2  BIS Review 14/2003  I particularly welcome the efforts of Sir David Tweedie and his colleagues at IASB in addressing so openly the hugely difficult task of getting the right balance and right principles into place. Many of us can see I think that the financial instruments standards IAS 32 and 39 have provoked significant and strong views. Wisdom, foresight and a certain forbearance will be needed if we are to achieve a good solution. So we should all welcome the present initiative of the IASB in holding a series of roundtables with respondents to their exposure drafts on revisions to IAS 32 and 39. Debate and efforts in relation to these particular standards seem to me to be vital. They get to the heart of the dilemmas and challenges presented by new financial techniques and often complex instruments. It has after all been shown, in the Enron case if no others, that detailed and prescriptive accounting standards, in the wrong hands, can engender a moral hazard in the search for ways round them which investment bankers and lawyers may well be expected to find. A similar logic applies in the prolonged debate between historic and mark-to-market accounting principles. Once again, whichever approach is used, neither of them will tell the whole story in terms of the underlying economic realities of a bank's risk and return, nor how the risks are managed. But forms of disclosure may help.
Last but not least, if Switzerland were to give up its monetary independence by pegging the franc to the euro or by joining the euro area, it would lose its privileged status and, consequently, Swiss interest rates would increase to European levels. Since higher interest rates mean lower asset prices and lower levels of investment, and also higher mortgage rates, the Swiss are understandably not keen on giving up their national currency. Since any major decision in Switzerland has to be approved in a public referendum, the prospect of EU and euro membership in the near future is thus highly unlikely. Given our exposure to global economic and financial shocks, and their arguably smaller importance for the euro area, pegging the Swiss franc to the euro is not a realistic option. Flexible exchange rates give us the room for manoeuvre we need. •  What has our experience been of coexistence with the euro so far? Very positive. Rather than crowding out independent currencies, the euro has stabilised the monetary scene in Europe. In fact, the franc is less volatile today than it was before European monetary integration. The price of the euro in Swiss francs these days is about 3% lower than it was in 1999, in other words, almost unchanged. We did have periods, however, when the franc was under pressure, especially after September 11 and before the outbreak of the war in Iraq. The safe-haven function of the franc then triggered a 10% appreciation in our currency against the euro.