samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Norges Bank Economic perspectives 15 february 2018  The krone depreciation, combined with moderate wage settlements, has contributed to a marked improvement in business profitability and competitiveness. This has provided a considerable boost to Norwegian firms exposed to international competition. At the same time, an expansionary fiscal policy and lower interest expenses have been important in sustaining domestic demand. This year, the policy rate may be increased for the first time in seven years – this is a good sign. Two years since the cyclical trough was reached in Norway, growth has gained a firm footing and the unemployment rate is approaching a normal level (Chart 15). The impetus from abroad has strengthened and exports are picking up. There is renewed optimism in the petroleum industry. A number of large development projects will contribute to a rebound in oil investment in the coming years. Chart 15 Mainland GDP. Four−quarter change. Percent 4  4  3  3  2  2  1  1  0 2012  0 2013  2014  2015  2016  2017  Source: Statistics Norway  Increased economic activity should lead to a pickup in inflation. On the other hand, the effects of technological advances and a more integrated world economy may continue to exert downward pressure on wage and price inflation. In its conduct of monetary policy, Norges Bank weighs the outlook for inflation against developments in output and employment.

Other factors could also have an impact during the course of 2008, for instance, via a decline in the total wage bill paid by the sector. Against this backdrop, Swiss GDP growth is likely to settle at around 2% in 2008. This easing-off should allow for a reduction in the level of capacity utilisation. In a moment I will outline the risks attached to our baseline scenario. BIS Review 150/2007  1  Developments in monetary and financial conditions Since the onset of the sub-prime credit crisis in August, yields on long-term Swiss Confederation bonds have remained almost unchanged. For 10-year maturities, the rate has fluctuated around 3%. For shorter maturity bonds, however, the search for quality investments has resulted in a drop in rates. Yields on two-year maturities, for instance, have fallen from 3.0% to 2.0%. However, this decline has been partly offset or even fully neutralised by an increase in risk premiums, in particular in the case of issuers with poor ratings. Since September, the depreciation in the US dollar has accelerated. The Swiss franc has also strengthened a little against the euro, although the movements were more volatile in nature. Monetary and financial conditions can also be analysed in terms of volumes. Special attention should be given to commercial lending, since a shortage of credit in the current circumstances would be equivalent to a tightening in monetary conditions. However, no effect of this kind can be identified in Switzerland, not even in the most recent statistics.
3  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  3  Throughout our work on AI/ML we want to enable safe innovation. We are open to use of this technology, but with proper scrutiny to the practical details. This is how we balance the competing demands of our primary objectives, which include ensuring financial stability and ensuring safety and soundness of firms, and our secondary objectives such as promoting competition. Open to new firms entering  My second theme is the importance we at the Bank of England attach to being open to new firms entering markets. In addition to supporting new ideas and approaches, fintech is creating a more open, competitive and diverse financial ecosystem. At the Bank of England, we see more businesses working on identifying and solving global financial challenges as a welcome development. It is clear that on several dimensions today’s financial system offers an imperfect service, including the cost and efficiency of domestic and cross-border payments and access for the disadvantaged or excluded. We want to improve the service consumers and businesses receive, without compromising our regulatory perimeter or undermining the ‘same risk -same regulation’ principle that underpins our approach. At the heart of our vision for these improvements is putting consumers at the centre and empowering them to take full benefit from their data. I will discuss this in more detail at tomorrow’s panel session on SME financing.

