The financial market developments of the past 12 months and the culmination of events in the last fortnight have attracted a lot of interest from the general public. These events have highlighted the interlinkages between the financial and the real sphere and the implications these linkages have for monetary policy. Understanding developments on financial markets is a cornerstone for monetary policy making.
Allow me to identify some of the key challenges that we need to address. First is the risk of a sharper-than-expected global economic slowdown. In its most recent World Economic Outlook (WEO), the IMF revised its global growth forecast for 2019 downward from 3.7 percent last October 2018 to 3.3 percent this April 2019.