In plain language, this means that the bank needs to have sufficient resources at its disposal to be able to carry out its tasks without being governed by subventions from the government. When the Riksbank carries out its tasks, this usually has consequences for the Riksbank’s balance sheet. Most of the instruments the Riksbank uses to steer the interest rate are also items on the balance sheet. The Riksbank currently steers the interest rate through its monopoly on supplying a payment system for transferring money between the banks (including the Riksbank) and above all by determining the conditions for this. It is mainly the conditions for the banks’ deposits and loans with the Riksbank that are used as an instrument to steer interest rates in the economy. Prior to the financial crisis, the transactions in the Riksbank’s different instruments were relatively small, but this changed during the financial crisis. Then we used our balance sheet to supply the banks with liquidity. Up to autumn 2008, the Riksbank’s balance sheet was around SEK 200 billion, but it increased dramatically during the crisis to at most SEK 763 billion in July 2009. The reason the balance sheet more than tripled was that the Riksbank began lending large amounts in US dollars and Swedish krona to the Swedish banks from October 2008. The dollar loans were largely funded by the Riksbank in its turn borrowing dollars from the Federal Reserve.
It allows the intermediation process to proceed uninterrupted when the banks are temporarily in difficulty. But more importantly, it helps with liquidity management. In the case of Thailand, the government throughout the 1980’s had been very disciplined in their fiscal policy. They maintained balanced budgets in most years. As a result, no new government bond was issued, as old ones were being retired. Without a deep and liquid government bond market, growth of corporate bond was also slow. When the crisis erupted, financial institutions that could not seek liquidity from the inter bank market were stuck without liquid instruments in hand. Some of them might have survived had the bond market been more active. After the crisis, the government had to issue massive amount of bonds to cover losses in the financial system. Today, the Thai bond market is therefore much larger, at 38 % of the GDP. We have a much more active market. What does an active bond market mean to monetary policy? I will highlight three points. First is the implication on transmission mechanism. When the central bank wants to change stance in monetary policy, it changes interest rate up or down. But it does not directly change the interest rates along the whole spectrum of the yield curve. It only affects the key policy rate, which in the case of Thailand is the very short-term 14 day rate in the repurchase market.