samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Eight meetings focused on the monetary policy decision, whereas four meetings focused on decisions about issues pertaining to supervision and financial stability. The decisions have been communicated to the public through press conferences, full publication of relevant reports and explanation, on a case by case basis, in accordance with requests by various media outlets. All the reports compiled by the Bank of Albania on the monetary policy and financial stability have been fully submitted, within the envisaged legal time frame, to the Assembly of the Republic of Albania and its Committee on Economy and Finance. In line with the above said, and in accordance with earlier public statements, the strengthening of governance has assumed a key place in the Supervisory Council decisionmaking process. From this perspective, I will now briefly focus on: Establishment of the Audit Committee The establishment of the Audit Committee is an important development with regard to strengthening the internal control at the Bank of Albania, especially the supervisory capacities of the Supervisory Council. The meetings held in 2015 discussed the organisation and functioning of the Control [Internal Audit] Department, the audit universe and annual plan, main findings, risk assessment and effectiveness of the internal control system at the Bank of Albania. Another important aspect of the activity was to monitor the work for the preparation of financial statements in accordance with the International Financial Reporting Standards.

It was maintained due to the continuation of positive values in net financial result. Addressing the non-performing loans issue has been one of the major engagements of the Bank of Albania throughout 2015. For the first time, after a four-year period, the level of nonperforming loans fell below 20%. Decisions taken by the Bank of Albania have constantly increased the pressure on the banking system, which, in turn, has added the efforts for managing non-performing loans through restructuring, execution, provisioning and their write off from the balance sheet, accordingly. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  The inter-institutional initiative materialised in the Plan of Measures for Reducing NonPerforming Loans, which consists in a multidimensional action of legal, fiscal and regulatory improvements, contributed to lowering the stock of non-performing loans to 18.2 % at the end of 2015. This plan includes other steps over the course of 2016, which will render the positive result even more visible in the system. Moreover, in 2015 the banking system was tested by the psychological pressure arising from the Greek crisis; however, it passed the test successfully. On the other hand, the situation served to test the effectiveness of prudential measures that the Bank of Albania had taken in due time. 4. Banking supervision  During 2015, we have worked on further bolstering banking supervision.
24502 Blinder, Alan (1998) ‘Central banking in theory and practice’ The Lionel Robbins lectures Carney, Mark (2018) ‘Guidance, Contingencies and Brexit’ speech given at the Society of Professional Economists, London Cunliffe, Jon (2016) ‘The UK economy post crisis: a series of unfortunate events?’ speech given at London South Bank University Cunliffe, Jon (2017) ‘The Phillips curve: lower, flatter or in hiding?’ speech given at the Oxford Economics Society Haldane, Andy (2017) ‘Work, wages and monetary policy’ speech given at the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford McCafferty, Ian (2018) ‘Changing times, changing norms’ OMFIF City Lecture Tenreyro, Silvana (2018) ‘The fall in productivity growth: causes and implications’ speech given at Queen Mary University of London Tenreyro, S and Thwaites, G (2016) ‘Pushing on a string: US monetary policy is less powerful in recessions’ American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 8(4): 43-74  14  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  14

(a) Descending the Jobs Ladder The global financial crisis generated a sharp fall in output. Given that fall, the subsequent rise in unemployment was more modest than expected. Between 2008 Q1 and 2009 Q2, UK output fell by around 6 ¼%, while unemployment rose by just over 2 ½ percentage points. By comparison, in the early 1990s recession output fell by around 2% peak-to-trough, while the unemployment rate increased by over 2.5 percentage points. Chart 15: Forecasts for unemployment Per cent  12 10 8 6 4 2 0  2005  2007  2009  2011  February 2009  2013  2015  February 2010  2017  2019  Actual  Sources: ONS, Bank of England and Bank of England calculations. 14  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  14  Put differently, in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis, unemployment rose by less than was expected by most mainstream forecasters, including the Bank. Chart 15 shows Bank forecasts for unemployment in early-2009 and early-2010. Having expected unemployment to peak at over 10.5%, the eventual peak of 8.5% was reached in late-2011. More recently, the “Okun’s Law” relationship appears to have steepened as weak productivity growth since the crisis has seen unemployment fall sharply since 2012 despite more modest GDP growth (Chart 16).
This is said to have caused inflation to undershoot the target for most of the inflation-targeting period and to have led to unemployment being unnecessarily high, sometimes quantified to tens of thousands of people. I would like to respond to this criticism as I consider it to be misleading and based on oversimplified analyses. How much has the target been undershot? The first question to ask is by how much the Riksbank has actually missed the target.3 The answer to this question is not as obvious as one might think. The inflation target is formulated in terms of the familiar measure CPI (consumer price index) and says that the CPI is to increase by 2 per cent per year. But sometimes there is good reason to allow monetary policy to be guided by other measures of inflation than the CPI. This is something the Riksbank has long emphasized.4 One of the most obvious reasons for also looking at other measures of inflation is that when the policy rate is adjusted, this has a direct impact on CPI “in the wrong direction” through households’ mortgage costs – when the repo rate is increased, interest costs increase and this is reflected in higher CPI, and vice versa when the repo rate is cut. Seen over really long periods of time this should not matter as the Riksbank’s cuts and raises of the repo rate can be expected to offset one another.

