samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
This latter check on structural and broad macroeconomic policies was the response to the hard-learnt lesson (especially in countries like Spain) that a lack of competitiveness and excessive credit cycles could seriously hamper the optimal conduct of monetary and financial policies and usher in financial fragmentation. Also, strictly in the realm of monetary policy, fulfilling our price stability mandate has become more challenging in recent times. Natural interest rates in the main advanced economies have been gradually falling over the last three decades and they currently stand at historically very low and possibly negative levels. There are also good reasons to think that natural rates may be stuck at very low levels for long periods. This, in conjunction with a lower bound for policy rates, seriously curtails the space for conventional monetary policy. Unconventional measures, such as asset purchases, negative interest rates and forward guidance, have helped us to partially overcome the lower bound constraint, thus becoming a necessary tool in our monetary policy framework. Notwithstanding, unconventional measures have their own limitations. In this context, inflation will ultimately be the outcome of the interaction between a number of factors. In order not to overburden monetary policy, it is essential to achieve a balanced policy mix. Such mix should include long-term growth-enhancing fiscal policies and sufficient structural reforms that increase productivity.

On the macroeconomic front, inflation expectations are firmly anchored, affording monetary policy the space to remain sufficiently accommodative to support growth momentum and mitigate global economic risks. Fiscal stimulus measures, including the first-car tax rebate scheme and the personal income tax cut, should also further help sustain domestic demand. The latest Monetary Policy Report released in January projected growth this year to be 4.9 percent, which will likely be revised up after the strong outturn of last year growth rate as announced by the NESDB. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  Challenges and role of monetary policy Despite this somewhat benign outlook, there remain three important challenges facing the Thai economy, from both domestic and external sources. The first key challenge is on the domestic side. Private sector credits, particularly those in the household sector, have been growing at a high pace, spurred by domestic demand momentum, fiscal stimulus as well as easy financial conditions. International evidence suggests that a prolonged period of rapid credit growth could lead to a build-up of financial imbalances, strain households’ debt servicing ability and loan quality, as well as sow a seed for asset price bubbles. While the more adverse scenarios currently remain a remote possibility in Thailand, the MPC is not complacent and has been monitoring risks to financial stability closely. Monetary policy can play an important role in preempting an emergence of such risks, and the MPC will continue to evaluate if and when a specific policy response is warranted.
It would seem, therefore, that no significant growth could  BIS Review 84/2005  1  be expected next year if the underlying pace of economic activity does not accelerate from this year’s level. The increase in Malta’s fuel bill is also roughly equivalent to the narrowing of the fiscal deficit achieved over the past seven years. In the circumstances, it would be foolish to allow the progress made at considerable cost to be blown away by this external shock. An attempt to cushion the increase in the oil price through borrowing may be economically justifiable in terms of sustaining the incipient recovery suggested by recent GDP data. On the other hand, any borrowing would have to be serviced; and, because it would constitute interference with market signals, it could also retard the process of economic adjustment. The only long-term remedy to counteract the effects of higher fuel prices is to expand productivity and output, and therefore incomes. Indeed, the oil price shock is another compelling reason, if one were needed, for redoubling our efforts to energize the economy. … and by a higher dependency ratio due to population ageing. The third challenge is the demographic shift caused by population ageing, such that the ratio of the working age to the dependent population is expected to shrink from almost four- to just over two-toone by the late 2020s. Some effects of this trend are already being felt this year as the first cohorts of the baby-boom generation reach retirement age.

