Agents attend the monthly briefing in Threadneedle Street ahead of each policy meeting, so information from their contacts is fed directly into the heart of the policy process. I know I speak for all of my colleagues on the MPC when I say that we really do find this a crucial barometer of current events, so I hope you will feel that a short while with our Agents once or twice a year is time well spent! Financial stability and Enron I now turn to my final subject tonight - that of the Bank's role in ensuring financial stability. Responsibility for the day-to-day supervision of banks passed from the Bank of England to the Financial Services Authority in 1997. But as the central bank we still have a key role in overseeing the stability of the system as a whole. In this guise we meet on a monthly basis with HM Treasury and the FSA in the so-called tripartite Standing Committee, to review the risks facing the UK financial system and take stock of any actions which may be required to address them. Keeping close to the FSA is particularly important. To this end, I sit on the FSA Board, and Howard Davies is a member of the Bank's Court. Of course, as I have no need to remind you here, with the border of the euro area just a few miles down the road, we cannot look at the UK system in isolation from the wider international financial markets.
At the same time, I intend that we will bring forward proposals under our Pillar 2 regime which should also reduce the risk that our capital standards are overly prudent for smaller firms using the standardised approach to credit risk to calculate their requirements – essentially by looking at capital requirements in the round rather than assuming that a simple “sum of the parts” approach will necessarily deliver the right answer. In the same vein, we will deliver what we promised in our Annual Competition Report this summer, improving the process by which small firms can transition to internal models. All this demonstrates how we can address unintended consequences while remaining true to the revolution’s goals. Too early to say  In 1972, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was asked about the impact of the French Revolution. His answer: “too early to say”. While it emerged forty years later that Zhou was probably not referring to the 1789 storming of the Bastille – 5  but instead thinking of the 1968 student riots in Paris – his remark is apt at the current juncture . It is too early to say how business models will shape up in the future. 5  Zhou’s cryptic caution lost in translation: By Richard McGregor, Financial Times, June 2011, available here: https://www.ft.com/content/74916db6-938d-11e0-922e-00144feab49a 8  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  8  For insurers, the low rate environment and persistent soft conditions in many segments of general insurance are creating real pressures.