samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Both the fund’s investment strategy and investment management have tolerated substantial return volatility over the past 20 years, partly owing to transparency about the consequences of strategic choices and performance. Regardless of how the GPFG is organised in the future, it is essential to maintain the established confidence in and legitimacy of the fund. Transparency about investment management will continue to be important in this regard. The investment strategy and organisation have evolved in parallel The investment strategy for the fund has evolved gradually since the beginning in 1996, with decisive changes along the way. The initial capital in the fund was invested exclusively in government bonds. Already in 1997, it became clear that the fund would grow larger than assumed and the saving horizon longer. It was therefore decided that 40 percent should be invested in equities to attain a higher long-term real return. From 1998, the fund therefore went from being a lender to just a handful of countries to becoming part owner of a wide range of private companies. Chart: Evolution of strategy and governance structure over time From 2002, fixed income investments were expanded to include bonds issued by corporates and international organisations. Important new steps were taken in 2007, when it was decided to increase the equity allocation and invest in new markets. The fund could thereby become a larger shareholder in more companies and in more countries.

Investment strategy, governance and organisation must continue to evolve in tandem The sceptics who 20 years ago doubted the decision to give Norges Bank task of managing the oil fund have not been proven right so far. In the National Budget for 2018, the Ministry of Finance states that the Bank has managed and continues to manage the fund in a sound manner. Norges Bank believes that the Bank is well positioned to manage the GPFG and perform central banking tasks in a sound manner also in the future. If the fund remains under the aegis of the Bank, Norges Bank recognises that there are arguments for establishing a separate committee for monetary policy and financial stability. Such a committee will substantially unburden the board of central banking matters, and the composition of the board can then be tailored more closely to specific tasks relating to investment management. In this case, the Executive Board favours a 4/7  BIS central bankers' speeches  model that is based on the current governance structure. Norges Bank also recognises that there are aspects of the current organisation and governance that could be reconsidered. The organisation, governance structure and supervision must be considered in the light of new challenges for the management of the fund and for central banking. In recent years, changes in the Ministry’s mandate have given the Bank greater responsibility for formulating parts of the GPFG’s investment strategy.
BIS central bankers’ speeches  7  When I weighed together the figures received since the monetary policy meeting in February, my assessment was that Sweden’s economic prospects had brightened. This may appear strange if one looks at the growth forecast in the Monetary Policy Update and sees that the growth forecast for 2013 and 2014 is slightly weaker than in February. But this is because at the end of February Statistics Sweden revised up the number of hours worked, which leads to a lower productivity trend and a lower growth trend for GDP. This means that the outlook for economic activity and resource utilisation remained largely the same as in February. The same applied to inflation prospects. The actual CPIF inflation rate, that is, the CPI with a fixed mortgage rate, has undershot the inflation target, but one should also look at the reasons for this. The strong appreciation of the krona that followed in the wake of the Lehman crash is one important reason. Low unit labour costs are another reason, but here there is now a turnaround, with labour costs being expected to rise faster during the forecast period than in the past two years. If one looks at the CPI, the most recent figures are moreover in line with the inflation target. In this context, I think that a little too much focus may be given to current inflation in the monetary policy debate, particularly given that it takes time for monetary policy to have an impact on inflation.

Long before it was responsible for monetary policy and financial stability, one of the Bank’s key roles was the provision of last resort lending to commercial banks facing liquidity pressures. It is hard to date precisely, but the Bank began undertaking such operations in earnest probably around the time the UK faced a steady sequence of banking panics in 1847, 1857 and 1866. The Bank responded to these panics by making liquidity available to support banks. Last resort lending, as Bagehot came 46  subsequently to call it, was born. Indeed, Bagehot later defined principles for such lending: it should occur  freely, at a penalty rate against good collateral. An interesting historical question, with relevance to the present day, is whether in fact the Bank abided by these principles in its last resort lending during the 1847, 1857 and 1866 panics. To assess that, we took data from the giant paper ledgers recording changes to the Bank’s balance sheet where these interventions 47  were recorded on a loan by loan, counterparty by counterparty, interest rate by interest rate basis. The transcription of these data benefitted from the fact that the hand-writing in the ledgers was from a small number of clerks across the three crises – one of the indirect benefits of job continuity. While the data was mostly transcribed manually, the project developed an image recognition system using a neural network st  algorithm which we will use in future to turn historic ledger activities into 21 century machine readable data.
If you plot the share of electronic payments for a number of countries against the share of cash to GDP you get a broad measure of the cost efficiency of the different payment systems. The further to the northwest corner of such a diagram, the more automated the payment system is. According to these measures, the Swedish payment market seems to be performing very well, as are the payment markets in the other Nordic countries. Swedes, however, seem to be using more cash than other Nordic countries. The Swedish M0/GDP ratio lies 1-2 per centage points higher than the other Nordic countries. As cash and card payments are close substitutes - in fact the only alternatives available for transactions at the point of sale2 - we would expect that the more widespread use of cash in Sweden would be reflected in a lower use of card payments. Payments data support this. Swedes use more cash and make fewer card payments per capita than other Nordic citizens. Why do we observe these differences in the use of cash and the use of card payments in countries that otherwise have very similar payment systems? What variables influence the users’ choice of payment instruments? Given that users’ choice is sensitive to prices, the price that consumers face for the use of different payment instruments is one such important variable. Indeed, there is a growing body of evidence that the choice of payment instrument is influenced by pricing.

