samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Ladies and gentlemen, let me turn to the general economy because a central bank or commercial banks alone cannot make the country good very quickly. It is quite obvious that world grain prices are on the way down. Between the years 1800-1900 when the West was being opened in the United States, grain prices fell over 30% over a span of a century. With genetic engineering, something of a similar nature might happen over the next 20 or 50 years. We have to plan our still agricultural-dominated population for this eventuality. It does not make sense to base strategy on an expansion of production in a falling market. It makes much more sense to base strategy on cost reduction and to add value to the final agricultural products. A ton of grain may be worth 10,000 baht, but a ton of biscuits is worth 100,000 baht. But to make biscuits, you need a brand and you need flavours, things which take a long time to develop and endow to the economy. As to agricultural finance, the most that is available at the moment is crop finance. But you can’t make the weather to order. The bad year will kill you, and a mechanism must be developed to finance the disaster of the bad years from the abundance of the good years rather than leaving it to pot luck or to the effort of individual farmers as at present.

Derivatives are very rare, and this is another area which needs development to reduce the various risks associated with the market, but of course, one should only do it under well known rules, and personally I think only to a limited extent, not to the extent that the beneficiaries are mainly the intermediaries as might be the case in a really large, sophisticated market. As to the scale of the market, I have been visiting MSCI and other important players in the world. It really is quite easy to improve our market performance. Presently, Thai market requirements are designed only to fit the Thai requirements. Requirements that are often self-destructive and unreal leading us into the bubble of 1997. The market in the Stock Exchange has not been much changed from the bubble days. It’s still doing the same thing, just without the bubble. Realistically, our rules will have to be changed so that it will comply with and take advantage of rather than be penalised by international norms. In government, the Board of Investment (BOI) is probably a crucial instrument. It’s doing a good job giving privileges on an individual project basis. That has its own limitations and faults. It might well soon be the time to make operating in Thailand generally viable. The original BOI philosophy, in that these are projects you wouldn’t get if you didn’t give tax privileges and therefore have no tax loss costs, is becoming more and more untenable.
The reaction to the budget for 2008 is a case in point. Attention has been focussed primarily on the perceived adequacy or otherwise of the proposed increases in incomes and benefits. The media regularly carry suggestions for still more handouts and other measures that would result in even higher consumption rather than investment. In contrast, little is said about where the “more” would come from. Neither has there been any serious discussion as to whether current levels of combined private and public consumption, at 87% of GDP in 2006, and of gross fixed capital formation, which was barely 20% of GDP  2  BIS Review 143/2007  last year, are appropriate. This imbalance is reflected in the persistent, if reduced, current account deficit, which suggests that consumption levels are indeed too high. Mr. President, the members of the financial community, and the credit institutions in particular through their lending policies, can play a useful role in seeking to correct this bias towards consumption, which occurs at the expense of improving the economy’s long-term growth potential and, therefore, weakens its ability to narrow the income gap with the more advanced members of the euro area. In this regard, we should be aware that despite the recent economic recovery, Malta’s per capita GDP measured in purchasing power standards is still just below 70% of the euro area average. Lessons from euro area country experiences Policy prescriptions for bridging the remaining income gap are readily available.

