Two of China’s central bank officials said the country should reduce its money supply expansion target for the next few years to safeguard against long-term inflation pressures as the nation’s economic growth slows, Reuters reported, citing China Finance Magazine. “The policy target for M2 growth should be set lower as China’s economy enters a stage of structural reform and demand for money and credit also drops accordingly,” Wang Yi and Shi Chunhua, officials from the central bank’s statistics department, said in the article. A slowdown in the expansion of foreign exchange reserves and the growth of domestic bond markets also makes creating base money in the banking system unnecessary, according to the two officials. M2, a broad measure of money supply, grew a slower-than-predicted 13.9% year-on-year in November. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the nation’s leading policy think-tank, prescribes an M2 growth rate of 15-16% for 2013, according to the official China News Service.