That has led market participants to make constant efforts to improve the safety of JGB settlement. I will illustrate two major examples of such market initiatives. One is to shorten the JGB settlement cycle, which is aimed at shortening the time-lag between the execution of JGB trading and their settlement.
Graph 1  In the major advanced economies, in contrast, growth has generally been below previous averages for quite a number of years. It has taken longer to recover than we had all hoped. There are, happily, some signs of improvement at present. Growth is slowly recovering in the euro area and has resumed in Japan.