The Riksbank does not consider the present level of house prices and household debt to be an immediate threat to financial stability, but their current growth rates are unsustainable, so future problems cannot be ruled out. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  Figure 4: Real residential property prices in Sweden and other countries  Index 1995 q1 = 100. Source: Reuters Ecowin and Statistics Sweden. (The Riksbank’s Financial stability report 2010:2)  If the current growth rates of house prices and household debt are considered to be a potential threat to future financial stability, it may be necessary to act soon, because it will take time for any measures to take effect. So the Riksbank is investigating instruments (existing or potential) to prevent or mitigate this threat by smoothing the house price cycle, controlling household indebtedness or improving the resilience of banks. There are a range of prohibitive instruments that could be used to restrict the choices of households and financial institutions. These could include, for example, the introduction of a binding maximum loan-to-value ratio on household borrowing 5 or a maximum debt-to-income ratio, or requiring mortgage interest payments to be fixed for a certain time period. There is also a range of taxation instruments that could act on the price of the activities of households and financial institutions. This includes changes to financial institutions’ capital requirements or changes to the reserve requirements (SEK or foreign currency that financial institutions are required to hold at the central bank).
Jean-Pierre Danthine: Does cash have a future? Summary of a speech by Mr Jean-Pierre Danthine, Vice Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, at the Assemblée Générale de l’Association des Alumni HEC, Lausanne, 8 May 2014. *  *  *  The complete speech can be found in German on the Swiss National Bank’s website: www.snb.ch. One of the traditional tasks of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) is to provide the economy with banknotes and coins. Since the establishment of the SNB, banknotes have constituted the most visible link to the population. As an everyday article of use, but also symbolically, banknotes embody the quality, security and stability of the SNB, and of Switzerland in general, not least of all also for the rest of the world. It is therefore of key importance that the SNB undertake the task of cash supply and distribution conscientiously. The role that banknotes play in the public’s trust in the institution and its decisions is not to be underestimated. In turn, this trust is an important prerequisite for the SNB to be able to fulfil its core monetary policy mandate, and thereby ensure price stability. Due to technological developments in the post-war period, the significance of cash declined, as measured in terms of economic performance. Since the beginning of the 1990s, however, the demand for cash has hovered at a stable level, and since 2008, in the wake of the financial crisis, there has even been a marked increase.

Thus caution, steadfastness and self-control are called for in all areas of the economy – in other words, the maxim that “the doors of pleasure should not be thrown wide open” still applies. As far as the Central Bank is concerned, ensuring low inflation is its most important function today and in the future. And that picture is growing brighter, although care still needs to be exercised. 4  BIS Review 34/2007
Miroslav Singer: Czech central bank head sees lowered risk of deflation – interview in The Wall Street Journal Interview with Mr Miroslav Singer, Governor of the Czech National Bank, in The Wall Street Journal, conducted by Paul Hannon on 11 October 2014. *  *  *  The threat of a slide into deflation or a long period of very low inflation in the Czech Republic has diminished, the head of the country’s central bank said Saturday, although he intends to maintain the weak-koruna policy at least into the start of 2016. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal during the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund in Washington, Miroslav Singer said he had been encouraged by the stimulus measures announced by the European Central Bank since June, since he had expected it to take longer to react to very low inflation rates. Mr. Singer also said that he was confident the central bank could bring its weak-koruna policy to an end without risking a “snapback,” or a sharp strengthening of the currency. The Czech Republic is a member of the European Union, but has chosen not to use the euro. It does have close economic ties to the currency area and particularly Germany. As a result, low growth and low inflation in the eurozone have been a big problem for the central bank.

The ECB has indicated it will keep its benchmark interest rate low through 2017, while the Bank of England and the U.S. Federal Reserve are expected to raise their benchmark interest rates next year. Some policymakers worry there is a risk of “snapback” when the process of returning to more normal monetary policy begins. Mr. Singer said the central bank has the power to ensure that doesn’t happen, and could intervene to counter an overly rapid appreciation of the koruna. “We will not tolerate snapback,” Mr. Singer said. “Our promises are credible to the markets, and obviously we are willing to prevent snapback.” The central-bank head said that for the time being, the balance of power in the foreignexchange markets had shifted towards central banks, since tougher capital standards mean banks have fewer resources with which to move a currency against policy makers’ wishes. “Temporarily, the power of central banks vis-à-vis market players has increased,” he said. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches
But the more important question remains whether the institutional framework for overseeing financial markets, seeking to prevent crises and, when prevention fails, to manage them, is adequate. Open financial markets will always be prone to bouts of irrational exuberance, but do we do enough to contain the collateral damage which excessive volatility can cause? Some academics, notably John Eatwell at Cambridge, argue that we need a fundamental recasting of the international financial institutions. He favours the creation of World Financial Authority charged with setting the regulatory framework for financial markets across the globe, and endowed with powers of intervention when crisis threatens. His arguments are persuasive, but it seems unlikely that countries will be prepared to cede sovereignty to such an authority on a scale which would be necessary to make it work effectively. There have been many other less ambitious proposals, both from within the IMF and the World Bank, and from individual countries. For a time it seemed as though the creative departments of every  BIS Review 25/2003  1  Finance Ministry in the world – if that is not an oxymoron – were engaged in a kind of architectural competition to draw up a new set of relationships between the international financial institutions, their member countries, and the key regulatory organisations in the financial sector. On the face of it, the changes made as a result of this frenzy of creativity have been very modest. No major new institutions have been set up.

