A careful assessment needs to be made of the potential medium and longterm effects of the proposed reforms on market structures and behaviour. These considerations are equally relevant in the context of Islamic finance. The assessment on the aims and relevance of each of the proposed reform measures needs to take into account the two important considerations in Islamic finance; the need to support sustainable and responsible innovation, and secondly, to leverage on its inbuilt strengths that set Islamic finance apart in performing its role in supporting the efficient mobilisation and allocation of resources to generate real economic activities. Given the damaging effects of complexity and opacity associated with the recent unfettered innovative activities in the conventional financial markets, it has resulted in a reassessment of the role and benefits of financial innovation. In Islamic finance, innovation is key in pushing the frontier of market development to generate the range of products and services, processes and functions. The key lies in preserving the benefits of innovative initiatives and activities whilst ensuring that they do not result in negative externalities. In considering the relevance of the global regulatory reform to Islamic finance, there is therefore a need to consider the underlying elements that guide the process towards sustainable and more socially-responsible financial innovation. This comes in the forms of its strong paradigm in governance, disclosure and transparency, as well as its emphasis that innovations are anchored in the objectives of Shariah and thus are for the benefit of the people.
In this work, all of the public authorities use the National Institute of Economic Research’s forecasts for economic developments. 8  BIS central bankers’ speeches  The Riksbank’s profits and dividends 1988–2018 SEK billion  Sources: The National Institute of Economic Research and the Riksbank  This development is not unique to the Riksbank. Many of those who have invested in bonds will face losses when interest rates rise. Those that are hit the hardest will be the central banks that have applied what is known as quantitative easing in recent years, that is, they have bought large volumes of bonds with long maturities to stimulate the economy. The fact that the Riksbank makes losses in turn means that the bank will not be able to pay dividends to the government for some years. As the dividend payment is based on the results from the past five years, it will decline with a time lag, and the forecast at the moment is that we will pay two further dividends before the losses take over and the dividend payments become zero. This is of course a setback for the government’s income. And as the dividends cannot be negative when the Riksbank makes a loss, the bank must bear the losses, which will reduce our equity. As we have equity of a good SEK 100 billion, we can manage this without any infringement of our financial independence. The Riksbank is financially strong I have now described how the Riksbank’s balance sheet has changed over the past ten years.