Those buffers ensure that banks are able to provide financial services to euro area households and businesses, even in the face of adverse developments, thereby smoothing rather than amplifying the impact of negative shocks 1/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  on the real economy. Banks with poor structural profitability can face higher funding costs and may be tempted to take on more risk.2 Within the euro area, weak banks are more likely than healthy banks to be connected to unprofitable firms.3 This reduces the flow of lending to profitable firms that need funding to invest and grow. The resultant misallocation of capital 4 towards unproductive businesses weighs on long-run economic growth.5 Low bank profitability can also matter for monetary policy by impairing the accumulation of bank capital over time. Thinly capitalised banks stymie the ability of monetary policy to stimulate economic activity in downturns. Their capacity to lower the interest rates they charge their customers and increase the volume of lending to the real economy is constrained.6 This limits the effectiveness of an important transmission channel of monetary accommodation in the euro area, which relies on bank lending supporting consumption and investment. As the crisis showed, dislocations in the banking sector can deepen recessions and seriously impair the smooth transmission of monetary policy across the euro area. That risk remains today. We recently carried out what we call a macroprudential stress test, which assesses this amplification of shocks using a micro-macro model that feeds back individual bank reactions into macroeconomic outcomes.
-  -  -  to provide financial knowledge to women in community, or schools (Primary and Secondary Schools), and enhance their entrepreneurship. Similarly, in 2021, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and the NBC conducted “women entrepreneurs talk program” to promote financial inclusion and enhance digital financial literacy to women, woman enterprises, and woman university students. Under the “Catalyzing Women’s Entrepreneurship project”, the NBC has been closely cooperating with UNESCAP to initiate training and seminar for women and woman enterprises to enhance their financial management knowledge and increase their financial accessibilities and usage. The NBC has also been cooperating with Good Return to establish “Let’s Talk Money” Campaign, which was launched in 2016. So far, the NBC and Good Return had successfully achieved phase 1 of the campaign which consists of 6 educational videos, a comic book, a mobile application called NBC-Edu, as well as the creation of “Let’s Talk Money” Facebook page and website. In addition, Let’s Talk Money phase 2 “little by little” has also seen the delivery of 4 financial literacy videos, which has since reached hundreds of thousands of people through social media platform. The NBC and Good Return also conducted a training, targeted at representatives from Cambodia Women Entrepreneurs Association (CWEA) and Cambodian Women for Peace and Development (CWPD), which helps the women deliver face-to-face training to women entrepreneurs and garment workers respectively.