But in recent months, the spotlight of the Treasury Select Committee (TSC) has swung onto this area, and we have all been enjoying the debate! Many hours have been spent highlighting the biblical scale of the reporting requirements, the wickedness of the risk margin calculations, the mystical nature of the Ultimate Forward Rate…I could extend this list tenfold. Then we have had a rather more pointed exchange about whether we at the PRA have been over-zealous in our implementation of Solvency II, perhaps damaging competition, or making life too difficult for insurance companies, or denying the nation of vital new infrastructure by being too cautious about insurers’ investment strategies, or all three! All of these are important topics, and in the course of the debate I am as guilty of focusing on them as anyone else. Indeed, I will double-down by talking about some of them again today. So for those of us inside the insurance beltway, this is a very useful and timely debate and I think it is a great thing that the TSC has taken an interest. Can we make our implementation of Solvency II work better? In my opinion, despite some inevitable differences of view, there is in fact a strong degree of agreement between us, the TSC and the industry about the answer to that question. Where is the policyholder? However, in all the blizzard of insurance and regulatory jargon, I think something has been missing from our discussions. Where is the policyholder?
It is just as important to avoid an inflation rate that is too low, as it is to avoid an inflation rate that is too high. Economic policy in the euro area The introduction of the euro on 1 January 1999 also meant the introduction of a single monetary policy in the eleven member countries. Greece joined as the twelfth country on 1 January 2001. The population of the euro area is a little more than 300 million and the euro area economy accounted for about 16 per cent of world GDP last year.1 Price stability is the primary objective of the single monetary policy in the euro area. The Governing Council of the European Central Bank has defined price stability as a year-on-year increase in the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) for the euro area of below 2 per cent. The project will be completed in January and February 2002. On 1 January, euro banknotes and coins will be put into circulation. During a changeover period, national currencies can be used as a means of payment alongside the euro. This period is no longer than two months in any of the member countries. As from the beginning of March, the euro will be the only legal tender in all euro area countries, and all prices will be in euros. The objective of monetary policy in the euro area is price stability in the euro area as a whole.