At the same time, the APP is said to have withdrawn increasing volumes of high-quality liquid collateral from the market, exacerbating pricing tensions, especially for special bonds. 1/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  While monetary policy may, in some circumstances, exacerbate repo market tensions, I believe it to be far from the only factor at play today, or indeed the most important one. The situation in the repo market today in fact reflects a confluence of longer-term trends that have affected both the supply and demand for good collateral. I will review some of these trends in a moment. Before doing so, I would like to recall an important point. Our mandate is clear: to deliver price stability. This is our primary objective and the sole orientation for our policy. What we aim to do is to act in a way that is necessary, proportionate and that limits side-effects. This is why we have designed our programmes in such a way as to deliver our objective without creating excessive distortions in market functioning and price discovery. And it is also why we have taken measures to mitigate some effects of our measures on repo markets. These measure, too, are governed by the principle that they must be necessary and proportionate, as well as not being in conflict with our price stability mandate.
With respect to individual countries, we should continue working to strengthen the bilateral surveillance process. While focused on the country at hand, it would be important that bilateral surveillance be fully-informed by regional and global perspectives as well. Systemically important countries will clearly continue to deserve special attention. Operationally, our respective country teams will remain the focal points for our activities in individual members. At the same time, country teams will continue to draw upon specialized expertise where necessary, from both inside and outside of the Fund. To maintain overall coherence, it would be important for efforts to continue in the integration and sharing of information among country teams and specialized experts. Second, our work in financial sectors and capital markets. The IMF is the one international organization capable of carrying out financial sector surveillance universally and comprehensively. Further efforts will be needed to realize this potential, not least by deepening the IMF’s role in anticipating sources of instability in national and global financial markets, and in generating timely action to address them. The IMF will continue to help countries strengthen their financial sectors, including in following up on the findings of the Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP) exercises. One important aspect of this will be to help members adapt their prudential and administrative frameworks to benefit more from private capital flows.