BIS Review 134/1999  6  The expansion in the volume of business with households has been helped by the spread of technical forms of lending whereby intermediaries rely to a great extent on credit scoring techniques to select borrowers.
On the external front, we have continued to build up our international reserves for selfinsurance to reduce our vulnerabilities to the inevitable moods and swings of international financial markets. At year-end 2008, our reserves rose to $ billion.