diversified, products more wideranging and sophisticated, and market infrastructure more robust. the offshore market has seen strong growth momentum, in particular in the past few years, as more crossborder trades are settled in rmb, more business activities and direct investments are financed by rmb as the funding currency, and more global investors are diversifying their portfolios into rmb assets. 1 / 4 bis - central bankers'speeches let the numbers do the talking : rmb bank lending in hong kong has tripled in the past three years to nearly 600 billion yuan in july 2024. offshore rmb bond issuance amount has almost doubled from 2020 to 2023. the share of china's external trade settled in rmb has also doubled from 15 % in 2021 to 30 % now. turnover of stock connect and northbound bond connect amounted to 161 billion yuan and 45 billion yuan respectively in the first seven months of this year, up 49 % and 132 % from the same period in 2020. looking ahead, the outlook for rmb internationalisation remains promising, supported by a combination of cyclical as well as structural factors. in the near to medium term, the accommodative monetary policy environment on the mainland is expected to continue, and this will incentivise banks and corporates to use rmb as a funding currency. in the longer term, we see a number of favourable factors. in the real sector, more mainland corporates are seeking overseas expansion as the global supply chain continues to reconfigure. trade and investment cooperation between china and asean, the middle east and other belt & road countries will continue to grow. as rmb internationalisation is gathering pace, china's trading partners are increasingly willing to use rmb in cross - border transactions. rmb - based activities in the real sector will further increase demand for rmb products, for treasury management, for longer - term investment, and for risk management. hong kong, as the premier offshore rmb hub, is uniquely placed to serve as the go - to platform that serves the different stakeholders while enabling our financial sector to capture the ever - growing opportunities. the great prospect notwithstanding, we need to do a reality check. how ready are we to capture those opportunities? what are the pain points that stand in the way of unlocking the opportunities? what more should be done and can be done to address the pain points? these are legitimate questions that policy makers and private sector participants should jointly answer. let me

. paying close attention to signs that inflation is moving away from our target - in either direction - promotes timely action. this is how we keep the economy operating near its full capacity and thus keep inflation low, stable, and predictable. the second point i want to stress is that having an inflation target as an anchor is very helpful in terms of the bank's accountability. if inflation persistently deviates from the target, we are committed to explaining the reasons why, what we will do to return it to target, and how long we expect the process to take. the third point is that any central bank that runs an independent monetary policy and targets inflation must allow its currency to float. it is simply not possible for a central bank to successfully control both the domestic and external values of its currency at the same time. we have only one instrument - our policy interest rate - so we can have only one target. thus, with inflation as our target, we naturally operate with a floating currency. canada's experience under inflation targeting now, let me quickly review our record with inflation targeting. as we look at inflation and economic growth in canada since 1991, it is quite clear that the benefits we had hoped would come from inflation targeting have, in fact, materialized. we expected inflation to become more stable - and it did so, sooner than we had anticipated. since settling on the 2 per cent target for inflation at the end of 1995, actual inflation has averaged very close to 2 per cent. and it has remained within the 1 to 3 per cent target range, with only rare exceptions. we expected our credibility to increase and inflation expectations to become well anchored - and this has also happened. we also thought that inflation targeting would help the economy to avoid the exaggerated " boom - bust " cycles of previous decades - and it has. the business cycle is still with us, but economic volatility has diminished. by keeping inflation close to the target, monetary policy has helped to keep the economy operating near its potential. finally, and very importantly, our transparent framework has allowed markets and analysts to better predict how we will react to different economic outcomes. within the bank, too, focusing on inflation has brought increased discipline and clarity to our monetary policy decision process. canada was the second country after new zealand to adopt explicit inflation targets. but over the past decade and a half, about 20 other central banks have also adopted this framework. some, like the central banks of the united kingdom and sweden, are from advanced