A cautious combination of a negative repo rate and bond purchases So how have we chosen to act, and what have the results been, so far? Up to this point, we have kept to changes to the repo rate and repo rate path, and purchases of government bonds. As it has not been completely certain how these would function in practice, there has been reason to proceed cautiously. We have combined several measures over the past year to make the combined effect sufficiently great. Over a number of stages, we have cut the repo rate and/or the repo rate path, at the same time as we have announced and initiated bond purchases in amounts that have been increased in several stages (see Figure 4 and Figure 5). In addition, in our communication, we have emphasised our preparedness, if necessary, to also rapidly increase monetary policy stimulus between the ordinary monetary policy meetings held every second month. In March 2015, we did exactly this – we took a decision on new monetary policy stimulus between two ordinary meetings. The repo rate cuts have largely worked As regards the repo rate cuts, so far we have been able to observe that lending rates followed to a normal extent, while deposit rates have stopped at zero for everybody except some larger companies.
Hurricanes don’t care about your organizational chart, and cyber attackers would actually like a copy of it to use it against you. Since threats aren’t siloed, our defenses can’t be siloed either. One of the insights of enterprise risk management is that good outcomes rely on integration across organizational boundaries and types of risk. That’s why it’s not just risk management, its enterprise risk management.3 We can use approaches from enterprise risk management to create bridges across silos. To start, enterprise risk management focuses on an organization’s objectives and the critical processes that support them. Critical processes span organizational units in a connected chain of activities, starting with inputs delivered by suppliers, to value-added transformations within the organization, to the final delivery to customers. So, to strengthen resilience, we identify the risks to process outcomes and then design processes and controls to address those risks. Since silos weaken resilience, you may want to look in your organization at some of the hotspots where enterprise-wide coordination is essential. I’d start with incident response. Are you ready for complex threats that require teamwork across organizational units? Another challenging area is external dependency management. Do you have a coordinated and coherent approach to understand and manage vendor exposures across the full spectrum of risks, including information security, data privacy, compliance, business continuity, and credit? Risk silos are as problematic as business-line silos.4 While the specialization of risk disciplines has benefits, common negative side effects are insufficient communication and coordination, followed by information gaps and ineffective decision making.