SPEECH DATE:  10 June 2020  SPEAKER:  Governor Stefan Ingves  VENUE:  Swedish Economics Association  SVERIGES RIKSBANK SE-103 37 Stockholm (Brunkebergstorg 11) Tel +46 8 787 00 00 Fax +46 8 21 05 31 registratorn@riksbank.se www.riksbank.se  The monetary policy toolbox* The spread of the coronavirus came as an unpleasant surprise to us all. It is now clear that the economic consequences of the pandemic threaten to be both serious and protracted. Most analysts have very weak forecasts for economic developments in the coming quarters, and in some scenarios also for a longer period to come. We are in the midst of an unforeseen economic development that needs to be met with various macroeconomic tools, and the Riksbank has an important role to play here, together with the Government, the Riksdag (Swedish parliament) and other authorities. During the initial phase of the crisis, we Executive Board members have already taken a large number of decisions to support the Swedish economy, and thus contribute to meeting the targets for economic policy, and I will comment on what we have done in more detail later on. We can note that many of the measures have major consequences for the Riksbank's balance sheet – something that will be a recurring theme in today’s speech. Today I intend to focus primarily on how the “monetary policy toolbox” needs to look to be able to manage future challenges.
With today’s integrated capital markets, we will have a global trend with lower real interest rates. An individual country with a floating exchange rate may deviate from this trend in the short term, partly for cyclical reasons and partly  5  Ingves (2019), and Frohm and Ingves (2020). 6 See Lundvall (2020). 5 [25]  because global investors may demand a time-varying risk premium to invest there, but in the longer run the real interest rate in a small open economy will follow the global trend downwards. The challenge for monetary policy is that the low real interest rate limits the monetary policy scope to manage a severe recession by cutting the repo rate. The nominal interest rate cannot continue to be cut indefinitely – a negative repo rate makes it increasingly attractive to hold cash. Even if frictions in the banking system make it possible to have a weakly negative repo rate, it is not possible in practice to cut the repo rate indefinitely. The average repo rate is the total of the average real interest rate and the inflation target – the lower the real interest rate is, the lower the average repo rate is and thus there is less scope for interest rate cuts in a recession. Figure 3: Global real interest rates have fallen in the past 25 years  Note. Per cent. Source: Lundvall (2020). Increased indebtedness Parallel with the fall in real interest rates, indebtedness has increased in Sweden and in many other countries (see Figure 4).