Lastly, in this very brief review, I would identify significant gaps in the consolidated supervision of some large and diversified financial groups. Banking supervisors have learned from bitter experience that consolidated supervision of a group is essential to understand the totality of its risks, and the interaction between different parts of the group. Yet there are still major international firms without a consolidated supervisor. In Europe, through the Financial Groups Directive (FGD), we are seeking to fill that gap, for the European Union itself, requiring each firm that operates in the EU to be supervised on a consolidated basis globally, or to construct a European entity which can be supervised in this way. Through the FGD we are therefore attempting to mitigate the risks we see from non-consolidation, but it would clearly be better if those risks could be mitigated on a global scale. (iv)  Expanding the role of developing economies  The fourth arena in which I think more could be done relates to the role of developing countries in the international financial architecture. If they are not properly involved there is clearly a risk that standards may be developed which are inappropriate, or too complex to implement in developing countries. How well are their interests represented at present in the key decision making bodies? I have mentioned that the FSF, though originally conceived as a G7 body, quickly chose to add representatives from other significant financial markets, including Hong Kong and Singapore.
To date, however, the upswing has been accompanied by subdued price movements. This mainly reflects a number of favourable transitory effects but there may also be signs of a somewhat lower inflation propensity. The strength displayed by productivity may perhaps enable the Swedish economy to expand somewhat faster without immediately generating inflationary pressure. But it is still too early to form a more definite opinion on whether the productivity trend has changed. It is now important that incoming statistics are still followed closely and assessed. As I just said, there is no reason at present to alter the repo rate. BIS Review 35/1998  ˝

The system is mandatory for all workers at companies that are part of the agreement. In this system, 4.5 per cent of labour income is allocated up to a cut-off point. If a worker earns more than the cut-off amount, 30 per cent of the difference is added to the original allocation.4 The individual also has a number of investment options to choose from in this system. Once again, the conclusion here is that pension wealth among those included in this pension scheme agreement is more evenly distributed than other wealth. Another way of expressing this is that many people in Sweden do not own their own home and have no financial assets but as a result of their labour income, they benefit from elevated asset prices as they have a share in funded collective pension systems. So how many of them are there? We don’t know at present, as no wealth statistics on the individual level have been recorded since 2007. A government inquiry has recently started to look at whether Sweden shall once again compile wealth statistics on the individual level.5 The Riksbank has been stressing for a long time the importance of reintroducing these statistics as soon as possible. An important reason is that household indebtedness has shown a rising trend in recent years and we now know more about households’ debt than about their assets.
Chart 7: Canadian and Australian banks better  Chart 8: Real short-term interest rates were  capitalised than UK’s in 2005  generally lower in Canada and Australia Per cent 7 Australia  6  Canada  5  UK  4 3 2 1 0 -1 Sources: Bush, Guimaraes and Stremmel (2015). Tangible common equity as a share of total unweighted assets. 2005 and 2006 average. 10  1998  2000  2002  2004  Sources: Thompson Reuters Datastream and Bank calculations. See also Ferrero et al. (forthcoming). 8  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  8  II: Some simple mitigants If this is right then the gains from formal co-ordination might not be that significant. Even a single, “joined-up” committee would generally find itself reaching for macro-prudential tools to control financial risk and using interest rates to moderate cyclical swings in demand and inflation. Shortly, in the next section, I’ll offer a more positive reason to keep some distance between the two policies. Before that, I should point out that, even in instances where there may be gains from policy co-ordination, there are things you can do within the existing framework. One involves the appropriate choice of secondary objectives. As I’ve tried to explain, the case for cooperation is stronger the more severe and frequent any conflicts between the respective objectives. There’s a very general result that puts the same point the other way around: if you give the two committees exactly the same objectives there is no co-ordination problem.

