Future Risks and Fragilities for Financial Stability

In March 2012 a conference, organised jointly by the ICFR and SUERF, on "Future Risks and Fragilities for Financial Stability", explored what the next pressure points for financial stability might be, how these may arise from the response to the last financial crisis, and how the industry and the regulators can prepare for them. In order to discuss this theme, the conference brought together a select group of academics, industry practitioners and policymakers to discuss a range of connected issues, mainly incentives and market discipline, regulation, competition and shadow banking, and size and structure of business models

Revisiting the Rationale for a Single National Financial Services Regulator

No Abstract is Available.

Independence and Accountability

Why have central banks become more accountable and transparent in recent years? This paper considers a set of analytical models of monetary policy institutions to shed light on this. One conclusion it reaches is that uncertainty - regarding the central bank's inflation preferences or about the underlying model of the world - can generate inflationary problems which transparency can help counteract. This offers one rationale for the current monetary policy framework in the UK. The paper also constructs a quantitative index of accountability. This suggests that transparency has been pursued most actively by central banks with little independence and a low accrued stock of credibility. Again, this chimes with UK experience. A shorter version of this paper is forthcoming in "Toward more effective Monetary Policy" - proceedings of the Seventh Internal Conference sponsored by the Bank of Japan's Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies.