•  As one of you put it recently, the adjectives used by bankers to describe the MAS are “no-nonsense”, “business-friendly”, “pragmatic”. •  You will be forgiven to think that we are sometimes schizophrenic. •  In my meetings with foreign bank CEOs, I have sometimes, in the same breath, said we would like to see an improvement in the bank’s risk management and internal controls and then asked what we could do to encourage the bank to expand its operations in Singapore – safely of course! Let me explain why we are both “no-nonsense” and “business-friendly”. The financial services sector is one of the key pillars of the Singapore economy. •  It accounts for about 13% of GDP and has strong positive demand spillovers on the rest of the economy. •  The sector employs about 200,000 people, 84% of them are Singapore citizens and PRs. –  It creates good jobs. –  The median wage for Singaporeans in financial services is $ compared to the national median of $  Financial services will become even more important in the future economy. •  The sector grew by an average of 8.6% p.a. during the last five years (2011–2015), two times faster than the overall economy at 4.0%.
An additional result of dissemination of the DIT strategy is elaboration of standards of communication in conducting the monetary policy (announcements of decision-making authorities, inflation reports and published inflation projections), which facilitate contacts of the central bank with the external environment (the financial market and the general public). It may be speculated that these standards make the interpretation of the decisions made by the central bank easier for foreign investors, which should, under the huge cross-border capital flows, increase the effectiveness of the monetary policy in stabilising inflation. Re 6) As mentioned before, the process of globalisation is a serious challenge for central banks. Following the increase in human workforce relatively to the capital resource, the pay of the workforce has gone down, and so did the costs of manufacturing of many goods and services. Setting fuel prices apart, whose increase is also brought about by globalisation, inflation in many countries remains very low, whereas a strong increase in the global labour supply mitigates the possibility of occurrence of the second-round effects i.e. wage increases in response to a rise in current inflation. On the other hand, the global surplus of savings over investments causes the capital to chase the high yield opportunities, thus increasing asset prices in many countries. An exemplary case may be increases in stock exchange indices, bond prices or real property prices in Anglo-Saxon countries and e.g. in Spain.