This gives the central banks a strong role. Figure 7 Voting rights of the General Board  4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Obviously, this requires efficient preparations for meetings. A Steering Committee with 14 members has therefore been established with the purpose of guiding the work to be presented to the General Board. The majority of the Steering Committee members represent the EU institutions and in addition there are four elected members from the national central banks. Two advisory committees have also been set up – the Advisory Technical Committee, chaired by Stefan Ingves of the Riksbank and the Advisory Scientific Committee chaired by Professor Martin Hellwig of the Max Planck Institute. The Advisory Technical Committee (ATC) mirrors the composition of the General Board with 62 members. The Advisory Scientific Committee (ASC) is smaller, consisting of only 15 academics and the chair of the ATC. I have been a member of the ESRB and the ATC at its first meetings Box 1 Steering Committee Members  ESRB Chair (ECB President) and first Vice-Chair  ECB Vice-President  Governors of 4 Central Banks  European Commission representative  Chairpersons of the three ESAs  President of the EFC  ATC Chair  ASC Chair The ESRB General Board held its inaugural meeting in January and has since met three times. It will meet again in December. The meetings were prepared by the Secretariat, the Steering Committee and the Advisory Technical Committee.
UK regulatory structure and proposals for change Across the world we see a lively debate on how the regulatory cake should be cut. There has been change in France. The Australian Government has set up the Wallis Commission to look at the institutional arrangements there. Their first report has just been published. Reforms are in progress in Japan. In the US the new legislative season is about to open, with a number of runners and riders already saddled up in the financial regulation steeplechase. Similarly, in the UK, a variety of think tanks, and the opposition Labour Party, have produced proposals to amend, or in some cases fundamentally reorder, our regulatory structure. But, before describing these exciting proposals, perhaps a brief description of the British system would be in order. Responsibility for financial regulation in the UK is divided between two Government Departments. Department of Trade and Industry  STRUCTURE OF UK FINANCIAL REGULATION  HMTreasury  Insurance Companies Act 1982  Banking Act 1987  Financial Services Act 1986  Bank of England  Securities and Investments Board  Personal Investment Authority Retail Regulator  Investment Management Regulatory Organisation  Securities And Futures Authority  Insurance Companies  BIS Review 21/1997  Banks  Financial Advisers  Securities Houses  Fund Managers  -3-  Most falls to the Treasury, but prudential supervision of insurance companies is the responsibility of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI).

It is no accident that in all major countries the central bank has a significant role in the supervision of banks, even if in some cases others have been given the legal powers to carry out the front-line tasks. Having as supervisors tried their best to limit the likelihood of failure, when faced with it central bankers are uniquely well placed to provide assistance, whether to the institution in trouble, to the market at large, or both. Those who wish to separate banking supervision from central banking must acknowledge that there are certain things that only the central bank can do, and that therefore there needs to be a strong link between the central bank and any new regulator. In Germany, for instance, the Bundesaufsichtsamt is the supervisor of commercial banks. But the Bundesbank has an important role in the day-to-day job of collecting prudential returns, and must be consulted on liquidity and capital requirements, which bear most directly on its role in an emergency. The logic of these arguments might point instead to a ‘Holy Trinity’, rather than a ‘Twin Peaks’ model, based on three agencies, focused respectively on financial services, banking and insurance. That might allow the most sensible match - albeit not complete - of regulation to function and institution. It would also have the advantage of evolving fairly readily out of the present structure.
Christian Noyer: The challenges of financial liberalisation for emerging market economies Speech by Mr Christian Noyer, Governor of the Bank of France, to RBI staff, Reserve Bank of India, Central Office, Mumbai, 14 May 2007. *  *  *  I am very pleased and honoured to be here and I want to thank warmly my good friend, Dr Reddy, for having invited me to address the staff of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The BIS recently announced that the RBI Vice-Governor, Mr Rakesh Mohan, will chair a new working group on "Capital flows and emerging economies". I would like to congratulate him for accepting to explore this complex issue. I will offer some views on a related topic: "the challenges of financial liberalisation for Emerging Market Economies (EMEs)". Financial liberalisation is defined here as the dismantling of internal and external controls on capital flows. It exhibits many positive aspects, for instance: •  it contributes to improving global capital allocation efficiency, be it at the national or at the international level;  •  it fosters competition on capital markets and consequently reduces the cost of capital as well as it brings about enhanced risk management;  •  it also increases the role of market discipline for firm managers and policy makers since it raises the costs of poor governance.

