. cheap, 2. of the highest quality and 3. universally accessible to all without entry barriers in the banking sector – like in the area of health care – we can either abandon one principle in order to achieve the remaining two more or less perfectly, or we have to balance all the three principles somehow, but all of them will be achieved and maintained only partially, imperfectly ( and sometimes deeply imperfectly ). that is the limitation we face and will always face in the banking sector, and that ’ s why no perfect and once - and - for - all accepted way of achieving the “ ideal state of affairs of banks ” will probably ever be established. all the more so as the reality makes achieving any ideal less likely in the future than it is now. look, for instance, at the issue of resolvability of banks. yes, we in the eu have the brrd bis central bankers ’ speeches ( bank recovery and resolution directive ) as our european answer to the question of resolvability. let ’ s put aside the fact that its practical implementation and the enforcement of its key principles have not always been convincing so far. and we are not sure that these principles ( namely bail - in ) will be applied in a dynamically consistent way across countries and banks in the future. but still many believe we have made banks more resolvable ( and also resilient ) since 2008. and i think there are underlying real - time processes that are actually making banks less resolvable now compared to the past. why? what worries me is that over time many end - users ( and also policy - makers ) tend to look at standard commercial banks as utilities with all their typical features. one of those features is that the population is becoming more and more incrementally dependent on the services such utilities provide, quite often without the very same population even noticing it. a typical example is electricity. we have been getting more and more dependent on electricity incrementally, in small steps, for many, many years now. so an electricity blackout now – in 2016 – would cause more harm and damage than it would have done say forty or fifty years ago, as many more devices, processes and productions are partially, or even fully, dependent on a continuous supply of electricity. and this continuous supply in turn incentivises the use of electricity as a tool of production and a source of power for various devices etc. this phenomenon of incrementally increasing dependence is

socialist system was inefficient and cumbersome and discouraged initiative and innovation. central planning by definition made the system less adaptable to change and created an economy of shortage. despite this, the czechoslovak version of socialism tried to eliminate the most glaring imbalances and preserve basic macroeconomic equilibrium. fortunately, our central planners didn ’ t cause any major imbalances in the consumer market in the 1980s, so the savings surplus wasn ’ t as large as in other communist countries. not that i want to defend the past economic regime in any way, of course, but let ’ s not forget that it had elements which can be traced back at least implicitly to the pre - war period. an explicit return to the three traditions i mentioned is the central feature of our post - 1989 economic history. many of us clearly remember that the liberalisation of prices and foreign trade in 1991 was accompanied by effective stabilisation measures. these included an appropriate devaluation of the koruna against a basket of currencies and the maintenance of balanced budgets or even slight surpluses. it is therefore no accident that in 1991 inflation was “ only ” 56 % here, as compared to triple figures in poland and often quadruple figures in other transforming 1 / 2 bis central bankers'speeches economies. the czech national bank embraced the legacy of price stability right from its establishment in 1993. the maintenance of a fixed exchange rate until 1997 was a condition for attaining singledigit inflation and provided a fixed point in the unstable transformation environment. the switch to inflation targeting in 1998 marked the start of a roughly ten - year transition to price stability according to the definition long applied in advanced market economies. maintaining price stability is not just our constitutional duty, but a long - standing legacy that we proudly embrace. the second feature of our economic history that i mentioned at the start is an ability to cope with the consequences of the struggle for economic independence. the currency separation – a reform implemented by alois rasin in 1919 – entered the annals of czech economic history long ago. it was aimed at nothing less than separating currency circulation in czechoslovakia from that in the other parts of the former austria - hungary. i won ’ t expand on all the ways this bold step could have gone wrong. i will point out, though, that the way it was done and the way it turned out are seen as impressive to this day, as the czechoslovak koruna went on to become one of the most stable currencies in europe.