If that’s been true at all over the past couple of decades, however, it’s a much more accurate description of the pre-crisis economy, when interest rates were significantly higher, than of the years since. Currently, house prices, equity prices and mortgage lending are all still materially lower, when measured in real terms, than they were a decade ago (in fact, this has been the first ten-year period since the second world war in which the real stock of mortgage lending has declined in the UK.) So if there had been a macroprudential authority throughout the past twenty years its policies would presumably have been a lot tighter in  economy with low inflation and rapid credit growth, a single policymaker might well choose such a policy setting. It’s generally the case that, as long as there are at least as many objectives as policy instruments, and when there can be independent shocks to those objectives, the policy instruments will occasionally move contrariwise, whatever the arrangements for setting them. For example, the same would be true in an economy with a weak economy but an undesirably high public-sector deficit – the right reaction, even for a single decision maker, could well be to set tight fiscal policy but loose monetary policy (see Kohn (2017) on this point). 7 Differences in objectives also drive many results concerning fiscal and monetary policy coordination. The literature is significant and diverse. But one strand (e.g.
In many of the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries of the EU, vulnerabilities have been reduced since May, but the economic and financial situation remains fragile. In particular, further economic contraction is forecast for a number of these countries next year. In this environment, a combination of rising unemployment and falling household incomes could be expected to raise the credit risks on consumer loans and residential mortgages. Corporate default rates are likely to be high in such a context as well. Given these fragilities, the possibility of a resurfacing of risk aversion towards the region can not be excluded. In several CEE economies, vulnerabilities stem from the fact that a sizeable proportion of outstanding bank loans are denominated in currencies other than the currency in which the borrower’s income is denominated. Such mismatched foreign exchange currency positions mostly affect households. In countries with flexible exchange rates, currency depreciations earlier this year have meant that households would have to repay larger amounts than they expected. Recent developments serve to underline the risks that exist when large stocks of foreign currency credit are outstanding. The share of foreign currency lending in many of these countries has been rising, owing to wide interest rate differentials. This has left them increasingly vulnerable to a renewed weakening of their currencies, which could trigger a significant further deterioration in banks’ asset quality. 2  BIS Review 168/2009  The general recovery of risk appetite has benefited the hedge fund sector.

Gent Sejko: Enhancing Bank of Albania’s alignment with EU Acquis Address by Mr Gent Sejko, Governor of the Bank of Albania, at the launching ceremony of the Twinning Project “Enhancing Bank of Albania’s alignment with EU Acquis”, Tirana, 19 December 2019. * * * Your Excellencies Ambassadors, Representatives of Banca d’Italia and Deutsche Bundesbank, Ladies and gentlemen, Dear guests, I have the pleasure, as the Governor of the Bank of Albania, to welcome you to the launching ceremony of the Twinning Project on “Enhancing Bank of Albania’s alignment with EU Acquis”. The project is financed with IPA 2015 EU funds, following a previous project on needs analysis for the Bank of Albania – designed and led by the ECB in partnership with 11 central banks of the European System of Central Banks. From this perspective, the new twinning project we are launching today may be considered a continuation of the previous one, given that it will address a significant number of recommendations from 2014. Hoping that in the spring of 2020 we will see a green light for the opening of accession negotiations for Albania, I would like to reassure you of Bank of Albania’s commitment to fulfilling priorities arising from the European integration process. Major objectives for strengthening the long-term capacities of the institution coincide with the approximation of its legal, regulatory and operational frameworks to that of the European System of Central Banks.
•  Noyer C. (2007), “Hedge funds: what are the main issues?”, Financial Stability Review, Special issue on hedge funds, Banque de France, 10, pp 105-111, April. •  Rajan R.G. (2005), “Has Finance Made the World Riskier?”, European Financial Management, 12 (4), 499-533. •  Rajan R.G. and L. Zingales (1998), “Financial dependence and growth”, American Economic Review, 88, pp 559-586. •  Thornton D.L. (1994), “Financial Innovation, Deregulation and the “Credit View” of Monetary Policy”, Review of Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis Review, pp 31-49, JanuaryFebruary. •  Weber A. (2006), “Concluding Remarks”, Conference of the ECB-CFS Research Network on “Financial system modernisation and economic growth in Europe”, September 29. •  Weber A. (2007), “Hedge funds: a central bank perspective”, Financial Stability Review, Special issue on hedge funds, Banque de France,10, pp 101-168, April. 6  BIS Review 42/2007

Three short-term concrete measures Now, I would like to share three initiatives that the Banque de France is striving to encourage: 1) Promoting a homogeneous approach to conducting penetration tests among various players in the financial sector. From this perspective, the TIBER-EU framework that the ECB provided earlier this year is a tool that would be helpful to implement in order to test the resilience of the financial system and especially the capacity of cross-border companies. In this respect, TIBER-EU will have to be rolled out at the national level, especially for testing market infrastructures, while taking into account specific local aspects and respecting core requirements in terms of responsibilities, risk management and the conduct of the tests. Through “coordinated frameworks” it will therefore be possible to achieve the much-needed harmonisation of practices and a mutual recognition of tests across the European Union. 2) Carrying out simulation exercises in the particular context of extreme but plausible cyber-attack scenarios, possibly including cross-border exercises. Against the backdrop of the rising number of cyber-attacks in the financial sector, there is a need to supplement on-site and off-site supervision, beyond merely conducting response exercises at domestic level, and possibly even across many countries at the same time. The G-7 has given priority to the enhancement of cross-border coordination in the event of a significant cyber incident: the Banque de France chairs the sub-group in charge of preparing and performing this exercise in 2019.