And in some cases there is also a willingness among central banks themselves to adopt a looser interpretation of their existing mandates. This tendency has strengthened noticeably of late. In our case, for example, there have been a series of motions in parliament calling on the SNB to do more with regard to climate protection. The same applies to the issue of inequality, ever since the use of central bank balance sheets to tackle the global financial crisis has increasingly raised questions regarding the redistribution of wealth. Time and again, there have been initiatives from politicians demanding that central banks directly finance government tasks. For example, a popular initiative was recently launched in Switzerland seeking to amend the Federal Constitution to give the SNB a direct role in financing the national pension scheme. How is the SNB to deal with these demands? All these concerns – from climate protection to the redistribution of wealth and securing pension provision – are important matters that are Page 9/16  rightfully being raised. That said, I am convinced that attempting to solve these issues with monetary policy instruments would entail a significant threat to the effectiveness of monetary policy over the medium to long term. The SNB naturally has to take into account the influence that changes in the economic structure have on inflation. For example, climate change can have an effect on potential growth, and this has to be considered when setting the monetary policy stance. However, the mandate of a central bank must not be overburdened.
However, this is not an easy task by any mean. Rating agencies should satisfy several criteria in order to be eligible. These criteria, as you might already be aware of comprise experience, freedom from external influence, publicly available assessments, requirements to disclose assessment models and approaches, sufficient resources and finally validation or recognition by supervisory authorities in our countries. Third but certainly not the least, the new system poses a challenge to all banks to improve their capacities in order to comply with the new framework to successfully compete and survive. Banks should start adopting a more dynamic and forward looking approach to the evaluation of risk and  provisions since under a risk sensitive approach there is always the risk of pro-cyclicality1, which means bank capital ratios are likely to fluctuate more over the course of business cycles. In spite of the above challenges, in Albania we have already started addressing some of these issues. First, by making sure that we have consolidated the achievements of our supervisory function by completing the requirements of Basel I. We are glad that the good progress has been confirmed also by the FSAP assessment during their mission in February-March, this year. Certain recommendations related with requirements about consolidated supervision, will be followed very attentively; Second, we have been pushing already our supervisory process and the banks, toward a more risk oriented attitude.