Jamie B Stewart, Jr: Developments in the US payment and settlement system and the Federal Reserve’s interest in the securities settlement system  Remarks by Jamie B. Stewart, Jr, First Vice-President and Chief Operating Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, before the Securities Industry Association T+1 Foundation Conference held in New York on 24 October 2000. *  *  *  Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am pleased to join you at the SIA’s T+1 Foundation Conference. This conference provides an excellent opportunity to review plans that have been announced for converting to a T+1 settlement cycle for securities transactions. Implementation of T+1 would represent a significant change in the payment and settlement environment. Before commenting on this arrangement, however, I would like to stand back for a few moments and focus on some of the plans under way to improve the functioning of the payment and settlement system in the United States. In addition, I would also like to discuss briefly the Federal Reserve’s interest in the securities settlement system. There can be no doubt that a sound and effective payment and settlement system is critical to ongoing confidence in the US financial markets and to the continued health and competitiveness of the US financial sector. In an environment of rapid technological change and rising trading volumes such as we face today, it is essential to make certain that the integrity of the payment and settlement system remains intact.
Of course, size and influence need not necessarily be negative from a competition perspective. The problems arise when new companies experience difficulty starting up their operations and are forced to deal with various entry barriers to be able to “challenge”14 the established players on the market in question. Both economies of scale and network effects can function as entry barriers, however. Starting up a new Facebook would be difficult and require major investments, but it is not impossible.15 A further problem that can arise from digitalisation is that companies can use the different price comparison sites to observe one another’s pricing. One often claims that these platforms are really good for consumers trying to find the lowest prices, but they also make it easier for companies to monitor one another’s prices and coordinate their prices with one another.16 This can be a problem from the point of view of competition. Challenges can be tackled The short-term challenges I have described should not be underestimated. They are real problems that affect real people. And problems experienced now are not helped by knowing that humanity will benefit in the long run. But what is the best  13  Stefan Fölster replicated a study by Frey and Osborne (2013) using Swedish data and found that more than 50 per cent of all jobs could be replaced by digital and automated technology in the coming 20 years.

The use of internet and online shopping have increased in Sweden and are at a high level compared with other European countries. We now have access to more information than before and can compare prices of various products and various sellers very quickly. Previously, if you wanted to buy a new pair of shoes you had to go into several shops to compare prices. First you needed to have an idea of where to find a specific model of shoe, say a pair of Converse all-stars in size 39, and then you needed to travel round to find the best price. Now you can quite simply visit a price comparison site online and enter the name of the model and get price information, stocks status and suggested sales points that are online. This has reduced the search costs enormously.21  Companies’ pricing At the same time, e-commerce is changing the playing field for many trading companies and changing their pricing. Why should customers pay more for something in a shop when they can buy it cheaper online? 19 Heyman et al (2016). 20 Sveriges Riksbank (2018c). 21  The Swedish Competition Authority commissioned researchers Niklas Rudholm and Charlie Lindgren to analyse how price transparency through price comparison sites affects prices and price spread between companies. They used information from the comparison site Prisjakt to compare how prices of games differ between various online traders. They saw that the development of prices for a particular product was highly correlated among the largest companies.
It is critical to achieve some redress of imbalances before external conditions tighten. Strange as it may sound, the banks’ efforts to hedge against the effect of a conceivable depreciation of the króna on their equity ratios has increased the market risk on their foreign exchange exposures. Credit institutions fulfil the Central Bank’s rules on foreign exchange balance, but have been permitted to maintain separate additional currency balances. Thus the banks’ capital positions are well hedged against a conceivable depreciation of the króna, but a short-term appreciation cannot be ruled out. The banks’ customers, on the other hand, are less protected against shocks from a depreciation, although data from the banks show that most of their borrowers of foreign currency-denominated loans also have substantial currency earnings and thereby a natural hedge against exchange rate movements. Financial Stability 2006 reported on a Central Bank stress test of the impact of a serious shock involving a simultaneous large rise in global interest rates, depreciation of the króna and fall in asset prices. This simulation has now been repeated using new data and assuming an even larger depreciation and decrease in house prices. Were all these shocks to coincide, estimates show that the contraction in national expenditure could prove considerably greater than in the Central Bank’s most recent macroeconomic forecast in Monetary Bulletin in March 2007. The pressure on the financial sector will be determined to some extent by the pace of the adjustment and the banks’ own responses to it.

