samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Do you think that zero and negative interest rates, forward guidance and extensive asset purchases are the “new normal” for central banks, including the ECB, or can there ever be a return to the old regime that existed before the global financial crisis? A return to greater normality will certainly take a long time. We are very cautious at the ECB about estimates of the natural rate of interest…  … meaning the rate at which growth and inflation are in equilibrium… … but there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that this rate, for reasons including demographics and technological progress, is now lower than it used to be. And that also means that the likelihood of reaching the lower bound on interest rates is much greater than previously thought. Then other tools are needed. As the Federal Reserve did after the global financial crisis, does the ECB need to have a fundamental debate about its mandate, its objectives and its strategy, especially since the last review, in 2003, was more than 15 years ago? The mandate is of course out of questions, it is enshrined in the Treaty. However after the experience of the past few years, it may also make sense for the ECB to review its overall monetary policy framework in the future. But now may not be the right time. Our strategy has a medium-term orientation, which gives us more room for manoeuvre. And with our two-pillar strategy, with the monetary analysis, we also look closely at aspects of financial stability.

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.
13 Article 173 of the French Energy transition Act of 17 August 2015. 14 Joint statement by the Founding Members of the Central Banks and Supervisors Network for Greening the  Financial System, 12 December 2017. 15 New Climate Economy (2016): The sustainable infrastructure imperative Financing for Better Growth and  Development. newclimateeconomy.report/2016/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2014/08/NCE_2016Report.pdf 16 www.climatebonds.net/files/reports/cbi-green-bonds-highlights-2017.pdf  4/4  BIS central bankers' speeches

Small changes in projections can have a huge impact on sustainability. Some of the implicit assumptions underlying current negative judgments seem to me seriously misguided. Let’s look first at the short run. As you know, we have been recently surprised on the upside with the dynamics of growth in the Euro area. Consumer confidence is almost back to pre crisis levels, PMI are at an all time high and GDP growth will almost certainly be above potential, on average, for the year 2011. Those developments take place at a moment where drastic fiscal consolidation programs are implemented in all countries. Those analysts who predicted that fiscal tightening would stifle growth in the Euro area are currently being proven wrong. Positive confidence effects in the private sector are outweighing the negative impact  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  of public expenditure reduction. In our economic jargon, we seem to be living to day in a “Ricardian” world. What about countries in the periphery? Spanish growth rate swung from –3.7% in 2009 to –0.1% in 2010, despite the fact that a major austerity plan was being implemented. Spanish exports are booming with an increase of 10% within the euro area in 2010 and 19% outside the euro area in 2010. This compares very favourably with performances of other countries both inside and outside the eurozone. Turning to the long run, it is essential, when looking at the inner workings of the euro area to make a distinction between real and nominal evolutions.
When the new regime with a floating exchange rate and inflation target was introduced in the beginning of the 1990s, it entailed new macroeconomic conditions for collective bargaining agreements. During the 1970 and 1980s, inflation averaged around 8 per cent and real wage growth was almost non-existent. The slowdown in inflation coupled with a relatively stable rate of increase in nominal wages meant that real wages rose sharply between 1995 and 2004, see Table 1.3 Not since the 1960s has there been such a long period of regular real wage increases. In 2004, around 450 collective bargaining agreements were concluded for some 2 million employees, most of them spanning three years. This year, approximately 70 collective bargaining agreements will be signed for just over 1.3 million employees. Municipalities and county councils account for 1.1 million of these, and an agreement covering just over two years has already been concluded for them. Recently, agreements have been signed for some 75 000 workers in the construction sector and about 60 000 employees in banking and insurance. The latter group received more than what has become the norm in the current agreement period. Worth noting is that almost the entire economy has an agreement period that runs up to some time in the middle of 2007.

