Recent developments indicate that market participants have either not been aware of existing best practices guidance or have made the conscious decision to violate such guidance in the hopes of making a short-term gain. The cost of these short-term gains has come at all of our expense and we must all be engaged to ensure that this does not happen again. Moving toward more globally harmonized guidance – and consistent adherence to such guidance – is an important step forward in maintaining the integrity of the market. In recognition of the importance of this work, a new working group of the BIS Markets Committee has been formed to facilitate the establishment of a single global code of conduct and principles and to promote greater adherence to such guidance. 14 This newly formed  13  See http://www.ny.frb.org/fxc/2015/Global%20Preamble%20March30.pdf. 14  See: http://www.bis.org/press/p150511.htm. BIS central bankers’ speeches  7  structure will deepen and broaden the already initiated public-private partnership and will engage an even wider set of financial centers in order to effectively move this work on best practices forward. The work will occur on a global scale and will engage a wide variety of market infrastructures and participants, including both the buy side and sell side. It will likely draw upon a variety of efforts, including the important work done in the U.K. under the Fair and Effective Markets Review. The FXC will be actively engaged in this effort along with its counterparts abroad, at the direction of the BIS Markets Committee FX Working Group.
The second session, chaired by Axel Weber, President of the Bundesbank, will analyse the impact of these developments on international capital allocation and global imbalances. The third session, chaired by Rodrigo de Rato, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), will consider economic policy responses and the spontaneous adjustment of markets and economic agents. Lastly, the round table, chaired by Roger Ferguson, will draw out the consequences in terms of international financial stability. Stanley Fischer has agreed to take on the difficult task of summarising this symposium. Stanley, like a few others here, is a symbol in himself of the diverse backgrounds of the participants in this symposium: he is a former Professor at MIT, an ex-Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, ex-ViceChairman of Citigroup and currently Governor of the Bank of Israel. As an introduction, I will touch briefly on a few of the questions raised by each of these sessions. The first session will consider some of the decisive changes in trends in productivity and competitiveness that occurred in the 1990s. First change: as from the mid-1990s, productivity growth accelerated in the United States as a result of the gains arising from the production and use of information and communication technologies (ICT) but slowed down in Europe and Japan. For instance, over the last ten years, productivity growth in Europe has been more than one annual percentage point below that of the United States.