Masaaki Shirakawa: Society, economy and the central bank Speech by Mr Masaaki Shirakawa, Governor of the Bank of Japan, at the Foreign Policy Association, New York, 18 April 2012.
*  *  *  Introduction Even as the world is practically getting smaller, with the remarkable advances in transportation and communications technologies, and with all the resulting increases in interaction among peoples and economies, foreign policy is, unfortunately, something that is all too often put on the back burner by people busy with their daily lives.