One of the lessons of the global financial crisis was just this – that we need to deepen our understanding of the workings of financial markets and the links between the financial sector and the rest of the economy. Having said this, I would like to stress that these are by no means issues that only came to the attention of central banks for the first time after the financial crisis. Over the years, the Riksbank and other central banks have on a number of occasions had reason to consider how various financial developments should affect monetary policy. However, these thoughts have been more based on intuition than on a concrete analytical framework. Research on these issues has literally exploded in recent years, so hopefully we will make some progress in the period ahead. But until a practically useful analytical framework is in place, I at least believe that there must be scope to put forward arguments without necessarily having to be able to translate these into exact probabilities or precise numerical effects on inflation and the real economy. If we are worried by certain developments we cannot, as I see it, refrain from taking action just because certain things are difficult to quantify or cannot be fit into a simplified, theoretical or conceptual framework for how monetary policy should be conducted. We cannot take a time-out and wait for research. This is an area with enormous potential costs for society. So I think a precautionary principle must apply.
Second, effective systemic risk oversight will require a broad range of expertise. This requires the right people, with experience operating in all the important areas of the financial system. In this regard, I believe that the Federal Reserve has an essential role to play. The Federal Reserve has experience and expertise in all three areas – it now oversees most of the largest U.S. financial institutions; it operates a major payments system and oversees several others; and it operates in the capital markets every day in managing its own portfolio and as an agent conducting Treasury securities auctions. Also, as the central bank, it backstops the financial system in its lender-of-last-resort role. Compared with where we were in late 2008 and early 2009, financial markets have stabilized, and the prospect of a collapse of the financial system and a second Great Depression now seems extremely remote. Even with this progress, however, credit remains tight, especially for small businesses and households. Economic growth has resumed, but unemployment has climbed to punishing levels. So while circumstances have improved, they are still very far from where we want them to be. We have no cause for celebration when the challenges facing so many businesses and households remain so daunting. Aggressive and extraordinary official interventions were imperative to bring about this nascent stabilization of our financial markets and economic recovery. The Federal Reserve has been at the center of many of these interventions.

Information sharing with other agencies is simply not as good as the intimate knowledge and understanding of markets and institutions that is  BIS Review 6/2010  5  gathered from first-hand supervision. Indeed, many institutions at the center of the crisis and arguably the most troubled – Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG and the GSEs – were not supervised by the Federal Reserve. Consequently, when those institutions came under stress, the Federal Reserve had poorer quality and far less timely information about the condition of these institutions than would have been the case if we had had the benefit of direct supervisory oversight. In fact, some of the hardest choices the Federal Reserve had to make during the most chaotic weeks of the crisis concerned systemically important firms we did not regulate. It is not surprising that, in the wake of the crisis, some countries that had separated bank supervision from the central bank monetary policy role are now reconsidering that division of labor. That is mainly because coordination problems created difficulties in responding quickly and effectively in the crisis. Separation made it more difficult to communicate in a timely way and to understand the broader implications of what was transpiring. It is critical that we not introduce new inefficiencies and impediments.
Concerns that systemic sovereign issuers may lose market access fed fears that they may be forced to redeem their liabilities in a currency different from the euro, and thus de facto leave the euro area. “Redenomination fears” became a new source of market anxiety. There was a risk that such unwarranted concerns would become self-fulfilling and the spectre of destructive tail scenarios was looming. In this context, the process of financial integration, which had evolved at a rapid pace since the inception of the euro, was partially reversed, giving way to fragmentation. Interbank financial fragmentation per se was not a new phenomenon in the post-Lehman world. However, during the most severe stages of the sovereign crisis the fractures across the euro area were not idiosyncratic but systemic – that is, they ran along national borders. This reversal of the integration process risked undoing one of the key benefits of the common currency. Fragmentation led to an impairment of the monetary policy transmission mechanism. The monetary impulse that the ECB had swiftly introduced in response to the rising risks to price stability was no longer transmitted uniformly throughout the entire euro area. While the ECB had brought its official policy interest rates to historical lows, a number of countries were not in a position to take advantage of monetary accommodation. Banks in those countries were tightening credit conditions, running against the monetary policy intentions of the central bank, with negative repercussions on access to finance, in particular for small and mediumsized enterprises.

