Some of the instruments (balance sheet policies) have even blurred the clear lines between the fiscal and monetary policy, and challenged the notion of central bank independence. Given the importance of the good statistics on monetary policy decision making, what does this new financial landscape imply for statistics? The crises usually tend to provide an impetus for reshaping of our thinking about the statistical concepts/frameworks of proper policymaking. Thus, the Great Depression shifted the focus to development of national accounts, growth of the euro-dollar markets during 1960 s and 1970s to the development of international banking statistics, and Asian financial crisis shifted the focus to strong linkages between the financial and external stability being conducive to development of data standards initiatives (GDDS, SDDS, and ROSCs). The emergence of the latest crises again  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  put the spotlight on the financial sector, revealing the devastating impact of lax regulation of the financial sector in the more advanced economies on the global economy and once again accentuated the need for tighter surveillance of financial stability. The cross-border linkages, internationalization and integration of the financial markets and institutions were underestimated, and so were their global economic consequences. This time it was the international dimension of the financial system that was emphasized and very importantly, the macro-financial linkages. Both of them do have major implications for the production of statistics and for the regular set of required data, needed for making informative decisions in monetary policy and in the micro and macro prudential area.

For some of the banks, the sources of financing of the credit activity were limited, acting as drag on their credit activity. Hence, the exploration of the individual bank data indicated that there are various reasons why the monetary measures do not yield the expected results and that different solutions are relevant for different banks. Lending survey has been widely recognized as an important source of relevant data on the credit market. In the midstream of the crisis, in particular, not only central banks, but also some international institutions started to conduct lending surveys to tackle the potential structural rigidities, precluding more rapid credit growth. In the case of Macedonia, we are running lending surveys since 2006. Ever since these alternative “soft” data have been an auxiliary, but at the same time a very important information source allowing us to detect the paths of the demand and supply of credits, the main determinants driving the two, but also the banks’ vision on the future developments. Very often, as policymakers, we go beyond the aggregate results and screen the results of the survey either by observing individual banks data, or data by group of banks (large, medium, small), as their behavior might differ significantly and can “be lost under the mask of the average”. This helps in better understanding the monetary policy shocks of different types of financial institutions (small/large, foreign/domestic, across different business models).