samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Findings show, for example, that an effective climate policy need not be expensive and that allowing for extreme events is inexpensive insurance against substantial but uncertain future climate costs, see Chart 1.22 The blue line indicates that the costs of overestimating the effects of climate change are not particularly prohibitive. This is because the carbon tax is an effective tool to reduce climate change at a low cost. The red line indicates, on the other hand, that the cost of underestimating climate change can be very substantial. Chart 2. Global warming for various carbon taxes. Degrees Celsius 9  9  8  8  7  7  6  6  5  5  4  4  3  3  2  2  1  1  0  0 2020  2060  2100  2140  2180  Temperature without a tax  Carbon tax in the EU (200 SEK/ton)  Global carbon tax (200 SEK/ton)  Global "swedish" carbon tax (1100 SEK/ton)  Source: Hassler et al. (2020)  Chart 2 shows estimates of the global temperature increase in four different scenarios. The first scenario (blue line) indicates what happens if we don’t implement any political measures. The temperature will then have increased by almost 3O C by 2100, and by around 9O C by 2200. The red line show that a carbon tax only within the EU has a very small effect on global warming.

Many people see EU membership as posing a threat to Swiss federalism and direct democracy. A full membership would also have a major impact on our monetary and exchange rate policy. Indeed, if Switzerland joined the EU, it would have to abandon its independent monetary policy and its own currency. This would deprive us of an essential component of our flexibility in setting economic policy. We could no longer pursue an interest rate policy geared to the needs of the Swiss economy. Membership would also spell the end of the interest rate advantage with respect to the euro area, which still stands at one and a half to two percentage points. This would entail the loss for the Swiss economy of an important competitive advantage. If there are grounds for hoping that an enlarged EU will lead to greater stability and prosperity on the European continent, it is also conceivable that a larger market will open new opportunities for Switzerland. Once the bilateral agreements have been extended to cover the new member countries, our economic relations with the enlarged EU will be regulated by the same network of bilateral treaties, as is the case with the current EU. The Swiss economy will thus enjoy easier access to a greatly expanded market totalling 450 million people. 2  BIS Review 27/2003  However, EU enlargement also represents a challenge for Switzerland. A larger Union needs to work out its joint position in lengthy internal consultation and decision-making procedures.
Assets under management in Singapore grew by 17% year-on-year, to $ trillion as at end-2020, driven by strong inflows into traditional and alternative investment strategies 10 as well as valuation gains 11 across major asset markets. The FinTech sector has also continued to do well. Investments in FinTech firms based in Singapore reached a record $ billion in 2020, an increase of more than 30% from 2019. In the first quarter of this year, FinTech companies here already raised more than $ million. The financial services and FinTech sectors created 2,500 net jobs last year. We expect the financial sector to continue to create good jobs this year. Financial institutions expect to create about 6,500 new hiring opportunities 12 this year, with strong demand in areas such as technology, wealth management, corporate banking, and insurance. 13 The financial services sector has exceeded both the value-added and employment targets set by the Industry Transformation Map (ITM) for 2016–2020. Growth in value-added during this 5-year period averaged 5.4% per annum, above the ITM target of 4.3%. The sector, together with FinTech, added an average of 4,700 net jobs per annum, above 7/9  BIS central bankers' speeches  the target of 4,000. MAS has started reviewing the ITM strategies and targets for the next 5 years. MAS has been studying in depth how the financial services landscape will transform and what Singapore must do to remain competitive in the coming decade.