Chart 6 GDP response to demand and supply shocks (y-axis: percentage change in response to one-standard deviation demand and supply shocks, x-axis: months)  Sources: ECB staff calculations. Notes: The Bayesian SVAR includes monthly interpolated GDP, HICP, ten-year OIS rate, HICP energy and PMI suppliers’ delivery times. The SVAR is estimated using the Minnesota prior with the dummy coefficient prior. Shocks are identified using sign and narrative restriction methods. Technical details on the method can be found in De Santis, R. A. and Van der Veken, W. (2022), “Deflationary Financial Shocks and Inflationary Uncertainty Shocks: An  SVAR Investigation”, Working Paper Series, No 2727, ECB. This leads me to believe that supply factors will remain, overall, the dominant determinant of inflation going forward. The persistence of the shocks When inflation is driven mainly by supply shocks, monetary policy should respond when the shocks are persistent to keep inflation expectations anchored and avoid that inflation becomes entrenched. Understanding the reasons for the persistence of current shocks and whether they may permanently lower potential is also crucial for designing the adequate policy response. There are two alternative explanations for the persistence of the supply shocks we have experienced. The first is that the economy has been hit by a sequence of temporary supply shocks, which have jointly created a persistent effect on inflation. In this case, potential output should remain broadly unchanged. And the lingering effect of the supply shocks on economic activity through real incomes and confidence could result in a negative output gap.
For example, the Central Bank is a respondent in all court cases recently filed in connection with unauthorized and failed investment schemes as the petitioners are of the view that the Central Bank is responsible for the loss of investors’ money. Let me therefore elaborate on Central Bank functions. First, the issue of currency Central banking is a concept originated from the issue of currency. In the evolution of money, private banks started issuing their own bank notes, initially based on their gold holding and later as their own liabilities. The bank in which the public placed the highest trust started operating as a central bank in the market. Later in the history, legislation was brought to empower the Central Bank to print bank notes or currency which function as the intermediary between all economic transactions. Currency in issue at present in Sri Lanka is about  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Rs. 422 billion and is a liability of the Central Bank, even as it is an asset to the rest of us. The Central Bank is prepared to pay against any currency note in any other value of legal tender preferred by the public. The Central Bank maintains a cash counter for this. In order to protect the public trust in currency, the Central Bank primarily undertakes two actions. First, it attempts to issue currency notes with intrinsic material security making it difficult for counterfeiting and designs are chosen to facilitate easy recognition of different currency notes by people including the blind.

On matters of vital interest to the state, however, it must be recognized that even in the absence of some such formula as the British or the Australian, it would be impossible for the Central Bank to adopt a policy or pursue a course of action contrary to the policy of the Government of the day. No agency which is a creature of the Government can be entirely independent of the Government. While the Government may be prepared to give an independent regulatory agency rather wide discretion in a field such as that of money, there is no gain-saying that in the last analysis the Government must assume responsibility for monetary policy as for other policies. The Governor and the appointed member of the Monetary Board cannot help being acutely conscious of the fact that, since no Parliament can bind its successors, their independence and tenure in office under the proposed legislation is limited by the ultimate power of the Government to change the law. The exact degree and independence of the Central Bank is likely to vary from time to time. For example, central banks can ordinarily act more independently in stable, peace-time economic conditions than in time of war or other national emergency. They also tend to take stronger stands on issues which are primarily monetary in character than on related issues which may simply have monetary repercussions.
Reforms to the “how” approach to the banking system oversight The Governor of the Bank said earlier this week that we face a choice between an overhaul of the regulatory regime and directly altering the structure of the banking system. As earlier policymakers would have put it, this is a choice between, on the one hand, regulating what banks and other financial firms can do and, on the other hand, leaving open the scope of what they may do but regulating and supervising how they do it. Since the thoughts on macroprudential instruments I shall go on to outline this evening are based on something like the existing structure of the banking system persisting, I shall briefly recap what I have said in a series of speeches earlier this year about the current reform agenda. 3 The three necessary planks are re-regulation and a return to supervision; for the first time, agreeing effective resolution plans with banks and any other key firms; and, I would hope, a clear Capital of Last Resort regime designed to avoid perverse incentives. 3  See “Remarks by Paul Tucker”, panel session at The FSA’s Turner Review Conference, 27 March 2009, “The Repertoire of Official Sector Interventions in the Financial System: Last Resort Lending, Market-Making, and Capital”, Tokyo, 28 May 2009, and “Regimes for Handling Bank Failures: Redrawing the Banking Social Contract”, at the British Bankers’ Association Annual International Banking Conference: Restoring Confidence – Moving Forward, 30 June 2009.

