A perceived comparative advantage of the United States in creating “high quality” financial assets from real investments may also have played a part (Caballero, Farhi and Gourinchas, 2008). This resulted in downward pressure on the yields on government bonds and other safe assets, and upward pressure on asset prices generally. Low long-term safe interest rates would also have encouraged the shift into riskier assets through the risk-taking channel described above. Second, the lead-up to the crisis was also a long period of steady growth coupled with low and stable inflation (the Great Moderation). 2 Households, businesses and market participants were consequently faced with a complex signal-extraction problem: how much of this reduction in economic volatility was permanent? Whereas many economic signal extraction problems involve learning about the first moments of a distribution, this involves making inferences about higher moments. The longer such a period of low volatility lasts, the more reasonable it is to assume that it is permanent. But given the necessary infrequency with which tail events occur, there may be a natural tendency for people erroneously to conclude that they could never happen simply because none have materialised recently. Certainly market measures of uncertainty are consistent with this idea, as measures of volatility implied from options prices (such as the VIX) suggest that the perceived risks in financial markets had shrunk to extremely low levels by 2006.
One obvious example is that the properties we want an e-krona to have will affect what technology we can use. The e-krona project will also need to be run in different phases. As a possible e-krona can affect the financial sector and the economy in so many different ways, there are many and complex questions that must be answered, and the answers are often interdependent. It is therefore wise to begin by creating a full list of all of the possible questions and surveying the most important deliberations and interdependencies. 9 [10]  Only after this, in a second phase, will it be possible to begin answering the questions and in this way gradually identifying which answers give the best target-fulfilment as a whole. If we do this work properly, at the end of the second phase we will have a set of answers that provide a good picture of how we want the e-krona system to look. Here of course the Riksbank can decide either to conclude the project or to proceed further. If the Riksbank decides that the e-krona system would promote the safety and efficiency of the payment system, the next step will be to construct such a system. I believe that the Riksbank has never before launched such a complicated project in such an unknown area. The complexity of course gives rise to risks and uncertainties throughout the project, something we will need to compensate for by being flexible.