– due to sovereign immunity – are not. we therefore need a super - national structure which guarantees that, should an omt be bis central bankers ’ speeches activated, government solvency – fiscal sustainability and macroeconomic viability – is in place and sufficiently constraining – national policies. this is why we need programme conditionality and multilateral surveillance as a precondition to initiate omt. moreover, the design of omts entails interventions only in the short end of the government bond market – up to three years ’ time to maturity – and they will be fully sterilised, meaning that we would absorb all amounts of liquidity injected by omts. early results of economic adjustment now i will turn to the “ green shoots ” of a nascent recovery that can already be observed. almost six years down the road since the start of the financial turmoil that turned into a crisis, many euro area countries have experienced a significant, but to date still partial, correction of external and domestic imbalances. substantial progress can be seen most clearly in the development of current account balances. in the programme countries – greece, ireland and portugal – current account balances have improved by more than 7 percentage points ( relative to gdp ) between 2008 and 2012. in spain the current account has improved even more dramatically. much of this was driven by an inevitable drop in domestic demand, but we have also seen strengthening exports in a global environment that is not really buoyant. this indicates that the countries ’ efforts to rebalance their economies are starting to bear fruits. part of this picture is also the partial reversal of previous losses of competitiveness, but here the pace of progress varies across countries. ireland has performed very well, with accumulated unit labour costs falling by 18 percentage points relative to the euro area average. greece, portugal and spain have seen a 10 percentage point relative improvement so far. in some other countries in need of strengthening competitiveness we are still waiting for the correction to become apparent. and in yet other countries, notably some of the countries that joined the euro area more recently, we have actually seen an incipient loss of competitiveness. it is important that these countries take a lesson from the mistakes of others. fiscal balances have shown strong improvements. for example, greece ’ s structural primary balance ( that is, the fiscal balance adjusted for cyclical developments, interest payments and one - off factors ) is estimated by the commission to have improved by more than 13 percentage points. i acknowledge

jean - pierre roth : recent swiss experience in monetary policy strategy summary of a speech by mr jean - pierre roth, chairman of the governing board of the swiss national bank and chairman of the board of directors of the bank for international settlements, at a seminar on monetary theory and policy, university of fribourg, fribourg, 28 november 2007. the complete speech can be found in french on the swiss national bank ’ s website ( www. snb. ch ). * * * one continually recurring element in the history of the swiss national bank has been the application of a clear set of rules that we refer to nowadays as ′ strategy ′. the snb ′ s monetary policy strategy consists of three elements : a definition of price stability, an inflation forecast and a fluctuation range assigned to a short - term interest rate. experiences with this strategy since its introduction in the year 2000 – judged in terms of both price stability and cyclical developments in the economy – have demonstrated its value. nevertheless, certain aspects of the strategy have been questioned by academics and by central bankers. these include inflation forecasting under the assumption of a fixed libor, the choice of the reference interest rate, the role of monetary aggregates and exchange rates in the snb ′ s models, and the decision not to publish the minutes of governing board meetings. however, these deliberately selected elements in fact serve to reinforce the legitimacy of the snb ′ s strategy.