The rapid economic development of these economies as they have integrated into the global economic system has created a major engine of growth for the world economy. However, this period of intense globalisation has not been without its downsides. Over my time on the Monetary Policy Committee since October 2006, we have seen how a highly integrated economic and financial system can also generate instabilities and transmit economic shocks rapidly around the world. The debates and the decisions of the MPC while I have been a member of the Committee have been dominated by the impact on the UK of the turbulence created by a global financial crisis, a major world recession and the inflationary impact of movements in globally traded energy and commodity prices. There was very little inkling of the turmoil to come when I joined the Committee in October 2006. My time on the MPC started towards the end of its first decade, which was a period of relatively stable economic conditions – steady growth and low inflation, with unemployment around 5% of the labour force. For me, however, this honeymoon period did not last long. Less than a year after I joined the Committee, over the summer of 2007, we saw the first tremors of the financial crisis. And by the autumn of 2008 it was clear we were heading into a major world recession.
MAS as central bank, integrated supervisor, and financial sector promoter Those of you who have visited Singapore might have come across one of the highlights of our architectural heritage – the black and white colonial bungalows. Combining British aesthetic sensibilities with local adaptations to a tropical climate, these former colonial residences exude stately elegance while offering cool, airy comfort come monsoon rain or equatorial shine. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) itself operates out of a decidedly functional office block. Thankfully, the work that the MAS does is rather more interesting. •  MAS houses under one roof central banking, financial surveillance, and integrated supervision. •  MAS is also responsible for developing a sound and progressive financial centre. MAS’ single agency model sets us apart from other financial regulators. Many jurisdictions operate on what is commonly known as the twin peaks model of regulation. Under this model, separate agencies have responsibilities for prudential oversight and market conduct respectively. Prudential oversight is concerned principally with the safety and soundness of institutions while market conduct is focused on effective functioning of markets and consumer protection. Australia, Canada, and the UK are among the leading jurisdictions with twin peaks regulators. Like the black and white bungalows, MAS’ unique mandate of central bank, integrated supervisor, and promoter of financial sector development, was born partly out of circumstance.

4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  •  At the same time, rapid urbanisation is concentrating ever higher economic wealth in exposed areas. Eight out of the ten global mega-cities most at risk from natural perils are located in Asia. They include Jakarta, Kolkata, Manila, and Shanghai. This large protection gap in Emerging Asia presents the global insurance industry, confronting mature markets and excess capacity, with a significant opportunity to deploy capital for better returns. London and Singapore as complementary insurance centres International financial centres in Asia, like Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as domestic financial centres in China and Korea are well-placed to meet this growing demand for insurance in Asia. But international financial centres outside Asia – such as London – with the enormous breadth of their markets, depth of financial expertise, and connectivity with other financial centres – also stand to gain from Asia’s rise. On occasion one hears stories of London losing ground as an international insurance centre due to tightening regulatory standards and a shift in the global economic centre of gravity to emerging markets. But polls and expert opinion also predicted the recent UK election race would be neck and neck. On both counts, the numbers prove otherwise. •  London is the undisputed global insurance market for specialty commercial risks – insuring highly exotic and bespoke risks from Formula 1 drivers to Cristiano Ronaldo’s legs.
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