We strive to keep up with new forms of communication, making us active on social networks by posting the the latest data in real time, addressing key changes and visualizing trends, making information available to more target groups. One of the aspects of enhancing our communication in this segment are certainly these regular meetings with you, as a platform where certain more complex statistical concepts can be openly discussed thus giving them analytical feature. During this year, there has been a trend where most of the media publish our latest statistical immediately after our release, which contributes to keeping the public informed on time. At the same time, the number of your articles related to central bank statistics more than doubled this year compared to last year, and even more compared to 2017, further increasing the their availability to all users. Since we have been publishing regular statistical releases, the number of visits to our website has increased, indicating that users are actively using these releases as a source of information. I have to mention that we are constantly and actively presenting the statistical data to the public in an indirect way, as well. They are the basis of our analytical infrastructure and decision-making. Therefore, in our monthly press releases, in which we inform on the monetary decisions, we refer to several statistical dimensions that we produce – for example monetary statistics, external statistics and banking system data. In our regular publications, analytically and in a consistent context, we talk about about economics through statistical data.
There are no insolvency laws or bankruptcy forum to address sovereign solvency problems, and IMF attempts to do so during the last decade failed, for several reasons. What is clear is that in the case of an insolvent sovereign, further official finance can only be provided when that sovereign restructures its debts and, at the same time, undertakes serious and credible domestic fiscal adjustment and structural economic reforms.5  3  See US Treasury Secretary Rubin, 1998. 4  The results of the simulations have to be viewed with caution since they are sensitive to the quality of the underlying data and the assumptions used in the exercise. 5  See, for instance, Roubini, 2002. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  The third feature that generally sets sovereign and corporate debt workouts apart is the externalities they may generate. A debt restructuring of a sovereign may have severe implications, both for the debtor’s and the creditor’s economies. Most of the experience in this area has involved less developed countries. In these cases private sector involvement has largely been a concern for foreign creditors. Taxpayers in creditor countries were affected, depending on the size of the exposure of their respective financial system and on whether the soundness of that system was jeopardised. Measures have been used in the past to try to reduce this impact, in particular through regulatory forbearance. One example is the prudential measures which, during the 1980s, permitted US banks to book Brady bonds at their nominal value.