If the credit risks disappear from the banks, where do they go? Today I intend to speak a little bit about the risks involved in credit derivatives, which so far mainly concern the international market. Here in Sweden the use of credit derivatives is still limited, although increasing. Then I intend to mention the opportunities I see in Sweden. But let me first run through how credit derivatives are used and how the market has developed in recent years. 1  How do credit derivatives work? A credit derivative is a financial contract between two parties. It insures the buyer of the contract against the credit suffering a credit event during a predetermined period. The credit event quite simply defines what the insurance covers, in roughly the same way as the conditions in a normal home insurance. I shall return to this shortly. Take, for instance, a company like TeliaSonera. Then imagine a bank that has loaned money to this company. This may involve a lot of money as TeliaSonera is a large company. Although Telia’s ability to pay is good when the loan is taken, the bank is exposed to the risk that it may deteriorate in the long term. If the bank considers the credit risk to be too high, it may choose to "sell" part of it to another investor. Then the bank can use the credit derivatives market. For the bank, which in this case is the seller of credit risk, the credit derivative functions roughly like a normal insurance.
In particular, BELab has been created with the aim of providing the research community with greater access to high-quality microdata, in a controlled environment that ensures data confidentiality, through on-site or remote means depending on the sensitivity of the data. The microdata available at BELab include the Survey of Household Finances, the Survey of  1  Financial Competences, the balance sheet data of non-financial corporations and microdata on loans to legal persons. I would strongly encourage all of you to have a look at these data, because I honestly believe that allowing independent researchers to access high-quality data is a necessary step to enhance our knowledge of the Spanish economy. And this annual conference specifically should be seen as another step in furthering our commitment to research as an indispensable tool for improving economic policymaking, in this case with the focus on understanding and monitoring developments in the Spanish economy as a basis for promoting well founded economic policy decisions. We wish to strengthen our interaction with the research community in this field as a way of better discharging our legal responsibility to provide advice to the Spanish governments on economic policy matters. And related to this responsibility, the annual report of the Bank, that it´s regularly presented to Parliament, offers an analysis of recent developments in the Spanish economy within the global setting, as well as how it is likely to perform in the future and the challenges it faces.