At a time when we are experiencing the biggest financial crisis since the 1930's, it doesn't take much motivation to explain why it is extremely important for central banks to have at their disposal a coherent framework that can explain and analyse the interaction between financial markets and the real economy.
The theme of this conference – "Towards an integrated macro-finance framework for monetary policy analysis" – is now even more up to date than we could have anticipated at the time it was chosen.