- year lag. for more information and to access materials from previous fomc meetings, see www. federalreserve. gov / monetarypolicy / fomc _ historical. htm. story, or public appearance. instead, i would draw your attention to the official communications that are actually approved by an fomc vote : the post - meeting statement, the minutes that are published three weeks after each meeting, and the economic forecasts that accompany the minutes each quarter. i would focus as well on the chairman ’ s speeches and testimony, both because he leads the committee and because he has the best sense of the current consensus on the committee. projections to understand policy, it is important to understand policymakers ’ views of the economy. in the early years of the committee, it was hard for the public to know, in any numerical way, what fomc participants were thinking about the outlook for growth, unemployment, or inflation. starting about 30 years ago, though, bank presidents and board members began submitting twice - a - year economic forecasts for a year or two ahead that were published and available to the public. in november 2007, the committee made a major change in its projection practices. the change had two important dimensions : the projections window was extended to three years, and the frequency of projections was doubled from two times a year to four times a year. then, a little over a year later, the committee participants began making projections for key variables over the “ long run ” as indicators of their views on the steady state of the economy. because of the press coverage that the quarterly economic projections often garner, it is likely that most observers are somewhat familiar with this development. now, i ’ d like to talk about the evolution of the post - fomc statement and the minutes of the fomc meetings. both of these documents are obviously closely watched, but i ’ d like to highlight here how they developed into their current forms. statements anyone who reads the newspaper has probably read some report based on the statement the fomc releases after each meeting. 3 reporters, investors, and others track changes to the statements word - by - word. if i start with a little background on how the committee ’ s focus on the statement has developed, i trust that you ’ ll come to see that the market ’ s focus on the statement is not entirely unfounded. it ’ s hard to believe, but it was only 16 years ago that the

svein gjedrem : government intervention and moral hazard in the financial sector opening address by mr svein gjedrem, governor of norges bank ( central bank of norway ), at the conference “ government intervention and moral hazard in the financial sector ”, oslo, 2 september 2010. * * * it is my pleasure to wish the participants of this research conference welcome to oslo and norges bank. i also welcome participants to our annual financial industry day. this year we have chosen to make that event an integrated part of the research conference. we believe the topic of this research conference should be of particular interest to practitioners. we have also put together the program for this first day of the conference with practitioners in mind. the topic that you will be discussing during the conference is very important for our work at the norges bank. moral hazard in the financial sector is a main concern for the design of government regulation and for the planning of government intervention in periods of financial distress. norges bank is not the bank supervisor in this country. the financial supervisory authority is a separate institution. but norges bank does have a general responsibility for the smooth functioning of the financial system : we have what are now being termed macroprudential responsibilities. we have been doing macroprudential supervision and published our findings in our financial stability reports since 1997. we were thus one of the first central banks to publish such reports. our semi - annual reports have been gradually improved over time. we believe that they are now important contributions to financial supervisory work in norway. we are concentrating our analyses on the macro developments of the financial industry and the macro risks that the industry is facing. for this purpose we are using data bases with detailed information on banks, non - financial firms and households. this gives us an intimate knowledge of the health of the banks and of their customers. macroprudential policies have at least two components. the most important is arguably the long term design of the regulatory framework for the financial sector. ideally we wish to build institutional stabilizers that will prevent financial boom and bust cycles, or at least make them less frequent. one example of such a stabilizer would be a capital buffer requirement above the minimum. a buffer requirement, combined with automatic dividend restrictions for institutions that do not meet the requirement, will most likely become part of the new international regulatory regime. another example is leverage ratio limits that will reduce the scope for expanding financial activities on a very small capital base. a third example is