B- In the area of payments, digitisation is likely to have additional consequences, which also pose major challenges in terms of sovereignty. Here, I would like to highlight two that deserve special attention: The first is the development of new types of settlement assets. The operation of our payment systems currently relies heavily on the largely complementary use of two types of settlement asset that can be exchanged at any time at par: central bank money, the only legal tender settlement asset, which is the money for the settlement of transactions between financial intermediaries, and commercial bank money, which is generally preferred for the settlement of retail transactions. Some crypto-asset projects aim to compete with – rather than supplement – this system by offering alternative settlement assets, “coins", whose value is not necessarily linked and fixed to central bank or commercial bank money. The implementation of these projects has shown that it is not easy to create the conditions for confidence in these alternative settlement assets and their use remains marginal to date. However, if their use were to grow significantly, their impact on the global economy could pose a major challenge to our current monetary order with major concerns for stability and sovereignty. The second consequence that deserves particular attention is the processing and storage of payment data. Both the applicable law and the ability of private and public players to ensure the proper management of their data depend on location of servers.
The expansionary fiscal policy is contributing to a strong development of household disposable income in the coming years, providing a basis for higher private consumption as well as increased saving. Exports rise during the forecast period but the increase is relatively modest both on account of the international upswing being tentative initially and because the krona is expected to appreciate. GDP growth is judged to be 1.6 per cent this year and then accelerate to between 2.5 and 3 per cent in the coming years, which as fare as can be judged is somewhat more than the Swedish economy can sustain in the longer run without giving rise to inflationary tensions. With the high resource utilisation, labour costs are judged to rise somewhat more than we foresaw in the December Report. Partly for this reason, domestic inflation in the forecast period is somewhat higher than foreseen earlier. CPI inflation stops at 2.2 per cent one year ahead and 2.4 per cent after two years. The corresponding forecast for inflation’s underlying rate, UND1X, is 2.2 per cent both one and two years ahead. Monetary policy focuses in the first place on the latter rate. In this price forecast, the supply shocks that are now leaving their mark on inflation are judged to drop out of the twelve-month change figures successively during the late spring. Inflation is accordingly expected to approach 2 per cent in the early summer.