic and international challenges that we may face in future. This is the prime reason why the Central Bank has embarked on a mission to upgrade the monetary policy framework with a view to strengthening the ability of the Central Bank to deliver sustained price stability amidst a rapidly evolving environment characterised by elevated uncertainty. During the year 2018, significant progress was made towards the transition to FIT in terms of initiating necessary amendments to the Monetary Law Act (MLA) with a view to establishing a strong Central Bank mandate, building effective fiscalmonetary coordination and further improving technical and institutional capacity. Let me elaborate on a few important areas in relation to the progress towards FIT. Last year, we highlighted the need and the importance of strengthening the existing mandate of the Central Bank to perform its key tasks related to price stability. It is widely accepted that a strong legal mandate is an essential prerequisite for the successful adoption of FIT as it is considered the linchpin that holds the entire framework together.
The long-term distribution effects of reducing tax relief on interest expenditure are uncertain, as they also depend on how the government uses the budget funds made available, something we perhaps do not think about too often. The funds could be used to compensate the indebted households or even to increase public expenditure in other ways, for example through various reforms. From a socioeconomic perspective, a reform gradually reducing tax relief on interest expenditure would probably be beneficial. The distorting effect of tax relief, which benefits excessive indebtedness in society, would thereby cease. In summary, it could very well be beneficial to have lower indebtedness from a distribution perspective. The most important effect of lower indebtedness is, as I have pointed out several times before, reduced risks to the financial system. But, as well as this, mortgage borrowers’ disposable income and thereby their consumption may thus also become higher over the longer term. The Riksbank’s responsibility for financial stability needs to be clarified One of the primary tasks of the Riksbank is to “promote a safe and efficient payment system”, as it is expressed in the legislation. This means that the Riksbank is to conduct a policy for financial stability but no more exact definition is given. One controversial issue in this context is whether monetary policy should take consideration of the risk of a financial crisis.

At the present time, the insurance provided by many monetary authorities may look cheap because inflation is projected to stay low and markets seem to reward those countries which liquefy public debt. However this equilibrium could be unstable and market makers, aware of some inflation “tail risks”, are hedging themselves through gold or currencies like the Swiss franc whose exchange rates have reached historical highs. By contrast, purchases of sovereign debt by the Eurosystem remained very limited and will stay so. Our objective is simple: avoid disruptions in the monetary policy transmission mechanism. Any lasting liquidity backstop has to come from the governments. This is why we are asking for more flexibility in the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF). Whether amounts are big enough is a matter of opinion but one could envisage to leverage existing commitments to provide greater intervention capacity. At this stage, the euro area is paying a double price. One for its mistakes and one for its virtues. The mistakes were to allow the piling up of debt through unsustainable fiscal policies over a decade, and then to create ex nihilo a doubt as to their ability to pay those debts. But we are also paying a price for our virtue as we refuse to liquefy our debt through massive monetization of our fiscal deficits. Will our virtue be rewarded at the end? I strongly believe so and I will explain why.