bank. that means we say, we announce to everybody that we target inflation rates so that they stay within 2. 0 percent and 4. 0 percent. that is a big help. because of those targets, we are able to anchor expectations. otherwise, expectations may get out of control, and you get very large second - round effects. by being able to anchor inflation expectations, we are able to manage the secondround effects. so, that is our strategy. that is monetary policy strategy in what we call a " supply - shock economy. " so, that seems to be working. on friday, the next inflation number will come out, and we are crossing our fingers that it will be a good number. but that is where we are. by the way, people say that we are tightening too much. that is a very difficult challenge because we want to make sure that we do not tighten unnecessarily. we do not want to cause a loss of output that is not necessary. 2 / 6 bis - central bankers'speeches sometimes, we make a mistake, and we tighten too much. but even when we make a mistake and we tighten too much, the loss of output tends to be temporary. so far, i think, we have been okay. we have been doing just the right amount of tightening. if you look at our gdp [ gross domestic product ] growth in 2023, [ it is ] 5. 5 percent. that does not look so high compared to 2021 for example. but 5. 5 percent is the highest growth rate within the fastest - growing region, southeast asia. china is doing 5. 2 [ percent ], and we are doing 5. 5 [ percent ]. so, that is not so bad. there are more jobs with that kind of growth rate. the unemployment rate is down to 4. 2 percent. the underemployment rate is down to 11 percent ; it used to be 14 percent. so, in terms of growth, in terms of employment, we seem to be managing reasonably well in the face of supply shock. strong banking system the banking system, i think, is in good shape unlike in previous crises. many of us remember in the 1980s, our banking system got into trouble in the 1980s along with latin american countries. in fact, we call that the latin american debt crisis. we were part of it. and so, when we tried to recover around 1989 from the latin american debt crisis, the

to be prone to hallucinations. they tend to imagine things that never happened. they are prone to herding. they tend to make the same recommendations to different institutions regardless of specific circumstances. so, those are some of the dangers, but we think that generative ai will still be used. they are just irresistible to banks and to ourselves. if you used chatgpt, you know how irresistible that is. serving the unbanked and then, finally, we want to make use of the digital payment system to serve the unbanked. we have two strategies in this regard. we have a local strategy in which we are using e - wallets [ electronic wallets ] - you know, your gcash or your paymaya - and what we call basic deposit accounts ( bdas ), which are deposit accounts that allow you to open an account in the bank in a very simplified way. together, in these two things, the e - wallets and the bdas, we have found some successes that will lead to bank credit and other forms of financial services, including investments. our efforts where we should get the unbanked to be part of the formal financial ecosystem - that is our domestic strategy. we have an international strategy. the one we do with our neighbors, the asean [ association of southeast asian nations ] central banks, singapore, thailand, malaysia, and indonesia. we are working on a project called nexus. this is to connect the fast payment systems of each individual central bank for each individual country. we have a fast payment system ourselves ; it is called instapay. other countries have their own fast payment systems, and nexus is designed to connect all those fast payment systems. so, we can go from pesos into baht, baht into ringgit, almost instantaneously. maybe, it will take 0. 5 seconds but not so bad. the goal is, when this is in place, to transfer money not costing more than 2. 0 percent. the g20 goal is 3. 0 percent ; our own goal is 2. 0 percent. 5 / 6 bis - central bankers'speeches and the nice thing about nexus is that it is designed to be very scalable. it is going to be easy to add more participants as long as they have a fast payment system. the united states ( us ) is not ready. the us does not really have a fast payment system like instapay. they have the fed