Timothy F Geithner: Overview of the US financial system Remarks by Mr Timothy F Geithner, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at the Bond Market Association’s annual meeting, New York, 20 April 2005. *  *  *  Thanks for giving me the opportunity to join you today. The U.S. and the world economy now confront the conjunction of several different transitions, which will have important implications for the U.S. financial system. Among the most important of these transitions are: -  The approaching demographic pressures on fiscal resources, which will hit most major economies at a time when underlying fiscal positions are still likely to be in substantial deficit. -  The disposition of the global imbalances reflected most conspicuously in the U.S. current account deficit. -  The inevitable evolution in the exchange rate regimes of those countries that have been actively targeting their nominal exchange rate against the dollar to a system where there is more variability in their bilateral and real effective exchange rates. -  The transition from a long period of exceptionally low short-term nominal and real interest rates to levels more appropriate to the present circumstances. The slope and shape of this path toward equilibrium is necessarily subject to considerable uncertainty, and will depend on how the outlook unfolds. These are all types of disequilibria. They can be sustained for a time, but not indefinitely. The imbalances in our fiscal and external positions could be diffused gradually and smoothly.
Real prices/ rents for office premises in Stockholm City 400  Index 1981=100  400  300  300  200  200  100  100 Sista observation: mars 2008  0  0  81 83 85 87 89 91 93 95 97 99 01 03 05 07 Hyror  Priser  Figure 5. Direct earnings requirement on office property Per cent  14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0  de c8 de 0 c8 de 2 c8 de 4 c8 de 6 c8 de 8 c9 de 0 c9 de 2 c9 de 4 c9 de 6 c9 de 8 c0 de 0 c0 de 2 c0 de 4 c06  14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0  Stockholm  6  Göteborg  M almö  Femårig statsobligation  BIS Review 60/2008  Figure 6. Office prices Annual percentage change  40  40  30  30  20  20  10  10  0  0  -10  -10 96  97  98  99  00  01  Storbritannien  Irland  02  03  04  05  Frankrike  USA  Spanien  06  07  Figure 7.

Prices of owner-occupied apartments also fell during the autumn, but have since stabilised. Employment and household incomes are of the utmost importance when it comes to movements in the property market. According to the Riksbank’s most recent forecast, employment is expected to continue rising this year, albeit at a slower pace than last year. Following a strong rise last year, around 4 per cent, households’ real disposable incomes are expected to increase by a good 2 per cent over the coming years. Given this outcome, there is little risk of a fall in house prices to the same extent as is happening in the United States, for example. In Sweden savings are also high to start with, unlike the United States where they have fallen to historically low levels. There is always a risk that house prices, and also other asset prices such as shares, which have been pushed up by exaggerated optimism or speculation, could plummet. It would appear that Swedish price movements can be explained by fundamentals, and that the speculative element has happily been conspicuous by its absence. As property often functions as collateral for loans, a large fall in prices would affect the banks. In addition, developments in the property market affect demand in the economy. Rising house prices mean that households can take on new loans to increase their consumption. Correspondingly, falling house prices can contribute to subduing demand in the economy.
Most recently, the exchange rate broke the upward trend it followed for several quarters. Actually, it has dropped compared with its levels early in the year. Symmetric to our previous actions, if for this reason inflation were to fall temporarily below our target, we would not apply a more expansionary monetary policy, unless after some time we saw second-round effects jeopardizing the return of inflation to 3% over a two-year horizon. Importantly, any changes in the policy stance in either direction can be warranted only if our medium-term inflation forecast suggests that it will deviate away from the 3% target. Of course this would be determined by changes in its fundamentals. What are the risks we identified in our baseline scenario? On the external front, one of the main risks is a reversal of the improved international financial conditions. As I said, the path that the Fed will ultimately take to adjust the policy rate is critical. An increase in the fed funds rate is very likely within this year, and the markets’ expectations point at very gradual subsequent adjustments. A more aggressive action by the Fed could increase global volatility significantly, affecting asset prices, capital flows and currencies. The Brexit vote materialized one of the risks outlined in June but, to this date, its effects seem 4 / 14  BIS central bankers' speeches  bounded. However, its true consequences are still in the making, so further repercussions on medium-term growth in the UK and Europe cannot be ruled out.

