6  Firms have taken advantage of the improvement in financing conditions in both bank lending markets and fixed-income markets and have resorted to debt to cover part of their higher liquidity needs. The year-on-year growth rate of debt increased from 1.3% in February to 6.2% in May. Since then, there has been some deceleration and the latest figure, for August, shows a year-on-year rate of 4.2%. The breakdown by instrument shows that the bulk of new debt has been in the form of bank lending extended by domestic banks. The public loan guarantee programme seems to have played an important role in improving firms’ access to bank loans. Up to end-September, the programme was used to extend loans to 541,000 firms and self-employed workers to the tune of more than EUR 102 billion. 62% of this amount has been granted to SMEs, 31% to large firms and the remaining 7% to the self-employed. More granular data, available until June, show that 46% of new lending to firms between March and June was extended under the public loan guarantee programme. As expected, 7  the use of public guarantees was particularly high among firms facing potentially more difficult access to external funding at the current juncture, such as SMEs, riskier firms and firms belonging to sectors more exposed to the shock, with a share of guaranteed loans relative to total loans of 64%, 65% and 60 %, respectively.
I look forward to comments from Robert and Catherine and the audience. Thank you once again for having me here today. 3/3  BIS central bankers' speeches