This should take into account an insurer’s legal and professional obligations, the wider impact on society, issues of equity and fairness, and preservation of virtues such as honesty and compassion. These issues I raised are delicate issues that can involve complex ethical choices. It will test the values of corporations, its people, its leadership. Specific issues for regulation and supervision Let me mention a few words on specific challenges for regulation and supervision in the future that is before us. First, the lifespan of regulations is getting shorter and shorter, with new areas of risk emerging faster than regulators can write new rules. Second, and adding to the complication, potential threats are also creeping in from beyond the traditional regulatory perimeter. This can be both from non-traditional players, or unfamiliar business models or technologies. Third, we may have to simply accept that we may never fully grasp or understand emerging risks facing the industry, in a timely manner. Allow me to offer some reflections on these issues. First, we need a better and effective approach to collate intelligence, including from non-traditional sources. Technological advancement offers additional opportunities. There is clearly vast potential on the use of big data and machine learning to improve risk identification and assessments. Last year, the US SEC successfully charged a bank for failing to adequately train its representatives in the sale of certain complex debt instruments, using custom analytics. Tools were developed to sift through millions of trading records, a task that would have been impractical with traditional investigative techniques.
Of course, it is never easy to judge what levels of financial asset prices are realistic, and the risk of volatile adjustments remains, as we have seen in recent days, but the important point is that the downwards adjustment experienced last year, which could have been abrupt and might have generated wider economic effects, was in fact achieved without significant repercussions on the real economy. In both cases, the result is a better foundation for the prospects for sustaining growth in the economy. Let me now turn from the year past to the year ahead. I have stressed the encouraging performance of the economy over the past year, and the confidence we can hopefully take in its underlying soundness, because we undoubtedly face serious challenges and a material increase in uncertainty in  BIS Review 22/2001  1  the year ahead. Most notably, we have to manage the UK economy against the background of an international environment in which the US economy has begun to experience a sharp slowdown. Each quarter the Bank of England publishes an Inflation Report which sets out the MPC's considered view of the prospects for growth and inflation looking two years ahead. Let me start from our latest Inflation Report, published last month. That recognises that the weaker outlook in the US will depress global demand and dampen growth prospects in other countries. The UK cannot, of course, expect to be immune to this weakening process.