4  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  4  And the TCFD is here to stay through the power of market uptake - with 250 major companies representing $ trillion of market capitalisation and financial institutions (banks, insurers and asset managers) responsible for $ of assets already having committed to make these disclosures and to talk to the users of information about how to sharpen and refine what disclosures are provided. Green Finance It’s perhaps less obvious that I, as a regulator and central banker, but wholly understandable that many of you here in the room, might be focused on the opportunities as well as the risks from climate change – and specifically the opportunity to ‘mainstream’ Green Finance. Unfortunately, measuring and tracking green financing comprehensively is difficult, partly due to the lack of criteria, indicators and a clear taxonomy, and so an absence of proper green labelling. But we can accurately measure the labelled green bond market. This has continued to develop rapidly: issuance reached over $ in 2017, and is forecast by some to pass $ this year overall. There have also been significant innovations in recent years. For example, the Agricultural Bank of China issued a green RMB bond and Bank of China issued the first ever green covered bond in 2016. We have also seen an increase in sovereign green bond issuance including from Poland, France and Nigeria. 4  But whilst welcome, this is not enough.
With the 2021 Budget just around the corner I want to take you back to the April 2009 Budget, just under twelve years ago, when, in my role as Chief Economic Adviser to the Treasury, I had to advise on the consequences of the deficiencies in the global and UK pre-crisis regulatory framework. By spring 2009, what had started in the summer of 2007 as a liquidity crisis in global financial markets turned into a solvency crisis for a number of global and UK firms, resulting in the UK government bailing out banks and injecting public  1  For more information see the Bank of England’s written evidence submitted to the TSC’S 2017 capital inquiry 2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  2  money to the tune of £ to stabilise the financial sector2. The contingent liabilities that the UK government had taken on to support bank funding or to underpin some major banks’ balance sheets dwarfed that sum. At that time, we saw the very serious consequences of the lack of appropriate focus on the safety and soundness of individual banks and the financial system as a whole, including the absence of a credible resolution regime – by which I mean a regime that sets out our aims, to manage the orderly failure of institutions, accompanied with the tools to deliver them.

•  Third, enhance supervisory colleges, which were designed to improve the exchange of information among supervisors with the goal of ensuring safe and sound banking practices, reducing the possibility of governmental assistance, and building confidence in the financial system. We need to make supervisory colleges more effective by going beyond basic information sharing. In addition to improving our information sharing, this should also include making sure that core colleges are appropriately constructed and reflect the key jurisdictions necessary to get a full picture of the risks of the firm; ensuring that the dialogue between supervisors and firms in college settings is robust and that the engagement among all parties is sufficiently high; and providing clear and direct feedback following supervisory colleges, both between supervisors and to the firm. Home supervisors should be providing host supervisors with feedback and, where necessary, direction on key risks and other issues requiring follow up in their jurisdictions. Host supervisors should be providing home supervisors with feedback on what they are seeing in their jurisdiction and how risks are evolving in their markets. And, finally, to ensure consistency of supervisory messages on group-wide issues, home and host supervisors should agree on key message to firms. Finally, supervisory colleges are a good way to promote more consistent supervision of globally active firms, and supervisors should leverage the college construct to reinforce more consistent application of global standards and risk management expectations across all firms.