My overall assessment in April was therefore that the repo-rate path from February was still appropriate. This entails a very expansionary monetary policy with a negative real repo rate for most of the forecast period. As I have mentioned, we saw indications at our meeting in April that the fall in growth at the end of last year was temporary, and we revised up our assessment of growth in the first quarter of this year. Since the monetary policy meeting we have received quite a lot of new information. For example we now know that Swedish exports of goods increased slightly during the first quarter after the steep fall in the fourth quarter of last year. According to Statistics Sweden’s figures, employment was higher and unemployment lower than in our most recent forecast. The National Institute of Economic Research’s Economic Tendency Survey also showed a large increase during the first quarter and the retail trade index, which rose strongly in February, continued to rise in March. All in all, new information received since the most recent monetary policy meeting shows no tendency to revise the forecast for Swedish growth during the first quarter. Still, I will wait to make an overall assessment of the new statistics until our next monetary policy meeting in July. Monetary policy in uncertain times I have described my views of the situation in Sweden and abroad.
Efforts are now underway in a variety of contexts to try to secure better coordination in these various initiatives, but it has to be admitted that in an ideal world they would not be quite so clustered together. That said, I would be the first to acknowledge that Basel II requires heavy investment in risk management systems and IT infrastructure, as well as radical changes in the risk management culture at some banks. However, this is a healthy development. I suspect that banks would have in any case needed to make most of the so-called "Basel II-related" investment if they wanted to stay at the top of their game. By agreeing to accept banks' internal risk management systems as the basis for the calculation of regulatory capital requirements, the Basel Committee has provided a powerful incentive for banks to upgrade their risk management systems. But this is only what they otherwise would have needed to do to be able to compete with the best. There are, however, some quite specific challenges for Asian banks in using the more advanced approaches under Basel II. One of the most important is the availability of data. Historically, many Asian banks have not collected the data needed to develop the type of models needed for IRB purposes. Some are only now starting to do so, and it will be several years before they have sufficiently rich data that it can begin to inform their credit risk management processes.