On the morning of December 2, the 2024 annual conference of China Society for Finance and Banking & China Monetary and Financial Forum opened in Beijing. This year's conference is focused on “building a modern financial system with Chinese characteristics to help build China into a financial powerhouse”. Pan Gongsheng, Governor of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), attended and addressed the opening forum. Yi Gang, President of China Society for Finance and Banking, delivered a keynote speech. Lu Lei, Deputy Governor of the PBOC, presided over the opening ceremony.

Governor Pan signified that since the beginning of this year, China’s economy has maintained stable growth overall. The PBOC has adhered to an accommodative monetary policy stance and adjusted its monetary policy several times. Especially since late September, it has launched a package of incremental policies to fully realize the expected goal of economic development throughout the year. Next year, the PBOC will continue to adhere to an accommodative monetary policy stance and policy orientation, adopt a mix of monetary policy instruments, strengthen counter-cyclical adjustments, keep liquidity adequate at a reasonable level, and bring down the overall financing costs for enterprises and households. It will make good use of structural monetary policy instruments to strengthen support for sci-tech innovation, green finance, and consumer finance, and to promote the stable development of the real estate and capital markets. It will actively expedite the reform of the monetary policy framework, strengthen the implementation and transmission of interest rate policies, and enrich the monetary policy toolkit. At the same time, the PBOC will improve the measurement of money supply, incorporating two highly liquid financial instruments, namely, personal demand deposits and customers’ provisions received by non-bank payment institutions, into M1 statistics, and it will strengthen the monitoring of money supply and social liquidity at all levels, including M2.

Governor Pan emphasized that improving the monetary policy framework and accelerating the improvement of the central banking system need joint research and support from all walks of life. It is hoped that the China Society for Finance and Banking will adopt a goal-oriented and problem-oriented approach to extensively pool the strength of the theoretical, policy and practical circles, and put forward targeted and guiding research results and suggestions to contribute wisdom to the high-quality development of the financial sector and the building of a financial powerhouse.

President Yi Gang delivered a keynote speech entitled The Course of Market-oriented Interest Rate Reform and the Evolution of Monetary Policy Framework in China. He pointed out that after more than 40 years of continuous advancement, China’s market-oriented interest rate reform had achieved remarkable results, forming a relatively complete market-oriented interest rate system, and the yield curve was also tending to mature. Currently, the transmission mechanism of China’s monetary policy is becoming increasingly smooth, and the function of interest rates in regulating macroeconomic operations continues to upgrade. The monetary policy framework with price-based regulation as the leading factor and with interest rate as the core, supplemented by the quantitative guidance of structural monetary policy, has laid a solid foundation for the PBOC to fulfill its mission of stabilizing the value of the currency and promoting economic growth, thereby effectively coping with multiple negative impacts from home and abroad.

During the keynote session, Zhao Yingmin, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, Xu Zhibin, Deputy Administrator of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, Gu Shu, Vice President of the Council of the China Society for Finance and Banking and Chairman of the Agricultural Bank of China, Liu Jun, Vice President of the Council of China Society for Finance and Banking, also Vice Chairman and President of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and Zhu Min, former Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, delivered keynote speeches. Zhang Xiaohui, Vice President of the Council of China Society for Finance and Banking, presided over the meeting. More than 500 experts and scholars from financial regulators, relevant ministries, financial institutions, research institutes and universities attended the meeting.