Engelsk

Speech by governor Lars Rohde at the annual meeting of Danish Auditors 10 September 2019

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time, requiring a large-scale economic transition in many areas, shows a review of the rapidly growing number of scientific articles and books on this subject, presented in a working paper.

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of this century. Mitigation requires a large-scale transition to a low-carbon economy. This paper provides an overview of the rapidly growing literature on the role of macroeconomic and financial policy tools in enabling this transition.

​In August 2019, the foreign-exchange reserve decreased by kr. 1.5 billion to kr. 446.6 billion.

International payment cards have become significantly more prevalent over the past 10 years. This especially applies to international debit cards such as Visa Debit and Mastercard Debit. In the 1st half of 2009, international debit cards accounted for 4 per cent of the total number of card payments in Denmark against 27 per cent in the 1st half of 2019. Dankort and especially VisaDankort remain the Danes´ most used payment cards.

30-year fixed-rate mortgage bonds with coupon rate of 1 per cent has since the introduction increased to kr. 116 billion. Of this, kr. 81 billion is issued in July alone, which is the largest monthly issue to date for 30-year mortgage bonds. Homeowners have converted mortgages to lower coupon rates to a record extent, in connection with the falling market rates.

During the conversion wave in the three months up to the end of July, foreign investors bought 30-year fixed-rate mortgage bonds for kr. 23 billion. This corresponds to foreign investors owning 37 per cent of the Danish 30-year fixed-rate mortgage bonds.

Danish individuals' interest on deposits that are tied up for shorter or longer periods averaged 0.22 percent in July. The interest rate on this type of deposit has fallen by 1.1 percentage points since the beginning of 2015. By comparison, the Danish monetarypolicy interest rates have remained unchanged since the beginning of 2016.