With the sustained budget surplus and accumulated surplus on the Exchange Fund and Land Fund assets, the actual amount of foreign reserves in Hong Kong amounted to $ billion at the end of September, the third largest in the world. This is more than seven times Hong Kong dollar cash in circulation or over three times $ M1. 30. The currency board system has an automatic adjustment mechanism to maintain exchange rate stability. When there are outflows of funds from the Hong Kong dollar, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) will sell US dollars to banks for Hong Kong dollar. On settlement day, the HKMA will debit the clearing accounts of the banks for the necessary amounts of Hong Kong dollars in return for the US dollar that will be credited to the New York accounts of the same banks. Since banks may have sold more Hong Kong dollars than they have in their clearing accounts with the HKMA, they can only obtain Hong Kong dollars by borrowing from other banks, by bidding up the interbank rates, or selling back the US dollars to the HKMA, that is, by reversing their short position. In fact, the banks do not hold excess Hong Kong dollars because they are generally long in foreign currency. The latest data at the end of July shows that the Hong Kong banking system is short roughly $ billion or $ billion. 31.
No matter where the future takes us, a common vision – a Swiss Payments Vision – is needed in order to ensure that the financial sector and the SNB take the right steps together. This vision conceives the future of cashless payments in Switzerland as an efficient, reliable and secure ecosystem that is also fast and interoperable in terms of new payment solutions and new technologies, and across national borders. Page 10/11  The SNB projects mentioned earlier have precisely this goal. In the area of instant payments, we are laying the foundations for retail payments to be settled immediately and around the clock in central bank money in the tried and tested framework. As for token settlement, we are examining how central bank money could also be made available in a regulated token ecosystem, should the need for it arise. The Swiss financial centre can face the ongoing digital transformation with unflinching resolve. The SNB will make the necessary contributions to the further development of the payment infrastructure in Switzerland. Together we will overcome the challenges and ensure that we continue to have secure, efficient, fast and interoperable payments in the future. Thank you for your attention.

In 2021, Switzerland became one of the first countries to adopt a comprehensive legal framework for the application of DLT. Besides various adjustments to securities law, a new licence category for DLT trading facilities has been created under the Financial Market Infrastructure Act. This has created the basis in Switzerland for a regulated token ecosystem. Where do you find interesting applications of DLT in today’s financial system? The short answer is in the area of financial market infrastructure, which includes trading platforms, securities settlement systems, and payment systems such as the SIC system, via which transactions are settled. DLT promises efficiency gains in post-trading, i.e. in the clearing, settlement and custody of assets. A shared ledger increases transparency and simplifies the booking of transactions. In addition, it eliminates the need for costly and error-prone reconciliation processes between different databases on different systems. Moreover, DLT also allows assets such as securities, works of art or money to be securitised in the form of digital tokens, represented in a decentralised and fraud-proof network, and managed. Standardisation allows assets of different types to be represented as tokens on a shared infrastructure. Transfers of tokens can be programmed in the form of ‘smart contracts’. DLT enables the efficient and low-risk settlement of transactions. For example, the transfer of tokenised assets versus tokenised money can be effected conditionally according to preprogrammed logic. 5 It replicates the payment process with cash, where the exchange of money and goods can take place simultaneously on a delivery-versus-payment basis.
Owing to their substantial day-to-day volatility and the interfaces with money laundering and other criminal activity, cryptocurrencies are unsuitable as a universal means of payment. On the other hand, cryptocurrencies are attractive as speculative assets. Crypto-assets is therefore a better term than cryptocurrencies. Central bank digital currencies Another possibility is central bank digital currencies (CBDC). A CBDC is a digital form of central bank money made available to the general public. A number of central banks, including Norges Bank, are assessing whether introducing a CBDC would be advisable and, if so, in what form. For the time being, banknotes and coins are the only form of central bank money, with a role to play both in a contingency and under normal circumstances. Effective electronic contingency arrangements are crucial for ensuring that the payment system is resilient to disruption. Cash is part of the overall contingency arrangements, in the role of last resort should the electronic contingency arrangements fail. Banknotes and coins will continue to be in use into the foreseeable future. However, the use of cash is relatively low in Norway compared with other countries and is declining. It is not impossible that cash usage, at some point in the future, will fall to such a low level that banknotes and coins can no longer be regarded as a generally accepted means of payment.