The aspect that impresses me most about this group is the virtually universal consensus on global economic issues. There is a broad consensus at the level of the G 20 on the diagnosis of the crisis. There is a broad consensus on the appropriate response to the crisis. And there is a broad consensus on the direction of financial sector reform, along with the main ideas that I described a moment ago. There is agreement that macroeconomic policies at the domestic level need to be consistent with the objective of global financial and economic stability. Medium-term and long-term sustainability in domestic macroeconomic policies will have to prevail. A renewed mediumterm perspective should guide macro-economic policies from now on. Like financial regulation, policies should not amplify economic fluctuations. Structural reform As I said, structural reform is ultimately the responsibility of individual economies. The crisis has reduced some of the imbalances almost automatically. In the euro area, economies with wide current account imbalances – including Spain – have suffered relatively more than others. As a consequence, output and employment losses in these countries are acting as potent stabilisers to re-absorb long-standing gaps between domestic savings and domestic investment. As Miguel Fernández-Ordóñez has said, some structural weaknesses have been revealed even more clearly and call for appropriate reforms. Spain was on a pattern of growth in the run-up to the crisis that was not sustainable.
These frameworks are now equipped with tools for assessing and addressing risks at a range of resolutions – microscopic, macroscopic and telescopic. And the gaping hole in the pre-crisis policy architecture – the macro-prudential layer – has now been filled. The institutional architecture for macro-financial policy has also been adapted since the crisis to better enable interactions between these policy layers to be addressed. In the UK, the micro-prudential, macro-prudential and monetary policy arms of policy are now attached to a single body, the Bank of England. Each arm has a separate policy committee tasked with  BIS central bankers’ speeches  13  setting policy. But these policy committees have shared inputs of information and meet jointly to discuss areas of intersecting policy responsibility (Bank of England (2014)). Taking each of the arms of policy in turn, at the highest level of resolution micro-prudential policy frameworks have been significantly revised in a number of countries since the crisis. Often, this has had the aim of refocussing the microscope on the systemic, as well as firmspecific, risks facing banks. For the world’s largest banks, significant extra cushions of lossabsorbing capacity are now being required, together with changes to banks’ organisational structures to make them credibly resolvable. In some countries, including the UK and US, large banks’ activities are being separated or ring-fenced. These initiatives ought, over time, to lower the degree of complexity and inter-connectivity of these entities, making them less virulent super-spreaders of financial contagion. A second area of progress is stress-testing.

So we  4  BIS Review 25/2003  cannot now gain a full picture of how financial risk is being transferred around the global system, without a clear view of the balance sheets, and the risk management of large reinsurance firms. Progress is being made in the International Association of Insurance Supervisors, and the European Union is considering a directive to regularise the position in Europe. But we are not there yet. A second, and related area is the issue of credit risk transfer and the role of derivatives. This has been the subject of some entertaining exchanges between Warren Buffett and Alan Greenspan, in the last couple of weeks. To simplify grotesquely, Warren Buffett believes that credit derivatives have generated new risks for the financial system; Alan Greenspan believes they are one reason why there has not been more financial instability during a period when markets have been highly volatile. This is a difficult debate in which to take sides. My own view is that neither proposition is rigorously proven at this stage. So my cautious recommendation as a regulator is that we need to know more about how these derivatives are used, and where credit risk has ended up as a result. In particular, we need to know whether regulatory arbitrage is one of the causes – whether risk is migrating to sectors with inadequate capital requirements for this type of risk. That is a subject on which many FSF members agree that our knowledge base is inadequate.
What would be the room for manoeuvre? There are tools which are aimed at the borrower or the lender. You have debt-to-income ratios, loan-to-value ratios, etc. There are also tax measures. If, on the one hand, you support lending by reducing taxation, it makes no sense to tighten lending with macroprudential tools on the other. One has to be consistent. Being consistent is the first rule of governance. If monetary policy is loose, as it is now, and on top you also have loose fiscal policy, and on the supervisory side you deregulate or have very lax supervision, then you’re asking for trouble. That’s exactly what caused the last financial crisis: 1/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  the combination of loose fiscal policy, accommodative monetary policy and lax supervision. How exactly does the ECB assess the risk of Brexit? First, we need to know what the UK is requesting. Second, we need to know what is happening during the transition period – if there is one. If there is no deal and there is a hard Brexit, this will harm both sides. There will be a need for some legal clarity. For instance, will contracts still be valid and, if so, how could they be implemented? The private sector solutions could be extremely difficult and cumbersome. But there could also be a need for a public sector response, e.g. some recognition or grandfathering of existing contracts. When do you start this grandfathering?

