Personally, I believe that it will be easier to arouse interest in a discussion based on facts, when the euro banknotes and coins appear next year. Globalisation requires stable game rules After this in-depth foray into the world of the euro, I shall return to the more general issues following on from the current internationalisation process. This creates, as I said earlier, the right conditions for a more rapid economic growth, but it does not offer any guarantee that this will be the case and it is important to remember this. The Swedish economic crisis at the beginning of the 1990s is still fresh in most of our memories. That experience provided a clear illustration of the importance of pursuing a long-term, credible economic policy. However, it also showed the importance of building up properly functioning institutions to oversee the financial markets when deregulated. In Sweden it was evident that the supervisory authorities were not prepared for the reality that would prevail after the deregulation of the credit markets in the 1980s. Similar conclusions can be drawn from the crises in for example Mexico and Asia. These also show clearly that countries wanting to participate on the international capital markets must meet the requirements for openness and provision of information.
There is also a risk that financial operations will simply be moved somewhere else, where the regulations function better. Role of the krona unchanged Now that I have discussed the role of the euro in integration of the financial markets in the euro zone, I will take the opportunity to deviate from the subject slightly and mention briefly the euro's role on the Swedish financial market. You will no doubt remember the discussions on the marginalisation of the krona prior to the introduction of the euro in 1999. Some prophets of doom claimed that the krona would not be able to survive so close to such a large currency. Swedish companies and individuals would spontaneously and rapidly go over to the euro. As we now know, this was not the case. According to the statistics the Riksbank collects on a monthly basis from the Swedish credit institutes, it can be concluded that the krona's share of the total assets has declined slightly. However, it has not been replaced by the euro, but by other currencies, probably chiefly the US dollar. At the end of last year, the euro comprised only 6-7 per cent of the total assets. The Riksbank's studies also show that the total Swedish activity in euro on the money market is relatively slight and in particular concentrated to the deposit and swap markets. There are still a few programmes of certificates in euro and the secondary trading in euro-denominated short-term papers is very small.