. it will guarantee the prevention of credit risk, which is cited by commercial banks as one of the primary causes for the existence of limits in the lending relations among banks. this law will also prevent the legal risk the banks are faced with when using repurchase contracts. drafting of the regulatory framework and putting into application the custodian principle of delivery versus payment. in order to minimize the payment settlement risk and facilitate the intermediation in all types of transactions involving securities, such as collateralized loans, repurchase agreements, and outright purchase and sale of government papers, it is being worked on to put into practice the principle of delivery versus payment. reducing the frequency of government treasury bill auctions. in collaboration with the ministry of finance, we have agreed on less frequent and increased size auction schedule of the government treasury bills. this less frequent auction schedule will limit the opportunity of banks to “ be liquid ” based on distributing their treasury bill investment in such a way that liquidity is generated by maturing these government papers. increasing the investment base of investors. in cooperation with the ministry of finance and the financial supervisory authority, it is agreed upon increasing the investors ’ base, eligible to directly invest in the auctions of government papers. the new agreement signed between the bank of albania and the ministry of finance provides the necessary regulative framework for giving an end to the monopoly that the banking system has had in investment in the primary market of government papers, leaving space to natural and legal persons, foreign and domestic individuals. i do not feel well to assert that this step became indispensable, under the conditions of high commissions applied by commercial banks in providing this service, making the clients reluctant to this kind of investment. earnestly believing in the efficiency and development driven by competition, i am convinced that increasing the number of operators licensed to trade government papers has also become a necessity. primary rate for favorable clients. being convinced that the monetary policy efficiency is enhanced through transparency, the bank of albania aims at including even this rate to the entirety of orientation rates used by commercial banks. this package is designed to increase incentives for you to find new profit opportunities and secure the necessary liquidity at a fair price in the secondary security markets. these measures are oriented toward promoting the activity, so that you will not wait for the client to ask for the government papers but search and find this client yourself. and the very first step you should make in this direction is : abandon the traditional pension fund security portfolio classification as

elements of insecurity, which have become, as you already know, dominant in last two years. making decisions on the future of this already globalised world of economic links, requires professional maturity. assessing and selecting appropriate and reliable statistical information requires profound intuitive abilities. making the selected data bank beneficial to the decisionmaking, requires analytical foresight. as a matter of fact forward - looking decisions should be made on the basis of an ever larger and timely information ; they should be constantly consulted with specialized economic and financial market agents. the bank of albania, likewise other central banks, endeavors to increase the qualitative and quantitative data base, in order to improve analyses and the decision - making process in making new steps. the finalization of the several - year project of the bank of albania, along which the business and consumer confidence indicator was consolidated, is an accomplishment of one of the medium - term development strategy objectives of our institution. the decision to publish these indicators passed through a prudent process and matured only after experts and decision - makers of the bank of albania were convinced that the confidence indicators, together with other indicators, revealed valuable additional information about the recent and future developments in the country ’ s real sector of the economy. allow me to briefly summarize some of the basic concepts on confidence, tendency and the foregoing indicators. they have been widely used in many advanced countries of the world, particularly over the last two decades. these indicators are constructed on the basis of information collected from surveys, which are technically referred to as business and consumer confidence / tendency surveys. the bank of albania conducts these surveys in cooperation with instat. increasing demand of analysts, decision - makers, market agents and the broad public for timely economic information and the ability of these indicators to hint business cycle turning points, have made them very common and useful. the peculiarity of these indicators is that they reveal information on the tendency of various economy indicators, based on qualitative opinions of businesses and consumers. the bank of albania has been working for several years to construct these indicators, based on the results from large - scale surveys conducted with 720 businesses and 1200 consumers. the cooperation with global leaders in this area has been very efficient. experts from the german institute of economic studies have supported the process of methodological and economic analysis of business confidence indicators. while working for this project, bank of albania ’ s experts have studied and applied important aspects of contemporary methodologies followed by the oecd countries and by the european