He said: “I have come around to agreeing with the HKMA that it could not simply stand by idly and BIS Review 85/1998  -6-  watch the speculators and hedge funds create a vicious circle involving the stock market, the currency and interest rates. ... When the hedge funds become a pack and attack a country the way they attacked Hong Kong, they are engaged in destabilizing and essentially immoral activity. They are intent only on making profits for themselves at the expense of The People. The speculators cannot be allowed to rule the world, and the State must use the weapons it has against them when they attack.” May I also leave you with this question: if the authorities of the freest market in the world are pushed into controversial market intervention action, could it be that there is something seriously wrong with the international financial architecture? Paul Krugman in one of his articles in a recent issue of the Fortune magazine provides some insight into this question. He said that “speculative conspiracies against companies are effectively regulated; those against countries are not... Capital markets are global, but the institutions that support and regulate them - that allow them to work - remain national. It’s hard to imagine how truly global institutions could come into existence - how we could, for example, prosecute American traders working in London for manipulating some market in China.
Remarks on The Post-pandemic Landscape for Central Bank Statistics 11th IFC Biennial Conference Pablo García Silva, Deputy Governor, Central Bank of Chile August 25th 2022 I want to thank the organizers for the opportunity to participate in this distinguished panel, providing some remarks on the challenges we face as Central Banks and as providers of statistics, particularly in the environment we live today, as the pandemic recedes. Central Banks are keenly aware of the need to provide timely, accurate, and in-depth understandings of the changing economy. This not only to inform correctly policy making, but also to satisfy the shifting demands of society regarding the environment we live in. This inevitably implies trade-offs. Operative and budgetary constraints mean that a careful balance of timeliness, accuracy, and depth needs to be achieved. The ever-expanding complexity of economic relationships, and the speed at which policies have had to adapt to very large shocks, imply in my view that compared to a not so distant past timeliness is today at a premium. The times of change we live in require us to react promptly. This, however, carries the cost that both the accuracy and the depth of data will be inversely related to its timeliness. This brings about the implication that both policy making needs to consider the implicit uncertainty of the environment, and also that statistics providers need to be candid about those uncertainties when communicating with the public.