That is the primary aim of this morning’s symposium, bringing together the scientific committees of both the ACP and the AMF who play a key advisory role in each of our  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  institutions and who clearly work in areas of common interest. It is organised around the following specific themes that I would like to introduce with a few words. I.  Firstly, in a difficult context, French households have altered their investment choices: what are the consequences of this alteration? Already high before the crisis, the savings rate of French households has further increased, reaching levels close to those recorded at the start of the 1980s. This increase in the savings rate seems to reflect a precautionary attitude on the part of households. The year 2011 was also characterised by a significant reallocation of assets between the various savings options. Alongside a substantial withdrawal from UCITS and a fall in net new money flowing into life insurance contracts – a movement that has nevertheless slowed since the beginning of 2012 – bank savings products have posted a significant rise in deposits. Savers clearly decided to place their money in more liquid and less risky banking products such as passbooks to the detriment of long-term investments, despite the need for the latter to cover certain requirements for both households and the economy.
As always, we are monitoring developments carefully and in connection with the Monetary Policy Update in April will make a renewed assessment of the international outlook in which we will also take into account how events in Japan may affect the development of the global economy in the slightly longer term. Sweden At the latest monetary policy meeting in February, we decided to raise the repo rate from 1.25 per cent to 1.50 per cent and our assessment was that the repo rate would need to be increased to 3.6 per cent by the end of the forecast period, that is in three years’ time. My assessment was that we will need to raise the repo rate by 0.25 per cent at every meeting in 2011 to 2.75 per cent at the end of the year. This entails a somewhat steeper upward path in the second half of 2011 than the repo-rate path presented in the main scenario of the Monetary Policy Report. However, in light of the uncertainty about the development of interest rates, I did not enter a reservation against the repo-rate path but confined myself to commenting on this at the meeting (see Figure 17). I will now discuss my view of monetary policy in the years ahead in a little more detail and take the picture of the economic outlook presented in the latest Monetary Policy Report as my starting point.