It is important to avoid fragmentation of the infrastructure for clearing payment transactions in NOK, otherwise we will lose the advantages we have today. An efficient and secure common infrastructure must still be a main feature of the Norwegian payment system, whichever solution the industry ultimately chooses. Looking further ahead, a number of broad issues need to be addressed. Norges Bank will initiate a project to assess the payment and settlement system of tomorrow as a whole. The aim is to make active and constructive contributions to an efficient and secure payment system, today and in the future. We will seek long-term solutions to several of the issues mentioned above, in particular the following two key questions: Should we continue to have a completely domestic payment infrastructure in Norway, or could it become more international? How would we then solve issues related to national security? How should the infrastructure be changed to facilitate the services needed by end-users in the future? Should payments still be cleared before they reach the central bank, or is gross settlement the best option? The first phase of the project is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2019. Cyber security As the payment system is centralised and ICT-dependent, it is vulnerable to cyber attacks. If an attack were to succeed, payments could come to a halt and financial losses could occur. An attack could also result in unauthorised access to or manipulation of sensitive information.
Victoria Cleland: Global action to enhance cross-border payments Speech (virtual) by Ms Victoria Cleland, Executive Director for Banking, Payments and Innovation of the Bank of England, at the Silk Road Cash & Payments conference, Almaty, 29 March 2023. *** Cross-border payments are crucial to the smooth functioning of the global economy, and their importance is growing in our ever more interconnected, global digital economy. The value of cross-border payments is forecast to increase from almost $ trillion in 2017 to over $ trillion by 20271. Yet cross-border payments are typically, though I want to stress not always, slower, more costly, less transparent, and harder to access than domestic payments. And this impacts not just big wholesale players but consumer and remittance payments too. There are instances of payments taking up to 10 days2 and costing more than 10%3 of the payment value, and all too often with timing and cost unknown upfront. The G20 made enhancing cross-border payments a priority in 2020 and developed a roadmapOpens in a new window for delivering improvements. Since then, organisations from around the world have come together and made significant strides to lay the foundations for enhancing cross-border payments.

But it needs to be complemented by action from the public and private sectors in individual jurisdictions to determine where progress is needed and how to best implement it through a range of projects and changes, in time to meet the 2027 targets. 1/2  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  I encourage central banks, payment system operators, providers, participants, and users from all countries – including all those at the conference today and extending well beyond the G20 – to work together to enhance cross-border payments. We can continue learning from each other and refining our approaches via international forums led by the FSB and Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) – such as the annual Payment Summit with senior industry representatives, the new Industry Taskforces 4, 5 working jointly with the IMF and World Bank on identifying appropriate technical assistance, and the new Central Banks' Community of Practice6. At the Bank of England, we are already making tangible progress towards enhancing cross-border payments. We are currently undertaking a transformational RTGS Renewal Programme to deliver a range of new features and capabilities for payments. This will include several features highlighted in the priority focus areas – such as the adoption of ISO20022 this summer, reducing barriers to access RTGS, and enhancing user functionality such as Application Programme Interfaces (APIs).
BIS Review 160/2009  3  Figure 4 The repo rate and other interest rates Per cent 7.0 6.0  7.0 Repo rate M ortgage lending rate (Stadshypoteket) 6-month treasury bill  6.0  5.0  5.0  4.0  4.0  3.0  3.0  2.0  2.0  1.0  1.0  0.0  0.0  Jan-04 Jul-04 Jan-05 Jul-05 Jan-06 Jul-06 Jan-07 Jul-07 Jan-08 Jul-08 Jan-09 Jul-09  Sources: Reuters EcoWin and the Riksbank. However, this mechanism has not functioned during the financial crisis. Banks that have had surplus liquidity have wished to keep it available for their own use instead of lending it to banks with a deficit. The global financial crisis has also led to the Swedish markets experiencing problems with funding in the financial markets. During autumn 2008 the Riksbank therefore began to offer loans at longer maturities to the bank to facilitate their funding. As a result of this, the banks have had large liquidity surpluses and have to a great extent invested the surplus in the Riksbank. There are several possibilities for doing so. Firstly, the Riksbank issues Riksbank Certificates every week with a one week maturity and at an interest rate that is the same as the repo rate decided on, that is, at present 0.25 per cent. This assumes that the bank system – as is now the case – has a surplus and needs to invest money.

