Karolina Ekholm: Why Swedish monetary policy needs to be more expansionary Speech by Ms Karolina Ekholm, Deputy Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at Almega (employer and trade organisation for the Swedish service sector), Stockholm, 15 November 2013. *  *  *  The views expressed in this speech are my own and are not necessarily shared by the other members of the Executive Board of the Riksbank. I would like to thank Björn Andersson who has helped in writing the speech. Accompanying charts can be found at the end of the speech. Interest in central banks and monetary policy has been greater than normal since the financial crisis. Here in Sweden, much of this interest has concerned the disagreement among the Executive Board on the level of the interest rate, where I have been one of those who has consistently voted for a more expansionary monetary policy. I have mostly voted for a repo rate that is 0.25 percentage points lower and a repo-rate path that rises more slowly. One might of course think that the difference between this and the repo rate and repo-rate path decided on is so slight that it would not have any effect on the outcome. However, behind this apparently marginal difference in the view of what the repo rate should be is a fundamental difference in the view of the role of the central bank and the route monetary policy should take in the new economic landscape emerging in the wake of the financial crisis.
José De Gregorio: Recent monetary policy actions and their effects Speech by Mr José De Gregorio, Governor of the Central Bank of Chile, before the Finance Commission of the Honorable Chamber of Representatives, Santiago, 27 July 2009. *  *  *  Thank you, Mr. President of the Honorable Chamber of Representatives, Representative Mr. Julio Dittborn for the invitation of the Chamber’s Finance Commission to speak about the effects of the monetary policy decisions we have adopted over the course of this year. Last March, at a special session of the Economic, Promotion and Development Commission of this Chamber, we presented our view on the pass-through we then observed in market interest rates of our monetary policy decisions. In following months, the Central Bank has taken additional measures that have significantly increased the monetary stimulus. The possibility of revisiting this subject, now before the Honorable Finance Commission is, therefore, very timely and very welcome, because it gives us the chance to present an analysis of the effects of our latest decisions. I wish to remind you that monetary policy, especially under an inflation targeting regime with a floating exchange rate like the one we have in place in Chile since 1999, is an important stabilizer of the business cycle. Thanks to institutional developments and high degrees of solvency and liquidity of our economy, the monetary policy makers have been able to act with unusual vigor.