Vipps’ market dominance reduces these challenges, but this assumes that all market participants will be connected to the system. This assumption may be too strict. Other payment service providers and payment solutions will also wish to enter the market on equal terms. The alias registers are important here. An alias register links account numbers to telephone numbers and other ways that identify account holders. Today, separate registers are compiled in each solution. In my opinion, there are clear advantages to having a central register that is used by all banks and other service providers in the Norwegian payment market. This should be part of a common infrastructure and not be part of private closed systems where ownership can change. A common register facilitates interoperability and high register quality. The greater the level of activity is, the more up-to-date the information is. We would also then avoid contradictory information in the various registers, which can arise, for example, when customers do not update their information everywhere at the same time. Insufficient register information may be a barrier to competition. An alias register shares similarities with a public good that should be organised as common infrastructure and be available to all service providers, for a price, if necessary. Service providers should compete on other aspects of the services they offer. I look forward to seeing initiatives from Finance Norway and Bits in this respect. It is often most appropriate for the industry to arrive at satisfactory solutions on its own.
Mervyn King: Monetary policy developments Speech by Mr Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, at the Eden Project, Cornwall, 12 October 2004. *  *  *  A year ago I described the period since the early 1990s as a non-inflationary consistently expansionary - or “nice” - decade; a period in which growth was above trend, unemployment fell steadily, and inflation remained low and stable. The ups and downs of the economy were much smaller in the nice decade than in any previous historical period. Will this stability last? To answer that question it is necessary to understand the causes of our new-found stability and, in particular, the link between growth and inflation. In the long run there is no trade-off between the two. Monetary policy determines inflation and the supply capacity of the economy determines the rate of growth. In the short run, however, it is reasonable to suppose that when the economy is running at above-normal levels of capacity utilisation there is upward pressure on inflation, and the opposite to hold when the economy is running below capacity. Such, at least, is the conventional wisdom. But over the nice decade inflation was much less sensitive to movements in output and employment than in the earlier inflation-prone 1970s and 1980s. Inflation barely moved despite substantial falls in unemployment.