On the contrary, lasting inflation would be the worst enemy of growth. II. Financing conditions are therefore normalising, without weighing  excessively on the situation of businesses The tightening of monetary policy has led to more restrictive financing conditions, after several exceptionally accommodative years. But the rise in  Page 3 sur 5 interest rates is being passed on to the real economy in a gradual and orderly manner, particularly in France. Regarding businesses and SMEs, outstanding bank loans to businesses remained strong at +6.8% in January, of which +5% for SMEs and VSEs. Bank credit is partially replacing market financing due to a more contained increase in its cost. As regards businesses, we should remain vigilant but not alarmist as we sometimes hear. Admittedly, their cash position has deteriorated, falling from an initially high level, as confirmed by our last monthly survey – in industry more than in services - but we are not witnessing a major return of the "spectre of defaults”. At the end of January, the number of defaults had risen to just under 43,000 over the past 12 months.1 This level is above the artificially low level recorded during the Covid years with their exceptional support measures, but still well below the average of roughly 59,000 recorded over the 2010-19 period. We should gradually move towards this figure, and we are monitoring the situation of SMEs and VSEs in some of the more fragile sectors very closely.
5 Dix-Carneiro, Rafael (2014) “Trade Liberalization and Labor Market Dynamics,” Econometrica, Vol 82(3), 825–  885; Dix-Carneiro, Rafael (2018) “Trade and Labor Market Adjustment: Recent evidence from Brazil,” Proceedings of the IMF Conference “Meeting Globalization’s Challenges.” 6 Dix-Carneiro, Rafael (2014) “Trade Liberalization and Labor Market Dynamics,” Econometrica, Vol 82(3), 825– 7/8  BIS central bankers' speeches  885; Dix-Carneiro, Rafael (2018) “Trade and Labor Market Adjustment: Recent evidence from Brazil,” Proceedings of the IMF Conference “Meeting Globalization’s Challenges.” 7 This negative consequence of higher trade barriers can be illustrated most starkly by the estimates of the costs  per job saved through protectionist measures. Researchers that have studied this closely estimate that the costs per job saved from protectionist measures in the United States typically run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. To illustrate, consider the case of import restrictions on Chinese tires. The cost of a job saved was estimated at $ per year while the measures were in place, or more than 20 times the average worker’s compensation. Hufbauer and Lowry, “US Tire Tariffs: Saving Few Jobs at High Cost”, Peterson Institute for International Economics, April 2012. 8 The U.S. provides some assistance to workers displaced due to trade through its Trade Adjustment Assistance  (TAA) program. A recent academic paper finds that TAA-trained workers have higher cumulative earnings (after 10 years) than similar workers who didn’t receive the training.

A cryptoasset is not money (hence the term cryptocurrency is misleading) and has no intrinsic value because it has no backing. It can have extrinsic value, in the sense that people like to collect and own them, just as they like to collect and own all sorts of things, but that extrinsic value is highly unstable and could be nothing. I have met crypto enthusiasts who take the libertarian view that something backed by nothing has more confidence in value than something backed by the state. Suffice to say, that is not a view I agree with. With stablecoins, there will be backing assets, and therefore they could have intrinsic value. An immediate public interest question therefore is what will it take for them to be trusted as money, bearing in mind that while they will primarily serve the purpose of a means of exchange, any holding of them will also be a store of value, even if this is an incidental objective? Stablecoins have the potential to be systemic in terms of their importance for the financial system and its stability. As our paper describes, the precise definitions and mean of ‘systemic’ in this context needs further work, but it will be linked to their ability to scale up and grow rapidly, and to become widely used as a trusted form of sterling-denominated payments by households and non-financial businesses.
Second, on the cyclical front, the sustained momentum in the Swiss mortgage and real estate market over several years has already led to imbalances that pose a risk to financial stability and, ultimately, the Swiss economy. So, what have we done to address systemic risk in Switzerland up to now? With respect to the structural dimension of systemic risk – the TBTF issue – Switzerland already adopted a package of measures back in 2011. This package aims at reducing both the likelihood of crisis at a systemically important bank and the costs to the economy in the event of such a crisis. The package consists of four complementary measures: (1) significantly more capital, and capital of better quality, (2) larger liquidity buffers, (3) rules imposing sufficient diversification to reduce counterparty risk, and (4) organisational measures. Let me briefly outline some key elements of this package. The new capital adequacy regulations for systemically important banks apply to the riskweighted capital ratio and the leverage ratio. Furthermore, they are designed to be progressive. Put simply, the bigger the bank, and the greater its systemic importance for the domestic financial system, the higher the requirement.

