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The purpose of our policy has been to prevent Sweden falling into the deep recession suffered by many other countries in connection with the crisis. It has thus been a question of wanting to manage our task of maintaining price stability and macroeconomic balance in the best way possible. 9 As I see it, there is no doubt that the Riksbank’s mandate allows us and even requires us to take into account risks linked to a credit boom and rising house prices. So, neither in the light of the international debate conducted today nor the mandate given to the Riksbank, has the monetary policy conducted been particularly “unusual” or “strange”. The monetary policy strategy the Riksbank has applied in recent years is also worth mentioning. What we have tried to do is to find a suitable balance where we support the recovery, but at the same time do not accelerate as hard as we might have done if we did not need to take into account housing prices and indebtedness. This has not, as one might sometimes think, been a question of braking hard. When all is said and done, the repo rate is currently no higher than 1 per cent. Difficult balancing act if the repo rate is the only tool But let me now return to Figure 1 and the discussion I started with. Stabilising two cycles – the business cycle and the credit cycle – with the aid of only one tool – the policy rate – is of course not easy.