The costs for the banks' payment services should thus, all else being equal, be lower in Sweden than in countries that apply systems similar to the textbook one. We can therefore say that our system is more cost-effective than the textbook's system. Following the tragic events in the USA the other week, some central banks announced that they were prepared to supply liquidity to avoid a shortage of liquidity on the market. During periods of unease the demand for risk-free investments normally rises. This leads to investors demanding higher compensation for taking credit risks. It can also lead, as a consequence, to an increase in the interest rate on the interbank market. In extreme situations, access to liquidity can be valued so highly that banks and other market participants are not prepared to lend money at any price. As a result of the great uncertainty prevailing, the daily lending market in US dollars functioned very poorly during the days following the terrorist attack, daily rates rose and there were indications that some banks were experiencing difficulty in obtaining dollars at all. Given these developments, the Federal Reserve offered the US banks increased opportunities to borrow dollars from the central bank. However, the European banks were also affected, and therefore with the aim of maintaining the dollar market function, a number of central banks, including the Swedish Riksbank, offered a dollar facility to the market.
It is intuitively easy to understand that the amount of money in the economy is a decisive factor for the price of the goods produced in the country. In modern economies, where payments are largely made electronically, the monopoly on issuing banknotes is no longer an equally evident condition for enabling monetary policy to determine price trends. Today, it is instead the right to determine the terms in the systems for large electronic payments between banks and the opportunity to influence how much the banks shall borrow or deposit in the Riksbank that enable us to steer interest rates. For electronic payments to be able to function as money, it is necessary for the central bank to be perceived as guarantor for these means of payment in the same ways as with banknotes. This role can only be fulfilled by a central bank and in this way one can say that the possibility to determine price trends in the economy still lies with the monopoly on issuing money. The Riksbank governs the shortest interest rate in the interbank market, so that it normally remains close to the monetary policy-steered repo rate. The fact that the Riksbank can steer the interbank rate is primarily due to the fact that each individual bank participating in the system handling large interbank payments - known as the RIX system - always has an opportunity to borrow and deposit money in the Riksbank overnight at the lending and deposit rates set by the Riksbank.