But, although the changing financial system offers opportunities for investors and consumers of financial services, the emerging business models also challenges us as regulators. Do we regulate the entity or the activity? My view is that we should regulate on the basis of strong consistency across entities, activities and products. But this consistency should be founded in the risks.
Both factors resulted in the savings ratio cushioning discontinuities in the income trend at least for some period of time and thus helped in a certain sense to smooth consumption over time. The fact that the previous savings pattern gave way to a continuous downward trend from the early 1990s initially reflected a return to normal from the high level reached in 1990.