When the system is operational, all parties will benefit from advantages in terms of cost, efficiency, payment security and management of the associated liquidity in the context of an integrated, competitive and innovative market for all cashless payments in euro. 3. Improving the attractiveness and competitiveness of the Paris financial centre  The competitiveness of the Paris financial centre is an advantage in our crisis exit strategy and one that is important to continue developing – particularly after the announcement of  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  ICE’s takeover bid for NYSE Euronext, which could substantially change the role of the financial centre’s players and generate new opportunities. It is essential that efforts undertaken to consolidate and develop market infrastructures as well as market and post-trade services be intensified. From this point of view, 2013 will represent an important step forward with the full deployment of the offer of clearing and triparty collateral management services for repo transactions in euro that has been developed with Paris’s principal financial operators, banks, clearing and settlement infrastructures and the Banque de France. We will also strive to take advantage of new opportunities as they emerge, particularly in the areas of services for financing, investment and settlement in increasingly international currencies (such as the renminbi) and infrastructures for enhancing market transparency (such as data warehouses for the repo market for example). 4.
The present Committee contains only one member (the present Governor) who has been there from the outset, and some of the early members served short terms. Might the latter day tendency towards changing rates only after a forecast reflect a generally less activist approach to setting rates? Table 1 provides an unscientific guide to Committee members’ degree of activism: it is arranged with the most ‘activist members’ (identified as those voting proportionately most frequently for a rate change) at the top.9 If personal preferences played no role, we might expect to see a relationship between activism and ‘MPC vintage’ – if MPC members responded to the same shocks, or their behaviour was affected by some other common factor, there would be clusters. Keen MPC watchers will no doubt find some support for the view that personality matters. But, in general, the members who voted for the most rate changes are associated with the earlier years of the Committee, consistent with the idea that the MPC may have needed to respond more frequently during that period.10  9  We have excluded the first 7 months of the MPC’s existence to allow for the possibility that the first rate changes were reflecting necessary adjustments to reach what the MPC thought was the right level of interest rates. 10  There are, of course, also other possible explanations, e.g.