One of our aims in undertaking such an exercise will be to ensure that, by the time the euro banknotes become available, every person using and handling them will be fully acquainted with their features to the extent that everyone will be able to identify the banknotes as being genuine.
The monetary base exhibits a high year-on-year growth rate of around 20 percent. The year-on-year growth rate of the money stock is around 3.0-3.5 percent. Funding costs for firms continue to be at extremely low levels on the whole. Against the above background, the financial developments are summarized as follows.