The title of this conference was chosen last year, and it probably is more applicable now than then. The financial turmoil of the past year, which very clearly affected some specific sectors in the U.S., does not recede, and keeps spreading to other markets and regions in the world.
This is a hard position to accept for anyone who has looked closely at the behavior of the financial system in the middle of the last decade. We need to remind ourselves that the principle underlying Basel II was that the private sector would manage risk efficiently and effectively, since the last thing a bank would want would be to fail.