This resulted in a series of devaluations, a smaller one of 3 per cent in 1976, two of them, 6 per cent and 10 per cent, in 1977, one of 10 per cent in 1981 and a large devaluation of 16 per cent in 1982. Overheating in the 1980s The 1980s thus began with two devaluations in 1981 and 1982. The background to these was that the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s had been very problematic. GDP growth had been poor, and production actually fell a couple of years. Unemployment had risen to 3-4 per cent, which was then regarded as a very high level. Inflation had soared to levels of 15 per cent. The current account and public finances showed a substantial deficit. Sweden found itself in a situation with weak real growth and twin financial deficits. I took part in the preparations for the devaluation in 1982, in connection with the change of government that year. The preparations were led by Kjell-Olof Feldt, Erik Åsbrink and Michael Sohlman. I had the task of making calculations of economic developments over the coming years, based on different economic policy alternatives. Two of the alternatives concerned expansionary fiscal policy to bring down unemployment and a strongly contractionary fiscal and monetary policy to eliminate the twin deficits. In both cases, substantial problems remained in the Swedish economy. The third alternative concerned a devaluation of 20 per cent in autumn 1982, combined with a price stoppage and pegging the krona to the D-mark.
Howard Lee: Keynote speech – ASIFMA 9th China Capital Markets Conference Keynote speech by Mr Howard Lee, Deputy Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, at the ASIFMA 9th China Capital Markets Conference, Hong Kong, 29 November 2019. * * *  Riding the Wave of Portfolio Inflows into Mainland China Mark (Austen), distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, 1. Good morning. Thank you ASIFMA for hosting this Conference in Hong Kong and inviting me to speak. I am glad to see so many friends of the financial industry here today, from Hong Kong and other parts of the world. 2. As you all know, Hong Kong has been going through an extraordinary period since this summer. For those of you who travel to Hong Kong for this conference, I hope you have so far found the situation on the ground less dramatic than what you might have seen from the news. No doubt we have experienced some serious disruptions to traffic and interruptions to operations of bank branches, but overall speaking the financial infrastructures and markets in Hong Kong have continued to function smoothly, and they remain robust and resilient. This clearly demonstrates their ability to withstand different types of shocks, as they did multiple times in the past decades. 3. Earlier this week, Hong Kong successfully launched the $ billion IPO of Alibaba. This deal would likely put us at the top spot of the global IPO league table again this year.