I think we have a significant role to play in-terms of capacity building not just in the banking sector, but in several other sectors that are vital to the economy. That is the challenge that all of you have to remember and try and participate. I myself, when I worked in these institutions few decades ago, the Ministry of Industries, in the Treasury, it was a very enriching experience personally. But at the same time, I carried over the expertise I had picked up in the Central Bank and enriched those institutions as well. So that tradition should continue and I think it is incumbent on the central bank to really use our manpower. All of you are a concentrated pool of brainpower in this country. I do not think any other institution has so many qualified individuals. We have engineers, we have people from all sorts of fields, not just economics, in this institution, and we have to really build on those skill sets. One of the plans I have, which I am discussing with the DGs, AGs, is to try and deepen our skill sets. We have to identify specific skill sets which are necessary for the central bank in the first instance, and also for the broader nation and to try and deepen those skill sets in a conscious basis so that our manpower development, what you call the improvement of our human capital becomes much more entrenched and becomes much more integrated interms of the national economic developmental effort.
One explanation of the relatively low level of overall investment in Sweden, which is one of the factors behind the current account surplus, is in fact the low level of investment in housing (see Figure 10). There are thus no signs that the credit growth we have experienced has financed a building boom or that it is associated with a low level of domestic saving. In recent years, the number of new-builds in the housing sector in Sweden has been around 20 000 per year, which a low figure in historical terms.13 The low level of new housing construction is thus an important factor behind rising house prices.14  12  When all of these three factors deviated significantly from their normal patterns at the same time, there was a 56 per cent probability of a substantial fall in housing prices. See IMF (2009), World Economic Outlook, October. 13  This is a level that over the last 50 years has only been lower for a few years during the 1990s (Statistics Sweden, 2012 “Housing construction low for a long time”, SCB Economic Indicator, no. 2012:92). 14  Peter Englund, among others, points to the low level of housing construction in Sweden as one of the reasons for the sharp increase in prices; see Englund, Peter (2011), “Swedish house prices in an international perspective”, Chapter I.1 in The Riksbank’s inquiry into risks in the Swedish housing market. BIS central bankers’ speeches  11  Figure 10.