the competitive edge of a financial centre depends largely on the availability of a large pool of highly professional market practitioners. a priority area for the tmf is therefore to work with the industry to enhance the professionalism of practitioners in the treasury markets. as you may be aware, with the support of the tmf, the financial markets association of hong kong ( acihk ) has recently launched a new membership regime, together with a revamped professional training and accreditation programme. under the new membership drive, acihk, traditionally consisted of practitioners drawn from the foreign exchange and money markets, has recruited new members from other treasury markets. in particular, with the support of the hkcma, many of you working in the debt origination as well as trading sides have now joined the acihk. the number of acihk members has by now grown to over 1, 800. as part of the training and accreditation programme for acihk members, two new courses, one on dealing and the other one on debt securities, have been developed together with the chinese university of hong kong and the university of science and technology respectively. the hkcma has provided very useful contributions in designing the debt securities course, which commenced last november. secondly, “ product ”. here i ’ m not referring to the wide array of financial products that are offered to the investors, which should best be left to individual financial firms to develop. what the tmf and the hkcma can help is to seek to develop the necessary infrastructure so that new products can be launched in hong kong. for example, the tmf, together with the hkcma and the hkma, have been seeking to develop the hk dollar repo market in hong kong. for the repo market to kick off, we will need the necessary repo settlement facility operated by the central moneymarkets unit. as a result of this effort, an efficient and highly automated platform for repo settlement has been made available since december 2004. this is an example of how the tmf can help promote product development in hong kong. the tmf has also worked on other issues to facilitate market development. examples include the ndf documentation for asian currencies, promotion of overnight index swaps and constant maturity swaps, review of electronic prime broking system, and work on standard documentation in chinese for use by mainland and other customers who prefer to use their mother tongue as the working language in financial transactions. last

david dodge : summary of the latest monetary policy report opening statement by mr david dodge, governor of the bank of canada, to the senate banking, trade and commerce committee, ottawa, ontario, 25 october 2006. * * * good afternoon, mr. chairman and members of the committee. we appreciate the opportunity to meet with this committee twice a year, following the release of our monetary policy reports. these meetings help us keep senators and all canadians informed about the bank's views on the economy, and about the objective of monetary policy and the actions we take to achieve it. when paul and i appeared before this committee last may, shortly after the release of our spring monetary policy report, we noted that the global economy had shown a little more momentum than had been anticipated : oil prices at that time were higher than previously assumed and metals prices had risen significantly. at that point, we were anticipating economic growth of about 3. 1 per cent this year, 3. 0 per cent in 2007, and 2. 9 per cent in 2008. things have changed somewhat since then. while global economic growth is expected to be a little higher than anticipated last spring, a weaker near - term outlook for the u. s. economy has curbed the near - term prospects for canadian exports and growth. the bank's outlook for growth in the canadian economy has been revised down slightly from the outlook in last april's monetary policy report and the july update of that report. the bank's base - case projection now calls for average annual gdp growth of 2. 8 per cent in 2006, 2. 5 per cent in 2007, and a return to 2. 8 per cent in 2008. weakness in labour productivity growth has led the bank to lower its assumption for potential growth to 2. 8 per cent for the 2006 - 08 period. together, these factors imply that the small amount of excess demand now in the economy will be eliminated by mid - 2007. core inflation is expected to remain a bit above 2 per cent in the coming months but return to the 2 per cent target by the middle of 2007 and remain there through to the end of 2008. lower energy prices have led to a downward revision of the near - term projection for total cpi inflation. total inflation ( which includes the temporary impact of the gst reduction ) will likely average about 1 1 / 2 per cent through the second quarter of 2007 before returning to the 2 per cent target and remaining there through to the end of 2008. as we noted at