This is why we should rely on a suite of models, and on actual data as much as on models. - the restrictive effects on activity, while being in mean reversed in 2025, are quicker than the dampening effects on inflation: hence we should be patient and consistent, including in our explanations to the broad public. The estimated transmission lags of monetary policy in the literature vary from one year5 to more than two years6. But interpreting these lags is more art than science. Overall transmission lags of monetary policy to inflation can vary over time and across jurisdictions, depending on factors such as the level of interest rates, the phase of the cycle and the sectoral structure of the economy (e.g. share of manufacturing, services, or housing). In the current tightening cycle, several factors suggest that the lag in transmission of policy to the real economy may be at the upper end of the two-year range. First, the current tightening cycle started from exceptionally low levels of real interest rates – as measured by nominal OIS rate deflated by market inflation expectations. 5  5. Smets and Wouters (2005); see also ECB NAWM model presented in P. Lane’s lecture on 16/02/2023, “The euro area hiking cycle: an interim assessment”. 6 Badinger and Schiman (2023), Measuring Monetary Policy in the Euro Area Using SVARs with Residual Restrictions. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 2023, 15(2): 279–305, or; see also ECB-BASE model.
(b) From 1940–1974 the total assets of the 3 largest clearing banks are used from the Bankers’ Magazine and banks’ published accounts. Bank observations are linearly interpolated between observations. (c) Total UK assets of the three largest UK owned banks are used after 1974 from Bank of England data. Chart 8: Holding periods in bank equities  Source: Bloomberg and Bank calculations. Notes: Average holding period of equities for a sample of 30 banks. BIS central bankers’ speeches  23  Chart 9: Market-based measures of capital ratios(a)(b)(c)(d)  Sources: Capital IQ and Bank calculations (a) “Crisis” banks are a set of major financial institutions which in autumn 2008 either failed, required government capital or were taken over in distressed circumstances. These are RBS, HBOS, Lloyds TSB, Bradford & Bingley, Alliance & Leicester, Citigroup, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, Merrill Lynch, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Goldman Sachs, ING Group, Dexia and Commerzbank. The chart shows an unweighted average for those institutions in the sample for which data are available on the given day. (b) The “no crisis” institutions are HSBC, Barclays, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, Santander, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, Crédit Agricole, Société Générale, BBVA, Banco Popular, Banco Sabadell, Unicredit, Banca Popolare di Milano, Royal Bank of Canada, National Australia Bank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and ANZ Banking Group. The chart shows an unweighted average for those banks in the sample for which data are available on the given day.

