4  BIS central bankers’ speeches    The total deposit base of the banking system increased by 23 percent to Le1.7 trillion as of November 2010.   Total private sector credit increased by 30.4 percent in 2010, lower than the 46.2 percent recorded for 2009, with non-performing loans declining, albeit slightly, to about 16 percent of total loans by November 2010.   Domestic interest rates remained generally stable, with the exception of interest rates on government securities, which rose due to increased borrowing by Government. This development, which is currently being addressed by the Bank of Sierra Leone and the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development could have a rippling effect on commercial banks’ lending rates. Your Excellency, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, in the early part of 2010, I summoned a series of meetings with board members and managing directors of all commercial banks to review various aspects of their operations, including profitability and corporate governance. The aims of these meetings were to ensure that all commercial banks were brought on board the central bank’s plan to reinvigorate the financial sector by creating stronger, more profitable and efficient institutions and to ensure that individual bank practices do not pose risks to the entire banking system as has been the case in other parts of the globe.
Philipp M Hildebrand: From monetarism to the inflation forecast 30 years of Swiss monetary policy Public lecture by Dr Philipp M Hildebrand, Member of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, at the University of Berne, Berne, 23 November 2004. The complete speech can be found in German on the Swiss National Bank’s website (www.snb.ch). *  *  *  Following the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the Swiss National Bank, in 1974, was one of the first central banks to adopt a monetary policy with monetary aggregates as intermediate targets. The monetarist phase of the National Bank lasted until 1999. During this phase, the National Bank repeatedly changed its monetary targets. In the course of time, it adopted an increasingly pragmatic monetary policy and paid more attention to the development of the exchange rate. In December 1999, the SNB introduced its current monetary policy concept, which uses an inflation forecast as the basis for monetary policy decisions. On the whole, monetarist ideas had a positive influence on Switzerland’s monetary policy. They brought the realisation that price stability is important, thus furthering the process of disinflation in the 1970s and 1980s. Moreover, monetarism caused the SNB to make its monetary policy more transparent and rule-based. The use of monetary aggregates as intermediate targets, however, was more problematic. With money demand proving to be too instable, simply controlling money supply growth was not sufficient to achieve price stability.