3  BIS Review 60/2000  Moreover, energy prices may pose a challenge to containing inflation. Energy price changes represent a one-time shift in a set of important prices, but by themselves generally cannot drive an ongoing inflation process. The key to whether such a process could get under way is inflation expectations.
Again, our low-interest-rate survey provides some interesting insights: about one in every nine of the nearly 1,600 institutions which took part in the survey are already in the process of merging with another institution or have specific plans to do so.