They provide preliminary information on expected producer price performance, an important link for the price-setting process in the economy. Consumption and savings tendencies of the population are revealed through relevant indicators. In conclusion, the economic sentiment indicator combines the businesses’ and consumers’ opinions, giving hints of the economic prospects in the short run. I would like to speak at length about the importance and informational utility of the confidence and the foregoing indicators. But, I would rather emphasize the respect the users should pay to such indicators, opting for being oriented to the large information flow through them. I regard this only as the beginning of a comprehensible and transparent cooperation. To this end, other special meetings and activities will follow, enriching various groups of interest with knowledge on business confidence or tendency indicators. I have confidence in the added values they will bring to users’ analyses. But, I advise and require of users, researchers, economic journalists of written and electronic media, students and pupils, businesses and consumers and the broad public, to rightly understand these indicators, before using them. These tendencies have resulted from businesses’ and consumers’ opinions and do not constitute the official stance of the Bank of Albania. The Bank of Albania has built them on the basis of an advanced methodology. It has made use of the information obtained from interviewed businesses and consumers and it has confidence in their qualitative assessments and in those indicators. Their publication enhances the public transparency and makes the decision-making process more comprehensible.

Yet at the same time, the Bank was poorly placed in the early stages of the crisis to launch well-structured liquidity assistance rapidly, either to the market as a whole or to individual firms. It lacked the information to evaluate firms’ solvency. And, where LOLR was required, it lacked well-defined pricing or maturity schedules, pre-arranged legal documentation or – most importantly of all – a clear ex ante understanding of the amount and quality of suitable collateral on banks’ balance sheets against which it could lend. Prudential supervision has now returned to the Bank, facilitating a more coordinated approach to financial crisis management, horizon scanning and proactive contingency planning, and improving the Bank’s ability to evaluate solvency ahead of any LOLR. And the bulk of the Bank’s liquidity insurance toolkit has progressively been made public since the height of the crisis. The Sterling Monetary Framework (SMF) now contains a range of facilities with documented price, maturity and quantity schedules, including a regular auction-based marketwide Indexed Long-Term Repo facility, a bilateral on-demand Discount Window Facility and a discretionary Contingent Term Repo Facility. All of these facilities can be used against a wide range of eligible collateral, including securities and raw loans. But this collateral must normally be “pre-positioned” with the Bank so that it can be credit assessed, priced and haircut well before any need to use it arises, rather than in the heat of a crisis.