While these ever emerging technologies such as Digital transformation, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Enterprise Mobility and Mobile Banking, have brought about efficiency and increased innovations, they have also exposed the financial services sector to cybercrime. Some notable incidents of 1|Page  cybercrime include, the attack on the Central Bank of Bangladesh, Russian retail bank and seven banks in the United Kingdom. The financial services sector is a key target by criminals because it is the custodian of large amount of funds in the economy. For this same reason, the financial services sector has to also deal with other types of risks, which among others include, fraud, extortion, money laundering, illicit financial flows, market manipulation, data theft, and currency attacks. With statistics showing an increase of cyber-attacks in the financial sector, the importance of ensuring that our institutions are cyber resilient cannot be over-emphasized. Ladies and gentlemen, the financial services sector has to see cybersecurity for what it is, a large scale operational risk deserving the utmost attention and thus develop the necessary systems and cultures throughout the sector to deal with this risk. Key to the development and operation of these systems and cultures is the need to nurture talent capable of addressing cyber security threats through prompt detection, investigation, reporting, prosecution and prevention. Distinguished participants, let me also emphasize that cyber risks should be viewed from an enterprise-wide perspective.
Perhaps it is imperative here to emphasize that it is important for Islamic banks to provide all information about their activities and financial statements with full transparency, especially that they bear moral responsibility. This would enhance their credibility, contribute to their good reputation to be accepted on a broader range, and remove any false beliefs concerning their activities. Dear Brothers, A number of central banks and supervisory authorities have recognized the nature of risks confronted by Islamic banks and pursued a supervisory approach based on measurement of risks. Thus, they have developed appropriate mechanisms for banking supervision depending on the type of risks. They have also realized the need for international cooperation to develop standards that could form the basis of a strong structure for Islamic banking. The increasing global interest in Islamic banking, in recent years, is attributable to the rapid growth of this type of activity in terms of size, scope and significance both in Islamic countries and other parts of the world. Islamic banking has spread widely in more than twenty-five countries in Asia and Africa. It has also emerged in many financial centers in Europe and North America to the extent that major international banks and specialized financial institutions have started to offer Shari’a-compliant products to meet the needs of a wide spectrum of customers in their markets and those of Islamic countries.

Corporate governance, risk management, transparency, disclosure, and internal control requirements in Islamic financial services industry should always be developed, and adjusted to meet the needs specified for Islamic banks, especially that an important part of the work of these banks is based on impression and reputation of the nature of their work. Therefore, these banks should be aware of the role entrusted to them, especially the ethical one. The nature of risks faced by Islamic banks may raise specific issues in terms of assets and inventory assessment, investment costs, regular income and recognition of losses, adequacy of guarantees and others. We must emphasize here the importance of continued development of mechanisms to cover such risks. This underlines the importance of integration into global financial markets, encouragement of competition, and provision of a proper climate for on-going innovation so that Islamic banks can consolidate their positions in all markets and boost their ability to provide products for all segments of customers. On the other hand, a controversy is sometimes raised and comparisons are made between Islamic and conventional banks in terms of risk degree, exposure to insolvency, and the argument ensuing concerning capital adequacy. However, the important point is the awareness and understanding the nature of risks, development of mechanisms to cover such risks, and the ability to compete in markets and meet the needs of customers.
Ladies and gentlemen, over the past years, the Thai economy has been very resilient to numerous economic shocks, ranging from the oil price shock, natural disasters such as flood and drought, series of political uncertainties as well as the 2008 global financial crisis. Nevertheless, Thailand’s average annual growth rate for the last decade registered at 4.4 percent which is within the range of our estimated potential growth. The Bank of Thailand expects economic growth for this year to return to this normal trend, with moderate growth in the first half of the year and steady growth in the second half after the supply chain disruption unwound. This is the first aspect of returning to normalcy, or growth normalization, which is a feature of resilient economy. Such economic expansion is on the back of sound external and domestic demand. On the external side, however, risks to the global economy have increased recently due to damages caused by Japan earthquake, a weaker-than-expected US economy and concerns over Euro area fiscal crisis. These developments will have to be monitored closely. As of now, we expect a slightly lower global growth prospect but this should not change Thailand’s economic outlook to the extent that derails the economy from its present growth path. In particular, Thailand’s export remains robust. Supply chain disruption due to the Japan earthquake is proven to be limited and temporary; limited in the sense that impacts are mostly felt in the production and exports of vehicles.

Everything suggests, moreover, that the economy will continue to impress. Last year, GDP growth was 3.8% and the increase in employment was the highest in the past twenty-five years. Another indication of the good circle in which the Swedish economy is developing at present is that forward-looking GDP assessments have also been revised upwards, whereas forecasts of inflation have not been adjusted upwards to the same degree. Financial market pricing is also a tribute to the present credibility of Swedish economic policy. Who would have believed a decade ago that the Swedish economy would achieve such a favourable path? The successful combination of relatively high GDP growth and low inflation can in principle be attributed to a number of factors. One may be the plentiful supply of unutilised resources after the crisis in the early 1990s. A change in pricing behaviour may have contributed once the rate of inflation had been brought down to a low and stable level. Increased competition in connection with, for example, deregulations, globalisation and IT commerce may also have played a part. But it may also have to do as well with an upward shift in trend productivity, so that more goods and services can be produced without an increase in prices, in other words, a higher rate of potential growth. It can be argued that all these factors have in fact contributed to the favourable development. When the upswing started there were plenty of unutilised resources.