is done very successfully in many countries – you go to asia, south america, almost all the central banks have special micro - finance areas and they expect all the commercial banks to be actively involved in the rural areas. i visited the chairman of the bank of baroda, few years ago, in mumbai and he briefed me on what they are doing in india in terms of micro - finance and i was very impressed. there is no reason why banks cannot have micro - finance specialization in their operation. there is no reason. we just have to change their mindset – that ’ s the key. people are too stuck with their own style of operation. we want them now to change their mindset, they are operating in fiji ; we are a developing country, we have large number of people in the rural areas and we want them to benefit from our banking industry. that was the thinking behind making the banks to open micro - finance units in each of their branches from jan next year. to assist in that process i have also announced the set up of a micro - finance research and development unit in the reserve bank, headed by a chief manager, to drive this process. so, in the next few months we ’ ll be having active discussions with all the key stakeholders and we really want to make a difference in a couple years of time. question 9 : any comments, any message to the nation? answer : as i ’ ve said we are going through difficult times. unfortunately, we had to devalue our currency. the circumstances warranted it. i feel for the people, poor people, but we had to do something in terms of the economy. prices are going to increase. i urge our people to grow more food, reduce consumption of imported items and be self - sufficient as much as possible. do not consume too much luxury items ; avoid imported items as much as possible. this is a subject, very dear to me. i ’ ll talk a little bit more about this. it ’ s a question of changing mindsets. sometime ago i went to navua. i walked about three hours up the navua river and got to this village. i was given cordial juice. i didn ’ t refuse but i was sitting under a lemon tree and ripe lemons were lying on the grass. but here i was drinking imported cordial juice. so, i said to the headman, i would have loved to have this lemon juice rather than the cordial but

within europe. nonetheless, plenty of room for improvement remains. authorities need wider powers to acquire or relaunch flailing institutions. supervision should be tightened too, to ensure that a closer watch is kept on the strategy and corporate culture of supervised institutions, but also that more account is taken of the macro - environment in which financial institutions operate. let me conclude. people are understandably disappointed that, nationally and internationally, the supervising central banks were unable to protect financial institutions from the storm in the financial markets that blew up in august 2007. the recognition that the world is less formable than commonly thought, and that supervision can provide no guarantee that a bank will never fail, cannot allay this disappointment ; nor can the notion that we were not dealing with a typically dutch phenomenon, but that there were banks all over the world that collapsed in the wake of the credit crisis. our response at dnb can only be that we will in future intensify our efforts to prevent misfortunes in the financial sector. and that, along with our colleagues in other countries, we will to this end do all that is humanly possible to draw every last lesson from the credit crisis.