Eddie Yue: Remarks at Media Standup Remarks by Mr Eddie Yue, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, at Media Standup, Hong Kong, 2 October 2019. * * * Ladies and gentlemen, 1. Today is my first working day as the Chief Executive of the HKMA. Apart from the transition to a new position, I will also be faced with a challenging external and domestic environment. This includes the weakening of global economic momentum, uncertainties over the ChinaUS trade conflict and Brexit, unpredictable monetary policy stance across central banks especially in the US, and the social events in Hong Kong in recent months. All these have presented huge challenges and uncertainties for the Hong Kong economy. 2. Our key priority in the next few years is to maintain Hong Kong’s monetary and financial stability. 3. And, the foundation for this stability is the Linked Exchange Rate System (“the Link”), which has helped Hong Kong weather different financial storms since 1983. I’ve been involved in the operation of the Link throughout my career in the HKMA and I have also gone through two financial crises. I firmly believe that the Link is the most appropriate monetary system for Hong Kong. We see no need and have no intention of changing this well-established system. 4. Our banking system is also robust and sound. I’m confident that Hong Kong’s financial system is well positioned to cope with market volatilities. 5. We will also reinforce Hong Kong’s role as a premier international financial centre.
William C Dudley: US experience with bank stress tests Remarks by Mr William C Dudley, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at the Group of 30 plenary meeting, Bern, Switzerland, 28 May 2011. *  *  *  Today I would like to comment on the U.S. experience conducting bank stress tests. I thought this might be of interest both in light of the lessons we learned and the relevance of these lessons as the European banking regulators conduct another important round of bank stress tests this summer. As always, what I have to say reflects my own views and not necessarily those of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) or the Federal Reserve System. As way of background, the U.S. experience conducting stress tests across an array of large banks came out of earlier work doing horizontal supervisory evaluations of banks. We found these exercises useful in identifying best practices and to determine where particular banks were deficient. In talking about stress tests in the United States, there are three distinct sets of stress tests to consider:   Supervisory Capital Assessment Program (SCAP), completed in May 2009;    stress tests conducted as part of the larger Comprehensive Capital Assessment Review (CCAR), completed in April 2011; and    the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act mandated stress tests, which we have yet to implement.

They have also made some progress in improving their international competitiveness, though there remains an opportunity for further structural reforms in labor and product markets – and not just in the periphery – to increase productivity and strengthen long term growth prospects. The European Central Bank’s (ECB) introduction of the outright monetary transactions (OMT) program has reduced financial market tensions considerably in the peripheral countries, so that sovereign debt funding costs in those countries are at more reasonable levels. The risk that interest rates in the periphery could spiral upward has been significantly diminished. Also, the commitment to European integration remains strong, a factor that U.S.based analysts and investors do not always sufficiently appreciate. Over the past few years, when the situation has been the most bleak, the choice in favor of the Union with the euro at its core has always won out. The bad news is that the eurozone is still in a recession and the political support for further rounds of budget-tightening has clearly lessened. The eurozone financial system is being fragmented and the partial easing of pressure on peripheral sovereign debt markets has not translated into a corresponding easing in private-sector borrowing costs in these nations. If growth does not resume relatively soon, then the political support for continued fiscal and structural adjustment could further erode. In Europe, a key challenge is to strengthen the economic foundations of monetary union at the system level.
The system was able to serve in – what were at least perceived to be – bad times as well as good. Now, it would have been easy in the aftermath of the crisis to swing the regulatory pendulum right the other way; to demand that banks fund themselves with huge amounts of shareholders’ equity. The system would certainly have been safer. There is a respectable academic case for very high levels of bank equity. And with past banking crises costing 75% of annual GDP, an empirical base for it too. 4  But two changes mean the baseline level of resilience does not need to be supercharged further. The first is the advent of legal regimes to resolve failing banks and the powers to effect that. We now have the powers to step in to recapitalise a failing bank using investors’ – not taxpayers - funds. There is more to do to here. But as long as major banks continue building debt that can be bailed in and making the necessary structural changes, there is every prospect that bank failure in the future can be less damaging to the economy than in the past. The second change is our duty to keep regulation up with the risks the system faces. Baseline standards do not need to be supercharged at all times for risk levels that prevail only some of the time. This, of course, makes it all the more important that levels of resilience keep up with the macro trends as they develop.

