Taking a longer sweep, over the past 35 years cross border asset holdings having risen more than six-fold in terms of world GDP (Chart 4). Financial innovation has delivered considerable benefits. New products have improved the ability to hedge and share risks and to tailor financial products more precisely to user demand. That has enabled financial intermediaries and users of financial services to manage financial risks more effectively, and has lowered the costs of financial intermediation. And innovation and capital market integration have facilitated the wider dispersal of risks, which may have increased the resilience of the financial system to weather small to medium-sized shocks. Innovation has also delivered new challenges and vulnerabilities. Dependence on capital markets and on sustained market liquidity has increased, as banks and other intermediaries place greater reliance on their ability to “originate and distribute” loans and other financial products, and to manage their risk positions dynamically as economic and financial conditions alter. In turn that places additional pressure on the robustness of financial market infrastructure to handle large changes in trading volumes and to cope with periods of strain. And the greater integration of capital markets means that if a major problem does arise it is more likely to spread quickly across borders. So as highlighted by a number of academics and authorities, 1 the flip side to increased resilience of the financial system to small and medium-sized shocks may be a greater vulnerability to less frequent but potentially larger financial crises.
Benign economic and financial conditions in recent years have kept credit losses at low levels. Combined with buoyant returns from capital market activity, the profitability of major financial institutions has been strong. And capital levels are high. But as highlighted in Financial Stability Reports by the Bank of England and others, this benign environment has encouraged an increase in risk-taking and a “search for yield” which has lowered the compensation for bearing credit risk and market risk to very low levels. The vulnerability of the system as a whole to an abrupt change in conditions has consequently increased. Against this background, I would like to focus my comments today on some of the implications for the management and reduction of risks to the financial system as a whole. More specifically, how can the public policy goal of promoting systemic financial stability be best achieved? I will not provide a fully comprehensive answer to this question but will touch briefly on four aspects; improving the assessment of vulnerabilities that might threaten stability; developing appropriate buffers for capital  1  Financial System Risks in the UK – Issues and www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/speeches/2006/speech280.pdf  BIS Review 77/2007  Challenges  (John  Gieve)  (July  2006)  1  and liquidity within the financial system that take due account of the changing nature of risks; strengthening the core market infrastructure; and lowering legal uncertainty.