The Iranian sanctions are designed to stifle the Iranian regime’s nuclear ambitions. The Cuban sanctions are intended to hinder the advancement of communism in the Americas and to change an oppressive regime through a trade embargo. For U.S. financial institutions, which operate on the basis of a public charter issued in the United States, the public purposes supporting economic sanctions and the detailed sanctions regulations are in harmony. With respect to rule compliance, the staff will follow those rules not simply because they are required to but also because they want to. While I am not here to speak for foreign institutions that have committed sanctions evasion, including BNPP, my sense from the evidence is that these institutions looked at economic sanctions very differently. They looked at economic sanctions as technical “American” rules that were not seen as consistent with the organization’s and the home country’s larger value system. In Europe, they found no similar sanctions, and there it was perfectly legal at the  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  time to do business with these sanctioned jurisdictions. Some European bankers almost naturally adopted the view that there was no value system underlying the technical American legal rule. The foreign institutions saw the situation as providing financial services to just another country; not to a country committing genocide; not to a country building a nuclear weapon; and not to a country fostering a dehumanizing ideology. This failure to correlate the rule with the value is the root of real mischief.
At the same time, the yield curve has steepened somewhat further, implying that the attractiveness of short-term instruments included in M3 continues to decline compared with more highly remunerated longer-term instruments outside M3. On the counterpart side, the annual growth rate of bank loans to the private sector continued to conceal differences in the magnitude of growth across sectors. The growth of loans to non-financial corporations stood at –0.2% in December, after –0.1% in the previous month, while the growth of loans to households strengthened to 3.0% in December, after 2.8% in November. Taking into account the effect of derecognition of loans from bank balance sheets and looking through short-term volatility, the latest data confirm a continued gradual strengthening in the annual growth of lending to the non-financial private sector. At the same time, the latest data point to the overall size of bank balance sheets having contracted again after expanding for most of 2010, mainly on account of a reduction in lending between banks. It is important that banks continue to expand the provision of credit to the private sector, in an environment of increasing demand. To address this challenge, where necessary, it is essential for banks to retain earnings, to turn to the market to strengthen further their capital bases or to take full advantage of government support measures for recapitalisation. To sum up, the current key ECB interest rates still remain appropriate. We therefore decided to leave them unchanged.