After this the meeting, market focus has been transferred to the governments in Spain and Italy, to their attitudes to seeking assistance from the EFSF and to the conditions to which the countries would then be subjected. Assessment of Greece’s savings measures in September Greece, Ireland and Portugal already have relief programmes set up and at the end of June Cyprus also applied for assistance. Representatives of the IMF, the European Commission and the ECB – the so-called troika – visited Greece during the summer to inspect whether Greece had made sufficient progress in its savings measures to meet the requirements for the next payment in the programme. The goal is a savings package of EUR 11.5 billion, which is to be implemented in 2013 and 2014. The troika has announced that it will conclude its inspection of Greece’s progress in September. It appears that Greek funding until the next payment will be secured through new issues of treasury bills. The importance of reliable reference rates Crisis management in the euro area has of course been a fairly central issue during the summer. Another news item that has attracted a lot of attention is the revelation of manipulation of the international interbank rate, Libor. Confidence in international banks received a further blow when it was revealed that several banks had been involved in providing incorrect interest rate data as a basis for calculating the daily Libor.
The objective of the Monetary Policy Council is that the increase in prices, as measured by the consumer price index, should not exceed 2% in 1997. as in the medium term. 2. To meet this ultimate goal, the Banque de France uses two intermediate objectives, one of which is external and the other internal: -  The objective of a stable external value of the currency: as it has been for ten years, the stability of the franc will be maintained against the group of the most credible currencies in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. -  An intermediate internal growth target for the money supply assessed by the development of the narrow and broad monetary aggregates: in 1997, the money supply should be able to show a medium-term growth trend of 5%. This figure is consistent with price inflation of no more than 2% and non-inflationary real GDP growth of about 2.5%, which could be exceeded, in view of the potential for growth to catch up in the medium term. The Monetary Policy Council has decided to simultaneously BIS Review 2/1997  -4-  monitor the main narrow and broad money aggregates in order to obtain a concise estimate of all monetary developments. 3. Total domestic debt is an important indicator. It helps the Banque de France make sure that the economy is supplied with enough financing to grow, and it enables us to track developments in financing for businesses, households and general government simultaneously.