John C Williams: Preparing for the unknown Remarks (via videoconference) by Mr John C Williams, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at the 2021 US Treasury Market Conference, 17 November 2021. * * * As prepared for delivery  Introduction Good morning, and welcome to the seventh annual U.S. Treasury Market Conference. This is our second time gathering virtually. Although I miss seeing all of you in person here at the New York Fed, I am pleased that so many of you could join us today. This conference is a great opportunity for market participants, as well as members of five publicsector bodies—the Treasury, the Board of Governors, the SEC, the CFTC, and the New York Fed—to come together and take stock of the U.S. Treasury market. The events of the past 20 months have further underscored this market’s significance in the global economy—and the important role our five entities perform in ensuring that it functions as it should. In fact, the Inter-Agency Working Group for Treasury Market Surveillance (IAW G) came together to examine recent, notable disruptions to the Treasury market, and it issued a report ahead of this conference that identifies steps to strengthen its functioning and resilience.1 I won’t have time to go over the report in detail, but I strongly encourage everyone to read it. Severe disruptions to critical financial markets like we saw last spring should be rare.
First was the so-called flash rally of October 2014; then, the repo market distress in September 2019; and third, the extraordinary dislocations at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020. General George Patton once said, “Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and unpredictable.” It’s a good piece of advice—and one that 1/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  should guide our work on Treasury market reform. The IAWG report I mentioned earlier reviews these events, so I won’t repeat them here. However, two lessons are clear. First, the unforeseeable and unpredictable will happen, and can result in significant stresses in the Treasury and related markets that may spread to broader financial conditions. Second, when disruptions have been sufficiently severe and persistent, the market has not been able to quickly self-correct without official-sector intervention. The severe disruptions to the Treasury and funding markets in March of last year illustrate these points. The incipient breakdown in market functioning quickly spread to other segments of the U.S. and global financial markets, risking a broad-based pullback in the availability of credit that is essential for our economy. The speed and extent of the market disruption necessitated immediate and dramatic action, the scale of which was truly unprecedented. At the New York Fed, we are used to talking in very large sums, but even for us, the figures were staggering.