The first and most obvious of those is Brexit. The challenge is to keep finance capable of serving the economy through Brexit, whatever form Brexit takes. 4  Reported in Brooke et al (2015). 4  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  4  The first condition for that: UK banks must be able to withstand any economic shocks arising from Brexit. In our judgement, that condition is met. Even the most severe economic scenarios for Brexit are encompassed within the scenario we’ve tested the banks against in our annual tests. They can pass that test. So they can pass the Brexit test too. But that’s not enough in this case. Because barriers to delivering wholesale financial services across the Channel could disrupt the end users in the real economy. The UK is a net provider of such services to the EU, so end users there stand at most risk of disruption. But end users in the UK would also suffer some disruption. UK investors invest in funds domiciled in the EU and 10 million UK policyholders have insurance policies with EU insurers. 77 branches of EEA banks operate in the UK, providing services that benefit end users in both the EU and the UK. That’s why, from the very start, we have overseen contingency planning across the financial system. And because it would be difficult, by March 2019, for all financial institutions to complete all the steps necessary to avoid disruption, we called for an implementation period.
Costs in the Swedish manufacturing industry have fallen in the last 15 years in comparison with those in a large group of countries (see Figure 3). Swedish exports have increased dramatically and the current account is showing a large surplus. The development of real wages is an additional way of illustrating that wage formation has functioned better in the last 15 years than in the 1970s and 1980s. In the period 1997-2007, the average increase in real wages was 2.5 per cent per year. There has not been such an extended period with real wage increases since the 1960s. This can be compared to the period 1970-1992, when the average increase in real wages was 0.7 per cent. Real wages actually fell in several years during the 1980s and early 1990s (see Figure 4). Wages and costs in the current agreement period I now come to my second point, which concerns wages and costs in the current agreement period. As far as we can judge at the moment, cost increases will be higher in the current agreement period than in the preceding agreement periods. Wage increases will be somewhat higher and the development of productivity much weaker.

Page 1  Central clearing: three lessons and a path forward − speech by Christina SegalKnowles Given at the European Association of CCP Clearing Houses (EACH), Brussels  Page 2  Published on 19 May 2022  Christina Segal-Knowles talks about central clearing (a system that helps manage the risks of financial contracts). She says the work to strengthen it is a crucial part of our efforts to enhance the resilience of the UK and global financial system. Christina reflects on recent episodes of extreme market stress, and looks at what could be learnt from them to make central clearing stronger. Speech Thank you for having me – it is a pleasure to be here with you to celebrate the 30th anniversary of EACH. I would have loved to be there in person. But I have another anniversary to celebrate here in London – my son turns 6 today – so I am multitasking! The reality is that Central Counterparties (CCPs) have much to celebrate. A decade ago, incentivising central clearing was a key prong of post-global-financial-crisis reforms. CCPs were central to efforts to move away from the opaque network of insufficiently margined bilateral derivatives contracts that helped to turn a slump in U.S. subprime mortgages into a global financial meltdown. Today, prompt and transparent margining and greater use of central clearing ensures that perceived stress on one major participant does not cause a panic. Greater use of CCPs and the broader reforms to derivative markets have made the financial system more resilient.
That characterization applies, in spades, to the unorthodox policy we have pursued at the zero bound, in terms of achieving full employment and hitting our 2 percent inflation target. Together with the healthy rejuvenation of the balance sheets and equity prices of investment grade companies, we have seen what I consider to be a manifestation of an indiscriminate reach for yield, a revival of covenant-free lending, and an explosion of collateralized loan obligations (CLOs), pathologies that have proved harbingers of eventual financial turbulence. Noticeably affected by QE3 have been the nominal yield levels of subpar credits and their spreads relative to investment-grade issues. Some 40 percent of newly issued CCC credits have negative cash flows. 2 And yet “junk” bonds have been trading at or near record historic low yields both in absolute terms and as measured by spreads over investment-grade credits. I worry about this as a risk that has been propagated by QE3, though I do not believe it is the Fed’s job to rescue reckless investors from the errors of their ways. The stock market bottomed in March 2009 and had already more than doubled by the time we initiated QE3. It has since risen by another 40 percent; equities have, all-in, tripled in price since the lows of 2009. Only time will tell if stocks have risen to unsustainable heights and, if so, how deep a correction might be needed to bring them back to sustainable valuations.

