However, in crisis situations the banks sometimes do not want to borrow, as this could signal that they have financial problems, as was the case in the United States during the financial crisis 20082009. Former Fed Governor Ben Bernanke says that the unwillingness to borrow from the Fed could have been reduced if they had a larger balance sheet. If the banks had had substantial deposits and larger loans with the Fed and thus been in the habit of having transactions with the Fed during normal circumstances, the stigma of borrowing in a crisis situation could have been alleviated. Among European banks, unwillingness to borrow from the ECB during the financial crisis was a much smaller problem than for the Fed. Bernanke points out that one possible reason for this could have been that the ECB had a larger balance sheet even prior to the crisis and that the banks in Europe therefore were used to making large transactions with the ECB. Increased supply of safe assets for the banks in the economy 50 The demand for safe and liquid assets with a short maturity has been huge around the world for a long period of time. This is often seen as one of the main reasons for the low global interest rates. If the Riksbank has a large balance sheet and  47 See Duffie and Krishnamurthy (2016) and Bertsch and Molin (2016). 48 The interbank market is one where the banks can borrow money from one another at short notice.
I would like to discuss the changes in the financial environment and how they affect our different areas of operation, but before I do so I shall talk about the Riksbank's main role in the financial system, namely to provide the Swedish economy with safe money that is easy and efficient to use. The Riksbank provides the economy with money that safe and simple to use Money is needed so that we can buy and sell goods and services. If we are to have confidence in money, and want to use it, it needs to be both safe and easy to use. This requires in turn financial stability, price stability and smoothly-functioning payment systems. Let me describe how the Riksbank tries to create the right conditions. If we start with money being safe, this means that one can rely on money representing a particular value in goods and services, and that it will retain this value until the day one wants to redeem it for goods and services. The pieces of paper that we issue have no value in themselves, but function as a form of evidence that someone has produced something of value. 2 In the academic literature there is, for instance, a branch known as ‘monetary economics’ or in its modern form, ‘new monetarist economics’ 3, which looks into why money arises and under what conditions it retains its value.