Becoming a leader does not mean you have made it and have nothing left to learn. Rather leadership is a discipline that involves deliberate practice and continuous learning. 23  In this spirit, policymakers must remain humble as they work to build a more resilient financial system. We must remember that, although we can make financial crises less likely to happen and less severe when they do occur, we cannot abolish them. Something will go wrong again even if we do not know exactly what or precisely when. Accepting this means our best strategy is to create an anti-fragile system that can withstand potential shocks when they happen. To accomplish that we are bridging, buttressing and burying. Bridging by overhauling the way we provide liquidity. The Bank of England is now open for business with a wider range of collateral, to a wider range of counterparties, for longer terms, at lower fees than ever before. Whereas before the crisis, the combination of banks own liquidity resources and their access to central bank facilities covered a mere 10% of short term liabilities of banks prone to run risk, today the figure is more than 100%. The benefits of this new approach were clear around the Brexit referendum. In the run-up to the vote, the Bank undertook extensive contingency planning which included encouraging banks to pre-position enough collateral in our facilities to enable them to draw up to £ billion in liquidity on demand.
In 2001, average inflation rates in the region as a whole fell to single figure levels for the first time since the fall of the iron curtain and, thereafter, they have continued to decline. In this context, let me highlight that, bearing in mind the potential inflationary pressures that might arise from completing structural reforms, the conduct of a  BIS Review 58/2002  1  monetary policy in the accession countries aiming at price stability should be seen as a medium-term objective, rather than as a short-term target. However, the sound management of macroeconomic policies cannot rely on monetary policy alone. In particular, stability-oriented policies in accession countries need to be supported by sound fiscal policies. Prudent fiscal policy management has been key to making sustainable progress in terms of macroeconomic stabilisation in the accession countries. At the beginning of the transition to a market economy, poor tax collection and governments' limited access to financial markets led to substantial monetisation of public deficits. However, from the mid-1990s onwards, fiscal policy has focused on macroeconomic stability. Therefore, a key lesson from the accession countries' experience is that responsible fiscal policy has been a crucial element in achieving and maintaining macroeconomic stability. Looking ahead, the best contribution that fiscal policies can make to sustainable noninflationary growth is by pressing ahead with fiscal consolidation, as is necessary to ensure the flexibility needed to deal with potential domestic and/or external economic shocks in the medium term.