to improve very substantially our handling of conduits and special vehicles. looking forward, some tentative policy implications can be identified from a financial stability perspective. first, we need to restore confidence as we have a paradox that there is a large number of high quality assets which investors are currently treating as if they were not creditworthy. now, it seems to me that the one important reason why we observe such a lack of confidence is because we do not have sufficient transparency. this is an area that we need to look at very carefully, to see which measures should be taken to improve transparency. let me remind you that after the asian crisis we drew that conclusion : the absence of sufficient transparency had driven a number of investors and market participants to consider that each particular issuer in asia was to be treated with great caution and fear, because they were not sure of the accuracy of the information and data which were displayed. the international community drew the conclusion that it was necessary to increase transparency in particular as regards monetary policy, fiscal policy and the level of reserve assets in these emerging markets. and it worked, in my opinion, pretty efficiently. so again, it is a lesson that we learnt in the past. i am now at your disposal for questions.

leonardo villar - gomez : speech - 25th treasury conference speech by mr leonardo villar - gomez, governor of the central bank of colombia, at the 25th treasury conference, cartagena, 9 february 2023. * * * i must begin by saying something that you know very well. the policy interest rate of banco de la republica ( the central bank of colombia ) has drastically increased over the past year and a half, completing an increase of 11 pp since the beginning of the current cycle of increases in september 2021. we are talking about the strongest monetary policy adjustment process that has taken place during this century and since the bank adopted the inflation targeting strategy that now guides our decisions. the effects of this increase have already begun to be experienced in recent months on aggregate demand, imports, and loans, among other variables. these effects are generally painful and clearly unpopular. unfortunately, inflation has continued to rise ; however, in colombia, we have not yet seen a break in the trendline as has already occurred in many other countries in the region and the world. the multiplicity of inflationary shocks that colombia has received, including the strong accumulated depreciation of the colombian peso in the last two years, has combined with the complex indexing mechanisms we have in colombia to generate considerable lags in the impact of the monetary policy adjustment process on price dynamics. nevertheless, we expect that the process of returning inflation to the target will begin to be observed in the coming months and may be completed by the end of 2024, as we announced after the board of directors'meeting last november. i would like to take the opportunity of this scenario to describe the diagnosis of the main macroeconomic variables and comment on their prospects for the year ahead. thus, i will first refer to the productive activity and the indicators of demand performance. then, i will turn to inflation performance and outlooks. aggregate demand, employment, and productive activity the first thing worth noting is that productive activity and employment were much more dynamic and robust in 2022 than anyone had imagined. the real gdp growth would have been 8. 0 %, a rate that by far doubles the growth of latin america and which the imf estimates at an average of 3. 9 %. last year, very few countries in the world showed growth rates higher than colombia's. the only ones i can identify with the highest growth are saudi arabia and guyana, in both cases, due to significant increases in oil production. the high growth of the colombian