In providing enhanced powers to the Central Bank to address financial stability issues and the strengthening of the oversight  2  BIS Review 113/2009  function of the Bank, correspondingly, focus has also been given to governance, internal controls and risk management by the Bank. For this purpose, the Central Bank of Malaysia Act 2009 empowers the Board to establish three specific committees, namely the Board Governance Committee, Board Audit Committee and Board Risk Committee that are chaired by a non-executive director, to ensure the independence of the oversight on the functioning of the Bank. A comprehensive financial system safety net Let me now turn to the second key area confronting central banks, namely the need to have in place an effective financial safety net. The global experience in these recent two decades has shown that crises have continued to plague the world and have resulted in massive costs to the economy. Financial safety nets serve two primary purposes, that is to avert risks to financial stability and to reduce the costs to the financial system and economy in the event of a crisis. They also serve an important social purpose of protecting savers and investors. The first component of the financial safety net is the existence of an effective regulatory and supervisory system to ensure the sound management of financial institutions and the ability to deal with problems affecting financial stability.
But the continued relative decline of manufacturing – and indeed the strength of sterling – over the past decade or so reflects, not the stance of monetary policy, but the remarkable wind of change that has blown across the world economy with the advent of China, India and much of the former Soviet Union into the world trading system. To their great credit, business people and politicians have not resisted changes to the structure of the British economy, unlike many of their counterparts abroad. As a result, total output and employment here have grown rapidly, and our living standards are higher than could have been sustained with policies aimed to defend the old industrial structure. Those changes, however, have led to the closure of many manufacturing companies. There are over a million fewer people employed in manufacturing now than a decade ago, and 200,000 fewer in the West Midlands. It is just over a hundred years since car production started at Longbridge, just over thirty years since it was nationalised, and no vehicle has been built there for over a year. But there are also many success stories. Since I became Governor, I have made regular monthly visits to the regions and countries of the United Kingdom, and visited around one hundred companies, large and small, new and old.