So much then, Mr Chairman, for the past, let me turn now to the challenges and prospects for the future. The most immediate challenge is to get through to the next millennium without significant mishap - to demonstrate that we have indeed succeeded in overcoming the Y2K bug. In fact I have no misgivings on that score as far as the City is concerned. The preparation has been immensely thorough. The Bank, with our colleagues in the FSA, and with our counterparts abroad, has worked with the financial markets, both on that technical preparation and to ensure that the necessary liquidity will be in place. That in turn has provided a degree of reassurance - to financial intermediaries and to the public more broadly - that should help to avoid undue precautionary behaviour which might otherwise prove disruptive. A second challenge is the advent of the euro - and on this score, too, I have very few misgivings. Even before the introduction of the new currency the City played a very positive role in its technical preparation - and one which has been widely acknowledged. And since that introduction the City has continued to play a very active part in the development of the broader, more liquid, financial markets which the euro has made possible, and which are vital to its success as a widely-used international trading and investment currency. This activity is in fact the greatest contribution that the UK can make to that success from the outside.
Of course the City is in competition with other financial centres elsewhere in Europe. But as I have often pointed out before, at the macro-economic level such competition is a positive-, not a zero-sum game from which we collectively, borrowers and lenders and market intermediaries, all stand to gain. I have every confidence in the ability of the City to thrive in this competitive environment - but it will thrive not at the expense of the rest of Europe but alongside other European financial centres. And in that context suggestions that we should be somehow artificially disadvantaged are irrational. The third challenge confronting the City - and a much more fundamental one - is the accelerating advance of information and communications technology which is currently sweeping across the whole of the global economy. In the financial services sector in particular it is the major driver of change and innovation. It makes possible the introduction of a whole raft of essentially new financial services and products, and it is radically changing the way in which they and existing services and products are delivered, whether in wholesale or retail financial markets, at a fraction of the existing cost. In wholesale markets it will affect the whole spectrum of activity - from trading through payments and settlements, across the whole range of financial instruments, across national boundaries - not simply within Europe although that is an immediate focus of attention - and it has the potential to alter fundamentally the relationships between end-users of the markets, intermediaries and exchanges.