Stefan Ingves: Monetary policy in a new environment

Speech by Mr Stefan Ingves, Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank and Chairman of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, to the Expert Group on Public Economics, Stockholm, 5 March 2018.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Accompanying slides

This is a year of celebration for the Riksbank. The major event is our 350th anniversary as Sweden's central bank, which will be celebrated in different ways during the year. Furthermore, it is 25 years since the Riksbank announced its inflation target, which was a milestone in Swedish monetary policy. It also happens to be 20 years almost to the day since the Swedish Riksdag took the decision to strengthen the Riksbank's position and, as part of this work, to create a Riksbank Executive Board with the responsibility for conducting monetary policy independently.

As well as being a reason to celebrate, anniversaries can also give us cause to pause and reflect on what has been, where we are and where we are heading. My intention here today is to perform just such a positioning exercise. A general reflection is that monetary policy internationally and in Sweden finds itself in an environment that in many ways differs from the one we have been experiencing for a long time. It is not merely a question of changes in economic activity. Structural shifts in the economy and changes in underlying trends have also created uncertainty about what the "new normal" will be in the future.