Encourage banks to improve their management of risk  We’ve also attained the third goal: to go beyond a rules-based structure and instead encourage banks themselves to improve their abilities to identify, measure, and manage their risks appropriately. As you know, the most sophisticated approaches to credit or operational risk in the New Accord will permit banks to rely increasingly on their internal assessments of risk when determining how much capital to hold. At the same time, the New Accord will be flexible enough for banks to build their risk management functions on the best practices available in the industry, even as those practices evolve in the future. By promoting the improvement of the management of risk across the industry, I believe that we are laying a foundation for more stable markets. The milestones achieved square with banks’ and supervisors’ long-standing efforts All of us can take great pride in meeting the goals that the Committee set out to embrace: the three pillars of capital adequacy, enhancing the risk-sensitivity of the capital framework, and creating incentives for banks to improve their management of risk. And we should recognize that these proposed revisions square well with the efforts that banks and supervisors themselves have undertaken, independent of the Committee’s work. The banking industry has done much over the years to adopt a forward-looking approach to risk management – one that emphasizes flexibility in, and improvements to, the measurement and management of risk over time.
The moral from all this is one that will be all too familiar to you as accountants, though perhaps one that sometimes gets forgotten by consumers of accounting statements, namely that the appropriate way to frame accounts depends on how they will be used and what questions are being asked. The Asset Purchase Facility accounts may tell us the scale of gains or losses on the Asset Purchase Facility portfolio narrowly considered, but will miss the impact on the public finances from higher activity and lower financing costs and fail to tell us anything about it macroeconomic effectiveness. The rise in asset prices and the recovery in confidence since the start of the Quantitative Easing program have been significant. We cannot identify precisely how much of this is a direct result of Quantitative Easing, and hence the scale of the boost to tax revenues. I have no doubt that this issue will continue to be debated for years to come, and that some sceptics may remain unconvinced. But even a sceptic should acknowledge that the net accounting gain or loss on the Asset Purchase  3  4  Of course that is not true of holdings of corporate assets. BIS Review 126/2009  Facility provides an incomplete measure of the impact of Quantitative Easing on the economy and on the public finances. Thank you.