Erik Thedéen: A year with the new Riksbank Act
Speech by Mr Erik Thedéen, Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at the Stockholm Centre for Commercial Law, Stockholm University, Stockholm, 18 January 2024.
The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.
Slides accompanying the speech
First, a warm thank you to the Stockholm Centre for Commercial Law for giving me the opportunity to speak about the new Riksbank Act, a substantial and important topic.
The new act – formally the Sveriges Riksbank Act (2022:1568) – has now been in force for a year. This is, of course, too short a time to draw any definitive conclusions about how the act is working. But at the Riksbank, we have now had some experience of applying the provisions of the act, and we have been able to analyse the legal requirements in more depth.
The great merit of the new Riksbank Act is that it clarifies a number of conditions relating to tasks, roles and responsibilities, but in my view it also has the weakness of being too detailed in some respects.
Today, I would like to focus on three important topics based on the new act. Above all, I want to talk about the Riksbank's independence, what it means and why it is important, but perhaps also to correct some misunderstandings about what independence means. From our independence, there is then a clear link to the two other questions I would like to address: first, cooperation and dialogue with other authorities and the Government in the areas of financial stability, emergency preparedness and monetary policy respectively. And after that, I would like to discuss the consequences of independence for the Riksbank's need for earnings and equity. But before going into these topics, I would like to touch on some aspects of the structure of the new act and the Riksbank's mandate.