have seen instances where countries have been punished for policies that undermine stability – the uk and even more recently when fitch downgraded the us. hence, if we have policies that go against the direction we should be going – towards normalization, consolidation, enhancing stability – then that is a significant risk for us going forward. if rating agencies are already punishing advanced economies, they would have even more appetite to do that for emerging countries like thailand. to end on a happy note, is there a happy scenario? i think there is. that scenario would be if the new government implements policies within reason ( even if they have to undertake some populist policies ) with adequate budget discipline, properly communicates to the markets, and undertakes long - term structural policies that we have been wanting to see for so long. improving the investment climate, doing regulatory guillotines to help with ease of doing business, and getting another investment cycle going are absolutely critical to enhance growth and productivity in the long term. there are a lot of global headwinds and uncertainties ahead, especially with geopolitics, but if we handle it the right way, maybe we could turn some of those headwinds into tailwinds. in that regard, thailand is not such a bad place to be. we are very well connected. we have strong relationships with major economies. we might not be the best at anything, but we are not bad in a lot of areas. and maybe that is not a bad place to be in a world where there is now a premium on resilience. if you think about the kind of shocks we have been through, thailand is a pretty resilient economy. i will stop on that positive note and thank you very much for your attention. the mpc has raised the policy rate 7 times since aug - 22, bringing it to the current level of 2. 25 %. 1 the mpc has raised the policy rate 7 times since aug - 22, bringing it to the current level of 2. 25 %. 5 / 5 bis - central bankers'speeches

in the world. however, this is a result of a lot of temporary factors base effect, temporary measures on electricity and a variety of other measures - which suggest that going forward inflation is gradually going to come back up again. overall, inflation should still reside within our target range for the year. hence, the broad contours of the economy are fairly encouraging. even with all the uncertainties out there, overall recovery in thailand has remained intact. on the global front, there are rising concerns about a slowdown in china, but concerns over a 1 / 5 bis - central bankers'speeches slowdown or risk of a recession in the us seem to have gone down. so, there are positive economic surprises to counter negative ones. domestically, the big question is what is going to happen with the government. i believe some of the concerns over government spending may not be accurate. the bot's forecasts have already priced in a delay in government budget disbursement of about 3 - 6 months. the fact is that, with our budget, the fixed expenses still go out the door but what will not be spent is the discretionary investment budget, which is not huge in size. so, the impact on this year's headline gdp from any delay in fiscal spending is not large. the impact, if it comes, will come next year. overall, the picture is broadly intact in terms of economic recovery. this is positive news that we should take away. part 2 : policy responses - monetary and financial policies policy is a balancing act. we must try to manage the trade - offs properly and be flexible and agile in adjusting our policies in response to the economic circumstances that have changed. on monetary policy when we started our policy normalization process last year, the economy was recovering much more slowly than the region because it was highly dependent on tourism. our policy objective at that time was to ensure a smooth takeoff. we did not want to do anything to interrupt the recovery process. hence, our policy response was to undertake a'gradual and measured'interest rate normalization and we increased the policy rate from the low level of 0. 50 % by 25 bps each meeting1. this was different from what other central banks were doing, and we received a fair amount of criticism - aren't you in danger of being behind the curve? aren't you in danger of inflation not being transitory? no. we did not think so. we genuinely felt that the situation in thailand