In order to promote the use of LEI at the start of the financial reporting obligations in the European Union, United States and other jurisdictions, an interim pre-LEI system has been agreed. The same report also identified potential data gaps, such as the availability of collateral information which would be necessary to evaluate exposure, and therefore risks, appropriately. Here in the European Union, for example, entities are required to report collateral information, whereas in the United States no such requirement exists. So, even if access issues are standardised across the board, a lot of data issues will still remain. In short, I see three main issues that have to be addressed. First, information gaps still exist, either due to a lack of or differences in reporting requirements. Second, data are fragmented across trade repositories and jurisdictions. And third, there are still obstacles impeding authorities’ access to data. In February 1999, in his report to the G7 finance ministers and central bank governors that led to the establishment of the Financial Stability Forum, Hans Tietmeyer called for “arrangements for the surveillance of global vulnerabilities, including the pooling of information available to the international financial institutions and the international regulatory groupings”. This was almost 15 years ago and we are not yet there. In fact, at the current stage, no authority has a complete overview of the risks in OTC derivatives markets or is able to examine the global network of OTC derivatives in depth.
Second, there remains significant excess capacity in manufacturing across much of the world. In the 2/6  BIS central bankers' speeches  United States, for example, the manufacturing capacity utilization rate was only 76.4 percent in November, about 2 percentage points below its average since 1972. Third, for manufactured goods, there may be more scope for substituting capital for labor, and/or lowering labor costs by importing labor-intensive intermediate goods. To the extent that this margin of adjustment is available, it would tend to dampen the impact of higher wage costs on prices of manufactured goods. Finally, the so-called “Amazon” effect, which results in greater price transparency for buyers, may weigh disproportionately on goods prices. Although inflation remains somewhat below the FOMC’s 2 percent objective on a year-over-year basis, I still anticipate that it will stabilize around that level over the medium term. As I noted earlier, above-trend growth should tighten the labor market further, pushing up wage inflation and eventually services prices. In fact, we have already seen some increase in inflation in recent months. Over the three months ending with November, core personal consumption expenditure prices rose at a 1.8 percent annual rate, up from a corresponding rate of just 0.4 percent last May. The pronounced slowing of core inflation during the first half of 2017 was due, in part, to transitory factors, such as a sharp fall in prices for cellular phone services. Those influences have been temporarily depressing the year-over-year figures.