banking system. as regards fiscal consolidation, the stability programme that has targeted a deficit of 3 % by 2013 is an ambitious plan. it has been recognised by the european union and has been met in its first year. accordingly, all tiers of government – central, regional and local alike – must rigorously fulfil the targets set for the current and coming years. turning to the identification of the problems posed by part of our banking system, the government and parliament reacted promptly. as early as 2009 the frob ( fund for the orderly restructuring of the banking sector ) legislation was approved, allowing the start of the restructuring of an extensive number of savings banks. and, whenever necessary, the government and parliament have not hesitated to adopt further legislation so as to speed through and conclude this process, as evidenced by the approval of the savings bank law in 2010 and, more recently, the passing of the royal decree - law on the capitalisation of our credit institutions. the fact these regulations have been approved with an acceptable degree of parliamentary consensus is most positive. in this case, as in that of cutting the deficit, it is expected that savings bank restructuring will be completed how and when the parliament has decreed. despite affecting a limited part of the banking system, the restructuring has generated such noise that the doubts as to whether the legislator should have adopted more drastic solutions are understandable. but i bis central bankers ’ speeches should say that some of the alternatives, such as injecting capital into the savings banks without making this conditional upon their restructuring and resizing, might have entailed more disadvantages than advantages, compared with the option actually chosen by the legislator. unlike other countries which found that their major banks had collapsed practically from one day to the next, the problem of the spanish banking system was confined to a part of the savings bank sector. and i stress “ a part ”, since some of our savings banks are perfectly sound when set against the commercial banks. however, during the upturn some savings banks had pursued a model centred on high credit growth with high exposure to the real estate development and construction sector. with the arrival of the crisis, the shortcomings of this model became clearly evident. in the new setting, with a rapid deterioration in asset quality, with margins diminishing and with business volume expectations much lower than in the past, it could be seen that it was essential to restructure balance sheets and reduce the sector ’ s capacity, which had expanded in prior years in parallel

bar is the international standard for liquidity. the actual liquidity held by our banks is much higher, as shown by the dark blue bar. these conditions show that our banks are still in a good position to support growth. i am also pleased to report that more filipinos continue to join the formal financial system. the chart on the left shows that the share of digital payments in total transactions has reached 52. 8 percent, surpassing our target of 50 percent under the digital payments transformation roadmap for 2018 to 2023. the chart on the right shows that account ownership among filipino adults almost doubled to 56 percent in 2021 from 29 percent in 2019. this significant increase was driven by the pandemic - induced shift to digital financial services, particularly e - money account ownership, which was 8 percent in 2019 and is now 36 percent. let me now turn to external inflows. the external sector is a picture of resilience. we have sufficient inflows to maintain an ample level of international reserves, which are our defense against external shocks. the biggest inflows are from remittances. that is shown on the chart on the left and then business process outsourcing, which is the chart in the middle. as you can see, they are increasing. in contrast, while we continue to record net foreign direct investment inflows, these have weakened in the recent past. nonetheless, we expect our inflows to rise even further next year and continue to contribute to building up our reserves. this chart shows the level of our international reserves. it averaged 101 billion us ( united states ) dollars in last five years. we expect that it will reach 104 billion this year. these reserves are more than ample to defend the country against external shocks. assumptions having presented the macroeconomic backdrop, here are the assumptions behind the proposed national budget for fiscal year 2025. we assume, based on our forecasts, that headline inflation will remain within our target range of between 2 percent to 4 percent for both 2024 and 2025. we assume that the price of dubai crude oil will be within 65 to 85 [ us ] dollars per barrel based on dubai crude oil futures prices. we assume that the exchange rate of the peso will be within 55 and 58 pesos against the us dollar. we also assume that the one - year t - bill ( treasury bill ) rate will be between 4. 5 percent and 5. 5 percent. the 6 - month sofr ( secured