Financial crises have arisen on many occasions through history, and not least the extensive financial crisis the world experienced 2007-2009 reminds us that financial crises can be extremely costly and that government measures can sometimes be necessary to stave off a total meltdown in the economy. 4 Some banks are quite simply “too-big-to-fail”. It is in the light of the banking system's inherent instability, combined with its significance for the economy as a whole that we should regard the need for special supervision, regulation and other measures to make the system more  4 See, for example, Reinhart and Rogoff (2009). 2 [14]  robust. As I mentioned in the beginning and I shall soon develop further, this is one reason why we need a central bank with an appropriated foreign currency reserve. In Palmstruch’s day, it was the depositors who rushed to the bank and caused a liquidity crisis. Unlike the 17th century, there is now in most parts of the world some form of obligatory protection for depositors’ money, a deposit guarantee. This reduces the risk that a bank’s depositors will rush off and empty their accounts if the bank's financial strength is suddenly called into question. The fact is that deposits from private individuals are now usually regarded as the banks’ most stable source of funding. But then we should know that the banks have for a long time also funded themselves through short-term and volatile borrowing on the international capital markets. 5 I shall develop this a little further soon.
Finally, I am worried that we are not going to achieve the full benefits from trade repositories. Regulators, market participants and TRs must continue to work together to ensure that comprehensive, and meaningful data are being reported to TRs and that authorities have the ability to access and analyze the data from the TRs. Although authorities currently receive data, the data are often fragmented and reported in different formats or are not comparable across TRs. This poses challenges for regulators and supervisors of market participants and global CCPs as well as authorities more broadly. Aside from the issues with TR fragmentation, data quality and regulatory access to data, we could be leaving considerable money on the table by not using the TR dataset to increase transparency into the marketplace more broadly. Moving forward on all of these issues will require global coordination and continued efforts across all stakeholders. Authorities must continue to coordinate their oversight of global infrastructures. Where FMIs are “global,” that is providing services across multiple jurisdictions and in multiple currencies, it is important for the relevant authorities to find efficient ways to cooperate with each other to effectively carry out their respective responsibilities. Additionally, where there are overlapping or contradicting regulations, authorities must provide clear guidance to the market on how regulation will be applied. One final point: What matters is not the standardization of OTC derivatives, central clearing or the use of the trade repositories per se, but instead the results that flow from these efforts.