Significant institutional reforms were implemented in areas such as governance, competition policy, labour markets, privatisation and enterprise restructuring. It is also true that, in order to comply with the accession preconditions, we had to take some measures a little bit faster than theory and other countries’ experience would have advised. I am referring, for instance, to the liberalisation of capital flows while still having a significant inflation differential and, therefore, a significant interest rate differential. We learnt before long how challenging it is for monetary policy to manage aggregate demand and expectations in a small open economy amid a flood of capital, particularly when having to cover also for an excessively loose fiscal policy. Some of the side-effects of liberalizing the capital flows are still haunting us today. I am referring here to the Swiss franc loans, which have lately become a thorny issue, even if the scale of the problem is by far the smallest among peer countries – less than 5 percent of the outstanding loans and just 2 percent of the total number of individual debtors at the time the problem erupted in early 2015. Its magnitude was from twofold to fivefold larger in Croatia, Poland or Hungary. I dare say the macro-prudential action taken by the National Bank of Romania is not unrelated to this outcome. Turning back to the EU entry in 2007, all things considered, I could say that we probably caught the last train, especially in the new post-crisis environment.
Eddie Yue: Join us and be part of the change Keynote speech by Mr Eddie Yue, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, at Hong Kong Fintech Week 2019, Hong Kong, 6 November 2019. * * * 1. Good morning everyone, a very warm welcome to the Hong Kong Fintech Week. For those of you visiting from outside Hong Kong – a special welcome to our city. 2. This is the fourth year we are hosting Fintech Week. I guess many of you were at previous ones. If you came to the first in 2016, you might have noticed how this event has evolved in just a few years. 3. Back then, the HKMA had just set up the Fintech Facilitation Office, or FFO. We hosted the first Hong Kong Fintech Week – basically as an “experiment” – at the relaxing PMQ heritage site in Central. We weren’t sure at that time whether people like you would be interested in coming along! Frankly, there wasn’t much talk about Fintech in Hong Kong at that time. Certain people in the industry did tell us, to our faces, that the HKMA was a big hindrance to Fintech development because our regulatory approach was too conservative! 4. But that’s fine! We always value your feedback. 5. That Fintech Week three years ago turned out to be a great first step. It genuinely started a dynamic and constructive dialogue between everyone involved in Fintech development in our region.