On the other hand, a tighter hold on the reins during the good years preceding the crisis would have increased resilience and provided more room for manoeuvre to manage the crisis when it did occur. It would then have been possible to manage the crisis within a couple of years and we wouldn’t still have to be dealing with it today. My conclusion is that well-balanced monetary and fiscal policies offer the best possible chances of preventing financial crises, but essentially other measures are needed. We need tools that are specially designed for working with the stability of the financial system. Macroprudential policy – a new policy area Traditionally, financial supervision has had a rather one-sided focus on the health of individual financial institutions. In practice this has also been the case in Sweden, although formally Finansinspektionen has the task of working for a stable and efficient financial system alongside its consumer-protection tasks. However, the fact that individual parts of the financial system appear to be healthy does not mean that they are immune to contagion from other parts of the system. The institutions have exposures to one another and it is sometimes unclear who is exposed to what risks. When an individual institution experiences problems, this may then have serious repercussions for the financial system and, ultimately, the real economy. However, traditional supervision has not sufficiently taken into account the risk of financial problems becoming contagious. Monitoring those risks is also a rather different process to monitoring the risks in an individual institution.
These days, your participation in the workshop takes another and even more significant meaning in the wake of the tragic consequences caused by the strong earthquake. It helps to show that, despite many losses, we are resilient and will continue to work to overcome the emotional and economic hardships of this tragic event, shed the desperation, fear and despair, and return to normal activity. I wish the workshop a great success, and all guests and participants a pleasant stay in Tirana! 2/2  BIS central bankers' speeches