Zeti Akhtar Aziz: Islamic finance – financial stability, economic growth and development Speech by Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz, Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia (Bank Negara Malaysia), at the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) Prize Lecture on “Islamic finance – financial stability, economic growth and development”, Jeddah, 27 November 2013. *  *  *  It is my honour to be invited to deliver this lecture on Islamic Finance: Financial Stability, Economic Growth and Development, here in Jeddah. I wish to thank the Islamic Development Bank for the invitation. The Islamic Development Bank has been pioneering and instrumental in the development of Islamic finance and has been an inspiration in driving its progress and evolution. It is indeed a privilege for me to be part of this journey, and to have witnessed the increasing dynamism of the Islamic financial industry amidst a highly challenging economic and financial international environment. Global financial and economic adjustments My remarks today will focus on the relevance of Islamic finance in modern market economies, taking into account the knowledge that we have today about the vulnerabilities of finance, its causes and its wider economic ramifications. Five years on after the global financial crisis erupted, the most pressing challenge confronting the world economy continues to be securing financial stability and generating growth and employment. While regulatory reforms both at the global and national levels have been extensive to strengthen financial systems, there has been less progress on the recovery in growth.
The current process of deleveraging in the private sector remains incomplete, while pressures on fiscal sustainability in these economies also continue to weigh on confidence and growth. Significant challenges continue to be faced in the implementation of the structural adjustments which in turn is affecting the process of fiscal consolidation. This has further restrained the policy flexibility to support growth. The extraordinary and exceptional monetary measures taken by central banks in these economies have provided support to their economies, but they have also come at a cost to savers with growing risks of market distortions and financial imbalances the longer these measures are held in place. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  In efforts to build stronger defences against a repeat of the events that precipitated the 2008 global financial crisis, the global regulatory reform agenda has placed significant focus on addressing elements of the regulatory and supervisory systems that allowed the build-up of excessive leverage. These elements include the unfettered innovation by financial institutions and the prevailing incentive system. Financial engineering had led bankers and investors to lose focus on their risk exposures when they failed to understand the increasingly complex products that purported to reduce the risks. The weak regulatory regime and supervision also failed to rein in such unbridled innovation. Misaligned incentives then fuelled excessive risk taking both at the institutional and individual levels.