hermann remsperger : real - time data and monetary policy welcome address by professor hermann remsperger, member of the executive board of the deutsche bundesbank, at the bundesbank conference on “ real - time data and monetary policy ”, eltville, 28 may 2004. * * * ladies and gentlemen, i have the pleasure of welcoming you to our conference on “ real - time data and monetary policy ” which has been organised by heinz herrmann, athanasios orphanides and pierre siklos. our conference concentrates on the uncertainty about the actual level of key macro variables. until a few years ago, this issue received little attention in the academic debate on monetary policy. this has changed dramatically over the last few years, not least under the influence of economists attending this conference like athanasios orphanides or dean croushore. awareness of the measurement problems in real - time data has important consequences. one could separate them into two classes which i would like to term “ ex post ” aspects on the one side and “ ex ante ” aspects on the other. with “ ex post ” aspects, i mean the implications for the empirical analysis of monetary policy. for instance, we have learned that the evaluation of forecasts based on final data may be misleading because it does not take into account which data were actually available at the time the forecasts were made. or, as another example, when analysing monetary policy decisions, it is important to reconstruct the information set available to policy makers at the time the decisions were made. with “ ex ante ” aspects, i mean the implications of measurement problems for the conduct of monetary policy. this category includes questions like “ how can we learn from past data revisions to improve our knowledge about future data? ” or “ how will the awareness of these measurement problems influence our policy decisions and the choice of our monetary policy approach? ”. obviously, all these topics are interlinked. answers to these questions require real - time data sets for key variables like real and nominal gdp, potential output and inflation. at first glance, developing a real - time data set seems to be rather simple - just enter old data into spreadsheets and save them for future use. but in practice, old data are usually overwritten by new data without saving the older vintage. producing a real - time data set thus requires a substantial amount of effort, including digging through old source data and figuring out what data were

international commercial banking groups we should not assume a monolithic approach to resolution. it is not a case of one size fits all. what i have described could work for banking groups that issue plenty of debt. it would not work so easily for groups operating commercial banks around the world that are funded pretty well entirely from insured deposits. if they haven ’ t issued bonds, then there would be no bond holders to bail in. it has become fairly common to say that such groups should be resolved on a regional basis, ie broken up. maybe. but, even if that is correct, it is obvious that “ break it up ” is an incomplete resolution plan. what happens to the broken - up parts? under a “ breakup ” strategy, one needs a plan for each of the parts, both the distressed and the undistressed parts of the group. under the fsb standard ( ka 11. 8 ), it is clearly the responsibility of the home authorities of the group to ensure that a group wide resolution plan exists. there is no ducking that. it removes an ambiguity that has quietly haunted banking authorities for decades. imagine that some of such a group ’ s regional / local commercial banks are smallish and simple, but that others are very large and complex. ( contrary to what is sometimes imagined, commercial banking can be complex! ) to the extent that the group ’ s problems are in a bank ( s ) that is relatively small and simple, standard “ purchase & assumption ” techniques can be employed. ie break up that bank into a good and bad bit ; and effect a sale of the good and economically critical parts, aided by an injection of resources, in the usual way, by the deposit insurance scheme, up to but not beyond what it would have had to pay out to insured depositors in a liquidation. the critical services are thereby maintained, and the dis becomes a creditor in the administration and realisation of the rump. at the end of that process of realising the assets in the rump, the deposit insurer learns how much it has lost. i want to stress that the di typically incurs losses but discovers how much ex post. bis central bankers ’ speeches now imagine that the commercial bank subsidiary in question is big and complex. the realisation of the assets via a standard rump - administration is liable to destroy a lot of value, increasing the deposit insurer ’ s losses. and in any case that strategy may not be consistent with maintaining stability