It is very important for future French growth, for investment and for job creation that we have the lowest medium- and long-term market rates in the European Union today and the third lowest interest rates in the world. Second, price stability curbs cost increases in our productive sector. In doing so, the competitiveness of our economy—other things being equal—is preserved and enhanced. This is good for future French growth and for job creation. It is important to note that we currently have a dynamic export sector and, according to the latest forecasts for 1996, the third highest current account surplus in the world. One other indicator of competitiveness is encouraging, namely the flow of foreign direct investment into France. It stood at FRF 120 billion in 1995. The latest figures for the first nine months of 1996 show inward foreign direct investment totalling FRF 74 billion. In all, since the beginning of 1995, a total of FRF 194 billion, the equivalent of USD 39 billion, has been invested directly in France, making us the third-ranking industrialized economy in terms of inward foreign direct investment, behind the United States and the United Kingdom.
The Monetary Policy Council will keep a close eye on other indicators, including all leading indicators of changes in prices, such as capacity utilization rates, production costs, developments in incomes and commodity prices. The Monetary Policy Council will also monitor long-term interest rates and the current account balance. * *  *  These decisions call for two remarks. First, on a technical level, the Monetary Policy Council has decided to monitor several narrow and broad money aggregates simultaneously in order to obtain a concise estimate of all monetary developments. As we have seen, certain data, and particularly, but not exclusively, M3 data, have been severely disrupted recently by several factors, such as the very substantial fall in short-term rates and the ensuing large-scale reallocation of investment flows towards non-monetary assets, higher taxes on money market mutual funds, and the continuing very high level of interest paid on housing saving plans. We will therefore keep a very close eye on the M1, M2, M3, and M3+P1 aggregates as expressions of the underlying growth of the money supply. Particular attention will be paid to the growth of the M3+P1 aggregate covering monetary assets and contractual savings. A very large proportion of the outflows from M3 in the past year was directed towards investments covered by P1, and particularly housing savings plans with a residual maturity of one year or less. In fact, this type of investment at present constitutes a very close substitute for monetary assets.