Looking ahead, the Governing Council expects real GDP growth to remain moderate in 2010, owing to the ongoing process of balance sheet adjustment in various sectors and the expectation that the low capacity utilisation is likely to dampen investment and that consumption is being dampened by weak labour market prospects.
The domestic economy has also benefited because we have not had to put up interest rates in order to maintain our external parity (as in a fixed exchange rate) or to prop up a floating rate that threatened to fall so far that it would have had undesirable inflationary consequences.