What considerations need to be made regarding Treasury market clearance practices given the growth in activity by participants who are not central counterparty members? Will the evolving settlement marketplace introduce new challenges to Treasury market participants? How must practices and culture evolve as market structure does? And, how will the interplay of all of these issues affect the future of the Treasury market? Today’s conference provides an excellent opportunity to discuss these issues. Thank you for coming. I look forward to today’s dialogue and the ongoing engagement between the Joint Member Agencies and the public as we all strive to ensure the continued sound functioning of this essential marketplace. 1 Joint Staff Report: The U.S. Treasury Market on October 15, 2014, U.S. Department of the Treasury, Board of  Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, July 13, 2015. 2 Ellen Correia Golay, Frank Keane and Nathaniel Wuerffel assisted in preparing these remarks. 3 The Joint Member Agencies are the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Board of Governors of the Federal  Reserve System, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. 4 Best Practices for Treasury, Agency Debt, and Agency Mortgage-Backed Securities Markets , Treasury  Markets Practices Group, Revised February 2016. 5 Banking Conduct and Culture, Group of 30, July 2015.
Over the next few years, the return on the Pension Fund is expected to rise roughly in line with government expenditure on retirement pensions through the national insurance scheme. Revenues from petroleum activities will nonetheless gradually decline, pulling down growth in the Fund. Over time, therefore, the national insurance scheme’s retirement pensions will grow considerably faster than the expected real return on the Fund. (See Chart: Generational account.) However, it is wrong simply to compare the Pension Fund and obligations under the national insurance scheme. The government has the option of taxing households and businesses, and this naturally also has a considerable net present value. Generational accounts allow for this. These accounts show whether there is a need to raise taxes or lower expenditure for the government budget to balance in the long term, based on forecasts for benefit and pension payments and oil revenues. The generational accounts reveal that there is currently a need for fiscal tightening equivalent to 10 per cent of GDP or of the order of NOK 200 billion. Longterm forecasts from the Ministry of Finance, that also take the pension reform into account, show a shortfall of around 6 per cent of mainland GDP. Calculations by professors Alf Erling Risa and Erling Vårdal here in Bergen paint a similar picture. The need for fiscal tightening roughly corresponds to current spending of oil revenues. Estimates of this kind are highly  16  Revised National Budget 2010.