thank and applaud you. palakpakan po natin ang lahat ng respondents and partners ng bsp! thus, today, the inflation environment remains benign while bank lending continues to expand. this enabled the philippine financial system to avoid the credit gridlock which paralyzed other financial markets overseas. meanwhile, our external position remains healthy, with a balance of payments surplus, and gross international reserves reaching record levels of roughly $ 48. 4 billion in june 2010. in particular, the data you share with us – through the cross border transactions survey, foreign direct investment survey, and coordinated portfolio investments survey – allowed us to derive sound baseline estimates critical in enhancing compilation of our external accounts and in calibrating well - anchored balance of payments projections. these projections are vital in estimating forecasts for inflation and in crafting our monetary policy formulation. let us thank our respondents with a round of applause! at the same time, remittances from overseas filipinos coursed through banks have been hitting unprecedented levels and helped raise our international reserves to record high figures as well. this was made possible by our banks who have efficiently handled the billion dollar remittances of overseas filipinos. in effect, your reliable service provides significant benefits not only to our hardworking overseas filipinos and their families but to our economy as well. let us give our banks a well - deserved round of applause. we also thank all our partners who have joined us in our economic and financial education programs as we push for a better - informed public. your unqualified support and cooperation are valuable to the success of the bsp ’ s economic and financial education programs. let us give our partners in our education programs a big hand! once again, ladies and gentlemen, we at the bangko sentral ng pilipinas thank and congratulate all of you for being our active partners. you have empowered us to craft and implement responsive policies that promote balanced and sustainable growth of our economy. growth that empowers and improves the quality of life of filipinos. moving forward, all we have to do is to act as a single force and move forward as one. henry ford once said : “ if everyone is moving forward, then success takes care of itself. ” ladies and gentlemen. today, therefore, let us commit to work more closely together and act in solidarity to be a single force and to move forward as one so that we can achieve the change we need, sooner rather than later. maraming sal

will be an improvement. but beyond looking at how local regulators have transposed basel agreements into domestic regulations, the committee has also begun examining whether the framework ( s ) are producing consistent outcomes. ultimately, what counts is that the capital ratio calculated and reported by individual banks provides a meaningful and comparable representation of their capital strength. differences in regulation, or their application, can undermine the regulatory framework by making it more difficult for bank depositors, counterparties, investors, shareholders and supervisors to have confidence that reported capital ratios serve their intended purpose. in this context, some concerns have been recently voiced that banks are not calculating risk weighted assets consistently. the committee has, in fact, been investigating this issue for much of the past year. this work has examined the calculation of risk weights in both the banking and the trading books. as with our country assessments, we will publish the results of both studies. the preliminary results of the trading book are most advanced, and will be published very shortly. the analysis is based on two sources of data : public disclosures by banks and a hypothetical test portfolio exercise in which 15 large, internationally active banks have participated from nine basel committee jurisdictions. i will not pre - release the detailed results today, but the headline messages are that : at least, fascinating for regulatory aficionados. see c goodhart, the basel committee on banking supervision, a history of the early years 1974 – 1997, cambridge university press, 2011 the level 2 reports on the european union, japan and the united states can be found at the website of the basel committee ( www. bis. org / bcbs / index. htm ). bis central bankers ’ speeches • there is a material variation in risk weights for trading assets across banks ( after adjusting for accounting differences and for differences in the riskiness of different bank portfolios ) ; • certain modelling choices seem to be major drivers of the variation in risk weights ; and • the quality of existing public disclosure is generally insufficient to allow users to determine how much of the variation in reported risk weights is a reflection of underlying risk taking, and how much stems from other factors ( eg modelling choices, supervisory discretions ). in thinking about these results, it needs to be borne in mind that the objective is not to achieve zero variation. if we wished to achieve that outcome, we could simply force all banks onto the standardised approach to capital adequacy and remove any modelling options. but the standardised approach – while an ostensibly consistent methodology –