But the regeneration of urban communities, and the efforts of British Waterways, have reversed this decline. The number of miles is now increasing. Last year, 13 million people visited our canals and the number of boats is actually higher now than during the Industrial Revolution. Such examples are important because our economy faces the prospect of change again. After an unprecedented financial crisis and deep recession, the UK economy needs to rebalance. Tonight I want to talk about what those changes will entail and the role which the Bank of England can play in supporting them. The Bank of England’s key role has always been to ensure that the economy is supplied with the right quantity of money – neither too much nor too little. For fifty years, my predecessors struggled to prevent there being too much, so leading to inflation. I find myself in the opposite situation having to explain that there is too little money in the economy. But, in the wake of the financial crisis, and the sharp downturn that followed, the amount of money in the economy as a whole – broad money – is now barely growing at all. That is restraining activity and pushing down the outlook for inflation. So the Bank of England has taken extraordinary monetary policy measures – through our so-called “quantitative easing” programme of asset purchases – to ensure that the amount of money starts growing again in order to support a recovery and keep inflation on track to meet our target in the medium term.
  10  Visa Europe, based in the UK and a subsidiary of Visa Inc, executed all 18.9 billion Visa transactions in Europe in 2015. These peaked at 2,000 transactions per second in the pre-Christmas period. 11  And third, although each of the pipes is distinct and serves a discrete purpose, they operate together to provide a seamless global network of functions that Michael Godfrey could not have imagined. The operations behind a routine financial transaction – issuing corporate debt, adjusting a pension fund portfolio or hedging against the risks of commodity price increases – will typically involve a wide range of financial market infrastructure firms over many jurisdictions (see diagram A). 8  https://www.cmegroup.com/company/files/cme-group-overview.pdf http://www.eurexclearing.com/clearing-en/about-us 10 http://www.swapclear.com/what/clearing-volumes.html 11 https://www.visaeurope.com/enabling-payments/processing 9  5  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  5  Diagram 1: Example of an international commodity hedge  Diagram 2: Example of equity issuance  6  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  6  These global pipes have proved pretty robust. In the last crisis financial market infrastructure proved resilient, including during the most testing time of Lehman’s collapse. But their use is growing, in part because they increase efficiency and lower cost – and in part because they reduce risk and authorities have mandated market participants to use them. 12  In line with this, post crisis, authorities internationally agreed that there needed to be a corresponding increase in the regulatory expectations of FMIs.