Of course, the role of financial intermediation is not limited to supporting start-ups. As a matter of fact, the seamless availability of a wide range of financial functions would best serve innovation-led economic growth. In the Asian context, channeling the region’s abundant savings to the vast demand for infrastructure is also an important challenge in which I myself was deeply involved when I was President of the Asian Development Bank. Developing bond markets has been one of the successful initiatives in terms of intra-regional matching between savings and investment. 17 Bond markets in Asia, especially those denominated in local currencies, have grown significantly since the mid-2000s, thanks to the efforts of the relevant financial authorities and other bodies. At the end of 2013, outstanding bond issuances amounted to 3.5 trillion U.S. dollars, which is about five times the figure for 2005. Turning to retail financial services, inclusiveness, which I mentioned a little while ago, is again an important issue. We should note that a significant number of people in Asia still do not have their own bank accounts. 18 Less than half the population in India has a bank account. China fares better, with the proportion of account holders being two-thirds of the population, but that is still far from the situation in advanced economies where almost everybody has access to a bank account. I believe that the Asian financial landscape, and  13  Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty, Crown Business, 2012.
OMTs are intended to provide the ECB with a tool to address severe distortions in government bond markets which originate from, in particular, unfounded fears on the part of investors of the reversibility of the euro. Effectively, OMTs represent a means to rule out destructive self-fulfilling prophecies that would force the economy into a sub-optimal equilibrium (with elevated interest rates, adjustments made impossible, ultimately leading to default and currency redenomination). 10 Meanwhile, OMTs preserve the incentives for governments to enforce the economic and fiscal adjustments which will prove  6  On the importance of central bank independence and credibility as a means to address possible inconsistencies between monetary and fiscal policy, see, T. Sargent and N. Wallace (1981), “Some Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic”, Quarterly Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Fall. 7  See, E. Leeper (1991), “Equilibria under ‘active’ and ‘passive’ monetary and fiscal policies”, Journal of Monetary Economics 27, 129–147. 8  See, M. Woodford (2001), “Fiscal requirements for price stability”, NBER Working Paper No. 8072. 9  “Ricardian equivalence” implies that forward-looking agents internalise the fact that the government budget will always be adjusted to neutralise fiscal disturbances. However, only a “Ricardian” fiscal policy has this property. 10  O. Jeanne has shown that elevated yields could make inflation more, rather than less likely, due to lack of fiscal adjustment. See O. Jeanne, (2012), “Fiscal challenges to monetary dominance in the euro area: A theoretical perspective”, Banque de France Financial Stability Review, No. 16, pp. 143–150.