Some of my findings – in the form of words, photos and cartoons – are available at https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/outreach#. I find that cartoons can be particularly effective, indeed much better than words, in capturing the sentiment and narrative in the room. For example, consider this one on what the local community saw as their key challenges and frustrations, taken from my visit to South Wales. Or this one, on the role of charities in the community from my visit to Leicester. 7  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  7  Or this one, on housing and other issues facing young people from my recent visit to Blackpool. These pictorial narratives provide a simple visual summary which, unlike the written word, can be digested by anyone in less than a minute. They are also a very useful cross-check on my own understanding and a check on my own cognitive biases. Often, I find that the message my non-economist scribe, David, takes from these meetings is different than my own. 14  In these situations, I take David’s reading of the room as  probably the truer reflection of what citizens have really said. I call these visits my Townhall Tours, though this is a rubbish description as I have yet to visit a town hall. I am told that anthropologists would call what I am doing “deep hanging out”, after anthropologist Clifford Geertz. 15  Deep hanging out sounds more appealing than visiting town halls.
And also what new in this crisis is the implicit linkage through reputation risk as noted earlier, that is, banks became obligated to rescue failing SIVs even when there were no explicit contractual obligations to do so. Against this background, what then can regulators do to address the interactions and the feedback problems. This is not going to be an easy task, but let me try to frame the discussion into a context. First, it is clear that systemic risk is endogenous. Risk is first encouraged by procyclicality and once the tipping point is reached, the interactions within the system takes over, turning financial fragility into systemic risk. From the current crisis, it is clear that the scope and intensity of systemic risk are related closely to three factors: (1) the collective behaviour of market participants that contributes to the positive feedback loops; (2) the underlying structure of markets and market practices which dictate the manner through which the interactions of feedbacks are propagated throughout the financial system; and (3) the authorities’ own responses. Therefore, to address the problem, we need to focus our efforts on all of the three areas. First, on the collective behaviour of market participants, the key objective must be to tame or dampen the positive feedbacks through right incentives and better regulation. For example, regulation to disallow capital reduction for credit risk transfer off-balance sheet could have discouraged the originate-to-distribute model.