At the moment our legislation lags behind global practices. We understand what an urgent topic this is, and in order to make our economy more attractive to investors there should of course be effective mechanisms in place to counter insider trading and market manipulation. The next important issue is the bill concerning a financial Ombudsman for the rights of consumers of financial services. Recently at the State Council Presidium there was discussion about rights protection for consumers of financial services, and, of course, a financial Ombudsman could be one of the instruments used to increase the effectivity of consumers’ rights protection. We propose to bring this in gradually. And here, too, I hope I can count on support for this project from the Ministry of Finance and the government and state Duma as a whole. These bills are in the process of being finalised before submission to the state Duma. Firstly, for us it is important that a bill toughens liability for false statements in the financial sector. We are carrying out major work on improving the cyber resilience of financial organisations and combatting cyber attacks. So it is important for us, taking into account the benefits of digital technology development for the financial sphere, to provide an adequate level of security and protection from risks. Therefore it is necessary to amend the law in order to establish legal requirements for the protection of financial organisations’ information and to combat theft of their clients’ funds. We are now working on drafting this bill, too.
So, the answer to the question whether central banks have too prominent a role in the new regulatory framework is once again “no”. Given our recent experience, it would be negligent not to address systemic risk directly in order to prevent system-wide crises in the future, and  9  Crockett (2000). BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  because addressing these risks involves a set of tools and competences that naturally belong to the domain of central banks, their prominent role in this task is a direct consequence. It is also important to bear in mind that the expanded efforts to prevent future crises will, if they succeed, reduce the need for extensive crisis management in the future. Conclusion History is a great teacher. And central banks must learn from its critical episodes. The recent crisis is such an episode and is thus an exceptional learning opportunity. Central banks were active in managing the crisis with both conventional and unconventional tools. Their efforts played a major role in preventing the collapse of the financial system in the early days of the crisis, and have contributed to mitigating the economic damage of the aftermath. These actions were only possible because central banks, including the SNB, were able to act flexibly in exceptional circumstances – a flexibility which the gold initiative would severely constrain.