2  World Bank Press Release: Predicts Sharpest Decline of Remittances in Recent History https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/pressrelease/2020/04/22/world-bank-predicts-sharpest-decline-of-remittances-in-recent-history 3 FSB Report on Enhancing Cross-border Payments: https://www.fsb.org/wp-content/uploads/P090420-2.pdf 3  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  3  The COVID-19 crisis has accentuated these trends and brought new challenges. The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated these trends. Temporary closure of shops and restaurants, or the desire to socially isolate led people to increasingly turn to online shopping. And many shops are encouraging contactless forms of payment over the use of cash. In the UK, data from LINK, the UK’s largest cash machine network, suggests that cash transactions have plummeted. Since the UK lockdown began (24th of March), ATM cash withdrawals in the UK have dropped by around 60%.4 A recent LINK survey found that 75% of survey respondents are using less cash than before the crisis. 5 And online sales have taken off, jumping to 30% of total retail transactions in the UK in April 2020 from just over 18% a year earlier. 6 To make these stats more real, my parents have for the first time in their lives begun shopping for groceries online. Now, I don’t know whether my dad’s extreme grumpiness about having someone else pick his produce means he’ll return to shopping in-person once it’s safe for him to do so or whether the convenience of having someone arrive at his door with his groceries will win him over. In time, we’ll see how enduring the broader shifts are.

But in order to ensure that sufficient monetary policy stimulus continues to support the further buildup of headline inflation that we see in our projections, the Governing Council decided: to enhance our forward guidance on the likely future path of our policy interest rates, expressing our expectation that they will remain at their present levels at least through the summer of 2019, and in any case for as long as necessary to ensure the continued convergence of inflation towards our aim; and to re-assert our intention to continue to re-invest the principal payments from maturing securities in our portfolio for an extended period of time after the end of our net asset purchases, and in any case for as long as necessary to maintain favourable liquidity conditions and an ample degree of monetary accommodation. These measures will continue to provide the necessary degree of monetary policy accommodation to bring inflation back towards a level that is below, but close to, 2%. Let me now turn to the Spanish economy. Following the severe recession in 2008-09 and 2012-13, Spain’s economic recovery has been strong, with five years of growth since 2013. During this time, the economy has expanded by an estimated 14% and the level of GDP is now above its pre-crisis peak. This strong recovery reflects substantial policy efforts at both national and European level, particularly the reforms initiated at the height of the sovereign debt crisis. Under the EU financial assistance programme, numerous measures and reforms were undertaken to strengthen the banking system.