Their latest metamorphosis needs to ensure they reach the parts of society they previously have not reached, using media they have not previously used, conversing as much as convincing, listening as often as talking. It is an irony, and not one lost on me, that this speech is a classic example of one-way central bank communications. Worse still, it comes in at around 11,500 words, contains 2,000 adverbs and adjectives and has a reading grade score of around 11. Perhaps central bankers, like this one, have always been better at preaching than practicing. If so, that needs to change. And when better to change than now. This would be a brave new world for central banks. They do not need to be as magical as Mandelbrot’s shaman, as good a storyteller as Charles Dickens, as great a showman as Elvis. But to make a success of this new world, central banks will need to be brave. 82  Roy et al (2012).
the harmonisation of the legal, regulatory, taxation and accounting frameworks. A first challenge is the need for global oversight. This need arises from several factors. In terms of the so-called horizontal approach, trading, clearing and settlement of securities operations already occur in different institutions located in several different jurisdictions; virt-x and SIS-clear are just two examples. For the time being, cross-border infrastructures deploy their activities in complement to domestic systems, but it is very likely that they will play a significantly more powerful role in the future. Oversight authorities tend to prefer a pragmatic approach, where one regulatory authority takes on the role of a lead overseer and consults with other relevant authorities. Such a model has already been put in place among central bankers in the context of the Continuous Linked Settlement system. A second challenge that oversight authorities face lies in the risk dimension of cross-border securities operations. Indeed, whereas the nature of the risks remains basically the same, both the probability of occurrence of an adverse event and the risk exposures themselves have clearly increased. The added dimension of cross-border activities lies in spill-over effects due to direct links between systems. Credit, liquidity and operational risk events occurring in one jurisdiction may indeed trigger a systemic crisis by spilling over to foreign financial markets. These kinds of linkages among different systems explain why oversight authorities have recently focussed not only on payment systems, but also on securities clearing and settlement systems.