Let that be a warning to those countries which have not yet signed up to the monetary integration project. The fall of the former hegemon is relevant not only for the current crisis, but also for the future of the monetary order in Europe. And here I do not see any positive perspectives, I must bitterly admit. I am not saying that the euro has to collapse, but I am pretty sure that if it prevails, it will be a completely different currency implying completely different monetary conditions from what the Germans in particular hoped for. And Germany faces a tough choice – further integration or a perfect monetary order. This question is rather new and painful. The answer to it will influence all of us, I believe. So let’s wish them good luck. Thank you for your kind attention. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3
In other words, credit growth exhibits a clear cyclical pattern with a medium-term orientation. The credit cycle appears to be a well-defined empirical regularity. It also appears to have been operating for well over a century. And its frequency suggests factors other than the business cycle may be responsible for driving it – including, for example, financial liberalisation and competition. Table 1 Summary statistics of real GDP growth, real loan growth and real bank asset growth in the UK and the US  Sources: Shularick and Taylor (2009) and Bank calculations. 14  We also experimented with the Hodrick-Prescott filter. Although the choice of an appropriate smoothing parameter is not straightforward a priori, this approach produced broadly similar results to the band-pass filter. See e.g. Harvey and Jaeger (1993) and Canova (1998) for discussions. 15  In what follows, we use Christiano and Fitzgerald’s (2003) optimal finite sample approximation to the band pass filter. An alternative to Christiano and Fitzgerald’s procedure is provided by Baxter and King (1999). Christiano and Fitzgerald provide evidence to suggest that their optimal finite sample approximation is preferable to Baxter and King’s when extracting cycles at lower frequencies.) Suppose the time series in with expectation . Its auto-covariance is question is a stationary stochastic process . The properties of the time series can be captured in the frequency domain by taking a Fourier transform of the auto-covariances yielding the power spectrum  is the frequency (in radians) in the range .

A concern for reputation incentivises banks to seek risky ventures (to keep dancing), the more so the better is the market’s prior on the macro state (the louder the music). We also posit as a larger proportion of banks set risky credit policies, the larger the incentive to pursue similarly risky policies. When others are posting positive earnings, the reputational loss from foreclosing and taking losses is that much greater. This is the “Keynes constraint”. It is better for your reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally. These conditions generate the potential for credit booms and busts. The better is the macro state, the greater banks’ incentive to pursue risky projects to preserve reputation, as the market attributes low earnings to low ability. But one bank’s announcement of positive earnings encourages others to announce positive earnings by setting risky policies too. In Rajan’s model this strategic complementarity between banks generates multiple equilibria: in sufficiently good states, banks coordinate on risky policies (“credit booms”), while in bad states they coordinate on tight policies (“credit crunches”). In between, either equilibrium is possible. Define the payoff function  . Substituting gives:  This captures the marginal return to adopting a risky policy. It allows us to define the regions of fundamentals over which risky policies and tight policies dominate respectively.
Capital deepening and TFP growth Percentage 12-month change (5 quarters sliding average) 6  6 5  Capital deepening  TFP growth  5  4  4  3  3  2  2  1  1  0  0  -1  -1 -2  -2 72 74 76 78 80 82 84 86 88 90 92 94 96 98 00 02 04  Sources: Statistics Sweden and the  8  BIS Review 9/2004  It is also interesting in this context to compare how developments in Sweden compare with other countries, particularly the United States. These comparisons are made more difficult by the fact that comparable statistics are hard to find. However, the statistics that are available indicate the factor productivity growth is relatively good in Sweden; much better than in the euro area, for instance. To summarise, we can conclude that there has been an upturn in productivity development in recent years. Earlier economic patterns are not being repeated entirely. However, it is difficult at present to establish what lies behind the upturn. The situation is reminiscent to some extent of that we saw for a few years at the end of the 1990s. Then, as now, there was reason for a wait-and-see policy, but not to reject outright the idea that what we see is a clear change. In any case, some importance should be attached to the new figures when taking a policy stance, although we must try even harder to understand what is happening.

I recall that some economists wanted to interpret the high level of unemployment following the crisis years as an indication that the changeover of monetary policy regime had raised the economy's equilibrium unemployment level and caused a permanent deterioration in employment. However, once the crisis had been overcome and the new policy was established, the labour market situation soon improved. Unemployment is currently around 4-5 per cent, which can be compared with figures of above 8 per cent in the mid-1990s. However, we still have some way to go to return to what was considered full employment prior to the crisis years 1991-93. 2  BIS Review 9/2004  2. GDP growth in Sweden 1970-2002 7  7 Annual growth Average 1970-1989 Average 1995-2001  6 5  6 5  4  4  3  3  2  2  1  1  0  0  -1  -1  -2  -2  -3  -3  1970  1975  1980  1985  1990  1995  2000  Sources: Statistics Sweden and the  All of this has been achieved parallel with a low inflation rate and during the period as a whole inflation has been in line with the Riksbank's target. From 1993 to the present day, the increase in CPI inflation has averaged 1.9 per cent, while the measure of underlying inflation on which we usually choose to base our monetary policy decisions - UND1X - has risen by an average of 2.1 per cent.