The Riksbank needs to develop its work on how to take climate change into consideration in asset management. For instance, we need broader and deeper analysis of the issuers’ climate footprint. At the same time, one must remember that the foreign exchange reserves are unavoidably dominated by US and German government bonds. The Riksbank's contribution to a better development of the climate will therefore remain small. This is entirely natural. The important decisions on how climate change should be counteracted in Sweden are political and should be taken by the government and the Riksdag (parliament). 6 [7]  References Bank for International Settlements (2014), “Re-thinking the lender of last resort”, BIS Papers no 79, Monetary and Economic Department, September 2014. Bartsch, Elga, Jean Boivin, Stanley Fischer, Philipp Hildebrand (2019), “Dealing with the next downturn: From unconventional monetary policy to unprecedented policy coordination”, Macro and market perspectives, August 2019, BlackRock Investment Institute. Bernanke, Ben S. (2016), “What tools does the Fed have left? Part 3: Helicopter money”, blog post, Brookings. Bernanke, Ben S. (2019), “Monetary Policy in a New Era”, in Evolution or Revolution: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy After the Great Recession, O. Blanchard and L. H. Summers (eds. ), Cambridge, The MIT Press. Cœuré, Benoît (2018), “Monetary Policy and Climate Change”, Speech at a conference on “Scaling up Green Finance: The Role of Central Banks”, Berlin, 8 November 2018. Eichenbaum, Martin S. (2019), “Rethinking Fiscal Policy in an Era of Low Interest Rates”, mimeo, Department of Economics, Northwestern University.

But to attain a higher yield and reduce the financial risk, the Executive Board has decided that a limited part of the foreign exchange reserves can be invested in other assets. The condition is that these are assets with a high credit rating and good liquidity, issued by central governments, provinces or intergovernmental organisations. 11  9 In addition, the Riksbank owns 125.7 metric tons of gold (worth almost SEK 60 billion). 10 The government has given the Swedish National Debt Office the task of issuing green bonds. See the Swedish Ministry of Finance (2019) and SOU (2017:115). 11 Our regulations also allow investments in US agencies and in bonds issued by local authorities or state-guaranteed organisations. 5 [7]  The Riksbank gives consideration to the climate in its investments Last year we stated in our risk and investment policy that we would also give consideration to sustainability aspects when choosing assets. The Riksbank has not yet fully decided how sustainability aspects should be taken into consideration in the investment decisions. There are two main lines to choose between: either we choose which assets or which issuers we want to have in the foreign exchange reserves. The choice between assets would mean trying to invest some of the foreign exchange reserves in particularly climate-friendly assets, such as green bonds. I have doubts about this type of strategy, primarily as our investments are largely in bonds issued by central and federal governments. It is difficult to earmark money for special projects in government budgets.