These lean balance sheets meant that they had an almost entirely risk-free financial position as the central bank receives interest payments on the assets while the liabilities are cost-free. In this way and if the interest rate is sufficiently high and the banknote demand sufficiently large, the central bank can fund its own operations and deliver a surplus to the state. The Riksbank and the Swiss National Bank also had relatively minimalistic balance sheets where the liability side was dominated by cost-free capital, but, apart from banknotes, these central banks had accumulated equity on the liability side. The asset side was dominated by gold and foreign exchange reserves, and the Riksbank held no government bonds at all. Despite these similarities, the Swiss National Bank had a significantly larger balance sheet than the Riksbank. This was due to both a substantially higher demand for cash in Switzerland and the fact that the Swiss National Bank had more equity. In other countries, such as Japan and New Zealand, central banks had balance sheets that were larger than was justified by the cost-free capital. The Bank of Japan had already implemented quantitative easing before to the financial crisis in order to bring up inflation. As a consequence of this, Japanese banks had liquidity reserves on the central bank balance sheet. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand had  2 [16]  a balance sheet with several large items on the liability side.
Zeti Akhtar Aziz: Asian money, bonds and derivatives in the new global economy Keynote address by Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz, Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia, at the 13th Annual Conference of Fixed Income, Money Market and Derivatives Association of India (FIMMDA) and Primary Dealers Association of India (PDAI), Kuala Lumpur, 27 January 2012. *  *  *  It has been more than half a decade since the beginning of the global financial crisis, and its ramifications continue to reverberate across the world. Currently, the global financial and economic landscape continues to be confronted with stress and uncertainty, stemming from the prevailing structural weaknesses, deleveraging of the private financial and non-financial sectors, and the escalating strains in public finances in the advanced economies. Despite these significant near-term challenges, the fundamental global economic and financial transformation that commenced prior to the crisis has continued unabated. A new global economy is emerging. The rise in significance of the emerging economies is resulting in a fundamental realignment in the global landscape as the balance of global economic strength shifts to the emerging economies, with its consequent implications on long-term global economic and financial flows. With the rapid growth in domestic demand, reinforced by the vast productive investment opportunities within and across the emerging economies, it is projected that the emerging world will account for 60 percent of total world output by 2030, higher by 20 percent from its current level.