Over the recent years, the Bank of Thailand has built awareness of this risk in the public which has contributed to the natural adjustment of the market and therefore the slowdown of household debt 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  accumulation. Going forward, the Bank is proposing a national agenda to the government to promote financial literacy and discipline to ensure long-term stability in line with our own ongoing financial awareness projects. I have now talked about the central bank’s commitment to growth, price, and financial stability in order to support sustainable growth. Now that we are in recovery, minding the future risks to financial and price stability, and being in possession of stabilization tools tested and refined over time, the Monetary Policy Committee will carefully weigh the tradeoff between short-term growth and long-term risks and ensure that the economy will have enough financial ease to recover to sustainable growth. Ladies and Gentlemen, I would now like to move on to the second role of the Bank of Thailand: facilitating an expansion of the growth frontier. Keeping balance as described in the first part is achieved through the use of the Bank of Thailand’s tools in guarding economic stability. To allow stakeholders to move forward and capture new opportunities, the Bank of Thailand employs its other instruments to enhance financial sector efficiency and create a favorable financial environment for investment that would lead to higher productivity growth.
Ladies and gentlemen, We forecast Thailand to grow at around 4.8% next year, a rate that means steady recovery to normal levels of economic activity. As the economy returns to full capacity, inflation and financial risks may surface. To ensure sustainability, the process of growth must not create imbalances in the economy that will draw down future growth. This brings us to the two other aspects of stability: price and financial stability. The Bank of Thailand has had much success in anchoring inflation expectation through our Inflation Targeting framework, adopted since 2000. Many times during this period, well-anchored inflation expectation has allowed flexibility for the Bank of Thailand, when needed, to actively support growth and ensure financial stability. As you well know from the Subprime Crisis, an economy with growth stability and price stability can still fall into contraction due to financial causes. The Bank of Thailand has learned from our own experience with a financial crisis as well as others’ and has been vigilantly monitoring indicators of risk to financial stability in the economy, and has policies developed especially to ensure financial stability. Conducting policy through the use of interest rate alone may not be sufficient to take care of financial imbalance. In addition to monetary policy, which sometimes is too blunt to optimally take care of financial stability, we have adopted macroprudential tools since 2002 and employed them to help us cover and specifically target areas of the financial system.