In addition, we have a surplus on the current account, which is tantamount to a surplus in the balance for the economy as a whole. Things look rather different in the USA. There, private sector saving has declined to –7 per cent of GDP, the household sector's burden of debt is at a record high level and the deficit on the current account balance is growing rapidly. Both American consumers and international investors have had strong confidence in the American economy's capacity to generate future income. USA central point in economic picture When it comes to the actual economic activity situation, interest is mainly focused on the USA, not least because of the low level of saving and the large build-up of debt described above. If American households were to rapidly increase their saving and reduce their consumption, and if foreign investors were to begin to feel hesitant over financing the current account deficit, there would be considerable consequences for the global economy. However, the American economic picture is still fragmented. It is true that the household sector's consumption is still at a high level and developments in the construction and residential sector are also satisfactory. Moreover, the large fall in the confidence indicators seems to have slown down, at least for the time being. But at the same time, industrial production is still weak, the inflow of orders is falling and the adjustment of stocks is moving unexpectedly slowly, particularly in the sensitive IT sector.

And we should expect that trend to continue for a number of reasons. First, and most obviously, what I have called the digitalisation of everyday life will continue. The growth of internet commerce or use of banking and payments apps, for example is forecast to grow/unlikely to stop. Second, there are further developments in train within existing payment systems, infrastructure and regulatory frameworks. These include Pay.UK’s development of the New Payments Architecture[5]. The Bank of England is well advanced in the build and implementation of a new central bank real time payment system (RTGS), the central rail of the current UK payments infrastructure. This renewal programme will increase resilience and access, and offer wider interoperability, improved user functionality and strengthened end-toend risk management of the UK’s High Value Payment System. As announced this morning, the government and regulators[6] will expand the Open Banking framework through making improvements on API performance, improving the provision of information sharing to third party providers and working towards additional functionalities, such as variable recurring payments. Third, and looking a little further into the future, over the last decade a set of newer technologies have emerged which may have the potential for a further transformation in payments. I am referring here to technologies that have been pioneered and refined in the crypto world, such as tokenisation, encryption, distribution, atomic settlement and smart contracts. These developments have been much hyped of course, and one could not say it was a certain bet that they will be as transformative as some have claimed.