We need to improve our ability to identify catalysts for potential crises, whether those catalysts manifest themselves in the form of asset price bubbles or reside elsewhere. Perhaps most critical among the challenges facing policymakers and lawmakers is how to ensure that we have a more effective regulatory structure going forward. This is a complex subject that I do not have time to do justice here tonight. However, I believe it is important to explain why the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy, lender of last resort and supervisory functions should remain in place. These functions are interrelated so that the execution of one of these responsibilities helps the Federal Reserve in its conduct of the others. For example, consider the Fed’s lender of last resort function. For the Fed to perform this role effectively, it is important that it have first-hand knowledge about banks, the capital markets, and payment and settlement systems. To perform this role safely, it must know its borrowers, which is why a supervisory role is essential. Put simply, if supervisory and other financial oversight responsibilities were taken from the Fed, it would make it more difficult for us to perform our lender of last resort function. To do that well and safely, it is important that we understand banks, the financial system and all its interconnections. One instructive example in this context is the Northern Rock experience in the United Kingdom, where banking supervision and the lender of last resort functions were separated.
So, for example, the holding companies of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, which is now a subsidiary  2  See, for example, Senior Supervisors Group, “Risk Management Lessons from the Global Banking Crisis of 2008,” October 21, 2009, and “Observations on Risk Management Practices during the Recent Market Turbulence,” March 6, 2008. BIS Review 161/2009  3  of Bank of America, are now under our direct supervision. We are making sure that they have appropriate liquidity buffers and capital. Second, the Federal Reserve is working with a broad range of private sector participants, including dealers, clearing banks, and tri-party repo investors to dramatically reduce the structural instability of the financial system utilities, such as the tri party repo system. Third, the Basel Committee is working on establishing international standards for liquidity requirements. There are two parts to this. The first is a requirement for a short-term liquidity buffer of sufficient size so that an institution that was shut out of the market for several weeks would still have sufficient liquidity to continue its operations unimpaired. The second is a liquidity standard that limits the degree of permissible maturity transformation – that is, the amount of short-term borrowing allowed to be used in the funding of long-term illiquid assets. Under these standards, a firm’s holdings of illiquid long-term assets would need to be funded mainly by equity or long-term debt.