Also, the global financial system currently provides ample liquidity, and since global markets have increasing access to more information on the productive and financial structure and the functioning of the economies of the region, they are more willing to provide tailored financing at good rates of return. Against this backdrop, we believe that the economies of the region have a good opportunity for building a new relationship with the Fund, which should be based rather on a collaborative dialogue about how global financial development could contribute to the final objective of achieving high and sustainable growth rates in the medium-term, than on meeting a certain set of stringent conditions associated to the lending programs as has been so far. Should the weight of emerging economies in the decision-making process of the Fund be increased, all these necessary efforts to which I have referred to above would produce better outcomes. Chile, as the rest of South America, did not support the proposed resolution on the quota reform in September, although it did fully support the search for an integral solution. The reasons for our vote are well known and it is not is my intention to reiterate our arguments in this occasion. We still believe that an increase in emerging country quotas would lead to more active and committed involvement of emerging economies in the Fund’s decisions that definitely would increase the Fund’s legitimacy in the region.
Rachel Lomax: Why monetary stability matters to Merseyside Speech by Ms Rachel Lomax, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, at the launch of the Merseyside Economic Review 2005, the Mersey Partnership, Liverpool, 24 February 2005. *  *  *  It is a great pleasure to be back in Merseyside, as the guest of the Mersey Partnership. It’s always inspiring to be in a city that has a great future as well as a glorious past – and I’m not referring to Will Alsop’s SuperCity of the North. When I was last in Liverpool everyone was on tenterhooks waiting to hear the outcome of the European Capital of Culture. Congratulations on a spectacular result. By all accounts you’re set to be European Capital of shopping too when the new Grosvenor development opens in the Paradise area of the city. This is my first visit as a member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). Of course, the Bank and Liverpool go back a very long way. Liverpool was a village when the Bank was founded. By the time we opened our first branches around the country, that village had grown into a major port, the gateway to the workshop of the world. So it was natural that the branch the Bank built in Castle Street in around 1850 was one of its grandest, the work of Charles Cockerell. We still have agents in the City – Neil Ashbridge and John Young.