The Bank of Albania asserts that the financial markets and agents have sound and liquid balance sheets, but they continue to be risk averse into undertaking long-term investments. In conclusion, the Supervisory Council decided that the actual monetary policy stance is appropriate and decided to keep the key interest rate unchanged at 2.0%. The new information analysed at the meeting does not change our evaluations for the current situation of the economy and financial markets, and expectations for their outlook. The current monetary conditions are adequate for ensuring the return of inflation to our 3.0 % target in the medium term. Judging from the expected developments and the balance of risks surrounding them, the Supervisory Council deems that the monetary policy of the Bank of Albania will continue to maintain its stimulating nature, for some quarters ahead. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches
We use weights based on the American Community Survey to construct summary statistics for our public releases. The survey consists of a core monthly module on expectations about macroeconomic and household-level variables and an additional quarterly module that allows us to address special topics. Our core module contains questions about survey respondents’ expectations for inflation, wage growth, home prices, various commodities, household income and spending, taxes, government debt, credit access, and job search. So far, quarterly modules have included questions on housing and employment, work history, job search, retirement, financial literacy, consumption and savings behavior, student loans, and various field experiments. These quarterly modules are developed by Federal Reserve staff in collaboration with academic consultants and the Nielsen team. First, however, new questions are evaluated using cognitive interviews, and every new module is pilot-tested before being put into the field. The Bank began publishing the results of the Survey in January 2014, after having fielded the Survey since December 2012. We introduced it through a series of posts on our Liberty Street Economics blog; eventually, after a suitable embargo period, we plan to release to the public all the micro data from the Survey. Approach to and benefits of eliciting probabilistic beliefs As I mentioned earlier, an important innovation of our Survey is that, in addition to asking the respondent for a point forecast, it uses probabilistic questions to elicit a respondent’s density forecast.