This means that they are dependent on the path of economic fundamentals; in the case of government bonds, for example, the relevant factors include the budget balance, monetary policy and inflation expectations. Financial asset prices are highly susceptible both to expectations of how the market ought to move, given the underlying conditions, and to how it will move, given the expectations of how other players will act. This can result in wide fluctuations. Prices may deviate for a considerable time from what could be regarded as their long-term equilibrium. Markedly inflated prices can result in ‘bubbles’, out  3  BIS Review 52/1999  of touch with the level that seems to be fundamentally justified. Examples of this are the developments in some Asian countries in the mid 1990s, as well as price movements in the Swedish property market around the turn of the 1980s. To some extent, such phenomena can be explained in terms of how economic policy is conducted. But the causes of large price movements are also to be found in the construction of financial markets. If a market is to function properly, all the relevant information should be available simultaneously to every player. In practice, that is evidently not the case. Moreover, financial players can act in the knowledge that what they do will influence the market. The fact that performance is assessed in the short run, in many cases in comparisons with other players, makes herd behaviour common.
The third panel, chaired by Duvvuri Subbarao, will take up the question of how to deal with these vulnerabilities. What are the appropriate policy responses, and what is the role for regulation and capital controls? One policy response has been the accumulation of reserves, which can provide a temporary shock absorber. However, reserve accumulation entails costs for the countries accumulating reserves as well as for the world economy as a whole. Our last panel, chaired by Masaaki Shirakawa, will discuss alternatives to self-insurance. An obvious question here is the role of IMF lending facilities. 2  BIS Review 65/2010  As already mentioned, the questions we address today are difficult and complex. Someone who played an important role in trying to address them over several decades was Jacques Polak. Sadly, he passed away earlier this year. Reflecting on the efforts to reform the international monetary system since the Bretton Woods conference, Jacques Polak once suggested that “those of us who toil at the international monetary system would do well to adopt Sisyphus as our patron saint”. In honor of Jacques Polak, let us then push the stone back up the mountain once more and start with our first panel. Thank you for your kind attention. BIS Review 65/2010  3