Therefore, in order to make sure that central bank independence is understood, internalized and safeguarded by the public, it is necessary for them to fully comprehend the rationale of independence, understand why it is important and become convinced that central bank independence does not imply independence from society. For this reason, I firmly believe that it is vital to talk about independence frequently. 20  BIS Review 36/2005  As I have reiterated before, it is a globally accepted phenomenon that achieving price stability is the prerequisite of establishing a sound market economy and attaining sustainable growth and employment rates in the long run. Another globally accepted phenomenon is that price stability can only be achieved by employing lasting, sound and stable policies. For this reason, the public provides central banks with freedom from political authorities in order to enable them to implement the necessary long-term targets to control inflation and attain price stability, to achieve full employment and to sustain growth. This structure gives central banks the opportunity to reject the implementation of policies that pose risks to attaining price stability and creates an environment in which they can give warnings when required. These are the reasons why central bank independence is essential. Monetary policy implemented by a central bank that is able to effectively exercise its independence, is accepted by all sections of the public and the political authority.
Ardian Fullani: Developments in the Albanian banking system Speech by Mr Ardian Fullani, Governor of the Bank of Albania, at the Third Open Forum with the banking system in Albania, Tirana, 13 October 2009. *  *  *  Dear participants, It’s a special pleasure for me to open the proceedings of the 3rd forum of the Bank of Albania’s dialogue with the banking system. Our communication with the market and its top administrators has now turned into a tradition, to share ideas and present attitudes related to developments affecting the banking and financial activity in general. Such meetings are an important instrument that carry out an inter-institutional communication and simultaneously create a window of communication with the public at large. They serve for identifying issues posing a challenge to the overall financial market operation and are a precaution for finding solutions, aiming at coordinating the interests of parties operating in the financial market, with the financial stability strengthening as the final goal. The 3rd forum we are holding today is the continuation forum. Allow me to remind you of the first forum, which, I would label, without any hesitation, as the forum that consolidated the financial stability foundations in Albania. Its conclusions highlighted many pre-emptive measures, which in the course of time, upon global crisis precipitation, resulted of an extremely immune importance. The 2nd forum recorded another salient achievement, having the confirmation of scrupulous implementation by the banking system of all previous tasks and recommendations as the main motif.

And we expect firms to continue to do this and maintain high levels of prudence in the face of continuing high uncertainty.6 Stress testing: 2021 and beyond In the near future we have two more stress tests coming up using a common scenario: (1) The Bank of England will be using the 2021 biennial exploratory scenario (BES) to explore the financial risks posed by climate change. The exercise aims to test the resilience of the current business models of the  5 6  See Insurance Stress Test 2019: Feedback for general and life insurers (June 2020). See Letter from Sam Woods to insurers on distribution of profits (March 2020). 4  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  4  largest banks, insurers, and the financial system to climate related risks – as well as the scale of adjustment that will need to be undertaken in coming decades for the system to remain resilient. Conducting a climate stress test poses distinct challenges compared to conventional macro-financial or insurance stress tests. The Bank is using feedback from last year’s discussion paper to ensure it is effective and that the design is appropriate.7 We are having further engagement with financial firms, climate scientists, economists, other industry experts, and informed stakeholder groups to support this work. We will publish scenarios in June 2021, with initial submissions due by the end of September. Given this time frame we would encourage firms to start developing their capabilities sooner rather than later.