I wish ING Public Takaful Ehsan every success in its endeavors and look forward to its meaningful contribution in driving the takaful industry and Islamic finance in Malaysia forward. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3
By components of the CPIEFE, goods inflation began showing a more moderate expansion, with y-o-y variation going from nearly 5 percent at the end of 2015 to 4.4 percent in the latest figure. This responds largely to the fact that, despite important fluctuations, the exchange rate has not shown a comparable increase to the one between mid- 2013 and third-quarter 2015. CPIEFE services inflation has also slowed, but is still near 5 percent annually, reflecting past-inflation indexation and the effects of the depreciation. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  Plus, gaps are still narrow and the labor market – despite a somewhat faster deterioration lately – still shows low unemployment rates and strong growth in nominal wages (figure 1). So, in our most likely scenario, annual CPI inflation will enter the tolerance range in the third quarter of this year and will approach 3 percent during the first half of 2017 (figure 2). This projection uses as a working assumption that the real exchange rate (RER) will hover around its current values throughout the projection horizon. Bear in mind that the RER has risen a little since the cutoff date of the last Report, to near 97 (index, 1986=100) (figure 3). The convergence of inflation is also linked to output gaps that are forecast to widen in the near future and with the labor market adjusting further during the year, especially helping drive a reduction – albeit moderate – of services inflation.

The possibility of the oil price’s upward trend continuing or steepening is another risk to the baseline scenario, because of both its direct impact on local and world inflation, and its implications on global growth. But there are also reasons for this price to recede to its levels of earlier months. Actually, inventories are historically high. At home, although inflation has diminished as expected, its high level for many quarters already is still an important risk in the baseline scenario. In the short term, its evolution is still closely tied to the exchange rate and therefore to the risks coming from abroad. For activity, the risks outlined in previous quarters persist. Confidence remains pessimistic and the Chilean economy is receiving a milder impulse from the world economy than it did in earlier years. The recent evolution of the labor market stands out. If it deteriorates more sharply or if the world economy acquires a more adverse configuration, this might result in lower GDP growth than forecast. Conversely, if the labor market makes smaller adjustments and/or the external economy remains fairly calm, output may perform better than expected. This could translate into stronger consumption growth or more favorable investment, or both. Upon assessing these risks, we estimate that the risk balance is unbiased for both output and inflation. To sum up, the macroeconomic scenario is, broadly speaking, the same as March’s. Inflation will return to the target range in the coming months and output will continue to post bounded growth.
If a marketplace has a high level of liquidity in an asset, many people will probably trade there, as they will be able to trade at the best, that is to say, the most correct prices. If a marketplace has liquid trading in one asset, it will often attract trade in other assets, as other companies want their instruments to be traded on a marketplace with many participants. In other  BIS Review 66/2004  3  words, there are natural tendencies towards concentration in financial instruments trading. The same applies to settlement and registration of ownership. However, technological developments have enabled increasing integration of the various parts of the transaction chain. This has also created incentives to establish automated systems all along the line, from order placement to settlement. The result is a vertical integration, where different stages of the value chain are integrated. Integration requires cooperation between, or even a merger of, the various parts of the infrastructure. Even if this, as I have mentioned earlier, leads to lower transaction costs, it is not certain that these cost reductions will benefit the end customers. When all of the stages of the chain are implemented automatically and ownership of the various parts may even lie with the same organisation, everyone will be dependent on a single supplier. This creates a risk that pricing will follow monopoly principles, which rarely benefits the economy.

This entails the EU Parliament and Council providing framework directives on issues of principle, while the Commission chisels out the details in follow-up directives and regulations. After this, a group of representatives of the countries' different supervisory authorities will adapt the interpretations of these directives. This plan can be regarded as a building stone of the Lisbon Strategy - the ambitious target set at the summit meeting in Lisbon in March 2000 - which aims to make the European economies “the world’s most competitive and dynamic knowledge-driven economy by 2010”. An admirable ambition, although it could possibly have been worded more modestly. 4  BIS Review 66/2004  Harmonising regulations and strengthening competitive advantage in the European economies is a commendable aim. Increased harmonisation simplifies price comparisons and thereby strengthens competition between producers of financial services. If these producers also become competitive internationally, there will be benefits for both domestic consumers and shareholders in these countries. I nevertheless wish to say a few words of warning. While harmonisation that is achieved through regulations can promote competitiveness in the short term, it can also cause concern in the slightly longer term. When all participants have to follow the joint regulations, it makes competition in the dynamic sense more difficult. This is not the idea behind the Lamfalussy Process. We often forget that regulations may also need to be subject to competition in order to become efficient.