Mervyn King: Monetary policy developments Speech by Mr Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, at the CBI Northern Ireland Mid-Winter Dinner, Belfast, 22 January 2013. *  *  *  I am delighted to be in Belfast to deliver my final regional speech as Governor. After the Bank obtained independence in 1997, we decided to establish a physical presence in Northern Ireland for the first time. And I was able to announce the opening of the Agency when I visited Belfast in May 1999. Since then the links between the business community and the Agency have gone from strength to strength. None of this would have been possible without the commitment of a remarkable group of Bank of England Agents: first, Nigel Falls, then Phil Eckersley and now Frances Hill, all supported by Gillian Anderson, today the Deputy Agent. During that same visit, I met with a group of politicians from right across the political spectrum. They were surprisingly eager to talk with, not at, each other – because they wanted to exchange views about the economic future of Northern Ireland, and to get away, at least for a while, from the divisive nature of daily politics. You would have been hard put to identify the affiliation of those politicians from their views on how to promote economic prosperity in Northern Ireland. And this is the key to the future.
Several broad economic forces substantially complicate an already difficult set of political challenges: the long-term increase in income inequality, the slow pace of growth in real wages for the middle quintiles of the population, the increase in the volatility of income that is a reflection of the greater flexibility of the U.S. economy, and the greater exposure of households to the risk in financing retirement and the burden of paying for health care. More generally, the global financial system and the monetary arrangements that underpin it are in the process of a delicate and consequential transition as the major emerging market economies particularly in Asia - move toward more mature monetary policy frameworks, more flexible exchange rate regimes and more open capital markets. This transition will require careful management, and the economic dimensions of getting it right would be complicated even without the political pressures those governments face. One final note on the financial system. The global financial system is in the process of very dramatic change. The changes of even just the last five years are extraordinary, in terms of the size, and strength, and scope of the major global firms, the role of private leveraged funds, the extent of risk transfer and the increase in the size of the derivatives market, the change in the structure of the credit market, the increase in and changes in the pattern of cross border financial flows.